Giotto's Yet More Divine Comedy 5: imitatio Christi need not be religious

imitatio Christi need not be religious

Every attempt at preparation fails -- I'm sure it's my fault, but you can't be good at everything, and sometimes being honest and being polite can't squeeze into the same rush hour subway car, one must wait for the next one, and oh no, here comes acutely reflected honesty, that is the worst, shoving everybody aside, failing to bother to thank and honor the tenured theories, unable to explain all the year long twists and turns by which it arrived at itself, but offering so many points to connect that your head spins, wearing weights in the shoes it's asking the reader to walk many miles in, as it counters all the conventional constructs that have become second nature, forcing its way into that car because it can't afford to miss another one, suffering the scowls of all the strap hangers it's squashing up against....

....most if not all of the religious, on their side, as well as the non- and anti-religious on their side, will want to wash their hands of this project before they ever get a molecule of it under their nose, lest they catch the killing virus of the enemy position. It would not occur to the former that I'm only practicing Imitatio Christi -- claiming to represent the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth while crying out -- impossible, there's no such thing! and then giving up the ghost every other paragraph (if you read between the lines). This practice of Imitatio Christi is what art itself inevitably does when art is not forced to serve ideological ends or conform to non-artistic criteria. (Such art chooses its own subject matter and uses it as athletic equipment, or as a crutch if a person or society's art has been wounded and can't get up without it. There's no shame in using a crutch if you need one, there's shame in cutting off your nose to spite your face. And what art, being a mirror of the human soul, doesn't walk with a heartbeat synchronized, syncopated limp?)

Whatever your affiliation -- you really can't avoid one, something is keeping the ground that is spinning you upside down seem stable -- you can also be a citizen of the bridge. You can be art as well as like or make it. You can pour on that gasoline that makes the ticks of idiotic ideologies (id wearing superego's mask) cling to us and suck our blood withdraw, but then be sure to wash it off, lest you set yourself on fire. Or set yourself on fire and then dive into this ice cold lake and try to swim to the island way way way out there, and then the next one beyond, and beyond, and beyond, until we're safely on the continent of the next frontier. Without those ticks, we're strong, and we're free!

okay, the guard's gone for the night, got my nail file, time to get to work on the tunnel that might just lead back to another cell, my sense of direction is fallible, but maybe I'll find a friend there...and a treasure!

STOP! STOP! Stop apologizing and get on with it!

okay okay I just want them to know what they're in for, the sticks, the carrots, the stick made of a carrot, so they can try to bite in whenever it bites, just let me give them a quick taste of it, the stick of this Italian carrot just in from the countryside in the mid-nineteen eighties...

...you see investigating the origins of perspective, my boring -- though I found, and I guess a few others might find it fascinating -- scholarly research involved thousands of logically linked steps that lead me to an anomalous object that rearranges the world, an object transparent to this journey, just as it crystallizes it. It's in taking the journey step by step that the object slowly appears, and the whole world is rearranged into a form of life versus a mere agglomeration of chemicals. The enlivening of everything has global repercussions, but the only way to it is going through it, as you also suffer the death of the deathly one to which they begin attaching us the instant we can speak. I doubt there is a messiah coming other than the lively life of everything.

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head of the giraffe

DIRECTIONS

AND FURTHER INTRODUCTION

zoom in under "view" a few times if text too small for you

draft

work in progress

continued from part 1 found at https://themongreldiscourse.blogspot.com/p/ulterior.html

BUT I recommend diving in here, nel mezzo del cammin. -- in the middle of the journey,

and half way through the middle going back to the beginning. Link will be offered again at the recommended point of return.

Going this way, at first you won't have any idea what I'm talking about or referring to, generally and often specifically. Be prepared for that mysteriously barricading effect among others. Although most of the meaning will slip through your fingers, there is so much meaning, that will be enough to assimilate on the first round. Just don't worry when you don't understand and just move right along, like you are watching a movie running on a reel on its own time. Although you have the reel and can run it again later, the projector only has two or three speeds. So it will be a map full of holes, and many of the missing parts will arrive later. Still, though you might in the end begin to put it all together with the scraps available, the final map remains faded, torn, and hole ridden, and this will awaken and exercise the faculties required to read it in the most effective way. It will be more like shadowing and following the process of discovery as a discoverer stumbling into an alien domain and having to sort through and make sense of the unknown stuff yourself, rather than having the completed discovery coming from the opposite direction hit you in the eye like a big pizza pie before you're ready for amore. In that case your mind would just stick out its hand and parry the blow before the backwards image could stamp itself on the screen in there.

Yes, I'd be happy to hand it all to you on a silver platter, but you would never accept it that way, without working your way into it and testing the parts as they come by your own methods to be sure they're safe to handle, where the "thing" being ultimately offered is an alien object or essence not yet named, defying and containing all known categories of discourse, unable to find its proper department.

This has always been a problem with the art history "department", where everything that has departed into departments -- science, philosophy, literature, psychology, mathematics (critical in this case, involving the origins of mathematical space), history -- arrives for the use of professional jugglers of all these balls to parce out the parcels of works of art that themselves suck up everything that's out there and begin this process of consolidation. Here the problem just comes to a head, that's why the art historians who trained me to juggle rejected it instead of kissing the beast in the mirror, those cowards who might be master jugglers, but today without faith in the fairy tale -- albeit 5% inspiration, 10%perspiration and persecution, 85% drudgery, though relief at escape from less worthy endeavors can spin that straw into gold -- of discovery and so generally unworthy of their sacred charge carefully and scientifically to dissect and read the entrails to guide the ship of state safely into the future. Meanwhile well bespoke science is quite naturally poetry -- which is why barristers and technicians of all sorts secretly read their clear, elegant, truly supremely poetic missives -- comparable to the table Ezra Pound says all poets should build to know how to write a poem -- over and over rightly beaming with pride -- and of course, poorly articulating a problem and a method is a sure way to make it wrong. And contrariwise the most comprehensive scientific statement is also the most beautiful image in the world -- once you kiss the beast, which then appears in its true form, which fear, the root of all prejudice, alone is blind to. In approaching this crystallized image, language begins to melt, but don't confuse that with lack of clarity. It is merely owning its own nature to optimize its capacity.

Alas, to attempt in advance to point in the direction of what I'm trying to transmit, the finding itself -- a verb, an ongoing action that just keeps happening and newly unfolding for its whole life, the way a painting that is worthy of the name just keeps painting itself (if in oils the thing itself evolves) -- hoping you might even this early catch a glimpse of its light, I can only reel through metaphors that arise in my head without rhyme or reason or any sense of proportion in relation to the previous one, that relation impossible to parse, like the size of the earth in relation to that of the universe. The "think" -- that's a typo, I meant "thing", but "think" works too -- in truth represents the consolidated, compacted, compressed over eons, but not yet crystallized essence of discovery itself, a burning orb, a ball of fire, massive but not made of mass, with your job, Prometheus, being to unbind yourself, catch it, hurl it up into and beyond the sky, ready to do its job when the sun burns out. Who else but you is qualified?

also I recommend printing it and reading a thing you can touch and hold and during a power outage, read by candlelight. In fact, I believe it will in any case be a lot more legible if read by candlelight. Please try that.

quest for and finding -- in the guise of the quest for the origins of perspective or mathematical space -- of the missing link -- between then and now, there and here etc. quite literally and verifiably restoring the wholeness of everything that science, beginning with Saint Augustine, who tore apart the sign and signified, has ruptured, this wonderful but at first acutely troubling, divine and generative intrusion, on the considered consent of virgin science, leaving its hymen miraculously intact.

it's carefully enough described to be verified, but it all will just sound dreamy and abstract, a mere beautiful, perfect idea that found a rather grotesque and awkward form to embody it, as the world had to twist and contort itself most horribly tortuously to squeeze its square body into that round hole -- once and never again, so to no particular purpose or effect.

but no, however hard won, however littered the battlefield with the gruesome detritus of war, it happened, the world took the form of the most beautiful idea in the world and fully embodied it, obviating every sacred and secular theory based on this being impossible. You don't notice how this impossibility is the lynchpin of every rival scheme until you do think about why that must be so, and then begin to notice how often it's repeated that this is impossible, just to deflect any attention or efforts in its direction. But this single superhero laid them all low. The war is over! and we won! We won because art won against every domineering ideology, every lesser, less just, less loving, less replete, less attentive, less healing language. Great art won against all rival forms of art. Fair play won against cheating even at cheating's chosen games. Poetry won against prose in its arena too. Flying won against crawling while managing to crawl lower into a yet more squeezed spot that crawling ever could. By a mere fortuitously elegant arrangement of dead stuff, life won over death, and art came alive to imitate life's way of doing just that and win life that is worthy of life -- or at least its map and underpinnings, no guarantees with gardening.

Nobody will probably admit it, but everybody who's been here and read this will know, even if they never know they know it, and that knowing will be contagious even when no symptoms show in the carrier, and confluenza will spread like wildfire all over the world making so many differences that can't be tracked by the cameras that they will be helpless against it.

apocotastasis now!

and if not, it will be our secret, just us two, the last true believers willing to take this terrible trek for a lick of the salt of quiddity in the whole wide world

Next you will be diving into the middle of the intricate, concatenated academic argument -- yes this is no joke, listen up, keep up, and scrub up, you will be joining me in my laboratory carefully to cook up Sweet Baby Frankenstein -- hair of the dog that bit us, a circle of bonfires lit all around it to suck up the oxygen from the forest fire -- by infallibly logical principles and acute attention to the properties of the materials at hand -- in which the whole mainly consists. Again, just note the somewhat seemingly senselessly scattered nodes.

After you come upon the link that returns you to the beginning and then go there and keep going, you will soon begin see enough of them to glimpse the constellation and finally grasp the method in this madness.

I told you the metaphors shift abruptly and bear no logical or fathomable relation to one another, so be prepared now for a screeching shift of gears. The good news is we'll stick in the next gear coming up for quite a while. Don't switch on automatic drive though, or you will certainly fall asleep.