work in progress

veronika sheer

Paradise Repletely Regained, my mission impossible 

and if you dared, you were there, never to go home again.  Please consider this option today, tomorrow is so very far away, and anything can happen between now and then. 

*****

to assume that art does not generate or autonomously validate, positive socially adaptable ideas, but only like oh so special, highly prized carrier pigeons trained to sing along with the messages we tie to their ankles, against something big and for some little way to kick it; or that one can deconstruct or avoid shared, positive ideas given the holes in them so they can breathe and take on all the risks that life entails, not noticing that only protesting and negating is just one big hole in which nothing substantial can happen, as these niggling nabobs of negativity (omg I never thought I would quote Spiro Agnew, but Ezra Pound was still a good poet too!) adopting and training positivity as a ferociously enthusiastic fighting dog toward their grand supposedly altruistic coincidentally self-serving negational or paralyzed project insist art apart from ideas imposed on it can not only differently resonate, but be completely different things to everybody — all this is to make art that fits that description and then use that art to create — in the guise of reflecting — an opaque world of isolated individuals who must latch onto group identities pursuing shared rigid, impossible, and therefore uniquely to them communicable ideals in order not to die of loneliness like Captain Kirk after the loneliness injection in a distant galaxy that now resembles earth to the dogged opponent(s?) of this nefarious negational scheme.  Did the self-fulfilling prophesy of the de-generative in-validating nature of art determine the limits of your training and skill set?  Did you accept it along with how it influenced what your internal authority, deeply entangled in that input, allows you to endorse or believe? Are you really worthy of her majesty’s secret service?  What would you sacrifice to accomplish the mission impossible described herein?  Wherever one is pointing the finger for all one’s and/or everybody’s troubles, always useful occasionally to try turning it around and pointing it at oneself.  Now burn this message.  Good luck!🤴🏼

*****

Note: this rather dry, mere abstract of an art historical interpretation of a rather dry image is like a rabbi who discourages converts, and if you seek to regain paradise repletely, you must pit grace against gravity, the latter a mighty force, the former a mere feather in the wind.  The very fact that it ever wins is a miracle.  I wouldn't try to fight gravity with any other weapon though.  You will just get exhausted, and if you win a few or even many battles, gravity will always win in the end.  Giotto is known for his gravitas, but it is only featured to feature an epic battle of the naked forces themselves, with grace the victor. 

 

*****

mere thinking will not do. With all this brings with it, I think it through, therefore I am, through and through.  

Perhaps there are other ways to be a human being, but so often they prove imposters, or insufficiently considered, shallowly well intentioned scenic routes that twist and turn by the devil's sneaky machinations toward his abode, or in trying to bulldoze the waters directly to it, capsizing like any sailboat refusing to tack back and forth, so I'm not taking any chances.   

 

unaffiliated 

krvs@me.com

#paradise #Giotto #perspective #visualphilosophy #phenomenology #paradigmshift

 

abstract submitted for rights to submit a scientific essay

bio (see postscript)'

Caravaggio, The Ecstasy of Saint Francis, 

Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut

Giotto

The Stigmatization of Saint Francis, 

Santa Croce, Florence

Sprouting abstract

In Eden, knowing (love’s consummation) is replete. When we took a bite out of it, whole knowledge (science) broke into pieces. We now naturally dote on any part, or part of a part, or..  of knowledge returned, but a part of another long lost part soon appears for a turn — please let’s try not to lose that last part of the other part — at the head of the table.  Wait, what!?? did I just find the last lost part?! Let the reader be the judge.

When mechanical, linearly logical science rules, with cold disinterest, we categorize the puzzle pieces according to like attributes and patterns.  Then comes time to ignore its generic “identity” and instead identify with each piece, like no other, as it seeks its particular partners, those it uniquely locks up with by what the painter Amy Sillman calls the order of adjacency — what just feels like being next to what.  Gradually, then suddenly an image appears, recorded in — the wheel to progress having regressed, as some gold in the mine was left behind —  a fresco by Giotto into which Dante’s expansive Paradiso — substances and accidents bound by love in a single volume —  implodes, the layered symbolic language collapsing in on itself and splaying out on the sparsest of storied surfaces with the densest meaning, the shallowest deepest, a rarified rigorous vision, reflection will reveal, of vision (versus scanning, prove you are not a machine!) itself.

However they will soon begin to dance, at least for musically minded mathematicians and vice versa (“Giotto paints what the eye cannot see.” (Bocaccio)), the fresco represents the dry bare bones of the ecstasy or stigmatization of Saint Francis, posed in the textual sources as a layering of paradoxes. The vision initiating the miracle consists in a crucifix signifying sorrow born by a seraph signifying joy.  He “receives” the wounds as, appearing out there in front of him, Christ in his divinity imposes them or “stamps” them on him, which reverses them, Christ’s left side wounds transmitting to his right side, where in understanding and perceiving compassionately, Francis engenders the wounds from within, by identifying with Christ’s humanity, which would not reverse them.

After several earlier tries, without unnaturally crossing the piercing rays that stitch the bodies together, Giotto corrects or reverses the reversal —as Francis turning to receive the wounds twists in such a way as to turn the loop joining the figures strung together into, effectively, a Mobius Strip, a band with a twist joined into loop that, when you trace a line from one point to its return, you have passed through all the terrain and remained on only one side.  There is only one side in the whole view, though locally two manifest, by which Francis in the visualized whole view is perfectly identified with Christ, as if shadowing him, but locally appears stamped from without as if facing him, simultaneously visualized.  

The scene glows dimly, as if blinded by the light that burns off the atmosphere and mingles in an interior source in the washing out of critical shadows that mold form and give fictive depth to the image, such that the distant hermitage diminished in perspective in the optical imprint, without atmospheric clues, sticks in the foreground seeming absurdly small, like the room that Alice found herself in at the bottom of the rabbit hole.

The saint as shown is differently cramped, like a pinned butterfly splayed out and pressed back, locked into, as a part of the landscape, his torso outlined by the sharp cuts in the stone, his hand centered in an adjacent facet.  

Giotto’s image, which, conceptually touching it not, he has left it to logic, has quite scientifically or objectively arranged itself so that without effacing, abstracting, or dismembering anything, without tampering with the scene of the brutal crime of beautiful Creation or self-created nature the landscape that the saint is wearing like clothes twists with him to lay as flat as possible, as if melting into the still wet plaster on the flat wall and staining it directly with its colors and hues, the nature of the flat configuration on the eyeball, resisting mechanisms of mediation, including the contingent conception of space apart from time, turning to face us as it melts into the wall before it turns back into the wall.  

One naturally will plow through this interference and in some way normalize the reading, as there is no precedent for what one is directly gazing at and experiencing, which is ubiquitously interfering with normality and wanting to kick it aside — let the dead bury the dead.  One is directly experiencing projected objects in projected space losing their resilience as they fade and dye back into the physical surfaces of wall and eyeball, or just emerge from them, the seer and seen effectively joined in that twisting loop, the light from within and without, human nature and all of nature commingling as one as they meanwhile differentiate, subject as subjected or subjector continually changing places.  One is restoring the being one lost entirely when one came into language.   

See Giovanni Bellini’s similar interpretation of the saint’s body as the intersection of inner and outer light, but here Jesus has commanded the oceanic waves to lay flat as a still lake, as the everyday world of objects separated in time and space is restored to stability.  It was lost and now it is found, though the modern viewer is only privy to the arresting afterglow of this drama and final recovery from the trauma.  

By contrast Giotto leads the modern viewer, you no doubt  — who, I profess, never found  faith because you never fully lost it, never totally abandoned hope to enter this hellish domain, where Giotto hand in hand with his friend Dante guides us, as words and world, broken apart, then bizarrely mismatched, come apart again to find their matches and dance closer and closer and finally mate in Giotto’s  glimpse of actual paradise rather than just the idea of it.  Bellini has restored the frame, purified, born again, kissed in every inch, trembling with being’s perpetual rebirth.  Giotto is melting the frame to reveal perilously rising waves with Jesus still sleeping in the boat — a theme attracting high romantics Delacroix, de Chirico, and Shura Skaya.  

A symptom of the clung to remnants of faith in all the protestations and affirmations that doth protest too much the death of God, that those who claim the unveiled phenomenon in Giotto’s fresco is other than a sign of such a thing, as meaningless as any sign without a signified — though the image is not a sign, it is the objects that are signs of the image, and this image knows it — will still viscerally read Giotto and my revelation of the truth below the veil as indiscrete, even pornographic, 

the more so when I dare to point out that as Christ conceptually, and on reflection perceptually presses on Francis, and on us, the voyeurs, his gaze is directed to Christ’s genitals seen through a diaphanous gauze, the wings opening discretely only to offer the saint this view and further tantalize. (Augustine: restraint is only valuable in the presence of desire. Or Simone Weil quoted by Leo Steinberg: “of course mystics use sexual metaphors, sex is what people have to love with.” but “if it’s just a metaphor, to hell with it (Flannery O’Conner))

Initiating the research that lead me to this image and decoded it, I came upon an article by William Hood, who found a Dominican manual called “How to Pray” in the archives at San Marco, explaining what’s happening in Fra Angelico’s fresco there. The friars depicted are, according to the method, imitating the gestures of the saint in various states from contemplative bowing to passionate gesticulation to look and act and feel like the saint and thus become like him.   

The telescoping (however shallowly) space in the illustrations of the prayer method showed the friar in foreground “spying” on the saint in the middle ground  gazing at the Crucifix in the background in the illuminations in the manual.   The supplicant is in the viewer’s space, the saint, as an image to be observed, is at the picture plane, Christ is the object on view.  Piero della Francesca in his treatise on perspective defines this separation as the very essence of it. But here the goal in defining and clarifying the components of the scene of appearance is to unread or undo the separation.  As corroborated in a larger pattern, original modern (Renaissance) perspective emerged then in opposition to its later use. It objectified objectification in order in order maximally to mitigate it, rather than to thicken the object and its skin until every object is an inviolable loneliness.   Moreover this suggests that there is nothing modern in this separation, every individual is alone at birth and death and suffers constant knowledge of this traumatic fact.  Sapien means knowing.  Perhaps only moderns by modern means can find our way back to the garden by not just knowing but knowing that we know.

Perspective itself was originally iconoclastic abstract art, consummately kosher!  As Jesus teaches, how you use and read it determines whether a pig, say, is kosher or not.  A pig is just another created thing, and it is good until badly seen or used.  Only humans can defile themselves in misreading or misusing it.  So it is with perspective.  But the reclamation of perspective in art today rarely carries this message. It is more likely fraught with bitter irony and resignation, not redemption, however it is impossible to wash away the aura and powerful effect when the retinal image, not made by human hands, is mirrored in a thing they do make, or when it burns an image that naturally forms through a pinhole opening in a cave’s wall onto a light sensitive film, and without significant human intervention, isolates that timeless imprint in which every story is written, as the light of the mind goes forth to meet and mingle with the light of the world.    But this is heavily glossed by the banal reading of all the sacred, expensive objects, each one purchased at a high but reasonable price, as the viewer has never lost the sacred world and therefore never found the water you don’t miss until your well runs dry.  For him, her, or they essentially, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps at its petty pace  from day to day until the last syllable of recorded time, a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing., but I must say he, she or they are very good at distracting themselves. And me, when tempted to lie down and go to sleep and be buried by this too beautiful snowfall, when I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep, such as finding someone who will take this jewel and run with it, which is like finding a lost needle in a haystack.  Well if a camel can pass through the eye of one, nothing is impossible.  

As I looked closely at Giotto’s image I was quite amazed to find Giotto seeming to echo the prayer manual’s way of breaking down the ways of knowing into component parts, featuring the torso of the saint, known from within, in one feature of the landscape. His hand, a mongrel feature both felt from within and seen from without — the hand both does and doesn’t have a mind of its own and if it doesn’t win the war against everything else and take its rightful place at the throne, as in this case in the center of the image — the artist after all is a manual worker —  it will be at war with itself — is featured in the adjacent landscape feature, the saint’s consciousness escaped his body and alighting on the vision featured in the sky.  This separation and objectification of parts serving not to reinforce the separation but to facilitate its simultaneous visible deconstruction. The separated parts are sewn together, and the seams are not concealed, but, unlike in the manual, the parts are as tightly hand stitched as in a Charles James gown.  The manual defining distinct bases — the friar’s space, the saint’s space, Christ’s space, where you’re safe, structured like a nocturnally lit baseball diamond, the archetypical story lighting up the whole field as Francis twists as for a jump shot in rigorously space and time bound, but fully occupying the three axes of its delineated envelope basketball, however more bruising than football.  

In Saint Bonaventura’s official  story of the Stigmatization, the vision of the crucified Christ born by a seraph “rises from a single point on the horizon” and, before the commencement of completely comprehensive comprehension, just hovers up there incomprehensibly, an unprecedented, self-contradictory, hybrid figure, the whole a hauntingly uncanny description of a perspectival construction that appears exactly where the pattern I’d discovered predicts, my having never suspected my sketch would so literally flesh itself out.   

Irwin Panofsky calls perspective as a symbolic form, the modern paradigm of knowledge”.  In a self-fulfilling prophesy, this male chauvinist pig, perspective, has been read as un-kosher however we look at it.  Cartesian (which should really be called Albertian) or mathematical space is commonly blamed for dissolving our bodies into mathematical coordinates, our pulverized bodies not yet reconstituted, stuck beaming across, the Spartan digital matrix identifying us, who are free to change our names, with our social security numbers.  Yes we can play around with our sub-identities all we want as we have long been de-identified with our bodies or names.  Our social security numbers, that is we ourselves, are in turn identified as 3 ever changing numerical coordinates, x,y,z at clocked positions at the crosshairs of the surveyors or their guns.

The pattern I discovered uniquely brings the origins of perspective as a symbolic form and paradigm of knowledge into distinct focus. It defines the official story by Bonaventura the distinct crossing between sacred and secular paradigms.  But the finding once found redefines itself as the crossing not between sacred and secular paradigms, but between unconscious sacred and self-conscious sacred paradigms, just as it awakens us to the fact that the addition of imaginary and irrational numbers to the coordinates of the matrix turns mathematical space into an analog, not a digital facsimile of reality. We never escaped from sacred reality in continuity with all of human history, as from the sacred existential condition there is no exit.  I guess that’s why a mathematics professor I met at Stanford University told me that most all mathematicians and scientists were closet essentialists, many of whom met in secret religious societies in fear of losing their jobs.  A non-sacred world is an aberration linked to commodification.  It is not a paradigm of knowledge, it is a paradigm of ignorance. 

I had been primed by much roaming around Rome and advanced scholarship and illuminating interpretation of Renaissance painting to notice the dizzying effect of something stronger than mere powerful prettiness, the widespread near conflation of form and content in the works, and they inspired me to a different perspective on perspective, not as a method (one element) producing a product (another element), but as a primal phenomenon, the division of subject and object awakening to awareness of itself, which awareness, and leave it at that — don’t use, abuse it — is paradise, or replete knowing, not just seeing the stars but knowing them and knowing that they’re there.

The scholarship has long been circling around it, but it is now definitively demonstrably so, that when and only when this pair of wolves in sheep’s clothing Saints Francis (who by the way, still dressed as Grandma, successfully negotiated with Brother Wolf) and saved his life and that of the farmer’s crops) and Bonaventura, were introduced into the damaged ecosystem, the dried streams with utmost dispatch filled with the most musically rushing and babbling water, the long languishing eager beavers got busy, and the drooping branches rose up,  bore sweetest fruits ,and sang in their crowns with all manner of long endangered, now voraciously multiplying fine feathered things.

Our noble blood has never been diluted only denied. we never were disembodied numbers, our immortal names are as they have always been doomed to eternal praise or blame, even those humanity forgets, the universe does not forget — the moving finger writes and having writ all our tears and sighs will not blot out a word of it.   Our paradigm of knowledge, the ground on which we stand, is not just a method of objectification, but of conscious de-objectification, both at once, allowing movement in both directions, freedom, and dysdysfunction, as things can only be judged good or bad in context.  Red and blue have no business building a wall dividing them, when they are as prone to purple as hydrogen and oxygen are prone to water. I have cracked the door and the gentle breeze that blows in when Dante sighs and signs at the ever elusive Beatrice blows down that wall, a flimsy partition in a gigantic house of cards, but instead burying us alive, the billions and billions of cards diminish rapidly in size until they vanish without a trace, except for the trinkets left behind when another Troy fell, to keep the internet archeologists on ulterior earth in Galaxy Y among others busy in perpetuity.  Even trinkets of little artistic value have wonderful stories to tell, useful as well as informative as to what not to do in order not to build an enormous house of cards surrounded by a fortress that with a crack in the wall comes tumbling down leaving behind relatively unimpressive trinkets reflecting a thin, broken faith that talked a lot of its own death, but never walked it.  

To seal this ulterior deal, Giotto depicts what is everywhere else invisible — again, Giotto paints what the eye cannot see — the instantaneous present, or the story’s climax, the infinitely thin slice of time between the past appearance of the seraph and the future appearance of the wounds, where everything divided is also happening all at once. His visual solution to the central paradox tormenting not just this situation, but all situations seeming to be and being to seem, word and world, impossible to situate, a hole in time, back to the beginning and, having mastered and deconstructed perspective, abstraction, and post-modern pastiche, back from the future, back to Eden born again again again — April is the cruelest month…stirring dull roots with spring rain — but far from banging, grunting. and howling like much faux-prelapsarian modern “classical” music, babbling in the transparent, cool, fresh, patois of state of the art interdisciplinary discourse — look, way up there in the magic fresco, the very mountaintop is mirroring and bowing to the gigantic interdisciplinary preposterously pre- and post-historic historic dinosauric pre-post-erous mocking bird synthesizing all the voices it mock the instant it divides them, signs of hope in negotiations with the divine mountain peak, as this towering fountain of babble  rises higher and higher and pours down into a basin wider and wider it is hoped in time to cool the world.  

(Giotto. who, in addition to painting what the eye cannot see, paints a fly so true to life that his master Cimabue swats it and who single-handedly rediscovers ancient perspective decades before, is devoted to nature’s proportions, and if you add the atmosphere he clearly purposely blows away with symbolic intent, the hermitage retreats into the distance, and the image appears quite naturalistic. But what is that absurdly gigantic bird doing there conversing with the attentive mountaintop? Moderns only recently discovered that birds are dinosaurs.   There are more things on heaven and earth than fit your philosophy. There is knowledge itself escaped from the zoo and stalking the city, as reported in the local news today.   Nobody knows what to do, everybody’s panicking, the president has ordered all news sources to cover this up immediately and all the cops of all kinds to remove all traces, whatever it takes.)

 

The seats of consciousness or ways of knowing, torso (belly, heart, diaphragm), then the mongrel hand, then projected gaze embedded in and reflecting fields the respectively lighter shapes that surround them evoke the very first sequential instants of differentiation or creation, now, when the veils fall now now now, as imagined three-dimensional objects isolated in the illusion of space being other than time are continually subsumed in this palpable — were the fresco not out of reach — planar surface melting from wetware to software to wetware and being both at once, one sided and infinite when comprehensively comprehended, though two sides, lover beloved, manifest locally until they seem to melt into and across each other manifesting always differently.   Being nothing and everything minimally different from being something. 

As weight and mass represent attributes different beings share, not  beings themselves, likewise quantifiable duration, a real day is known by the works therein.  Here where reflection minimally differs from the reflected, creation is reflected in the giornate or days of fresco painting, marked by an edge that can’t be disguised after the day dies and dries. Let there be light. earth and sky.   Let there be green things, flying things, let there be the son god and the moon reflecting, that is, Christ and Francis, a man, and the woman, veronika, watching from the window until the drama moves her to rush downstairs and dive into the scene as the magic image appears in her veil.  

The kingdom of heaven within you mirrored without, the knowing in sight and thought that sight is thought and beauty is truth.  Not loveliness or prettiness, which is often if not always a mask, but sublime, terrible monstrous beauty, up against the rocky wall and  whirling around  at the edge of a ledge facing a sheer drop into an abyss with insane serenity.  But the irregular shapes and details of the surface, a pressed flower, all in perfect balance, none lording over any other. The aleatory outline of the mountain (resembling the graph that, as purveyed in my vocabulary enhancing email service, plots the erratically rising and falling use off that word over several decades) trips up the mountainside inscribing the always surprising, flowing or abruptly turning melody line of the too terribly unbearably beautiful nightingale’s melody, luring the listener with ears to hear up the mountain to death and perfect union, where she will be reborn Bellini’s brother, not his distant admirer wondering how did he do it.  What is his secret?  No I did not fall through a hole in time.  There is no such thing as time.

But they scorned the poet who professed that credo, beauty is truth, until seen through veils of fictive time, both dulling and heavily glossed, antiqued and varnished, then rudely carelessly cleaned, the scarred truth was buried under the veneer, and only a powerful prettiness remained, just as at the Sistine Ceiling., where comparison with early photographs verify the loss on restoration of certain shadows.  In another relevant case, his contemporaries still threatened by the truth in a Vermeer covered up the beauty, and only when the truth had been sufficiently squashed centuries later did the almost overpoweringly perfumed prettiness emerge.

But the fresco featured here resists all varnish and rude cleaning, a strange shadow, impossible to soak up with solvents, still moves over its waters. It has remained a perpetual pariah, despite the reams of attention poured on all of Giotto’s work. Only visually illiterate, at least on the job, straight historians or theologians have ever at least failed to speed up when it passed by the window of their well sealed vehicles, and at least they — specifically Carolyn Bynum, who referred me to Jean-Claude Schmitt — were onto and helped illuminate the pattern I saw that placed this image in a pile I ought to scan. At least straight historians do their jobs without privileging any type of evidence, rather than doting on images too commonly with only half their eyes open, in fear of being moved or turned on by them.  They may possess it, but do not sufficiently cultivate the faculty of musically minded mathematicians and mathematically minded musicians to be overwhelmingly aroused, but with blank faces, like bluegrass musicians or Bob Dylan (he characterized his music as mathematical) in the very throes of their frenetic, placidly executed objective calculations always adding up to being’s true nature as love.

Yes, everything does, but your ears and eyes do not deceive you this time; they’re in the hands of the man who made us modern men to make us always present ones.  This really is paradise on earth — gone to rack and ruin, but here’s a rake and some stakes to lay out your plot.  Let them laugh as they like.  What did you expect they’d do before everybody does it too? 

Lucky for you, you have a bit of time before the crowds arrive.  That the Christian story and history with its multiplying searing wounds are the tools that perform this task and are irrevocably implicated in it is not the only impediment to its reception. It’s relatively easy to make and compile things and ideas that are post- or against anything known, for the known thing has made the map. and all you have to do is reverse it. All you need to do is protest and thrash splash and tweak until it squeaks unspeakably, and then take a bow and wash off the make up, or possibly get arrested, which can get serious in certain places, but everybody has to die sometime, and inside you are pure as the driven snow. If you identify as protestor (not to be confused with protesting a lot) or are just an avidly posting post-er poster child resigned to jailhouse humor and joyeuse jouissance,  you have de-identified with the perpetrator to identify with the victim. 

Of course shared identities don’t completely define individuals, and those who identify as protestors may indulge in devotions to nature and natural healings, and other positive projects in their art or elsewhere. But these disunited efforts submitting to no overarching specific vision cracking the whip and setting the bar higher and higher, whatever good they do locally, are relative pieces of cake to execute once the burden is lifted of identifying with any perpetrator. 

It’s a whole other thing to identify with the perpetrator of the travesty of freely choosing to use one’s life to let go of anything that could justify it and get totally lost in the woods and take wild shots in the dark and then dive in after them and sink or swim with them and if something pans out, you’re in real trouble.  But as ee cummings says — the only living thing is yes; and he’s right, and all that isn’t yes is dead.  

Something strong enough to tear down the ever expanding to appear benignly inclusive and protective fence that corrals art, and/or something small enough to slip between the slats and spread the germ, something that isn’t against anything, but is for the past, present, and future in a weirdly novel way, if you were to take it seriously, as anything that really exists demands, even a thing so presently anomalous that to take it seriously would demand redefining reality, would blow all that away.  And when Lazarus  is commanded— rise up! Rise up from the dead, it isn’t so easy to get out of bed, and to make things far worse, it takes months for all the cells in the brain to die and the synapses to stop firing, so in his head he’s still dreaming he’s the essence of liveliness, where the only way out of something as determined as dying is all the way through it.   That’s the deal with death.  And I daresay no previous born again so called Christian has ever this much died to be not born again until the whole world agrees to the proposition, but I was only three weeks late the first time I was born, and though I’ve far advanced in the art of procrastination given my native talent, I don’t know how much longer I can put it off.   

Oh yes, yes is a nice idea to get you through the day until the day washes it away, but an unqualified, irreversible surgical conversion of identity under the blade of logic and evidence, to a yesser to one single thing that turns everything around confronts all the inertia in the world, all the momentous momentum driving us, as scientists devoted to facts predict, like lemmings over the cliff.   Spread the news and make it a global movement — dear me Veronika you are really nuts! — before making a move lest you get trampled trying to turn around in the rush to post-everything that everybody’s doing with what art won’t post- they use to blow off steam or sleep well and dream deep toward optimal service everywhere else to the machine.  And don’t be so sure I’m the one who’s nuts.  The mind-snatching machine of tyrannical, categorical language — “everything solid has melted away” — serving itself and the status quo will mechanically gloss over anything so obsessively beautifully formally formed as trivial “formalism”, however to efface itself and get a job done that has nothing to do with it — oh then it’s just pretty propaganda, too bad dear, we’ve got every exit covered, this is one flew over the cuckoo’s nest, and you, my dear, are the patient — and keep confining paradise to fleeting subjective perceptions materializing in scattered, however grand and inspiring, architectural delights.  

Yes yes, but Giotto has awakened all the human (superhuman) mental and physical faculties to their still surviving, delicious autonomy, and they’re gearing up for a fight!  When the eye is clear, the whole body is full of light!   

is it religion and you’re not religious so you can dismiss it, or vice versa?  no it redefines the terms and you can no more dismiss or embrace any term on any terms but its pure, transparent own.  Once you know the world is round, you cannot go back to flat.

Nurse Ratchet my friend, I agree it’s a very sad case, but you really needn’t bother having that lock on the window fixed.  Believe me, the perpetually young and surpassingly beautiful queen of hearts is very happy right where she is, leaping across a tightrope between the twin towers of 1330 and 1970 or dancing handcuffed to and with the cops who greet and toast her on the rooftops, as then the whole world goes crazy and all the Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hydes outside in some way identify with uniquely whole, so called schizophrenics, which mitigates against bad trips.  But the good and bad (depending on your perspective) soldiers still go on killing each other, as the rats prepare to spread a plague, so as it revs up and pulls away from paradise on earth, the king of hearts suddenly leaps off the back of the APC and then shows up stark naked at the gate to be admitted to this madhouse, and now wild horses couldn’t drag her away.  

Selected Bibliography

Alighieri, Dante.  La Commedia, Paradiso. The Divine Comedy, Paradise) Princeton. Princeton University Press. 1973.

Barolini, Teodolinda. (1992) The Undivine Comedy, Detheologizing Dante. Princeton. Princeton University Press. (Original work published 2003)

Baxandall, Michael. Giotto and the Orators, (1986) Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition. Oxford. Clarendon Press.

Damisch, Hubert.  (1994) The Origin of Perspective.  Cambridge. The M.I.T. Press. (Original work published 1987)

Eco, Umberto, (1997) The Search for the Perfect Language, Hoboken. Wiley Blackwell. 

Edgarton, Samuel Jr..  (1975) The Renaissance Discovery of Linear Perspective.  New York, Evanston, San Francisco, London. Harper and Row.

Elkins, James. (1994) The Poetics of Perspective. Ithaca. Cornell University Press.  

Frugoni, Carla. (1993) Francesco e l’invenzione delle stigmate. Torino. Giulio Einaudi editore. 

Merleau-Ponti, Maurice. (2012).  The Phenomenology of Perception.  New York.  Routlage. (Original work published 1945)

Panofsky, Irwin. (1991) Perspective as Symbolic Form (Christopher Wood Trans.). New York. Zone Books. (Original work published 1924-5)

Scarry, Elaine. (1985) The Body in Pain, The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York, Oxford.  The Oxford University Press. 

Schmitt, Jean-Claude.  (1990) Les Raisons des Gestes dans l’Occident Medieval.  Paris, Ile de France. Gallimard.

Steinberg, Leo. (1983, 1996) The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Painting and Modern Oblivion.  Chicago. University of Chicago Press.

ortega don quixote

ortega the philosophy of history

kubler the of time

Vasari 

gravity and grace

millbank 

etc

postscript/bio (confession) and supplemental bibliography

veronika sheer is a painter, poet, and unaffiliated (cowboy) scholar. who. intending to rob from the rich to give to the poor, years ago sweet talked the powers that be into fellowships and penetrated the fortressed ivory tower. There she gathered a heap of booty, including masters degrees in architecture, art history, and the philosophy of art history from Rhode Island School of Design and Columbia University, the framed or ribbon tied, rolled diplomas talismans having magic powers in Oz. (see The Wizard of Oz)

However, the magic conferred in carefully handling illuminated manuscripts in the Vatican Library with white gloves is purer, and I pray their funding of that research serves as sufficient penance for any dark spots in The Confidence Man’s (“wizard’s”) methods, with his rather liberally distributed — however today supplies are relatively limited due to the population explosion given the hyper-fertility of the brainy, big hearted, brave straw men, tin men, and cowardly lions of today, and you do have to show beyond a reasonable doubt that they work very well just being dangled in front of you before you get to take one home — diplomas, medals, and lockets — very effective placebos, not labeled as such of course, that would obviate the placebo effect — especially today given the increasing cost and difficulty of getting to submit to the dangling and arduous testing procedures.  (Sometimes I fear that when Dorothy wakes up, we will all just disappear. )

Thus Veronika’s stash logically as well as magically grew enormous, as she had previously soaked her often extremely loudly growly grumpy, but otherwise singing over and over in his charmingly off key, parodic baritone, Old Man River, I’ve Been Workin on the Railroad. There is Nuthin like a Dame, John Henry,  Sixteen Tons, or You are my Sunshine, really softy dad, despite his serious opposition to her decadent, regressive, faux (this couldn’t be real) elitist aesthete tendencies, for several sojourns in Italy, where she aimlessly roamed around Rome and environs continually consulting the Guida d’Italia del Touring Club Italiano, Roma et Dintorni originally published in 1925  and therefore eternity for seven summers and made friends with some very highly placed ghosts impressed by the supernaturally, as otherwise inexplicable devotion of this peasant girl from Missouri — considering that as a child, she had gazed every night across the dinner table at a painting of a young female waif or more like a beatnik bohemian with a chic haircut and enormous thickly lined eyes as she held an umbrella to the Parisian rain melting the painting of the street into blurry mush, an oil painting for which her father had traded with the proprietor of Woolworths, the five and dime that had got up to a buck or so, but maybe not so much as that would be like today’s a hundred, what he had traded with the lady we called Dr. Shiny Teeth after the play dental kits she sold, the then not yet understood to be politically incorrect, adorable, really beautiful in some inexpressible way, inflatable black banshee Winky dolls with ears that doubled as looped earrings and only simple red flat ovals for a mouth and eyes that winked when you turned them, and when inflated, wrapped your arm in theirs so you could kind of wear them, and Veronika (then called Kerry but that’s another story) loved and felt loved by hers so much I can’t tell you, everybody who didn’t get one envied those who did, and I personally can’t believe after she gave maybe five away that he traded away the rest for that terrible, scary magic painting of the forlorn bohemian girl with the french haircut ( it probably was just a Parisian stage set) stuck out in the rain that the confessant here pretty much became.  Actually truth be told, I’m not really exactly sure that’s how he ended up with that terrible magical painting. I only just now thought that might explain why he sped off with the rest of the coveted Winky dolls.  

And when practicing architecture, the confessant topped off the already over the top stash, when she and her friends occupied the shared rental every other weekend, by luxuriously plowing all the way through A La Recherche du Temps Perdu (English translation, but she used the French, which, having read the English, turned out easier to read than the English, in the soon to be mentioned class) for seven summers by the wine dark sea way out on the then still quite elegant, even rather Balbec-esque, especially when the beach emptied at sunset, end of Long Island, as protected under its shimmery silvery mother of pearl underside, Proust spun and spun, until the shell finally closed her out of it again, and, as she’d agreed to do the dishes for getting to stay at the beach until nightfall, she trudged home alone under the infinite heavens as just a few and then hundreds and then by midnight thousands upon thousands of magical stars, many totally imaginary having burnt out thousands of light years ago. but bearing news from that far! — and if we can’t exactly fathom it, we humans know it, we get it, our minds are that unfathomably expansive! any pessimists, even Schopenhauer, however I do agree with his actually optimistic view that the world is [as] will and representation — diplomas didn’t work, false confidence being a serious occupational hazard —are just, let’s face it, compared to those of us when not, however frequently, dashed to the ground by life’s vicissitudes, overflowing with spontaneous gratitude just being on our feet again, those of us with bold, dangerous imaginations, grand, dangerous, constantly scorned, but intractably resilient aspirations, given to seriously attentive prolonged observation of the most inspiring models — which are all just slavish enough to be completely original translations of each other translating the gospel tooth, even in the throes of total despair and beyond imaginable pain — my god my god why have you forsaken me, quoting a psalm full of hope —   into different languages, despite those naysayers’ potential for genius and their wiley ways with seemingly important words, as they bother to think a little ahead of those who don’t want to bother to think at all, just quote other thinkers with maybe a marketable twist, their thinking simply calculating and computing, of which negation unlike creation, consists, these computers recalcitrantly dumber than today’s state of the art computers, and the harm they do with their venerated, sometimes Nobel prize winning self-fulfilling defeated and defeating prophesies is quite unfathomable, and I really feel sorry for what they will go through or went through when their Death of Ivan Ilyich type death is or was upon them — 

and/or the magical moon to greet the others who’d just finished barbecuing the fish and local vegetables, befitting her cultivated palette since the days when her very favorite was hash made of Campbell’s vegetable soup and hamburger meat overcooked in the electric frying pan and the magic “caveman” eggs that Harry, her “papahhh" (with such flourishes I think in retrospect he was winking that he was secretly in on all this, and by so opposing it actually pushing it, if only unconsciously, but I think or dare to hope it’s we who feed the unconscious part of us that always has the upper hand the greater intentions that determine our behavior regardless of narratives we embrace to explain them that may have nothing whatsoever to do with them.  However I also dare to hope that when lightening struck me while gazing at a fresco by Giotto, and my unconscious mind was instantly flooded with light, that since then there’s been an open line of communication, but maybe I just went back to being as clueless as before, only more constantly in touch with the magic, as one never knows does one?) whipped up according the method he claimed had been passed down from his earliest ancestors, the cavemen, who invented the dish by accidentally dropping eggs on some hot rocks on a summer day and trying to scoop them up, where the unbroken lineage and the divinely transmitted always novel magic incantation that had allowed an effective enough recovery did seem, even guests were bound to admit it, to make them somewhat magically delicious. 

Only noticed years later, the always related, however distantly, magic had ordered that symmetry of seven year stints, absorbing classics and by the way also struggling amply for terribly elusive, given the hours she’s put into it, anywhere near fluency in the languages of the two most classically romantic of traditions — when a diehard monogamist loves her clunky native tongue to death and it clearly loves her to death, it might be impossible to go anywhere near the distance with another, however her ears stray terribly when a really far more gorgeous rival slinks or clicks so singingly by in its French slippers or Italian heels, and she will come home late after an innocent date when one grabs her and takes her dancing until it loses its temper and slaps her on the face for continually stepping on its toes  — along with the reading list (it might be difficult to list over a  thousand) augmented by Antoine Compagnon’s (He was actually the A.C. in A Lover’s Discourse) equally essential course “Proust and the Arts”, featuring Proust’s putridly fragrant dying, darkening flower of transcendental faith in its relation — see Proust’s translations of Sesame and Lilies and The Bible of Amiens, based on his mother’s transliterations because he didn’t know English — to Ruskin’s, at the brink of the abyss that one must dive into in order to grow wings.  

Not that there are not other wing bearing abysses to dive into, but only this winged abyss is technologically transparent as it was engineered in consonance and constant communion with modern science, of which Saint Bonaventura, who, by flagrantly divine inspiration, discovered perspective as indeed a symbolic form, is the father, therefore available to all, therefore however superficially (but in no way actually) politically incorrect, aligned with my mission impossible, paradise repletely regained.  

Yes available to all, even disbelievers (until they jump, but would they ever? maybe at least those about to jump into the wingless (at least so far as we know) abyss, why not, what have you got to lose at this point, and maybe the world needs your next great poem or play, or just you right now, your particular grain of je ne said quoi, for the magic to work.  If you read on the web Einstein’s theory of relativity in words of four letters or less you will know, if you don’t already, that if everything else disappeared except you — this applies not just to sub-atomic particles, but everyday life seen with the naked eye, where this sometimes happens — you would not understand the meaning of the words “size” or “weight” as you don’t — and once you absorb this you will experience it directly — have any at all of your own.  

Some hold that nobody even exists at all autonomously, but this solipsistic view boils down to extreme narcissism, either directly expressed or implicit in the pretense of being able to be the perfect opposite of self-interested or even envision being that.

For the purposes not just of life, but of light, I will argue, it’s our twoness that creates any oneness, where as verified in scientific experiments.  I am no bigger or smaller or heavier or lighter than the visual phantom or ghost before your eyes shrinking expanding with nowhere to land, the visual ghost that changes size as you move the caliper of your thumb and finger enclosing it further or closer to your eye —please try this if you have never done so.  

Well, the supposedly very different things themselves, which the ghostly images supposedly signify (instead of vice versa, as is true) turn out to be, by the quite rigorously verified theory of relativity, exactly as shrinkable and expandable, their size and also weight depending only on where you frame them with nowhere to land or call home.  

One never gets deeply lost in the woods for half one’s life to abandon hope in order to catch a sustainable glimpse of paradise without an initial glimpse to anchor one to the source.  When I was three years old at Washington University (the Harvard of the midwest! There were no tests then for admission, your mother, that noble lady Suzy or whomsoever, just had to know the best place to go, a remnant of feudal noble entitlements.) Nursery School, I discovered the theory of the relativity, apart from light, the absolute, with the world of “material” objects a shorthand code.  The luminous visible shapes signifying you or me, or Brother Sun or Sister Moon weightless and as malleable in size as visual phantoms you can size down to the size you want to draw them before they ever meet the page; 

but though, due to the poetic genius of the people who discover/invent them by divine inspiration, the words themselves ping and sing of the luminous weightless things themselves in the instant they’re recognized as something to ping and sing of by the pinging singing clan pinging and singing in each tribesman’s ear, without stringent rituals in place to arrest this phenomenon, the message overtakes the original singing pinging messagemedium, as the transparent luminous world regresses into an illegible wild woods, where the cannibals — who found scraps of the map sufficient to feel at home there, a little knowledge being a dangerous thing, at least for the winners of the Dorothy Jackson (The) Lottery — beat their drums and the man eating animals howl in the night.  Sitting at a formica table in a row of them with my crayons, I began to draw the expected stick figure, indicating that I knew the parts by name, neck, leg, arm, mouth, etc.  But everybody knew I knew them, why would I do that? I then noticed the visual “phantom” of the arm I wasn’t using to draw resting on the table and gazed at it, perceiving that two edges that could be represented by lines would evoke an actual arm   I noticed how I could change the size of the “phantom” at will and shrink it to a size right for the paper.  When I then drew the two lines, the god I am suddenly came to, as the so called ceiling simply dissolves to let my head rise up to the clouds.  Ah, so this is the real world, and everything else is a storybook, the goriest fairy tales the ones most people love the best, like they love those cartoons I can’t stand, where all the animals and crazy people are bashing each other, or Inferno, forget Paradiso.  I guess many are called, but few hang around to get chosen.  Until all the fire they play with starts to join in a circle around them and everybody. Or the circle is joining around their grandchildren, whom they love, or at least like, far more than those bratty kids who don’t know how to raise them.  No more playing with fire everybody!  But it’s hard to get people to listen to a three year old.

Decades ago, soon after I met Giotto personally, DS who just now recommended I submit the proposal for this article, introduced me to a gallerist who had visited my kitchen table studio and expressed interest.   This induced me to be sure to attend an opening at his gallery in Chelsea, which I subwayed to from the Upper West Side.  There I met Madeleine who invited me to her studio in Red Hook, thence for dinner at Robin des Bois an antique store French cafe with a giant snake skin snaking across a wall, an enormous chandelier from a late brothel on Wall Street, a few full size plaster statues of saints or virgin and child, etc.  — on then otherwise pretty abandoned Smith Street, and I met and shortly thereafter hooked up unofficially then officially til death did us part at least materially so far, a painter who got kind of famous for painting, minimally, simply two gently curving lines inspired by, and on the way to evoking a torso managing to bend the stretcher as it peels off the wall as the frames around everything dissolve and the eye follows the curves of the warped stretcher to infinity.  Having both noticed the other could walk the walk, we verified the talk in the first fifteen minutes, when he had occasion to invoke my (great hearted, silver tongued, but his theory is full of dangerous holes, and the animals do prostrate themselves before divinity, my dog does so every morning, so I’m not really recommending the following book) astrological twin Walt Whitman’s Democratic Vistas.  May goes in with a revolution and out with revelations, he the over the top easy ephemeral peony, I the difficult enduring rose, who arrives that top and stops on a dime.

Many people go around thinking of what everything signifies and can be used for and never noticing the shapes and colors around them and basking in the presence of fellow luminous forms, and those same people have very fixed ideas of themselves and everybody and everything. They never switch sides, or if they do, once, they stick more rigidly in it than ever before, not that some sides aren’t worth sticking to, but that’s not why they do. They have become to themselves and others those ideas, and if anybody knocks at the gates of their gazes, nobody’s home.  You are not that kind of zombie, you are the opposite of that.  

Sadly we are, as far as science sees,  mortals, however made of light perhaps suggesting that we persist beyond what science sees,  but still when a luminous loved one falls out of the angle of science’s vision, we sorely grieve and desire to join the beloved in either oblivion or purgatory or paradise, even hell.  And for aging couples, often this does somehow occur naturally, the death of a mate soon follows the first when the partners have spent many decades together; but it is rare that one will take one’s own life in these circumstances.  For if one loved enough to want to do that, in loving one, one has learned to love life and likely formed other significant attachments, and so will wait it out, given reasonable speculation on the ultimate nature of life forms made of light and what might be their ultimate rights and responsibilities.  

But if you are feeling like ending it for reasons worthy of the zombie we are all at constant pains to avoid being bodysnatched by, as the zombies more permanently bodysnatched torment you, please, put down that gun you are pointing to your head or toss those pills out the window, gaze on and draw the shape of a tree or any such fancy shape you see that you may fancy, this will quickly recalibrate your caliper to shrink the zombies, as the warbling line around the shapes whistles a happy tune.   If you sing off key with it and never get near the notes, just let it roll its eyes, laugh its head off, or yell at you at the top of its lungs.  The shrill whistling lines of trees are really prima donnas if I may so, and if the line is very annoyed with your possibly presently terrible whistle to it light years away from the note sung in its, perfect pitch, perhaps you’re not yet up to whistling like the wind with the tree thrilling to its touch.  Try singing with a bowl, anything round makes a lovely sound.  And you can relax, those graciously curving lines have generous souls, and are not as finicky and fussy as the fancy lines of trees. If you relax and let it flow, singing with the line of a bowl is like improvising on the black keys.  Even if you’re a total novice, everything harmonizes.  

Beautiful, keep going!  We are creatures of light!  We’re full of sound in no hurry, that is, music, signifying nothing, we are back to the garden!  Luckily there’s work to do, useful and beautiful ideas — nothings, such as zero, are very useful entities —  to project and tame and keep in their places, to arrange and rearrange into better and better forms to play in the garden like all the gods of Ovid’s Metamorphosis.  Luckily these ideas are formidable challenges, like children, luckily you will many times feel like shooting yourself in the head, as some bad ideas pursue you or yours with malevolent intention — as Saint Paul in his letters says, there are numerous battles even among the angels of paradiso — but how you will be glad when these bratty ideas grow up, make good, and dote on you on your deathbed, and if they don’t, well at least you tried, you fought the good fight, you never became a zombie with empty eyes, totally selling out the present for an ever elusive rewarding enough reward the lacking of which, or the disappointment on the attainment of which caused you to shoot yourself in the head as somewhere along the line, you bought all the other explanations that persecute you more than the persecutors they name as such.  I never promised you a rose garden without plenty of thorns.  No thorny bramble, no sleeping beauty.   

Alas in attempting to drag all this booty out into the world, Veronika discovered that the magically blessed booty is inseparable from the sometimes a little darkly, but generally I think pretty okay-ly magically blessed box, with every step out of it, magically, it gets more deeply into it, so deeply into it, that Veronika may, after officially signing off and pressing past the “KEEP OUT” signs, have penetrated the inner sanctum of the box, where, in the deep gloom, a circle of light appears from an imperfectly sealed manhole to the street above.   She now seeks allies among the still affiliated, whose contemplative capacities and felicities she appreciates for their own sake, and clearly needs to engage for the mediation of her mission.  She has published writing in, among other venues, The Brooklyn Rail, and has exhibited paintings and illuminated texts in Saint Louis and New York, including a solo show at Galerie Tanja Grunert, then in Chelsea in Manhattan. She has taught at the Cooper Union Architecture School in Manhattan and elsewhere and performed numerous public readings.  

*****

 

NOTE: IT WORKS SO MUCH BETTER IF YOU BASICALLY MEMORIZE THE ABSTRACT, SO YOU DON'T HAVE TO KEEP CONSULTING THE MANUAL   IF YOU THEN ASSEMBLE THIS CONTRAPTION, YOU WILL HAVE ON YOUR DESK A LITTLE GAME CHANGER TO END ALL GAME CHANGERS, AND WHEN YOU JUST CAN'T TAKE ANOTHER GAME CHANGER, YOU CAN SIMPLY PRESS THE BUTTON, AND IT WILL START WORKING AND KEEP SPITTING OUT INSTRUCTIONS -- for everybody it's different, but I suspect most will begin with several re-readings -- FOR THE STEP BY STEP, PEACEFUL ATTAINMENT OF ROAMIN CATHOLIC (ALL INCLUSIVE) READ MARKSIST UTOPIA, HEAVEN ON EARTH)

where -- if a rigorous fully professional scientist, poet, analytical philosopher, critical theorist, cultural critic, art critic, historian, archeologist, anthropologist, journalist, artist, full time wife/medical caretakers,  gardener, medicine man, clown, and child (such as a childless artist) were to communicate constantly out in the world and speak the same language in the first last gasp of fully realized patriarchal (not limited to biological males but open to all those with such fluid gender identities that I personally just prefer to be classified biologically in order not to be pinned down), humanist critical discourse -- born in a night to perish in a night -- with the wife critic proofreader translator etc. behind (but in this case incorporated in) the scene, this dying being  could, in the nick of time, understand how well I’ve analyzed and set the stage for solving the problem everybody is facing and jump out of bed.  I know because being all those things neutralizes them all arriving at a perfect vacuum into which everybody not yet included rushes in and suddenly coalesces in a surprising form, the perfect -- yes perfect, as still and smooth as the face of Ilaria carved into her tomb  -- art historian.  Elsewhere everybody is very busy and doesn’t have time to keep up with everybody, but everybody knows that everybody is everybody, so don’t worry what you think, just know what you know.  Okay let’s go!  Novices must pole vault.  Experts must shimmy under the Lindy pole.

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