draft 
work in progress

continued from giottosrose4.blogspot.com



In the story of a tool -- which begins and ends in language, the articulation of a lack, penetrated by more language to be re-conceived as a hope for what's lacked, the hope taking form in the questioning of its originally inchoate nature, and in articulation consolidated into the image of the lacked, a map for making it be, and then it finds a name  -- the inventor imitates Francis in the field of prayer. Urged on by his desire to find what does not yet exist, the tool seeker and the story teller enter into and take command of new, uncharted territory in the infinite open field of what can be known, that is, what can be read or understood. Once spoken and understood the metaphor of a tool of prayer creates a problematic collision between two objects both different and alike. The motive was there, so the metaphor activated a problem seeking a resolution. All these names, origin of perspective, tool of prayer, they are all tropes the dreaming whole weaves after spinning the threads. The whole needs to climb and retract the tropes to get a foothold in the realm of the rose, so we can go on making compost, knowing what it's for. This is what is really happening, by the empirical evidence. 

This problem itself began to produce the yet unimaginable form of the tool, which is simply a clear statement of the problem in terms of the materials at hand. Even without the sanction of the pope, the problem of the tool of prayer had come too far to stop seeking its solution. After Peter the Chanter proclaiming "He who prays is an artisan who knows how to use his tools." dared to trigger the quest in the midst of given creation for this strangely anomalous, otherworldly object, the tool of prayer, subsequent developments appear as technical refinements. The local force driving the solution forward past the temporary impasse was the competition between the painter and the writer.  For how could the rational, analytical artist Giotto rest easy with the fact that he had enlarged the zone of invisibility in the imitative process and had reduced the visual to an instrument of debilitation. Giotto would not sit back until he had stolen back for the use and aggrandizement of his own medium the perspectival appearance in the written account of the Stigmatization. 

In the year --        -- Pope Innocent III dreamt he saw an image of the saint holding up the foundering church with his hands. In officially canonizing the saint, the pope ensnared him in his own dream, forgetting that the church too is a our shared dream's trope for climbing to the rose, however necessary some might think it might be to  keep repairing this frayed trope, so as to keep deploying it again and again after each retraction.  But popes aren't good at tropes. So he brought in the most accomplished problem solvers available to preserve Francis from being consumed by the rationalizing, problem-solution process the church, in service to the dream of the rose, had set in motion in order to produce him. 

But Francis belonged to the rose and even in the end demanded his order remain an autonomous servant of her. The Stigmatization is only meaningful, credible, and useful to the church in the light of the whole life and thought of Saint Francis that lead up to it. And this life, in turn, was intimately bound up in the subjection of the process of imitative prayer to an apparently logical and objective reading of the laws and functions not only of the church, but of the God-given body and mind that comes to the church. The church could not use a cut off, embalmed Francis any more than it could stop the world from problem solving and from reading the world as a problem to be solved. 

Only by remaining rooted in the powerful mechanical/biological metaphors unleashed by the church itself could the frail body of the saint wield enough power to hold up and carry forward the huge, lumbering institution. So the church cheated. By the letter of the law, the church claimed the body of Francis. But it allowed the spirit or the reading of the body to escape into the hands of the unpredictable, inquisitive problem solvers. But given the enormous meta-problematic nature of the problem at hand, it is no wonder that the pope, who perhaps had never experienced the magical, impossible process of making a tool himself, could smell no solution boiling. For this was no ordinary problem seeking its solution by materializing in a specific tool. Bonaventura had already begun to see what the tool would be -- the delimited, reproducible form of the limitless process of problem solving itself as it traverses and binds together the metamorphosing fields of both the body and language.









The best possible holy grail is written and read like an instruction manual for assembling it if you really wanted to assemble it correctly.  Something minimally intrusive slipping under the crack, by which they stop interfering with our reception of what is that it is, however dire it is on the dire days, which are most days, still, for most people. Just to stop that interference, carefully, systematically, to go under the hood and fix the engine, with others watching to make sure there is a communicable, objective basis, so we can turn language on and begin moving, and solving the problems, so we can move on to new ones, and trade up symptoms, slowly, slowly surfacing, to avoid the bends -- down here, here on earth, nothing special, that it could actually be real, this goes beyond your wildest dreams, really.  And really a literal, airhead manifestation would soon get old and flat, and the instant it showed the least signs of age, you'd have to go find another holy grail and break that one's heart, but this one could keep you interested with its cat and mouse game forever.  This one is Uncle Irv's Aunt Helen; their passion simmered to the bitter end.  The gods are jealous of the density of mortal, human life.  








The day I find the holy grail, I’m perched on a stool at a gashed, ink stained butcher block kitchen counter that doubles as a desk now piled with art history books. From this vantage point, I gaze out over my Upper West Side garret, a space about nine feet wide and fifteen feet long, with a ten foot high ceiling and a full height shuttered bay window.

Mouldings that run along the wall and ceiling break off in places, the slats of the shutters do not move due to multiple layers of slathered and slopped paint, the plaster has been rudely and incompletely stripped to reveal the brick of the non-functioning fireplace, and you can still see the tape where the sheet rock was applied to repair the ceiling when it collapsed due water leaks. A mouse streaks across to the floor and disappears under one of the loose floor planks, as Groucho, the large black cat with a white chest and white bow tie on his nose tears off in futile pursuit of it. Margaret, a long haired kitten who resembles a rabbit, crawls out from under the couch and freezes in abject alarm.

Though it’s not pleasant when the ceiling collapses again from a leak, and it takes three months for Steve, the landlord’s agent, to respond to my call, I savor the non-renovated patina of this anomalous remnant of the pre-yuppy days -- the dust-filtered sunlight, the graciously high ceilings. Each mouse, being a sign there are no rats, is my friend. Yes, this is her garret, and I’m playing a Cinderella type who resembles the Parisian waif type in the oil painting of a rainy scene that my father, who’s in the toy trade, picks up at Woolworths.

When I’m nine years old I think the Parisian waif with the almond eyes, shag hair cut, and copious black make up is oh so beautiful, so I’m glad that my mother, in fear of hurting his feelings and provoking his wrath, hangs this travesty in the dining room. There she stays until she gets packed up, only to be installed in the dining room in a new house, and then in the apartment to which we later move. Every night she stares at me as I eat my dinner and zaps me with bad taste rays. I guess that's how I come to write the dissertation in bad taste, I mean bad taste like a kitschy postcard of Jesus with a wandering holographic gaze, or worse. Here you're at sea. You never know where you are. At least I now get to play the Parisian waif from Woolworths, rather than look at her. The looking is now your mission impossible.

The mouse escaped, the cats now pose statuesque among slats of shutter slit sunlight beside wine bottles, broken threads of light tracing their western edges, on the oak dining room table in the bay window alcove. I now remove from the top of the pile of books and photocopies on the butcher block counter a monograph on Giotto. I've moved to the photocopy of a fresco of the Stigmatization of Saint Francis, one of, if not the last work Giotto ever painted, in around 1330.  The work surmounts the Bardi Chapel, to the right, looking toward it, of the apse, in Santa Croce, that church in section a simple, tall pointed arch formed of two unbroken broken lines that meet at the apex, the walls a uniform tapestry of muted, dusty frescos between slim columns that rise, their lines gently bending into the vault's ribs like roped seams of the calcified robe of an enormous ghost. I’d surely seen the fresco in situ more than once, as I spent my summers as an architecture student roaming around Italy, but had no recollection of it. 

I've just finished reading the story of the Stigmatization, and my pulse is already quickened by the realization that I really am discovering something new that has something deeply to do with perspective, the method of making mathematical space, something that seems to subvert and invert the deeply digital desire in the dark heart of it, like I'm journeying to a smoldering, safe fusion reaction uniting East and West in the hearth of the world in the heart of darkness.  I'm now perusing the photocopies of the various depictions of the story. As mentioned at the outset, Caroline Bynum directed me to the work of Jean-Claude Schmitt, who noticed that the rays that convey the wounds sometimes cross, undoing the reversal in the mirror image.  You can, by the way, experience the effect at the Pink Pony in one the Lower East Side.  They've rigged up a mirror that too undoes the reversal, allowing you to see yourself quite objectively, as others see you.  It's a quite disturbing effect. You realize that the person you normally see in the mirror is still umbilically attached to you, but now the umbilical cord is cut, and she's been hurled out into space, and has turned around to gaze at you, as disturbed in finding you out there as you are in finding her.  In my case I recognized her instantly as the woman in pursuit of the holy grail, the woman who was ruining my life in her obsessive quest for objectivity, which everybody read in reverse as succumbing to the worst forms of subjectivity. 

This non-reversing mirror at the Pink Pony, my alter ego noted and demanded I write in my notebook, is a tool of prayer would work well with the Dominican prayer method and also mix well with a beer from the bar.  Let's go and get one! Well, at least she drinks, though to keep our distance, we pretty much only drink together in the company of others.  When we think together though, we have a ball. Truth, as Hegel says is a Bacchanalian revel in which no-one is sober.  Few know, though, that thinking is so like drinking. They have not spent enough time in front of the non-reversing mirror at the Pink Pony or gazing at the soon to be examined fresco by Giotto, aka the holy grail, that creates the same effect, but more so; and so they have not yet watched their autonomous selves go forth, in spite of them and their special interests, to discover a world of autonomous things that do not send out reversed messages, in spite of themselves and their special interests.  

Still, I am bound to wonder -- what is the crucifix of sorrowful, unreversed thinking doing held aloft in the ecstatic wings of joyful, unreversed drinking?  I am lost in wonder before this mysterious, scandalously absurd image, and meanwhile the longer I gaze at it, the more it resonates in this echo chamber. Then the thunder fades into pure silence, and in a lightening flash, I come to understand, and when I awaken later, having swooned into the arms of an angel, the marks of understanding impressed on my brain have begun to manifest in my bodily life. I've found the bridge to the holy grail, and these little black letters are the evidence, as you, reader, bear first hand witness to this marvelous miracle.





In the photocopy I'm gazing now gazing at in wonder, just as I'm coming to understand what it could mean -- in the traditional practice of art history as it is first described in a mystic's dream (come true?)


Staring at the photocopy, otto. 


http://www.flickr.com/photos/24364447@N05/4385900268/



It takes me a little while to figure out what the rays are doing. They don't appear to cross. Finally, I figure it out. The saint has twisted his body and leaned his torso slightly back, as if posed for a jump shot -- we've moved from a baseball field to a basketball court -- in order to scoop up the right-sided ray with his right hand after it passes behind his halo.  He intercepts the left ray by crossing his left hand over his torso into the right side of his visual field. So it is by making it seem to happen that it seems to happen to him. Just as the vision actively confers its stamp, so the saint actively pulls the stamp in by twisting his body around to catch it.  Just it comes from out there, he produces it from within. 

Meanwhile, instead of gazing directly at Christ, his gaze is slipping off the hovering image to conform to the account that says that the vision disappears (though nothing is said about this vision of the vision) when the wounds begin to appear. Both Giotto and the depicted Francis are at pains to show the rays showering on the saint naturalistically, shortest distance between two points, so it doesn't look like the painter has forced the rays to cross make a theological point.  Francis wheeled around and this is what happened to happen, it looks like, to happen to coincide with the most proper theological account, the one that satisfies everybody from the pope to the masons in quest of the holy grail, Catholic for once being catholic, all things to all people.

The vision appears not in an indeterminate gold field, but before dawn in a luminous grey-blue cloud of light that reflects off Mount Verna and illuminates a differentiated landscape. The two dollhouse-like altars have metamorphosed into an entry to a cave and the Church of San Damiano, where Francis prayed to a Crucifix similar to the one enclosed in the wings of the seraph. 
The figures are sewn into the landscape participating in the event, completely the opposite from the way the figures and objects float in the gold ground in the Louvre. Still, though the figures have not regressed into medieval schema, they are not as vividly naturalistic as those in the earlier image.  The whole image is flat, like the bodies were cut out from a magazine and pasted on the landscape itself a series of shapes pasted on. 

By identifying with the looked at, just as we identify it as an other, we behold it, we see it, we recognize its recognizable aspects and we notice the novelty of this present case. Along with noticing the novelty of this rendition, I find myself identifying with Francis, pretty easy to identify with, because he doesn't look like he's being seared with fiercely painful wounds, but rather it seems likely he's having an out of the body experience, floating above the scene and gazing down on himself in it as I am, gazing at the strange image of it in wonder, just placidly trying to figure out it could mean; and then when he and I come to understand, that the image is not a mirror of a mirror image, but a Pink Pony reversal of the reversal,  the umbilical cord is cut, and the image pushes itself away, turns around and faces us, eyeing us strangely, like an autonomous thing with a mind of its own.  The story says that at this point the stigmatizing vision fades away, and now the wounds appear in a deep identification with Christ's pain.  I wince, shallowly identifying with that. It seems, though, that suffering is quite short lived (even as it sporadically returns as the agony and the ecstasy of the Stigmatization does not end; the epiphany is ongoing) and Francis, with this hypnogogic phantom, this vision of the vision, thinly hovering out in front of him, is already swooning in ecstasy into the arms of Caravaggio's angel.


Having established its intention to behave by its own lights, this appearance of the original appearance refuses to fade away in the throes of our beginning to understand it, according the Augustinian, Bonaventuran formula.  Instead the colors, texture, and light grow brighter and begin to press up toward us, to engulf us in the beast's domain, just as I notice that the landscape is engulfing the body of Francis, his body contained in a triangular opening in the rock, his hand taking the central position in a mirroring triangle representing the landscape beyond.  Like a child working intently with Elmer's glue and scissors, the image is cutting us out of the regular world and pasting us into this novel one that the child is inventing to express something that very much needs to be told to the grown ups, something that only visual language can say.


The grown up being cut out and pasted in reminds me of Judy Garland playing a giant child who sings with a grown up's voice in the Wizard of Oz.  I now notice the giant bird appearing on the top of the mountain in the image; it has the same un-naturalistic scale, another reminder that we are somewhere over the rainbow to where an ominous source of harm that leaked in from behind is threatening to disrupt the peace.  No sign presently of the straw men, tin men, and cowardly lions we danced with and left behind to find ourselves here in the bowels of the danger, ready to take on the armies of zombies and melt the phantom away in a bucket of clear thought. 

It seems the novel disposition exists to diminish the importance of any thing depicted, so that none of the things depicted seem more important than any others or than the space between them or the surface on which they appear or the pigment seeped into it. Everything that's ever found a word to denote it, or even the subtle qualities of hued shapes not yet named, warmth weighed against size and intensity, nothing calling attention to itself, everything equal to everything else, and everything counted, and counted equally, even the relations. So the things, the objects, cannot claim any more interest than the relations between them, or the transitions, and everything is related.  As if to remind me that I never forget in the thick of gazing, that the gaze can only graze over the surface, that this is just a world of language, or a mathematical field, a map, not the land; but everything is done with a great deal of care. Everything language touches, it cares about. All praise to you, my lord Sister Mountain peak. The Mountain Peak bends to the bird. All praise to you, Brother Bird. As they count each thing, the numbers that number things care about them, but not enough to privilege one over the other, which hurts everything's feelings until it learns to rise above itself, like the mountain peak bowing to the bird. That took some supernatural effort, for the mountain to rise up so high, then bow to the bird, for the bird to hear the words the saint preached to it, and grow big enough to command the attention of the mountain peak. Everything, even the flat surface itself, is working at it, striving, striving to learn to rise above itself and not lord it over, or be lorded over, by anything else. 

Obedience subjects a man to every other man and even to the wild beasts, as far as God allows it, teaches Saint Francis.  As far as God allows it meaning all things, however small, should honor themselves.  The bird should puff itself up and insist the mountain bow down to it. There's great effort in staying in this novel, never before visualized, and until this moment, deemed un-visualizable disposition, the child is having trouble with putting on too much or not enough Elmer's glue, the figures and forms want to slip off the cardboard base, but the child is determined to make it stick.  She holds down the cut outs and waits patiently.  What a patient, determined child!  She looks up, smiling proudly, then gets back to work, muttering -- how stupid are grown ups.  They think this is a map.  Everything else is a map.  This is the land.   The mountain has bowed to the bird.  It is done.

"Poor deluded child.  Sunday school is a form of child abuse."

The child overhears the atheist and begins to cry. Her tears melt and scumble the boundaries between the glued on shapes and forms. The wet surface begins to undulate.  "Shit!" cries the child.  "Go away and leave me alone!"

"How dare you blaspheme in such a context!" intones a priest who has approached to protect her from the atheist.

"My mind is spinning like a super-computer.  My heart is in this work!  I'm cobbling together the holy grail out of Elmer's glue and cardboard!  My spirit is aflame with divine inspiration.  Flames crackle and spit. The atheist says I'm deluded, and my tears are melting my art work, and I'm not allowed inadvertently to spit 'shit!' To hell with that!  Go pick your nose, and stay out of the heads and pants of babes. It is written that all manner of blasphemies will be forgiven, but those agains the holy spirit will not be forgiven.  Suffer the little children to get the job done. I can handle the atheist, we'll soon be getting along just fine, like Mother Theresa and Castro."

The priest is amazed at this impertinent child's knowledge of scriptures and history.  Like a mountain bowing to a bird, from his towering height, he looks down in consternation on her sitting on the floor next to her pet rabbit like a Madonna of Humility by Titian, cutting and pasting the mountain bowing down to the bird.  She's lost again in the work musing -- foolish grown ups thinking this just a map, when this is the land.  We arrived just in time, as planned. I've got that priest in the palm of my hand. The change has come. He's under my thumb. No gene or meme is going to call the shots, so long as I'm the boss, and I AM the boss, whether the world knows it or not. In the end you'll be able to see who's been pulling the wagon. I am a classic case of an avant garde, gothic (modern) artist; it's only called a post-modern moment when they're waiting for another batch to hatch."


When given the okay, though it can only speak in parables, the formal disposition, which in reflection reads as wholly precipitated, starts chattering away explain itself against the viewer's immediate repulsion in the face of something so odd and impossible to relate to any prior thing. Like the blind man healed, this image is dying to tell all its secrets, assuming the admonitions to keep things secret are just to assure everybody that Jesus and Francis aren't show offs.  The radical difference from the Louvre image and in fact any other image I've ever seen jolts my sensibility.  How did the historians fail to notice or mention this?  Do they think the artists aren't thinking, aren't interpreting and illuminating the story in any way that could be relevant to the questions that they, as historians, are asking?  That art should be seen but not heard?  Whatever the art is babbling about, the historian should not listen. The historian is not supposed to get involved with the art. He's supposed to go in there straight as an arrow, know what he's looking for, find and take it, and move on to the next one. (Interesting, those are the rules for sexual relations between art history professors and their students.) At least the great art historians like Leo Steinberg taught me how to play with and enter into images like the naughty -- but in the end on the side of truth and justice -- little girl a woman is still supposed to play in a titillating way.  Still, it was the good historians obedient to rules of their discipline who wandered into the beast's palace and stole the rose, which gave the rose in the guise of its beastly root -- so to speak, as it were -- the right to kidnap the beautiful art historian (well, like all humans, from our perspective, a beauty relative to the beast). 

You won't get it until you learn the notes and play it yourself. The keys just sit there until you figure out how to play this instrument, which could take years, but what are years compared to the centuries it took to find the score?  No, it doesn't do it for you, but when you do it, this score meets you more than half way.  You have to get over having it done for you, which is what images do, and this is what we expect of images, this is why we come to them, to relax and let them do it, but this is vigorous exercise.  This is not a spectator sport, this is a sport where everybody is working/playing, something like fishing (until it morphs back into basketball, which is not as far from fishing as it might seem, but most people just stare at the turbulent waters, not noticing that there's something under the surface).  You finally find and take some pains to arrive at the waters where the famous fish lives. You toss out the line, that takes some skill, you wait, you dream, you keep waiting for a bite, then you really have to work, and be lucky, to reel it in; and then it's so beautiful, you can't help tossing it back in the water.  Then you toss out the line again...


You feel a weight there, biting from below, pulling on the line. The space behind pressing up against bodies that wear the space, it gestures with them, and the bodies are one body sewn of the scraps that wrap them. The gesturing space is created and molded by the story, the vaporous words of the story custom made to condense and the crystallized forms to melt into the space, but it's not exactly a space.  It's a fluid flowing surface.  The space is pouring back up into the all sensed surface, reading pouring back up into being, but reading a bottomless source of the up-pouring;  the story unfolding in time does not change in appearance.  The appearance is a shallow relief in which the immediate past and immediate future are implicit, the strip is not so much moving as vibrating, as the reversible, unhinged past-present-future of the Stigmatization continually appears without changing, rooting me in an ever more palpable present weaving around this shallow relief of past present future present past... a constant, embodied now, unhinged from clocked or directional time, time still there, to create thickness.

All this pressing up to the surface pressing up to the retinal image in my eyeball saturates the sense of sight and it seeps into the tactile and even other sensory domains. I can almost taste and smell the image.  But it's only so drinkable because it's so thinkable.  It's encapsulating years of thinking and research like a several mile long accordion collapsing on itself, as if this were the end of the quest of someone deaf and dumb to hear and make this, her first sound, in great relief and release as the accordion closes in on itself.  Those years of thinking and research are not about me. I was tracking two primary quests, one leading the sacred world forward to the tool of prayer, the tool that prayer was seeking in order to become its not yet known real self, the way flouting, before it became itself, was seeking a flute, the other the quest of the secular world for the origin of perspective, the origin of Cartesian space (should really be called Albertian space, but whudda thunk a sense-drunk artist would have first proposed that "I think therefore I am", though the treatise that affirms it, with just a bit of interpolation, is well known.)  -- when they first conspired to take away our names and give us social security numbers; maybe if we can find our way back, there will again be a choice, and we can go the other way at the fork in the road.  Both quests lead to the same place, the missing link, the finding of which closes the circle and makes us whole, as if to answer that urgent prayer of Leonard Cohen. (Knock and the door will open, ask and you shall receive.) I am a cipher to something everybody, past and present, has long been seeking.  You can remove me altogether, and it's still there, but as I'm the one who cracked the code of the score, and who's presently playing it with the strong sense of being guided by the original composer. I must play it passionately, not just bang out the notes.  Crescendo. Piano. All that is written into the score.

Verbal language is strung out in time, where light inhabits all present space, but that doesn't mean space and light are at a loss for words. Words that give voice to Dante's all visual paradise, when space has broken free of time, must only agree to speak indirectly through parables and poetry. Or they can shadow the formal disposition to call attention to the possibly overlooked visible features and visible organization. Another way to it is the mathematical argument, with empirical verifications, of the theory of relativity.  The mongrel discourse of allusions to that theory, parables, prayer procedures, poetry, geometrical-perspectival-linguistic diagrams, formal shadowing, and formal analysis that Giotto has orchestrated at seven centuries distance to realize his gesumptkunswerk, a yet more divine comedy, is competing with directly with Dante. With the long sought magic flute now in the hands of the mongrel discourse, it aspires not just to fail better, as Dante is resigned to do, but actually to illuminate directly an ulterior world of light and space, offer a direct and sustained view of paradise on earth, seen through a window in the present scheme.  Alas, there's a lock on the window with a combination. Maybe the stethoscope now being scrutinized can help the same thief to open the lock; she's been working on it.  

To glimpse the world ulterior world through the window, you must use the tool in hand to help you put aside the lens of linear cause and effect and experience not objects, but luminosity, nothing but impinging light, regardless of what it comes from or seems to signify. The lens of cause and effect only brings into view causes that effects have already relegated to the obliterating past, stars that have burnt out by the time the rays reach our mind.  To be present to the present, we must take the time to look and carefully see precisely the colors and shapes that are there, and just where they precisely are in the luminous field impinging on us.  To return us to the present, the abstract artist does just this, then he rearranges the luminous field, so no distracting objects pointing to past events can interfere.      

But the interesting, so called abstract, modern artists are not really that at all.  The arrangements are not just there to negate the known objects and create interesting and beautiful color schemes.  The arrangements are projecting a novel world. They are giving a voice to the artist's hope and desire. If you spend enough time with them, the works begin to speak, hidden orders emerge in the seeming chaos. There are visual stories being told weaving across each other in uncanny ways. That's because all great modern works of art are holy grails.  The original is like an amoeba that divides into thousands, and it's still the same amoeba. However some degradation occurs over time, so it's good to have the original and occasionally start a new batch directly from it.

In the story told by the original holy grail, the crystallized objects shatter.  The vampire is laid to rest. Suddenly these objects having shed the shell of their signifying nature, appear resurrected as living bodies, presences.  The humans, the rivers, the hills, the clouds as such, the roses return, but as living presences. Maybe God is there somewhere with a good old white beard.  Accept no substitutes.  Believe; or don't.  Dare to be utterly childish, or put away childish things.  I guess I shouldn't judge it. If you can't sustain childish faith, what's left but the job of humble functionary? Glad somebody's down there in the trenches, and also glad it isn't me!  I've done my service, I've paid my dues.

The longer I drink in, and think on, the forms, as the magic flute flouts fate; the more clearly I discern that the image of the Stigmatization before me has, by virtue of its own unique formal qualities and its way of being transparent to its own generation, broken free of my projections and expectations into the realm of space and light.  If it appears at itself, it not only appears as, it cannot but appear as, living presence breaking through the shells of objects constantly re-crystallizing within it, presence breaking out, animal egg animal egg animal egg round and round, world without beginning or end.   

As my senses drink, I'm thinking, thinking, dreaming, waiting fishing. My mental muscles are in shape because I know this baby is a big one. Before this image, thinking is the consummate drinking partner. In fact, if you don't think on it, you can't drink of it, and if you don't keep thinking on it, you can't keep drinking of it.  Luckily, clearly, I'm addicted to this kind of thinking and this kind of drinking, so much so that in order to get to do more of it, I've taken to pushing it. 

As my thinking partner and I are gazing for the first time Giotto's fresco, thinking and drinking in what comes of thinking on it, this is the first thing we notice after noticing Francis's jump shot move, that the continuously visible space is part of the unfolding action, collapsed in time -- the way it feels like a whole live Knicks game takes ten minutes, only this is instantaneous.  The illuminating and activation of all the space in all directions -- as you try to pour as many squirming bleeps as possible into the hole -- is what causes the time to collapse.

The field of Dominican prayer resembles a baseball field, with the spaces between the posts or bases blanked out, that space between the bases some a-feared feminine void threatening to swallow up the runner diving for the base for dear life.  This quintessentially urbane, versus suburban, game, by contrast, offers a replete contained space-time continuum pouring out of squeezed, confined interval of clocked time, the whole field a contained, throbbing, pulsing body, with negative and positive space given equivalent value. Stasis only in the heart of motion, palpable being, everything flowing.  Nothing abstract but the points, which are just there they function like the vanishing points in the perspectives flashing by and burning into the retina of the eye as the reel unwinds. These constantly ping-ing points of emergence remind us of our own emergence and ongoing re-emergence, on one level, out of nowhere and nothing. 


This lover turns on the light to make love.  This kind of lover likes to look and know everything about the one to whom he is making love.  To this kind of lover nothing about love is obscene.  In my private affairs, I might not be this kind of lover, and in my private tastes, I might prefer baseball, but this isn't about my private tastes.  These are the tastes of my alter-ego set free to pursue the holy grail and, she insists however grandiose I call her, save the world.  She has none of my Victorian compunctions. She doesn't judge them, but they don't interest her.  I'm surprised when I watch her in action, as I'm bound to admit that she is probably the so-called real me.  I see her point about reality, but to me, reality is over-rated.  There's a third face of Eve that morphs me and my alter-ego, her voice runs all through this text; but it's a social pathology to try to reduce the self to one. The self is three and one, and each part needs to be able to function autonomously.  Sometimes I show my real Aristotelian face, and often I wear a Platonic mask, but I'm always updating my sublimated, Aristoplatonic self, a mask that's as real as, or yet more real than, my so called read face.  The wheel must regress to progress. Without the first two to cycle back to, I can't advance.  I have to stay moving, changing, growing, in order to be at all. Same with everybody pretty much, and that's perfect.  There's nothing to cure. That's a fundamental.

My thoughts quicken, this activated space in the fresco captures all my attention. Everything in the image is so stridently saying it is part of everything else. How did the historians fail to notice this? Their looking is directed to a different field; they assume the works of art are pearls spun around a grain and their job is to x-ray the pearl and reclaim the grain.  They develop a whole language for the grainy world they reconstruct, a world in which the works of art, the pearls, are beautiful, but irrelevant to history's truth. That's how my two, favorite mentors, Carolyn Bynum, the historian, and Leo Steinberg, the art historian, came to lock horns.  Bynum couldn't see with Steinberg's eyes, because Steinberg has only contempt for Bynum's categories.

The holy grail defies and abhors this division between beauty and truth. and instantly moves to deconstruct it in order to reconstruct the whole.  This fresco thanks the historian for sending me to it, but wants the historian to grow now. It does not accept the historian's fixation on grains, and the historian's excuse that he doesn't stop to look hard because he isn't "visual".  When understanding is saturated with itself, it crystallizes in a great work of art.  There can be no profession that claims to arbitrate truth, but then sets an arbitrary obstacle in the path of illuminating, so that every time illumination is about to surge and crystallize in a work of art, from which it pours much more profusely, as well as literally, the historian shifts direction to avoid it.  

Meanwhile, the historian, again, is arbiter of truth, and all departments must remain mindful of this.  The art history department is dutifully obedient, teaching everybody to wonder at images, then try to understand them, and when understanding surges, the images fades away, you must move to the philosophy department, which maintains an interest in art that effaces itself to illustrate philosophy, the greatest of all illuminators of this world of dark grains that will never be illuminated, the pearls of art a surplus value.  Those who keep thinking and drinking in the sensations to arrive at illuminations beyond those authorized in this scheme are called dreamers, if not mad. The historian assures everybody that the world made of opaque grains in which knowledge never crystallizes in art, art at best can illustrate philosophy; and art is only an irrelevant, beautiful, string of pearls.  But this nightmare world of opaque grains is in fact a dream world, and the world of art is the real, whole illuminated, visible world at the edge of the knowable withholding nothing that can be known, constantly bearing forth more to be known, while basking in endless mystery.  

This world described in art is well known by scientists, who often belong to secret spiritual and even religious societies, but if they were found out, the pope and bishops would excommunicate them from the secular universities.  We go to school expressly to be taught since childhood that reality is made of the dark grains that historians glean; that's the only game in town: If you don't like it, if you can't stand it, then kill yourself.  Works of art, if they do not illustrate the opacity of these facts, are decorative pearls woven around the grains.  

If you have not managed to retain interiorly an alternative to this idolatrous world view, you'll have to lose your mind to find it.  And if you've held the truth secretly, well, it's time to share the wealth. Many cells are already in place. We're occupying the institutions.  After those professors whose hearts are strong enough to survive reading this best seller doctoral dissertation confer, rest assured, and rejoice, that phd is on its way.



I'm pushing hard thinking and the hard drinking in of sensation that attends it, the very opposite of what we've come to believe by looking in the mirror, and believing our own reversed projection's constant imposition of a reversed world -- that the two are mutually exclusive.  That to come to understand, we must put out our eyes, like Oedipus.  That nothing happened since to reverse this reversal.  Nobody died for our sins, forget about whether you take the story literally or not, in any case, it doesn't work; but if that's true, how did we pull the sword from the stone, and how did we come to be drinking from the holy grail?  And it comes so naturally to us that it's hardly creating any affect at all, as if we've been doing it all along, and everything else is just a smokescreen, and even with this first sip, the smoke is all blown away. 

The only affect is missing the smoke, to which we're all addicted, but unfortunately this smoke is much worse for our health than nicotine or alcohol. This unwholesome smoke is sucking up all our resources, dividing everything into irreconcilable dyads, signs astray from what they signify, the heart holding up its mask, the face gone. This un-wholesomeness is forcing itself on us, including its wholistic-ness, which is basically a scam, with everybody invested in maintaining this wholly unwholesome smoke to which we're all incredibly addicted.  I guess smoke will always be easier to be addicted to than the physical exercise to which you get addicted in order to quit smoking, but we're up against the wall. The whole world is going to go up in smoke if we don't give up addiction to this kind of holy grail obscuring smoke. I'd say it's time to get addicted to the elating exercise of thinking the smoke away, as our senses are restored, and we begin to be able to taste our food again, and smell the roses.  As you get addicted to any kind of exercise, of course, you must stay vigilant, and never underestimate the resilient and wiley vices -- laziness, gluttony, etc. -- that will try to keep you from doing it however addicted you get to the game itself, feeling the body and/or mind in action, the beauty of the patterns that form,  and the glorious sensations, and the glorious laurels and trophies that ensue.

 In previous accounts of imitation, at the moment the observer dons the gesture or wounds of the observed, the observed passes out of view behind, eclipsed. But we can still interpolate the continuous, physical structure of the mental orbit as a lunar orbit. The instant of identification remain un-seeable, since the dark side of the imitated never once reveals itself during the single rotation and the single revolution of the observer's projected body into and returning from the realm of the observed. 

We need a different physical structure to describe a continuous circuit in which each side always acts also as the front side. This structure is the mobius strip, a plane that twists around in order to join its back to its front. (fig.) Francis's spinal column, the extension of his brain into the torso, is the axis of the twist in the mobius strip. 


                                                                         


In the experience of Francis, the direct, linear, one-way path described by the shower of golden particles passing from one body to another overlaps with the looping wave of the path of mental projection from body to body and back in perspectival or figural reading. The consciously read light of the Stigmatization is at once particle and wave -- that which is sensed and that which is read -- both of which travel at the same instantaneous speed in order to traverse two different distances.  Now by the letter of  law, the picture still obeys the Pope in showing the direct impression of the wounds.  But by the spirit, it reads as consistent with perspectival acount of Bonaventura. 

In the perspectival reading of the origins of perspective,  Giotto begins now to close the loop in forging the tool of prayer. We can read the frontal plane of the picture as the face where the front of the extrusion of the imitative loop joins to its back. In order to recreate the tool of prayer, we must work the craft of reading over the whole surface plane of the picture until the front and the back of the temporal, spatial imitative event are evenly and firmly cemented front to back. Once cemented, the apparently determined form of the tool of prayer should read the observer transparently through to the whole, determined, visible, continuous, self-enclosing act of devout imitation. 

The deeper and wider we read, the more firmly the surface should cement the imitative act, since imitative prayer as conscious perspectival reading is the performance pre-determined by and determining the form of the tool of prayer. If we have before us the real McCoy, the bonafied tool,  then the word processing by the image and the image processing by the word will appear natural and determined by one another. 

As we run reading over the painted surface, pressing it out, the imitative event affixes itself, perspectivally, to the time and space surrounding it. First, Giotto overthrows the abrupt contrast between the schematic landscape, and naturalistic, detailed bodies in the Louvre picture. Instead of focusing on the figures, the painter gives space and figures equal time; the seraph hovers at a greater distance from the saint, and the figures flatten, lending some of their previous depth and differentiation to the setting. The landscape is divided into shaped zones, which correspond to part or whole giornati or "days" of fresco painting. (Each day the painted, wet plaster dries, creating a visible outline, which Giotto conceals under a painted outline.) 

The zones describe not only the days of painting, but the micro-seconds of reading structured as in the temporal Dominican imitative procedure. We recall how the procedure defined first the zone occupied by the physical body of the friar and read as opening onto an illusory space; second the place of the read figure at the illustrated surface, and third the three-dimensional space beyond the surface where the imagined body resides. Giotto carefully shapes the painted surface in order to delineate these three zones. Francis enters into the field as he responds to the light by turning toward it and "fitting" his body in the first shape: the triangular outline that curves down the body of the mountain from the mouth of the cave. He now has moved into the first position, in which his "real" space opens into the imagined space of the vision. Giotto carefully centers the saint's left hand, seen in profile in a second shape, which outlines the lit face of the mountain. The hand occupies the second position in the perspectival imitative circuit, that of the visible figure. Like the figure at the plane of a picture, the hand holds the imagined object at bay in its imagined position throughout the destabilizing, projective process of reading and imitation. But at the same time the visible hand, as it appears to have just scooped up the wound and scooped across the whole, diminished body of Christ is also a handle (again like the figure on the plane of a picture) by which the saint mentally pulls himself into the realm of the vision. Finally, as Francis receives the wounds, reading the body as if from inside the skin of Christ, the saint mentally rotates out into the third shape marking the third imitative position, the cloud of light containing the seraphic vision. As Francis receives the wounds, the vision begins to fade, and the saint, now permanently trans- and disfigured by the scandal of perspectival reading, returns home to the everyday world closed to the realm of the vision.


By way of Francis, Giotto brings the circuit of reading gradually and also instantaneously into the full visible spectrum; the painter not only articulates, but also breaks down the boundaries between the distinct relational positions that define the circuit. Francis's left hand crossed over his distant view of the seraph and having scooped up the correct wound belongs to all three imitative zones, that of the body of the imitator, that of the figure he sees at a distance, and that of the distant three-dimensional body, he knows as if from within. Giotto not only consolidates the imitative zones in the hand, but blends them across the painting surface. The black interior of the rock leads out to the darkened fold in the rock, which opens out to the shaded brown form of the saint, which passes into the zone of the observed hand of the body, which fronts on the illuminated face of the mountain. The face of the mountain, toward which a lit path descends back to the mouth of the cave, sends a tree and a church up into the cloud of blue light where the tinges of reflected color that have been progressively added now separate out into the still muted blue, brown, green, red, and white seraphic vision and the church exterior. And although the door of the church faces the saint and the cave, by contrast, backs him up on the opposite side, both church and cave back on the same continuous darkness, the same everyday blindness that, outside of the reflected light of the vision, presses in from all sides of the miraculous event.

We have already read how first the Dominican prayer performance of devout imitation as a mirror of the act of reading and, second, the contour of the life and thought of Saint Francis in nature, both read as forms determined by the motivated quest for a tool of  prayer. In the pictured instant of the Stigmatization, we see Francis as he pours into one mortal instant the act not of tearing apart, but of separating out his being into the perspectival or social roles that defined his mission.  Contained in the folds of the land, he plays the role of the hermit, read from within his own bodily affect. Gesturing with his hand, he plays the role of the active friar, read as a visible example of exterior forms of piety such as charity and physical poverty. And finally, projecting his being out across space along the stigmatizing rays, he plays the role of the saint, read outside of the visible, material life of his own mortal body.  Like the body of Francis, the space that contains the body strains to differentiate itself and to lacerate itself, but continues to hold itself together. The mountain rises up, tearing the rock apart to form the mouth of the cave; the open church rises up,  followed by the rising, opening body of Francis to bind the earth to the sky. The upward gesture that is the material form of the aspiring, suffering, prayer to become one with the immaterial, now readably configures the whole readable surface of the painting.

Now we press reading forward, over the painted plane of the read picture, seeking out new segments that have not been firmly cemented, leaving gaps between the front and back of the temporal, spatial imitative event. We find a “bubble” where the strangely contorted, seemingly contrived gesture of the saint meets up with the naturalistic context of the event.  But we only need to read backwards in time to press this out his gap.   The saint has apparently been kneeling with his hands joined in the typical posture of supplicating prayer, facing forward in roughly the same direction as the front of the church.  Using all the proto-tools available to him to enflame himself with love of the crucified Christ, he no doubt has placed before his mind’s eye an image of the physical crucifix, to which he commonly prayed in his own local church of San Damiano, seen nearby.  As his ferver grows, the light in his mind intensifies until suddenly he can no longer discern its origins in his own interior meditation. He responds instinctively, suddenly turning "toward" the light coming from behind the interior image of the crucifix he sees before him, by bringing his right leg forward and opening his left arm out from its praying position. The rays catch him at the instant he catches a monocular, perspectival glimpse of the whole vision in his left eye, before his body has completed its gesture of turning toward the light behind him.

Giotto, imitating Bonaventura as the omnicient narrator of the story, records an instant of the saint's own subjective experience, but as if seen from without. According to the painter's account, as the saint turns, he sees the hovering crucifix born by the seraph. come into view in front of the actual Church of San Damiano that houses the crucifix on whose image the saint likely has been meditating. As he turns toward the vision conjured up in his meditation, the vision indeed appears as if it might have risen up along an arc from the open door of the actual church seen in the landscape. Yet, at the same time the saint sees with his open eyes the seraphic vision as a "real," exterior object that has come from not from God, who is "within", but from the God outside in "the highest point of heaven." And finally, as the vision stigmatizes the body of the saint by flashing through the imitative loop intercepted by his body, it also reads as having projected itself, with strings attached, into and out from the body of the saint.

The separate, simultaneously presented readings refer to three separate, but melded together times -- first, the saint's coming into the event from the interior field of meditation; then the moment, according to Bonaventura, that the saint grapples with the strangeness and exteriority of the observed vision as it hovers before him; and third, the empathetic understanding that brings on the appearance of the wounds and the fading of the vision. In the read instant of stigmatization, the past, the present, and the future of the event reflect and absorb one another like the blended, but still legibly distinct colors in the reflective surfaces of the painting.  

We have run reading back and forth over the segments of painted surface that bind the thought of the saint to his gesture and the gesture to the space it navigates. But the joint still does not appear permanent.  It is as if Giotto in painting around, and sketching over the instant of Stigmatization, evoking its character,  provided a sticky surface, so that the front and back of the imitative circuit find numerous points of adherence.  But permanently to fuse the thought and gesture of the saint to the surrounding space and time,  we must press reading yet harder and hold it down. 

For Bonaventura the Stigmatization begins right after Francis understands the dual aspect of the vision; he suddenly can read it. At this instant Francis recognizes nothing new in its exterior form; instead he recognizes its single interior source: "the fervor of [Francis's] spirit." In the instant of reading and recognition, the seraph begins to fade away and the wounds begin to appear. Bonaventura thus tells us that for Francis to read or recognize the meaning of the vision corresponds to waking up, insofar as it entails understanding that his dream or hallucination has an interior source.  In the experience of waking up, Francis recognizes not only the non-visual source of the vision, but also its contrast with the apparently exterior source of the surrounding, everyday, "real" world. As Francis wakes up and the vision fades, the wounds appear. In this protracted time, one instant remains sudden and instantaneous -- the instant of recognition. "Then and there," says Bonaventura, that is, at the instant Francis recognizes the interior dream against the exterior world, the wounds appear. 

The boundary in the mind between leaving the hallucinatory state and entering the world crosses the boundary between the mind and the body at the points of the wounds. Now the loop of reading comes fully into view, closed by the instant of recognition. Francis has just finished adding up and redistributing in space the information gleaned in time from unconsciously scanning and projecting the mind into the waking world. He suddenly reads it, separating it from his "dream." Francis, however, is not just dreaming; he is a saint having a vision mixed up in waking space. But the instant of Stigmatization occurs precisely at the boundary between the saint's visionary experience of waking up and recognizing the "truth" and the observer's everyday experience of the same phenomena. The build up of visibility described by Bonaventura does not break, but instead culminates in the sublime ordinariness, the perfect naturalness of the structure of the instant of the Stigmatization. It is not so much that the extraordinary can break into the ordinary, but that the ordinary is already extraordinary enough to receive it.  

For in waking and experiencing consciousness  or recognizing presence against absence, we experience directly and presently the imperceptible, illegible, invisible, and infinitesimal, which is the thickness of the sensed surface where the difference between past and present passes through sameness in the continuity of time. For the rational, perspectival reader, a miracle in which one who the reader would call a hysterical believer psycho-somatically induces a bodily wounding appears unlikely. But for the same perspectival reader -- for whom the read/seen world reads as having built itself logically out of language and problem-solving --  the existence of the immediate experience of read spatial, figural presence reads as more than unlikely, but in fact impossible.

aside:

Elaine Scarry represents -- to date, but love has the wit to win -- the minority position, which is that beauty, though by its power and insistent neutrality, it can be manipulated, used as a weapon, is neither cruel and sadistic, nor deprived and masochistic, in nature. It is not intrinsically allied exclusively with the defensive team, whose job is not to produce, but to prevent production, but nor is it allied with a sadistic aggressor. It is rather a calming, quieting, positive progressive force, intrinsically the handmaid of justice. It's possible that there's no such thing, really, as apolitical art for art's sake. Left to its own, to serve its own sake, beauty intrinsically moves to balance the infield and the outfield and honor from both sides the space as much as the base.  

Beauty seeks to align being, seeming, and reading, with only a minimally invasive and minimally significant Marilyn Monroe mole, as Scarry put it in a recent lecture at the School of Visual Arts, to remind everybody what beauty is not, so that beauty can be.  I firmly stand with Scarry, with the work of Giotto as my witness.  The argument does not rest on the limiting of data to that which appears only to those whose eyes see like machines do, and can record and categorize the data so that machines can read it. I ask the detractors to reconsider.  I'm sure they agree that if you can never change your mind, you don't have one.  One detractor is glad that Scarry reclaims beauty, but finds her arguments as they sometimes swoon into poetic modalities "medieval".  But a recalcitrantly advanced post-post-existential writer trying to shadow beauty's nature is going to have to slide into the nauseating, relative field, is not going to stand there and just grind her shoe into what the world insists is a safe, sandbag base. If she's not on a base you've predetermined, and you tag her out, you're playing the wrong game. Far from nailing her, you've committed a foul. Where she's holding court, it's soulville, where flesh sweats, bodies shine, space is thick, and the louder time ticks, the more the game belies it. If you get sucked into it, you glimpse the whole in a five minute glance that the clocks say took two hours. 

Speaking of the ineluctable palpable, I refer anyone who is the friend of beauty to the Arena Chapel. All the world's a stage, let's play the best play offered and play it as well as we can. Yes, there is massive suffering, but the massive suffering in the world is a given. In this scenario, love has the wit to win the minimal allowable suffering in a world where light implies and cannot manifest without darkness. Giotto shows the world accepting the offer here and now, picturing the impossible as possible -- the way you finally picture a tool you have carved language down to in the process of clarifying the problem you need to solve into its own solution, and now with this map you can gather from the world's disparate stuff, join the parts, and have the tool in your hand --  by building that story into itself, at which point a redeemed, balanced world now is approachable. Of course there is constant temptation to slip out of one's role and lose faith in the script and the other players. The way that pope seems to improvise and interpolate, I just can't see the connection to Giotto's, which is transparently the main man's score. True, as Petrarch says, the ignorant cannot understand it, but not because of any intrinsic imbalance in which a difference between the obvious view and that of the cognoscenti is built in. At least there's no flaw in the map, however hard to learn to read it, and then to navigate the land.  At least the foundations are solidly rooted in the laws of tectonics. At least there's nobody saying that his world is the real world that doesn't rest on theatrics and faith, when there is no such real world -- unless it's the world that fully surrenders, finally, to its actual, that is, acting, nature. Listen to language. It holds the world's most ancient, always most modern and even post-modern wisdom.  Whoever made up the words knew -- probably in a witty wink to his fellow friends of Robin Hood against the prince's claim of divine right to the throne -- that the actual prince is whoever acts the prince.  

The set designer who paints the Arena Chapel is in the throes of a great performance that renders transparent the original scheme. He is not improvising, clearly. He is rendering visible the gospel text as a script for a redeemed and just world in a sudden illumination that makes the early work at Assisi seem like that of another hand and mind. At Padua, what you see is what you get, but the more you see, the more you get, the more you take, the more it gives, the more you eat, the more you have. It makes the machines sing Daisy.  It is no longer a tit for tat world, and neither is it an unreal world dominated by ghostly ideals. It is the way of nature even, the more fruit the animal eats, the more seeds are dispersed, the more fruit there is, life itself making inroads against the tit for tat laws of thermodynamics now being seriously questioned by physicists as respected as Howard Bloom. 

Giotto's real life, realizable world is no longer a world where those in who get a chance to bat have to steal bases and are denied any chance of spiritual illumination and communal existence, so all they can do is try to steal more bases, and win more points, until it's impossible to get an out on these guys. They're so addicted to winning, with the pressure so intense, they're likely shooting up or snorting in the back room, their mirrors in the sports world chomping on bubble gum or spitting tobacco, their eyes shooting back and forth like cornered animals. It's more and more a one inning game. This unbeatable infield is growing more and more estranged from the guys playing defense, and the spectators, the 99 percent who feel the whole, the too forgiving soul of that guy on the edges of the outfield is spilling out of his sax, the guy getting hungry and hungrier until he dies right there on the pavement.

end of aside:

Bonaventura has already pictured the continuous process of word making in figural terms, and Giotto brings the act of recognition of objects into the continuously visible figure of perspectival reading.  So that now the words of reading themselves lay flat on the frontal surface that closes the phased cycle of reading.  Still, he who reads the surface as now firmly cementing the front of devout imitation and perspectival reading to the back still does not read hardly or deeply enough. For the reading circuit breaks apart if the cement of reading does not penetrate to the limits of reading.  At the limits of reading, the surface refuses to adhere to anything in front or behind it in time or space by reading its own forms as abstractions, mere formal geometric relations. 

With forms read as abstractions can have no lasting connection with surface, that the very act of reading at any time can rape and dominate forms by appropriating them and preventing any exercise of autonomy. But when words begin to process down to the skeleton of the abstract geometry of the picture, the tool of prayer opens to admit them even into the most sacrosanct, intimate domain of the image, the domain of geometry, which even words will grant, belongs not to themselves, but to the formal relations of the image.

The figure of the Stigmatization describes three primary relationships: the self in its own body, the self before another self, and the self within the phenomenal world. The first self as a body, reads itself in the pull of the central point of the central axis -- the solar plexis -- against the movements of the perifery. If the self as body opposes itself, twisting one part against another, it breaks at a point.  The second self, the self as a body seen before another self or before its own mind can now read itself through the figure of the mobius strip that contains two facing bodies.  Through this figure,  the self reads the seeing and reading of itself as continuous with being itself. If the loop of the mobius strip opposes itself it breaks apart in two points along a linear axis. The third self, the self surfacing on the surface of the figural, phenomenal world reads itself as a plane.  If the self as surface opposes itself, it must break off in the three points. In order fully to embody his three selves -- the self as body, the self seen in another self, and the self as surface, Francis must remain pinioned within three confining geometric systems -- first, the radial system of the center and periphery of his own body (the point as pivot),  second, the looping figure that contains two bodies (two points or a line as axis),  and third the triangulated plane, marked in the Stigmata,  by which the cross to which Christ is pinned translates itself onto the surface of the body of the saint (three points or a plane as rivet.)

The geometric relations that define the perceived bodily self against itself and the other, then, determine the mode of picturing the story.  Read perspectivally, from our vantage point, the structure of the story of the imitation of Christ itself is determined by the differential calculus that imagines and manipulates the infinitesimal -- the boundary or limit  -- which we have encountered over and over in the perspectival reading of the origins of perspective -- shared in likeness between the different in a continuous, linear system.  That is, we can summarize the story as follows.  That which is not the body, we call God or the infinite and the invisible; it defines and fulfills itself in moving out to the boundary, where it reads the different as likeness. The different from God that can be read as likeness is a living, mortal body dying in self-denial, performing at the outer limits of what a mortal body is. There is only one figure that describes the shared boundary between the infinite, selfless invisible and the mortal, finite, self-sensing body.  We can name that figure the spirit-infested body or the body-infested spirit of the dying Christ.  At the boundary that defines where the difference between the figure of God/man, which we call Christ, and all other mortal humans dissolves into likeness we find another, single figure -- the figure of Francis, who enters into a like fervency of spirit with the self-denying Christ. The body of Francis is not like the Godly body of the dying Christ, except in its five wounded sites.  But the interior of Francis closes around and touches the boundary of the spirit-infested body of the dying Christ, who in turn, wraps around and encloses the limits of what Augustine calls the innermost interiority -- God.  The exterior boundary of the whole system of God inside of Christ inside of Francis cuts through the body of Francis. This boundary divides Francis’s looking inward and his sense of interiority, which touches Christ, from his looking outward and his sense of being a surface read against everyday, exterior space. Touching this boundary and surrounding and sharing likeness with the interiority of Francis is perspectivally read space.  This is the last surface because it is both body and surface. We reside in it and so cannot help but touch on the boundary of the interiority of Francis, as it cradles the spirit/body of the dying Christ, which holds within it God. And from the surface that slices Francis into exteriority and interiority, we look back out on the continuous surface of the world, as both we and it reside inside of and pass through the loving body or the bodily love of the saint.

The mathematical, geometric, and formal relations on the surface of the picture have now opened up to receive not only the reading mind, but the history and story by which the reading mind first reads itself and then reads itself reading itself.   But when reading cements the thinnest layer of the surface that closes the circuit of perspectival reading by triple-locking itself into the inner sanctum of the formal, still neither word nor image read as dominant.  So reading, having travelled so far through the brambles, but not having anticipated the terms being negotiated by the figure, remains restless, nervously peering through the window both unsure of the security of its position and perhaps also having a few second thoughts about its immanent, long desired union. Before it can take the final plunge and settle down, reading paces back and forth,  inadvertently running its cementing a few more times over the surface that will enclose it, possibly forever, in the visibility of the tool of prayer.

 For Augustine, God, that is, love, is a Trinity because love requires the three terms -- lover, love (a fluid, story-telling medium into which, like perspectival space, a beholder enters mentally), and beloved, perpetually both to defer and to enact their unity. Giotto stages the relation between Christ and Francis to exemplify and make visible the phenomenon of love, or God as the phenomenon of sight itself. The apparent transparency of the surface of the picture and of the saint stands in for love, which carries the willing will effortlessly across the threshold that separates self and other. But while the mind, penetrated by the sweet, affective thoughts it learns from the body, travels freely across the threshold of the picture, the physical body is barred from entry. The black entry to the cave marks where the body of the saint enters the body of the earth. It also signifies the inviolateness of the painted world to the observer's body, which cannot penetrate the painted body of the wall. But when the observer's mind, infused with bodily memory and sense, arrives at the surface of the picture, it too confronts an obstacle: the bloody palms of the saint.  Facing the stigmata is the toll, the price of admission into the world of the painting. The stigmata prevent any sane observer from smuggling illicit, pornographic body sense into the picture. Giotto thus creates a vestibule, a second threshold -- the "hardness" of the wounds, reflected deep in the mind of the observer, to monitor just how much body the mind dares to carry with it into illusory space. Still the wings of the seraph discreetly close, shielding from the profane gaze of the outsider what appears before Francis: the whole perfect body of Christ, covered only by a thin, gauzy loincloth.

Manuscript pictures show the virtues of Christ sprouting from the wounds, which culminate the narrative of Christ's life. Here, drawing us into the picture, the narrative, which Christ passes on to Francis, sprouts from the stigmata. But the same stigmata nail Francis to the wall that holds us at bay. And this relation is reiterated in the tension, which Giotto continually exacerbates -- between surface and depth, between revealing and concealment, and between the bleaching light that dissolves space and reduces objects to signs, and the same bleaching light that reveals the objective relations that construct space. In Giotto's picture, the body at its most body-like, its most laden with meaning in internal, shared, and recorded history, is caught up in an engagement with surface at its most surface-like as it resists the accretion of meaning.

Francis, who represents humanity, strives perfectly to imitate divinity. In the very same moment divinity, the crucified God, imitates humanity by metamorphosing from a celestial being to a man, dying on a cross. So the figure of the picture exists at the intersection between the counter-imitations of Francis and Christ in one direction and of surface and readable body in the other. And this figure appears also in time, between the pre-history that leads to the making of the image and the history that followed it. That is, to read the picture from this side of it in time, we bring an additional seven centuries worth of recorded experience plus our own remembered and immediate experience to it. But it still remains impossible to imagine a picture more self-descriptive, more equally open to all the angles that look in on, produce, and limit it.  We strain in vain to imagine a story or image more violent and peaceful, more confining and freeing, more smooth in its decisive, abrupt transitions, more entangled in the untangled circuits of the reflective, but unrequited mind that produces and reads it. 

Giotto's spatial order contains, and also transcends, the perspectival order. Where the perspectival construction usually disappears after if it produces the perspectival image or vice versa (as in Bonaventura's instant of Stigmatization), here the image visibly reads as it constructs the act of reading itself. The mobius strip that describes the projective path is, more precisely, not a three-dimensional object but a surface slicing through bodies and space and reorganizing them. The figure organizes not an objective, conceptualized space, but read space, which draws the observer mentally out into a projective circuit in which the observing position constantly changes. The figure makes use of the concepts of front and back, up and down, inside and outside, self and other, time and space. But the order in which the figure feeds these dualistic concepts into space demands that space, in the act of being read, immediately violate them.

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