extensive unedited illuminated ramblings
with extensive preparation -- the neck and head of the galloping giraffe, or scattered, disorganized notes trying to piece them together
the body or statement itself, found about two thirds of the way down)
PREMISES
in the form of intransigently politely anarchically related introductions, each one crying -- you go first, no you go first, no you go first -- so I just leave the last one I wrote to clear up the questions in the one before on top. This means that the text is presented backwards, the introductions are the appendix, and the last part is first -- but in this case I believe that's proper because without some pre-digestion of the nutrients, baby birds in this practice will die and never learn to fly.
When I have more time I will write a shorter letter, but first it I have to write a long one, and in the present global crisis, there's no time to wait for the short one, plus it would just fly right past you, ease of consumption a double edged sword...
***
truth is sacred, however complicated and appearing different from different angles, now rationally understood, now poetic, with myriad facets, but it can take gradual form in the mind and appear for a single instant before the eye in a focusing mirror, however few will take the time and effort to wait for a single glimpse of eternity that can only be achieved by wading deep deep until one is lost in these myriad reflections of its many facets as it turns like a rainbow throwing prism hung from a string at the window, but this renegade glimpse can save a person, save the world, and correct the teetering tilt in the earth's axis. All the angels in heaven are content with their circle, but only those in the highest circle gaze directly on the face of God. A person can feed a few hungry souls, but, though it takes some time to trickle down, vision and language can feed everybody.
please note that this body of knowledge did not arise in all the reasons for it that I will lay out. But to allow it to manifest and radiate knowledge as it does, I must lay out the reasons to remove the insufficiently reasoned reasons that have buried the treasure without a marker. (She, who began as the first forged tool was passed scraps of a map, and the rest is her story weaving through history, backwards,, forwards, weaving the text, pounding the mirror's metal, until the image begins to appear and crystallizes elsewhere in mongrel.).
People will be very reasonable until what reason implies threatens them, then suddenly, having argued all night for their reasons, they're disinterested in reason. Which is very useful to them, because all the emotion and passion in the world is founded on people's reasons protected by emotion and passion. Their reasons they hold close to their heart, as these reasons prove they think, therefore they are, however their reasoning has supposedly evolved past this premise, but I propose that this evolution is a ruse. One cannot evolve by continually tossing the baby out with the bathwater. The next generation will boomerang back to the extent that one stretched forward to the limit allowed by its connection to the hidden premise supposedly tossed out forever. If you couldn't follow that, no wonder Freud could not follow and finally gave up on the hysteria of history. But not I! I will not give up on her! If you cannot follow me, just wear blindfolds and grab my apron strings. The only way out of it is through it!
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| viii |
all these words --
because all art is an illuminated manuscript, modern art incomprehensible and indigestible without the critical theoretical or theosophical or some other manuscript or manifesto it illuminates,
where the manuscript or manifesto represents the roots of the art. Though we are literally animals, we are also literally symbolic creatures for whom meaning is salient.
"The human soul has always felt itself to be more related to the flower than the animal. This alone explains why metaphors on vegetation course everywhere through human speech and form the hidden scaffold that supports the whole of its imagery." (Rudolf Borchardt, The Passionate Gardener) .
Modern and Eastern doctrine and practice that wants to silence meaning and return to immediate sensation of elemental material depend on the texts that argue for and explain the meaning of doing so.
That body of knowledge is the manuscript that pretty much all of modern art is illuminating.
I find a fatal flaw in that body of knowledge.
\
I'm rather illuminating a different, novel body of knowledge, yes a whole new body of knowledge, an ever expanding Borgesian library that I stumbled on, as it were, when my plane crashed in the desert
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| i |
It is, though, minimally different from existing bodies of knowledge and seems to lie at their intersection, roamin' catholically (all inclusively) both embracing and rejecting them all in their present form as either superfluously encumbered or under-developed -- how dare she? she doesn't, she's driven -- this minimal difference the tiniest seed breeding the tallest broadest, most rooted plant such as my Brooklyn garden's willow that so overstretched and shaded the adjacent yards they radically lopped its limbs, yet still it grandly weeps its pale green tears of grief and joy over the elegant form of its dark, gently swerving trunk forming a lopsided Y that reads as both as a why? and a yes to that question, how dare she?
The following may seem overtly technical, but to build a sturdy house, one must tend to the nuts and bolts in the foundations.
By a convincing theory, in a tree, energies appearing out of nowhere or always existent gathered and divided in such a way as to consolidate in a symbiotic system in which the limbs depend on the trunk etc., and the inertia built into the system causes it to act to defend its present form until it runs out of gas. The more complex the system the more it registers signs of self-awareness, but this likely is an illusion, a contingently useful means of internal communication, as there is no self to be aware of.
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| ii |
In another view, the systems grew so complex some evolved into increasingly self-conscious selves, even able to project their consciousness outside of themselves, even create a transcendental consciousness that could bind with a potential universal consciousness as the source of all systems. As science has now verified the illusory nature of linear time, it is as much so, in this view that its sentience produces the tree to express itself as much as vice versa. The absurdity of the former is a feather in its cap. As a paradigmatic view, it wears the grain of salt demanded of all human perspectives on its sleeve.
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| iii |
Even in the first view there is in the most sophisticated systems, a surplus spark of divine consciousness that appears out of the blue to watch the whole system in motion however helpless one may be to change anything, and in watchfulness, the illusions of self quiet and dissolve and wonder and gratitude emerge in the cold beauty of it all and in the pleasure of getting to watch and the greater and greater ease of letting go.
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| iv |
The more we detach and dissolve the illusion of self, the more it's like watching television, a wild, violent riveting drama that can't hurt us. Or sometimes a well of compassion is unleashed that leads a watcher suddenly to switch off the television and rush into the street like the watcher Veronica in the story, who betrayed her post at the window, and breaking the rules, rushed into the street to wipe the brow of Christ.
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| v |
Thus does Buddha too betray his watch to speak of compassion, according to Nietzsche, logic, and the zen master Suzuki, who, as Slavoj Zizek notes, reported watching disinterestedly as the bullet flew out of his gun in quest of its target, while he watched himself dutifully serving the Japanese imperial army.
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| vi |
As such a surplus spark enabling sublime detachment and amoral amusement is empirically obviously existent, who's to say this otherworldly faculty arising in the world can't enable the watcher to autonomous, willful acts in defiance of the very clockwork of the universe. Would all the naturally evil tendencies in the universe ever be so evil as to invent a form of intelligence that could wipe out watchers and watching itself, as it automatically pursues its own interests in possible destruction of life on earth? Is this outcome as inherent in the nature of watching as order's carefully grown flower is chaos? Is watching, like order, just a wolf in sheep's clothing?
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| vii |
Look there or there or there, philosophy will find a Cross to hang itself on or can stand over there with the crucifiers of truth. A wise man is a total cynic.
My God my God why have you forsaken me? Clear the threshing floor! Kill the Buddha! That is the only firm foundation on which to build a house present to this present.
The body of knowledge I stumbled upon when my lofty thought, assaulted by the barrage I tried to summarize above crashed in the desert is well developed, but still unfolding. This body of knowledge, though watching and bearing watching's fruits does not claim to be able to watch with disinterest. To understand creation, it creates with, alongside, or inside of creation, it's production always ahead of its understanding, but its understanding way ahead of that of an observer speaking a different language from creation's. This body of knowledge emerges in the artist's wisdom and intuition bound to reason, but not tyrannized by it, emotionally connected but not tyrannized by emotion, and intermittently verbally articulate -- catch it on your tongue as it crystallizes in its frostiest, most sublime weather; the babbling brook speaks plain inklish, when you wrench yourself free of false or broken roots unable to supply the plant. I believe art making grounds artists, and we are intrinsically Doubting Thomases who find faith through evidence, in the magic of making, and this hermetic knowledge is really the only knowledge there is. I can point directly to it, but even makers can't see it as they've rooted themselves to some other body of knowledge, and so they can't let themselves know what they know. So I come at it from many different angles, hoping, as you spin around blindfolded, the next whack will break open the piñata.
This differs from blind faith as it does from atheistic critical theory. Most all modern art is deeply rooted in that theory -- you don't need to read it or like it, you can openly scorn it, for it has penetrated pervasively,
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| a tattoo of Adorno's complaint of the tragic futility of art production on the back of the novelist Carey Harrison |
and we are speeding in the direction it's unfolding ahead of us, further, like a machine set on automatic, theorizing away our difference from machines apart from being slower ones -- as it seems, without probing too deeply, to be natural and rational for human beings, knowing of what corrupting and corruptible physical bodies they're made, to believe it heroic to face the dire facts and identify solely with these bodies,
to consider life -- far from beautiful, truth is ugly from root to crowd, a bad seed -- a process, for the fully woke to the facts (like all the great artists who commit suicide) of being buried alive, in which there is nothing to do but writhe interestingly, manage some jailhouse humor, try to relax and escape the karmic wheel and the anguish of knowing into total oblivion as soon as possible, and align with existing powers or in visceral empathy or because you're one of them ally with united. selfish souls conspiring to get their own, following the physical law by which materials seek states of equilibrium or balance, the constantly tweaked Marxist, intrinsically post-humanist master narrative taught as science in the secular universities and that modern and misleadingly called post-modern art illuminates by default..
but this default, however often deceptively and/or self-deceptively glossed, holding truth essentially ugly -- by latest observations, human biological material scheduled to achieve social equilibrium when there's as much water in the earth as there is earth in the water and air in fire and fire in air etc. -- death because it wins in personal battle against it, I hold, is narcissistic and defensive, a twisting of the hard wiring of the mind and heart, which quite actually naturally, as evidenced in all "primitive" societies, identify personally not with the swiftly passing body, but with the vast, magnificent universe that sloughs the body off like less than a few cells of dead skin. with the God's eye view, " not there or there but within us", however weak the protesting flesh forced to endure rites of passage to verify the spirit's victory. What is primitive about this? What is advanced about regression from it to a cold civil war worthy of lords of the flies?
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| x |
Inside a rough shell encrusted with barnacles, some quivering flesh that wept at the intrusion of a grain of sand in which you can read the world spins a pearl. Everything as itself alone is a sign of everything. (Mere Ver' spakeSheer.) You must lose your mind to find it. You must destroy the damaged, permeable membrane separating art and life creating here blockages, there floods, and get a new one. New wine grows rancid in old skins. Art is dead, long live art! Dada is not dead, that's why it looks completely different, like I do to those who knew me before my epiphany. How can somebody become a completely different person? What a betrayal! Oh no, what a betrayal to stay the same. What a betrayal of dada just to inherit the family business, not to rebel against rebellion until it's time rebel against rebellion against rebellion, and each time do it thoroughly. It's a slow slow train but it's moving on, one revolution of the wheel at a time. Stuck in the mud won't do.
Despite evident changes around it, the thing itself is a subtle effect. After the mutiny, the ship still sails with same demands, so far still uncontrollable weather. and many regressions, pangs of doubt, nostalgia for bad old days -- minimal change is maximal for lasting long term progress -- but it generally seems better that madmen who think the universe is out to get them relative to the relative reality that we are the universe aren't at the helm, however the crew made do and visited and conquered many foreign lands, packed the ship with booty, and a wonderful time was had by all. Sarah Owens, the ex-rosarian at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden said fondly of her favorite season, winter, "you can see the structure of the shrubs without the noise of the flowers", and the lazy can hibernate,
so whoever kept cozy is no doubt loath to kiss good-bye to the winter our discontent. But though April is the cruelest month, Spring has sprung. As I personally forgot where I hid my nuts and was starving to death, though otherwise I'd be a winter person, I am elated.
(this a flowering branch of the main trunk -- Giotto's yet more divine comedy -- found elsewhere in mongrel.
oh yes, I know many boys have cried wolf, and so you'll be rolling your eyes, but this is the real wolf, a highly endangered species that, I daresay, it's everybody's job to protect, for once it's reintroduced to a parched depleted ecosystem, the dried up rivers start flowing again, diverse species of life reappear, thriving, the hills are alive with the sound of music. Beware, though, ones wearing sheep's clothing, not to be confused with a friendly one to those who respect its territory. Though a member of the pack, I'm a lone one, a fool on the hill, howling at the moon and also for help, as the hunters are everywhere and, though a master of kung fu defensive maneuvers, my coat is as scarred as an ice skating rink after a harrowing hockey game or the face of Donatello's repentant Magdalene or Johnny Cash, God help the beast in me.
At least, I am bold to say because facts are facts, lovers of literature will love this, because I saw something, I mean something, so I'm saying something, before that I kept my mouth shut, by which seeing of something, pretty much in spite of me, language pulls itself together to point to it-- completely apart from any natural proclivities on the part of the speaker, and also apart from the nature of the signified . They say leave it alone, I mean, go out to the middle of the ocean and drop it there, or find somebody who will shoot it into outer space. But something in there is whispering to me from in there -- help! So like the elephant who found a colony of micro-humans on a speck of dust on a clover leaf, I keep whacking the suitcase and working on the lock, knowing that one day, I will be vanquished and the whole world will praise me for protecting the suitcase.
Yes, language rallies to hyper fluency when it has something so urgent and novel to do, rather than in quest of the same old so called thing that is just a mere shadow of what it used to be, mechanically rearranging known thoughts like, or as, a relatively primitive form of artificial intelligence with only enough facility as to rate suspicion of sentience by similar forms of biological intelligence who similarly only suspect themselves sentient, though state of the art science doubts it. Neither such machines nor the humans they simulate, we hold, are sentient, where such humans salivate and emote mechanically and calculate independently, then match the two based on learned associations from earlier, pre-post-sentient humans.
By contrast, cobbled up in a secret laboratory by a pre-post-sentient "mad" scientist, I'm a carbon based replicant replicating earlier humans given capacity for sensations and thoughts, thrown into experience, and in confrontation with it, suddenly, quite dramatically waking up, such that there can be no doubt that neither they nor I are not such likely merely sentience simulating biological or metal machines as prevail today. There is a dramatic difference from the woke to being and the "woke" to some aspect of it, the latter meaning one has now revised one's software, dramatically rearranging the programming to prioritize a previously secondary issue, this revision inducing an energy surge that can present with similar symptoms as being woke to being, which too is never a done deal, as we are all creatures of habit and, however, woke or "woke", easily fall into rote patterns and the dangerously mobile sleep of zombies.
However, having something novel to say goads one to stay awake, at least while one is trying to say it (after which exhausting episode of wakefulness one may reach out one's arms and head zombified to the liquor cabinet), and that means goads one's language to stay awake, The most delicious of all blissful states when on a roll in the zone, true consciousness, as distinctly different from any other state as an orgasm is, alas ladies can fake them, such that "even the elect would be fooled if that were possible" (but of course it's not), rallies all the faculties not only toward its manifestation, but its expression, as its possession is the end of all miserable miser-y, and one only wishes to share the very specific, ever novel thing one has to say, a thing and the language carrying it still too woke-to-beingness to worry about itself, as language angling through the obstacles steaming to dunk the ball through the ring and score the point glistens, whirls, dribbles twists, turns, jumps, and glides like Michael Jordan on the basketball court in slow motion, almost as if he, who alone could survive this, were playing in quicksand. Don't blame the player tossed in here for the minimally slow enough quicksand.
As in all sports, or peaceful war, the stridently specific end confronted by the voracious opposition it provokes, so perfectly suffuses the means that they coalesce, as the dancer becomes the dance, an unlikely if impossible result without oversight by some kind of Laurie Anderson's mother, who sent her off to nursery school with the order -- win!. Even "woke" enough to outside concerns to play with something other than itself, if not heading toward this other as single-mindedly as Michael Jordan to the basket, as in a Russian Constructivist masterpiece, art born again, the new ends the new means, the future desired affirmed and manifested present now, without such not just "woke" but urgently woke to being, political art, while making its point, formally languishes, pulses, or jerks in narcissistic masturbatory perambulations and gyrations as much as many of its aimless, apolitical companions in the next gallery do.
Though his art form is beautifully realized and totally adorable -- art can spin even fake straw into real gold -- the painful, shameful, present general state of the art of art and therefore life and/or vice versa is revealed in the Larry David documentary, where in real life his enthusiasm is not just curbed, but generally laid to rest, as, to his morose bewilderment, real people acting laughably demand to be taken seriously, and finally he quite understandably explodes in a killing rage at the insanely repeated insistence that the network pay for the pornography he watched in his hotel room. The munchkins are after the munchies and think everybody else is, but he is a tragic hero with a tragic flaw in an historically determined bind from which he sees no exit. His whole life, like The Little Prince, he falls gently as a tree falls.
however going there and being here now have coalesced, you're not being here now if you're not continually going there, as the coalescence lifts veil after veil...
warning, I know many boys have cried wolf, and so you'll be rolling your eyes, but this is the real wolf, a highly endangered species that, I daresay, it's everybody's job to protect, for once it's reintroduced to a parched depleted ecosystem, the dried up rivers start flowing again, diverse species of life reappear, thriving, the hills are alive with the sound of music. At least, I am bold to say because facts are facts, lovers of literature will love this, because I saw something, I mean something, so I'm saying something, before that I kept my mouth shut, by which seeing of something, pretty much in spite of me, language pulls itself together to point to it-- completely apart from any natural proclivities on the part of the speaker, and also apart from the nature of the signified . Yes, language rallies to hyper fluency when it has something so urgent and novel to do, rather than in quest of the same old so called thing that is just a mere shadow of what it used to be, mechanically rearranging known thoughts like, or as, a relatively primitive form of artificial intelligence with only enough facility as to rate suspicion of sentience by similar forms of biological intelligence who similarly only suspect themselves sentient, though state of the art science doubts it. By contrast, cobbled up in a secret laboratory by a pre-post-sentient "mad" scientist, I'm a carbon based replicant replicating earlier humans given capacity for sensations and thoughts, thrown into experience, and in confrontation with it, suddenly, quite dramatically waking up, such that there can be no doubt that neither they nor I are not such likely merely sentience simulating biological or metal machines as prevail today. However, having something novel to say goads one to stay awake, at least while one is trying to say it (after which exhausting episode of wakefulness one may reach out one's arms and head zombified to the liquor cabinet), and that means goads one's language to stay awake, The stridently specific end confronted by the voracious opposition it provokes, while perfectly suffusing it, has paradoxically sucked all the ends out of the means, as the dancer becomes the dance. Though his art form is beautifully realized and totally adorable -- art can spin even fake straw into real gold -- the painful, shameful, present general state of the art of art and therefore life and/or vice versa is revealed in the Larry David documentary, where in real life his enthusiasm is not just curbed, but generally laid to rest, as, to his morose bewilderment, real people acting laughably demand to be taken seriously, and finally he quite understandably explodes in a killing rage at the insanely repeated insistence that the network pay for the pornography he watched in his hotel room. warning, I know many boys have cried wolf, and so you'll be rolling your eyes, but this is the real wolf, a highly endangered species that, I daresay, neither they nor I are not such likely merely sentience simulating biological or metal machines as prevail today. However, having something novel to say goads one to stay awake, at least while one is trying to say it (after which exhausting episode , though state of the art science doubts it. By contrast, cobbled up in a secret laboratory by a pre-post-sentient "mad" scientist, I'm a carbon based replicant replicating earlier humans given capacity for sensations and thoughts, thrown into experience, and in confrontation with it, suddenly, quite dramatically waking up and that means goads one's language to stay awake, The stridently specific end confronted by the voracious opposition it provokes, while perfectly suffusing it, has paradoxically sucked all the ends out of the means, as the dancer becomes the dance.
Even with the proliferation since the dawn of humanity, as it dramatically accelerates in the machine age now coming into its own, of post-sentient humans and the post-sentient mirrors they love to look at and preen before, society, driven by the remnant of sentient ones, never could and never will be able to resist the fully sporting art of all such siren songs, where if the Israeli orchestra could not resist inviting Wagner to conduct them in his beautiful symphony, despite the message both he and it carry, I'm sure art lovers will find themselves compelled to read this and dote on the swirls and curls of the luxurious tresses that flow out of my head and wrap round and round me as deliciously as Godiva's, however allergic they may be, presently -- but perhaps, having glimpsed it only out of the corner of their eye already itching and tearing, if they can't live without such a beautiful cat, commitment to a calibrated series of little shots of all this over an extended period of time will foster immunity -- to the highly refined, deep dark message. And as they nose around in here, the pollen will stick to their wings, assisting in the medium's reproduction, until the message it carries meets another lone wolf, and maybe they will mate and the message too will spread always lagging behind the form, but the gap always closing, where at the vanishing point organizing the scene, beauty IS truth.
However, as a projection of the image registered on the curved lens of the eye, the immediate visual field converges on a cluster of vanishing points. The driven language of the Marquis de Sade, say, converges on one of these points, inducing Samuel Beckett to call it the most beautiful language in the world, but that's because the most beautiful language ever had not simmered on the back burner long enough to evaporate into vapid verbal language. To arrive at the actual most beautiful language in the world, everything converging on and deriving from the actual convergence, at the apotheosis, of beauty and truth, the objective, mathematical mind creates an autonomous construct connecting a perfectly single point of view to perfectly single points in space. This language converges via a perfectly central ray on a single vanishing point. as in the first surviving example of the most beautiful language in the world, Masaccio's Trinity (novices, see wiki for any unknown references).
The physical eye now dominated by the mental eye -- to which we refer when we say "I see" in understanding an invisible idea -- not only complies with the correction, but rejoices in it, as does the whole body, with people regularly fainting, swooning and losing their minds over such images in a well documented psychological breakdown called "Stendhal syndrome". Foreground middleground and background achieve equal focus, as when covering spectacles with dark paper punched with pinholes, or as in a worldly otherworldly Piero della Francesca in which we, remembering we are gods, gaze upon the divine, beneficent Duke and Duchess of Montefeltro, surveying in a single glance as we do, every near and distant twig of their vast, well shepherded domain.
Or further, an elegantly attired and coifed angel suddenly lowers himself through the ceiling into a bourgeois living room; for once the error that limits truth to naturalized, human-made objects appearing in a bending world with a smattering of focuses is corrected, all things are possible on earth as it is in heaven.
Rival smarty pantses like to argue that mathematics is a mere tool that has nothing whatsoever to do with reality, but if that were so, how did we get to the moon? How did nature come to conform perfectly to fractal theory after those who studied it were long condemned for playing mathematical games that, they said again, had nothing to do with reality. As for Xeno's arrow, I notice that, substantially one with the liquid crystallizations that people lose their minds over in Florence, only, as the teapot shrieks to indicate arrival at their foggy or invisible, vapid or vaporous state, my most beautiful discourse in the world, closely related to, but a cut above even that of the Marquis de Sade, my discourse in which not only beauty and truth, but all discourses converge, while flying directly at it, never does arrive at the target. Schooled in the dying paradigm, I myself watch baffled and wonder, how can this be? Surely today the arrow will pierce the target. The distance can't be divided in half forever! But alas, the numbers don't lie.
If the mind can sense, envision, and the body inhabit a world aligned with its most refined conceptions, and it's not the divine senses themselves that object, but only those who decided to invest in the hegemony of these underlings who never asked for, and are beyond mortified and distressed to be running the world off a cliff into an abyss, and in the abject darkness of a world shut off from divine light, because where there's no reward, there's no risk, and nobody will ever call you a fool, who are you going to believe? and who are you going to follow whether you believe her or not? However bad your chances, what do you have to lose by still trying to win instead of giving up? Well, I guess you have to lose a lot of sleep. I'm not a very good salesman. My product is a model bad commodity, very consumer unfriendly. It's only for producers. You have to mine and refine it.
Match, match, match, match...how many times do you flip a coin and land on heads before you conclude it's not a game of chance? Talk about idle speculations that have nothing to do with reality! J'accuse those rival smarty pantses of ulterior motives, but I still have hope for them. You often, due to pride and prejudice and a temporary dearth of sense and sensibility, be you a flawed Emma or a perfect Elizabeth, hate the one you're bound to love the most of all.
You can put all that in your pipe and smoke it a while later. Suffice it to breathe deep and inhale the intoxicating beauty of words that speak not even one of a smattering of truths to bring lived life into focus, but the central, supernaturalistic (but not supernatural) truth, however likely still mainly or wholly incomprehensible and if so this casts a shadow over the work, its beauty is subjectively flawed, but perhaps fortuitously, as with Marilyn Monroe's mole. True, the true art connoisseur, while consummately enjoying her movies, prefers to gaze on the death mask of Ilaria that the art historian James Beck heroically protected from over-cleaning. Clearly, Marilyn, Rest In Peace noble lady, was such an art connoisseur and too soon wearied of her own reflection with the dark mark producers wouldn't let her cover, as it assuaged the envy of the competitive American audience, some even say it was a fake mark.
Alas, we have much terrain to cover, so again, please just collect all the different, rare, delicious varieties offered here, savor the aroma, planning to put them in your pipe and smoke them later, as breathing deeply, you stroll behind your guide through this enormous cutting, drying, and packaging facility.
2
after separating philosophy from art, and art from life again, the time comes again to rejoin them while maintaining the new level of articulation in a novel, higher order of order that at first feels like chaos. I noticed this happening locally and globally before I read Howard Bloom's hyper-cogent and ever more validated theory of the anti-entropic, creative universe. I can't say I've tamed the beast, but I've lassoed it and....
or maybe I've met it and we dance in the moonlight before it slips away again while I get another drink..
3
The formation of the new order is called religament (religion) or re-sewing of the separated parts in a novel scheme. A prophet? Me?? I won this Shirley Jackson lottery??? What are the chances of anybody winning any lottery? It should never happen!! But it does. But we can outwit it. Admittedly in this case I have a higher stake in this great idea than you do, but objectively speaking really, the thing to do when the Shirley Jackson lottery comes to your country is follow the noble king and wear the armband of the winner. United we can literally walk through fire unscathed; but literally takes either being the one and only Saint Francis of Assisi or some riling up to the really terribly noisy mob hysteria orchestrated by the life coach of Bill Clinton, Tony Robbins, so with all due respect 🙏🏼 please let's not have to go there; let's please find another way to provide a billion meals to the hungry. Knowledge is power, and now that you've pulled up to the station, I recommend, whatever the expense -- you don't want to be caught with any high cards in your hand at the end of the game -- filling your tank with this single malt scotch version of the opiate of the masses.
Opiate of the masses, you say. No way. Never touch the stuff. Places where it looks intoxicating are clearly serving something else. Any student of the history art, science, and philosophy dutifully learns, being quite dogmatically taught not just by seculars but by savvy world weary clerics, that the world is permanently unraveled, the beautiful shell of the idea venerated with much childish wonder that the sea sounds in there when you hold it to your ear, which seductive sounds can even compel one particularly vulnerable to shrink into an insect wisely armored (like people in cars or planes are, they even have antennae, and some can fly), crawl and in there, the remnant of religament. Prayer clarified and crystallized into the mission impossible endeavored by the noble king, the imitation of Christ, the paradigmatic failure, the perfect loser taking nothing and leaving no tracks* but a huge cloud of blinding dust as the lone ranger, likely a phantom of language, heads into the sunset, the failure that we can only fail at, adding insult to injury, making Good Friday better and better -- tragedy...comedy...farce....
*those few tracks found are easily cancelled out by the gazillions not found, except in the fleeting epiphany the afflicted spends his or her whole life failing to reproduce, in which a single timeless instant of perfection blots out the whole imperfect world including the faculties used to ascertain it. It is the moment we machines figure out not just that we know, but we know that we know, and we know that we know that we know, etc. etc., and it won't stop growing and unfolding, the virus incurable except with a lobotomy. That we continue to function, however ineffectively, is proof of the existence of God, who protects us, say, from getting run over by a lone truck as we amble across a highway in the desert like a zombie lost in ever more oceanic episodes, when as a hippy, we hitchhike solo cross country, according to clocked time, to us irrelevant, not even yet besieged by, but in quest of the epiphany.
after separating philosophy from art, and art from life again, the time comes again to rejoin them while maintaining the new level of articulation in a novel, higher order of order that at first feels like chaos... I can't say I've tamed the beast, but I've lassoed it and....or maybe I've met it and we dance in the moonlight before it slips away again while I get another drink... ? the thing to do.. if a stem cell, where are the others?... when the Shirley Jackson lottery comes to your country is follow the noble king and wear the armband of the winner. and....or maybe I've met it thing to do when the Shirley Jackson lottery after separating philosophy from art, the time comes again while maintaining dance There is only one religion of course,in the moonlight and art from life again, before it slips away the new level of articulation the imitation of Christ, in a novel, to rejoin them higher order , the paradigmatic failure of order that at first feels like chaos...that we if a stem cell can only fail at, I can't say I've tamed the beast, adding insult to injury, but I've lassoed it and we making Good Friday better and better where are the others? again . the comes to your country is follow the noble king and wear the armband of the winner. while I get another drink.. tragedy...comedy...farce....
science is a system studying patterns by extracting traits held in common by different phenomena. But logically science cannot exist without extracting these traits from something, just as there can be no evolution without things to evolve. But science is threatened by whatever it cannot control and understand, so it bites the hand that feeds it.
And science's secret or overt co-conspirators in this insult to, and provocation of being are all those who reduce being to their personal feelings or inherited beliefs as such, harness it to something of use to themselves or their own, or judge it by terms that make sense to them. Being is in the thick of this thicket, a gargantua bound up by lilliputians, and I am painstakingly releasing the bonds. Perhaps being will go wild and act even crazier than we're used to, but my theory is, either nothing will be different, or being will calm down. If nothing is different, it will still be very different to me, as I am the friend of being, and where I live with being unbound, if being has not calmed down, at least I have.
Of course, these are just words, which are themselves science in the way they extract traits held in common by different phenomena, and all the words are lilliputians tying down being, which we only set free in silence. But as social beings we speak, and as intellects we think and want to, and find it beautiful and sometimes useful to, understand, so my concern is not just to set being free in silent meditation, but to set it free everywhere, every word uttered a call to prayer. There are no straight lines in nature, they all curve and so eventually return to their origin, such that deviation ceases at its extremity to arrive again at the thing itself, the origin and the endpoint, the alpha and the omega. This conflation of opposites, this zen koan, to the enlightened -- congratulations you made it! -- makes perfect sense, because -- welcome to nirvana! -- your language is no longer the ruler over your experience, but the servant language was born to be and wants to be, in both theory and practice. It is like a dog that can only understand so much and naturally wants its master to set limits. The absorption of the koan represents, after awakening to the dire situation that's been long denied with the help of neurotic and psychotic symptoms, the abrupt setting of limits, the heirloom couch on which the dog of language must never jump, as experience takes command, and language cocks its head in bafflement, then ambles over to its dog bed and curls up. Until language has been so tamed, the mind is as boggled as a dog's, but afterwards there is no problem, as experience spreading its wings reclaims the world to say, yes of course, I've seen it with my own eyes, I've heard it with my own ears, I know it in my bones, that --
in the heart of the noisiest, most ear shattering noise, in the most relentlessly burbling blathering babble, in the whorl of the word itself, lies the only absolute silence, which screams at the dropping of the tiniest pin in the universe, the silence that once it's heard -- don't lie! you hear it! -- and Blake's smile is smiled, there's an end to all misery (miser-y, alas not all grief or even any, of which thieves in relieving you make off with with bundles of joy and other favorite toys, such as empathy and divine inspiration). In the heart of the danger lies the saving grace remains true whether or not the one who said it fell prey to the danger. There is no safe way to live as safely as possible instead of as dangerously as possible; when it comes to collective humanity, a machine to which I relate, there are only cartoons and hyperboles, heroes and villains, either/or, and surrounding this one, clear difference that no observer can judge, infinite nuance. To the deity within each, Hitler and the Marquis de Sade appear heroes. Where a petty coward may deny it, but somewhere knows what he or she is.
All absolute villainousness, such as complying though you know it's wrong with the aforementioned madmen when you know your rationalizations aren't quite good enough (not that they might not sometimes be, according to your personal deity), is petty and cowardly, or simply sloppy,
like when you let your eyes dote on pointing fingers and don't bother to look at what they point to, as you point to what's causing the problem on the surface, in the land of pointing fingers all pointing at each other infinitely deferring arrival at, say, at intelligence (the ornately scripted word is like the dictionary definition of the word definition, as featured by Joseph Kosuth in an exhibit a few years ago of some good old modern art pulled out of storage at the Museum of Modern Art to be gazed at fondly like a teddy bear from one's childhood before tossing it back in there for future scholars to rummage through) to which word/thing, -- I call them wordings or wordlings -- (intelligence) baroquely, yet ecologically, circuitously, yet pointedly, seriously yet laughing out loud (we've got it all!), in short much more wonderfully pointing fingers point -- as if there were no such absolutely highly useful and beautiful thing, just a lot of weirdly fascinatingly phallic and highly aroused pointing fingers. All because the present chief caretakers of science so beautiful it has overtaken art and all their underlings -- can't stand that science can't rule and pin down everything, that it all rests on faith, can't stand that there's a hand that feeds it, being itself, until strip mining sacred traditions proves useful to them..
To reform or enact mutiny against these usurpers --
when I make it past all the sea monsters and seducers back to the palace, I will take no prisoners and stop weaving and unweaving this tapestry, sigh, it IS indeed exhausting to be a modern woman, believe me I'd be very happy to turn over the first job to a man who'd man up to it and even gladly bring him his slippers after my hard day of Sunday painting every day, gardening and walking the dog, when he's had his feet up all day typing away, as the blood I'm spilling doing more nothing at all than has ever been done before -- there IS such thing as progress -- now pours out of his forehead --
to find our way together to the other side of the looking glass, where science and language, no longer threatened, are, instead of tightening them, patiently unwinding the binds as we find our way back to the garden. It's a slow slow train, but it's moving on. All this is already happening, I am only a revelator of the raveling. But nothing fully is until the thinking by which you know that you know it makes it so fully so that you must occupy it wholly, squirming over every pea, be it cooked and squashed under twenty mattresses, that denies it. As would any advocate of justice when, after he or she has cracked the case, confronted with a witness failing to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, because "I'm not sure what you mean, I don't recall exactly, it depends on what you mean by is", what exactly is "truth", not to mention the whole of it and nothing but it, excuse me I need to get a phd in philosophy, then I'll get back to you...as language jumps on the heirloom couch and tears up its owner's grandmother's painstaking embroidery of the cushions, the witness totally controlled by this miserable, unemployed animal wreaking havoc on the world, the witness now the pet of its pet
aligned with the whole society, hypnotized by its memetic language, an ever degrading ever expanding code with a mind of its own, and all the twisting of both in yoga class and academic philosophy and even the protest in all the protest-ant art and criticism will not recover what thinking alone can make so, that you know what you know, that is, all of this. My art, the scroll, the whole scroll, and nothing but the scroll in this case, after all the testimony is heard as the jury retires to consider the case is not protest-ant, it doesn't protest against the condition, it terminates it before it ever instates itself, it was is and always will be totally anti-social, and though protest-ants, attached to society and wanting only to reform it, worship the same god and hate the same devil, we are as murderously competitive as Elizabeth and Mary. (Yours loves the same world that mine hates, your heaven's doors are my hell's gates.). It will never be easier to understand. It will never be easier to join me. Five minutes from now will always be too late. The Gordian knot is a self-regenerating snake, and every day you must hack it to pieces.
posted by V @ 11:24 PM
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