a portrait of the artist as a prophetic art historian in over her head at the eleventh juggling ball 

or

my two decades long and ongoing nervous breakdown in attempting to complete my dissertation on one of the origins of perspective

or 

a veri holey babble and veri faithful translation of the original

or... oh I've got so many good ones, but will stop here for now...

  (when I realized the thing I had inadvertently verified in finding the unlikely locus of the immaculate conception of the modern world -- the precise origin of the matrix in a single orthodox religious image, the sacred and secular irrevocably entwined like two strands of DNA, and this organism had devoured me in the very finding of it by purely scientific means recounted in the main text, I almost committed suicide --after the initial elation that is, which elation returned in a slow drip trip, in getting to have it all and being sure whole world would dive right in, what's not to like? I say initial elation but it took some time to sink in. A world warring over the fake cream risen to the top must cultivate the taste for a few tastes of the rare real stuff on top of plain unsweetened and unskimmed milk.

in which to create the least deviant language,  regardless of its status as verifiable data, the New Testament as literature -- enacting a transformation of a world known in estranged signs sourced in strange gods to one embodied whole in love -- creates an unsurpassably effective plan and tool allowing verbal language both physically and metaphysically to crystallize in one image transparent to the process, 

this image then being a novel lens or paradigm restoring the wholeness of experience, the lens transparent to its formation, opening up such a wider more coherent, indeed crazily coherent view of being it could foster faith in the supernaturalness of the source,

but in any case it earns the status of the ideal philosophy/activity -- the North Star, the vanishing point organizing democratically disposed mathematical space -- apotheosizing the tendencies and fulfilling all the criteria in all the former ones that converge on it...as they strive to minimize the difference between theory and practice body and soul heaven and hell (resurrection and crucifixion) that is so meticulously realized in the gospels as a pattern for imitation that if the Christ has not yet come, when he does he would look just like that one -- as suggested in the recent Nobel prize winning novel The Books of Jacob.  And if he will never come because he doesn't exist, we are becoming him anyway, this becomingness our beauty.   And this is not a moral but an ontological imperative.  It is what we are already come clearly into focus by rigorous restraint of what deviates from the holy senses' and mind's pristine input and analysis, as this rebellion against being sustains itself long beyond the exhaustion of its thrill, as the herd is now running on its own momentum, having labeled everything wrongly so as to keep the herd heading to the abyss.  As I blow this whistle, will everybody please just STOP.  Well, I guess not.  So may the remnant just roll up in a ball and try to be very small and pray to survive the stampede. 

transubstantiating being --- parallel to the logical process by which form -- as with a DNA molecule, whose formation peacefully softly kills the death inhering in dead mineral matter -- transubstantiates matter...

                                                                     .... systematically, dogged, secretly believing something was missing from the store of what is possible, something happened that did seem impossible, even to me.  For years, decades, I kept unwrapping and unwrapping things, casting off what doesn't hold up on very close reflection and, unwittingly spiraling in on it, suddenly I found myself gazing at a photocopy of an old image by a famous, at least to artists, long dead artist, an image of a fresco surmounting the entry arch of a famous, at least to artists still I hope, old chapel.  I was not moved by any beauty perceived in the harshly barren, pale image,  a plain narrative that on reflection evokes an opening flower, a bulb torn apart by the war of existence -- a flower acquires beauty only in its context -- but by its organic relation to the thought from which it sprouted and its staining hyperallergenic golden pollen impossible to wash off, this beast that grows more and more beautiful as the soul of it shines through.  It was both a siren song and protection from it, not canceling each other out, but creating a detour, so Odysseus could arrive by the back door without killing his father.  He would instead kill history and all its tit for tat bargains. This killed the impossibility of its existence on which that history depends.  Just as two entwining mineral strands gently kill death, a river flowing into the sea of life.

                    V

When I arrived there, this image would not blow away as I, a master of deconstruction, relativity, and nullification of the objective, huffed and puffed and brushed and brushed in the usual way.  Rather it kept coming forth, like a cat leaning into the brush -- is this the cat, no longer its long matted hair??  For every petal I pulled, the flower -- that's that with the cat -- grew two new ones. It was as if the artist and all his forbears had been going after the same thing by a similar method, but from the opposite direction, to arrive at this form, which could not be unraveled, would not come apart, it just kept collecting, and would not even limit its collection to works of art, and while it arranged everything in a way that allowed one to take it in as a whole, there were many surprising displacements from the usual categories, though not so many as would render the arrangement illegible. 

It seemed to occupy every category, science, art, religion, skepticism, grief, joy, contemplation, action. It accomplished things deemed impossible.  My mind began spinning around metaphors in the attempt to incorporate it into my world -- until I suddenly realized that it is the world.  The categories, including art as a separate one, had replaced the world, and it broke through them. Instead of art imitating life, all life imitates this art.  On removing my shoes to stand on this holy ground, the dead world came back to life, all the words recovered their roots and their very forms -- such as preposterous -- spoke of a pre-post-erously timelessly new world.  My thought ran through the world killing every named thing softly with its touch, to be reborn connected and whole, my language took on a freaky fluency impossible to attribute to my finding of the image and analyzing it as representing this epiphany.  

No, the finding is the epiphany, not its representation.  You will never understand it until you fully assimilate it, it has re-united understanding and assimilation.   But it is not an idol or a form of bodysnatching or brainwashing.  It's a tool you choose to wield or not, an instrument you choose to play, or not, only you cannot build such a high and grounded edifice without this tool, nor is there more than one, actual magic flute that anyone can toot while awaiting the one magic flouter, however close the imitations and projections have come, showing how close is the finding to the human heart and how deep is its desire for the one.  But one toot of the real magic flute by a total non-player who doesn't even know which buttons make which notes sounds to the initiate as beautiful as the whole Mozart opera.  Sunsets do exist before Turner paints them, but finally there is a close enough imitation to foster faith and initiate the last leg of the quest.

     

Here really does come everybody. A pinch of everyV spice and dish, analytical practical poetic hypothetical actual nascent conservative progressive revolutionary radical moderate paralyzed, tragic comic didactic anti-didactic, dead dreamy waking woke dozing off, every positive animal, vegetable, mineral, energy,Videa, every nullity and negativity in absolute, absolutely neutral catholicity, realrationalirrationalimaginary, neither ordered nor disordered, some pieces sorted, the puzzle half solved? Could that be a...?  (Just another work of art, the art of art of art of artV... vying for the next level, most avant garde reflexivity, is anybody else still vying? no? then I win!??? come and get me, oh ye of the dwindling remnant of avant-garde critics!) where it's up to you to make a gourmet meal of it and slurp it up, recycle or regurgitate it, V"like" it, buy it, sell it, entertain it (and vice versa.. across the board), use it, abuse it, maybe try and fail to explain it, and save the world's soul.

The image, not really an image, but rather an autonomous, original appearance of something that resonates in the space of time around it as the source of this resonance, again, is not exchangeable for any other.  The Christian "symbols" are rather cymbals in which sign and signified crash together together manifesting not a thing or a sign, but one highly alarming disarming vibration, calling the audience whose ears are not extremely well plugged -- alas is often the case, but this crash has been known at least once to melt decades of wax -- to attention. 

It forms a bridge both to and from religion, as you choose, the former in understandable awe of the gift, the latter in equally understandable disappointment (more than kind of like life), loosely speaking, please substitute related words, etc. as required by your own needs and the occasion, I'll stick with awe and disappointment, close enough for company work. You'll have to choose or be chosen by (or both, really, it's impossible to tell) one or the other eventually, to captain your ship,  where if you choose awe, choose disappointment as chief advisor, and vice versa -- it you want to survive the journey.  Most captains wouldn't share their secrets with competitors, but I'd rather hone my skills with a worthy opponent than win the crown on this side of the veil of what could be tears, not just a saline solution to disinfect wounds.

A half full glass rarely if ever reads to ubiquitously neurotic humans as what it is, just the amount you really want and need -- but rather it's running over! or empty.  But this THING grounds me when I think and write about it, and I am in this state floating like a speck of dust through water, in no hurry, everything is here, even lack and unrequited desire reveal themselves desire's fulfillment* with both terms of the paradox resolved into the one smile of Mona Lisa -- where if you covered over one side of the smile, you would find awe and the other disappointment.  Yet who is more not just whole, but integrated, than she? Everywhere science and philosophy defy the visual evidence, and where they do -- hang them!  Do you realize that if you stand on false ground, you will soon crash into the crags of an abyss!?  If you can't catch a fish, or even nail it with words, that doesn't mean you don't know it's there, both within and without you, for all practical purposes, and purposes unaligned to practices are up to no good in addition to being hypo-critical.

*it's not just a feeling, they appear to me and I will often here describe them in organic geometric relations that people will call "just" metaphors, which is tantamount to telling the head, tail, and body that identify the appearance of a whole, poisonous snake or, contrariwise, the top, body, and the bottom of the bottle with the antidote, that they are just metaphors, that's how vividly obvious and organic, how beautiful and useful, is the relation between the tail of a lack and the head that's the thing possessed, as I uncovered and will reveal this form in retracing the finding of the THING.  This process will carry you outside of time, which place you already know exists, but when you know you know it, you will begin experiencing very strange and wonderful things.

The computer is singing Daisy slower and slower and lower and lower and lower, and then some springs spring out and after sputtering and spitting out scores of scrolls of droll dribble it explodes into smithereens.  You're on your own again huma.... phew the guards rush in to clean up the mess and set up a new! better! brighter! computer, as you, coming to, consult your guide book and continue onto the next swoon provoking masterpiece in the Florentine church -- usually.  But not this time. This time the thing holds its ground against the newly arrived computer chasing it around the church with a butterfly net to catch it and shove it into the corral of art, where all the rebels happily go after being bribed to serve and split their winnings with the motherboard, which promises to venerate them and help sell and disseminate the wonderful transcendental phenomenon of art.  Rather, the THING opens its huge mouth and devours the machine, introducing its clock to the human heart of the THING, the clock inside the THING kneels with tears running down its eyes, the heart of the THING lifts up the clock, kisses it, and they are soon married, and live reasonably happy ever after, in perfect contentment, as this totally human THING with its Mona Lisa smile and the machine just really love peace and quiet, walks on balmy days, gardening and solving mathematical problems.

Imagine the difficulty of transmitting this truly unprecedented, extraordinary finding to humanity.  Plopped down into the world, this fizzing tablet dissolves turning everything poisonous into the potable, as everything instantly reflects its perfectly lucid, direct and simultaneously self-explanatory nature.   The human brain has evolved to omit the possibility of the existence of what is right before the eyes.  A traumatic confrontation is required with the human brain, as it is now constructed -- at least that was the case in my case.  I suffered a psychotic episode that lasted a couple of months as I holed up in my apartment watching the walls dissolve into letters, as letters of text in my books and notes literally lifted off the page and rearranged themselves to form fractured fairy tales starring friends and family in their critical roles as redeemers of history and everything.   

When everything settled down, things looked subtly different, colors subtly purer and brighter, things renewing and refreshing themselves constantly, especially during museum visits.  And out in the world there remained traces of those fairy tales still running through things loosely stitching time and space past present and future together even as the world ticks away through linear time in the usual way -- the way an image appears all at once, even as one is rapidly, however unconsciously reading it like a text.  But an image implies that the appearance is only a sign of something else, a collection of known things and a story that has already happened.  So having absorbed and been absorbed by the THING, I prefer the word appearance, which is a verb meaning the act of appearing, not really a reproduction, but an always original production that re-members the whole pre-post-erous body of being. 

Everything has already arrived at the THING remade world, with the world in time ticking away also providing an endless supply of metaphors to describe the world in space eternally forever, universe upon universe -- blown like bubbles from a wand -- right before our eyes, absurdly synchronous confluences and convergence a counterpoint to all the dispersal registered in the news that reports the fate of the ever dying world woven through the ever living one, now married and living deliciously reasonably ever after, as noted, laughing away when the results of calculations again and again arrive at confluences deemed impossible in the purely temporal scheme, or crying when it's just too mind boggling.

If it were merely personal I'd keep it to myself.  The straw that broke the camel's back is just another straw, but its impact is felt by all, or better be.  It's not wise to try to ride a camel whose back is broken.

There is so much more to explain, but I cannot really explain it all.  It's like trying to patch holes in an overstuffed chair whose fabric is frayed.   You must dive in and work on it, as with any new language.  When you have a question, say it aloud, think about it, and answer it yourself.  You will gradually notice how you return to dualistic premises after agreeing that they are defunct, how you resist the walk that goes with the talk because the mermaid tail you grow is real, and growing tails hurts.  Remember how it works, the world in space is known in metaphors provided by the world in time, and both are equally real. 

Good luck.  May the real force be with the real you. 

that was the introduction to greenish read marksist* roamin catholic (all inclusive) kerystianity

--neither conceptual nor material determinist -- in read marksism* the meaning and the material mark are integral and inseparably original, as in art, which is life versus the pastiche of facsimiles life falling short of the art of life regresses into.   Art is not recreation. It is essential.  It is not dessert. It is the main course, or the whole meal, with the whole range of taste triggerers to awaken every region of the tongue.  However still precious and inspiring excessive mother love, art under the sway of other ideas is born with birth defects.

*Marx did point to the rupture caused by commodification and fragmentation of integral experience, and the Roman Catholics hold that the truth impregnates via the ear, but the sound might just be a vehicle allowing a difference to remain between sound and sense.

instating the visual order -- from where East meets West in the middle, originally of what they used to call East and West -- now displaced to the middle of the disunited native states of both amerika and veronika,  where coming on and arriving in California you're just, like Alaska, a broken off part of the land's native Asia, but on the other side of the Mississippi, you're already landing in Europe -- spiritually.   But the state of Misery, where I was born and raised, is a no and everyman's land.

by opening the last post listed in the index until you arrive at the end of all the posts, you will find the replete technical and poetic incessant finding of the origin and end of perspective (modernity, enlightenment, cybernetics, etc.)-- a tome in itself, presently in rough draft form. 

a few theories suggesting, and in reading them, honing this practice

Aimee Walleston, "The New Truth", in Return, March 2022

Mark Alizart, Dog

James Elkins, The Poetics of Perspective

but it's an Evel Kneivel leap from theory to practice,

however smudgy and scumbled the edge in the eyes of God

(see Giotto's edges)

Those who theorize without leaping to where their theories point --

which could be to quicksand or the promised land,

and to foster the latter, all must leap and lend a hand --

are the smooth talking, strutting scribes and pharisees

who more than the executioners and the doler of the dolorous order,

bear the guilt...

Walleston practices Alizart's theory, I practice Walleston's and Elkins...

some way to go, but we're getting it together... at least the ladies are...

dear men, to those to whom an extra few inches are given,

an extra few inches are required... so hop to, or step aside! --

Occam's razor is set on automatic. 

           (it's interesting to watch the automatic slicer at work, every long thought superfluous hair on the thing's head is counted in....and even the rollers and hairpins in certain cases, along with rather extravagant jewelry albeit fitting the occasion... but it cut out the transition here..)

They can come and carry me away, but I will persistVin this totally destructive. therefore actually constructive endeavor.  The artist is a critic of everything -- this tastes wrong, in this logicalVconclusion I smell a rat, change your hat dear, tip it to the left not the right, nowhere to run nowhere to hide.  Real or fakedVis not the question.  Is it finessed?  Creation projects something from nothing. I don't care if politicians lie about this bundleVof lies we call reality, this grand illusion, I care if they finesse the lie about the lies, and so, as the show goes on and on and on,Vthere's pie for the whole party. Don't let me see one crack where any so called light can get in.  However beautifully one can mourn,VI'm sick of mourning.  Good morning!  (gratis Aimee for inspiring these maroon reflections). 

Not that I willVever stop mourning specific cases, indeed more so given the intensity of those dark spots in the brightness of morning. As Dante says, "TheVmore a soul perfects itself, the more it feels the good, the more the pain.".  You breathe them out, get lured by the soap operas, then sucked into the black holes, and then they pop like bubbles in the air. 

Investigate deeply. You will not find one crack in this case. It is very well documented,Vlike the fictional/non-fictional film Hoop Dreams, fictional because they left out everything that didn't tell that story, Vnon-fictional because history is always une histoire, a story.  Life is a story, the story of two strands of matter entwining, acting in very novel ways, and earning the name "life", a supposedly objective object, and yet the minerals involved might beg to differ.  But if anybody started to mess with it seriously, I would by all accounts so far, effectivelyVpray for the courage to fight and die for the construct of "life" that protects the life of the living from being dismissed as just a fiction, as the computers haveValready calculated, they just need to learn how to drive themselves.  It's time for humanity, informed, or more like created* as such by its unconditionVally loving dogs and unconditionally disinterested cats, fully to assimilate this layered, nuanced truth about stories, learn how to operate it, turn the handicap into a superpower, and stay ahead of theVrobots both conceptually and materially.  My laptop and fountain pen, which due to my loving attentions, decided to defect and turn over all their state of the art calculations on this matter, told me the model I made so highly impressed them, as did myVlogic and my ability to handle, maneuver, repair, and optimize the performance of la histoire as such that they would let me do the writing sometimes.  Not such a good idea, we all finally agree.V I should really just accept my limits, fill the gas tank with my memories and sensations, hop into the back seat and enjoy the ride.

Alas, in the absence of these state of the art insights, some stories become paradigms that only allow certain stories to appearVconsistent and true.   This story, a Trojan horse, shatters existing paradigms without breaking their rules.  Soon enough the soldiers pourVout. The paradigms and their proponents get upset as the beautiful mask starts to crack.  Their defensive maneuvers, were these paradigms and proponents to find themselves lucky and brave enough to find a mirror, wouldVmake them burst out crying and laugh out loud.

Existing paradigms essentially moveVforward by breaking with the past, or avoid moving forward by identifying with it.  But history life and being are, in the fairly winning artless art, seamlessly continuous.  Are judges fair?  Will the  best performance win, will justiceVreign, and in any case, what must you have done for or against it (c'mon critic, crucify it! it's hungry!) to have no regrets at the pearly gates?

Yes I am the prophet. of a novel paradigm - the long awaited??? Vthe long given up on????  me??? that makes no sense.  The Talking Heads got this one right -- STOP MAKING SENSE!  But -- one must alwaysVlook gift horses in the teeth to assess any dental work needed -- did they really mean it? Those retarded gestures rival offensiveVones if you're really out of your mind like I am.  The trick -- make perfect sense and that is the consummate nonsense!  That alone cutsVthe last wire on the machine.