draft -- work in progress
continued from giottopage1.blogspot.com
The difference between a procedure and a process defined by a physical tool is that the former has stops, or bases, tagged by words. A procedure is full of holes or empty spaces between step one, step two, step three. In the perfecting of a procedure, it moves into a process. Finding a tool or instrument (with dancing it is the body) that defines the process is how you perfect it, how you fill in the empty holes. (We are talking here experientially, we are not talking about everything being made of atoms.) There are no holes in flouting with a flute or hammering with a hammer. At the pauses in the music you are no longer flouting or hammering.
So in the quest for the holy grail, the tool of prayer, it is necessary to evolve the procedure into a process. The tool of prayer would be all illuminated process -- whereas in hammering or flouting, you feel the continuity interiorly, but there are splices between the frames in the perception of what is happening. You don't know how you get from point A to point B. So all known, and seemingly all possible processes are really only procedures with very fine gradations between the known posts. There is constant interruption of the perfect flow, yet can this be really?
We are always in and experiencing the flow, but our language and understanding has not caught up with where we are. Then theorists concluded that language by its nature is incapable of ever catching up. I instinctively knew this wasn't so, in spite of the reams of theory meant to prove it. But how can you understand a living thing like language by tearing it apart and picking all the bones without noticing that when assembled, all the parts behave completely differently by a quantum leap;
and when assembled well, as if to maximize the original principles built into the genetic code of the organism of language; all the parts behave yet more differently, by yet another quantum leap that renders quantum leaps obsolete.
What the pure art of art can do, only the purest science of science has the least clue, but who funds that? Well, they fund it until the art of art grabs it, and they fly up ahead of them, and then who can blame them? They know not what they do. Sooner or later, they'll come around. Any delays are the fault of those of us who do know what we do. It's our responsibility to make it comprehensible and palatable, where the gut can't easily digest some of these archaic roots and fruits, and modern taste has strayed from the original recipes.
Who then will take the first taste of such archaic roots and fruits prepared in such a novel way, and if the taste is bitter and strange, another and another to cultivate the taste for the brew, even if the transparent process verifies that it's intrinsically likable and nutritious, who will waste time reading all the writing on the label and watching the video filmed at the factory that comes in the box? One must first foster trust. It is by trusting one is trusted, at least that's an infallibly correct operating principle, whether it always works or not. Animals can smell trust of each other. Trust, the quiet imperative.
Reading this story when I happened to read it, with all the works of art I was studying in quest of a new angle on the origins of perspective leading me to it and then surrounding it, and pointing to it like characters in a grand opera, changed my life. Before I had just been playing at being a cool, stylish academic, just enjoying the role and the time you were allowed to spend looking at beautiful art and thinking on interesting matters. Why not find a way to get paid to do it? But in my quirky quest for a new angle on the origins of perspective through the land of crucifixes and beheaded, burned, eye-plucked and otherwise tortured saints, wondering at all this wounding wound round and round all this past possible beauty, time began to slow down, my whole world being absorbed in the affect of heightened palpability, as if held close, pressed in on, swaddled like Bellini's Christ, like that wound in history was healing wound round and round in the stained bandages of art. I was witnessing and being pulled in, beginning to participate directly in the slow and painstaking, obsessive unraveling and weaving at its vortex, of the paradox of distance and intimacy. I was no longer looking for a pleasant way to earn a living. I was being called into the service of an illumination that was hidden somewhere deep inside of, just as it is all on the surface of, this gory, weirdly intricate story.
Rivaling in mysterious, intricate poetry the courtly mating dance of the seahorse, it is the mating dance of matter and language, and after the consummation, cut to the most intense and gruesome moment of laborious birth, as if life, with all its pain, still had nothing to apologize for. Like a dream it would arrange itself in this most economical form to articulate and express a thing so complex without the distancing abstractions and concepts required to translate it into the words -- I, naked life, am shameless. I have nothing to apologize for. The beauty of truth is in the eye of the beholder who makes it to the top of the mountain. (This paragraph, as well as others here, is worth dwelling on until assimilated. There's no use rushing. All the way there is arriving.)
The writer has often dreamt of being there, oh so sure she has been there, she's seen it oh so vividly, and she is quite clairvoyant; having cajoled the rock into releasing it, she holds the sword, and is watching those terrible, killing metaphors dissolve into harmless sparks in the air, she believes, but faith without works is dead. To waste one's life on empty words, how horrible. She is still climbing, tormented by worries. What has she gotten herself into? What does she know of draconian situations, except that nobody needs to believe in them; they are certainly there. So musing, she continues to climb, one step at a time.
... one morning about the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, while he was praying on the mountainside, Francis saw a Seraph with six fiery wings coming down from the highest point in the heavens. The vision descended swiftly and came to rest in the air near him. Then he saw the image of a Man crucified in the midst of the wings, with his hands and feet stretched out and nailed to a cross. Two of the wings were raised above his head and two were stretched out in flight, while the remaining two shielded his body. Francis was dumbfounded at the sight and his heart was flooded with a mixture of joy and sorrow. He was overjoyed at the way Christ regarded him so graciously under the appearance of a Seraph, but the fact that he was nailed to a cross pierced is soul with a sword of compassionate sorrow.
He was lost in wonder at the sight of this mysterious vision; he knew that the agony of Christ's passion was not in keeping with the state of a seraphic spirit which is immortal. Eventually he realized by divine inspiration that God had shown him this vision in his providence, in order to let him see that as Christ's lover, he would resemble Christ crucified perfectly not by physical martyrdom, but the fervor of his spirit. As the vision disappeared, it left his heart ablaze with eagerness and impressed upon his body a miraculous likeness. There and then the marks of nails began to appear in his hands and feet, just as he had seen them in his vision of the Man nailed to the Cross...His right side seemed as if it had been pierced with a lance and was marked with a livid scar which often bled, so that his habit and trousers were stained.
But Bonaventura only clearly visualizes the top half of the picture and the first part of the dance of prayer. Now the light brought into the field begins to flicker and fades. Bonaventura does not give us a full description of the configured, positioned body of the saint as he receives the wounds. Instead he spotlights the wounded sites on the hands, feet and side of Francis as the figure passes through the saint. Then we see the suffering Christ, into whose interior Francis has mentally entered. Then as the stage lights dim, and the vision fades slowly back into the invisible, the house lights go on, and Francis returns to the everyday world, closed off to the spectacular world inhabited by the visible Christ. As Francis rushes urgently through the dark temporal field of prayer as imitation, lighting it up as with a flaring and dying torch, he fixes the temporal, perspectival event of the Stigmatization irrevocably in the space of time.
But the light of the Stigmatization is not only moving forward through time; it is spreading. Light pours into the visible sphere of the saint as the luminous seraph approaches, appearing larger and larger and finally coming into focus. Then, as the seraph stops in a holding pattern, the pouring of light into the now saturated visible sphere also stops. This stoppage isolates the observing segment of the reading cycle, which began when the single point of light appeared at the most distant point of the visible sphere and ended when the saint recognized the focused vision against the visible surface of appearance.
I was astonished on finding this story after a vague hunch about the Dominican prayer procedure bearing loosely on the origins of perspective lead me to look into other devout theories and representations of imitation. I assumed that any origin found would be one of many equally significant origins equally unworthy of the name origin at all. But I seemed to be spiraling into a vortex that seemed more significant than others.
The hovering vision in Bonaventura’s story is the perspectival image, which appears at a particular moment the cycle of un-reading the image to return it to the body from which it projected. At this moment the focused observed picture stops and presents itself to Francis, lost in wonder before the unfamiliar, composite, outlined form, not yet fully subjected to the assimilating, integrating act of reading and understanding. Behind it, still visible (if the descent of the vision has been swift enough) or visibly remembered, lingers the splaying trail of the image as it has descended from its vanishing point.
The story reflects not only on the everyday, projective practice of reading space, but also the ongoing practice of constructing a common language, which determines what objects exist in visible space, that is, what ideal forms are mirrored below. Bonaventura not illuminates the construction of the sense date of the observed, but he also shows us the a-priori linguistic filter that determines which forms vision will pick up, which lights will break into the whole, legible, visible sphere.
continued at
giottopage3.blogspot.com
continued from giottopage1.blogspot.com
The difference between a procedure and a process defined by a physical tool is that the former has stops, or bases, tagged by words. A procedure is full of holes or empty spaces between step one, step two, step three. In the perfecting of a procedure, it moves into a process. Finding a tool or instrument (with dancing it is the body) that defines the process is how you perfect it, how you fill in the empty holes. (We are talking here experientially, we are not talking about everything being made of atoms.) There are no holes in flouting with a flute or hammering with a hammer. At the pauses in the music you are no longer flouting or hammering.
So in the quest for the holy grail, the tool of prayer, it is necessary to evolve the procedure into a process. The tool of prayer would be all illuminated process -- whereas in hammering or flouting, you feel the continuity interiorly, but there are splices between the frames in the perception of what is happening. You don't know how you get from point A to point B. So all known, and seemingly all possible processes are really only procedures with very fine gradations between the known posts. There is constant interruption of the perfect flow, yet can this be really?
and when assembled well, as if to maximize the original principles built into the genetic code of the organism of language; all the parts behave yet more differently, by yet another quantum leap that renders quantum leaps obsolete.
Who then will take the first taste of such archaic roots and fruits prepared in such a novel way, and if the taste is bitter and strange, another and another to cultivate the taste for the brew, even if the transparent process verifies that it's intrinsically likable and nutritious, who will waste time reading all the writing on the label and watching the video filmed at the factory that comes in the box? One must first foster trust. It is by trusting one is trusted, at least that's an infallibly correct operating principle, whether it always works or not. Animals can smell trust of each other. Trust, the quiet imperative.
Anyway, that's how I came to deviate from the approved paths in doing this research, and happening to notice that history was working on this problem, not just seeking, but bound to find, the holy grail, all of history dreaming about it, the ship of state tacking back and forth seeming to be heading anywhere but there, unless you notice that this is the way a sailing vessel with a competent, however ghostly, captain navigates the winds and the currents, in dogged fixation on the straight and narrow course straight ahead.
We are moving toward the repleteness of an unprecedented, all visual experience, the melting of crystallized, physical signs and the condensation of vapid significance in a single fluid field, a patch of the visible world refusing to allow us to undo its wholeness and fluidity, its un-fixity and flux, where be is finale of seem. The story that soon follows is the next tool for getting us there, and we should not be presently concerned with its literal verity or anything else about it. This is not to say that it's a metaphor; it is to suspend judgement on that matter. We must watch it perform and see what it can do before drawing conclusions about its nature, however seemingly supernatural. Natural life appeared supernatural -- I'm sure it quite scandalized the proteins -- at its origin, but they soon were able to see that it could only be the next logical step, and fell right into service.
Whatever species of thing it is, it is the next logical step in the full replenishing and re-saturation of the visible with language long strayed from its field, and vice versa. It is the story of the Stigmatization of Saint Francis of Assisi, which is the first attempt to turn the procedure of prayer into a non-deconstructible process.
So that when the emoting machines that can be produced by the Dominican procedure are in the room, the humans, constantly drunk on the antidote in the chalice, can recognize one another and remain impervious to their contagious, automatic empathy and kindly smiles, even as, unless they are saints like Fra Angelico, they are likely to be conspiring to burn you at the stake, should you show the least sign of spontaneous inspiration, which would verify that you must be a witch.
Fra Angelico, by the way, is so high a saint, the word deflects, as with Muhammed, all attempts to victimize him. I'm not authorized to speak on behalf of God by that name, but I suspect Allah is not one to dote on the letter of the law, but he kisses all who are pure-hearted with song and isn't going to fry anybody for an inadvertent Satanic verse, if that's what it is, concerning the divinity of the son.
How sweet and divine is the peaceful cloister and the art that emerges there. The quest for the holy grail, though, is more like jihad.
How to segue to it? There is no way to prepare you for it. After recounting it, I will thereafter simply stand away from it and discuss it from a distant, formal perspective. I officially now must don -- not counting my alter-ego's whispering in the gallery, and I really must ask that she restrain herself as far as possible -- the distance of a surgeon, concerned, as far as will be possible, only with the aspects that can be objectified, for it is just too strange. Yes, I little doubt you will concur that Bonaventura's official story of the Stigmatization, complying closely with that of the earlier biographer Tomaso da Celano, is the strangest story ever written. It is the very essence and phenomenon of stigmatized strangeness made visible/audible. Whatever species of thing it is, it is the next logical step in the full replenishing and re-saturation of the visible with language long strayed from its field, and vice versa. It is the story of the Stigmatization of Saint Francis of Assisi, which is the first attempt to turn the procedure of prayer into a non-deconstructible process.
So that when the emoting machines that can be produced by the Dominican procedure are in the room, the humans, constantly drunk on the antidote in the chalice, can recognize one another and remain impervious to their contagious, automatic empathy and kindly smiles, even as, unless they are saints like Fra Angelico, they are likely to be conspiring to burn you at the stake, should you show the least sign of spontaneous inspiration, which would verify that you must be a witch.
Fra Angelico, by the way, is so high a saint, the word deflects, as with Muhammed, all attempts to victimize him. I'm not authorized to speak on behalf of God by that name, but I suspect Allah is not one to dote on the letter of the law, but he kisses all who are pure-hearted with song and isn't going to fry anybody for an inadvertent Satanic verse, if that's what it is, concerning the divinity of the son.
How sweet and divine is the peaceful cloister and the art that emerges there. The quest for the holy grail, though, is more like jihad.
Reading this story when I happened to read it, with all the works of art I was studying in quest of a new angle on the origins of perspective leading me to it and then surrounding it, and pointing to it like characters in a grand opera, changed my life. Before I had just been playing at being a cool, stylish academic, just enjoying the role and the time you were allowed to spend looking at beautiful art and thinking on interesting matters. Why not find a way to get paid to do it? But in my quirky quest for a new angle on the origins of perspective through the land of crucifixes and beheaded, burned, eye-plucked and otherwise tortured saints, wondering at all this wounding wound round and round all this past possible beauty, time began to slow down, my whole world being absorbed in the affect of heightened palpability, as if held close, pressed in on, swaddled like Bellini's Christ, like that wound in history was healing wound round and round in the stained bandages of art. I was witnessing and being pulled in, beginning to participate directly in the slow and painstaking, obsessive unraveling and weaving at its vortex, of the paradox of distance and intimacy. I was no longer looking for a pleasant way to earn a living. I was being called into the service of an illumination that was hidden somewhere deep inside of, just as it is all on the surface of, this gory, weirdly intricate story.
Rivaling in mysterious, intricate poetry the courtly mating dance of the seahorse, it is the mating dance of matter and language, and after the consummation, cut to the most intense and gruesome moment of laborious birth, as if life, with all its pain, still had nothing to apologize for. Like a dream it would arrange itself in this most economical form to articulate and express a thing so complex without the distancing abstractions and concepts required to translate it into the words -- I, naked life, am shameless. I have nothing to apologize for. The beauty of truth is in the eye of the beholder who makes it to the top of the mountain. (This paragraph, as well as others here, is worth dwelling on until assimilated. There's no use rushing. All the way there is arriving.)
The writer has often dreamt of being there, oh so sure she has been there, she's seen it oh so vividly, and she is quite clairvoyant; having cajoled the rock into releasing it, she holds the sword, and is watching those terrible, killing metaphors dissolve into harmless sparks in the air, she believes, but faith without works is dead. To waste one's life on empty words, how horrible. She is still climbing, tormented by worries. What has she gotten herself into? What does she know of draconian situations, except that nobody needs to believe in them; they are certainly there. So musing, she continues to climb, one step at a time.
... one morning about the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, while he was praying on the mountainside, Francis saw a Seraph with six fiery wings coming down from the highest point in the heavens. The vision descended swiftly and came to rest in the air near him. Then he saw the image of a Man crucified in the midst of the wings, with his hands and feet stretched out and nailed to a cross. Two of the wings were raised above his head and two were stretched out in flight, while the remaining two shielded his body. Francis was dumbfounded at the sight and his heart was flooded with a mixture of joy and sorrow. He was overjoyed at the way Christ regarded him so graciously under the appearance of a Seraph, but the fact that he was nailed to a cross pierced is soul with a sword of compassionate sorrow.
He was lost in wonder at the sight of this mysterious vision; he knew that the agony of Christ's passion was not in keeping with the state of a seraphic spirit which is immortal. Eventually he realized by divine inspiration that God had shown him this vision in his providence, in order to let him see that as Christ's lover, he would resemble Christ crucified perfectly not by physical martyrdom, but the fervor of his spirit. As the vision disappeared, it left his heart ablaze with eagerness and impressed upon his body a miraculous likeness. There and then the marks of nails began to appear in his hands and feet, just as he had seen them in his vision of the Man nailed to the Cross...His right side seemed as if it had been pierced with a lance and was marked with a livid scar which often bled, so that his habit and trousers were stained.
I have donned the Dominican cowl, and am playing a spy stationed at the keyhole, fixed at the position of analytical observer.
In the visionary sight of Francis, the outside world commingles with the interior space of thought when a single point from beyond the boundary of the visible breaks through the surface of appearance. As it enters and approaches, the entire first sequence of the dance of prayer as imitation appears in time -- first the mountain hermitage opens into an illusory or visionary space, then the mind of the friar and the appearance of the vision swiftly approach one another until the vision stops at the position of the distant observed. As the vision slows down, hovering in space, so also does time. We can now read the distinct mental rotations or thoughts that spin Francis mentally out into the realm of the distant body of Christ. That is, Francis mentally reaches out and into the vision in a struggle to understand or grasp its two opposing visible aspects -- suffering body and seraphic spirit -- and also its third, still concealed aspect -- its single, integral meaning. Just as Francis slips his mind into the vision "coming to understand", Christ physically reaches around Francis to enfold him in the wounded skin.
In the visionary sight of Francis, the outside world commingles with the interior space of thought when a single point from beyond the boundary of the visible breaks through the surface of appearance. As it enters and approaches, the entire first sequence of the dance of prayer as imitation appears in time -- first the mountain hermitage opens into an illusory or visionary space, then the mind of the friar and the appearance of the vision swiftly approach one another until the vision stops at the position of the distant observed. As the vision slows down, hovering in space, so also does time. We can now read the distinct mental rotations or thoughts that spin Francis mentally out into the realm of the distant body of Christ. That is, Francis mentally reaches out and into the vision in a struggle to understand or grasp its two opposing visible aspects -- suffering body and seraphic spirit -- and also its third, still concealed aspect -- its single, integral meaning. Just as Francis slips his mind into the vision "coming to understand", Christ physically reaches around Francis to enfold him in the wounded skin.
But Bonaventura only clearly visualizes the top half of the picture and the first part of the dance of prayer. Now the light brought into the field begins to flicker and fades. Bonaventura does not give us a full description of the configured, positioned body of the saint as he receives the wounds. Instead he spotlights the wounded sites on the hands, feet and side of Francis as the figure passes through the saint. Then we see the suffering Christ, into whose interior Francis has mentally entered. Then as the stage lights dim, and the vision fades slowly back into the invisible, the house lights go on, and Francis returns to the everyday world, closed off to the spectacular world inhabited by the visible Christ. As Francis rushes urgently through the dark temporal field of prayer as imitation, lighting it up as with a flaring and dying torch, he fixes the temporal, perspectival event of the Stigmatization irrevocably in the space of time.
But the light of the Stigmatization is not only moving forward through time; it is spreading. Light pours into the visible sphere of the saint as the luminous seraph approaches, appearing larger and larger and finally coming into focus. Then, as the seraph stops in a holding pattern, the pouring of light into the now saturated visible sphere also stops. This stoppage isolates the observing segment of the reading cycle, which began when the single point of light appeared at the most distant point of the visible sphere and ended when the saint recognized the focused vision against the visible surface of appearance.
I was astonished on finding this story after a vague hunch about the Dominican prayer procedure bearing loosely on the origins of perspective lead me to look into other devout theories and representations of imitation. I assumed that any origin found would be one of many equally significant origins equally unworthy of the name origin at all. But I seemed to be spiraling into a vortex that seemed more significant than others.
The hovering vision in Bonaventura’s story is the perspectival image, which appears at a particular moment the cycle of un-reading the image to return it to the body from which it projected. At this moment the focused observed picture stops and presents itself to Francis, lost in wonder before the unfamiliar, composite, outlined form, not yet fully subjected to the assimilating, integrating act of reading and understanding. Behind it, still visible (if the descent of the vision has been swift enough) or visibly remembered, lingers the splaying trail of the image as it has descended from its vanishing point.
The story reflects not only on the everyday, projective practice of reading space, but also the ongoing practice of constructing a common language, which determines what objects exist in visible space, that is, what ideal forms are mirrored below. Bonaventura not illuminates the construction of the sense date of the observed, but he also shows us the a-priori linguistic filter that determines which forms vision will pick up, which lights will break into the whole, legible, visible sphere.
continued at
giottopage3.blogspot.com
