edited expanded and intermittently intensified

 draft of ten minute talk delivered at SFSIA, a week long educational program floating around the world. Its theme this year  was "cognitive justice and the crisis in epistemology".  

Good morning, I only have ten minutes, so no time for thanks... but thanks.  I take heart that it’s been highly endorsed here, as I am a contender in contentiousness.  I came to share not just listen, because I only half agree with everybody or agree with a twist. 

some scattered issues — is there a basic contradiction and paradox — in the respect of indigenous cultures very internally rule bound and possibly puritanical and the ribald contentiousness in the tastes of the benign overseer of this practice.   

jumping to another, I very much relate to the question raised by Kosi regarding discretion in displaying sacred artifacts.  I uncovered hermetic knowledge and confront not external but internal warnings and pressures to keep it under wraps.  re. responses.  As a poet David Shapiro posted on facebook.  No-one can help you time to swim in the rip tides.  The buck stops here in the choice of the artist and curator after many conversations with herself and her god or gods.  And these choices drive history.  Art rules the world. no-one can relieve us of the burden.

my work and self are so totally contentious we contend with contention or not depending on the constantly changing context. we are colossally non-inertial, therefore sluggish in motion, restless in rest, every move determines itself -- as with the brushstrokes of Monet as discovered by students of David Elkins trying to imitate the fluid effect.  We're so digital we're analog, and vice versa, particle and wave -- unfathomable! "irreducible!  "Did not the psalm say ye are gods?" everything else is just self-important rhetoric to slither away from one's responsibilities, including having fun, like Jesus does when he's playing all those other gods, it's just a lot of clueless sub-homo sapiens who bring him down and strap him to a day job 24/7 til death do them part.  

Neither the left nor the right will have me and I deny their categories as crystallized in their dubious lack of doubt of their positions, the contour enclosing fluidity's proponents more crystallized than those proposing crystallization.   Clearly fear of doubt is never other than lack of faith, which like any speaker who knows her material and hopes to refine and expand it, welcomes questions.  If you're sure you're sure, you're likely unsure, that double lock installed against questions that threaten, anger, or confuse you, where the clearer they are, the more threatening, therefore the more "confusing".  

It's a rude awakening, as you might have installed it so long ago you lost the key or forgot the combination of the double lock, and it won't be convenient to take the time to find it.  I speak from experience, but oh the release at the unlocking, like stripping off your clothes and dancing naked by the sea, one arm dangling free, a feeling that surpasses understanding, a pure pleasure with no use whatsoever, not even rest and relaxation for maximum productivity.  Since then, standing firm in the place where I am, therefore constantly doubting it, barraged by questions, my own and others, it's like I was beaming over to the other side and I got stuck in the beamer downer, dissolved in cloud of shimmering particles like Tinkerbell or a migraine headache.   I think heaven is a beautiful place but it's lonely.  

I wrote a list of reasons why to get a dog and a list of why not.  On the latter side were a hundred reasons.  On the former one word.   When I went to Italy however politically incorrect I fell into that word, I fell in love.  When I was gazing at Saint Teresa in Ecstasy a gnarly priest  resembling Nosfaratu stuck his nose in my face and growled — did you ever think of praying not just gaping.  good idea. when I was studying italian art, I was interested in the anonymous manuscript illuminators, but they were interested in becoming Giotto, and I wasn’t just interested enough to get a dissertation written and a nice job,  I listened in love worthy of the name, yes, I paid attention, I mothered the evidence without smothering its otherness until it dawned on me -- 

the european tradition has colonized and abused the indigenous european tradition itself.  when you look at any of its practices or objects you could be looking at a weapon or a tool, a distinction relevantly delved into by Elaine Scarry, thinking on such parallel lines I'm still making my way to her for an official baptism.  

That is, what the authorities, neither devout nor free of it, were generally commissioning in the art were bludgeons, but the artists were, without the authorities noticing the details, carving the bludgeons into hammers and drills to build a house of many mansions by the direct orders given in the gospels that the proto- or internally protestant artists were reading directly.  They believed it, so they saw it, pictured it, and inhabited it, in the way that belief in anything productive and useful, even nothing, a very productive useful entity, produces something, by which nothing reveals itself as something after all.  Actual actually means acting, and nothing actually exists, however ineffably, on the two dimensional plane, another ineffable actuality, dividing the ineffable actual past from the ineffable actual future, so nothing -- no thing does not mean no thingamajig -- is no stranger, but our daddy. as a matter of fact, another ineffable actuality.  

That's why they will never find the original particle.  Everything is a verb, nouns are at best nounly, to matter is a verb, and matter is short for what matters to the ongoing embodiment or realization of our being. The problem is you can't own or buy or cash in on a verb, unless you're an athlete, dancer, or a musician.  That's why I wisely chose to be both -- watch me leap and pirouette! hear me sing, blow my horn, beat my drums, and tap these keys, favoring the black ones, which all harmonize even when a novice improvises!  Any other choice seems self- or world-destructive, reifying the unreal. 

So all that's needed is a grain of awareness to penetrate a lack by which it's recognized as that -- in the beginning of life in language, the only life we'll ever know, even when all is silent, to us it sings I AM,  is the word logos or idea attended by the first inchoate groan of verbos, again all that's needed is to recognize a lack as that, which instantly replaces the lack with a new conception, a hope for the lacked, a hope that instantly begins to articulate its nature as the hoped for, be it a chair or cher bebe, gains internal organs and extremities, as does the groan, word and world, logos and verbos entwined. The hope for the lacked is finally perfectly visualized and then, if all goes well enough, born into the world in blood sweat and tears.  

In Italy you wander around the shells of the new Athens, the city of God on earth with all the other cyborg ants licking the dried nutrients from the remains of the real live slimy gooey organic life that wove the shells.  and some cyborgs even dwell in the shells in belief they are one with the weavers, and in believing it, they see it, and in seeing it, they manifest it in blood sweat and tears, and, though many don't make it through the ordeal as modern medicine has just arrived at this scene, but for the few who do, this false belief becomes a true one, and an updated cutting edge old fashioned human has actually replaced the cyborg.

However physically protected from the hurricane, this world that art made in the eye of it is as much the victim of a crisis in epistemology as worlds physically far afield and unprotected.  And physical protection is not enough.  A baby can die from lack of touch. A physically protected schizophrenic is suffering comparable to, or worse than, a person in a physical war zone.  Doctor heal thyself.  Don't try to save the world while you starve the members of your own family.  Didn't you read Dickens?  

all this attests to the sibling rivalry simmering under the slobbery kissy surface. we are all at sea tacking back and forth and the ship can only have one captain.  However they may be friends when the ship docks for a night at the pub before continuing on its journey, philosophy and art will fight to the death like Buck in call of the wild to be leader of the pack.   I and other artists and curators may have actually integrated them, but we fall on the art side relative to what I argue is dominant philosophy or theory today, thinking in a measured controlled way as it worms its way through the most radical efforts.  

This I hold is it, the root of all evil, it is the secret source of turning capital into a monstrous ism, where God is capital, being is capital, capital is the reason for everything, we must work hard and earnestly dissect capitalism and try to defeat capitalism as if it were a great force or substance not just a blindness and scorn on the part of individuals to anything not commensurable, measurable, digitally discernible, machine translatable, safe, good or bad, right or wrong, art or science, to anything essential apriori bigger than us unless it be so other than us, we can define it that way and wash our hands of it that way and fail love of it that way. 

The love god's presence is revealed in productive, generative recognition of the love god's absence -- this is not an idea, it is a recipe known only by the cake that it bakes when you remove all distractions from the kitchen and use only the refined ingredients listed in the recipe in the order described, when, essentially, like all good artists, you get yourself out of the way and let the cake follow the recipe and make and bake itself, in its own time, this recipe, like Bach's original scores, allowing spaces for improvisation in the mode of the composer.  The recipe here is just a highly flexible structure like the skeleton of a highly flexible animal.  When you take on its bones, who knows where you will take off to.  

Philosophy now reaches out to indigenous cultures because it discerns in a measured controlled way that they know what they’re doing.  but they really only know what they’re doing because they aren’t measured and controlled because they’re artists who don’t know what they’re doing.   Things need to work to survive and to be good at work and to work is a good thing but what works in indigenous cultures will stop working if it stops playing.  Until art, like Buck at the sled, goes for the throat of any philosophy that stands in the way of art leading the pack or sailing the ship, support and appropriation of indigenous methods, while locally charitable, mainly serves the vampire system just to save the system, however I'm not a theorist or critic who would criticize the best we can do however not enough.  I offer a means of besting our best to be good enough by laying new foundations whose nuts and bolts are included in my delineated plan, a new modality of discourse, a new paradigm of knowledge, what I call the visual order.

Presently, honorable — and I deeply bow to it — any individual act, as a society we are a virus latching  on with no autonomous life force of our own, our being is grounded in work not play.  So no, it is not enough for a small enclaves to do what they can as the greater system marches on.  Until we defeat it, and we must — Aunt samantha wants you — everything we do it uses.  But the good news is, we don’t need weapons to defeat it.  We need courage and choice, we need to free our minds and clean up our own house, alas I guess that’s bad news. 

play includes work much more work than work does, michelangelo slept in his boots and stunk like a skunk, art includes philosophy but philosophy or work in command is actually rather out of control because it strings ideas one after another in sentences that get all tangled up, and its hard to weave the threads. straws are examined in an effort to find what broke the camel’s back, but it’s not in any straw but in the sum of them. we live in symbols and images and all our concerns have this density and multi directionality, so art in being more relaxed is also tighter.  everything is made of the same thing atoms, it’s their different arrangements that create different substances.  Form is phenomenon and essence. That’s why art must captain the ship, however it is not measured and controlled. But trying to be too safe is too dangerous.  

with all due respect to the sentiment, I say artists don’t need to, as well as they never could, produce at the scale society destroys, we need a few or one to produce at the depth the problem reaches, with millions of noble stem cells recognized as such by ferocious critics daring to criticize and hone our sperm to give them a chance, however unlikely, at the egg. 

So when I show you a work of art that realizes the religion or religament, the repair that philosophy strives for and demands, you will not take it seriously, because however strong art gets, it defers to philosophy and science, these are truth for us, or you, however you will protect the intractably different them or us, as I’m one of them.  Philosophy literalizes what’s called contention.  In art there are no literal criteria.  You must set a chair in the museum and stare at a work for possibly years to know what it’s saying and doing, what’s hiding in it that’s the opposite of what it’s literally saying.  

When you join this mutiny and we demote philosophy to first mate, as it relaxes into this, its natural place, every word will have a different meaning.  The world will be turned inside out, the last first, the debased elevated.  It will be more systemically disruptive than ayawaska, until it settles into a slow drip trip. Then you will look the indigenous in the eyes without a grain of wide eyed veneration, which always disguises condescension.  You will not just have had an interesting vacation in Peru.  You will be an indigenous person, you will hear the ancestors whispering continuously, they will guide all you do, you will feel your roots sinking into the earth as you drink the light.  But you are wise to learn philosophy, to study the rival closely, to learn all it knows, this we must do. 

Many of the philosophers have penetrated the inner sanctum as spies, however they may have forgotten their mission, drunk on the wine of words and invested in all the work work work.  It’s an addiction and this is an intervention.  Capitalism may be a monster out of control but like a computer, it was programmed by humans. I penetrated the belly of the beast and unplugged the machine, I will shortly show you the picture I took to prove it.

As Heidegger says in the heart of the danger lies saving grace.  And that means you need a lot of tries to get in there and get it and to be willing to fail as he did, fail really miserably.  You too could become a Nazi on your way to the saving grace, God forbid, so if you  don’t know you won’t, let someone stronger go in there and grab the booty, like yours truly.  Still I can’t clean all the danger off of it.  

image please. 

This image was forged carefully by the zeitgeist the spirit of the times moving through history painstaking forging the holy grail or perfect language or the minimal difference between subject and object joined physically and spiritually by love, the scientifically verified viscous medium of relative being.  The gospels speak in personification, they personify the idea.  

Neither denying nor complying, the story processes and cathects all the cruelty in nature, so that we may be reintegrated both within and outside of its rules, even reforming them, as  epitomized by Saint Francis of Assisi, who talks the wolves out of killing instead of killing them. How else can this be done.  The story is the tool that performs this necessary, psychological or psyche or soul-ological task with the maximum economy (beauty), and the degree to which you can believe it constitutes the degree to which the task can be performed, arguably making those  crazy enough to believe it the holy fools the others must ride, like Phineus Finn rides Bonebreaker, who manages the wide stream but is okay to turn back to help the friend who didn't, but still it's Finn who has the reins and chooses the game, render unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar. 

The tool is cut as fine as a key. Personification engenders allegories that diffuse the idea and suffuse the world with it.  Then appears a procedure in a Dominican prayer manual called "How to pray" -- by initiating the gestures of the saint as he venerates and identifies with the story moving from cognition to affect in order to achieve maximum likeness to the personification by mechanical behavioral means.  Then there is a story, in which, uncannily -- as I discovered all this in researching the origins of monocular perspective or so called Cartesian space -- the first such image is described as the seraph “rises from a single point on the horizon”, the literal origin of the matrix or mathematical space, of the so called secular world in a so called mystics vision, not as an anomaly but demonstrably, as with more time I can demonstrate, smoothly continuous and fleshed out by all the phenomena surrounding it, whether looking from here to there or from there to here, making it scientifically imperative -- as no such continuity and predictability presents itself elsewhere -- to dispense with the sacred/ancient versus modern/secular categories and recreate the scattering world gathering in the image of this finding, integrated with the past and rooted in it, created by the future result desired in the present, and then there is an image that crystallizes the story, this trajectory when examined carefully encapsulating and shooting past state of the art linguistic theory, as the semantic in refusing re-fuses with the syntactic.  

A quasi-pantheist who called the sun and moon his lords and who said that obedience subjects a man to every other man and even to the wild beasts, Saint Francis his lover is so close to Christ that in empathy Christ's wounds appear on his body.  They travel across space at the speed of light but they are also produced from within by identifying with Christ, which is a problem, because if they travel across space the image would be reversed like a print — Francis, shown reincorporated in nature, the first photograph the saint being seared into an image, this imitation of Christ not other than the imitation of nature  — but if he produces them from within by identifying with Christ interiorly he gets the left hand wound in the left hand and right in right, as recognized by the scholar Jean-Claude Schmitt, who tracked and classified various examples of both approaches in images of the scene, but without attention to the affect on the image as a whole.

when I grabbed the baton he passed and ran with it, I noticed that after several tries in earlier images verifying that he knows what he’s doing, Giotto contrives or notices and records a twist in the body so that being and seeing are resolved visually affectively cognitively immediately narratively as the whole space into which the saint is locked flattens up against the picture plane, like a retinal image not yet read, true light within bound to true light without, something like a nuclear blast has obliterated the shadows that would rationalize the size of the hermitage by shooting it into the distance, while, irrationally a giant bird, my mirror mocks the mountaintop mocking it.  

Empathy means replete occupation of the other connecting all the real rational irrational and imaginary numbers locating every single dot repairing the breach between discourse and all that it isn’t, making word deed spewing us out of the belly of the whale to grab for the breast of being and suckle, reborn. Among myriad miraculously coherent and crazy logical and poetic things that are happening in this image I’ve no time here to tell of [but explain elsewhere] we have the six days of creation represented in six giornati of fresco painting, creating always now now in spacetime… 

but just in locking and unlocking and then locking it into your gaze for intermittent seconds, you already begin to see think know feel that this image speaking thinking radiating knowing what it says and does at the lightening speed of the flash of cerebral synapses is as good and smart as they are in spite of the rotting detritus of thought and thinking due to the long lack of this garbage truck image come to carry all it all away and leave only stark cold love as vision, touching every part of you mind and body as only an image can do, not just negatively but positively  -- the death of self from which, in the seven instantaneous giornati aforementioned, sprouts all the world's pristine, generative abundance born anew -- 

not just an idea you try to illustrate, but a weirdly formed thing staring you in the face and then pressing against your face like that nosfaratu priest with his teeth in your neck as you die and awaken not a body gaping but a spirit praying, that is, imitating Christ -- real or imagined, or at this convergence, this re-origination in reorganization there may be no difference -- or love, the prayer that answers itself to the god that is within you.  Everything else is garbage, so just leave it outside for this very efficient self-driving garbage truck image to carry it away as with the terrible roar of absolute silence it mows you down to leaves of grass. 

You will not be able to keep up with them until you shift gears, and your body adjusts to the speed of your own brain synapses that speak its language at the speed of light, as that white light through a prism divides into rainbow colors that slow into sound that slows you down to the ground, which you graze only to lift up again, you have wings!  The word encouraged the image in its autonomous self-realization, it happened, and then the word fell on its knees and begged her hand as she promised obedience to the word's encouragement and insistence on her staying up there on her pedestal.  But just as girls, legal and medical questions aside, can call themselves boys, we are obliged to acknowledge it for medical and other purposes, but we don't have to identify with this now empirically verifiable, for the visually literate, naturalistic account. This ends the crisis in epistemology and everything.  The city is again functional. 

You were waiting for the next zarathustra like waiting for the messiah, but you were waiting for the wrong thing.  You, Penelope, were weaving and unweaving while you waited for me, and I will take no prisoners among the usurpers in the palace, and as we two leaves of grass entwine and I bestow on you all the jewels I gathered on my journey.  We are all the gods in god in earnest, in magic, in faith with all these signs and proofs that came when I stopped asking for them.   We are everybody’s providence one body of which we are different members, to say the toe is intractably unable to communicate with the finger is wrong,. When we of all political persuasions encouraged by the cops occupied wall street, there was no leader, like all the perfectly balanced parts of a yogi or athletes body in the zone, but in theorizing otherwise it fell apart, and each plurality could not find its spot, as we blamed the capitalist god, namely capitalism, so it won again. We certainly never thought to find the map in a Christian image.  But life is full of surprises.  

more notes I didn’t have time to read…

Okay you pulled the sword from the stone, and it’s in your hands, so do it. Kill the Buddha.  To hell with trying to be a disembodied spirit without blood and history.   However you will never find us as we fly through the all ages of man, like Artaud we must spit on or why bother to, just pity a spirit that dares not be born in flesh to suffer and die and leave something behind of not just re-nurtured nature, but to defy the cruelty of nature until we conquer it with love, not just a tool but a weapon!    The love that binds plurality is one and thick as the water we mainly are, the seasons turn and the pure vapid idea will warmly melt and coldly crystallize…but it’s never not the same substantial substance.  even potential energy is matter, just as time is space. 

You must be giants, however presently bound by an army of lilliputians whispering seductively in your ears, just keep screaming interiorly or droning a mantra whatever will block them out and listen to yourself especially the tiny little voice that knows as Sartre says that everybody is your enemy. Push push against the ropes and one day you larva, will fly free as me, or die there in your cocoon and bring the whole world down with you.   Waiting for the messiah, the next zarathustra, thank you so much for bringing out that nasty little bug so I can crush i!  and if you find the best thing since sliced bread and notice it’s still hungry after you feed it keep feeding it.  Thank you.

Of course I’m just playing with you, therefore getting some real work done finally.  This fish you can’t catch is all the truth and power  in the world in the palm of your hands.  You are again naked before your god the moment you turn around to move toward it, when the veils and false forms that conceal and deny its absence finally fall and fail provoking the obsessively described lack of it weaving around and around like a cocoon becoming the hope for it darkening, deepening like a butterfly in the cocoon.  This is religion or religament, the incomplete, therefore sustainable act of resewing the world that is always falling apart so it can happen.   Wittgenstein I guess never picked up a needle and thread.  And he never figured out that words don’t have to be pinned down for their form or arrangement, their substance, their being to work and play perfectly, bear hug dancing with the world, on earth as it is in heaven… wait, there’s no capital in this, it’s nothing, it’s perfectly worthless.  fight it fight it find it where it’s hiding in you and fight it.  you will always have to fight it.  there’s no more any help in the future or anywhere out there, but only in you right now.  in the perfect fiction or history or whatever it is, that’s what Jesus said and as the characters write the story to be true to life, some were healed just by touching him and others crucified him.  and today the message is as if brand new, people today yet more infantile than they were 

see bottom of next post for full account of the finding as the meaning of the fresco -- and read top too, it takes many wacks of the blindfolded and spun around to break open this piñata.  

because -- it bears repeating -- when I show you a work of art that realizes the religion or religament, the repair that philosophy strives for and demands, you will not take it seriously, because however strong art gets, it defers to philosophy and science, these are truth for us, or you, however you will protect the intractably different them or us, as I’m one of them.  Philosophy literalizes what’s called contention.  In art there are no literal criteria.  

You must set a chair in the museum and stare at a work for possibly years to know what it’s saying and doing, what’s hiding in it that’s the opposite of just as it may be perfectly aligned with what it’s literally saying.   And that thing alone is the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth, beyond a reasonable doubt, without collective access to which there is no fair free trial and just blind  obedience to strong armed, nepotistic authority hidden under the very rhetoric that opposes that.   

Don't believe what you cannot see, and if you like what you do see, let it be, which, like or as sitting and staring at a point on the wall, is a very arduous activity.  It works for you if you work it as it plays and plays.  Let the point on the wall become everything, as all the different ones, each like no other, drift gently to the ground softening all the edges of a flowingly coalesced glittering world touched by magic.   

Everything is a sign and a symbol of the significant symbolic world humans inhabit. When the scales fall from your eyes, and the eyes have it, the whole world is transparent to the whole in all the terror and wonder of it.  Not one grain is just mundane, however all the mega-microphones may be in the hands of those whose scales weigh on the side of scales scales and more scales...as the human lemmings however they yell across the aisles suppress all protest against running in the same overall direction, so as to prolong everybody's lives, instead of getting trampled immediately upon reversal of direction.  

So just spread the news I'm whispering until we all can do an about face together at once safely enough.   If after all the crime is confessed and earnestly repented with super commensurate amends, and this practice well established, humanity's beauty and brilliance still bowl you over when you watch your beloved peeling an onion or a tight rope walk between twin towers or Heidi  painting a floridly limpid lazy lined portrait of a person and her pet projects dissolving into the patterns and light all around though Heidi's never taken any psychedelic drug other than painting and living in love, perhaps you will vote humanity deserves a second chance.  If so, please very very carefully and self-critically measure your existing project against this dangerous one, and bravely generously reform or replace it as required.