INTRODUCTION AND BIO

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note: this text is both teleological and etiological, going somewhere and starting right here everywhere forever -- kind of like life.  The linear flow is what aligns it to everyday mortal life, which begins and ends, and it is mortal life that it values and speaks to and for, where the timelessness it channels and that is likely its source is only known to mortal life through mortal life, so if the space that gradually opens up here precedes time, only time knows it constantly reining it in, corralling and taming it to time's service, child is father to the man, so please respect and don't interrupt the  temporal flow, just go with it  ... 

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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..

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all people who need art to breathe, which is really all people and 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 serious consequences.  As an artist 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 truth, everybody's truth -- all have their own collections of facts, but truth like facts are not subjectively chosen, but given to all -- in a particular painting, the truth that does not translate into facts, but simply appears when in faith in your faculties and instincts and the dogged rigor of your method, you say to the mountain range, move, and as promised, it tiptoes away.  The only way I can transmit faith in the seemingly haphazard method by which I arrived at this truth so as to allow you to experience it is to recreate a similar journey that in the thick of it feels like madness, but the method in the madness is gradually revealed.  Though a discovery, it is built up and carved away from all directions like a creation, tapping into the minimal difference between these two only overtly diametrically opposed phenomena. I don't know what the truth will tell you or tell you to do, I can only show it to you, nor can I force you to follow me to it.  Truth is not 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 lead me to a peripheral view, still dangerous but doable. 

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....settled in now, distant spriter (speaker writer) in the middle of presenting the long promised INTRODUCTION and BIO faintly audible..  but check your tank, I think by now you're likely quite close to empty on fuel and should pitch a tent, get a good night's sleep, but to avoid having to start all over, please wake up here, where I suggest you pitch your tent, tomorrow..  where the slowly systematically circuitously being woven cocoon in the mongrel discourse is a pretext for the practice practice practice of the traumatically positive, mutually respectful reintegration or marriage of the word and world and everything -- after you heal imperfectly from your personal trauma (don't bother if you don't need to) you need this ongoing trauma of everybody healing perfectly forever --

                             great vehicles think alike 

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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 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 if we stay on track, as Leonard Cohen sang, democracy is coming even to the USA. It’s a slow slow train, but despite, nay, because of the regression on the flip side of progression, it’s moving on. Mark the place we start and where we end to verify it, and when verified, decide whether or not to kill me for completing a revolution of wheel to return to where everybody fled with a minimal advance.  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.