work unfinished in progress -- draft
And their Quest for the Tool of Prayer
William Hood noticed that the frescos by Fra Angelico at San Marco are elaborated illuminations of the prayer practice. The friars are seen spying on and gesturing outside of scenes from the gospel story.
The same way discovering the piano in the quest for a better harpsichord creates a new thing altogether with its own standards, but more so.
A usable instrument transforming prayer into a thing accomplished in the very use of that instrument would amount to a toot of that magic flute in a boot up the magic mountain, the trip a sip from the holy grail.
#Giotto
#Elaine Scarry
#William Hood
#redemption
#poetry and scholarship (their relation)
#pacifism
#linguistic determinism
#Elaine Scarry
#William Hood
#redemption
#poetry and scholarship (their relation)
#pacifism
#linguistic determinism
entitled (note to self: choose title tomorrow!)
the tao of not tao
(em)bedded up with Giotto
Giotto's yet more divine comedy
a curious move by the green knight
the birth of the scientific paradigm of knowledge
in the dream of a mystic,
and the birth of the romantic paradigm,
handmaid of science, queen to the king,
in the crystallization of that dream
in an image by Giotto,
the whole built brick by brick
to the sound of a magic flute
at first hardly heard...
but just keep laying the bricks
as carefully and lovingly as you can.
My magnificent other's grandfather
gave up practicing medicine to practice masonry;
he was discouraged in the former
by the effectiveness of placebos.
Bricks, bricks, bricks, so many bricks
held by hand make for edifying edifices
that sing songs of themselves and everybody.
No longer married to a prestigious doctor.
his wife never forgave him,
but masonry is only as far below you
as it is above you.
reduce screen width to end first line at too
reduce screen width to end first line at too
The Finding of the Not yet Named
In our Quest for the Modern Origins of Perspective
And their Quest for the Tool of Prayer
detritus of a dissertation trying
to surrender to the will of its thesis
bricks bricks bricks more bricks, just keep laying bricks, one by one, until the next break, however hot it gets out here. (The world is a wheel, and the metaphor most distant is also the closest.)
--- here leaving out the beginning and starting in the middle...
Jean-Claude Schmitt recently brought to light a Dominican prayer procedure practiced in both Spain and Italy. Four known manuscripts contain descriptions of the practice in a text entitled "De Modo Orandi (How to Pray). The manuals illustrate the gestures assumed by Dominic seen secretly praying before a Crucifix and "seeming to see the real Christ on the Cross." The text then instructs the meditating friar to imitate the gestures of the saint in order to elicit in himself the sentiment of which the gesture is both cause and effect.
--- here leaving out the beginning and starting in the middle...
Jean-Claude Schmitt recently brought to light a Dominican prayer procedure practiced in both Spain and Italy. Four known manuscripts contain descriptions of the practice in a text entitled "De Modo Orandi (How to Pray). The manuals illustrate the gestures assumed by Dominic seen secretly praying before a Crucifix and "seeming to see the real Christ on the Cross." The text then instructs the meditating friar to imitate the gestures of the saint in order to elicit in himself the sentiment of which the gesture is both cause and effect.
Gregory the Great justified the use of images as they translated the bible into a visible form, so that the illiterate, undisciplined populace could "read" the sacred stories on the walls of the cathedral; but here pictures, accompanied by texts, perform in the opposite manner. The literate friar is to unread, or deconstruct the image.
I was trying to find a new angle on the origins of modern perspective as a paradigm of knowledge - turning names into numbers, all the world a stage --
as opposed to ancient perspective, a confined theatrical technique that did not threaten the sacred paradigm and the belief in physical embodied reality finally questioned today by transexuals demanding the society adjust to their state, this phenomenon a kind of apotheosis of the dematerialization of space fully achieved with Descartes Cartesian system, the Renaissance being a transitional period, in which dematerialization meant transcendence linked to incarnation, and the nodes of perspective in paintings were inhabited and had symbolic meaning.
In other words, this liminal world of the Renaissance spiraling in on the precise crossing is an impossible oxymoron in modern terms ruled by the digital switch and the quantum leap. The immaculate conception of the modern world cannot be the same thing as the apotheosis and realization of the ancient one. That is to say that there is no difference between doubt and faith, no and yes. But whether you read or use the bridge as a wedge or a bridge, it is what it is a strung up platform over the water -- a thing that conforms quite perfectly to its image and is therefore known through the eyes. It is a being before it is a doing, just as I am a human being not a human doing, as an Instagram comic condemning capitalism pointed out. Our presence transcends our use, we work so we can play, not vice versa -- in the paper order of things. Observe the lilies of the field, they neither spin nor toil. When the eye is clear the whole body is full of light, and as they were so carefully assembled, eyes quite naturally open and look around and in their close alliance with the mind, they wonderfully wander and wonder until the fullness of wonderment leads them back to themselves, the alpha and omega of wondering wandering wonderment. All the tomes of theology have been inching along like caterpillars dreaming, and I, a child wondering and wandering in the woods with my brownie camera, was privileged to observe and record the breaking free of the cocoon.
but my brownie camera refused to spit out an image -- it was blinded by the light. The image is not conveyed in parts or sound bites, or summaries of arguments, like a Jewish rabbi, even Jesus in truth, it discourages converts --making cryptic impossible remarks and outrageous claims that only an experience of the full living presence can explain or justify in any way. Scholars are suddenly lowered onto a desert island without their books and their rhetorical methods and their self-satisfied understanding that is called understanding when it finds the alignment necessary to quiet its thought and socialize it. True understanding is a bottomless question, every question a kiss from the fountain of bliss. It's in the telling of a thing that can't be told, which is why Saint Augustine, I believe I read, said he kept writing to keep the faith.
Hood’s article on the prayer manual, consummately inhabited proto-perspective, teaching a practice of reading to unread the world, intrigued me. In order to show the friars spying on the saint gazing at the Crucifix, the illuminators produced a telescoping space. As Piero della Francesca says, perspective involves separation of an observer, a picture plane, and the observed; this is what defines it. The prayer procedure does the same thing, with the mediating saint's image interposing itself at a distance, prying apart observer and observed. The telescoping, proto-perspectival space automatically emerges to illuminate the procedure.
Following the prayer manual, the self-effacing, schematic image (tossed away or hidden under the final perspective in fully developed perspective), though, in part undoes the work it hopes to accomplish. The friar re-embodies the figures depicted by identifying with them, but when he looks at the figures again, they are flat and schematic; the bodies are sucked away into the distance.
But then again, fully developed perspective errs in the other direction. If the figures are too robust and easy to identify with, this does not assist the friar in consciously constructing that robustness himself, from inside out, by identifying with the figures from inside out. The friar is denied the full dignity of knowing what he is doing and being in charge of it.
In fact, when Peter the Chanter around this time said, "He who prays is like an artisan who knows how to use his tools." he registered an ongoing quest for a not yet perfected tool honed to the task, the way a flute is honed to, and in fact creates, the previously unknown phenomenon of flouting.
The thing that was sought, the tool so honed that it would marry prayer to the instrument that facilitated it would create a new kind of experience.
The same way discovering the piano in the quest for a better harpsichord creates a new thing altogether with its own standards, but more so.
It's more like finding the cure for cancer while trying to invent a better toothpick.
A usable instrument transforming prayer into a thing accomplished in the very use of that instrument would amount to a toot of that magic flute in a boot up the magic mountain, the trip a sip from the holy grail.
So, while investigating the origins of modern perspective in the re-emergence of the merely mechanical method that is really its afterbirth, I began, as some evidence disclosed already affirms, to track very accurately what was leading up its discovery from the other direction, the quest for a tool of prayer that would make prayer as previously known obsolete, the quest, that is, for the holy grail, but like all artists, they didn't exactly know what they were doing. It's only discernible from seven centuries hindsight. I came to see, though, that they were relentlessly, systematically carving away and getting rid of what is not the holy grail. As you will see, following this line of thought, I was able to make sense of the continuous trajectory that lead to the discovery of perspective.
At this point in my research, I was just tracking a scent and didn't yet know I was tracking the quest for the holy grail. I just happened to find a relation between the structure of a Dominican prayer practice and perspective. For this work, I was praised, my dissertation thesis approved, and I won a grant to research Dominican prayer manuals in the Vatican library. Caroline Bynum, in the history department, was excited by the work and suggested I concurrently investigate Franciscan modalities of imitation. She directed me to other work of Jean-Claude Schmitt, where he noticed details in the renditions of the Stigmatization of Saint Francis that address similar issues of distancing and intimacy that impact how space is constructed and read.
We're taught that artists were forced to adhere to the theological program, and only in the secular world are artists free to speak their own minds in their work. All lovers of sacred art who bother to look into it soon learn that is just flat wrong. The artists studied and embraced the sacred content, as these tropes could not have been better woven ropes for climbing up the mountain for the view they sought. This sacred tradition uniquely demands and provides tools for the embodiment of the divine and visualization of the invisible. That practical embodiment is also fraught with intrinsic (legitimate) alchemical magic in which the artists believed.
At this point in my research, I was just tracking a scent and didn't yet know I was tracking the quest for the holy grail. I just happened to find a relation between the structure of a Dominican prayer practice and perspective. For this work, I was praised, my dissertation thesis approved, and I won a grant to research Dominican prayer manuals in the Vatican library. Caroline Bynum, in the history department, was excited by the work and suggested I concurrently investigate Franciscan modalities of imitation. She directed me to other work of Jean-Claude Schmitt, where he noticed details in the renditions of the Stigmatization of Saint Francis that address similar issues of distancing and intimacy that impact how space is constructed and read.
We're taught that artists were forced to adhere to the theological program, and only in the secular world are artists free to speak their own minds in their work. All lovers of sacred art who bother to look into it soon learn that is just flat wrong. The artists studied and embraced the sacred content, as these tropes could not have been better woven ropes for climbing up the mountain for the view they sought. This sacred tradition uniquely demands and provides tools for the embodiment of the divine and visualization of the invisible. That practical embodiment is also fraught with intrinsic (legitimate) alchemical magic in which the artists believed.
By contrast, there are many regulations of art's content today that might not originate in the artist's conscious choice or any understanding of how an artist by nature thinks and functions.
It's like the medieval artists were gradually evolving a bludgeoning stick into a hammer to build a house, but the authorities didn't notice and kept using it to bludgeon and trained everybody else to do the same, in fact, prohibiting other readings of the strangely formed stick.
The formalists later classified the types of contours and named the different schools by the qualities of the line. Sometimes an imaginative preacher would read edifying, pious stories into the strange, incomprehensible (All artists are crazy, that's a given.) contours on the shape. Uninspired artists with technical ability won accolades by elaborating contours in flamboyant frivolity -- to celebrate God's joyous incomprehensibility, and why not? That's a side of God, and the supplicant is charged to enjoy all God's sides, but the artists in quest of the grail were in an Apollonian more than the Dionesian mood. Not that the elixir wouldn't have Dionesian qualities, but as I saw their quest for the tool of prayer almost aligning for some while with our quest for the origin of perspective, I suspected that they were after intoxicants similar to those that induced the drunken ecstasy of the painter Uccello, whose wife would try to call him to bed, but he would stay up all night sighing, "oh what a lovely thing is this perspective!" Many are called, but few are chosen to enjoy such swich licour, of which vertu engendred is the flour, as the spring morning light rises on a reborn world whose nest of bones the artist works all night, night after night, to forge and assemble. Perspective is villainized because we read it from outside in only, not inside out as well; we read it without faith in the convergence of opposites that it embodies, or most of us do. At the vortex, where the sacred world turns into the secular one, it is both at once. It is a third paradigm.
(The late modern (post-? I doubt it) age has so long been in a raw Dionesian mood that it's giving me, for one, a headache. Change change is spice of life, change is life, change is everything. It's time for a change from the sameness of constant change.)
Anyway, for now, let's go back to being them, thinking that they're looking for the perfect tool of prayer, or not so much thinking, or looking, as being vehicles of a process unfolding through them. As them, we've already arrived at the illuminated Domican prayer manual. So now we're analyzing -- how the manual functions to try to get the bugs out, that it function as a tool of prayer more perfectly.
It's my observation and understanding that in respect to the naked phenomenon all language, however attentive, is at least minimally displaced. It would have to be, or it wouldn't be language. There would be no consciousness, and even no sentience, which demands a perception of a difference between an "I" and what's trying to devour it, though long or deep observation does not sustain this difference. This displacement is particularly evident when language tries to describe a potential or actual patch of the world that fits the program of the holy grail.
However, there is another displacement backward: long and deep observation also reveals that empirical experience is made of language, which breathes recognizable form into the dust, even the language that recognizes the not yet named as such. So language, in long and deep observation, functions like the veils that swim over the forms of Botticelli's muses, in concealing them, revealing them, the displacement awakening the viewer's sentient awareness of their actual or represented actual presence.
By contrast, a fast snapped photograph of a gut spewed battlefield is a form of withholding of evidence, as it impedes the flowering of recognition and awareness planted by language in the evidence in the beginning of its existence as such, and it numbs sentience. The sense of being tantalized, tormented, and tortured by a writer who does not give the reader this kind of embryonic tissue, torn out of the womb of language, to chew on, digest, and expel, is in the undeveloped or unraveled mind, atrophied heart, and burned out, chemically and otherwise mutilated tastebuds of the fully socialized beholder whose last frontier is slumming.
As I pursued this line of research, I began -- leading to the later moment when my advisor would suspect me of "not being a fully socialized person" -- to identify with the seekers of, and believers in, the tool of prayer that would recreate prayer, the way that a flute recreates sound to conform to what the flute wants to sound like, and no floutest by nature need ever seek another instrument. I could feel they were onto something that went beyond perspective. In identifying with and entering into the process, I was hoping to discover what it was, though at the time I just thought I was looking into the origins of perspective. Contrariwise, if nobody were ever to enter, retrospectively, into the process that revealed the form, nobody would be able to recognize this absolutely anomalous phenomenon, the so called holy grail, if it were right before his or her eyes. To us disguised behind the, to us, misleading name, holy grail, it would blend right into everything else, its qualities appropriated by known objects, such as works of art, which are allowed to look like no known thing without being the one and only so-called holy grail.
It's like the medieval artists were gradually evolving a bludgeoning stick into a hammer to build a house, but the authorities didn't notice and kept using it to bludgeon and trained everybody else to do the same, in fact, prohibiting other readings of the strangely formed stick.
The formalists later classified the types of contours and named the different schools by the qualities of the line. Sometimes an imaginative preacher would read edifying, pious stories into the strange, incomprehensible (All artists are crazy, that's a given.) contours on the shape. Uninspired artists with technical ability won accolades by elaborating contours in flamboyant frivolity -- to celebrate God's joyous incomprehensibility, and why not? That's a side of God, and the supplicant is charged to enjoy all God's sides, but the artists in quest of the grail were in an Apollonian more than the Dionesian mood. Not that the elixir wouldn't have Dionesian qualities, but as I saw their quest for the tool of prayer almost aligning for some while with our quest for the origin of perspective, I suspected that they were after intoxicants similar to those that induced the drunken ecstasy of the painter Uccello, whose wife would try to call him to bed, but he would stay up all night sighing, "oh what a lovely thing is this perspective!" Many are called, but few are chosen to enjoy such swich licour, of which vertu engendred is the flour, as the spring morning light rises on a reborn world whose nest of bones the artist works all night, night after night, to forge and assemble. Perspective is villainized because we read it from outside in only, not inside out as well; we read it without faith in the convergence of opposites that it embodies, or most of us do. At the vortex, where the sacred world turns into the secular one, it is both at once. It is a third paradigm.
(The late modern (post-? I doubt it) age has so long been in a raw Dionesian mood that it's giving me, for one, a headache. Change change is spice of life, change is life, change is everything. It's time for a change from the sameness of constant change.)
To recap where we are, at this point, if we're them, we're tinkering around thinking we're looking for the holy grail, the perfect tool of prayer with a hotline to the source of the universe; or we'll say that in retrospect, because nobody is consciously doing that, they're just making tools of prayer that very gradually are trying to perfect themselves. If we're us, we're tinkering around thinking we're looking for the origins of perspective. We really do think we're doing that, but I doubt it.
Anyway, for now, let's go back to being them, thinking that they're looking for the perfect tool of prayer, or not so much thinking, or looking, as being vehicles of a process unfolding through them. As them, we've already arrived at the illuminated Domican prayer manual. So now we're analyzing -- how the manual functions to try to get the bugs out, that it function as a tool of prayer more perfectly.
The prayer process demands the observer become aware of the difference between seeing and being, that he isolate the image, then effectively turn around and put it on like a wrap, then slip into the skin of the participants, at which point the image disappears.
 |
| Add caption |
It's a dance where one partner turns to fold into the arms of the other, so he shadows her, and now his left foot is doing just what her left foot is doing, his right just like her right, and there really aren't two, there are just one and a shadow, and the shadow disappears as he passes behind her, then she unwinds and now it's her left foot that imitates his right foot, reminding the two that even as they're one, they are also different.
The world of roles the manual creates is a stage, but the play's not yet the thing. The friar is lost in the role, but he is also lost in space. He only has the name of a character: observer. The observer will play the observer. Then the friar will stop being that character. He will then play the gesturer. The gesturer will then allow himself to shift into the role of the empathizer. The play is happening nowhere. The constellation that joins these nodes is a tale almost as remote to the experience of them as a big dipper or an archer is remote to Van Gogh's living, burning balls of fire.
It's my observation and understanding that in respect to the naked phenomenon all language, however attentive, is at least minimally displaced. It would have to be, or it wouldn't be language. There would be no consciousness, and even no sentience, which demands a perception of a difference between an "I" and what's trying to devour it, though long or deep observation does not sustain this difference. This displacement is particularly evident when language tries to describe a potential or actual patch of the world that fits the program of the holy grail.
All this obfuscation, though, encouraged the development of many different kinds of ornate and beautiful, hammer-like bludgeoning sticks, some so lovely they could never be used to bludgeon, all the exquisite medieval works we see in museums today; but, ironically, most of all, it helped these Apollonian artists in their deviant insistence to hold to the straight and narrow path. They moved toward the discovery of perspective in this quest, but a pre-packaged way of rendering three-dimensional verisimilitude was not what they were after.
With the flamboyant formalists, the imaginative preachers, and all the ulterior modes and manners, artists in quest of the holy grail, their effort and faith fed by the gospel text's weirdly consistent encouragement, could keep developing the "magic" flute in the open, even funded by the corrupt authorities, blind to the details, sight itself considered an impediment to spiritual vision, just as acutely attentive vision is generally considered an impediment in historical research, though you can get away with it if you aren't unlucky enough to stumble on the holy grail.
Meanwhile, the artists in closing in on the object of their desire began to educate the whole world into opening its eyes, but still, except possibly in hermetic circles, everybody - conveniently blinked when the actual, desired object flashed into view, and history rushed past it without noticing. Had this aversion been averted, could it have averted the black plague? Will history learn? It sometimes does.
It is like, actually, more than like, it is so that the mainstream of history parted (some creme de la creme in high places, usually behind the scenes) and went two ways around it, not yet to rejoin itself, so necessary it was to avoid all contact with something so extraterrestrial.
By contrast, a fast snapped photograph of a gut spewed battlefield is a form of withholding of evidence, as it impedes the flowering of recognition and awareness planted by language in the evidence in the beginning of its existence as such, and it numbs sentience. The sense of being tantalized, tormented, and tortured by a writer who does not give the reader this kind of embryonic tissue, torn out of the womb of language, to chew on, digest, and expel, is in the undeveloped or unraveled mind, atrophied heart, and burned out, chemically and otherwise mutilated tastebuds of the fully socialized beholder whose last frontier is slumming.
As I pursued this line of research, I began -- leading to the later moment when my advisor would suspect me of "not being a fully socialized person" -- to identify with the seekers of, and believers in, the tool of prayer that would recreate prayer, the way that a flute recreates sound to conform to what the flute wants to sound like, and no floutest by nature need ever seek another instrument. I could feel they were onto something that went beyond perspective. In identifying with and entering into the process, I was hoping to discover what it was, though at the time I just thought I was looking into the origins of perspective. Contrariwise, if nobody were ever to enter, retrospectively, into the process that revealed the form, nobody would be able to recognize this absolutely anomalous phenomenon, the so called holy grail, if it were right before his or her eyes. To us disguised behind the, to us, misleading name, holy grail, it would blend right into everything else, its qualities appropriated by known objects, such as works of art, which are allowed to look like no known thing without being the one and only so-called holy grail.
The Dominican procedure is a highly contemplative practice, and completely submissive to given language. That is, the saint is looking to locate himself in one of the approved, fixed roles representing known, defined states of being -- observer, gesturer, empathizer, where the act of moving between these states is a technical problem of no concern. You want to get to the base as fast as possible, and stay there, until being there long enough catapults you instantly over to the next state.
So here the dance of prayer not only resembles a baseball field (see diagram above), the game itself is similar. That game similarly privileges contemplation and stasis, where you want to get on a base, where it's safe, a known, legal, authorized place, described and approved by the trusted authorities, as fast as possible, and you want to get home, where it's even safer and quieter, you want to get back to the quiet and safety enough to steal a base. It's eternal damnation, the black void, you're fleeing when you're between the bases. Where it's safe and still, there's time to reflect, to contemplate the situation.
Meanwhile the field is charged by subtle signals passing among the players spying on each other, the way the friars spied on the saint, to analyze, and imitate, and even possibly one up the model. Many are called and few are chosen to win salvation. There might be a fixed number of places. You want your friends to get there with you. Only one team will win the world series. All the sages agree. It's a hard path to the top of the mountain, and many fall by the wayside. Facts are facts.
By the long and deep, unhurried, unforced observation so facilitated, she sincerely concludes, quite accurately beyond a reasonable doubt, in defiance of her funders, who perpetrate the ulterior dogma, arbitrarily related to the question of sincerity, that beauty is truth, and truth is beauty, and that is all there is, and all you need to know.
But it takes a thief to figure it out. Corruption, as Walt Whitman notices, is the husk that holds the poetry. I'm glad when I was a worm I was the relatively innocent type, who pretty much had no idea what she was doing, and I'm glad I bit the apple, hair of the dog that bit us, to figure it out and evolve into a higher species of being, and so I resolve to sin no more, except when I don't know what I'm doing, which, according to neurologists who study the typical human brain, is about nine-five percent of the time, and to distribute the stolen property to the spiritually starving people.
Art reception, and most of art making today is generally a high stakes baseball game of sorts. You intercept the message from the artist, and ricochets off you, you storm into the fray, first sliding into the authorized base, "observer", then you make or steal your way into the authorized base of identifying with work, then the base of doing something with it, then getting somebody buy what you're doing with it -- you're home! Don't get delayed between the bases. That's not the game. This isn't soccer or basketball. That's a whole different game.
Meanwhile the field is charged by subtle signals passing among the players spying on each other, the way the friars spied on the saint, to analyze, and imitate, and even possibly one up the model. Many are called and few are chosen to win salvation. There might be a fixed number of places. You want your friends to get there with you. Only one team will win the world series. All the sages agree. It's a hard path to the top of the mountain, and many fall by the wayside. Facts are facts.
By the long and deep, unhurried, unforced observation so facilitated, she sincerely concludes, quite accurately beyond a reasonable doubt, in defiance of her funders, who perpetrate the ulterior dogma, arbitrarily related to the question of sincerity, that beauty is truth, and truth is beauty, and that is all there is, and all you need to know.
But it takes a thief to figure it out. Corruption, as Walt Whitman notices, is the husk that holds the poetry. I'm glad when I was a worm I was the relatively innocent type, who pretty much had no idea what she was doing, and I'm glad I bit the apple, hair of the dog that bit us, to figure it out and evolve into a higher species of being, and so I resolve to sin no more, except when I don't know what I'm doing, which, according to neurologists who study the typical human brain, is about nine-five percent of the time, and to distribute the stolen property to the spiritually starving people.
Art reception, and most of art making today is generally a high stakes baseball game of sorts. You intercept the message from the artist, and ricochets off you, you storm into the fray, first sliding into the authorized base, "observer", then you make or steal your way into the authorized base of identifying with work, then the base of doing something with it, then getting somebody buy what you're doing with it -- you're home! Don't get delayed between the bases. That's not the game. This isn't soccer or basketball. That's a whole different game.
