Giotto's giant, introduction part 2 -- exactly what's wrong and exactly how to fix it

Oh to open one's eyes in the one flowing, waking world, but I am a citizen of the world, and every time I seem to open them, the disjointed mosaics of a dream world have more and more encroached on the waking world.  All my cooking, gardening, dog walking doesn't seem to be helping anybody but me, my dog, and my small circle of friends, another disjointed mosaic in the endless skein of television screens, and if I had thousands of followers of my art, just another disjointed mosaic in others of the same. When I sometimes get lost in a dream that I know is a dream, I try to scream and I can't, and I push and push and finally I kick hard enough and finally my dream leg becomes a real one.  

With this last push, with this last kick, there will be no doubt which side we're on, with a bright new day dawning before us, this dream we've (yes we've, there is no they've) been weaving fast fading from memory. And now lend me your eyes and ears for one half hour, dear flipperables as flexible to be what you deem ethical as Philip Guston -- he converted at the grand victory and apotheosis of painterly abstraction to existentialist figuration, which to friends was worse than your dear son, a well loved happily married rabbi suddenly breaking an orthodox mignon, and filing for divorce to become a Christian monk, or vice versa  --  including Guston gone to gusty ghostly gusto itself, still carrying the world on his shoulders with utmost grace and good jailhouse humor though, he can put it down now, now that everybody's suffering being a turncoat against everybody, we'll carry it together -- and I will change everybody's mind and change everybody's life, and everybody's gaze will meet another across a crowded room, and everybody will fall in love with the murderer of her brother, and however tragically, or not I pray, our stories may end depending on our luck and skill in battle, we will save the world.  this spakesheer in earnest.

see you tomorrow!

now please zip up your mental* mechanics uniform and roll up your mental sleeves, as you lower down onto your mental back to slide under the mental chassis and show the boss what you're mentally and therefore in all ways made of (Michelangelo: you draw with your mind, not your hands), for the boss wants everybody to know how the Cadillac modern mind works and how to fix it.  Those who took over the shop -- excuse my French -- don't know their heads from their arses, but they did figure out how to tamper with the speedometer, so everybody will crash before the unsolved problem disables the vehicle.   

*pertaining to mind esprit geist spirit intelligence consciousness humanity connection discernment vision 

exactly what's wrong and how to fix it 

in the language of history philosophy critical theory poetry oratory instruction manual- and tweety birdese fully integrated before the fall of the towering edifice of edifying babble due to neglect of the requisite sacrifices and oblations, so I performed them and was granted a permit to build my own as I high as like as far as the angels are concerned.  Humans are another story.  They terribly envy and fear the implications of my tower for their dispersed, disjointed departments spinning around in circles supposedly looking for the solution that would put them out of business -- so they can't look too hard, however hard they try to, and they do work very very hard and try very very hard to -- and keep building thicker and thicker walls around it -- of reasonable height, as nobody ever looks up anymore, but only down into their cell phones -- so nobody will see it or me, who am up here climbing higher and higher as my tower does.  Somebody once called me strangely invisible.  It is not strange to me.  x plus y equals z.   

But now I've reached sufficient height, and I'm turning on the lights and waking everybody up from the dream, just like that.  Dreams seem oh so real in the thick of them, and then they're gone, just like that, and the world is, I wouldn't call it woke, it's still a very dreamy world, more dreamy than dreams, really, with its soft mists and flowing hills for miles and miles and then rising into mountains for miles and miles or drifting down to the seas, so I wouldn't call this dreamy waking world woke -- with all due respect to the so called woke and the important issues they rightly call us to awaken to, I think woke might have to wait til we're dead. 

Of course fellow citizens of the world have been visiting the dreamy waking world,  or daydream, and taken a lot of pictures of it to bring back to the disjointed world that is structurally so like, I suspect it subterraneanly connected to a nightdream, but you couldn't live in the daydream and call it your home -- for reasons that are not only obvious, but further clarified below -- without cutting all ties to the modern world.   Yes, that is true.  One must saw and saw until you cut it off however badly that hurts.  The difference is like the difference between identical twins at conception.  The cut is made, and that minimal displacement blossoms into two very distinct individuals.  There is no turning off the alarm.  You, modern world, are waking up.  I will apply an aesthetic as I saw and saw off the nightdreamer who should be fading away by the end of this no mere essay in a mission impossible.   

please prepare yourself mentally and we will begin sawing at the next post.

*****

In the high and late Middle Ages, in the spread of literacy and the birth of capitalism, with the rise of the first universities absorbing advanced Arabic mathematics and optics mingled in attentive studies of nature, the world was being born an objective thing, a thing that is out there, disconnected from us, and we can study it and arrive at objective conclusions as to its nature.   

Society began to demand a level of detachment that centuries later fructified in what was called the Enlightenment, not coincidentally related to the detachment sought in Eastern enlightenment.  All spiritual traditions demand rites of passage toward achieving self-transcendence or detachment, with self denial seeming a built in given charge to humans, a charge that when fulfilled allows unconditional reception of the gift of being itself, revealed in all its glory as the lead weighted cloak of ego drops off the shoulders of the brave brave or enlightened one or saint who like Saint Lawrence being grilled says -- turn me over, I'm still not roasted on the other side.  For the enlightened or earnestly aspiring, to be unburdened of the self is worth any pain it might involve.  If thine arm offend thee, cut it off.  

The Age of Enlightenment and all that lead to it hoped so to detach from and objectify the world apart, no saintly sacrifice need be required.  Overseen by disinterested enlightened science, all would automatically live in the light.  Obedience to science's methods and results would effectively turn everybody into beyond a saint, a superman who didn't even need a heavenly reward. Moreover the heavenly reward idea clearly did not arise in the objective analysis of the existing evidence.  The enlightened modern human's innate will to power would reemerge in its driven animal grandeur, as called by the wild, tribesmen lock horns like great elk, humanity a cipher of given nature, however objectively considered, that didn't exactly work, disinterested science calculating an intractable difference in human animals, however spiritually as post-existent and self-abandoned as animals in the wild, I'm nobody who are you?  There's two billion of us, ssssh don't tell anybody.

Alas it is a terrifying thought for the so called scientifically enlightened that this edifice of the enlightened amounts to a house of cards that depends on a sealed isolation chamber and has grown so tall it may very well collapse with the very next card.  The reason it is a house of cards is that science depends on empirical evidence, and empirical evidence is subjectively perceived and subjectively gleaned.   To deny and forget all about this toxic germ in the pristine spa waters -- only an enemy of the people would demand to expose it -- science allied to capitalism (people don't do things for just one reason, but when reasons allied to different, among them contradictory intentions add up), in the transition to a scientific paradigm, experience is rather suddenly reduced to categories of experience.  Observing the categories scientists can more and more predict how categories will behave.  What is the same about all hydrogen atoms behaves in a certain way.  

This does not tell us how hydrogen atoms behave, only about how what is identical in all hydrogen atoms behave.  Hydrogen atoms don't matter, only what is like about them matters as this is what enlightens the enlightened as to the behavior of the category.  There is likely such a thing as a hydrogen atom because it is visibly creating a number of effects identical to those other such things create, and under the electron microscope we can see each one looking a little different with our own eyes, but the instant we notice this quirkiness, to manifest our enlightenment we instantly create a category, quirkiness, and file the quirkiness into the category.  

The category of artist defines an artist as one who represents the categorical quirkiness of things, as quirkiness is also a trait all hydrogen atoms share.  Enlightened artists in close league with scientists are not interested in the atom itself, only its quirkiness.  They create a whole species of mating and spawning embodiments of quirkiness that represent nothing but categorical quirkiness and have nothing to do with the quirky things themselves as the source of quirkiness.  

Overtime "enlightened" institutions deny the existence of the things themselves as science cannot study or find them through their categorical lenses, however they quite obviously appear before the eyes as the source of all that science studies, just as your friend, unique in all the world, appears right before your eyes as just that.  But it is actually taught in all "enlightened" institutions that essentialism, the claim that there is an essential thing itself apart from the categories it yields is definitively debunked.  Not that they acknowledge the actual existence of the categorical entities either, but for all practical purposes, the categorical entities exist, because they are studied and the studies yield results that predict how the categorical entities will behave.  

So whatever one's metaphysical beliefs, practically speaking, one must put out one's eyes and lock the Pandora's box with evidence and logic driving at a reasonable verdict, hope for the world, at the bottom of the box, for if opened, the breeze would topple this house of cards, and what would appear and be empowered like Gargantua released from the bonds of the lilliputians are the incommensurable sources of all the categories from which we gleaned the attributes that replaced the entities with their attributes, such that a girl once called a girl feels that in any way that she deviates from every other girl, she does not exist not just metaphysically, but for practical purposes; and this cannot be, so maybe she is the collection of attributes called a boy, or if that doesn't work, she is a "they", the collection of attributes for which that doesn't work.  

But one day being "they" will not work either, for she is not a collection of attributes, but a transcendental source of many of them.  However this revolutionary insight would not be commercially viable, as its expanding implications would so stabilize the world that, as in the sublime great age of unsurpassably artistically realized cave painting, nothing would change substantially for at least 50,000 years or possibly forever.  

So for the foreseeable future, people's minds do not completely trust the eyes that take in their friends and lovers and pets, all the different transcendental sources that imperialistic science more and more determinedly debunks not just philosophically, but practically and in every possible way.  As it refines its categories, the digital images seem incredibly real, "verifying" the "fact" that what makes two of one category alike is for all practical purposes the existent entity, and the two incommensurable sources are not what you see at all -- however they are exactly what you see, that's how you see the attribute.  

That is the reality that the digital image reproduces in order to look, rather than be, real.  And people accepting science's claim on truth complain about losing the boundary as if they were the caretakers of it.  But they are really only complaining about losing the category of the boundary as they bind with the source that is producing the loss in, among other things, denying the existence of sources.       

In denying the evidence of their eyes and the logic with which their sight is allied, people's vision grows grayer and duller, as if a dusty veil were thrown over the world.  They learn to trust authorities and professors instead of thinking things all the way through for themselves and get very defensive when their honed categories are challenged.  Now it is time to defend science against those who threaten its objective procedures.  True, but it also the time to question the imperialism of categorical experience.  And then one identifies with the categorical imperative to identify with one or another, when that is the very transcendental entity, the very demonic source of the need for the debate that is escalating into a nuclear war.  

But the pendulum swinging back and forth is good for business, which is good for science, so there's a lot of hope for that side.  Great.  Maybe one day we can rid everybody of this compulsion to trust their own eyes and minds, and everybody will find the category that makes them happiest, and in this brave new world, any objectors will be sent to a beautiful island where they can live all alone or with a few other oddballs.   

Alas, I doubt it.  People are all giants tied up by these lilliputians, and we will together break free and "meekly" (with words mightier than swords) inherit the earth.  In the meantime people remain very sentimental because their hearts can never agree with their dulled distrusted vision and their supposedly cold disinterested mental constructions, but this makes people feel that there is no essential they.  They have indeed cut their very essence into two essences that are no more essences, just categories.  

But people are very resilient and have very big hearts, and they will make the best of this very sad and terrible situation.  Oh but it is such an effort. People are very heroic.  As when Izthak Perlman heroically played a common violin and then a Stradivarius.  He worked so hard to fool the connoisseurs that he actually managed to!  The connoisseurs could not tell which was which.  He later explained the value of hard work in saying that the common violin was oh so difficult to play well, but Stradivarius just played itself.  He did not have to be a hero then.  Playing a Stradivarius, he could be a child in paradise on earth.   

So it is when the eyes have it, until somebody makes somebody like Saint Lucy literally pluck out her own eyes; and then on Saint Lucy's saint day, people bake and eat buns with black current jam eyes, but Saint Lucy doesn't mind.  She doesn't want to torture the children with her story, but finds sweet this way of reminding them of the sweetness of  and preciousness of their own eyes, so as to sustain, she prays and prays, and never to betray their childhood, when the eyes have it, and to be a child is to be a violinist playing a Stradivarius.  

A friend who now lives far away told me once that her mother tacked a photograph of her as a child of three on the wall of her bedroom and wrote beneath it, "Never betray her".  She rarely spoke of her mother, with whom she didn't speak.  She did not long live with her mother or her father in her later childhood, but was raised by others.  The world is not kind to the wise.  The world is not kind to the eyes. It is not kind to ply a child with sweets and then fling mud at them over and over.  A child who owns her own eyes and who rebels will be punished, and the punished become punishers.   The exception proves the rule. 

The eyes do have it, but the "enlightened" scientists have gone with the nays, and the artists on their side have betrayed their own eyes as instruments, indeed our only instruments of knowledge.  The eyes are made to serve categorical language.  They mechanically scan and pick out quirkiness in other art or things and then they represent this category in a quirky way.  The artists are specialists in quirk, the captain quirks of the starship free enterprise always going where no man has ever gone before, as the market demands.

The artists can no more paint portraits like Rembrandt does without being "kitsch" or false to the "enlightened truth" that there's no such thing as the essential person that Rembrandt sees and represents.  Everybody's  heart is moved (except Alex Katz, who finds Rembrandt completely irrelevant and downright dumb), but can never go there.  The heart is a lonely hunter who got lost in the savannah and now haunts the world from the other side. The heartsick artists like the quirky paint handling and all the other quirks they can add to their cabinet of quirks when mixing and matching quirks for their own sake or to express their and in some way everybody's heartsickness and blow off that steam so the kettle won't explode.  

The convenient "philosophical truth" that there are no essentials makes for art built for obsolescence infinitely, again, marketable to the "enlightened" public not just to dangle another shape before the easily bored infantile public, something I particularly enjoy without guilt, but to corroborate its nature as scientifically "enlightened", something I totally reject.  I am a baby and do not approve of dirty bathwater, but I like fellow babies.  

I love words, I appreciate the scientific findings that work in the efficient system of breaking things down into categories.  But I want words returned to their rightful place as servants of the acknowledged, essential, immediate visible world, servants transparent to their nature as such.  When I managed to make them do that, words started singing and helping the things they serve in a way that seems to suggest some original collusion. But first it is necessary to kill the wicked delusion and free the mind of the mesmerized munchkin words as they withdraw their claws ubiquitously, and to restore the absolute authority of the visible world.  

The eyes have it, so the nays must suck that fact up and shut up until they are called upon to contribute. Professors should cry -- I see the light! and fall off their high horses and repent their denial of the essential, visible world of things that are the source of their categories or be fired on the spot.  For ALL practical purposes the visual world is rightly the dictator who dictates all the dictation, not vice versa. Words should prostate themselves before the dictator when they enter the royal chamber, however then this most beneficent of dictators bids them rise and look the dictator straight in the eyes, very interested in all the healing discoveries brought to us by categorical language.

Without first acknowledging and bowing to the dictator, words once they start to deconstruct, want to just keep deconstructing until there is nothing there, or not to begin at all.  Stop it words! Back off!  The visible world is like what they used to call woman, a flowing sea that cannot be controlled, but only loved and navigated wisely.  Maybe woman is still that basically, and that is why after all this time, as might makes right, the visible world has been denied authority.  It here and now -- for mightier than might is the minny voice of truth -- assumes the authority that simply makes sense and that everybody professes to the sense of, everybody claiming to be faithful to what is right before the eyes, however it is a sea one cannot control, but only love, respect, and navigate and try to desist from overloading with trash and plastic.

To respect and protect the wild sea of empirical evidence, the foundation of science, words resort to poetic tropes.  Science without poetic assistance doesn't work and eventually starts falling apart.  Science seeming in perfect control and avoiding all risk and uncertainty has certainly overstretched and if it does not retreat to the proper borders of its native land is doomed to a fall like Rome.  

Heed the sibyl!  If you notice someone is riding the whale of the sea of being and laughing for joy for her own honor and glory, she herself, whoever would have thunk it, the least likely candidate, opening the eyes of the whole world, for her good and your good and the good of the whole world, respond accordingly.  Bang on the door of your neighbor! Spread the good news!  Opportunity knocks. 

Not everybody is the whale rider.  There is only one whale rider per age if any, and no age is too sophisticated.  She will adapt, like all the children featured on all those videos, and be as sophisticated as the age.  But she will not always be with you.  

To navigate the sea of seeing you otherwise need a solid vessel.  You need a map of the sea.  The map is also an exercise machine to exercise the use and trust of your own eyes.  The map I call Giotto's giant, shortly to be unveiled and intently scrutinized as an image of the autonomously eyed world.  Not just the artists, but -- balk as you like -- the Catholic Church was conspiring to save the eyes from rising capitalism.  There are manifold references that point to the eyes and giving sight to the blind and to trusting the eyes and immediate experience in the Gospels.   The first democracies were established in collusion with the church in Siena and Florence, but then the Guelphs, the capitalists, defeated the Gibbelines in a reign of terror resembling the one sponsored by the consummately "enlightened"  French Revolution.  

I heard of a book or an article that I now cannot find called the French fear of sight.  applied to the French philosophers and theorists who fostered an intellectual reign of terror -- comparable to the rein of terror depicted in a New Yorker cartoon that showed trucks at midnight rounding up all the fat people, where the coin of beauty truth having luckily landed on beauty's side, must never be picked up off the sidewalk -- lest anybody question the purity of the pristine spa waters devoid of all allusion to any essential visual source of knowledge as it cannot be rationalized.    How dare I suggest that vision is, by definition, visionary. This original particle of being appearing in the microscope of thought so threatening to their scheme it requires a reign of terror to wipe out any reference to it.  (Wait! don't pick up the coin from the sidewalk.  The most beautiful city should remain that, and French women wishing to get fat should move to Belgium.  Just know what's on the other side of the coin.  No need to toss the baby out with the bathwater.)

If for you, the visual is a source of pleasure but not knowledge, when it ceases to offer pleasure, find a young mate who still has a trace of respect for and adoration of the knowledge conferred by a face.  If both members of the couple are cheating, it's okay really, were they not cheating themselves of love itself, as they never trusted their own eyes, never saw their beloveds themselves, and either ran like hell, or fell on their knees like Dante before Beatrice, truly worthy as was visible right before his eyes, like the lovely Taylor Swift, an honorary doctor of the arts.  She is no scullery maid missing teeth with a foul tongue, as are many of the false toothed beloveds, under an immediately recognizable living death mask to all with open eyes, of blind modern "lovers" wreaking havoc on each other and the world.  

In Don Quixote, the wise clerics ruthlessly inquiring into the matter save the visually intelligent romances and only ban the idiotic, blind ones.  Eyes come alive and ruling the world notice Taylor's lovely face is animated by a lovely lively soul, and however many traits she shares with other beauties, she is consummately unique to herself.  The beauty fades, but eyes true to themselves latch onto that lovely lively soul through the windows of her own eyes.  Like Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, their pairs of mutually gazing eyes outside of time bear it out to the edge of doom.  This spake sheer.  

Dear friends I will now take leave of you for a shortish spell.  I am polishing the titanium sailing vessel, Giotto's giant, and will shortly pull it up to the dock that you may tour this magnificent vessel, truly not made by human hands, but begotten of being to whom he lent his hands, his mind, his heart and his soul just by trusting his own eyes.   As the eyes of the world clear -- hear hear! -- the whole world is filling with light!  The angel of the apocalypse is calling the elect to the fold!  First time as tragedy, second as farce, all praise to folly! 

okay now you know exactly what's wrong and exactly how to fix it.  Garner your tools, gardeners, down on your knees to dig, as I'll be back with the seeds and bulbs to plant.  Eden is not a category that contains the lovely traits all gardens share.  Eden is gardening with hands that are hands eyes and the things they envision, and eyes that are hands eyes and feet and with a mission impossible being executed on your laptop swimming around in your head in the clouds, when that each thing is more each thing when it is everything is no longer any more a paradox than a snake is when you connect the head and the tail, or a coin with head and tail when you hold it in your hand.  

You are one with and have reestablished the sensorium, and words can never hurt you, that horror story is over, now they only tweet about you and eat out of your hands, and wonder of wonders, one day you notice that all these sweetly twittering words speak inklish, your native tongue!  The categories themselves are incommensurable things themselves down to their living roots that like mothers and fathers appear in the faces of their children. When we betrayed our three year old self in part by spoiling it, we did the same to language, and we both grew up into narcissistic megalomaniacs who call me that, a very bad case of them, just because I pulled myself up by my own bootstraps and healed myself all by myself, with a little help from my friends, family, professors, the news, books, crayons, my dog, the moon the sun the stars... like any three year old quite naturally does. I did betray her, but not for long.