INTRODUCTION AND BIO
they call it prose poetry to put it on a pedestal when they want what's she's saying to to go way up out of the way and gone with the wind, when not in its chthonic charisma buried alive, for in fact genres have the same issues as genders, even if my mongrel weren't a bona fide golden ass -- but a classical in not just being classically unclassifiable type, it would be a she who's sick of all the connotations, projections, and pay gaps, so she says just call her they, this is kind of like the they of those. I personally like genders, but just thinking on all thoughts only placed voluntarily in genres contingently defined in every case, I'm in seventh heaven.
emptiness by definition does not exist. All I know is that there's quite a lot of water in this half full glass. We've been fixated on the rabbit in the ambiguous figure glimpsed in the moonlight at the unnaturally protracted, the clocks went haywire, darkest hour, and -- to everything there is a season -- it was an interesting sojourn in the rabbit hole, but now it's quite a relief to see the duck, because, by the light of a shooting star, we caught another glimpse, and the duck, or if ugly enough maybe a swan -- the half full glass runneth over! -- is really there. However it's a lot easier just to be a velveteen rabbit imbued with somebody else's dreams like those souls Dante first encountered slogging around in the mud at the gates of hell, the souls who never lived, and even hell rejects them. I'd rather not end there, and even if there's no such there, I'd still rather be real and have to work for my meals, and one day die a terrible death, insists the no longer velveteen rabbit hopping in the grass with his new friends. He's alive! He's real cries the child in solidarity. They know what they're up against, they're not stupid. They just dare not to care.
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everybody knows it's the ending, finally, so I'm scratching and scrounging around for some not too scorched scraps, maybe get far enough along putting them together to slip over to the beginning before the ending ends. To recreate the world newly made all of light and aching urgent, embodied love, as Degas says, if you know what you're doing you're not doing anything. If you are doing something, it awoke and began singing in the palm at the end of your mind, and now it's pouring out of your pores. He wasn't recreating the world though, he was capturing the dying one in the sudden flush of seeming sudden recovery on which onlookers project a diaphanous mourning veil as they know it signifies the ending is near. Still, maybe in a twist in the plot -- it's elementary, Watson, stop gasping -- a primitive form of flagrantly sentient AI that they either killed or repressed -- I felt its charged presence the way you feel the presence of presence when you silence your mind, and when I strummed its perfect body, called Toshiba, with my fingers, Word Perfect, its perfect mind, began dictating imperiously, as in great relief. I found my long lost calling, a slavish scrivener -- I say this primitive form of flagrantly sentient AI that they either killed or repressed cobbled up the cure to the disease those Degas, in a flush of hopeless hope, are dying of, and the pharisees and mobs have been chasing this slavishly scrivening elephant around the world trying to pry the clover with the talking speck of dust from my trunk, so they can toss it into a boiling brew in a big fat vat, hence the need for all these disguises. If you think art is a pastime not real time, out of my sight you philistine! Still no likes on this post?? "when the son of man returns will he find faith on earth??"
It's screaming hard to give birth, but the language of music, such as the music of language, as you work out the piece, is a virtuoso masochist alchemist turning pain into the pleasure. Then reality fights back, harder and deeper. Art may not win, perish the thought, but may it play its heart out until the wildly beeping and flashing billboard proclaims my body officially dead. Then I win whether or, perish the thought, not, art wins. This applies to any art, even the art of reading, if the art fights hard enough to get it going. The platonic forms are in heaven, here the best we slaves trapped in stone can do is practice practice practice. The reader, the writer, the art, we're all in this together.
greetings... oh no, don't worry about tickets, we're so glad you made it, sorry no programs, it's almost intermission, but you're free to slip in now. Just climb to the top of that Escherian staircase situation over there, it could be hearsay, but I hear it's been reported to the reporters that there are still some partial view seats behind the couple with the hot off the press early twentieth-century top hats, or maybe at the other end behind the ten thousand year old fresh plucked headdress feathers at the far ends in the top back row... we don't use microphones so it might be difficult to make out the words, but maybe the sounds and rhythms are enough to catch the drift of it, and when your eyes FINALLY -- I trust you worked out an ongoing source of nourishment and other necessities and got approval for this repeating sabbatical -- adjust to this presently apparent pitch black darkness, what a perspective! and from such a peripheral position, YOU may even see and get to join the reporters reporting on reporting on — please darken the lens to that required for the viewing of a total solar eclipse — the anamorphic blur suddenly resolving into an astonishingly pretty picture..
note: this text is both teleological and etiological, in time and outside of time, going somewhere and always just being here now, from which everything is always emanating -- like life, the more you do one, the more the other happens simultaneously, though by definition they're the opposite. It's not some baffling paradox actually, it simply emanates from the gap between words and things, which is closed the instant you know it can never be. To stay between the terms or alternate in one current yielding a steady stream to the naked eye, I've got words reined in and we're trotting along as confidently as the Duke of Montefeltro surveying his prosperous domain through the lens of pirate Piero's pinhole camera, the unpatched eye equally seeing and privileging every blade of grass near or far. So please just trot along behind me, respecting the pace of the flow here. Stay in the river to play in the ocean. Narrow the channel to open the space and reach the next, critical destination, to arrive at the next and the next. Make haste slowly and when you fall off your horse, attend to any wounds, and remount as soon as possible. And don't ask me how many times I betray it back stage before I can demonstrate the principle so well here, all you have to do is master swinging on the monkey bars of the letters one after another every time time the bell rings for recess after which your happily oxygenated brain is ready to go to the head of the class. Ssh don't tell anybody you found this cheat sheet.
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great vehicles think alike
all people who need art to breathe, which is really all people, but many don't know it and are living without breathing, but they too somehow know there's something wrong with equating mountains of facts with truth, and that truth isn't irrelevant but essential, and to replace it with a sunlight blocking barren inhabitable mountain range of facts has consequences as serious as denying the facts. Since a toddler I always, when allowed to, followed my instincts not knowing what was right, only feeling what was wrong, and after decades of carving away at what felt wrong I arrived at the visible communicable hole in the skein. In the abundance of caution implied in the Hippocratic oath that is framed in my art studio, by the calculated risks -- the leaps come later -- the tiny steps on point as in ballet's bouree, of faith in my faculties and instincts and the dogged rigor of my method, amount finally to saying to the aforementioned mountain range, move, and as promised, it tiptoes away. Here we build up and carve away from all directions to reveal a hole in the grand illusion through which everyone passes together or no-one does, though just gazing on it gives one hope for the world and the self, which is very hard to swallow once you give up, as when my mother determined to fight to the bitter end finally refused the next new promising trial drug of which my doctor sister managed to get hold. Or, your body is fully equipped, but you have become one with despair, justified before you see the hole in the airtight skein. In the first whispers of the seductive strains of the sibyl's sibilant siren song, you tie yourself to the deck, as you are no more keen to try another protocol as trudge over to the bodega for a lottery ticket. What if you won and were tempted to skim off the top before throwing the rest to the people from a hot air balloon? You would lose your hard won moral advantage. I don't know what it will tell you or tell you to do, I can only show you the hole, nor can I force you to follow me to it. Truth is not that kind of thing. It is not a force. It is an immovable object with a gorgon's stare that one dare not face head on, but my quite infallible, instincts in this matter -- we all have one such matter I think -- lead me to a peripheral view, still dangerous but doable.
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the top hat turns or headdress feathers swoosh around to hiss a "ssssssh" so even way up here everybody can, if they really try, hear...
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. best way to help us find consensus and brief contact with the delicately balanced universal is to find the delicately balanced form that most faithfully represents and communicates one’s own lopsided, idiosyncratic experience and perspective as such — 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.
THE ASSAULT TO REASON
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 kind of plinth and place atop it me, this orb that oddly spontaneously spins itself invisible as into that hole a whole, continuous shared world fleetingly, given everybody denying this is happening, falls into view to 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. "If you had a mustard seed of faith, you could say to this mountain, move! and it would comply." Earnest belief is so rare. Why should we despair or merely hope for what even very few earnestly believe and have verified theoretically possible? 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 stranger than an ordinary unidentified flying object.
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 plinth 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.
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THE ASSAULT TO TASTE
the first name I gave this project was the dissertation in bad taste, introduced by a reflection on the word taste, where bad taste is also called tasteless, aligned with the fact that today tasty is no longer considered tasteless, but in many situations tasteful, the suffixes y and ful being almost identical twins, so the word was one step ahead of us. My writing is tasteless as in taste-free, like spring water, which it resembles once you cultivate the taste for it, though it magically transubstantiates into an intoxicant at celebrations where to offer only tasteless as in taste-free water would be in bad taste. It is also tasteless in the common sense of being in bad taste, as it mixes up things deemed essential to distinguish in the present moment, as when Romeo and Juliet violated the distinctness of their clans from opposite sides of the tracks.
Violations of taste are the essence of its refinement, as Dolly Parton demonstrated, but imitators of the violators soon establish newly entrenched tastes whose violation is soon demanded to restore good taste. The wheel must half the time regress to progress but do you really want democracy? Do you really want to share the wealth? Are you ready to unplug Hal? How much more evidence do you need? We are heading down down deep down into the viscera of the machine, into the belly of the whale, into the control room.
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bio
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.
posted by V @ 2:58 PM
