this is a workbook -- fun!
the primacy of form
technical scientific introduction to the finding of science and art's own philosopher's stone.
All manifest being consists in elementary particles, these constitute the evident evidence of being, which itself consists in the evident evidence of itself
where the different substances and elements only differ in the different forms and arrangements of elemental particles....
Mineral particles become life in their reformation into double helixes, or lead becomes gold in the mere rearrangement of photons electrons and neutrons. The number of particles changes for each element, but the exact same number and type of particles can be rearranged to create totally different elements.
One may say that sub-atomic particles and molecules are different from entities like chairs and human bodies, that they constitute matter, but are not matter, but then, if so, what is matter? Scientifically speaking, matter may look different to us from atomic particles, but matter still consists in and is nothing other than those particles and in their different arrangements.
Just as a Rembrandt consists in paint strokes, however when you stand far enough back, you see the image of a man that you have come to recognize and name as such because the things of which things called men are made when they behave in a certain way are classified as men.
But that account is actually a metaphor for the fact that when the particles of which men consist are arranged into what we call men, the particles are actually transubstantiated by this arrangement -- as is evident under the microscope, which shows the form of the molecules and the genetic code of a man. This arrangement is the source of the painting. The painting is not made out of paint strokes, it is made out of particles like everything else, but it only becomes what it is as opposed to everything else in the arrangement of paint strokes, which become what they are as opposed to what they are not in the arrangement of particles.
What you see is what you get, but what you measure and weigh is not what you get. Measurement and weight do not exist. Something is bigger or smaller than something else, nothing is big or small, as everybody now knows, but still people dote on the quantifiable, and all the thinkers in the world, I will argue, have nothing more to add to, but just more to obfuscate our understanding of what it is we are dealing with by being beings and when indicated, how to take the reins and where they are..
Form cannot be quantified, it is known through vision and other senses. You know it in identifying with it.
But the particles of which we consist hover in the Star Trek transporter -- this more than a mere metaphor more accurately illuminates reality than any venerated philosophy, ALL of which is relatively if not absolutely out of touch with it --
until, beaming down, we take form and become what we are, life or mere matter, gold or lead, where what we are determines what we can and cannot do. It might even determine what we will do. It certainly deeply affects how we do it.
In identifying with a practice, we automatically perform in it with all of our being. Effortlessness begins to win over effort. As when a Stradivarius almost plays itself, or a BMW almost drives itself before being programmed to do that.
Such is human nature's true nature and maybe nature's too. Maybe the birds sing more out of desire, because they are song, than as machines programmed to do that. How absurd to try to explain sentience in material terms when material terms cannot be explained in material terms.
You can reform your own being through meditation and other practices and spread the vibrations and the desire to do that, but you will not reform the world unless you reform it to conform to being's nature. East West North South face the center and move toward this convergence since the first dispersal of humanity. The Middle East is the Middle East and the Middle West is the Middle West, but all roads lead to the Middle Middle. All roads lead to Rome, well, actually, to Florence, the only city recognized by official psychiatry as a dangerous vortex whose art (form, the primal category) systematically stripped of all exterior criteria repeatedly drives people stark raving mad -- that is, sane.
Trembling, swooning, or fainting before these consummate works of pure art built on the bones and long of the gospel tooth, people become briefly disabled until they shake off the effect, which they must do as soon as possible, because the perception that threw them off the given tracks would keep derailing them.
But my finding of science and art's own philosopher's stone, a particular Florentine fresco, happened nel mezzo del cammin. I was, in the current, required de-creative deconstructive mode systematically dismantling the given tracks when I suddenly I arrived at the vanishing point at which they converge and the given tracks simply disappear. I had no tracks to go back to. Nor could I forget and deny the view at the top of the mountain and pretend it did not exist. That's why as much as everything I profess is consummately sane and logical, everybody thinks I'm crazy.
This kind of laughable profession is oft repeated off handedly. I do not think it is funny. To think it funny is a way of accepting it and all the horrors and griefs it engenders as it sucks all the joy out of the world and turns the laughing infant's thrill at flying when tossed in the air into the laughing cynic's thrill at one upping somebody or the sadist's thrill at watching a poor clown slip on a banana peel --
not that cynicism and sadism shouldn't be given an outlet lest they morph into fascism, but a vaccine should serve to prevent not infect one with the disease.
The official Reformation, meaning that of the Catholic church, is not said to have broken with its spirit, because the spirit is invisible and forms are just masks. One can display a form and in no way occupy it spiritually. This latter assertion of course is true.
As scientifically minded people who feel capable of understanding the nature of things, we are bound to admit that humans and possibly other beings have a supernatural capacity to defy the essential nature of physical creation. But we can also choose to go with it. We can make a Stradivarius that helps pervert our tendency to perversion. We can flail and flagellate our flesh and consent to be beaten with a zen stick until our will to rebel is defeated, and we disappear into the formal beauty of formally based given reality. If thine own hand offend thee in this effort, cut it off. Luckily I found the Stradivarius of Stradivariuses, science and art's own philosopher's stone, as will shortly be verified, and so don't need a hair shirt.
The finding of art and science's own philosopher's stone re-forms or reforms reality, including us. Such reformation is truly revolutionary, as again, form is and can transubstantiate elemental substance. We become self-known life not as a disembodied idea or aspiration, but in our form, in our very chemical being, just as, again, mineral particles become life in their reformation into double helixes, or lead becomes gold in the mere rearrangement of a pile of photons electrons and neutrons.
But you can continue to insist that you are neoplatonists who honor only disembodied ideas, or neoAristotelians who honor only quantifiable matter and consider any spirit apart from it so not of this world nothing worldly can be said about it, and who say gold is something entirely different from lead, but they both consist in the exact same particles and then shrug -- so I contradict myself, I contain multitudes.
Form? what has form got to do with anything? What venerable philosopher has ever considered form a critical concern? There is endless literature on the meaning and importance of art in general, but all specific attention to form is the province of only a very few art historians whom almost nobody reads, as artists, headless green knights under a magic spell, however worshipping science -- so they contradict themselves, they include multitudes -- disparage the wordiness and headiness. Therefore form can't be important. The highest humanity, just a bunch of clowns, impossible! The earth revolves around the sun you say? You are out of your mind! Next!
To acknowledge the critical nature of form and resolve the contradiction would require admitting that the entire history of the world's educated thought, East and West, and all the culture built on this thought requires radical reformation based on the findings of veronika, this nobody, this clown hilariously (to you) slipping on a banana peel that she calls science and art's own philosopher's stone. (btw I'm Walt Whitman's astrological twin; May goes in with a revolution, out with a revelation. He is the more gigantic, flamboyant peony, a necessary, but short lived thrill, and I am the thorny rose, which lasts all season. I contain multitudes, and I don't contradict myself! There's no contradiction between the heads and the tails of the world animal when you turn on the light, send your vorpal blade into the belly of the jabberwok, and it melts into your handsome prince. True story.)
You can wisely continue to denigrate form and use art only mainly as a playground to blow off steam, or a protest machine, as in a global meltdown, misconceptions and misperceptions begin to succeed in de-creating creation faster than creation can create itself.
You can, to be practical, refuse to vote for truth because only those other two parties stand a chance of winning. What good would it do to write in Veronika, how downright immoral to do so when the right to abortion depends on voting for the neoAristotelians?!
Even if she's not running for office, how downright immoral to spend more than five minutes on hopeless truth, when the neoAristotelians, however metaphysically wrong, still offer hope for the right to abortion.
Who cares about metaphysics? I do, because metaphysics are just a branch of physics, centered in the prophetic art history department, where I'm perfecting a fusion procedure that will bring peace and prosperity to humankind for millions of years.
Oh yes, you can and probably will refuse to look at or deny or fail to own what we have become in this finding. You can fail to read the account let alone reflect on it and why it is so hard to read and assimilate. It's possible nobody else will read or reflect on it. It doesn't fit with anybody's present agenda and will radically reform that agenda at probable massive inconvenience. Nothing surpasses humanity's capacity for evasion of responsibility and self-delusion. Just as nothing surpasses its capacity for the opposite. Two sides of the same coin. You don't have to flip it. You can just choose the side that's right for you.
warning: should you accept the mission impossible of continuing to read as long as I continue to talk, as the finding unfolds requiring the effort involved in, say, assembling a mail order jungle gym for an elementary school, or more like making a mental become physical Stradivarius including years of apprenticeship, you will without doubt soon begin to get bored and distracted -- it's a beautiful profession, but not the one I was cut out for -- and forget any tiny bit of resolve you may have mustered up to help me out here.
How I manage to keep the faith is beyond me, well, no, it's not beyond me. I merely gaze out the window at my autumn leaf strewn garden with the giant the limb lopped weeping willow and the cherry plum, and the Stradivarius just plays itself. One needs no reformation really, only to recognize one's original form. One needs no gratitude list. One is gratitude. But with every flip of the switch to vote for neoplatonism or neoAristotelianism, one forgets oneself entirely and must crawl back up the mountain again on one's hands and knees. It's again day one of the program. Making -- I don't promise you a rose garden, only rose gardening, which, as evidenced by Sarah Owens, the ex-rosarian at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, waking up in the middle of the night to save a vintage shrub from some raindrops it was complaining about (if only the little prince had been a little princess) is like a full dose of LSD compared to a toke of a reefer) -- which is having and taking very good care of a Stradivarius, though, really helps.
Actors excel in politics, as well they should. All the world's a stage and life is too serious to take seriously -- seriously. Nobody works harder than actors because nobody plays harder. It's time for everybody to ascend stellar performance in this stellar profession in which immanence and transcendence, reality and fantasy, are constantly at play, like two hands in a Bach fugue or two eyes turning the world as a flat diagram into the incommensurably inexpressibly deep and expansive world as will and representation.
That poetry, the solution to a Rubik's cube, turns out to be science proves to us science (among other things it is hoped) worshippers that it's serious, but in that poetry is also simply poetry, it remains ethereal, ungraspable, the smile of the Cheshire Cat after the rest of it has disappeared. In a formal world, that is, the real world, the looking glass has melted, and there are no more sides, only the whole, with everything given a place, even nothing, the vanishing point. The sign is transparent to the signified, which only means one is paying sufficient attention, as when gazing long at a hammer, never before seen, its form to the Sherlock Holmes we're called to be, tells the story of its making and answers all the questions -- where why how when who. I think of Proust's dissolution of time as he describes an ancient column in the public square. That changed this changeling's life again. The world is a sign of itself signing itself signing itself.. a babbling brook calling to the source.. with the eye drops supplied supplying a slow drip trip and tears to wash away the fears that underlie every negative emotion, so just roll with it, thinking, speaking, hearing, seeing no evil. Beware of present professionals. Beware of present people. Power to the peepholes. Power to the future. Power to the seeds of the trees that we will never see. The truth can be quite tacky, that's how it sticks.
part 1
part 2
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. The bridal chamber and the image must enter through the image into the truth: this is the restoration. This power the apostles called "the right and the left."
(Gnostic) Gospel of Philip, Codex II, 3
posted by V @ 10:37 PM
