bio and introduction

in the subjectivity of experience, the best way to help us find consensus and brief contact with the universal is to find the form that best represents one’s own — that is how art speaks so universally it survives and speaks across space and time as so vividly illustrated in The Voices of Silence by Andre Malraux. 

You can read the world in anyone’s story, as in any grain of sand, but strangely my story, like some grains of sand, is almost perfectly transparent. Finding myself a cipher, it's my duty to build a platform from which this oddly invisible orb that brings a whole, continuous shared world fleetingly into view can be viewed by whomsoever cares and dares to look.  Some believe we exist as one, some theorize it, some hope it, some despair of it, but to experience it is to activate the belief and theory, fulfill the hope, and assuage the despair.  Why should we despair or merely hope for what even very few believe and have verified theoretically?  Its appearance is inevitable.

An army of Frankensteins taking over our lives as they threaten life on earth isn't really surprising at all.  It was a predictable step in a trajectory, and we built and made it happen based on what we already knew.  By contrast, things that are truly shockingly novel, even possibly brand new things are happening all around us, but we refuse to look if we doubt something's there -- how sad, as this turns all these extraordinary things invisible.  Then we say everything. however monstrous, is ordinary, essentially predictable, however it may elaborate and compound predictable things, like when a machine can cook dinner not just vacuum the floor, or kill everybody instead of just millions of us; but we only "verify" this qualitative ordinariness of everything by refusing to look at anything that we can't make common sense of.   

I somehow intuited -- though it makes worse than no sense, it makes negative, the very opposite of sense as if carefully conceived to unscrew every screw and unbolt every bolt, systematically and concertedly, but gently and non-violently -- however violent the effect when it hits you -- to undo the machinery of sense -- that I was this anomalous transparent orb and so persisted in whatever it took to reveal myself to myself as such, and now I can only build the platform and mount the orb, I can't make you look.  However, I suspect, however still dimly, you too intuit my status and will, however protracted the procrastination, in the nick of time find a way, however long the winding road and fraught with detours, to parry or flatten the obstacles to bringing the extraordinary thing that seeing through me brings into view.

Long a denizen of Brooklyn, veronika (nee, and as corroborated by kerry, see post how the sibyl got her name) was born and raised in Saint Louis, Missouri, which she left in a hurry eventually to study fine arts and architecture at RISD, then practice architecture in NYC for over a decade, then study art history at Columbia University leading to an M.Phil there. Alas, her dissertation on a recess to care for her dying mother in Saint Louis morphed into poetic prose and watercolor diagrams aspiring to autonomous art, as what she uncovered in her research transcended an academic finding, while remaining grounded there, stridently challenging existing categories and modes of discourse, recovering the status of certain kinds of art as instruments of knowledge -- a seismic shift with notable tremors, however fleeting, objectively registered and locating a dangerous fault line indicating the need for an inconvenient and emotionally charged relocation of the center line, whatever denial exists in the highest, most medium, and lowest of places.

She might not be right and even if right she might not win the fight, but Marlon Brando's Terry taught her in the epic film On the Waterfront -- Terry and Veri nee Kerry are both Red Hook, Brooklynites -- do NOT take the sizable payoff to play it safe and bow out. You've got the talent, training, and you're fighting for something that's bigger than you are. Get in that ring and contend, and if the powers that be punish you for it, philosophy is now a public performance, and the people will make them pay for tyranny and injustice, eventually. The seed of a flowery, fruitful, air purifying tree may seem to be inert, but it will likely wake up and come alive when she's about six feet under. 

Yes, she recognized in retrospect her mission as a Robin Hood to rob from the sacred stash, cannibilize the canon, chew, digest, regurgitate and feed a flock of baby birds dying to fly as high as the sky in a celebration, roughed up refinement, and consolidation/expansion of the vernacular tongue, which not only filters out the all the more toxic for being over-sterilized waste, but doesn't peter out at the thousandth plateau. Her painting practice did achieve autonomy and now goes its own way, and they commune productively. 

In short, if she'd been, say, self taught holed up as a hermit with a day job maybe in clerical work or manual labor, instead of, as indicated, loaded with degrees and in practice lacking all the common sense that her thought at least venerates, it would all be the same. She is the philosopher as performance artist who gets all the angels to dance on the head of a pin, or Giotto does, and she arrives there the way Pierre Menard arrives at Don Quixote -- here man's fiction is woman's reality, she fulfills his desire, but fear not. The finding of the beloved is just the beginning of another quest for her.