don't disparagingly call what is simply a visual order either chaotic or necessarily what's commonly meant by religious, not that there's anything wrong with that...

 

Every image is an image of the world seen from that image’s perspective.  A chaotic image turns the world into chaos, a beautiful image turns the whole world beautiful, a truthful image turns the whole world true to itself.  An image speaks from thousands of directions at once, which could perhaps be encapsulated in about six, suggesting a hexagonal figure in which six symmetrically disposed texts appear on a page converging on a vanishing point, the image of the image, the epiphany, in which the image’s language is fully absorbed in a replete illumination, the frame around it dissolved, the world itself the sign of its own destruction or redemption. 

For Saint Augustine, in the perfect most fair and disinterested image, God is perfectly suffused in his creation, the visible world seen through the mirror of the pure heart no longer darkly is God, the ultimate good.  In the Middle Ages the gnostic understanding of the image that so suffuses the gospel text and gives it its bite, such that I call it the gospel tooth, had not been repressed in orthodox doctrine and was not yet relegated to the realm of often deemed heretical hermetic wisdom. 

A pious orthodox theologian was trained in visual thinking and its translation into words only able to be absorbed by the likewise trained, allowing geometric organization of multiply layered thoughts reducing the risk of latching onto the banal idealizations or idols so deplored by Saint Augustine as well as many modern thinkers — see Ruskin translated by Proust and evolved into a novel flowering out of the touch on the tongue of a wafer, that novel, which Proust described as a cathedral, being the best elucidation of holy communion ever put forth, except for the fact that it excludes it, as if that most florid sunset flower were the last the seed had in it. But maybe that’s not the case, maybe a miracle such as the pregnancy of Anna ensues, or the plant is still young, but just as a long gestating period.

Later…and earlier, Saint Thomas Aquinas would hear dictated, right from the horse’s [multiply tongued] mouth — not being disrespectful that’s an old figure of speech meaning from truth unmediated — the six aforementioned arguments as six scribes present recorded them, the saint periodically falling on his knees weeping at the beauty of the image conjured up by the whole text absorbed and remembered at its conclusion already visible to him, surely comprehensible to other visual thinkers.  

hang in!  keep going!  -- toward a novel paradigm of knowledge -- requiring radical change -- a complete inversion, as they fail to align with the visible world,  of categories in common use and turning the world imagined through those moribund categories inside out (eg. materialist red marxism >. etherealist read marksism or artism (first time as comedy second as tragedy, but time goes backwards, to be further elaborated roamin catholically (all inclusively).

thereafter gradually to achieve mastery in propelling through the waters of being by reversing and re-enacting this reversal as does the diaphanous veil of a microscopic creature I once viewed through a microscope, or thought I did*

Alas, not to contemporary readers who chew through texts like worms tunneling underground, strictly following linear lines of logic, and on arrival, finding every light a mirage — fortunately for the tunneling business spreading the rumor that you'd need to amputate all your extremities to live happy as a dolphin in the sea of being, as if one’s carefully concealed mermaid tail were insufficient evidence to the contrary — poor worms without the eyes of birds taking in and becoming the whole world, their gravity defiant grace, their skill at arithmetic defying all materialist principles trying to navigate those little brains. Lets hope for their sake, my contemporaries, those birds become worms, having served the earth faithfully, will soon be devoured and become what eats them again, as with each cycle time shrinks, such that I, an old soul clearly, go from worm to bird to worm to bird several times a day.  

However, even when bird-eyed, our common faculties can only read one argument at a time even when they are simultaneously presented on the page. So it is necessary when reading a visually layered text evoking an unprecedented image or vision, one that does not, as does all art, prick substance with the insubstantial — but partakes enduringly of both, like the green knight who carries his talking head, which got that way to find a true friend — to suspend all judgement and not expect to understand until all the arguments and reflections have been absorbed and can then be ascertained simultaneously — 

even as a modern reader must re-forge atrophied brain connections and restore atrophied regions of the brain to maintain the distinct layers, while ascertaining the whole and avoiding the tendency to flatten images and store them in priori files, which modern readers are trained to do from the first year of grammar school and.before— 

all this accomplished creating a novel image of the world, an image that must scorn the image it replaces and throw it off with no small vehemence given how deeply entrenched is that image. And if one lets go of the old one clings to the new for dear life, such that in five minutes it is as deeply entrenched as the old one that’s been around for centuries.  

As my mama liked to say, choose your poison. But choose carefully, perhaps what you thought was medicine and what you thought poison is medicine, it just needs de-contamination.  Stick with what you’ve got until you know enough about the thing you might be trading for.  And only trade in dire circumstances, such as the scientifically projected imminent end of the world we’re now facing. Even then the untested view requires several exposures viewed on different days in different moods drunk and sober the latter allowing close analysis and attention to the case — do not leave to professionals, they will almost always stop thinking when it could threaten their careers —  

that’s why the good beautiful truthful work concurring with this truth does not sweep you away.  It provokes interest, a tinge of horror with some holes where some holy ghastly humor blows through, and the critics will give it high grades for this quality of jiggling the juices, triggering interest and leaving it at that, so they can scroll onto the next perfectly spiced hors d’oeuvre on the magic buffet that never fills you up at the endless cocktail party.  

Captains, these art aficionados are not your friends; if you’re one of them this is not the real you. Do not depend on a yet more severe global pandemic and an enduring power outage to remember who you are.  Do not tarry another minute lost in the swirls of the notes of the musical score forgetting about the music, as those become poison inky swirls regress to sirens. 

I mean — the interesting, incomplete, ambiguous effect that characterizes art becomes an empty affectation as an end in itself.  It should arise naturally and artlessly in the nature of the work of art as the schematic score of the replete reading performance it is orchestrating.  It is dismaying to see fledging artists imitating the effect and understanding nothing of the authentic good beautiful true whole completed by the reader when the score is an authentic one, when the artist has seen something worthy of calling to the cops’ attention, however corrupt they may be. Alas, today there is an entire bureaucracy of philosophers critics artists who worship the effect and supposedly debunk the epiphany — as they never took Antoine Compagnon’s course on Proust and the Arts elucidating the origins of modernism in the shattering of idols, not the creation of an army of them.   

True you can survive on seeds, they’re nutrient packed, but they will soon run out with that approach given the seed’s fate in the sewage treatment plant, as evidenced by the shorter and shorter life span of the hors d’oeuvres at the cocktail party. Plus, human does not live just by the gardens nutrients, but by its delights. So lick a little, but mainly save the seed, plant, water, wait, tend the plant, wait, enjoy the flowers, wait, slurp up the succulent fruit — dare to eat a peach — wait and plant and collect and tend more seed, wait, all things come to those who wait. Oh no, this writing like all good truthful work would prefer not to play another hors d’oeuvre at the endless cocktail party, it rather cries -- resist the cocktail party as such, have the crew tie you to the deck, set the course on autopilot at top speed heading home!

In short, as with other truthful works you’ve nibbled today, you’ll want to find a way =- publishers movie makers take note to maintain access to the paragraph and all my paragraphs and read them several times, but until then I hope you enjoyed a small sampling of the mildly spicy nutritious seed very hard to bite through but if you can’t crack it useful as fiber, in either case it should, if it has not already done so, induce a deep refreshing sleep and an unusual durable power surge on awakening. Play back as many times as you like, but this fresh fare will not last in the refrigerator for more than a few days and really should be frozen after 24 hours. If it stays up it will be pickled, and I for one am not a pickle person, but most people are, and they are probiotic, good to keep them on hand in case of an emergency; but I’m a novice in pickling so might have to toss this batch out, we’ll see. 

(find earlier version of text read aloud at krveronikas  instagram)

 *(Wherever unmitigated allegiance to those categories and the assumptions they foster reigns, the first reversal feels like child birth in all its gore and glory, nourish and let gestate for nine months, or maybe years, or centuries, alas, I doubt there's that much time for us to get it together.) and replete restoration -- such that you might not get what you need, but you'll get what you want.  Note that the replete world shown here reconnecting the sublime to the ridiculous, the personal and the transcendental does not place me in the center of your world, but through a contagious reaction, you in the center of yours, instead of hanging onto the moribund modernistic illusion that we can observe and manage the world by turning ourselves into selfless machines, rather than daring a glimpse in the mirror thereafter to humble our vain selves -- vanity vanity all IS vanity -- before the unknowable knowable/unknowable knowable, beloved love lover, the fluid terms of the trinity established by relativity.

Stefano di Giovanni (1392-1450)

Vision of Saint Thomas Aquinas

1423

tempera on walnut wood

height 25 cm (9.8 in.) width 28.8 cm (11.3 in)