the horny black toad

the following is not the latest draft of the latest version, but will stand to convey the finding until I replace it

part 1

https://drive.google.com/open?id=13IQ6oQpCTp5hjelUr1LgYnTGU4erYpCr

part 2

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nRamMVOGDjxSn-4bdZa1ABcHVvZUG0ui/view?usp=sharing

There is a rebirth and an image of rebirth. It is certainly necessary to be reborn through the image of Resurrection. The image must rise again through the image.

(Gnostic) Gospel of Philip, Codex II, 3

further introductory remarks

the hunting of the horny black toad -- 

don't expect to trap it, though the finding is a visible, crystallized form it  keeps melting and slipping between your fingers, like, exactly like, the present itself.  It is the present in all its primal and latest flowering, again coherent, whole, returning all difference to the naked edges between differently gathered substances conceptually and perceptually, what is hidden revealed.  In both theory and practice, visibly and invisibly, interiorly and communicably, technically, practically, sublimely.  I found it by thinking as far as thinking could go and found that others had done the same. The thinkers were now dead artists, philosophers who, using forms for leverage, thought too fast for the nominal ones to keep up, arriving in a future that the world has yet to glimpse.  It will be hard to keep up with me, but I'm really slow enough if you think hard enough.   To keep up with them and for you to keep up with me, half ghost half human, I am about as medium as a medium can be.  

Many are called, but few earn the right to be called democratic, but if there are two of us, we might foster four, then sixteen etc. So come on down from the attic and try on the slipper, maybe that dream was not just a dream.

In the middle, through me - first time as tragedy second as farce -- you find universal religion -- which means religament or resewing -- mapped and fostered in one orthodox roamin catholic read marksist image in every detail that can in no way be imagined before it appears, or understood without participating in the lively, ongoing appearance slowly and sustainably out of the mists of this deadest, most silent image you will have ever set your senses on. It creates a completely unique place, a place that consciously, neither naively or nostalgically, refuses just to be a Cartesian space made of numbers not names.  As for a bird that says, thank you so much. I love this 3-D printed ultra-modern cage with the flushable bird sized toilet, fully equipped little bird sized fridge, and my beautiful bird bed, but keep the door open please, for I can't live without my night flights.  

But logically, as a plant dies cut off from its roots, if the stories and symbols it uses to create this magically perfect place where you can have your modern cake and eat it too are simply empty place holders, the thing it achieves dries up the instant it flowers.  The modern world rejects the transplant.  But before it fails, born in a night to perish in a night, it is.  Its being for that split second is a first hand glimpse of Dante's paradise, the place he could not directly describe, the place that is even more beautiful than his metaphors, and if you dare to follow the reconstruction mindfully, it will change your life forever, though you may not notice this until years later after you notice that you crossed a line you were sure you could never cross.   Perhaps you may even feel ferociously determined to find a way to sew the head back on the chicken.  If so, good luck!

The image is a formal, phenomenal reality transparent to its function and reconstructible as such. All these are simply facts and direct implications of facts pertaining to immediately visible, phenomenal reality.  Other justifications and apologies for the Christian tradition are speculative.  In that tradition, the resurrection of Christ is placed in the center, but when the scales fall from your eyes as the space created becomes visible, that center recedes to a vanishing point.  If you close your eyes, you may bring it closer.  Again, that is not my department.  I only deal in facts. It is simply not true that there are alternative facts.  There is only one set of facts to which all knees must bend and every tongue give homage.    

As in the story by Borges, in which Paul Menard writes Don Quixote from a completely autonomous modern perspective, so did I reconstruct Giotto's image, but without knowing what I was doing.  You must follow the reconstruction to verify the finding as what it is.  As was Paul Menard's, it is a long, meandering journey.   You too must play the original seeker, with the links in the chain constituted by mindful thought and attention, rather than the familiar associations that make for easy reading that is always veering from the straight and narrow path a text claims to be following in objective pursuit of an objective object.  It veers in this need to pander to the reader, it veers not only from truth, but from beauty, where no mask is as beautiful as the ugliest face.   Not that the most beautiful face isn't more beautiful than the ugliest, so I don't think there's anything wrong with a little mascara and lipstick on a persistently real face, where a scowling, harshly scrubbed naked one is likely to be a mask.

 

work in progress -- unfinished somewhat complicated concatenated demonstration of something of an actual miracle  -- my finding of the single origin of the modern world (it is a single malt scotch of rare quality before it's mixed up in all the lesser, cheaper blends, 

and the pilgrim soul of modern man, be she any color or any class or the citizen or slave of any nation 

is a genetically determined connoisseur who, once she sips it and is instantly woke to her universal nature will not drink from any other cup --

in a fresco by Giotto creating its own paradigm of knowledge connecting the ancient to the modern world and restoring the wholeness of collective experience, 

what's blended can't be unblended, 

but I found the original on a detour where I settled after I realized before I landed there that I previously only thought I knew where I was going  -- 

all this, to the aforementioned connoisseur, the original purpose of the signs, symbols, and stories, tools with the task of crystallizing in this uniquely binding image of all images  -- 

as I will show if you are patient enough to watch me build the machine -- just as a hammer is forged to hammer. and nothing hammers as well as a hammer, or a flute is forged to flout.  

Not just the anatomy of the tool, but the truly miraculous confluences it embodies and reveals appear in the text, however a horse delirious with thirst is unlikely to drink upon arrival at a lake of fresh water if the signs and symbols of which the "water" consists are linked unto locked into their misuse -- 

like a hammer needed to build a house, but a person has only ever seen a hammer used to bludgeon people and freezes at the very sight of it unable to listen to the explanations.  As winter is coming, and the house is needed, one hopes something will break the ice, but one has no idea what will. 

it's a vicious circle, one must already have it to seek, find, and grab it, so each must seize a sword from a stone, find the gumption to slay the dragon, cut the Gordian knot, and be on one's wildly determined, wildly wandering way to the bottomless bittersweet elixir in the holy grail

the fresco, I will show, like all of its legitimate heirs, is perfect language.  

For whomsoever once saw a sign or caught a whiff of the world's perfection, and began seeking a stable frame for its manifestation, however long they've been sleeping in the poppy fields or otherwise distracted by the hounds of society, 

they know in their bones that the destiny of humanity they are duty bound to serve lies beyond the yellow brick road.  

Just like Sara Bareilles sang it in Georgia (see YouTube) before an Oz ymandian doctor prescribed a little pill that made the ache go away, or attenuated it so effectively she can only keep repeating -- 

there's no place like Oz, there's no place like Oz.   

If you've miraculously managed to protect your ache at full volume, if you've sufficiently dodged all the home wisdom and spiritual and biochemical and cognitive and emotional and political therapy showering down like manna from heaven, 

or if not, but like me you're at the mercy of all the dribble, and I luckily caught you in a brief hiatus -- a golden opportunity to dive into my net --before you bounce back up after being pushed to the ground, 

welcome to the real live hunt for the motherly father of all horny black toads.

but patiently building a complex machine is left to "lowly" engineers.  We observe a structure as amazing as the Brooklyn Bridge, but what philosopher knows how to build anything, let alone anything so grand.  

Though an architect, Wittgenstein was more interested deconstruction, and his buildings were meant to evoke feelings and ideas, not express their own structure as it follows the function.  

This latter type of naked honest consummately beautiful construction describes the finding herein.  It's the Brooklyn Bridge of philosophy.   And as you build it with me painstakingly nut by nut and bolt by bolt, it renders all previous so called philosophy obsolete, until, reordering it to converge on this vanishing point, the internal "I see" is verified in the blind regaining their eyes --

for it bridges all the positions whose raison d'être is to distance themselves from and isolate previous or rival positions, so all the rivals can now cross the bridge and kill each other once and for all.   Or kiss and make up.  

All philosophers will rejoice, but are there any genuine philosophers or lovers of knowledge among the ranks of grown ups?   If there were, their hearts would already be singing for joy at this long awaited eventuality -- as with a barrage of booms every current category shoots up into the air, explodes, falls and melts away silently in the greatest firework display, if I am not mistaken, in the history of the world.  But who will take the time to build the bridge?  Knowledge is no longer valued let alone loved.  

please sit a minute to absorb what I just said and prepare yourself for the actuality of a protracted building project that will proceed at the pace of a physical one, and if that seems too daunting, reflect on why it's worth it to proceed anyhow, and how the value of the thing is rooted in this process and its nature.   

Not that you have any idea yet how and why.  But if you get past all your knee jerk reactivity, you can intuit when you're on the right track.  You will be moving in the direction of creation and discovery of something novel,  the otherworldly gold I found and in finding realized I was spinning it up when I thought I was just feeling and thinking my way to worldly straw.  

I realized then that all retrospective, so called knowledge is just some thinkage for fleeting contingencies that, without deferring constantly whenever possible to actual knowledge can only stagnate the world.  

It's happened thus a lot, so we'll assume it will happen that way again, and again, that is useful for contingencies, but the instant it breeds the repetition it expects, it is no longer science or philosophy, but reverse alchemy, spinning gold into straw.  

But if you move toward the new and find it, then you know it's there, and though your footprints to shangri la do not survive the constant blizzards, each trip you make, you are a better and better guide.  

So that's basically your choice, reader, a paradigm of knowledge not just finding and/or spinning up straw for critical contingencies, or, on the other hand, one spinning up straw for critical contingencies, but otherwise following a guide who is spinning up gold out of straw. 

You may go it alone, but you are not qualified to lead of course until you have found it.  Meanwhile a guide who has found it cannot be faulted for getting lost in the blizzard again and again until she finally finds it again.  

Indeed if she never gets lost she isn't on or near the mountain, and is an imposter.  It is a very blinding blizzard already, but I, your guide, have been through this so many times I'm very confident, however long it takes, 

however many times we get lost again -- many will give up and go back to reverse alchemy, the mountain will recede, the sun will shine, friends will greet you forgivingly like a prodigal son who has returned to the fold, as the world continues to go to pot by one more vote in that direction -- but the remnant who stay on the mountain will finally arrive, and by this the world will survive.  

As with all language, this parable with all its metaphors may in no way properly be confused with the thing itself.  It's just a guide who's been there, a guide that's minimally less lost than you are in the blizzard, 

suggesting that at least you found the mountain and are desisting from the common practice of spinning gold into straw, always with no rest from the contingencies.  

Indeed every time you remember that language itself is only such a guide, you are spinning language itself back into the original gold.  It's possible that everybody has been there once, and everybody is a guide minimally less lost in the blizzard than you are.  

But some may have forgotten their long ago arrival and might really have gotten so irrevocably lost in the blizzard with all the critical contingencies flooding in, that one day they woke as out of this "dream" on the plains,

friends and family gathering round to welcome them back to the presently over all relatively sunny, "real" world and the good news is, that it's all going to pot is their fault, not yours, who could not be working harder to handle the inpouring contingencies in the properly verifiably analytical way. 

You are working oh so hard to save the world with your feverish truly unremitting address of the inpouring contingencies, which you handle based on careful reflection on what's already happened toward the most predictable positive results, 

and maybe you will save the world that way, by spinning all the gold into straw, until there are no terrible, difficult surprises, no blizzards more blinding than any worldly blizzard, no visits to shangri la, however actual as verified by objects produced or found there doing very strange things, reported ever again.  

By the way, what real Buddha would not choose to be a bodhisattva and depart at each arrival to guide others there, until all sentient beings achieve enlightenment?

Until then, nobody lives in shangri la, it looks like a ghost town, so lonely you'd rather be lost in a blizzard again, the few remaining stragglers packing their bags to go back home tomorrow, but we're here now here and now together, your face, your hands, your eyes, your possible touch pouring all over me and into me and I into you, and we might all be dead by tomorrow.  

oh it's certainly beautiful perfect enough to be lost in a blizzard and lost with the last in the world who tried to stop spinning the gold into straw for one split second, who really tried but finally couldn't, just to have them here and now and be alive.  Don't let my mind wander to the terrible future.  If my mind doesn't wander these minutes will last forever.  and maybe, by a miracle, they'll change their mind by tomorrow if I just don't think about tomorrow.

 krvs at me dot com