work in progress
draft
I know some other artists who agree with me, who still believe in the message, but many, I think, believe, as most people do today -- including my ex-dissertation advisors -- that if you can’t extract the message and place it apart, you have nothing to say. That’s what I was told in graduate school in art history when, in the throes of research on the origins of perspective, so many insights began flooding in on me that I could no longer organize them linearly, and I began building a cathedral in my mind to order them, a Proustian cathedral.
Proust already wrote one of the books I wrote to organize all the insights that flooded in on my mind as, so I don’t have to. They told me then, if you can’t sum up your insight in a few sentences, it isn’t insight at all. I find this absurd. The most important insights and messages won’t be extracted from the medium. They are fish you can observe while scuba diving, but they will never let you catch them. But that’s just a clumsy metaphor, because you can’t even separate the fish of insight from the water in which it swims.
The insight is within you, hidden, private, inviolable, and yet it can be communicated if there is desire and love of a challenge, and some willingness to suspend disbelief, on the part of the reader. Maybe the writer is drowning here, and crying out for rescue. Not to be able to communicate is to be locked in. Or maybe we’ve all come to feel this is the universal, human condition, to be locked in, unable to communicate what is most deeply hidden in our hearts without violating the very individuality we cherish. “Everybody knows.” sings Leonard Cohen, how horrible this feels, how horrible this is. But what if there were a way, just by being careful enough not to extricate the medium from the message, to communicate the message without violating the privacy of it? What if by rescuing me where I am crying out in the sea, you’d be rescuing yourself just by learning that rescue of another is possible. As Saint Francis of Assisi would say, it is by rescuing that we are rescued; but somebody must consent to be rescued that another can be rescued by rescuing her. It is by giving that we receive, and that’s why tis a gift to receive, that another might give. This text involves much give and take, the walls between giving and receiving come tumbling down.
To keep alive the novel, you must let the novel be novel. There’s no such thing as a non-novel novel, any more than there’s such thing as an insider artist. If an artist isn’t an outsider, she isn’t an artist. All these categories are bourgeois, do you think, just let them go, like the dream of democracy? But what if we could have our individuality, our novelty, our democracy, and be communal beings simultaneously, what if we really could all be ladies and gentlemen worthy of the name, just by not trying to extricate the medium from the message. It is utterly impolite to do so. It is a form of violence. The medium with self-contained message is a stranger with a mind of its own, I’ll grant, and it takes some skill to swim in it, but by his willingness to do that, James Joyce can be taken at his word in saying, “I am not a violent man.” Having tossed his shoe at musician at a poor performance and departed half barefoot, he is a gentleman indeed. On the integrity of music, the very existence of the name of peace depends; the name creates and sustains the thing, which does not exist in the nature we perceive before we find and name peace, the peace that we suddenly find in leaving the city and climbing the mountain, whose silence we likewise perceive only in finding the word “silence”.
All words are verbs, are findings, are alive in the immortal present where finding begins and never ends. All peace is destroyed, first within us, then without us, just as music becomes noise, when the message is torn out of the medium, or when the medium is denied the right to carry and be a message.
To stay in the shadows, to let language and experience find each other by their own lights, here language circles around a thesis not yet named. All the words unfolding here represent the first intuition of this thesis. Perhaps it will launch some readers to a place where the thesis can be better articulated. For some of you, a positive articulation might involve fixing the thesis in the realm of not namable. You then would hold to the dogma that no dogma surrounding this thesis should ever be uttered. It is prohibited to utter the name of the thesis or link it to any known or knowable thing. Others might come to think and/or feel that certain dogma work better than no dogma to instate, maintain, and honor this strictly intuited thesis, at least from their perspective. They feel that no symbol points to a thing too dark and opaque, but symbols open up the possibilities, language allows light and love to enter the realm of the unknowable.
In any case, further articulation of the thesis goes beyond the scope of this book. This book merely allows representation to what has previously been denied representation, the intuited thesis that language can only circle around and suggest, and language will circle around and suggest it. Not the plant, but the compost in which it might grow. Language will begin to construct the thesis, and a structure will appear around this construction, but it will resemble railroad tracks converging in the distance, though the tracks circle around the world, and you never arrive at the vanishing point. While we discipline our mind to this structure and get ourselves out of the way, language and experience are free to find each other. It is a public form of meditation.
Uncanny that as I write this, I presently find myself in San Francisco for the wedding of my nephew. This world I am describing, a world circling round, and held in place, by a merely intuited thesis, fragile as bubble, is a world as ethereal and softly rainbow colored as this city, each low lying, light wooden “painted lady” respecting the desire of all the others for the softly misty light as she breaks into modestly delighted ornament, all singing together, a city appearing in pure desire and faith in a worldly Eldorado. It is blessed by its name, Saint Francisco, which saint wrote the first poem in the Italian language, and reawakening the senses to the beauty of nature, gave birth to the Renaissance. I will later re-mention and elaborate on this, because language and experience desiring to re-convene first called me to be their medium when I was gazing at a fresco of Saint Francis of Assisi, a fresco by Giotto. I am bowled over by the beauty of San Francisco, and am amazed by the way this luminous, ethereal city perfectly represents the world of which I gain glimpses when I write in this way, pulled by an intuition of something deep in the desire of language and experience, a world in which language and experience begin to converge in a heavenly city on earth.
I feel it strongly, and I believe in the existence of this impulse in language. Again, I don’t necessarily mean this should be taking literally, that there is somebody there in and as language, that is “there” in the way that we understand to mean “there”. It’s just that we meet it half way by doing the best we can, so we refer to it as there, because to us it is there relative to not existing at all. It is an energy, which is just a form of mass, or vice versa. This it is not under our control. It may not feel its own desire in the way that we do, but like the north pole of a magnet seeking the south pole, it desires. Language is built to desire that we allow it to commune with experience. It wants to assure us of its watchful presence without revealing its nature or imposing on us, it needs us to trust the benignity of its purpose for it to function, all this by a thesis that can only be intuited, a thesis that contains positive knowledge that can never be mined. I believe it is beautiful and good that, by my faith in my own intuitions alone, positive knowledge exists in this form, impossible to use or exploit. I am a thesisist. Sadly, it’s impossible to control the use of this uselessness, soul, some say we should deny it exists, even if we intuit that it does. We should deny our intuitions, but this breaks what Elaine Scarry calls the pact with aliveness.
(If it’s just a metaphor, to hell with it.)
I cannot say when it will come into view. It is a convergence, a site of potential consensus, which is the one thing that everybody today seems to want to avoid and cover up, even as there’s constant complaint of the absence of it -- whether you’re on the right or the left. The center is so vacant that a politician who tries to stand there gets sucked into a black hole. Must we go in after him? In truth, to find what might hover, hidden, in a site of consensus and convergence, I could only invoke terms and categories I used to find oh so tiring and easy to debunk. At first, the advanced scholars debunked them, but finally even the retrogrades conceded, such that when I circled round and experienced the convergence, and these old terms and categories suddenly woke up to reborn life, I found myself effectively autistic when using them. The poet Robert Kelly says that all poetry partakes of this condition. This book isn’t poetry, but it does reveal that everything is poetry.
The old, worn out story of the dawn of the Renaissance (not to be confused with the rise of secularism; the renaissance was a devout age, though the gospels point to radical new levels of individual responsibility) isn’t just a metaphor for all healing and awakening. It is vehicle for all collective healing and awakenings. A body gets to used to its pathologies, even fatal ones. Even when a body awakens to the seriousness of the condition, staying awake and healing will hurt, and at a certain point, a body decides to give up. At a certain point, further attempts to encourage a doomed body to fight for its life can only be called sadistic. Maybe those who think the human race is doomed would call this text sadistic; or maybe if this text feels sadistic to you, you’ve given up on the human race, and didn’t fully realize it. Maybe this text will wake you up.
The awakening of the Renaissance is a public awakening to the beauty and deep coherence of the visible, legible world, and from that premise, all the other qualities of the age proceed, qualities as complex and as self-contradictory as beauty itself. Once in the inner sanctum, the world begins to arrange itself in such a way as to undo the contradictions, which accrue from lack of vision, where in the Renaissance interior vision, wisdom, begins to fuse with optical vision. A Renaissance defies the categorical thinking that defines other times, which can only find an escape from binary thinking in arcane philosophy and theology. The renaissance is an age friendly to everyday experience, finding wisdom in the vernacular tongue, an age that gathers all ages into it, an age friendly to science, but ruled by art, an age that, like a Shakespeare sonnet, scorns time. So I am not talking about a renaissance. I am talking about the Renaissance. It cannot die, it can only sleep. The notion that we’ve gotten past the Renaissance makes no sense to the Renaissance. The wise Renaissance knows that there’s no getting past anything. There is only saturation with, or dilution of, what always is.
The re-awakening of the Renaissance, the age of mindful beauty, depends on individuals empowered to trust their own cognitions and senses and let the walls crumble between prescribed categories of experience. As this happens, it’s impossible to say what’s causing it to happen. Maybe we awaken the Renaissance. As in a recurring dream I have, in which I notice an inconsistency in Aristotelian space and time, it’s Tuesday, say, but I’m not in Arizona, though I arrived there this morning, by which now I’m dreaming that I must be dreaming. Waking has whispered in my ear and made me aware that I’m dreaming. So mentally I’ve woken up, but the world I inhabit is still a dream world. I try physically to wake up, but I can’t, and so I try to feel my body, then with great effort, I gradually become aware of my physical body, and then, in increasing panic, I try to scream, but I’m paralyzed, and then with yet great effort I push and push, to give birth to awakeness, and finally I manage a sound, I cry out, and then I wake up.
Looking back at my life, I see that this is what happened over decades, a studied analysis, dawning cerebral understanding, then panic and many failing efforts, pushing, pushing, then one day I woke up. I was living in the Renaissance, a condition that many find curious and rather incomprehensible, a bit mad, but hardly threateningly so. No way this could be contagious.
Individuals, one by one, re-awaken the Renaissance, by observing the incoherence of their world, then with great effort rediscovering their bodies, and finally re-integrating them into the body of the world. Signs are everywhere. Spring is in the air.
“Right writer. Dream on.”
I’m aware that by current standards, this text is a document of madness, but I’m also aware that all newly discovered or rediscovered truth sounds like madness. Vision is always new vision because vision is in the present. If you don’t see something newly, you don’t see it at all. You only register and use the information. You don’t see wholes. You don’t see a whole image in a photograph, you see fragments, as you register and use the information carried in the image. In a medieval age, they say there’s no such thing as an epiphany. This is some kind of illusion based on a delusion, specifically, this time, the “God” delusion, whereas medievalists centuries ago called it the “self” delusion. I sing a song of myself.
Only vision can expand vision. Only vision can see and hear the language of vision. One is gathered, or swept up into it as if inadvertently, though one is purposely backing into it; or not. Vision is strange stuff. It’s all over the place. It scribbles around in the air like a sparkler, whose lines suddenly appear as a sphere. The sign that it’s coming upon you is a feeling of total confusion and bafflement. It you stand in that place and wait, peace will soon be with you. You are a rock that such winds cannot disturb. Let the winds of confusion tear around you. Don’t listen to the howls and admonitions of the winds “Go back! Retreat!” or the whisperings, go to sleep, go to sleep. You are a rock. You are constantly awake at the origin of being.
It’s like the vanishing point on which a one-point mathematical perspective converges -- in the optical image it’s an archipelago of vanishing points actually, due to the curved lens of the eye and the displacements of binocular vision, but this densely gathered scattering implies a pivot at its center -- when everybody was still trying to avoid discovering it in the late Middle Ages. Norris Kelly Smith discusses this avoidance in his interesting book, ... He explains and shows how painters, in gradually discerning how to represent the optical image adhering to objective, optical, mathematical principles, long concertedly avoided the discovery of the vanishing point(s) even as they groped for it. As artists began to converge on the discovery, they made sure to conceal and obscure the implied archipelago of vanishing points and the further implied pivot, behind architecture or furniture tilted in respect to the optical axis. The revelation of the autonomous, mathematical skeleton, including its inherent harmonious proportions, which induced Renaissance artists like Piero della Francesco to liken the commensurate proportions in perspectival diminution to those of music -- and only the blind can’t hear Piero’s arcade’s sing -- hinged on the discovery of this archipelago of vanishing points and its single fulcrum.
It’s understandable. If the vanishing point(s) were to come into view, the medieval artists would lose control of the image’s basic form. It would belong to science, mathematics, to objective principles. They weren’t interested either, though, in profligate freedom. They wanted to register their earnest desire for objectivity, but in a world where the chief manifestations of it would constantly elude them. They were in love with the dream of objectivity as it appeared from afar, untouchable, un-sulliable, and they thrived on unrequited love of it. The possibility that they might meet and win the beloved, that a platonic order might descend to Aristotelian earth, and one day Plato and Aristotle would walk hand in hand in an image in the Vatican palace, that sounded to them as scandalous and blasphemous as God becoming human here and now in the form of an artist representing himself as Christ, as Durer later did; and the clerics didn’t protest when the artists saw themselves as gods, because that’s what Jesus taught them to do.
As Leonardo says, outlines do not exist in nature, so they made sure the figures in paintings were crisply outlined even in shadow in order that the ideals they embodied not be taken as actually realizable. Not that all that fuzziness in Leonardo represents aesthetic perfection; forms in light do gently define themselves, and contours, though imaginary, please the eye and mind. I’d say Leonardo’s renaissance was already drowsy again. Does a rebirth after three hundred years deserve the name?
Anyway -- to continue with the tired, old, simplistic take on the world that you can read about in Vasari and is repeated ad nauseum in all introductions to art history written before the late nineteenth-century -- before Giotto’s discovery or rediscovery of perspective, there were signs of dawn, but the world was still dark. Before Giotto, says Vasari -- and all the Renaissance, baroque, neo-classical, romantic artists, and even up to most modern artists and art historians, the light’s shadows played in the world, but the light was elsewhere.
Oh such terrible dark ages, goes the old account that was only phased out in the last fifty years. Everybody, it was said, was addicted to wearing blindfolds and being spun around and wacking a hard surface, with the pinata not about to relent. It was a job they knew how to do. Losing had been romanticized and institutionalized, and it well served the relative winners in a loser world. The closer they came to dawn, the harder they watched for it, the more the watched pot refused to boil. The minutes stretched to hours, the hours to days, the days to months, the months to years. The artists felt safe to seek, quite certain there was no risk of finding. As Catherine of Siena put it, “All the way to heaven is heaven.” Not that there’s no universal wisdom in that. Seek for seeking’s sake to experience the unattainable. Still, don’t pass up the attainable that you find along the way, lest you lose the way, or die along it due to lack of the supplies it offers. Don’t worship the stars and denigrate the earth.
Was Vasari so wrong? Is all this really so easily deconstructible?
Did I say that? Is necrophilia the next frontier? C’mon, don’t run away. It’s safe, I just let the paint peel and failed to oil the joints to make it creak and sound scarier.
The latter gloss, regarding the attainable, had been carefully erased, largely, so that the erasers could hoard the supplies, and the ability to reckon with it atrophied for generations, parents teaching children teaching their children: seek and do not find, until the children were as if born blind to the attainable. So even if they heard of it by hearsay, as forbidden documents were passed around behind closed doors, and they began to believe in it in theory, their brains had not forged the necessary family of synaptic connections to create any direct perceptions of it. Oliver Sacks reports how those born congenital blind cured by advanced medicine are traumatized, sometimes fatally, by the arduous process of learning to expunge all the ulterior input in order to let the optical image come quietly into view.
So when the pinata’s skin began to relent, and the receding edges, by the artists’ ever more careful observations of nature -- no, no don’t jump off from here, that’s too long a fall. Wait until we circle back down -- both softened and began to imply convergence on the vanishing point(s) that, in renaissance paintings, allow the bodies to appear whole, round, sensual, and palpable, the artists panicked and shoved up buildings turned askew in the center of the image, to obscure this literally life-threatening perception. The realization of perspective would create an image as if traced on a transparent window, not essentially different, if you remain, like a supplicant one of the chapels in which these images appeared, still and fixed on the station point from which it is constructed, from what you would see if the window weren’t there at all.
Okay, I admit it’s not just a game. This is factual, despite all the reams of theory written to “verify” that mathematical perspective is just as subjective as any other method of image making. The voracious expansiveness of this theory is directly proportional to the defensiveness of the proponents, due to all the fatal flaws in their arguments.
Perspective is not just another subjective representation. Science verifies that the optical image burned into the retina is perspectival, the mathematical principles and methods of projecting and experiencing the world we share are well known. Robots can read perspectives, and by this, not bump into the physical objects out there, and this can save their lives. If perspective were just as subjective as any other method of representation, then science and mathematics would be just as subjective as religion, so why not have prayer in schools? There’s no possibility of separating church and state. Not that the choice to honor the universal validity of methods that involve trust in the human faculties and communicability of knowledge doesn’t require a leap of faith.
Okay, let’s say we’re back to natural incandescence, let’s say the alternative has slipped out of our hand, and, with sufficient protection against hazardous chemicals, now the shards are all cleaned up. If the image constructed to be seen by stationary, contemplative viewer at a fixed station point just mirrors the retinal image as if it weren’t there at all, why then bother painting the image at all? (Why bother painting a naturalistic image after the discovery of photography, asked an abstract painter I know.)
There was much reason to bother. The people were taught that the images that distorted and fractured the retinal image, that reduced the natural world to schematic signs, represented the higher truth, and that they should, whenever possible, ignore what didn’t conform to their modified, schematic representations.
Unconsciously, of course, everybody used perspectival diminution to read distances in order to navigate, but this automatic function is just that, automatic. The sub-conscious mind takes care of it. Reading perspective doesn’t need to involve seeing it at all. As the representations were schematic, people learned physically to see the same reductive schemes in the world and block out everything else. The people learned to see the world from the artists’ eyes, which were really the clerics’ eyes, because it was the clerics who developed the schemes, and the artists were not given the right to impose their autonomous vision.
In fact, the great theologians and many of the preachers did not endorse this prohibition against the trust of the immediate senses, which diametrically contradicts the gospels. The renaissance painters who broke through the taboo were quite orthodox and devout. It was the only the corrupt clerics who probably weren’t believers at all, but who garnered and wielded political and economic power, who conveniently confused reverence for what is unattainable with lack of reverence for what is attainable.
The beauty in the world is always teaching us about justice, whatever else is happening, as Elaine Scarry discovers and patiently explains. So there is always a liberating impulse running through the elaborate, well-funded machinery of obfuscation. The beauty of the machinery itself is a counterspy, working against beauty’s appropriation to a vile function. The designers and technicians designing and assembling the bugging machines are bugging the inner sanctum of beauty, where justice is held hostage. Justice begins communicating with them.
As the artists began educating themselves in theology and reading the gospels directly, they pushed harder toward breaking through the impediments to healing the world’s ruptured image, to align their representations with what imprints itself of the retina, so they and everybody could remember how to see, really see, not just unconsciously register, the whole of what floods as a whole, as a suddenly and ongoing epiphany, not a fractured, deformed abstraction.
Finally Brunelleschi verified that it had been done, the artists had won, at least for a while! Reflecting the simultaneous awakening to the existence of two distinct realms, sacred and secular, he painted two panels, one of the Baptistery, one of the public palace, and he pierced each panel with a hole at the center, so an observer could look through the hole at a mirror that would reflect the painted image, then remove the mirror, and see the existing buildings, that the impinging world with or without the image appeared effectively, literally the same. For verification of the alignment, the viewer was not to look there or there for guidance, but within himself. The alignments were strictly formal, keyed to the sensory information. The exercise taught the observer to separate the pure formal, visual stimulation, and get all the signifying monkeys off its back. As he noticed how substances and relations in one image aligned with those in the other, he began learning how to look and see, be in the world again. When the light from what’s out there floods in through the pupils, there’s nothing in the world that’s left out of the image. You can read the world in a grain of sand. All grains are created equal, for you to watch over and protect them all, as if you were the god who created them, as if he had really become man and demanded believers imitate him, Durer appearing as Christ.
Behold the balance and justice in the image of the world that is right before the eyes? Observe the millennia dissolve, and awaken with eyes as young as those of newborn humanity? Celebrate requited, not just unrequited love? Dante marry Beatrice and have a bunch of kids like Giotto did? You’ve got to be kidding. Yet Dante was pushing forward, even as he was holding back, and he was the first to admit that the eyes have it. And his friend, Giotto, had the eyes and also the acumen to crack open the pinata, and he won acclaim for being able to draw a perfect circle and make things look true to life and also beautiful, but the nobody noticed the dramatic difference, nobody saw, until after the black plague, and the artists began to gather up the sweets.
And now the wheel has turned round a full revolution, and it must pass through Giotto, for the wagons of the caravan to move on. Plus c’est la meme chose, plus ca change. It’s different now, it’s not like we can’t see the literal vanishing point(s). It’s not like our machines don’t crank out mathematical perspectives, correct them for every nuance of vision, make sure every island of the archipelago is transmitting; and it seems like we’re too focused on the attainable, but rather need to be awakened to the unattainable. Seems like, but not is like. The less than 1% of the 99% are just beginning to wake up and try to shake off their resignation only to be reminded that their movement is caput by supposedly non-biased, liberalish NPR radio -- “Never turn it off.” “Never turn it off.” “Never turn it off.” self-advertises this medium that protects free thought only to turn it against itself. With one rare exception, all scholarly theory despairs of shared insight. There’s a pile of furniture turned every which way right in the center just to conceal where all that rises up to the eyes’ level converges, not up in heaven, but here on earth, on the horizon up ahead, in a dramatically empowering epiphany.
With all our skill in constructing literal perspectives, and even the 99% able to amass and litter the world with more literally attainable objects than ever before in history, we’re further today from this epiphany, Giott’s discovery of the perspectival image as the ontological form, than were the medievals. Even the automatic reading of perspective has atrophied, and we depend on machines to navigate our cars. Everybody’s turned in their given eyeballs to pop ones in that are officially sanctioned to maintain phenomena in outlined categories, however finer the divisions between them, be sure to establish the quantum leap between them, so the computer can read it.
The finer grained the facsimile, the more convincing, but make no mistake, every photon counts; a mind awake to its own eye can see flash the mere seven or eight photons that can turn the election for the status of an image of billions. What a piece of work is man, how like an angel, but the world’s in throes of sound and fury. Perish the thought that the furniture would be removed, the image of the world before us arrange itself symmetrically and justly in a mathematical order, not an ironic commentary on it, the hospitals multiply, instead of being shut down, the bodies healed and restored to wholeness. As a virtue’s presence follows many floundering attempts to produce it in oneself, so what representations precede what the represent; but in a mechanistic, medieval world, people wait around for whatever’s there to cause the next thing to happen, then they say it’s not their fault. They protest. We’re not protesting, we’re advertising love, say the signs of Occupy Catholics. Oh no, it’s not happening anymore says NPR, it all fizzled out.
The multiplication of soup cans, no two exactly alike, not reduced to a critique of impersonal mass production, but -- though I’d not remove that Marilyn’s mole of a reading just yet -- flooding into our pupils as a mirror of the massively multiplied wonder of the soup cans existing at all, not to mention the implied promise of global distribution to alleviate world famine? Pollyanna be gone lest I puke all over the floor! No, she won’t be gone! Apocalypse or apocostasis, it’s either/or. Apocostasis now! An epidemic of Stendhal syndrome as young women faint in the face of the beauty and the truth in those multiplied soup cans. Bankers repenting for usury pouring vast fortunes into work that only causes them to repent more until they’re the ones who fund the revolution. Such conversions are the result of vision. Vision is the result of attention to the sources of vision. The sources of vision must be disseminated and supported. This book is not an idle fantasy. This book is not a protest. This book is not a call to action. This book is a source of vision. This book is a revelation. There can be no revolution without revelation. A revelation comes to life in the hearing. You cannot add up its parts, put them in a sack. A revelation, like vision, is invisible, but not the visages it re-envisions. They were always there.
Come, follow me into the graveyard. We will exhume the corpses and dissect them. Let the boundaries bleed into each other, let the essences flow from state to state. From now on only nature -- by definition a given, not a construct, a given we accept in a leap of faith in the wonder of the given -- will be our teacher. We will learn to see and represent whole bodies as they have never been seen and represented before. We will equal and surpass the equalers and surpassers of the ancients. Look, the receding lines are converging..
and then I fall back into the arms of an angel like Caravaggio’s Saint Francis of Assisi receiving the Stigmata of Christ. That’s a metaphor in this case. The actual experience rearranges everything more thoroughly and deeply, is huger and deeper, though softer, so much softer. I can hardly tell the difference between before and after, except that after I had something to say that would take my whole life to say. I was reborn an artist, prophet, a visionary, or just crazy, you never know. People say they can’t figure out what I’m trying to say, why don’t I get it together? As if vision were something you can pour into a bowl, measure, taste, assess, verify. If you have any vision, you know you have to pass through a void each time to gather up the lost and stray beauty in your world, pull it up and let it fill beauty’s contained form. If you have any vision, you know you can’t hold onto it in a world full of so much pain, and you need all the vision, tools of vision, skills of vision seeking and vision retention you can get. Have these people who don’t seem to recognize the qualities of vision, who want it to look just like the visible things it envisions, ever possessed it, or if they have, have they forgotten when? Or maybe they’re just uncomfortable around the language of vision. It’s a taboo to talk about it, the way beauty was before Scarry broke though.
When this primal response of our bodies in communion with the collective body is inverted, when, for instance, injured, bound feet appear beautiful, it’s still an effort at justice -- to get back at the uncontrollable source of pain with a controlled version in which pain is appropriated to pleasure. Without death and pain, there could be no life and pleasure; an ironic inversion tricks death and pain and restores the balance. So even this practice, seeming so far from it, can teach us about our deep seated aspiration to justice and reparation of injury. But sadomasochistic practices for real or for play can become addictive. So on beauty’s path, we can get waylaid on the way back home to justice. When sadomasochistic inversion becomes almost an academically endorsed imperative, when graduate schools, with rare exceptions, teach that there is no possibility of a primal, untwisted response to beauty, or if there is, it must be veiled and and denied a voice, when art schools relegate to outsiders (where educated artists cannot be outsiders unless they are incompetent or insane) those who happen to enjoy and find valuable and healing such responses and, by the freedom pact among artists, claim the right to refuse to veil or obscure them, a then what began as a project of keeping open freedom’s door is not that any more.
Moreover, when the body, or the collective body, is mortally threatened, it comes to its senses, it wakes up and stops playing with fire.
Scarry, whom I heard lecture last week at the School of Visual Arts, “Beauty and the Pact of Aliveness”, shut off her beautiful slides at one point to inform us of the colossal scale of the recent, unreported growth of our nuclear arsenal. The way she embedded this information in her reborn language full of sensory reconnection, allowed it to penetrate. She scared me to death, that is, rebirth. It was like being tossed into a vat of ice, which acutely painful medical practice once saved the life of my fiance, who’d contracted rocky mountain spotted fever from a tick. Surely everyone in the room and all who hear her lecture are similarly affected in a way that is affecting others around them.
Here is the account of action on this front. The very night of her lecture, I returned home, rushed to my desk, and my language began to bind with hers in a new introduction to this book, on which I was already working. This accelerated a process that began a few weeks before, when I opened a file from three years ago, began carving and tweaking it, and for the first time, I was able to find a pace and rhythm by which ideas for which I’ve been struggling to find a form for decades could dance in bare feet, Martha Graham style, not don the usual, red toe shoes in which each new attempt, after a wild, surreal performance, was bound in the end to, and always did, after succumbing to rigor mortis, end up stacked in the mauseleum in a titled, dated casket. The whole body of work that has sprawled into at least a thousand of such suicidal files had begun to contain itself. I think with the first debate between Romney and Obama, I already had one foot in the ice bath. I’d quite a while back stopped finding the game of hobbling around with bound feet amusing.
So finally Scarry, who’s clearly been there herself, pushed at least one of us into total submersion in the ice bath, and this one of us, though aching sorely, feels reborn, green, not an easy feeling, but a good one, until she looks around and notices the house is still on fire. At least her feet are no longer bound, and so we all stand that much better of a chance of escaping.
Beauty teaches us justice, but the failure of justice keeps beauty alive with work to do to correct it and enhance itself. Beauty aspires to stillness, but I can’t share Aunt Sylvia’s apparent belief that my mother looked more beautiful in her casket than she did laughing, or even crying. Though they threw off the balance in her face, they corrected an imbalance that ran in another dimension. Beauty’s dimensions are beyond calibration; whether, in the end, at the end of the world, they add up to a just, beautiful whole, I cannot say, though by the end of the journey that allowed me to write this book, I came to take a wild leap of faith that they do. I guess I always believed they do, but I couldn’t trust my own intuitions in the face of all the opposition to my position, so I head out in the counter-intuitive direction and just kept going all the way around the world until I landed exactly where I started. Then I tried art, a hybrid of intuitive and counterintuitive, and it lead me back home too.
In the end, you can laugh your head off, but this does seem to me to be even better than the best of all possible worlds. I say even better because to be the best of all possible worlds isn’t saying much, given the stringent requirements and laws to which things must adhere in order to exist at all, such that the best and the only are probably synonymous. The way my father, to be just to my sister, called me his favorite youngest daughter, and vice versa. Such incredibly beautiful clockwork, with whatever made it or allowed it to happen remaining veiled in perpetual mystery. Our shared existence comes with many trials, but just to contemplate the wonder and worth of our existence as a thing of beauty is a salve for all suffering not too intense to allow such contemplation, where some practiced contemplatives have in meditating on the beauty of the world overcome the capacity for physical pain. This beauty is always alive and making and re-making itself. Failure of beauty teaches mercy, love, and forgiveness, with allowance for error, variation, activity, necessary features of beauty, as when, in the hauntingly beautiful stories, Jesus pays a late coming laborer for a whole’s days work, or rejoices with a feast for the prodigal son, whose weakness for beauty’s glitter caused an un-beautiful imbalance in his checkbook. The good son was infinitely beautiful, but mathematicians say, though it boggles, as does beauty, the mind, that infinities can be multiplied; the prodigal one, whom beauty hit in the eye like a big piece of pie, and threw off balance, was infinitely more infinitely beautiful to the father. Jesus said -- do not call me good. Only justice is good, not beauty; forgiveness and mercy are not always just, but they are always beautiful. By the gap between beauty and justice that needs constant correction, we possess the dignity of privacy, interiority, and apparent free will. We don’t live in the show me state, we’re not always being scanned or scanning for the visible signs, where, in fact, the recognition of all beauty, unlike justice, transcends the perception and understanding of it. In short, while imbued with them, beauty, though it makes perfect sense, goes beyond making sense by not being perfect. All kinds of beautiful things, those that shine in glorious, near perfect beauty, those that quietly bask in their own beauty on isolated beaches, and you can only read their letters as you burn with desire, those that redress injustice just to perpetuate a lesser variety, as when they go up in balloons and toss overboard the money they won in the lottery, and that means the beautiful clothes that could have put their iffy looks over, those that play games where beauty is under one of the cards, and many other kinds of beauty are, in fact, always playing quartets and symphonies within and without all things of beauty.
Meanwhile, the lord is one. Beauty as one is transparently one with justice, a mobius strip where, by the genius twist that revealed their relation in Scarry’s work, the two sides bleed into one. Such beauty appears here and there everywhere. Wherever and whenever justice is transparent to itself on earth, and you are at the center of this phenomenon, whenever you give a glass of water to a thirsty victim of circumstance, or you receive such a gift, it’s as if the veils fall from the eyes of the world, and it appears a perfect, oh so fragile sphere, transparent but for thin, flowing, rainbow films of color that reveal the form of the sphere. Though many of the faithless are very good people who support charitable legislation, which is very altruistic, as well as give to many tax-deductible charities, which is wise and prudent, which are among the cardinal virtues, faith is only born in individual acts of perfect, that is, self-forgetful charity that go the way of pretty bubbles in the air and carry you away with them. And then you must be reborn in blood, sweat, and tears to pick yourself back up and make your way to another of the thirsty. I’m not claiming to be a person of faith. Whether or not these words represent experience I’ve personally had and am speaking first hand, or might just be a bit clairvoyant, the way writing can make you, words having a life of their own, regarding what faith produced and sustained by charity might look like to others, I wouldn’t say. Maybe telling you all this puts me in the center of a beautiful bubble I’m not about to hurry into bursting.
Is this near universal recognition by self-aware artists of the flat, self-revelatory beauty of an image transparent to justice surprising? The love of justice is hard-wired into us and begins operating before we can speak. This I know from a story told by a woman with whom I once worked in an architecture office. She was sitting in her highchair, and her nanny brushed by and spilled the milk on the tray. Her mother then turned and saw the spilt milk and chastised the baby for spilling the milk. The housekeeper chimed in -- oh baby, dear dear, bad baby, baby should not spill the milk! My colleague began howling in indignation. She could not yet speak. Even if she’d been able to form them, she had no words to say -- Unfair! Unjust! Injurious! They were still part of her though. She didn’t yet have the words, but they already had her.
Along with that account, I submit exhibit A, the Arena Chapel, your honor, in defense of Scarry’s thesis against any of its detractors, and I rest my case.
Everybody else, every other artist, must take a fall, but fall gracefully, beautifully, originally, right from the heart. As Beckett says, fail better. For the job of every other artist is to be one of all the other artists whose aspiration must not be, as was Giotto’s, to create the most perfectly, consistency, coherently, transparently beautiful work in the world, but to create, in collaboration with all other artists, the most perfectly beautiful world possible. Meanwhile everyone can learn from the Arena Chapel what beauty precisely is, the nude body of it, not that there’s anything wrong, not at all, with all the dressed up forms that delight in, and show off all the glittering facets of beauty’s nature. But if you love beauty, you can’t but love her nude body most of all. Let the other winning thoroughbreds breaking the ribbon overrun the end line. That’s only natural. Giotto, supernaturally, stops on a dime. It’s difficult to share the nude body of beauty with everybody, but we must.
At Padua, the dying, schematic dark ages with its sunken chest has passed on, and the reborn world, with a deep inhale, fills with air and expands into the globe it is.
A renaissance born in a night to perish in a night, that’s only its ghost haunting the next few centuries? Is this reborn world already again dying inside the Bardi Chapel, as the friars gather round the dying Francis gazing into his eyes, kissing his hands?
My attention drawn to that image, I’m suddenly taken aback. It could almost be my father’s deathbed.
We’d been on rotating shifts. Kathy, his “favorite oldest daughter” and Betsy, his doting, personal nurse, had stayed with him all night, and I, his “favorite youngest” had just arrived to relieve them. I greeted him and kissed his dry, inert lips, then Betsy and my sister, then slipped off my faux leopard coat and lay it on the window sill. The attending nurse, who was leaving, suddenly stopped and turned, noticing a change in his breathing. “It’s happening now.” she told us in a low voice, and as she quietly closed the door behind her, something or someone or somehow all of us together gave us three women permission to slip out of the modern world, and just like Giotto’s friars at the death of Francis, we fell on him weeping, kissing him, telling him over and over that we loved him, the air a moist, palpable binding medium, just as in the fresco within the chapel. I can’t say how long it went on. Ten minutes at least. He was drenched in, he was born away in the warm stream of our tears and murmurings, as a long slow breath streamed from his lungs. They collapsed on themselves, flat as...
and by now lost in these memories, I’ve wandered outside the chapel, passed down the nave, and before leaving have turned once again to gaze way up at the Stigmatization fresco above the portal to the chapel. Since I found it, I’ve come to this fresco so many times before, all the journeys traced in this book lead back to it over and over, but now, for the first time, it uncannily takes its place in a sequential illumination of my memory of my father’s death. His last breath has just been expelled, his lungs will never fill again, the front side flat against the back. Our tears are all spent, none left to feel with. The bastard left and took our tears. Better put in his teeth before his jaw sets, says Betsy to Kathy. I shudder. His skin is grey, the shaved parts bluish. It lays smooth on the bone. The room is plain.
Back in Santa Croce, the fresco hovers high at a distance, expelled from the chapel, expelled from the community of images, the landscape almost an abstraction clinging to a surface, resisting reading, pushing away language, impaling Francis’s image, just as the images of wounds burn into him, the watcher burning this image into the retina of the watcher’s eye, and pinning him down, almost literally like a moth in a collection, now classified, memorized, a sacrifice to science. The plain, unadorned barren instant stolen away from living, moving time, stuck in stillness like Harry’s body in rigor mortis.
The story at Padua restores justice to the world, and heals it, again, fills it with air, so what is the source of all this terrible injury? Saint Francis, the child-like saint who loved and protected animals, who called the son, the moon, and the water his brothers and sisters, is rewarded for his compassion with mortal wounds that fester for the rest of his life. Some might say it is the Catholic Church that has betrayed the original program, that keeps crucifying Christ over and over, can’t accept the fact that the original has done its work, is still traumatized and compulsively repeating the trauma. But can we blame the Catholic Church for what Francis and his story represent, and Giotto again re-enacts. The awakening to the necessary repetition of the cycles of life and death, the metaphorical nature of the story, the burden of producing beauty and justice, now that we’ve been shown what it nakedly, flatly is, all on our shoulders.
Nobody can save him, I gasped with horror, when I suddenly woke up to the fact that he was dying. At such a recognition, you are torn away from time and space and made helpless, you are gagged, your hands are tied behind your back, and you are dragged away into a dark cell. The door is slammed, the key turns, there is no air. You are stigmatized, branded apart, expelled from the daily paradise of ignorance of life and death. All this is perfectly re-enacted in Giotto’s fresco, this image more expulsive of language than death, which is marked by time. This is pure pain, which festers incontinently, until the end of the saint’s life, impossible to measure or calibrate. Time bears you away from it by action at a distance, so you forget what it’s like inside, where time and language cannot go, where you still are, eternally returned to a consciousness of consciousness that language and time cannot touch. You are Prometheus chained to a rock.
My God, my God, why have you forsaken us? Your world as a whole, modern people, is stuck there, outside of time, outside of language, in the unforgettable, unrelenting, endless realization of the existence of death, the source of science’s relentless unveiling of its sordid details, sucking the air out in one long breath that goes on and on. You’re witnessing a galaxy exploding into ash in an infinitely expanding universe rupturing in its core and dispersing in all directions, and you can’t find the frame that would allow you to ascertain whether the whole is even presently in balance, and you can’t believe in it, that’s not allowed, you must find it and nail it down. Every instant the universe is reborn out of nothing, as billions upon billions of universes spill through dimensions we can’t perceive. This insight has impaled the whole modern world. When we’re together, as one, our eyes are held open by needles, lest we flag in facing and feeling a single fact, lest language create a gap between sign and signified. Once stigmatized by science, by Giotto’s return to the raw machinery of vision in this image, each person apart lets time pull her along, language restoring order to her world, but this language is pretty much not shared. The shared language, if it can be called that, is back here, where the light pours in unmitigated, without shadows, as in the Stigmatization fresco, an image being burned onto the retina without time to read it. The shared language is examining, classifying, x-raying, x-raying the x-ray of the x-ray of the image, observing its qualities in hopes of preserving and sustaining it, for the ego prefers to perpetuate itself under any circumstances. The language that returned when you re-entered time’s flow on your own is for talking to yourself, or to a small enclave. Some enclaves are concerned with going back and rescuing the world and bringing it back into time, into language. If they succeed, they will rescue me.
Put blinders on? Be content with small acts of kindness? Or even pat myself on the back for fomenting, if I could do it, a revolution that would realize nuclear disarmament, the solution to global warming, and the end of world famine. Sit back and relax a bit after that? No, that would not be just, not commensurate with the problem. What about the millions of other earths there are out there?
I was a dog who’d been given a whiff of the sock of the traveler, beauty, who was lost in this barren place.
There is no justice on this one, there is no beauty, there is a gaping, festering, un-healable wound in every view before us -- to hell with the world, let it go up in smoke -- until you see me staggering down from the mountain to you where you’ve been so long waiting by the campfire that you decided to pack this morning and return home, defeated, and as I come into view, you recognize the wounded body that has tied itself to my back.
I suspected though, that this apartness of beauty was a projection of my own apartness, an apartness that made me a part of the modern world. I sensed, though that if I could get to know beauty better, and separate its intrinsic nature from my own, that is, the modern world’s own projections, it would lead me and us out of this excessive apartness. I always believed that beauty, like everything, has a life of its own. Is that so uncool?
I traveled alone, only spoke to Italians though my command of the language disallowed what deserves to be called conversation. That was my rule though, no English allowed. It would break the spell. I remember arriving in Siena at dusk, and I heard music playing, and climbed the cobbled roads to a country dance. A beautiful boy with dark wavy hair and royal blue eyes grabbed my hand, and pulled me in. We waltzed in the pink light looking down over the misty hills, as the moon rose, and then he bowed and withdrew, one of the rare ones who didn’t try to make it with you. A miracle really, leaving the otherworldly magic night unsullied by a raw physical act, so perfectly beautiful it could not have been true, and yet it was. Still intoxicated, I stumbled down the cobblestones and checked into a pensione. It was the age before fax machines, the phones hardly worked, with the operator constantly interrupting asking for gettone.
Like Pygmalian, I had kissed him in a fresco when the guard wasn’t looking, and one of the boys who grabbed me up to waltz, or for a one night, or maybe week lonhg fling, had come to life and stepped out of the work of art to dance with me, or make love to me, and after he melted back into the cityscape, just to check if it was the same one, I went back and saw him there, say, in the crowds gathered around Saints Cosmos and Damian in Fra Angelico’s fresco. Even more than the boys who still lived with their parents and snuck me in and out through the windows, I blocked out the modern world and lived in the old one. I was a ghost from another time and place, intermittently visible, slipping in and out of the shadows with my sketchbook. But just looking around, just listening to all the chatter, I was happy.
I wasn’t surprised to see that the title of Elaine Scarry’s recent talk at the School of Visual arts was “Beauty and the pact with aliveness. She doesn’t choose the nodes and forge the relations among them. They are already there. They’re what you find when you renew your pact with aliveness and remove what is dead. And when get yourself out of the way. I managed to do that enough to glimpse the curtain lifted from another perspective.
With beauty my guide, Italy renewed my pact with aliveness. It was my mood enhancing drug, like good weather. Italy to me felt like good weather, whatever the heat or the rain. I always was a fool for good weather and was comforted to read that Proust too was appalled by his own inability to counter his ruthless want of connection to suffering humanity in the face of a serious wooing by good weather. Let the mourning mourn for the mourning. It’s a beautiful morning! At least neither Proust nor I two-time the weather. Humanity is a good diversion, but the weather is our lover. The weather is as transparent to emotion as the Arena Chapel is transparent to justice. If we emote in response to sentience, and it is not sentient, then why does it emote in a precisely parallel way? I sense and believe that everything is alive, the wind, the air, the skies, not just metaphorically, but actually, but I’m aware that what is alive in us can only perceive aliveness. For this reason, I’m not so worried that I might be wrong. What’s so bad about being wrong if wrong means beautiful and healing, which, by the way, I doubt is wrong? I’m much more worried that so few others share my “illusion”. Are there parts of them that aren’t alive? Are they not wholly alive? Is not life by its nature whole, therefore being partly alive is not being alive at all? Reconsider again, then, the aliveness of everything, now that there’s a gun pointed to your head. Apocostasasis now! Did you make it over? Of course not, of course the gun isn’t loaded. It isn’t even a real gun, silly, but be careful, it’s alive, and it means business. If you read this paragraph enough times, if you aren’t already, you’ll come alive.
When good moods happen, as with all living things, they are both like all other good moods and completely different from all other good moods. They are, like all living things, made of two different strands intertwined to produce this complex phenomenon, life or aliveness, with extraordinary qualities, including a mysterious awareness of itself as a single entity. In the case of living bodies, the two strands begin as sperm and egg. In the case of lively, good moods, the two strands begin as language (the generic, recognizable thing denoted by the name “good mood”) and sensation (the immediate phenomenon unlike every other good mood).
The remembrance of good moods past built into all good moods present not only enhances, but orients and pacifies the wildly unprecedented nature of each specific good mood, prevents it from ascending to mania. You can recognize features of the generic and features of the totally anomalous in the living phenomenon, but it’s something else really, neither generic, nor anomalous. Just as you can recognize features of the mother and features of the father in their offspring, but the offspring are whole individuals and different in nature from either. Good moods are symbiotic with other forms of aliveness born of the mating of language and sensation. There’s a whole ecosystem of mutually assisting phenomena that good moods born of the mating of language and sensation need to sustain themselves. We develop this ecosystem when we are three years old, when, psychiatrists say, we are in love with the world. We are creating the whole world including its wholeness in marrying it to language. The marriage is a nominal verb. The wedding must never end. The instant marriage is done, it unravels. The reverberations of the pronunciation that marries matter and language, as with all great marriages, keeps ringing in the air, with every word still singing in the original sounds and meanings of which it is made.
If, later in life, language and sensation start to peel away from each other, a person, or a whole culture, doesn’t feel alive, it feels dead, or sleeping, or something neither this nor that. It’s reverted to an egg that has not yet been penetrated. It’s hardly aware of this though. To be aware, you must be alive. If you’ve lost the connection between sensation and language, you must suffer to be reborn in blood, sweat, and tears. If you’re still animated, though estranged from language, you’re either seeking with all your heart and mind and muscle an egg to penetrate, or you’re a virus.
Dead. That’s how America felt to me. I grew up in the suburbs in the flat midwest after the hearth had been replaced with the tv. The houses were supposed to look like manors or castles, but even children knew that wasn’t real, though I was better than most at pretending. So much so that I slipped back sometimes into the times of real castles and manors. You might say that I’m something of a mutant with the capacity for time travel, but I soon learned to conceal this fact and train myself to think and feel in the prevailing paradigm. This required, though, that I deaden myself in yet another dimension of experience, beyond that which had penetrated the public domain.
It’s a wonder Italy didn’t shock me to physical death, so thoroughly had I adapted to the regressed, half dead state of an un-penetrated egg. In Italy, everything had been conceived, developed, had dared to suffer birth, was alive. Language had clearly penetrated and awakened all sensation, and this fertile aliveness had replicated and represented itself in forms transparent to the mingling of matter and language in them. In the art and architecture everywhere, in the streets and squares that were also works of art, in the always carefully dressed and comported Italians who gathered in the squares or waited on your table who too were works of art. You could readily see how half of their features resembled language -- “I signify”, said the clothes of a guy, “a lady killer with skill in foreplay.” “I signify” said the facade of a church, a Greek temple on vacation from austerity -- the other half pure sensation-arousing matter, but the whole well integrated and altogether different from either parents. These living forms awakened and enlivened my eyes, and when the eyes wake up, so does the whole body. Meanwhile sensation was infused in everybody’s language. There was no such thing as pure information. If you asked for directions, you’d get a greatly entertaining song and dance, much warbling and gesticulating, though it might well include several wrong turns. Such is life. Information means the act of informing, or dis-forming, taking away the form and leaving the data. It’s easy to get lost if you’re just a machine and need to be informed in order to locate the positions in Cartesian space and plot the route, but getting lost in life is the way to get to know it as such. By this, you stop being just a machine; you wake up. So the machine I am woke up in Italy. It became a “she” and “I” again in Italy. I got lost in Italy, and went back summer after summer to get lost in Italy.
I never made a plan. I just wandered town to town or roamed around Rome with my sketchbook, my Olympus camera, and my little red bible, the guidebook of the Italian Touring Club, which describes in Italian every little statue in every little niche in the city. I didn’t follow the maps or the routes. I’d settle on one thing I wanted to see and just amble in that direction, using the sun as a compass, and on my way, stop wherever I felt like stopping, and read about what happened to be there wherever I happened to be. I never wore a watch. I never thought about the time. By this I began to remember and recover my mutant capacity, as it were, for time travel.
To give credit where credit is long due, as is just, my parents funded these summers in Italy. I’m ashamed to admit that I lacked any carefully directed gratitude. I then considered these parents simply contemptible, clueless materialists subject to a little mitigating liberal guilt, over thirty years old, therefore not to be trusted, and it was my duty to exploit their generosity, just as it was the duty of Saint Francis of Assisi to steal money from his banker father to renovate the church. My father in any case wouldn’t let me refuse his money, not only because his ethic disallowed limiting my freedom to choose what to do with it, but because it was his only hope, in defiance of that ethic, of surrepticiously controlling me. So you see, by not letting me refuse his money, he couldn’t lose. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt, though, and chalk up his incontinent, impure charity largely to his romantical (his adjective), disinterested altruism. What a piece of work was that man. Later when he learned I’d applied for a fellowship -- I then didn’t give him the benefit of the doubt and wanted him off my back -- to attend graduate school in art history, he howled in fury, of course, on learning that I’d not asked him to pay. “Even the wild animals take care of their own!” This despite the fact of his ferocious abusiveness -- “you goddamned idiot, you’re no scholar” -- upon hearing that I wanted to waste my life studying the mouldering old art of a dead civilization that I overheard my mother trying to calm him down saying, “At least she doesn’t seem to be a drug addict.” but to him that would have been more romantical. I never figured him out at all, and vice versa, but we are known by our works and fruits. He funded my trips to Italy.
Then it was time to go home and suffer weeks of jet lag and months of culture shock.
The quest for the origins of perspective had lead me to an image that turned our notions of what perspective is inside out. Perspective, the discovery of mathematical space, is supposed to have abstracted experience, and that’s how we still experience it. You can type up a perspective now in a computer without ever visualizing the scene. A robot can decode it and track down and catch a thief. I found the origins of perspective in the fruition and apotheosis of the previous paradigm, in an image in which language had perfectly re-married matter. This was the womb that gave birth to the modern world.
In finding and being able to read this fresco, I had in fact, for myself, brought that ancient, integral world back into existence. I had returned to the womb. This can happen to anybody fleetingly or somewhat lastingly, in the latter case one becomes an archaic believer, which is very different from a modern believer. Archaic believers doth not protest too much. Their faith is so integral to themselves they don’t have to justify it or defend it by pretending they’re sure of it, which sounds like a contradiction, because I just said they were sure of it. Archaic belief is a paradox, like a zen koan. This integration of opposites happens all the time in experiencing art. If believers today were mainly archaic believers, not self-constructed, really quite false believers, artists would be the first people, not the last people, to understand religious experience.
There’s a difference though, between other types of fleeting and lasting epiphanies or the sources of them, and the one triggered by this fresco. This fresco is objectively formed to embody a world conceived by everybody, the collective at large, as sacred and integral at the very instant it swells and soars with hotly contested awareness of itself, before it gives up the ghost. I felt and feel that this fresco can be illuminated in language, can function as bridge to a more integral world for everybody. Before I called Scarry, I’d developed a whole theory to show how in Giotto’s fresco, language crystallizes into a tool of integral experience without any rupture in the passage from word to thing, two aspects of one essence flowing from one to another like water changing state passing from ice to water to vapor, where Giotto had discovered, and I rediscovered, its molecular composition, which never changes. I developed and wrote up the theory in long hand while sitting on a bench in the Lehman wing of the Metropolitan Museum in front of the altarpiece by Gaddi, one of my favorite works of art, and one that resonates with a gravitational density that reverses the diffuseness of modern experience. It kept me grounded in the alien experience of Giotto’s fresco as I tried to describe its transparency to unified experience.
When I finished the piece, I read it, and it sounded like perfect madness. Metaphors were melting into morphing into various states. Words and things were mating like organisms. I was about to toss it away, another failed attempt to describe what I’d discovered in this fresco, when by the oddest coincidence I stumbled on Scarry’s book in a bookstore. I began flipping through it. I soon found her passage about how language and consciousness poured itself into a chair. At first I was elated. I wasn’t crazy, I was onto something significant and timely, but then I crashed. It dawned on me that she was way ahead of me, and had already done what I’d been trying to do. She’d landed on the moon and planted her flag. Finally though, I managed to worry out what was left of my project, something that wasn’t fully covered in her book, that still needed to be understood and articulated, what was unique to Giotto’s fresco, which, as it were, solidified her liquid findings.
The trouble is that it’s not even easy for all that many people to swallow Scarry’s flowing tonic of newly re-integrated sensation and language. Who’s going to dive into an ice bath of the same stuff? In truth, I began ranting deliriously when I found myself submerged in the icebath of Giotto’s fresco. It reminds me of my friend’s description the similar one that saved his life after a tick bite poisoned him with rocky mountain spotted fever. He said being forced into this ice bath was the most painful thing he’d ever experienced, but it saved his life.
Scarry notes that pain expels language, that beauty and pleasure heal injury, but sometimes something painful is necessary to heal injury. We get small doses of this healing expulsion of language -- it hurts so good -- in abstract art that restores our constantly assaulted and degraded, pristine sensory experience.
It feels strangely synchronous that, just as Scarry was planning her trip to New York for the recent lecture, I’d picked up this work on Giotto once again for the umpteenth time, a file dated 2009 -- well as well that one as another -- and, spinning around the core of it, with much deleting and augmenting, seemed for the first time to be able to slow down and give the complicated twists and turns the space they need to begin untangling the knotted yarn. In Scarry’s lecture she dwelt on the little known colossal expansion of our nuclear arsenal in the last two decades. I wonder if a critical mass of us is ready to admit how high our temperature has risen, how close we are to burning ourselves up. Am I able to write up this story, finally, because, having exhausted every other recourse, we’re ready to dive into a frozen icebath of this water of which Scarry has released a warming flood, the water of re-integrated sensation and language, even if the temperature drop represented by this text might be the most painful experience of your life, as it was mine.
So I began to identify myself as an artist. As I grew more and more aware that my illuminated manuscript looked like the outsider art of the insane, I began to separate the poems from the paintings and respect the classical disciplines. Society graciously had set aside a place for slightly crazy (or maybe slightly not crazy enough) people who can’t separate matter and language, can’t face the “fact” of the corruption of utopia, a place called the art world, where little utopias abound. Though not trained as an art therapist, I lucked into a job running an art program in a detox unit. I was pretty great at the job, as it wasn’t hard for me to identify with people feeling hopeless and desperate and to share the way that making art feels like breaking out of prison. Many slumping depressed people would leave the room smiling after my sessions. When I tracked down my ex-dissertation advisor in his office to get a recommendation to teach art history in a prison, he first lauded my concern for the unfortunate, then suddenly looked downtrodden himself, declaring that “Really, I should do something like that.” Suddenly, though, he drew himself up, tossing off the guilt trip he was laying on himself, just as he’d found the proper approach to WIN -- “Why is it that only failures do social work?” he intently inquired, locking his gaze in mine.
“By the way, did I ever tell you how much I wanted to thank you, Kerry. (The name by which I was then known.) Because of you I clarified my stand on a very important matter. After dealing with you, I realized that art history and poetry could not be mingled. Art history and poetry are two completely different things. You see this letter here on my desk. It’s from an accomplished poet who wants to study art history, and I’m discouraging her roundly.”
Great, fine, okay, don’t forget to send in the recommendation, bye.
In truth, though I was glad to do the work in the detox unit, it was not satisfying my creative impulse. Trying safely to socialize my art wasn’t working too well for me. I spent most of my available time not painting or writing poems, but writing around in circles trying to say what I’d wanted to say that turned me into an artist in the first place.
“Oh nobody has anything to say anymore,” is the general message. You just let the materials play. If you want to say something, be a scholar.
But I can’t separate them. The hyper-classical categories, scholar versus artist, in this hyper-classical, hyper-everything world, don’t work for me. I’m a hypo-manic gothic monster, a gargoyle sticking its tongue out and leering at the whole world. All the art I love speaks, it carries a novel idea that changes my whole sense of reality. The more it chatters away, the more beautiful it looks. Can you beat Chartres? The gargoyles, like me, are just some swirls of icing on the cake, the mole of Marilyn Monroe. Art talks to me, and I talk to art, but only the most beautiful art in the world is so chatty. That art is as literate and witty as a Shakespeare heroine. Women, of course, should be seen and heard, as we like it, and men do too, if they’re secure enough not to be threatened. By this they thrill to carve our names on every tree. This most beautiful, talkative art explains things to me. It argues with me. It cracks the whip when my mind gets tired and can’t keep up. I like it like that. So you see, I haven’t succeeded in being a fully socialized person. I’m more than a little crazy.
Elaine Scarry herself is a talking work of art. No wonder she reminds us generally to trust our senses and cognitions, and trust that, though they sometimes debate with each other, they are, for the most part, on the same side. She herself comes into view at the convergence of beauty and justice, the seen and the thought, when you trust in your senses and cognitions. Without such trust, when you disperse your attention, she, the whole person, grows invisible. She is the direct embodiment of her own ideas. Her very, personal life, the legibility of her being, depends on their reception. That’s evident in the passion with which she speaks.
Shut up! I’m not listening! I’m covering my ears! Give me blinders. This thoroughbred has been in the gate long enough and is steaming to win a race. Yes, I spend most of my life doing battle with that practical, nay saying voice, which I believe to be dangerously cynical. Individuals striving for justice and to beautify the world without any faith in the continuing and un-severable bond between beauty and justice bonded to being itself, those who doubt the capacity of language, distrust all glimpses of the transparency of being to language, can only lug the stone up the mountain in a futile struggle against fate. Their little good deeds will be crushed in the tidal wave that multiplies the capacity of our nuclear arsenals. The power behind that tidal wave, I am convinced, is not ultimately the greed of bankers, though they are willing servants of that power. Whether or not it sounds dowdy and archaic to say it, it’s still the truth. That power is lack of faith in ourselves and everything, that lack a terrible vacuum, a void pried open and kept there by stubborn laziness that isn’t even any fun. It’s just a hole, a blob of nothing, a lack of willingness, imagination, and industry necessary to cobble together out of the materials at hand a reasonable, grounded belief that our deepest desire, for beauty, is for the just, which is the good, that nature is on the side of hope, and that’s the truth. C’mon, Elaine Scarry has single-handedly done almost all the work, and all anybody has to do is add a few struts to make it work for him or her.
As beauty inspires love and protection, and all beings want most of all to be loved and protected, all beings appear and strive to stay beautiful, or to beautify themselves, in order to be loved and protected. Though it sometimes hurts so good, even more pleasurable than being loved is to love. So, until they are brainwashed otherwise or fall out of contact with the original desire of their being, all beings desire to beautify others and make them more lovable. A self-beautifying world seeking justice, peace, and beauty, as all forces in nature strive for equilibrium, all desire strives for its quieting -- nirvana, slow intoxicating drips of self-remembering, self-reflecting, infinitely expanding pleasure in an infinitely expanding universe, this disallowed by overdoses -- is just the natural order of things.
What’s everybody waiting for? Grab Scarry’s plug and make it work for you. That hole, that recalcitrant vacuum is growing bigger and bigger, almost ready for the leap to black hole status that will, if this tendency is not swiftly reversed, suck every single effort down into its heavy dark center. By reasoned, rooted faith in us and everything, you will, relatively, fly up a flight of stairs propelled by a miraculous force as in the story of some saint whose name I’ve forgotten. By the lack of lack of faith alone, the universe will begin conspiring in your projects, to this I can attest from my own experience, and if faith itself rushes in, we might stand a serious chance against the doomsday clock. There’s something in the voices of the sages that I trust in this matter.
But alas, to discover and maintain direct, reasoned openness to this never finally verifiable goodness at the core of being requires long and sustained reflection, and a leap of faith in its capacity. Many are the enemies within and without of faith and contemplation, but these enemies can serve a purpose. The best ideas get lazy without a sparring partner. Opposition that doesn’t kill ideas makes them stronger.
All roads today lead away from Rome. I had to take one or another or stay at home and stare at a wall. So I sluggishly made my way along some available road leading away from Rome. I filibustered and couldn’t put my heart into any of my efforts, even when I decided to become an art historian specializing in the early Italian art I loved. Like Walter Mitty, I’d get lost in picture books and in reading arcane tracts instead of organizing my effort in order to shine as a student. I didn’t want to master their ways of looking at the world. I felt I was betraying beauty by learning to spew out their theories. I’d found my way back to the road through medieval and Renaissance Italian art, but I wasn’t allowed to travel it back to the convergence of the good, beautiful, and true. I was supposed to use these “cultural artifacts” to deconstruct that relation. Either that or “shut up and just give us the facts”, the prohibitively boring approach of the anti-theorists. I wasn’t aware of all this, only that I was depressed and unmotivated, though I loved looking at the works, until I stumbled on an idea about the origins of perspective that happened to demand moving in the prescribed direction for a pace. For a pace it seemed I’d found a way to fit in, but the development of the idea gradually deviated from the prescribed direction, and soon I was again disobeying the flipped signs on the road that once lead to the convergence of the good, beautiful, and true. By then I hardly noticed or cared what the professors said or thought. I was hot on the scent of what I was looking for all along.
So slipped off the road and I began blazing my own trail through the dark woods beside it. I was in thick of it when I found the work of Scarry, and I tried to call to her from the bramble, but I was too deeply tangled up in thorny vines to extricate myself and too unsure of where I was to lure somebody in there. Too bad I didn’t go to Harvard, where Scarry taught, at the outset. At Columbia, all roads divided language from experience and undermined the capacity of the former. Not to say some of the work of the professors didn’t bely this tendency, the way art itself belies all the theories that disempower and undermine it, even when the artists support these theories. But as a student in graduate school, if you tried to travel the road that used to lead to the convergence in that original direction, you got stopped by a cop, if you were lucky, and not too badly fined before you crashed and killed yourself. Your little bug heading toward, wouldn’t stand a chance against the fleet of Mac trucks leading away from that Rome. You’d be crushed. That’s what happened to a fellow art historian in the program at Columbia. He came out to Saint Louis once, where my folks still lived, to interview Isadore Shank, the architect who’d designed a house I’d lived in as a child, as my mother loved both beauty and justice, though didn’t consider their connection. Shank was one of the great, mid-twentieth-century modern architects M was studying for his dissertation.
M left behind a beautiful wife and two beautiful children. How is that possible? He loved beauty, he lived for beauty, and he tried to track beauty to its source, but his love of beauty only drove him to injury. He injured those who didn’t live up to his standards of beauty, and finally he mortally injured himself with all the injury that leaves behind in the world. What went wrong? Who severed beauty’s original and intrinsic bond to justice, by which, as Scarry teaches, it is intrinsically bound to healing not injury?
Perverse or injured and vengeful humans over time switched the one way signs on beauty’s road, which once lead to the convergence of the good, the beautiful, and the true; and if you follow the flipped signs, you’ll end up way out there in your own world at the furthest possible distance from that convergence. If all goes well, you’ll be selling your “art” in Chelsea or have a cushy job in academia riding on a theory so convoluted nobody can worry out the flaws in the argument. Or maybe you’ll be the CEO of an advertizing firm. You will have scalped the body of beauty. You’ll be trafficking in living skins, or what appears to be that. You’ll still be doing good in spite of yourself, because you can’t remove the fair face of beauty from its call to fairness, you can’t remove the call of fairness to repair injury
of which Scarry speaks. Beauty and justice are intrinsically joined, but you can comply in the resistance to the contemplation that reveals and activates this relation, the resistance that so severely prevents beauty from correcting the impulse to injury that it can appear, as in the case of M, that beauty, or the love of it, is causing the injury.
So even though I still claim she is the most beautiful, brilliant woman in the world, I don’t agree with Scarry’s position in the question and answer session, that notwithstanding her particular interest in its relation to justice, it’s good and fine publicly to tout “beauty for its own sake”, where this phrase refers to the sensual aspect of beauty apart from its relation to justice or any other attributes intrinsically bound to it. Beauty for its own sake includes the attributes intrinsically joined to it. Beauty reduced to a sensual experience is beauty for our sake, not its own sake, and this goes against beauty’s nature, as beauty, Scarry notes, moves to displace us and place itself at the center.
By a failure to honor and, if beauty demands it, to offer sacrifices to the beautiful for its own sake, the sake of what it wholly is to itself, as revealed on contemplation of its nature, we deface beauty even in doting on it. That’s why Scarry removes the image of a beautiful work of art from the slide screen in order to inform us of the increasing perils of nuclear proliferation and stir us to action against it. The god of beauty demands this sacrifice, demanding that Scarry remove the slide and beauty avert her face, to correct injustice. Beauty doesn’t want a light shining directly in her face constantly as if she’s under interrogation. Those Caravaggio paintings were meant to lurk in the shadows, the coins that light up the space and suggest the image is there, the beauty is there, as a mere sensual surface, insult the beauty and hurt its feelings. It’s not up to us to refuse to offer the sacrifices that beauty demands. It’s not up to us to choose not to be still and listen until we hear the god speak and discern what it desires for its own sake, the sake of its wholeness, halo and all, or if we cannot do that ourselves, it’s not up to us to fail to heed the sybil, who translates beauty’s command. We must obey or the god will punish us and destroy the world as we know it. It has always been so.
When I’m not around aliens like my fiance, Scarry, or the mostly homeless heroine addicts in the detox unit, I’m lost. It’s so lonely among modern humans who have evolved their brains to function almost as well as automatons and now have attached themselves to computers and become quasi-metallic beings. Only in work that requires reactivation of the archaic functions, as approved by the system manager, do they trust their own cognitions, senses, intuitions as one, analogic experience. If it’s not in service to work, including art work, ordered, approved, and rewarded by the global system manager, they isolate and indulge the senses sloppily, skimming over surfaces so fast they miss most of what’s there. They certainly do not trust those intuitions that suggest the senses and cognitions converge on truth, the existence of which “construct” they have deconstructed, despite the fact that truth is, by definition, what has not been constructed, but given. And not by faith alone, Scarry demonstrates, does this given stuff, truth, exist. On reflection it is, if not transparent, then translucent to language and visible right before our eyes.
Long ago, humans were all as primitive as aliens like me, and the very words they still use, words that autonomously create at least half the meaning in their utterances, attest to the faith humans once had in their own goodness and that of the universe. That’s why these automated humans today feel and are very schizophrenic, and they speak very inconsistently. Unable to argue cogently, they rely on soundbites that trigger the affect of being right. The way they work contradicts the way they play. The ancient, childishly faithful humanity of their words contradicts the scornfully skeptical things they make the words say.
When you listen to Scarry, you cannot but be dazed and amazed. She does not speak with forked tongue. Her words speak from the hearts of words, and then become deeds. A discussion of the etymology that links justice and beauty melts into a terrifying fact packed action against nuclear proliferation as she dwells on the beauty of the graphic signs of the covers of the pamphlets supporting her cause. She is an integral being in a world of pastiches. I was ashamed at the little jingle of applause at the end of her talk at the School of Visual Arts last night. There should have been hoorahs and whistles, a ten minute standing ovation. Whenever we see injustice, whenever we fail to give back commensurate to what is given, we should move to correct it, says Scarry. So excuse me while I stand and applaud for at least ten minutes and cry out my hoorahs. Let us all thank the universe for sending her to us. Elaine Scarry is a sage, and a sage like no previous sage. She does not spoon feed us simple truths or lay out prescribed practices to achieve elevated states. She drives us not only to trust our own senses and faculties, but to labor constantly to hone and improve them in a world whose complexity and surprising, variegated qualities we should always honor and, in her words, multiply, inflect, reflect, expand. She made me think yet deeper about beauty, as she always does, and .
But evolution is somewhat crude, and in evolving to survive, many beings, especially humans and human made or perceived objects, including beauty, overshoot the mark. They don’t just want to survive, they want power to lord it over others. They want to build underground shelters and amass weapons to assure their own survival, such that you’ll see them starving out and launching preemptive strikes against other beings on whom their survival depends. Unless they wake up, such degraded beings will not survive too much longer, and then nature will restore a more balanced ecology, where every species of being, whatever piece of work that being is, however like an angel, will be content to play its part, to strut and fret its hour on the page, and then fall gently into compost and be heard no more. Or maybe I’m just dreaming, God forbid. Maybe, if we don’t fight them with all our hearts, all our hearts, all our minds, these power mad beings will survive in their shelters and inherit the earth and just continue to replace balanced nature with their robotic hierarchical agglomerated corporation, which they will launch into space in order to strive to dominate the universe. Perhaps you’ll find this a crude way to say it, but it has the virtue of economy, a salient feature of beauty, which Einstein convincingly equates with truth: I for one still believe there is a battle going on between God and Satan for domination of the universe.
Do I reject the robotic hierarchical agglomerated corporation (RHAC). I do. Does the RHAC still whisper in my ear and take many seductive forms, concealing its true nature, to lure me into its service? Yes. Do I ever sin and serve it by failing to pay attention and falling for the disguise? Yes. Do I sin just by omitting positive actions in support of the balance of nature and the wellbeing all beings? Yes. Does providence, the ongoing source and sustainer of creation, forgive me and wash away the sin if I confess it openly whenever I become aware of it, and I earnestly repent of it, and perform healing acts in penance? Yes, I believe that providence does, and I have many times experienced it, as after confession and penance, creation comes alive in me. I pledge allegiance to the the balance of nature and the cooperation of all mortal beings in our struggle against the robotic hierarchical agglomerated corporation.
With the work of art in question, the difficulty is commensurate with the reward. There is perfect symmetry. The love you take is the love you make. It is a mirror of being, and a mirror of the mirror, and a mirror of the mirror of the mirror...
But in truth, Francis is only the gate to the gate into the renaissance. No man can do what art can do when an artist stops thinking about what he can do, and let’s art do what it can do.
Behind Francis on a ledge to the side of the mountain peak, a huge bird is perched as if carved out of the rock. The peak leans toward and mirrors the form of the bird. At this highest place, the giant bird facing the carved rock bird facing it is a comical element in the otherwise barren scene. The forms in the image diminish in apparent size with distance, but the cloud of otherworldly light that surrounds the seraph has burned off the atmosphere, and, surreally, there are no shadows. For this reason, we do not tend to take the next step and read depth into the landscape. Rather, the diminishing of forms by the rule of perspective makes the scene look fantastic, the mountain only twice the size of the body of the saint. I think of Alice squeezed into the dollhouse space after falling down the rabbit hole.
After a day of fresco painting the plaster sets, and there’s a crack that marks boundary of each day painting. Each visible zone representing a day’s continuous work is called a giornata. The visible giornata allow us to convert the passing time of painting into the present shapes of painting. Here, the giornate of creation can be read also as the giornati of Creation, one separating light and dark, one giving rise to vegetation, one creating the man (Francis) and woman, who is not shown, but watching from without, or another Francis and Christ as the moon and the sun. It is creation of being as appearance -- the world becoming all at once visible as a whole and imbued with language, as when Hellen Keller suddenly could read the words written into her hand, and she recovered discovered her inner vision, foreground, middleground, background, observer, observed, and suddenly there was serenity, beauty, and it was good.
But this is the crossing over, not the crossed into, the awakening, not the awoken world, because the latter could only be an illustration of a concluded event, and this is art, a public activity always happening right now, on the softly scumbled edge between past and future, a collective effort toward shared vision that each one must complete alone.
Francis, as he has turned and his torso faces the viewer with his body splayed against the plane of the picture, is locked into the landscape, his torso contained in the triangular shape that defines the opening of the cave, his hand centered in the colored field behind it. This contradicts the effect of an immediate record of appearance like a photograph, turning the surface into a kind of text or map with regions keyed to signify abstracted meanings. So the world (the land), like Francis, is tortured and twisted to conform to the word (the map), that is nailing it down. By mirroring Christ’s pain Francis absorbs and assuages it; the land (the world) mirrors, absorbs, and assuages the pain of Francis. All suffering shared equally relieves all suffering to create the most dispassionate image imaginable, as if the world had just emerged from a ritual bath.
Bonaventura’s story conflicts with that of the papal bull not only in the emphasis on the saint’s interior state as the active force in the miracle, but also because Bonaventura describes a protracted event unfolding in time. By carefully contriving ambiguous gestures like the twist that allows Francis both to receive the rays from without and produce them from within, Giotto represents all at once the unfolding story, as it tells of the seraphic appearance that fades away in an emotional response that produces the wounds from within. As Leo Steinberg shows, both Michelangelo and Leonardo also create ambiguous gestures instantly to visualize a story that unfolds in time, which is no surprise since they study Giotto closely. Indeed he is their beacon.
In this case, though, the image itself is one of those single gestures that consolidate a story. I call it a gesturing space. The gesturing space is created and molded by the story, and that’s why this fresco cannot be categorized, even as proto-perspectival. In fact, consolidating the entire history of Renaissance and modern art, Giotto seems to be moving away from perspective in apparent knowledge and rejection of it, though realized perspective hasn’t yet appeared in art. He’s not really moving away from perspective though. He’s moving down into the core of it.
The story that molds the space presses Francis up against, to the point of impressing him with, an image of Christ. That story of pressing up against and impressing intrinsically takes place on a visible surface on which things lie flat until you read space and time into them. Splaying the body of Francis over the surface to offer it maximally to the visible, Giotto composes the whole image to embody that pressing of what unfolds in time onto what appears instantly on a surface.
Whether or not the image is Catholic, like Saint Francis, it is catholic. Christ and Francis are not dead bodies or historical or literary records of their purported selves. They are not symbols. They are constantly reborn embodiments, like the immortal buffalo that to the Native American sheds his form and returns as the next buffalo, like Muhammed is every person named Muhammed, and even some people who aren’t named Muhammed. To be thirsty and receive a glass of water is to be Christ even if your name is Muhammed. To surrender to God as love is to be Muhammed even if your name is Father Shaun O’Brian. To give the water is to be Francis being Christ on the other side of the bread line, where he is sometimes found. You can’t correct or improve on the obvious fundamentals of the sacred texts. “Fundamentalists” are no such thing.
As God the father is a model for Christ and imprinted on and in him, as Christ is a model for Francis imprinted on and in him, as Francis is a model for Giotto’s disappearing to give rebirth to all this in the present, so Giotto is a model for the viewer to find her own way to participate in the present, catastrophic, cataclysmic drama, the drama of rebirth. The rose becoming the rose becoming the rose again, shedding the name to smell so sweet who cares what its name is, the word slipping back into the form that conforms to, and demonstrates its meaning without having to say so, with the remnant of the estranged word haunting the world as a ghost, or spirit, as all ideas crystallize in original, surprising, useful and beautiful material productions, all philosophy and theology condenses into this one beautiful hieroglyphic, a written character with every twist and turn of the brush significant, and becoming ubiquitously legible as such, where a rose not only by any other name, but by any other form, would smell as sweet. There are no literal criteria. What is essential, though material, is invisible. If you don’t understand yet, just listen to this music that it spontaneously composes just to tell us what it is. Your heart can understand the music, and it will teach your slower mind. In the beginning is the poem, and nothing else matters. The poem will inherit the earth because everything else is a mask that falls off eventually. The masks are falling, the names, the literal, rote, prosaic forms are all dropping away from the original poem.
I am not sure I can be with the rose in the garden. I’m not sure I’ve removed her last mask, I’m not sure it’s she who is singing to me, I mean the rose as she is to herself, not just my idea of a rose, a very tame, pet rose who’s as sweet as she looks, the thorns inherited from when she had to fight off the tigers, she didn’t keep them for spite, surely not for spite; but I can be with this rose, Giotto’s rose, it demands it. This wild rose refuses to be anything to me but love in action, wherever and whenever it’s in action, love referring to nothing else, rising up out of the compost of history and language and blooming, the stem still intact and carrying water and nutrients from the root. This is materially happening, whether or not it ever happened before, whether or not there is such thing as before, which it and I radically doubt. It is always now.
James Elkins, though, in his fascinating, beautiful, and hilarious monograph, Pictures and Tears, notes that art historians do not strive for distance in order to re-connect. Distance is the end all and be all of their profession. By his thorough surveys, we learn that almost every single art historian is allergic to emotional connection to images and finds such responses foolish and stupid.
I’ve many times wept in front of pictures, and am in no way suited to the profession of art historian, but I love the art I love and think it’s a fine idea to get paid to gaze on, think on, and talk about art; so when I discover William Hood’s article, I’m doing my best to keep my total distance from the content. I’m aspiring to the cool, cold profession of art historian, at least when I’m on the job. I’m interested in the prayer procedure because I’m researching the origins of perspective, and with the machine-like accuracy of which I’m capable when I apply myself, I instantly grasp that the images that illuminate the prayer practice, including those of Fra Angelico, are critical in the understanding of the development of this technique. Like the prayer method, perspective coldly analyzes the components of perception in order to restore affective response.
Perspectival pictures, those streams of stills in movies, seem alive and real, they carry you away, they make you laugh and cry, because those who constructed them, including cameras and other mechanical devices, kept cool and analyzed how to do that. The early perspectival pictures, though, don’t irrevocably separate the cognitive preparation from the emotional effect, but in fact, bind them together. In Fra Angelico’s frescos, refined renditions of the illuminations in the prayer manual, as we enter a telescoping space custom structured for this function, we see the friars spying on the saints gesturing before the images of the holy scenes. The viewer is supposed to analyze his or her own place in this network and consciously identify with the friars first at the outskirts, then with the saints closer in, then with Christ himself, as affect returns, and tears begin to flow over the plight of the suffering, or in joy at his resurrection. So compassionate humanity returns to the viewer, who, due to original sin and because love hurts so long as people are hurt, has a tendency to degrade into just a machine. Or he denies he is a machine, or denies he is capable of any dignifying, relieving distance at all. The prayer practice assists in the prevention of all these imbalanced calibrations of the relation of self to other. Fra Angelico aims for not too cold, not too hot, but just right, and to my mind, he walks the line.
Fra Angelico’s images tingle with intangible, purely visual earthly beauty. Whenever we gaze out at the world, we see a phantom, an hallucination, but these dynamic energies, these living acts of appearance, are experienced in the present more than what we read into them are, including our rigid notions of self. The fluid, enlightened beings who appear in his images have surrendered to their own phantasmagorical, purely visible nature. They have brought their depths up to the surface and given themselves all away to the fleeting moment to be recreated anew in the next one. They share their qualities with the everyday people around them. The boundaries between them and others are very permeable. Each being though is still a unique, contained body, responsible for his or her own ineffable grain of autonomy.
That is, if you look out at, say, the appearance (a verb meaning the appearing) of a lamp in front of you, and you put a caliper (You can try this right now just using your thumb and forefinger as a caliper.) around the lamp to measure its size, the size will change if you move the caliper closer to your eyes or further away. Before you place the caliper there to measure it, what you’re looking at has no fixed size; it is appearing, but it hasn’t appeared, hasn’t crystallized into a noun, a thing of the past. It depends on where you place the frame. Here relativity is operating at the level of everyday perception. The world we experience is relativistic because it is proto-existential, not post-existential. It is embryonic. Maybe in the afterlife, we will manage wholly to exist, or maybe there’s no such thing.
If something is visibly appearing stable, immaterial or not, it must be a certain size; but try measuring it, and you’ll see that the appearance of any object before you is not. How can this be? Truth, as Hegel says, is a Bachanalian revel in which no-one is sober.
This is why a photograph has such an effect of verisimilitude. Having no size until I frame the appearance, it aligns in perspective with, and bleeds into, the tiny image briefly burned into the retina of the eye, almost as if the photograph weren’t there at all, and you were looking directly at the appearance that appears in it -- at least for those accustomed to suspending disbelief and not fixating on the strange fact that the three-dimensional phantom is stuck to a flat piece of paper.
It’s not, as philosophers have argued, just one of many equally transparent (or equally non-transparent) representations. The relative sizes of shapes in that microcosmic movie burning itself into the eyeball tell us, by simple mathematical translations that can be performed by moving around, and regrouping beads and never abstracted, of the relative distance of recognized objects from us. We never have to leave the relative field to see/read the retinal image within as the world it reflects and that contains it. It’s not a representation, it’s an immediate experience of being in the present that is never broken into sign and signified. 3-D glasses and a curved screen refine an image by accounting for binocularity and the curved retina of the eye, but these corrections are not needed for anyone willing and able to suspend disbelief -- because perspectives, again, appear spontaneously on the retinae of our eyes, and by the time we’re crawling, we’ve already begun to learn to read the relative sizes of objects as markers allowing us to map the deep space in front of us.
Despite all the post-modern theory trying to obscure this old-fashioned view -- mainly because there’s nothing else new to do, who cares whether what they say is false or true, they’ve deconstructed the difference -- the rediscovery of perspective by the likes of Giotto and Fra Angelico amounts to the un-reading of the world and returning twisted, manipulated, verbally dominated constructs to primal, visual perceptions, now known consciously, reclaimed by free choice, and sustained by disciplined practices. Freedom isn’t free. You have to fight for the right to party, or just be joyfully quiet.
Ironically, it’s the most apparently repressive and controlled institution that sponsors this renewal of immediate experience in respect of the dignity, responsibility, and privacy of individuals, and their right to pursue happiness and to drink in the unmediated, sensory world. Why is this? Why would the church work so hard to restore immediate perceptions and foster empowering awareness of self? Why would the church sponsor the Renaissance, an awakening and return to primal perception that lead to the reformation, that lead to the decline of the church’s power?
There are many possible answers, but I’d like to entertain a dark horse candidate. Not that I’m saying right here that I’d bet on it, but you have a right to know that it’s in the running. You owe it to yourself, if I may say so, to take it into account. Please suspend disbelief and wait to the end to judge.
Could this gloppily jewelled institution, the church, be a Trojan Horse? In any case, when true to its aspiration, as Saint Catherine of Siena says -- all the way to heaven is heaven. Could the severe limits the church has now accepted to its ultimate authority over the individual offer hope that, though we’re not yet out of the muck and mire, we’re past the worst of it if we can manage to avoid regression beyond what’s required for the wheel to progress? Could the real enemy, tricked to receive the Trojan Horse, be the rising class of bankers who, in the high Middle Ages, sponsor a reign of terror to repress the democratic movements supported by the church and the nobles in order to hold the bankers at bay. Until the bankers win, a democracy forms in Siena with even common laborers achieving the right to vote. Augustine’s plan for a City of God on earth begins to unfold, as magnificently represented in the frescos of Simone Martini in the public palace.
True, after so much time inside the Trojan Horse, the soldiers, most gone mad, are divided into factions. The American nuns are trying to remind everybody just what they’re doing inside this enormous dark, damp horse with the only light available filtering in through the stained glass jewels. Meanwhile the bankers have coopted the reformist tendencies that grew out of the church sponsored Renaissance.
So I began to align the ever more refined technology of prayer as imitation of a saint with the ever more refined technology of the imitation of nature. My fellow machines in the form of art history thesis advisors at Columbia are excited about my idea, and so is the historian Carolyn Bynum. She turns me onto the work of Jean-Claude Schmitt who notices the different ways of depicting the Stigmatization mentioned earlier. These rays binding subject to object and also prying them apart resemble those of a perspectival construction. Clearly these images bore on my study.
It is Giotto at Assisi who apparently invents the conceit of showing threads of light sewing Francis to Christ and piercing the saint as sewing pierces a fabric in order to bind it to another. In this first attempt at Assisi, Giotto is fascinated with perspectival principles just being rediscovered, and he wants to use them to create the illusion of a deep, naturalistic space. He’s beyond the friars’ need to act as if they are experiencing intimacy with the Crucifixion. He’s no longer acting as if. He’s lost in the movie and wants to purvey cinematic effects by which the viewer too will get lost in the naturalistic illusion. The space in the image reads as an extension of the space in the church. Meanwhile the relation of the saint to Christ isn’t intellectualized. Who cares at this point on which hand the rays land? Christ is gazing into the eyes of Francis and vice versa as if into a mirror. The rays carrying the wounds shower on the saint, the right-sided wounds connecting to the left and vice versa, like hands of dancers.
Compared to this image with its deep space, the later one at Santa Croce at first looks flat and archaic. Though some convolution is required to make a appear to the view and act of appearance to somebody else, Giotto either isn’t interested in torturing and twisting the appearance to nail down the world to the word, the space to the map, or can’t figure out how to do it. The contemporary viewer is bound to think the former, that Giotto is reaching for freedom from the torture. He wants to give rebirth to a happily pagan/secular reality, a meaninglessly livable, everyday world. Imagine. The Assisi effect persists in an image by the workshop of Giotto at the Louvre. Here the figures are painted in yet more naturalistic detail, but the background dissolves into a golden field irrelevant to what’s revealed in their focused gaze at each other. Giotto, in apparent imitation of Saint Francis, just feels his way into a representation of a loving relation between saint and Christ, one that allows space in the most intimate connection.
It’s my theory that Giotto has some kind of crisis of faith in the burgeoning secular world, as in the lingering, devout one, to want to go back and intellectualize the relation between saint, Christ, viewer and image. He maintains or rises to faith, though, in precipitated form, in art’s unique ability to expunge the unconsidered and haphazard from immediate experience, fuse the word and the world, and create a revelatory scenario. As in the Dominican prayer method, at Santa Croce, he needs to set the stage by objective principles, locate characters in the ideal relations. Maybe then he will try to stand in their shoes and identify with what it feels like to look like that. He, though, will refine the depicted scenario so that it’s not just a picture of the saint responding to Christ, but more a picture of the saint and his world conforming to that of Christ and his world. As the saint imitates Christ, earth imitates heaven, as with Fra Angelico, seeing imitates being, original, unmediated response restored, the optical imprint rising without rupture into a three-dimensional world, appearing fluidly, refusing to be hinged to absolutes.
Fra Angelico (a Mozart type) dares to visualize paradise, and is able to, because he lets his imagination go, doesn’t demand the description be perfect, just feel perfect; but Giotto (a Beethoven type), as Boccaccio says, paints what the eye cannot see. He’s more interested in truth than beauty, and prefers not to intervene, but to let the two coalesce when they happen to in spite of him.
Giotto has hit the ball out of the ballpark of art, but that’s called a home run in the baseball of art. Bases were loaded too, with Simone Martini on first, and the Lorenzetti Brothers on second and third. The well, some say unfairly endowed Yankees of art -- won the series once again that year.
Now let’s get back to basketball.
Just as I’m noticing the subtle twist in the body that allows Francis to receive the right sided rays in the right hand, the left in the left, as in a jump shot, so that Francis could be producing the wounds from within just as they’re imposed from without, I notice that, in sharp contrast to the Louvre image I’ve just put away, where the figures are rendered in such detail, and the schematic background objects float in a golden field, the fresco at Santa Croce grants equivalence and equal attention to every part of its surface. With all gratitude to Jean-Claude Schmitt for noticing the details of the sometimes crossing, stigmatizing rays, the logic that shoots through every detail of the whole image, the way the detail informed the whole and by the way the whole image was treated ascended to a meaning far beyond itself went right over his head. Leave that to the art historians. Historians look at art as a cultural artifact made up of a pastiche of isolated signs. To me that’s like trying to understand a three-dimensional world by attributing to it only the attributes of a two-dimensional one. I’ll mine it for what it digs up, but I really don’t believe in history. I only believe in art history. What can documents and artifacts teach you if you can’t read art, which alone integrates the information? Eyes aren’t just for artists, art isn’t just for art types, and art history shouldn’t be just another discipline. Art is the heart of the culture. Everything should be organized to serve art and art history, which can pull it all together. Only art and art history have a chance of showing us whole, who we really were, are, and have a chance to become. If we’re doomed to be dour, plodding academics who take the world too seriously, we might as well take the job seriously. Sadly, very few art historians still believe in art history, they too turn works of art into pastiches of signs, mere cultural artifacts, because very few people still believe in us. I guess you have to be pretty crazy still to believe in us, and that’s why my email name is lamoorefoo.
So many things were coming together in this research. I felt the scales were falling from my eyes. I remember Irwin Panofsky’s stressing this equivalence of figure and ground as the hallmark of mathematical perspective, which reads all locations in the image as equal, indifferent to whether shapes represent negative space or positive form. Meanwhile all the other features mentioned of the fresco are impressing themselves on me, especially the way it reads as a perspectival image burning into the retina, but depth has not yet been read into it.
I’m meanwhile considering the story of the Stigmatization as told by Saint Bonaventura, worth recounting here.
On the morning of the feast of the Exultation of the Holy Cross, as he was praying in a secret and solitary place on the mountain, Saint Francis beheld a seraph with six wings all afire, descending to him from the heights of heaven. As the seraph flew with great swiftness towards the man of God, there appeared amid the wings the form of one crucified, with his hands and feet stretched out and fixed to the cross. Two wings rose above the head, two were stretched forth in flight, and two veiled the whole body.”
"Francis wondered greatly at the appearance of so novel and marvelous a vision. But knowing that the weakness of suffering could nowise be reconciled with the immortality of the seraphic spirit, he understood the vision as a revelation of the Lord and that it was being presented to his eyes by Divine Providence so that the friend of Christ might be transformed into Christ crucified, not through martyrdom of the flesh, but through a spiritual holocaust.
"The vision, disappearing, left behind it a marvelous fire in the heart of Saint Francis, and no less wonderful token impressed on his flesh. For there began immediately to appear in his hands and in his feet something like nails as he had just seen them in the vision of the Crucified. The heads of the nails in the hands and feet were round and black, and the points were somewhat long and bent, as if they had been turned back. On the right side, as if it had been pierced by a lance, was the mark of a red wound, from which blood often flowed and stained his tunic."
This story then is arranged in the economy of visual language to appear all at once, as appearance bleeding into and marking substance is both means and ends, both method and subject. It all collapses in on the retinal image being burned into the eye, the image to which this and all other perspectival images that align with it in perspective are transparent. It all collapses in on the present like an accordion sucked back into its frame.
Can the same be said of modern painting when optical experience crowds out or mutilates narrative space and three-dimensional bodies in order to dominate them? In this case, there is only visuality but no visual order. The visual order, again, bleeds into and cannot peel itself away from, let alone marginalize, expel, and mutilate the other. Not that there isn’t joy to be found where colors and light dance in their own space. I only feel the test of a monk is when he leaves the monastery to preach to the unconverted, not that I would put any monk to the test.
The mobius strip has been invoked a lot of late in philosophy, and for a reason. To make one, cut a strip of paper, twist it once, and join the ends. If you follow the surface, you navigate one side bleeding into the other side and arrive where you started, having navigated both sides, which are really only one side. It’s not a three-dimensional object; it only has one side. When you slice it down the middle all the way around, so the cut is complete and continuous, the last snip joining the first, what’s this? The loop won’t divide in two; instead you have one, uncut loop with another twist. If you slice it again, it divides into two twisted loops that are looped around each other. I think of this as an illumination of the evolution of love into a marriage, in which both parties achieve a degree of autonomy, but one can’t escape from the another with out tearing the other one apart. The mobius strip, where two sides become one by the geometry of love -- as Francis and Christ, as subject and object, in Giotto’s fresco -- is magic, the real world known in the visual order set free of the verbal order and performing impossible feats, right before your eyes.
This simple figure, the Mobius Strip, verifies that linear logic as a tool of knowledge is visibly wrong; it is inadequate to experience. In insisting on a blind either/or logic that simply does not align with empirical, sensory experience, linear logic lies outright and continues to mislead us and create killing divisions among us. Visual logic is not arithmetic, but it’s higher mathematics and relativity. It’s the way things visibly are, the way the head and the tail of a snake are different, but there’s only one snake. All this is by now well known in theory, but gazing at Giotto’s fresco, which just happens to be the site of the origin (and beyond) of perspective -- which discovers Cartesian space centuries before Descartes and which Irwin Panofsky calls the modern or scientific paradigm of knowledge -- I felt the ground open up under my feet. The tightly woven world of crystallized, absolutely sized, falsely naturalized three-dimensional objects began to melt around me.
I’d found a single image that, by objective criteria, turns the world inside out, or right side in. It sloughs off all that’s irrelevant including the entire literal world to represent the skeletal nature of love, the only thing that’s present to the present. If the skeleton finds you, it wants to walk a mile in your skin, and it will slip in there and start dancing in you. If you love love, you will not be able to get it out of you, not that it’s easy to maintain such bones. Maybe those who are already living in alignment with love will find it redundant, but clearly I wasn’t, because I didn’t find it redundant. I cannot but doubt that anyone, though, is perfectly in alignment with love’s most purified representation, and so surely it can’t hurt periodically to let the bones of Giotto’s fresco walk a mile in you, squeezing out the artificial distance that verbal categories create to remove us from our brothers and sisters, from our dishes and forks, from our lords, brother sun and sister moon. When Giotto’s skeleton walks a mile in our skin, we all meet in one surface, where we feel each other touching, burning us. There is no there.
Though now I have a tool of being in a loving relation to the world, a tool that does the work for you, still it hurts just by playing, and I can’t say I pick up the tool that often. So it’s not that I got so much better at love in discovering this fresco. It’s that I saw that love no longer so much depended on my ability to do it, though my happiness, of course, depends on letting it do itself. I saw that love, in the most economical order to which all things tend in nature, is aligned with being. Those who don’t perceive this alignment tend to work harder at love, in that it’s all on their shoulders, but no matter how hard one strives to push the stone up the hill, if love isn’t aligned with being, one’s efforts are futile in the end. It is good news indeed to be able to believe that love might be aligned with being, even if it makes you a lazier lover, as it’s no more all up to you. Though it might not be obvious for millennia, what faith and vision in the hands of a few lazy, bumbling fools can achieve in the long run is beyond what any army of disciplined, brilliant hard workers at love can do.
Yes, I learned to distance myself from the tool of overcoming distance. I learned to lock the tool for turning yourself into a saint, who is turning himself into a god, in a cabinet, where I could venerate it and remember to believe in the original goodness of the visible world through it. And to thank those who suffered so much to reveal this truth. It’s important to let the bones crawl into me once in a while, and to try not to be too lazy and selfish of a lover, but I’m pretty sure the tool is happy there, and doesn’t want me to use it to flagellate myself or work myself into such a frenzy of identification with Christ, that I break out in hives, if not a Stigmatization. Though maybe I’m copping out, I’m not called, I don’t think, to be Saint Francis of Assisi. He himself repented his own asceticism late in life. All the great successes are failures.
So the tool of overcoming distance, or reminding one it’s possible to, is quiet now, and happy just to sit there aligning love and being and patiently waiting for everybody to notice the way it works. When I first discovered it, though, that was not so. The tool was alive in the wild, then it burst into my domain, flying around the room like the broom of the sorcerer’s apprentice. I’d been lead to an insight that caught me off guard, where the admonition to love lost all abstraction and literally reordered my sense of reality.
I remember wheeling down West End Avenue on my bike, after a night in Avery Library trying to put together all that was coming together for me around Giotto’s fresco. It wasn’t just working to verify my theory of the origins of perspective, it was creating a novel world order. I couldn’t situate it anywhere. The fresco seemed to be alive, some kind of embodiment of language assuming animal personae. I wrote hundreds of what I called failed introductions, the finding of the origin of perspective as my untamable dog, the finding of the origin of perspective as my way of rolling around on the ground with the lion of language, the finding of the origin of perspective as the parabolic parable of the Saint Louis arch, with one leg representing my quest for the origin of perspective, the other leg representing history’s quest for the tool of prayer, perspective as the drill of prayer, which fixes the axis and then drills your mind into the painting -- “Are you sure you want to use such sexual metaphors in this context?” (Professor Freedberg) “Yes.” “Why” “Because that’s the way it is.”
The finding of the origin of perspective as the sweets that pour forth after a series of wacks at a pinata, the finding of the origin of perspective as the endless introduction to the finding of the origin of perspective. The fresco as an orgy of masochistic surrender. The fresco as a phallic thrust that inseminates the world. The fresco as a high Lacanic colonic. The fresco as Here Comes Everybody. The fresco as the rebirth of the renaissance. The fresco as the national debt that my professors were leaving to their children instead of dealing with -- “My dear, you’ve become an artist -- the finding had evolved into an illuminated manuscript including nefarious poetic flights -- and we’re very proud to have produced you, but if you think you are getting a doctorate for this project, you are truly not a socialized person.” “My dear, I have to thank you, after dealing with you I finally realized I had to draw the line. Art history is one thing, and poetry is another. They have nothing to do with each other. Case closed” The finding as a baby to which I’d given birth. One day I felt it leap into and off my lap, and then I thought I got it. It’s a cat! That explains everything. It’s a cat that won’t be tamed. And then the cat ran away and never returned.
All this was running around in my head as I was wheeling down West End Avenue on my bike when the reason for the failure of language to handle this occasion hit -- language isn’t supposed to be a pile of nuts and bolts, and tires, a handle bar, pedals piled up on the floor of the garage. Language wants to be organized into a visible structure, a vehicle requiring no fossil fuels, one that remains grounded in flight, speeding along but never losing touch with the earth, is a joy to ride, but still involves exercise, doesn’t just fly away with itself. You can coast going down hill sometimes, but then you need to pedal to ascend to a new plateau.
Get out your notebooks and press-type, reader, you might want to make a labeled diagram, so you can assemble your own, perfect language machine.
The World-moving Mixed Metaphorical Exercise Bike
- The two wheels of the gears are terms of a metaphor.
- Metaphors are numbered by degrees of difference between terms.
- The spoke, or spoken quality of the word connects the gear or metaphor assembly to the wheels representing physical, or outer whee!ality.
- Where the energy carried in what’s spoke makes contact with the world, that’s where the friction worries out, and discards what’s fiction,
- by which language moves the world,
- as the writer or rider faces backwards and finds the effective metaphor, in describing the past, to release us from it and propel the world forward.
- Or maybe the world is moving language, same difference.
- Shift gears or metaphors frequently. Never get stuck in one metaphor as the terrain out there is varied.
Isn’t everything equally anomalous when you get to know it? Shouldn’t we start beating the weapon of language into a tool of peace and illumination.
Shouldn’t language always be assembled into a mixed metaphorical mountain bike to respect the uniqueness of each object/event, its wanting to speak through language, but not be fixed in any one metaphor? A work of art IS a kaleidoscopic lens of thousands of lenses through which the constantly fractured and reconstituted world beyond appears as if through stained glass in ever shifting crystalline patterns. Language can say that. The metaphor is perfect for that instant, then it fizzles out like sparks in a firework. Language can kiss the event as it flies. All things are like Giotto’s fresco. All bodies are gods. Giotto just stripped off all the generic masks, as the fresco sprints naked ahead of us, like Bruno Latini in hell, carrying the torch to kick off the Olympics. Dante’s friend Giotto is just illuminating his manuscript, all three books as one, from the God’s eye view in paradise. Verbal language is just so inefficient.
Unfortunately, the contemporary world in no way makes such sensational sense. I was beginning to lose touch with it. I’d begun to fall down the rabbit hole into the unified field of Giotto’s painting. Or maybe I was waking up from our collective nightmare a little ahead of time. Of course, I’m not the first graduate student to have what I’m sure would be diagnosed as a nervous breakdown while trying to complete my dissertation, but I am one of the few who kept my head about me in the throes of it, refusing to chalk it up to Western science’s biased (non-scientific) judgement of the occasion. I had to go crazy to stop being as crazy as the whole world.
When you get deep enough into it, you’re faced with the terrible disease in the heart of the prevailing paradigm of knowledge. How many philosophers can you read, before you throw up your arms listening to them complaining about it, victimized by it, refusing to assimilate their own words, refusing to occupy their own positions? The problem they articulate clearly enough -- a frozen world, a world of crystallized, reified objects with sharp lines around them, all having lost their connection to one another and to the whole. The image will not cohere because the modern mind is possessed by, blinded by, verbal logic reaching an apotheosis in the digital age, with every byte of experience defined by off or on, either/or choices, with quantum leaps from byte to byte. The witty tv sages don’t see that they’re the tools of this digital paradigm. It has them wrapped around its little finger. It corrals the poets, artists, and inspired scientists, and makes them serve it, when it should be serving them, whom I’d like to call us. It turns the faithful into frantic freaks trying to prove by linear logic what defies proof and finally falling off the deep end into total denial of their own doubts, by which they become right wing fanatics.
The fruition of one paradigm gives birth to another, that birth always a rebirth, but to begin to rebuild paradise on earth, you must first abandon hope as you harrow hell. From the instant the scales fell from my eyes gazing at the photocopy of Giotto’s fresco having just read the narrative describing the event in perspective, and the visual order began to assert itself, I began to feel myself falling off the edge of the world. Giotto’s fresco so systematically and relentlessly deconstructs the rigid categories that create recognizable objects in the modern world, and this fresco so powerfully pulled me into its forcefield, that recognizable objects started to fall apart in my perception, the names and ideas would not stick to the things. The little shadows that play across the slightly irregular surface of the sheetrock wall of my apartment appeared as letters that began to arrange themselves into stories.
The letters on a page would not stay put. I’d gone mad, full flown psychotic, down the rabbit hole, and I knew it. I hid away in my apartment for about three months, watching the letters swimming off the walls arrange themselves into crossword puzzles uniting all the fairy tales and names of my favorite old friends, composers, and writers. It was psychotic reverse paranoia, the whole world conspired to assist and embrace me. Finally, quite by its own incomprehensible volition, the world around me started to quiet down. The names floated back to hold the things together. The walls solidified. The visual order that moved into rule, as noted, does not suppress the verbal order, it only tames it. It resurrects appearance, the active verb, an appearing, from the dead noun representing an object that appeared in the past. The visual order only needed to clean the slate, refresh the screen before installing the updated software. Finally, it was the same world as before, but subtly more beautiful, happier, the colors of everything more saturated, the art more fascinating, the occasions of synchronicity multitudinous. I felt guided, tuned to the connections... was I now a believer?
