draft
work in progress
the tao of not tao
or
a curious move by the green knight
continued from giottopage2.blogspot.com
In everyday life, the figural presences in the act of appearing read as already existing objects -- evocations of past phenomena, fixed and encoded in memory and indexed by words.
To create a common world, we cannot disinter from language either ourselves or the figures coming into presence around us, but we can burrow through to the figure and scrape off some of the dust around it. By showing phenomena in the very act of consuming and regurgitating language and vice versa, Bonaventura finds a way to read the figure directly from inside the thick, muddy medium of absent, objective phantoms, or figures fixated in language.
The attempt by Bonaventura to unrivet, rather than to disinter the figure, in fact, has a precedent in the language of the Gospels read not as a collection of signs and symbols of past events, but as a tool for restoring presence (including the present affect of absence). This special language consists in three types of figural or indexical signs, specially constructed to protect phenomena from fixating on objects. The evolution of language from distancing weapon to a tool of reparation of experience in the Gospels is similarly, but far more thoroughly, analyzed by Elaine Scarry in The Body in Pain. When I happened to read her book right after I had written the first version of this one, I felt as if I were acting by a script she already wrote.)
The first type of counter-signifying sign is the sensory index, for example, the touching of the hem of the garment as it signifies healing. Here the act of reading transfers meaning from the distinct objects of hem and hand to the present figure of the boundary they share. The act of reading this counter-signifier occurs in the instant the mind crosses the boundary not only between the hem and the hand, but also between the reading of named, phantom objects evoked by different words and the reading of the sensed sameness of different objects in the presence of touch. Yet more blessed are those who later believe without seeing, those who see/read directly the sensing and reading of others. In this second type of figural sign, embedding reading inside of reading, also protects the phenomenon of reading from attaching to and fixating on exterior objects. In the third type of sign, the parable, the signifier withdraws from the object in yet another direction -- onto the larger cultural practices, natural processes, and norms of behavior from which words and objects come, to which they point, and also from which they alienate themselves. Of the three figural signs, the first is sub-literate -- the spoken enacted; the second is purely literate -- the reading of the record of reading; and the third is supra-literate -- the reading of writing as the written un-writing itself.
This language does not un-rivet the figure by jerking it free of language. When these three, non-objective signs construct themselves in opposition to language, they rather encompass and describe language, and at the same time, they objectify their own collective existence as counter-language. So they defy language by offering themselves to it and turning the other cheek. They perform the counter-embrace that loosens the grip of the opposition.
In the silent, visual language of the Stigmatization seen by Bonaventura, as in the inflammatory, demanding, meekness of the oratory of Christ, the solid block of written language explodes into glowing fragments that display themselves in fireworks instead of aiming at an enemy. The shooting sparks inscribe their trail on space and return, falling directly into and through the blind hands and eyes of the watchers. There, like lazars, they heal through wounding.
Bonaventura's novelistic fragment paints a moving picture of the continuous process by which the two lovers, words and things, come together to produce newly authoritative words and things. The nocturnal tryst climaxes at the instant when an instantly legible whole, in being read as such, displaces its components. To waste the precious time of words and the precious space full of things on haggling over the question of which came first, the word of the text or the image of the thing, is an exercise Bonaventura leaves to the rhetoricist scribes and the materialist pharisees. He surrenders to change, he seems to be a verb, never to accomplish it it finally, but always to be accomplishing the shedding of the difference between us and our so-called different stories and so-called different theories and theologies, as reading no more differs from becoming, even becoming the story of making words itself flickering and fading in and out of view, slowly moving, ever-changing, quivering moon shadows filtering through distant leaves, as we no more differ from our changeling spirits, as art no more differs from its history, as seeing no more differs from becoming, that is, loving, as the bottomless fount of never pours into always..
We're observing something that is melting the lens by which we are observing it by bringing itself into focus, rendering the lens that lead us to it obsolete. The novel lens isn't yet, but is becoming a kaleidoscope catching, dispersing, and ordering the light, and that's all there is, which we always knew, but now it must be sinking in, because we're starting to see it, outside of time, stolen into the heart of enemy camp, outside of self and other, then and now, them and us...
Given that we are in language, the most immediate, bodily, sensual thing we can do is to experience the bodily immediacy, the sibilance and sensuality of words as they sink down into themselves and point to their limits, the point on the horizon and the line from us to it just a line to hang the zigzag of sailing on, so it won't fall apart and become some other thing. Meanwhile language in presence includes feeling all the absence of it present, the tinkling of thinking, the phantoms clinging to the winding and twisting ladders of logic. Mother Mary whispers, let it be.
Vasari, writing in 1556, describes a method, prospettiva, to create an image using the geometric constructions of a ground plan and an elevation; he attributes the discovery of the method to Brunelleschi.
Vasari apparently refers to Brunelleschi's lost demonstration panels, dated to around 1410, which survive through Manetti's description, dated to around 1490. But no one knows how Brunelleschi produced what Manetti describes as their surprising effect of verisimilitude or even of what the effect precisely consisted. When the first description of the method of perspective appears in Alberti's treatise in 1435, Alberti dedicates the treatise to Brunelleschi but does not associate him with perspective at all; and neither does Alberti himself claim authorship.
As Damisch and many others have noted, it is the later fifteenth and sixteenth-centuries that invent the idea that an early fifteenth-century author of perspective exists. The gradual clarification of the method and the appearance of perspectival images in the fifteenth-century are technical achievements. But perspectival effects in images appear gradually, and methods of perspectival construction are varied. Still, the invention of perspective is indeed a "catastrophe," initiating what Panofsky, following Cassirer, calls a new paradigm of knowledge insofar as perspective constitutes a radically new way of reading an image.
Read as a construction, perspective replaces the image as an absent object with the image as a non-objective presence or coming into presence. So, here, at the origins of perspective, before the image peels off from the method, perspective is anything but banal. It is the very essence of the sublime.
In fact, no historical evidence links any of the specific perspectival achievements of the fifteenth-century -- neither the panels of Brunelleschi, nor the first surviving perspectival image of Masaccio, nor the treatise of Alberti -- to the discovery of a new mode of reading. Instead, the historical evidence of Bonaventura's text forces us to back-date the invention of the perspectival signifier, if not the word prospettiva which later attaches to it, by about a century and a half. As with a tool, forms of verbal language precede and give rise to the new physical form of prospettiva, which, once delineated, gives rise to a new name and new meaning in language, and finally new uses.
To return to the story by Bonaventura, careful visualizing of the scene increases the pain for the viewer by rendering it more vivid; but even as this is so, the single images -- the seraph hovering in space confusing the saint and demanding he dwell on it -- unlike the image in the Dominican procedure, which image is never to be dwelt on -- move radically to attenuate the pain, even numb the observer -- as to read an image approaches an instantaneous effect accruing from distancing oneself from the objects depicted. Francis is to study the image with disinterest, and come to understand, even as he remains lost in wonder. Though the wounding that follows has the reverse effect, I wonder if part of the purpose is to begin to teach him how, in the future, in order to live with the wounds, he can mentally reverse the reversal.
In general, the time the signal that something painful is being depicted arrives at the nerves by way of the brain, the beauty of an image has swept the observer past it to inhabit the next instant of the blissfully engulfing, all-present present. This is why the museum goers and art historians study the images in complete detachment from the subject matter depicted. Originally the discipline of art history included art appreciation. Students were encouraged to be lost in wonder before these objects as impenetrably visual phenomena, and after noticing and often, as does Bonaventura, carefully describing the images, then to try to understand them. This discipline of appreciating and understanding images is distinctly separated, as in Bonaventura's story, from the act of identifying with them.
Here is born, in and along with perspective, the discipline of art history, the arresting of the image to appreciate, wonder at it, and to come to understand its meaning, and the discipline of science, and that of modern philosophy, when the image fades away, and you begin to understand, which accounts for the rational french "fear of sight", the modern world in this nocturnal tryst was, before he was born, already leaving Dante behind, with his glimpse of substances and accidents bound in a single volume by a single light, or it's only now circling back to reclaim that reunion more elated and strongly sewn than the union before the rupture.
Here is born, in and along with perspective, the discipline of art history, the arresting of the image to appreciate, wonder at it, and to come to understand its meaning, and the discipline of science, and that of modern philosophy, when the image fades away, and you begin to understand, which accounts for the rational french "fear of sight", the modern world in this nocturnal tryst was, before he was born, already leaving Dante behind, with his glimpse of substances and accidents bound in a single volume by a single light, or it's only now circling back to reclaim that reunion more elated and strongly sewn than the union before the rupture.
In order indeed to circle back, that the wheels turn so the caravan can inch forward, in my reading, the modern world, leaving Dante and Giotto for this long long stretch behind, took off from Bonaventura's moment. It dragged the story out of the operating room before it succeeded in re-sewing what it tore apart to perform the surgery. It had not overcome the splicing, which overcoming would allow the continuous process to prevail over the discontinuous, procedural aspects, but rather, featured its own failure to be able to do that, the story itself transparent to that failure.
In short, Bonaventura's story has failed better, but in terms of the quest for the holy grail, the tool of prayer that instantaneously and continuously defines the act, it has still not failed good enough. Though now there is a continuous reel that illuminates that division silently, Bonaventura's story, in which the vision fades away as observation moves to empathy, surrenders the process in the end to the procedure. It upholds Augustine's earlier insistence on the division between signs and what they signify, just as the Taoist affirms and constantly features the difference between light and dark, even as they flow through and into each other. It tries to love and honor woman and artist, darkness and absence, but in the end it can only observe and represent these things, and appreciate them. It cannot fully enter into them.
However kind and again, patronizing to the dark side, it is essentially a yang, dualistic world.
However kind and again, patronizing to the dark side, it is essentially a yang, dualistic world.
Time suffused in light restores memory surfacing in the present, even as, paradoxically, here that surfacing memory tells the very story of time's way of devouring the past. That story is a wedge, but illuminated, it is also a bridge. We have seen the light entering to bind the unfolding story across time, but it is only sporadically lit, time in the end devours the consecutively spotlit occasions.
Artists are rarely aware of what they are doing, and it's only interpreters in retrospect who can read the score as not just music but a grand opera with a libretto. I hold to the renegade view that my job is not just to provide a subjective reading among many. I'm supposed to find the words of the grand opera intended by history itself, of which the artist is an instrument. The way I test my interpretation is the way scientists test their theories. Can I predict the next next lines of the opera even before I find them?
That's exactly what happened. I was effectively predicting the lines, the next moves in the quest for the holy grail, before they appeared to me. By the time I arrived at the holy grail, I had already constructed it, and the object simply helped me to brush the dust off the blindness to what I was doing. I was systematically dissolving the difference between an artist and a historian in the way the grail, as you sip from it, dissolves all difference and converts time into all present space, the future creating the past; and I was gradually illuminating the way it does that -- just as Bonaventura gradually illuminates the field of prayer that as it collapses the difference between subject and object.
Only sporadically at this point, the way it sporadically happens in the story, where in the end, time wins over space and devours the image; and we know that Francis empathized with the suffering of Christ and that he received the wounds in feeling that suffering; but our only glimpse of the interior vision appears in Caravaggio's image, as the saint in ecstasy swoons backward into the arms of an angel, as all the encompassing experience obliterates time, time the source of all pain.
After four hours lost in the woods pursued by a bear in an audiobook, my nerves vibrated inside me like screeching violins with torn fibers lacerating my muscles. It was twilight when I arrived, and in Schermerhorn Hall, haunted by ghosts, lengthening shadows were pouring into ominous pools of darkness. Notices pinned on the pillars spoke to beings to whom I, one of the ghosts, languished long dead, clinging to the dust, no hope of averting my own murder? On the second floor, a single light beckoned, emanating from his oaken office, where he sat at the big, oak desk surrounded by beautiful books in just the kind of nook I had once had hopes of crannying to grannitude, as students in love with me lined up to flatter me and win a good grade, and maybe something more?
Maybe it was my nerves, but I perceived my ex-professor greeted me with less warmth than I anticipated; after all, when years ago I showed him the illuminated manuscript into which my dissertation was evolving, he'd claimed pride in having "produced" me as an artist, though later recommending I show the manuscript to the psychiatrist he assumed I wasn't mad enough to fail to be consulting. Specifically, I knocked gingerly on the door, and he continued to write for several minutes as if not hearing. Now he looked up, intoned his pert South African hello, and invited me to pull up a chair.
As I sat facing him opposite the desk, he complimented me on my desire to teach in a prison (I had come for a recommendation.), but then suddenly his body went slack, and he seemed depressed. "You know, I should do something like that I think." then he drifted off again, but suddenly, he perked up to wonder, "Tell me something, why is it that only failures do social work?" Now his juices were flowing. "You know, I have something to thank you for. You simplified my life. Do you see this right here, this is an application from a poet. She wants to study art history, and I am roundly discouraging her. After you, I realized that art history is one thing, and poetry is another, and they have NOTHING to do with one another!" Nightfall by now had nudged away twilight.
In a papal bull, Pope Innocent III officially declared the authenticity of the Stigmatization in... advised all believers: Let us see with out minds and..(find quote). Dredging up an old metaphor, the impress by God, the Pope as much as blocked Bonaventura's reading of the Stigmatization as an event produced interiorly, in the empathy of the saint and his scandalous capacity verily to melt into the being of Christ -- as if Francis, receiving by giving, according to his famous prayer, brought the Stigmatization on by his own efforts. Instead, the papal bull features the rupture between Francis and Christ, to whom the saint blindly surrenders. A series of vivid imaginings of the event surrounded the Pope's declaration, but none more perfectly obedient to the pope's bias than the weapon, by the workshop Giotto and now in the Louvre, of human subjection to the power of the divine as carried by the church.
The picture, painted in about 1300, depicts the saint in the very instant he receives the divine impress. For Bonaventura, just as Francis slips his mind into the skin of Christ the vision passes out of view behind Francis as if draping itself over the skin of the saint. But as if to illustrate the , Giotto has the vision stamp the saint before it fades out of view, breaking this continuous, naturalistic event -- in which the act of actively reaching for configures itself at the boundary it shares with the act of receiving.
Giotto imagines "with all his strength," the immediate visual relation between the two meticulously detailed bodies, but not the temporal and physical spatial context, which he renders schematically. Rays of light emanate from the wounds, directly stamping a reversed print on the body of the saint in literal correspondence to the pope's metaphor; so now there is no danger of a reading in the figure of wounding a blasphemous confluence of the body of Christ and that of Francis. The predella of the panel shows three scenes, first the dream of Innocent III, in which the Pope sees Francis holding up the weakening, corrupt church; in the second the Pope canonizes Francis; and in the third the saint preaches to the birds. The choice of scenes is telling; God speaks to Francis through the hierarchy of the church or through sounds and affect understandable by animals. Francis and God no longer communicate in the complex, exquisitely responsive, perspectival human language described in Bonaventura's story.
Again, this is not to deny that helpless unknowing is not a sublime and honorable state of actual being that deserves representation. It is only to say that when the surge of new knowing that provokes the a reawakened awareness of all that is unknown is denied or repressed, the know nothings are protesting too much that they know nothing. They're trying to hide something. Something is rotten in the state of read marks.
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