Just Another Cultural Visionary

the narrator

jtmonro@hotmail.com (Jeremy) — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 14:25:00 GMT

I am finally at that place where I can identify myself in more or less concise terms. I am the scholarly embodiment of the mysticism and history of Science.

The core moment of science is a purely mystical phenomenon – something Einstein spoke about very directly in his later years. Perhaps this is why contemporary scientists, in this final age of denial, have reverted to technology and avoid all talk of the epiphany which is the essential attraction of scientific work. That epiphany cannot be described by the usual presumptions of ‘scientific method’ and therefore falls outside of the purview of the present self-definition of science. When certified scientists popularize the delusion that science itself, as an experience, is not only other than paradoxical, but also the categorical denial of spirit and the religious shift in awareness, then one can only chortle at their stupidity about their own experience – for want of weeping.

When I was sixteen, Einstein’s simplified description of the Special Theory of Relativity brought to a close my contemporary version of the old fate / free will struggle. Light is not two things. But the empirical evidence pointed to two natures in light. How Hendrik Lorentz and Einstein synthesized those two natures showed me the radical natures of Spirit and Cause, how time can be both sequential and simultaneous, and therefore how the moment can re-determine fate through the restructuring of time in the moment. Over the years, this has emerged as a range of formal practices. But it also opened the gates to the seeds of the view which is Science itself.

Science, of course, is an historical phenomenon. For one, science is the inverse of prophecy. Einstein’s initial conversion has its great historical force precisely because it meets at the merging of the mystical and the scientific. Time, as cause, was always the essential issue of Science. What causes what. But cause is also an historical product. But civilization – apparently necessarily correlated to philosophy in some form – nevertheless does not automatically focus on cause. This is the one appropriate claim for the kinship of classical Greece and the later European West. The Greeks pointed directly to cause, and established, if somewhat defectively, the ground for cause.

The only problem, finally, was that the ground was the five elements.

Science now demands numerical evidence. But Science itself is a child of number. We could define the present impasse – the intellectual corollary, certainly, of the ‘final days’ – as the failure of the zero / One definition of Science. It is this zero / One definition that the professional atheists with scientific degrees are now purveying, as if it were not only still alive, but as if it were the only possibility of truth.

But science is also the key to the reflective eye – what I commonly, in these scribblings, refer to as the Eye. Cause is the medium of self-awareness. Inference and analysis are the necessary conditions of self-awareness or first reflection. Neither self nor object exists in first consciousness. Self and world begin to emerge when we are three. Paradoxically, the model for object and for our reifications of ‘self’ is the inherent behavior of the structure of awareness in the act of reflection – consciousness not being different from identity (and hence ‘field’), from focus as both value and act, and hence from volition itself. But as volition and identity, awareness is already potentially reflexive.

But reflective awareness also emerges as a post-evolutionary fact of human prehistory. And since consciousness of cause is the necessary condition for the objectification of reflective awareness – beyond prophecy and shamanism – we have a philosophical history that leads to Science. But this is not just Bacon and Descartes and the so-called Aristotelian thread. Hume has generated his zero / One addiction game for the street level concept addicts – who nowadays have great skill in acquiring degrees and professional status – but the problem is other than One, particularly the empty One that ‘measures’ zero.

But this means there is no single cause, a fact that the legitimate philosophers of empiricism – simply read ‘philosophers’ – have invariably adverted to, even in the driest darkness.

Momentarily, we let the ‘prophecy’ slip by, but you knew we had to come back to it. Here is where things get strange. We do our explicitly spiritual or religious voyage, at a certain point – sail across continents, if not oceans – and what we find on the other side of the field is the same book we left with – the Gospel of Thomas. If prophecy is fulfilled, we can take the defective definition of the elements and turn them into causes. Jesus says, you have five trees in paradise, and they are not moved in summer or winter. You would have to be pretty much physical to say they are just the senses. Why five? Taste falls into four. Skin has several. Why five?

As the Narrator, I can point to the Poet. Here, his mind, if not his Voice, necessarily joins us. What follows is something of a Duet.

I was always disturbed by the strange and infinitely replicating cosmologies of the gnostics. But if, as we have said, the zero / One Proposition has died the living death, there is no single cause. That is, Cause itself cannot be Single.

What our ‘researches’ have shown us is that the ‘true’ One is Five. The living One invests both world and abyss. Concept reduces the living One to the dead artifice of concept as habit or habit response. The zero / One Proposition held that this dead concept One covered cosmos. But finally, even inference and analysis cannot be derived from it. While the living One is beyond words, there is also the true One, which is the created nature of the reflective act. And this One is always Five, whether as the functions of awareness itself, as cause or as the elemental basis of psychology.

As the Poet studying Spirit and Cause, one became absorbed in Oracles. Perhaps I have recited this history here before, but it is worth repeating. I started to look at I Ching because the whole framework expressed an obverse for what I had experienced ‘in the darkness’, so to speak, in my first encounter with Einstein. If the moment determines value, all values are functions of the moment. The essence of the moment brings all history to bear. (Hence the creative act restructures history.) But this, of course, is also a viable, if not active, description of ‘Spirit’.

Spirit, finally, is the ‘aura’ of value, the power of value that can be finally separated as Symbol or ‘expressed value’ – a key to the reflective act, though less than the whole potency, since awareness and value themselves are apparently prior to this ‘emanation’ from value, this active principle of value within awareness.

So one can study Spirit as the act of value in terms of the moment. But the context supplied by I Ching is synonymous with classical Chinese culture, legitimate scripture in its timeless value for the culture. But one already had too much take home homework to enter the kaleidoscopic radiance of those ancient halls.

So, instead, one found this apparently western Oracle, lying in pieces, that, as far as one could tell, only a deceptive catholic priest had tried to integrate – and then only as a proselytizing instrument for the church – a dastardly travesty as well as sacrilege and blasphemy in terms of the actualities of the Cards.

I have spent years struggling with the fact that the core philosophy of reflection, as I understand it, is expressed through my formal work with the Tarot Cards. It falls within the scar in my soul, the distance between Poet and Narrator – a narrator desiring to retain his potens as the serious Voice of the culture and a poet perfectly willing, finally, to take psychedelics and see the White Light in a nutshell as well as the shell Eye of cosmos.

But we have always been jongleurs in our rags.

The Cards are Numbers and Symbols. The Major Arcana are the ‘moral history’ of the mystical path, since true mysticism can only begin in a concern for Justice. The dead truth of concept is not Justice, except the concept stand up and walk, leading back through the abyss to its source in value – the brief epic of awakening. And we can use the Minor Arcana to create a structured framework for the formal presentation of the philosophy of reflection, a necessarily multidimensional phenomenon, although the transcendent Five, being itself subjected to reflection, to view and viewed, is necessarily reduced to Four (since ‘the witness’ necessarily holds a position) and expressed through sets and sequences.

– the Narrator

tony raga

jtmonro@hotmail.com (Jeremy) — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 12:22:00 GMT

Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like if I had met a teacher like Tony in the poetry. As it was, my ‘initiatory’ moment confirmed the rightness of my commitment to the craft, and opened the gates of study. Perhaps Tony had the same experience with one of his teachers, perhaps Noyes.

But this is the point. Tony spent his life in an unremitting commitment to the craft, that is, to the unbreakable thread, the necessary and endless thread of joy inherent in the practice of the craft. The thread leads through suffering. But the joy and the mysteriously profound promises of the joy constantly transform the suffering.

In this constant practice, he absorbed not only the available history of art, but the full history of art, as the function of his practice. The insight of the Eye finds the whole from the part.

Therefore, by the time William met him, Tony could transfer the whole history through his person. The fact that real and ideal are the same. They diverge, no doubt, from that moment of sameness. But this is the difference between fact and art. The art holds the sameness.

This is a gift which at the present moment I choose to identify with Plotinus, since that is where my work lies today, this morning.

But this is the difference between Painting and Poetry. As I said in my last post, true art is philosophy embodied. In painting, it is embodied for the eye. The eye and the Eye. All art is the Eye.

Therefore Tony could hold the peculiar power of the One, in this case the power of the history or the tradition in Art, while his peers fell into the abyss of abstraction, the necessary finality of a negation of Art – the consequence of the historical necessity for purging society, for opening the gate of the Other, the non-abstraction beyond objectivity.

One hesitates to say, the king is dead, long live the king. But Art, like God, does not die. What dies cannot be named. And this mystery is the constant reminder, the recollection.

It allows us to touch the Same. And, as I have said, this sameness is where Art begins and ends.

When ‘Art’ is gone, Art returns.

It is the same Eye of Sameness. But that same Eye of sameness is always new, always different, always unique and intimate.

The art embodies philosophy or the art dies.

Now we have embodied the ultimate death art, if death is nothingness. But having died, the Art returns as joy – the same joy it has always been, even in suffering. Perhaps it is like the Great Eye of History having blinked. We stand on the other side of the Baroque necessity in the whole of western history hitherto. Perhaps we fulfill the Puritan promise of the two Lights, the inner and the outer.

But, in any case, it was there in the visual history as against the visual present for the artist who was willing to hold both lights, the essential sameness, the central joy of the Art in painting.

But Poetry is words. Poetry embodies philosophy when the words embody the philosophy, when the language itself has received the philosophy from the philosophers. And, since philosophy died more than a hundred years ago, the man or woman of words, the fabricator, must recreate the philosophy.

No word now embodies more than the non-non of our present ‘culture’. Yes, the society has merged with Tiresias, blind in both eyes, waiting for his taste of the pooled blood in the fosse to prophecy the destruction of all save Odysseus, ‘ou tis’, no man.

Rather, it is time for Ou Tis to emerge from the fosse to his own prophecy, to return to the sources of Cause as Wisdom, the Eyes of the eye : Consciousness (nous), Logos (logos) and One / Other. The Three Eyes of the Two Eyes.

So one goes about the wicked world gathering the wondering fragments, like small frogs and fishes for our decorative pond, lilies and lotuses, the necessary gear for the fountain – like a man walking in his sleep, gathering and dispersing the clouds of dream. Following the thread of his joy back to the dirt hole in the Earth that seems to lead nowhere, except by the thread of light.

Two lights, and the Third Light which is Darkness, the luminous nature of the dying Eyes, the dying eye.

Perhaps it’s like Henry Miller said. Somebody has to stick an arm into the machine, perhaps to have it ripped off. But it’s not a machine. And what one sacrifices is all and nothing. What else is there but the thread of Light.

So the poet winds up in the clover fields of philosophy, the hot, dry summer ground of a breathless day, the strange, indistinct fragrant straw odor.

Light is the image. Consciousness is the image. Value, the linking principle, is the pure image. The One hides the Other; the One is other than the Other; the Other emerges as the One – the Light of the One / the Light of the Darkness.

Etc.

Thence one returns, as – What? – the Poet?

The verse stumbles in the prose poem pedantic prosody one detests. But one embodies the new history of the Craft, the gift of the same, the sameness of real and ideal in the objective nature of the fact, which only finds factness in the poem.

– Jeremy

watercolor 22x30 1983

jonah@justanotherculturalvisionary.com (Will) — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 08:59:00 GMT

diptych - etching - 1990 - about 5" high

jonah@justanotherculturalvisionary.com (Will) — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 12:41:00 GMT

the path of art appreciation

jonah@justanotherculturalvisionary.com (Will) — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 10:47:00 GMT

I have come to understand art appreciation as a course in values. What we 'like' or value in art represents the focus of our consciousness in relationship to values, cultural. Of course we in essence, all of us, represent the culture as it lives now. In fact, this is our power were we to be conscious of that. For me, "Culture is the door spirit creates to walk through." But this understanding of culture is the topic for another day....
    In my experience as a student of art appreciation, I had the good fortune of studying with an authentic Master in both Sculpture and Painting, Antonio Salemme 1892-1995. I started studying with him when he was in his late 80's. He was doing some very rarified work both in painting and sculpture. It was because of his earlier work, work done before 1960, that I suspended my judgment and took him at his word when he would say his current work was more advanced.

     Note: an early portrait of his wife, Martha, from sometime around 1940....

Romeo and Juliet, 1979

His work had evolved into a more direct expression of the brush and color. To my mind, at the time, his more contemporaneous work seemed rough and unsophisticated compared to his earlier work. Like I said, he called it more advanced, 'better'. I struggled to know what he was talking about.
     For 2 years, I would visit his studio and contemplate the work he was doing, and he was painting every day. Each work he put up on his easel for perusal was a challenge to my conceptually based consciousness. I would generally grasp onto the literary, illustrative aspects of the work, ie. 'the picture', and try to understand from an intellectual viewpoint what he was doing. Of course, this didn't deal with any directness, with the issues of painting Antonio was evolving and exploring.    In retrospect, I see what I was going through was not very different from an infant dealing with the issues of learning the verbal language of the culture it is born into. How does one learn something like that from scratch?
     After 2 years, I had this 'sudden' awakening, a satori experience. It went like this...As usual during a visit to his studio, he put up a painting to look at. It was the above Romeo and Juliet. Immediately, I saw it as crude, and I say within myself, 'Uh-oh, here we go again, another Salemme!' IN that moment, the work went from being 'crude and primitive', (in MY mind of course), to absolutely beautiful and sophisticated! In an instant! I had finally understood. The key was saying to myself...'another Salemme'. I realized that what I was FINALLY, looking at was something other than my conceptual, subconscious ideas of what I had 'thought' art was supposed to look like! Where did I get those ideas? From growing up in America. From absorbing quite unconsciously the prevailing cultural values and then seeing through those conceptual filters and judging accordingly. For the first time in my memory, I was seeing without those filters. I was seeing the originality of Antonio's vision! I could see the deep psychological resonance of color and brush! in relationship to motif. It was a direct vision of beauty, and undeniable. I didn't need anyone to tell me it was good. It was A SPONTANEOUS expression of Antonio's art practice that signified Mastery! And I could see that. Yet that Mastery was based in a pure and original, direct way of seeing! The medium is absolutely expressed in its most direct possibilities. I saw it as visual language grounded in what I call 'The Aesthetics of Spontaneity'. I saw the medium as inherently profound and beautiful. I began to understand 'painting as opposed to making 'pictures'.
     AND when talking about values, the primary value became THE HUMAN BEING doing the work! IN this case, the consciousness of Antonio's use of color and brush to express his ideas. Finally when looking at a work of true art, in my honest opinion, it is the consciousness of the human at the center which is the real value. The human being expressed as the medium. This begins to answer the great questions of "Who are WE? Where have we come from? Where are we going?
     It is this innate originality of self that is the maturity of the true artist. And it is the human at the center that we desperately need to honor in all walks of life in this American Culture.

I would be happy to answer any questions as there are definite threads of possible discussion that move out from this....

classicism

jtmonro@hotmail.com (Jeremy) — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 00:44:00 GMT

As a concept or principle, classicism was ‘discovered’ in the Renaissance. In fact, we could say that classicism is one of the dominant concepts that ‘produced’ the Renaissance, since it dovetails more or less completely with the ‘humanism’ so often cited as both impetus and primary object of Renaissance thought and art.

But, of course, classicism, by its very nature as a term, refers first of all to a prior historical period, a prior cultural orientation or understanding. Classicism primarily references the unique purity of Greek sculpture, architecture and verbal arts. If it includes the Roman, it does so with the understanding that what is ‘classical’ in Roman culture generally either adverts to or develops out of the Greek.

And, of course, the Greek is historically unique. Greek sculpture apparently both follows Alexander and travels the Silk Road, since it clearly modifies the Persian, Indian and Chinese sculpture of the time.

In the general historical thesis we have been developing here, this uniqueness becomes an imperative question. What separates the Greek from prior and contemporary societies? While the difference is necessarily cultural – that is, more or less pervasive in the higher reaches of Greek society and particularly in the Athenian state – and therefore the aesthetic is as explicit in its way as the intellectual in expressing the uniqueness, the intellectual ground provides the pure answer.

As we have shown here, the common interpretation of Plato and Aristotle as the ‘founders’ of subjective and objective orientations, respectively, is a retro-projection from later European culture. At the same time, this later development has its basis in the Greek thinkers. Plato’s archetypes and Idea grounded the formalization of the One as an instrument for analyzing reflective awareness – a principle furthered by the neo-Platonists. And Aristotle developed and shifted the earlier or pre-Socratic focus on the ‘elements’, establishing a nominal basis not only for our modern concept of ‘matter’, but, undoubtedly more importantly, introducing a formalization of cause, which allows for the later differentiation of subjective and objective causality, and hence for our modern sense of self and world.

Here, of course, we are on the cusp of individuality as we understand it. But a careful reading of both Plato and Aristotle will show – as we have said here previously – that both were essentially locked within a frame that we would define as more or less purely subjective. Aristotle’s reaching for ‘true nature’ (physis) may appear as an impulse toward the ‘objective’ as we understand it, but Aristotle himself remained within the Platonic world of the One, the presumption that divine and individual psyche are necessary subsuming corollaries, and therefore that the witnessing awareness (nous) is part and parcel of the reflective nature of cosmos, in which divine and human are bound directly together in the structures of the Earth and the Heavens.

Here, of course, is the paradox of cause. At several significant points, in this spherical immersion, Aristotle seems to touch some prophetic insight concerning a necessary otherness or independence, whether of psyche or of the substantive world. But he is caught in the breathless moment of the One. If he posits an unmoving first cause, it naturally falls back into the ‘un-Being’ behind Being of the neo-Platonists, a kind of ‘dark side’ of the One.

As we have suggested here, prophecy is not particularly about precognition, but, rather, about the reality of time. Prior to the Greeks and apart from the strictly prophetic tradition, time is the religious nature of cycle, tantamount to the divinity of the One in Plato, but without his first inklings of the reflective nature of the One – precisely the intuitions which send his student, Aristotle, toward tentative moments of apparent ‘objectivity’.

But without an enactment of the prophetic, we revert to the human figure. On this cusp between time and timeless, the only image, the only metaphor for this time / timeless ‘moment’ is the human persona, the cyclical nature of human life as manifested in the uniqueness of the individual, who experiences the irrevocable nature of time in the history and destiny of personal life, of birth and death, of infancy, youth and old age.

Hence the Greek focus on the human figure and the human predicament.

True art is philosophy embodied.

When we look back to the Greek sculptural figure, we see the synthesis of ‘real’ and ‘ideal’. But this is our view, essentially at the conclusion of an historical dialectic produced by the ‘moment’ of Greek art, viewed, not only through the lens of the ‘humanism’ of the Renaissance, but through the roots of this ‘modern’ dialectic in the Medieval questions that arose, in part, as a response to the art of Greek philosophy, but to the art of Greek philosophy as viewed through the altering lens of the prophetic, of the belief in time itself as an ‘objective’ phenomenon.

The ‘trinity’ of Plotinus – his definition of the reflective moment of awareness – becomes the ‘trinity’ of theology. Prior to this dogma, God is the ‘moral’ creator of the world, shall we say. While God is portrayed as the ontological ‘creator’ of the world, the ontology takes its force from the ethical, the grounding absolute of the moral imperative. But, with the emergence of the dogmatic trinitarian God, God becomes the ‘material creator’, the supreme and objective nature of Cause. Cause, itself, becomes objectified.

It is this which allows for the emergence of ‘nominalism’.

Perhaps paradoxically, ‘nominalism’ is the beginning of ‘realism’, in our sense. But confusing the issue is the fact that nominalism emerged against a ‘realism’ which insisted that value is essentially indigenous in language. This first ‘realism’ was the inherent residuum of the Platonic and neo-Platonic as the pervasive basis of pre-Medieval dogmatic theology. The manifest nature of the divine is inherent in ‘the word’, not simply as the bearer of value, but as the medium of value. In other words, value is the manifest nature of the divine and therefore the divine is immanent in the word.

If the ‘nominalists’ could ultimately find acceptance in the church, it was because the abstraction of value from the word was consonant with God as the ‘objective creator’. Value inheres objectively in the world, and not just in the verbal symbols for the world.

In other words, nominalism asserts that value is inherent in the world itself, and not just in our interpretive verbal expressions for the world. The world itself is ‘real’. And therefore a realism of the One gives way to a realism of time and cause that apparently breaks the One apart.

Here, then, is the opening moment in the dialectic of ‘real’ and ‘ideal’, for, while the One is no longer solely embodied in ‘the word’, it still will not go away.

But, of course, we have also misidentified ‘the real’ as cause itself. Causality may point to the objective nature of the world, but ‘cause’ finally is a human interpretive response, based as much in the volitional nature of perception as in any necessary condition of ‘the external’.

The issues are value and human awareness. Experience as perception requires the specificity of both. Since sensation is totally atomizing and awareness is solipsistic, value itself invokes the spontaneity of response – the volitional act – which is ‘the real’, while the structuring nature of the reflective act of consciousness supplies the formalizing element which ‘produces’ the object in consciousness, namely a unifying or synthesizing function which is the actuality of ‘the One’.

In this respect, we cannot escape the pretensions of the original ‘realism’. While, obviously, value is not solely limited to ‘the word’, without the interpretive structure of language we cannot sustain the reflective view which constitutes our present mode of ‘experience’. But the view itself is the embodiment of the One, both generally and specifically as ‘field’ and ‘object’ respectively, essentially proto-abstractions necessarily based in the traditionary unifying structures of reflection that parallel language development.

So every ‘experience’ involves both an immediacy of value and, simultaneously, an indirect and ‘traditionally’ grounded formalization for the value.

‘Real’ and ‘ideal’ are necessarily simultaneous in experience. And both are necessary and essentially ‘absolute’ with respect to the value.

This, then, is the basis of ‘classicism’ as a contemporary phenomenon.

Thus far, our argument has not involved ‘error’, being, in itself, a kind of ‘ideal’ presentation.

Perhaps we could say, like the Buddhists, that ‘error’ is a function of habit, since the link between immediate value and form is not only ‘habitual’ but an essential expression of ‘habit’ itself. But the reality of cause and history means that error is essentially valid in itself. That is, it is a ‘real’ possibility.

But the immediacy of value also means that ‘error’ can be ‘corrected’ from value itself.

As a discipline, the practice of classicism begins in an immediate recognition of value – that every instance of value presents both the ‘habitual’ form and the immediacy of value itself. While the practice of classicism ‘breaks through’ the habitual pattern, the ‘pure value’ can only be experienced through ‘form’, that is, through some expression involving the equal potency of ‘the One’, of the traditionary nature of form itself.

Hence, the practice of classicism is necessarily vocational. Only as a calling can an ongoing ‘awakening’ to the immediacy of value evoke an equally disciplined awakening to the whole of the tradition in which both value and form are embedded.

To assume that we can have immediate value alone or pure form alone is an illusion. To insist on the assumption is the marker of an addiction to an illusory idea of experience, which, being the marker of the ‘self’, indicates the grandfather addiction of all addictions, the addiction to an artifice for self.

– Jeremy

aesthetic fundamentalism

jonah@justanotherculturalvisionary.com (Will) — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 09:27:00 GMT

sectarian aestheticism

'...the dogmatic belief in a stylized version of artistic expression.One becomes enamored of a personal form or 'hook', that is grounded in concept as opposed to direct seeing. This is a form of cultural fundamentalism, that is as destructive as any religious fundamentalism.'

     This whole idea of sectarian aestheticism is grounded in the mistaken notion that 'if you like it, it's good.' The truth is that if you like it, you like it. It doesn't necessarily mean that it is good. This is where that great question 'Why?' comes in. As you ask yourself this why? with regards to aesthetic expression and preference, like and dislike, it is an arrow pointing INTO the self.   You are exploring your assumptions that are often unconscious.
      What is this 'Good' when it comes to painting? Generally to the sub conscious, neo-classical conceptuality, it is seen as the artist's ability to recreate on canvas the illusion of reality. This conceptuality has been big through out our history. This 'technical' ability gives the unschooled viewer a sense of comfort. There is nothing really to know about the work. ONE IS MORE CONCERNED WITH A 'PICTURE' THAN WITH THE 'PAINTING'. One can marvel at the 'technical' (conceptual technical) achievement. You could look at the work of Ingres, or Beaugereau, Messonier, or Dali and see this viewpoint expressed. However, Delacroix, a contemporary of Ingres, was beginning to see that there was this 'inner dimension to the artform, which he began to explore as a classicist. One of my favorite Art History quotes, is the comment he made in his diary, after seeing an exhibition of Ingres work. "...It is the complete expression of an incomplete intelligence."
     Art forms have clear boundaries. These boundaries could be explained as the personality of the medium. Each medium has a specific personality. Within these boundaries, however, is an infinite space to create.
     An aspect of the personality of the medium is the artist's personality. It is neccessary to have some conscious entity expressing their consciousness through the medium. Then you have this most precious event taking place that we call art. The mortal being expressing who they are, as the eternal principles that go into the the artform, ie. color, brush, motif... The marriage of the personal with the seeming impersonal. This is the gift given to us by all true artists. When we contemplate a Cezanne painting, for example, we see his understanding of color, brush, and motif expressed as his personality (thought and feeling). (absolutely symphonic visually...)
      Now, if you are an artist, I would assume you would, in fact, wish to be expressing in this way. And if you would like to appreciate art, I assume you would like to share the artist's understanding of the ecstatic, and eternal nature of the medium, so that you could share in that direct ecstasy that the artist is involved in. Yes? No?

against Augustine

jtmonro@hotmail.com (Jeremy) — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 15:58:00 GMT

In the famous exchange of letters with Maximus, Maximus addresses Augustine, in the opening of his letter, with the gentle assertion that everyone can sense the presence of the gods in the marketplace. Augustine responds harshly, both accusing Maximus of jesting with him and dealing with the issue of the gods as if Maximus were only referring to the statues of gods and human sages placed in the market square.

I would suggest that Augustine’s response is not only characteristic of the vehemence and bitterness he can exercise against those he deems his opponents, but also reveals Augustine’s essential spiritual deadness apart from the doctrinal core of the Roman church.

What makes this last problematic, of course, is that the core doctrine concerning the ‘godhead’, namely ‘trinity’, involves a spiritual as well as a theological potency. In the Gospel of Thomas, we have Jesus saying, ‘Where there are three gods, they are gods. Where there are one or two, I am with him.’ What Augustine shows us, in both his life and writings, is that when one focuses on a trinitarian conception of God, one can access an illumination which is both spiritual and ‘trans-spiritual’, or truly religious. The problem, of course, is that both the spiritual and religious understanding which arises, when it is limited to a trinitarian doctrine not based in the original nature of the triune – which is the mystery of consciousness itself – remain within the essentially ‘mythical’ nature by which trinity itself is conceived. If we do not grasp directly that trinity points to the reflective nature of consciousness – and the double mysteries inherent in reflection – then, while the ‘spiritual’ light that is revealed bears the true nature of Spirit and the light reaches ‘in’ or ‘out’ toward the dark core ‘beyond’ Spirit, the whole is limited by the limited understanding of the triune, and cannot extend these ‘revelations’, properly, into the wide world.

Spirit is pervasive and universal. Trinity points to the otherness at the center of experience – the Great Mystery, which is the Great Death, and therefore acquires such correlated but indefinable names as ‘God’ – an otherness which all religions, including shamanism ultimately point to. And to give ‘God’ substance in any form is not only a travesty, but both blasphemy and sacrilege, since God, as such, is a speculative corollary for this human experience of the Mystery.

This is not to say that we cannot in some sense live in the Presence of this Otherness. Such is vocation, the sequential revelation of the true self. And the Great Death assigns benevolence to this Mystery, an incontrovertible conviction of its being and benign nature. But otherwise, it necessarily remains unknowable as ‘a nature’.

I repeat what I have said elsewhere: the basic known fact that Augustine’s doctrine of trinity originates in Plotinus. But – also a known fact – he acquired his understanding from his primary conversionary teacher – Ambrose of Milan – and not from the writings of Plotinus himself.

My own feeling at this point is that Augustine was a rhetor and not a philosopher in any true sense. Creative and imaginative he no doubt is. But what he creates is essentially myth – a communal myth grounded in the spiritual collectivity of the church, and specifically the metropolitan churches that ultimately come to focus in the Roman see. Within that relatively limited spiritual context, his focus on trinity gives him the prophetic insight characteristic of the creative literateur.

But the true philosopher, on the other hand, finds the independent prophetic power of trinity, by hook or by crook, as inherently beyond all Spirit; and hence can use it, precisely, as the instrument by which to break out of the pervasive stranglehold of Spirit, thus escaping such narrowing spiritual entities and communal powers.

The fact that Augustinian trinity is less than the actuality of true trinitarian power – is in fact a myth – is exemplified pragmatically by the emergent potency of the Mother as essentially coequal with the godhead in the formal worship of the church. The Mystery is neither male nor female. Only a primitive understanding of trinity would insist on its essential masculinity. But this insistence has corrupted the church into its present abusive hierarchy.

We can view the trinitarian source as either essentially male or essentially female. The difference results in radically different views. The Mystery itself stands beyond both.

But this is the point of trinity. Any legitimately embracing understanding of Three can produce the profound awakening that ‘transcends’ Spirit and enters the Mystery, provided, of course, that the understanding of Three is also essentially vocational.

It is the limitation of all subsequent development within the church to this Augustinian myth for trinity that has limited church mysticism to a relatively narrow ‘spiritual’ trinitarianism – eventually becoming the defining condition for mysticism within the frame of the church.

– Jeremy

realism / nominalism

jtmonro@hotmail.com (Jeremy) — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 16:12:00 GMT

Almost all contemporary explications of the realist / nominalist controversy are thoroughly corrupted by the modern subjectivist / objectivist dichotomy. While the realist / nominalist controversy is the groundbreaking moment that leads to the modern categorical experiences of ‘subject’ and ‘object’, these experiences are specifically modern and should not be projected back into the intellectual conditions of the Middle Ages. Granted that this controversy is the originating moment for the modern perception of ‘concept’ as well, we are still far from concept as it comes into common usage in modern or post-Renaissance philosophy.

In addition, a persistently religious reinterpretation of the controversy, in terms of established dogma, has produced a third or fourth stream of misrepresentations, to further confuse our view of the topic.

But the first issue is to recognize that the controversy is essentially religious or ‘theological’.

The concern as to whether ‘the real’ resides in ‘subjectivity’ or ‘objectivity’ is first arising precisely at this point. This eventually produces our categorical sense of the ‘ego’ as well as our modern experience of ‘scientific objectivity’. But precisely because they emerge from this controversy, we have to understand that they are not extant at this inception.

The concern of the Middle Ages is the question of the ‘God nature’ of the world. Specifically, we are dealing with the Biblical injunctions concerning ‘the word’. When we go back to Plotinus – the actuating source, outside Jesus’ references to ‘three’ (some non-canonical), for the doctrine of ‘trinity’ – we find that ‘the word’ is the linking principle of the ‘three hypostases’ in Plotinus’ doctrine of origination. That is, this is the ‘logos’ which in the Greek Gospel of John constitutes the parallelism for ‘the beginning’ at the head of the Old Testament.

While we now generally treat the Word as an abstractive name for Jesus, and hence sacrosanct, or beyond philosophy, the Medieval philosophers treated it as the simple reality of the word itself: the word is the word, the value linking principle by which we recognize the nature of things, the ground of perception itself.

But to call it ‘the value linking principle’ is, in itself, a consequence of the realist / nominalist controversy. The controversy begins in the question of whether value itself is immediate in the word.

It is this teleological focus on the word which is the beginning of the controversy, and accounts for the vehemence and virulence that ultimately surrounds the contest.

‘Value’ rarely surfaces as a term in contemporary philosophical discourse, and then usually only in pejorative phrases – such backhanded references as ‘value judgment’. But, if God has chosen to appear in the world, as the Medieval thinkers took for granted, then the paramount question becomes how or whether that immediate ground of value persists in our world of everyday life, apart from specifically religious observance.

The Latin use of ‘verbum’ in the Vulgate becomes an immediate philosophical reference – insisting that the word of daily usage somehow now carries the value imbued in the world by the Creator and rectified by the Messiah. Perhaps we can assign trinity itself to the word, particularly if we can find our way back to Plotinus (not necessarily an easy task in the scholarly context of the Early Middle Ages), but the experience of the word, for the philosophical mind – apart from any specifying history – might suggest a similar train of thought.

The word brings value to focus. Undoubtedly the Medieval thinker is possessed of the tacit human experiences of self and world, but these have not been established as categorical values apart from the experience of value itself. Therefore, they remain largely outside the sphere of consideration. The value experience of the word antedates both. And since that value experience, in this context, is only encountered in terms of language, it is possible to assume that value itself is located in ‘the word’.

It is this premise which stands at the head of the realism / nominalism conflict.

The ‘realism’ of the controversy, of course, is almost explicitly the inverse of our use of the term. At the beginning of the contest, ‘realism’ means that the word itself is the reality of value – that value can only be found in the ‘reality’ presented, immediately, by the word.

Since, even today, with our wonderfully precise sense of ‘self’ and ‘object’, value is still the prior condition, this is not as odd an assumption as it might first appear.

If we deal with the word as ‘merely’ the ‘bearer’ of value – as we do now – we are instantly mired in the dispersive questions of relativism. If the word is not value, where does value reside? Obviously, we cannot ‘locate’ it except in terms of our experience. Hence, solipsism. But we now have the experience of objectivity. Therefore value must reside in some feature of the world. If we cannot make ‘matter’ stand up and walk on its own feet as the nature of value, however, we wind up reassigning value to concept or word. The circularity is endless.

We could say that this circularity and the endless hunger for ‘the real’ are the basis of the contemporary intellectual disease, a disease which more and more looks like modern intellect itself.

The ‘postmodern’ rejection of ‘the real’ does not further either question or issue, since it not only rejects the actuality of intellect, but of experience as well.

But we are still possessed of the experience of value; that is to say, we still have experience itself.

Perhaps the real problem is that we are unwilling to begin – as the Medieval philosophers did – from value itself.

II.

The controversy begins from one of those peculiarly specific moments of philosophy. In Boethius’ translation of Porphyry’s Isagoge, we find a brief statement of the questions that inspired the subsequent arguments.

Thus far I have only found the core Latin text on the internet, in a form obviously garbled by the typist. I have corrected typographical mistakes as subsequently corrected in the contextual essay, but since I have less than a modicum of Latin, there may be further errors. But I quote it for the primary terms.

Mox de generibus et speciebus illud quidem sive subsistant sive in nudis intellectibus posita sint, sive subsistentia corporalia sint an incorporalia, et utrum separata a sensibilibus an in sensibilibus posita er circa haec subsistentia, decere recusabo.

The Isogoge, of course, is Porphyry’s introduction to the Aristotelian categories. Porphyry is the student and editor of Plotinus, whose hypostatic definition of ‘nous’ or ‘consciousness’ we have already cited as the basis for the doctrine of trinity.

Since the given translation is profoundly infected with contemporary ethnocentrism, I will give a paraphrase, hopefully not adding further corruptions. While a single statement, like the contextual translation, I will render it as separable questions.

Are genera and species, in themselves, ‘subsistent’ or purely intellectual?

If ‘subsistent’, are they corporal or incorporeal?

And, given this ‘subsistence’, do they exist within sensible things or outside the sensible?

Granted we are dealing with the foundation of the Aristotelian categories, since ‘genera’ and ‘species’ establish the abstractive conditions by which the abstraction of descriptive categories for objects becomes possible. But this is the first introduction of this core theme of the Aristotelian corpus into Early Medieval thought. The corpus itself will only appear much later. We have to remember that the seeds of philosophy at this point are grounded in a theology which is essentially neo-Platonic.

In other words, the nature of the essentially Aristotelian question might suggest a more or less complete structural sense of abstraction, whereas, in fact, the moment is the opening moment for the philosophical recognition of abstraction within the frame of the Early Medieval mindset.

However, the issue here is not abstraction, but value. The introduction of the terms ‘genera’ and ‘species’ is only suggestive of the necessity for abstraction – a residual or tacit suggestion from the past – not, for the Early Medieval reader, the representation of a more or less comprehensive understanding of abstraction. Precisely the question of abstraction is being raised for the first time.

In this context, the set of questions comes to focus on the issue of value and its grounding and point of access, given the tacit understanding that the awakening to abstraction necessarily raises these issues vis-à-vis value.

For our eyes, the quote presupposes Aristotle. For Boethius and his contemporaries, the quote introduces Aristotle, and introduces the question of formal abstraction into their previously relatively closed understanding of value and its sources in the given theological presuppositions which grounded their worldview.

The quote itself adds its provocation, since Porphyry concludes by ‘refusing to say’ what the answers might be.

III.

My standard Latin dictionary equates ‘subsisto’ with the Greek ‘hypostasis’. Only in late modern and contemporary philosophy could we call it ‘objectivity’. Perhaps ‘substance’, in some form, might be a valid translation, since ‘substance’ has a history in western philosophy that probably suggests the values inherent in ‘subsisto’. But this original use of ‘subsistence’ is precisely the source moment for ‘substance’ as a western philosophical term, and its subsequent development therefore implies a great deal more than is inherent in ‘subsisto’.

‘Hypostasis’, of course, denotes the ‘ground of the unmoving’, a core term in classic Greek philosophy, with its evolving concern for the ‘self-moving’. As such, we could probably begin to equate it with Aristotle’s primitive notion of ‘inertia’. But primitive his notion is. We get a better representation of hypostasis, perhaps, in the hypostases of Plotinus, where it is certainly not an antagonistic term – not defined by negation.

But the term that interests me most, at least for the present study, is Boethius’ ‘intellectus’. My OED refers all modern English forms of this radical family to ‘intelligent’, which it assigns to ‘inter’ plus ‘legere’, saying that all meanings in the array are based on ‘linking together’. But this strikes me as a modern speculative interpretation based on our own views of perception and idea. To me, it smacks of the derivations of that other notably problematic word, ‘religion’.

Since we are dealing ultimately with Aristotle, we are not far from Aristotle’s definitive word for the actuality of the world, namely, ‘entelechy’. And since I am suggesting that the Medieval and pre-Medieval focus was largely on value itself, it would be natural that pre-modern philosophy in the west would focus on the Greek ‘telos’, because it is precisely the spontaneity or ‘finality’ of value that would make its first appearance at the outset of the question of abstraction, that is, the question of the functional nature of value.

A short walk would take me to an open stacks research library where I could probably find Porphyry’s Greek and perhaps even Boethius’ Latin. But sitting here watching the snow fall on the already deep piles, my inclination is to refer to my own knowledge. In my book, the OED is suspect on the basis of its common refusal to consider theological terms, no matter how extensive their usage in the language. And I have the sense that the same impetus might bias their speculative turns. ‘Teleology’, of course, has become a relatively intellectual verbal vector for religion, just as secularism has its array of loaded intellectual terms.

And I am consistently convinced that lexicographers in all languages nowadays underestimate the potency of cognates and semi-cognates. Both by nature and developmentally, language is a field, not just an array of linear threads. But the lexical tracing of radicals is, by nature, a business of discrete threads.

Whether ‘intellego’ and ‘enteles’ share a common radical, I would assume that they share a semi-cognate force in the situation, given that Boethius is translating from the Greek, and therefore obviously has a strong affinity for the basic terms of Greek philosophical language.

He is also, by our terms, a relatively strong religionist.

What I am suggesting, then, is that the ‘purity of intellect’ that he cites by translation, while ‘subjective’ by our terms, in his world would imply subjectivity only insofar as it tends to isolate the word as the human response to value. But the force would still reside in the word as the integral nature of the value. I am suggesting that for Boethius, Porphyry’s question involves the first imputation of a formally philosophical rather than a theologically lapsarian ambivalence in value as the word. The question involves the theological issue of the teleological force of value as the word, but raises a first philosophical impetus, precisely because the teleological force is neither specifically subjective or objective. Neither thing nor awareness is the teleological force which is the value

Naturally, from our perspective, we are still inclined to view this distinction in subjective / objective terms. But if one is beginning from the value itself, in the presumption that word and teleological value are synonymous, the issue is essentially trinitarian, and not dualistic, but trinitarian in purely philosophical rather than theological terms. And since, precisely, subjective and objective remain relatively tacit in the teleological force of ‘pure intellect’ and the ‘subsistent’ nature of the tangible value – that is, since both remain philosophically bound up in the value itself – the consequent philosophical process is still entirely in seed.

IV.

The question is actually complex.

We have the parallax between the concerns of Porphyry and Aristotle, on the one hand, and those of Boethius, on the other.

At this point we are largely ignoring both Aristotle’s and Porphyry’s concerns, namely, the questions of the appropriateness and legitimacy of the categories.

But the Aristotelian basis for abstraction, establishing abstraction as an intellectual possibility, points outside its frame, thus provoking the question that arises for Boethius and his contemporaries as soon as the question is asked, namely: What is the nature of ‘the real’?

It is this dislocation of frames that allows for the question to be asked.

We have, in fact, a three-way parallax of concerns.

Aristotle took his analysis and categories more or less for granted.

Porphyry introduces his questions because he believes that the penultimate neo-Platonism of Plotinus, as the putative synthesis of Platonic and Aristotelian philosophies, both raises and answers his stated questions, although he ‘recuses’ himself from answering them in the present passage.

Boethius is the naïf at the outset of western philosophy. As both a serious religionist and philosopher, he is concerned with ‘value’ as defined by the post-trinitarian focus on ‘the word’, the ‘common’ word not only as the given value medium, but also as the intimate expression of the world renovation implicit in Christianity.

Jesus has ‘rectified’ the world. Therefore the value of the world once again holds the possibility of the pre-lapsarian expression of the godhead.

There is, of course, a natural evolution that leads from Aristotle’s analytical groundwork in his attempt to find the ‘prime mover’ or ‘self-moving’ to the analysis of ‘the real’ as initiated by this passage in Boethius’ work. But unless we follow the actual and radical changes of frame, we cannot understand the process in its own context, and will thus misinterpret both cause and result.

- Jeremy

looking south from above Bodega Bay on Ca. north coast

jonah@justanotherculturalvisionary.com (Will) — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 13:47:00 GMT

composition 94 - 16x20- oil on canvas- with audio commentary

jonah@justanotherculturalvisionary.com (Will) — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 09:38:00 GMT

hornet? - oil - approx. 28x30 - 2006

jonah@justanotherculturalvisionary.com (Will) — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 00:16:00 GMT

'spring' -composition 1981 - Antonio Salemme

jonah@justanotherculturalvisionary.com (Will) — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 23:37:00 GMT

This is painting at its best. Pure expression. Genius composition. Genius color harmony. Totally spontaneous. Perfect performance. Perfect balance between motif, color harmony, brushwork, artist's personality. What's wrong with it? It is a clear mirror in which to see your preconcieved notions. All the stuff that doesn't register the work as genius. When a pickpocket meets a saint, all he sees are the pockets. Raja Yoga. Perfect 10.

little bird blues - a video montage....

jonah@justanotherculturalvisionary.com (Will) — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 12:19:00 GMT

o crap, economics again

jtmonro@hotmail.com (Jeremy) — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 15:50:00 GMT

‘Post-industrial capitalism’ is an unconscious euphemism for ‘bankrupt’.

The collusion of economists and financiers in the active program of theft, which is now the largest American corporations, is only the most prominent signal.

To speak the usual truism, it is ‘the system’ itself which is bankrupt. But what is not usual is the solution.

If one said ‘capitalism’, one would automatically fall into the company of Ayn Rand and her readers, her clique of thieves-in-waiting. But what Ayn Rand advocates and her thieves-in-waiting regurgitate is the paean to frontier capitalism – the capitalism in which we are presently frozen.

Like any other cultural function, capitalism evolves. But, at this point, capitalism is caught in its pre-medieval phase, the moment before the frontier begins to civilize, a developmental era requiring a maximized capital turnover to produce a coordinated development.

Capitalism will never be able to divest itself from ‘industry’. But commercial production will never be able to divest itself of capitalism.

The question is, whether capitalism can transition out of the ‘frontier’ mode and into the realms of economic equilibrium – an ongoing period without raw developmental force. We speak of a ‘self-sustaining’ environment – a balanced eco-system. But I do not hear people speaking about a balanced economic system, where capital can be raised for changing needs without the expectation of excessive profits.

Presumably, the solution involves letting the system itself evolve.

But the real problem, at the moment, is the wonderfully addictive nature of theft as a pastime, particularly when the results are spectacular – unconscionable sprees in bonus land. But the theft itself is addictive. Witness the politicians transforming themselves into fishhooks to serve the twisted process, with relatively minimal rewards.

The question is whether the system will ‘evolve’ after a holocaustal collapse or collectively begin to enter a visionary understanding.

Given the peculiar buried strength of the cultural or ‘spiritual’ hunger beneath the present post-everything ‘culture’, this possibility may not be so untenable or remote as it seems.

– Jeremy

hungry ghost - American - oil on wood

jonah@justanotherculturalvisionary.com (Will) — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 23:08:00 GMT

gnosis / transmission

jtmonro@hotmail.com (Jeremy) — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 15:00:00 GMT

Obviously, I identify gnosis with the original Jesus teaching.

What the Gospel of Thomas shows us is that the teaching was first of all a face-to-face transmission. The ‘three words’ that Jesus speaks to Thomas are, inherently, a global ‘conversionary’ transmission, whether the phrase itself intends spoken signs or a cryptic description of an experienced, non-verbal exchange. But both the context and the symbolic force of the image explicitly point to the latter, in any case – that is, whether overt words were involved, the force of the exchange was necessarily beyond words.

But this is not exclusive to the Thomas tradition. In the emergent ecclesiastical tradition we have the ‘laying on of hands’. And the Pauline tradition, at least in its earliest phases, seems to be based on a legitimate spiritual accession commonly involved in the act of baptism.

And these possibilities are reinforced by the recurrent image symbols of ‘chrism’ and ‘bridal chamber’ appearing throughout much of the literature.

I find it difficult to read the contemporary research into the origins of the Jesus streams. The work not riddled with shallow or facile assumptions tends to hold narrow views that exclude all known facts outside the area of focus. And much of the work suffers from both these defects.

That the ‘inner’ teachings of Jesus originally involved an ‘initiatory’ transmission may suggest a resemblance to the workings of the mystery cults. But this does not mean that we can dismiss this aspect of the tradition as derivative, and therefore a later accretion. The pervasive nature of the initiatory moment, as I have just described it for some of the primary streams, more than suggests that it was not only indigenous in the original message, but also a necessary function of its core.

One of the authors I have just been reading assumes that utopianism only emerges from poverty and that the only possible transformative ideal, in the Jesus tradition, is necessarily the ‘salvational’ message of the resurrection. The worldwide utopian turbulence of the 60s did not emerge out of poverty. And Thomas shows us quite clearly the salient features of a subjective transformation not at all based on resurrection theology.

What is important here is precisely the range of outward symbols used to describe this ‘inner’ experience. But, equally important is the range of descriptive imagery for the nature of the inner transformation itself.

Perhaps I am naïve, but I would assume that we can assign the origins of ‘resurrection theology’ to Paul, with his experience on the road to Damascus, his preaching of Christ crucified and risen from the dead, and his psychology of the ‘new man’. But perhaps researchers have found that some or all of this is a later imposition on ‘Paul’. Paul has not been a central focus of my quest.

The Gospel of John, of course, is generally treasured for its delineation of the psychology of Jesus – by implication the ‘new’ consciousness of the ‘Christian’ who has awakened to the ‘holy spirit’, an intimate directive spirit as distinct from the generic spirit of insight and common awakening.

The gospel, of course, no longer emphasizes the transmitted nature of this change, since John, more than any other gospel, is specifically a community defining polemic. For the first time, perhaps, the transformative function is identified with the force of community.

When read carefully, however, the Gospel of Thomas is more comprehensive. Like the Johannine doctrine, Thomas speaks to the inner nature of the ‘change’. ‘If you know yourselves, you will be known, and you will know that you are the children of the living father.’ (Saying 3) But Thomas also points to a changed perception of the external, in which ‘Jesus’, in some form, now pervades the world. ‘Split wood, I am there,’ says Jesus, ‘Lift a stone, you will find me.’ (Saying 77)

Elsewhere, I have identified both the internal and the external change with what we now know as ‘objectivity’ and the experience of objectivity. And, as such, I have identified objectivity and prophecy as corollaries – both in terms of the ‘prophetic’ impulse and in terms of the historical evolution from prophecy to objectivity.

Jesus said: Behold: I have thrown fire into the world, and I sustain it until (the whole world) is in flames. (Saying 10)

Here we have the basis of an ‘apocalyptic’ vision in the radical definition of that adjective – a revelation, or, more specifically, an uncovering. What is ‘uncovered’ is an inner nature that transforms the experience of both inward and outward worlds. But the transformative process is historical as well as psychological. That is, we have an apocalyptic vision in its fulness without a ‘resurrection theology’ and without a catastrophic concluding holocaust.

But my concern here is with the nature of the transmission and its history.

If the ‘transmitted’ nature of this vision has come to rest as the core moment of ‘objectivity’ – recognizing the essentially mysterious or ‘mystical’ nature of that experience and its consequent potency as a transformative instrument both internally and externally – then the strict necessity of the transmission has ceased. We no longer require face-to-face initiation.

But the original necessity of face-to-face transmission would explain much of the sense of strange deficit we encounter when we try to approach the earliest records of the Jesus phenomenon. Granted that early spiritual movements, generally dependent as much on the personality of the teacher as on the teachings, tend to evince similar deficits, they nevertheless either regroup under an essentially ‘philosophical’ exposition of the teacher’s purpose, or they perish.

Perhaps we can cite the elaboration of doctrine, in the Christian tradition, as ‘philosophical exposition’, but it is actuated by dogmatic mysteries which either require ‘faith’ or beg the experiential or empirical.

One of the peculiarities of Thomas – and therefore presumably of the Thomas tradition – are the Sayings which suggest not only that ‘the name’ of Jesus is not a necessary adjunct for the transmission, but also that the Presence which Jesus has manifested is now indigenous – teleologically, I suppose – in all serious religious endeavor.

Jesus said : Where there are three gods, they are God. Where there are two or one, I subsist with him. (Saying 30)

The him is presumably the practitioner or ‘seeker’.

In other words, since the change which Jesus brought is universal and spiritually pervasive, it now invests the human ideal. At the same time, at the outset, the full presentation generally requires a transmission. But the transmission does not require the added ‘tag’ of the name of Jesus. The transmission can break free from its explicit generative source.

Since Science not only governed my early awakenings but also was apparently the unique instrument which opened self-awareness for me – undoubtedly a more or less anomalous fact, culturally – I have to assume that the spiritual threads or traditions that have blossomed into embracing moments of consciousness for me are necessarily reflections or mirrors of that primary tradition.

As a consequence, solely on the basis of this personal experience, I believe that the late Upanishadic traditions, the Tantric traditions, Zen Buddhism and perhaps Mahayana Buddhism as well all manifest elements of this transmission.

Early traditions report that Thomas went to India. For much of its history, modern Biblical criticism suggested that Palestinians in the time of Jesus had no precise knowledge of India’s location, and that Thomas went east overland, perhaps to Iran. But I understand that archaeologists are now excavating an Egyptian seaport on the Red Sea, enlarged by Caesar Augustus, specifically for trading with ports in western India.

– Jeremy

another one from me early period - pieta -from VanGogh, from Delacroix - oil - 30x24 - 1983

jonah@justanotherculturalvisionary.com (Will) — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 12:56:00 GMT

just an old friend - 30x40 - sonoran desert dreamin' - plain air

jonah@justanotherculturalvisionary.com (Will) — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 15:21:00 GMT

reading zen

jtmonro@hotmail.com (Jeremy) — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 13:51:00 GMT

When I was fifteen, Alan Watts and Jean-Paul Sartre were two demigods of the underground, both of whom I found essentially unreadable at the time. Nor have they become particularly more readable since. Like Freud, in our present quickfood culture, not being here now, they instantly fade into oblivion, although Watt’s books are still on the bookstore shelves.

And then, of course, when I finally got serious about religion, there was D. T. Suzuki, the self-appointed professor of Zen for the West. His books have also receded, but for different reasons. His viciously anti-western attitudes are the flipside of the Japanese nationalism that wrecked havoc in the Pacific in the second quarter of the 20^th century. The same jingoism inspired his attempt to abduct Zen from the Chinese – his project to establish the unconditional superiority of Japanese Zen over the original Chinese Chan.

But there are other reasons not only to reject D. T. Suzuki, but to root out his influence. Undoubtedly one is grateful to the professor for his promotion of Zen, since it brought the practice into the range of western intellectuals, just as one is grateful to Japan for the preservation of the tradition, however diminished. Perhaps we could say that the inherently paradoxical nature of Zen inspired it, but Suzuki’s interpretation split Zen, precisely, along intellectual lines. On the one side, he argued that Zen is essentially anti-intellectual, primarily geared to exploding the cognitive or rational mind. He acts as if this is the sole purpose of the Zen dialogue, the Zen koan. On the other side, his researches focused almost exclusively on the most intellectual aspects of the immediate Buddhist tradition which produced Zen, the late flowerings of the Mahayana sutra tradition, particularly the Flowery Garland (Huayan) Sutra, and the Prajnaparamita literature with the related Madhyamika (voidness or shunyata) philosophy.

Recent discoveries and researches are showing the profound debt that Zen owes, in its emergence in China, to the contemporary Daoist traditions. Nevertheless, Chan or Zen is Buddhism, and Buddhism of a high order, experientially. One might describe it as a ‘puritanical’ restoration of Buddhism, a renewal that reaches back through to what is apparently the original impulse, although one finds that its face-to-face transmission may also involve a western element.

But, if one were to characterize its ground, what it points to in its own tradition is ‘middle’ Buddhism, the transitional philosophy that eventuated in the full-blown Mahayana. In this middle period, Buddhism produces a subtle and complex, but specific, philosophy of self-awareness, apparently emerging out of the doctrine of the twelve-fold dependent origination. The doctrine tells us how the perceptual field is essentially self-dependent, emerging out of a self-sustaining pragmatic mutuality, and not from an ‘outside’ cause.

The western ‘discovery’ of solipsism validates the necessity of such a description, although the western tradition has established the validity of cause in its own right. But, in a sense, a philosophy of reflection is the inherent corollary of an established ‘causality’, since it premises the descriptive interpretation which is the perceptual field. In the west, we can now establish such a philosophy on a purely cognitive basis. But Zen established it empirically from the relatively cognitive philosophical grounds of middle Buddhism.

The problem is that a cognitive ground cannot establish the singularity of cause, because, in spite of its apparent nature in function, cause itself cannot be reduced to a unity. The grief of the 20^th century, whether in its wars or in its final cultural desiccation, can be largely assigned to the failed assumption of the essential unity of cause.

At certain points in the not too distant past, it has been appropriate, in American Zen, to speak of the ‘two Suzukis’. In apposition to the intellectual / anti-intellectual presentation of Suzuki Daisetz, we have the pragmatic, but also essentially verbal teachings of Suzuki Roshi, Shunryu Suzuki. While undoubtedly Roshi’s American students will disagree with me about the ‘essentially’ verbal nature of his teachings, I am not altogether impressed with what I have seen of the first and second generation of disciples. He brought a peculiar light, but his light was grounded in an extraordinary document, the Shobogenzo of Dogen Zenji.

At this point, the Shobogenzo, the ‘Treasury of the True Dharma Eye’, is the only piece of Japanese Zen that interests me.

Students of Suzuki Roshi and their associates produced the first piece of literature that actually opened Zen to me, the Moon in a Dewdrop, a translation of selected tracts from the Shobogenzo. Here, for the first time, one could see the living paradox of Zen, not as the enemy of the cognitive, but as the ultimate extension of the cognitive when one recognizes that cognition itself is a form and function of ‘the spiritual’, the magical act at the center of self-awareness.

‘The green mountains are always walking. A stone woman gives birth to a child at midnight.’

This is the nature of cognition that grounds poetry itself. The west has traditionally distinguished between poetic and analytical reason. But here is a document which shows that they are essentially the same.

What the Shobogenzo showed me, finally, is that Zen is Chinese and not Japanese. If Dr. D. T. Suzuki is the scholarly epitome of modern Japanese Zen – and presumably he is – then even the transmission is suspect in my eyes. Like the late Korean students of Zen, Dogen captured the final reflective flowering of the Zen tradition in China, the historical summation of the classical period in Chan or Zen in which a renascent tradition produces exponents who summarize the voluminous records of the classical teachings and classical teachers – a paper compendium, which is simultaneously comprehensive and fragmentary. Comprehensive because an incredible range of the lineages is represented. Fragmentary because of the empirical and pragmatic nature of the teachings, almost entirely composed of immediate interactions between teachers and students, teachers and teachers, and students and students.

But it also showed that the odd expressions are cognitive elements in a comprehensive cognitive whole. Contrary to D. T. Suzuki, the truth of the koan lies with the phrase of Miura and Sasaki, that the koan is the most economical expression of a given Zen fact or understanding.

The period of classical Chan or Zen only lasted for two or three centuries in China. It coincided with one of the highest periods of classical Chinese culture, and helped feed back into a resuscitation of Daoism and Confucianism as well as a synthetic or syncretistic movement. But it endured a fairly extended period of decadence before the great koan collections were produced. And these collections themselves reflect a self-consciousness about the decadence as well as a new flowering of the tradition. But, of course, such a ‘flowering’, being reflective or retrospective, involves a subtly differing intent from the original impulses. Nevertheless, since we are outside both ‘classical’ periods, this is our necessary window. We need to find the borders in order to find the center.

But even these collections, for the most part, remain out of context. Although the slashing brilliance of transmitting incidence had apparently subsided, a vast surrounding oral tradition remained. Most of the koan collections therefore remain intensely cryptic. Like many documents at the core of eastern traditions, they are more like lecture notes, peculiarly condensed. The teacher presenting the koans would use traditional recitations, anecdotes, scriptural references, and so forth, to locate the exchange and suggest its significance.

The Shobogenzo, of course, embodies some of this context, which is what gave it much of its first force for me. But most of the other collections remained remote. Here, we take them, translated, off the bookstore shelves. We forget or ignore that these were once the in-house texts of a relatively small, remote and esoteric sect. Historically, in their own time, they would have only appeared in the frame that gave them flesh. And one wonders how many of the students would have actually handled the scrolls themselves. They are teachers’ documents. The presumptive presentation is oral.

Thus far, it would seem that only one of these documents takes full account of this situation, and finally includes the context in the text. This, of course, is The Book of Serenity. Perhaps the glib eye can skate over a passage or two. But the text defies a linear reading. But the issue of importance here is the fact that the book consists in perspectives of awakening. Awakening itself involves a hierarchy, since light and darkness are each potential windows. But, since awakening is also whole and part, every individual is distinct, even in awakening. Awakening is not different from the individual nature, as much as a given perspective might be characterized by a generalization as well, since awakening, by definition, is also a ‘universal’.

This is where Zen becomes the correlate for the next necessary step if the west wishes to return from the poisonous desert, the bodiless realm of negation it has fallen into. The fact that the single cause has fallen backward into its own emptiness, an emptiness which is nothing other than the denial aspect of our continued addictive clinging to the possibility of a causal One, means that the next step is the recognition of the multi-causal One. The One as obverse is the reverse of awakening. But the One of awakening invokes the wholeness and darkness prior to the One. The Light is grounded in the Darkness. Awakening emerges from any point on the wheel of Darkness. And, finally, the wheel of darkness is global. But the points gather. And the gathered points are causes. The apparently casual archetypes of the Zen story ultimately have an order, a causal succession. But, like the twelve-fold process of dependent origination, there are only causes, but no final cause. Or, rather, the Cause is the causal wheel, the turning points of awakening resolving into archetypes.

– Jeremy

selected paragraphs from ‘reading zen’

jtmonro@hotmail.com (Jeremy) — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 13:47:00 GMT

At this point, the Shobogenzo, the ‘Treasury of the True Dharma Eye’, is the only piece of Japanese Zen that interests me.

– Jeremy

Anima and Animus -oil, Salemme, 22x30, 1982

jonah@justanotherculturalvisionary.com (Will) — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 00:13:00 GMT

Always loved this but now I understand it at a much deeper level. So rich...

lectures from the ‘tarot poem’

jtmonro@hotmail.com (Jeremy) — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 14:53:00 GMT

the aesthetic

witnessing of

the kingdom

the real basis

of the modern

– from

‘Grail King

(King of Cups)’,

tarot poem

the Artist

awakens

the Sage

prophetic

light,

prophetic

voice –

nevertheless

the first

desire

is aesthetic

– from

‘Grail Knight’

tarot poem

– [ Professor M. (Editor) ]

Imaginary Portrait with Nude Environment 22x30, oil, 1982 -Antonio Salemme

jonah@justanotherculturalvisionary.com (Will) — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 22:34:00 GMT

Perceval

jtmonro@hotmail.com (Jeremy) — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 16:44:00 GMT

Perceval

whether I have

lost my memory

or been transported

by the hermit’s

magic, I do not

know, but it would

seem that I have

fallen in the East,

far from the mist

green meadows

of my native

rivers

outside

jtmonro@hotmail.com (Jeremy) — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 16:28:00 GMT

out of the boundary

stones –

the voices of God

beyond the

heaven worlds

of the western

darkness, the

outside

place

that bright

breathing

steel-

born

dream

bodies

ascending

between the

two horns

perceval

child of the Sword

child of the steel

no sword can

defend thee against

the day or the

year

a new prosody

jtmonro@hotmail.com (Jeremy) — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 16:22:00 GMT

There is an actual rhetoric to our present speech, something the ‘modernist’ artifice fails to notice.

The rhetorical basis of the American language has shifted away radically from the British.

It begins in plainstyle, the educated corollary for the frontier effect – the deconstruction to the basis of necessity. Being English middle class, it flattens the language, opening it up to the external. The final shift is African, Caribbean and other native influences introducing a force of rhythmic diversity beginning in raw syncopation.

Hence the division between a rhythmically dead intellectual poetry and hip-hop.

Hip-hop produces textures. Snoot ‘poetry’ clings to its denial of the Shakespearean iamb.

– the Critic

IP#1128 w/nude environment, 22x30, 10/92

jonah@justanotherculturalvisionary.com (Will) — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 16:01:00 GMT

motif : the advanced course

jtmonro@hotmail.com (Jeremy) — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 00:36:00 GMT

Contrary to the beginner’s course, certain premises are reversed :

The motif in art is not one’s own.

We are born with an ear for the ‘higher conversation’ which is ‘art’.

The motif in art is not one’s own :

The motif in art is not the motive of the artist. The craftsman’s motif depends on audience. The artist’s motif is at least a personal god. The presence of this personal god defines the artist at the outset, defines the act of the artist in terms of impulse and intent.

To speak of value is as crippling as the Buddha name in Zen.

We are born with an ear for this ‘higher conversation’ :

First mind is the mind of the artist in each of us. The distance between first mind and formal creativity is death & rebirth, the expulsion and return to Eden. The creative act dies into its own beauty. Connoisseurship requires the open mind that can die into the mind of the artist. Art teaches us the frame of the tradition. Reborn, the tradition becomes the living Eye.

– Jeremy

theology

jtmonro@hotmail.com (Jeremy) — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 14:09:00 GMT

theology

cause established

through prophetic

power –

Calvin lives –

his gifted

rebus

slaying

‘sinners’, the

‘fallen’ –

the zen sword

of the west –

his fate &

free will

will always

be the

stumbling

stone

block of

the west

now as the

twisted Eye

of physical

light –

Einstein & Lorentz –

& the self-positing

self

of Fichte

– the priest

why I choose

jtmonro@hotmail.com (Jeremy) — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 15:41:00 GMT

why I always chose

the poetry –

only poetry retains

the esoteric force

of reality

– Jeremy

perhaps –

today

only poetry

retains

(etc.)

even science now

finds its blind

way

in technocracy

shunning the

moment of

convincing

otherness –

objectivity –

the mystical

realities of

Einsteinian

paradox

[ poetry is my ishta deva

in the arts, synecdoche

for living traditions ]

Antonio Salemme - Imaginary Portrait - 22x30-oil-paper

jonah@justanotherculturalvisionary.com (Will) — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 09:59:00 GMT

Madonna and Child by Antonio Salemme

jonah@justanotherculturalvisionary.com (Will) — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 20:53:00 GMT

Imaginary Portrait 22x30, oil on paper, 1980

www.antoniosalemme.org

reading serenity

jtmonro@hotmail.com (Jeremy) — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 22:00:00 GMT

[I suppose you could

call it ‘reading

the book of serenity’]

expressed

recitation

refines

the crazed

actors

the

knowledge

seal of

not

knowing

defiance,

shunted

eyeballs

scan the

ancient

ranges

– Jeremy

motif : an introduction

jtmonro@hotmail.com (Jeremy) — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 18:35:00 GMT

Question : Why isn’t photography an art?

Answer : Because photography is view alone. Nature and camera determine the view finally, however subtle the selection. Sophistication of choice is not ‘creativity’ – the obverse whose reverse is epiphany or awakening.

Question : But isn’t all representational art ‘view’?

Answer : The two sides of your question require two answers. All art is representational as ‘view’, if ‘view’ is a window on the artist. Even craftwork, however banal, reflects its maker.

But all that is legitimately art is motif. Motif separates art from craft. The motive of craft is not one’s own.

Question : But isn’t motif ‘view’?

Answer : This is the level of understanding we begin with in this culture.

No. Motif is not ‘view’.

Motif begins in a subjective moment of invitation initiated through the perceptual instance of some ‘external’ concatenation. As such, motif is as much a process as a formal presentation. And the inceptive presentation is perceptual – the spontaneous response of consciousness – not necessarily the external in view.

Hence, motif develops as the artist proceeds.

In the legitimate artist, the motif is the final value expression inherent in the work – being the spontaneous product of the ‘moment’ from invitation to finished object. What makes the vocational artist is the coherence of the value from inception to completed work – that all actions emerge from this ‘final’ value.

This, of course, is a relatively cognitive definition of motif, and should not be taken as a comprehensive definition of art, in any sense. At the same time, it suggests the first qualitative shift in consciousness required on the path to connoisseurship – that we must begin to distinguish between ‘content’ and ‘motif’.

Apart from William and Antonio, I have neither seen nor heard any contemporary art criticism that makes or is based in this distinction. Antonio initiated us into his understanding by saying, in front of his work, “Look at the brushstrokes.” Eventually one realized that even where he varied the image from tangibly abstract to representational, the brushstrokes not only unified the painting, but opened the door to the ‘pure mind’ of the artist.

Where brushstroke is not necessarily self-evident, we can commonly enter motif through ‘pure’ color, apart from any representational forms. But wherever we ‘enter’ motif – brushstroke, color, line and so forth – we proceed toward the core nature of a higher conversation.

We were not born with an ear for this conversation. It must be learned. And the learning involves qualitative shifts in awareness.

– Jeremy

again the story

jtmonro@hotmail.com (Jeremy) — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 00:44:00 GMT

again the story

of the Angelic vision

in forest & old stone

ruin – the great neglect,

the glistening promise,

it all moves inevitably

toward that broken

castle

what is reclaimed cannot

be assessed against the

early narrative as

cause : everything fits

together now, but the

causes are still

unrevealed

Poet and Philosopher JT Monro at the Foundation

jonah@justanotherculturalvisionary.com (Will) — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 11:35:00 GMT

shark dentures

jtmonro@hotmail.com (Jeremy) — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 16:37:00 GMT

It only seems natural that someone raised in Los Angeles, but an émigré in New Zealand, should challenge the concluding shibboleth of the New York art market. New York has been tangibly losing altitude since mid-20^th century. Los Angeles proposes itself as the viable alternative, pushing its candidacy with aggressive multi-billion dollar museums and acquisitions. But Los Angeles feels like a New York creation – a conceptual arts performance built on sand and imported water. New Zealand, as peripheral in our field of awareness, yields a wistful fragrance of sophistication and nature, an appropriate source for a contemporary romanticism.

And, of course, anyone with the temerity to attack New York – particularly the New York art market – must be a romantic: distracted, if not deluded.

Conceptualism has been the abrading basis of modernism in the arts from the beginning. The 20^th century understanding of abstraction necessarily eventuates in conceptualism. Granted that art, by nature, is abstract, the abstract has only become formal concept during the past century.

But conceptualism is a cultural disease, not simply a disease of the arts. The visual arts perhaps most tangibly express the progressive formalization of the concept, the extending rigidity that denatures the creative act itself. What claims to be the latest, the epitome of the new, finally becomes the obvious sign of senescence.

But it is not simply the senescence of place, the degeneration of a given locale – a characteristic of aesthetic history. In many ways, New York has always been the expression of an idea. The conversion from the indefinite to the definite is indigenous in the nature of the city. New York has always embodied the idea – that is, the idea as commodity.

The concept is the final paradox that unseats academic philosophy as it is practiced today. When we reduce philosophy to the ‘verifiable’, concept becomes the necessary pivot that cannot be verified by our present strictures.

Perhaps we can deny awareness, assigning it to some region of the nebulous, without losing the nature of analysis. But if we cannot verify concept, analysis itself falls into the abyss of probabilities and skepticism.

Paradoxically, this is the basis of the exclusivity of concept, of its elevation to the status of the dominant cultural god. Concept becomes a commodity, a transactional given. We cannot locate its source. We cannot certify its existence in any other terms than the ‘fact’ of its existence – even if it finally stands outside our definition of ‘fact’.

But, as the essential transactional commodity, it is the only ‘entity’ we need. It not only stands in place of consciousness and unity, it becomes the de facto corollary of the ‘matter’ of ‘materialism’, even if any strict definition of ‘matter’ is precisely what precludes us from registering concept as ‘fact’. To have matter, we must have a tacit rubric for unity, something that matter itself, as presently defined, cannot supply.

That is, concept becomes the living embodiment of dead fact, a philosophical impossibility but a transactional necessity.

And it is precisely this self-excluding concept which has become the diminishing point toward which the arts now stand in asymptotic approach.

– the Critic

more priest: gods & Angels

jtmonro@hotmail.com (Jeremy) — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 15:02:00 GMT

One hesitates to say that von H. ‘explains’ himself. Nevertheless, the divisions have become necessary in his shadowing forth of the Cards, and hence reflect back into the philosophies and practices of the Poet and his Hermit friend. More from his notebooks. [H. T.]

Gods and Angels, gods and Angels: such creatures I never expected to discuss. My education was round and perfect. No whispering lapidary fact was absent from my curriculum. On the church side, the God show lifted itself to the Heavens, with only a misting drizzle toward the dismal lands of human suffering. God himself round and perfect, a golden sun radiating the sophistries of a dormant truth. On the pseudo-Gothic ivy side, my tutelage was, if anything, more round, more perfect. Since the fact is self-defining, at least in these regions of cerebral magic, only the round and pure gain the pass, the sanction of the unspoken guardian of roundness and perfection.

Thence one walked through the mirror. Too much belief, I suppose. When the glass shattered, companions fled. One enters the dark cave, or perhaps discovers the always immersion which is the cave. But the darkness is new. It has texture and direction, like bad wallpaper. An imperative. Lifting and directing, like a mother. Directing and correcting, as one supposes a father should. No matter. The old skein unwinds, no matter how tight or twisted.

Nevertheless, the process is kosher, halal, according to Hoyle. Even the body is sometimes allowed in those hallowed halls of purity, although no provision is made for ‘necessities’, as they say.

Ah, mysterious mirror: the metaphor cracks as badly as the glass. Because, crashing through the mirror, one turns back and sees . . . . the mirror intact! But now one has lost the orientation. Which side of the mirror am I on? Nothing in one’s education has prepared one for this, has it? Or, rather, the distinction that the mirror seemed to indicate has disappeared, the original distinction, although what that was remains vague. But a difference persists – here and there, this and that. But now it seems to move.

It begins in One and Two. What are these two worlds? And for most of the succeeding duration, they seem the same, on the same scale, within the same systematic set. But tack one, and the other escapes.

What are these two worlds, then?

One stops at Cause and Spirit for a while, since these were in fact the two gods of one’s education. But Cause and Spirit fall on the side of Mind finally, the nexus of Unity. Ah, that darkness! how it plunders the Unity. Everywhere, Unity falls back into a feeling. And the feeling leaps! No other words for it. The feeling leaps to its mark, something unseen that only reveals itself in the unpremeditated pounce.

No, Cause and Spirit are essentially static, a round robin of the fact of act, but not act itself.

But act, body and Unity are a host in both senses, a mutual hosting of world and self, a transaction carried on through the mirror, a transaction not different from ‘the mirror’ itself.

Spirit and Cause stand on the same footing in the created World, but this new order implies hierarchy, a new being of Being, something that resonates throughout the prophetic tradition. For when we pierce back through into the pure prophetic tradition, always we find the two Masters, one Spiritual and one prophetic.

Spirit is the Eye of Cause, the whole body of cause, the fulness that comes to rest in the final Eye of the leap, the prophetic receipt. But prophecy is value prior to Cause and Spirit, prior to impulse and luminous aura of the prophetic fact.

Only an Angel explains it.

The gods emerge everywhere. Everywhere the evolving human lifts the corner of the mirror.

But the Angels emerge in Persia, shared home of the prophetic birth, just east of the mid-world for which the prophetic promise is just west.

– A. v H.

priest words

jtmonro@hotmail.com (Jeremy) — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 14:49:00 GMT

Behind his back, his friends refer to him as the Mad Priest. His original church sees him as renegade, although one must acknowledge that, except in the view of the congregants, the tenets of the church are reasonably strange.

Before I went mad with the Cards, I thought the world was simple enough. Two or three principles should hold it together. A matter. A cause. Some kind of formulaic appurtenance pointing to a linking principle at the center. One shouldn’t quibble over words like God and Science, seeing their ultimately interchangeable nature at the center of the worldview. One could pass from congregation to congregation without blinking, so long as one remembered the native dialect: this here; that there. A reasonably good living so long as one kept to the appropriate script. And there were always the talk shows, the dice throw of success, the possibility that one would strike the right note, for whatever reason, and be showered with adulation, to be poked, pressed and pursued by the hordes of hungry ghosts.

But, speaking of dice, I didn’t come here to tell my bad history, except for the break, as the analysts call it. Because the break is the key. I know how my friends refer to me behind my back. But I made the mistake of getting interested in the description – the catechism, if you will. Every church has its limits, you know. The world is flat. Beyond this point you fall into . . . . .What? . . . The non-world? . . . Whatever is over the edge is still just on the other side of the street. But this is something no church will tell you, because then you might just put your boat in the river and sail across. Churches have to keep you at home, otherwise the cash flow stops.

In any case, this is also beyond the pale, out in the land where I wound up. The world of numbers. But not as any mathematician has known them. Ah, mathematicians. Numbers are like the un-God. The Un-God and Ur-God together. A number is as pure as Science itself. And what the numbers do is, beyond question, the prime acrobatical circus. Yes, indeed, there is nothing beyond matter and cause . . . . except Number. But don’t ask what a number is. Don’t ask ‘where’ it is that we ‘experience’ them. Just take them and fly.

But every number is a limit and a set, as well as a freedom. And the set nature and the limit nature are indigenous in the number. Where the mathematicians and I part company is at the Symbol value of the set, the limit and the Number itself. But I also part company with those old number gamers who reduce everything to One and Two, and take a twelve digit number and reduce it to Three or Four, or whatever mishmash of signifying ghosts – signifying ghosts, at least, in my world. Perhaps I can recite the longest word, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that I am literate. And, until one understands the value of One and Two in their native context, the rest is just hereditary burden. Only the first Ten, the first Twelve. And so forth.

This is what the Cards do. They not only point to Seven and Twelve, they explain Seven and Twelve. But one must pay close attention.

Here is the Rose. Perhaps the Rose is the Divine Feminine. But, in that case, the thorns are a bad joke. The Divine Feminine is Wisdom. Even the Shekina trails its fragrance of the feminine in that patriarchal document. But Wisdom is simply the meaning of meaning, also known as value. Like number, we like to use value but not look at it in terms of what it is, how we experience it. No, let us quibble over the analysis by which we will assess value until we decide that analysis cannot assess value, at which point, we deny that any such thing as value exists. . . Of course. . . . What alternative is there?

But value does not arrive in experience by analysis. Value is direct. Analysis is the derivative. If your tool fails, you find another tool. But if analysis fails, you deny the world. You don’t even question whether your definition of analysis is correct. Meantime, the Cards show you the nature of value. Value is the key. Out of the muck of the Earth it produces this fragrance. Or is muck a too indelicate word? Perhaps ‘substance’ is more discrete. But the fragrance points to the substance, and not the reverse. The substance begins in the fragrance when you look at the process of experience.

But here is where the break comes in, because the break both awakens us to the mirror and actually breaks the mirror. Breaking the mirror is the break. Seven years bad luck, no doubt – that Zen tunnel through the mountains. Who would choose to go there? The mirror not only lets us see the value, breaking the mirror shows us that the value adheres to both sides of the mirror, internal and external. The mirror breaking moment is also the moment of objectivity.

So we have the Suit Signs for the Numbers in the Little Cards, the Minor Arcana: Rose, Sword, Cup and Wand. A Medieval congeries, no doubt. And what did they know? those illiterate backwoodsmen of Europe. Long before Brentano, they asked the question of intention. Now this requires the broken mirror, another question altogether. Or so it would seem. But the Sword is intent. The Cup is identity. The Wand is the magic of both the whole and the other, of the sameness of whole and other and the magical nature of intent that brings them together at the point of value to produce the identity which is the object in awareness, the sameness of value and thing. Here is the real key to analysis. We need at least four simultaneous causes.

And since both are now on both sides of the mirror, we can project this out as well as in.

What remains is to notice that Four is not enough. Every Four implies a Five. The world requires transcendence. The world always requires an Aristotle to discover the fifth element, like the Aetheric, something not only beyond, but of a different nature, as the difference in motion between sub-Lunar and Aetheric, linear versus spherical.

This is not simply a Four world. Every Four World is also a Five / Four world.

– A. v H. (the Priest)

[From the notebooks of Albert von H., as translated by H. T., the Scribe.]

scribe speak: on ‘theosophy’

jtmonro@hotmail.com (Jeremy) — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 18:34:00 GMT

the Scribe speaks,

scribe & historian of the times

& sometime amanuensis

of the Poet :

Unlike the Poet, I still trouble myself, sometimes, over the words.

He said his friend, the Hermit, taught him true spontaneity. And while, as a poet, he felt obliged to maintain his craft, and therefore listened to all language with the same innocent ear, hoping to hear the new in both Art and language, he refused further struggle with the language, assigning that to the early journeywork that sums apprenticeship.

And were I to suggest that what troubles me now is an appropriate label for what he and the Hermit, and their other friends, achieved and changed, he would hold me aside with one of his peculiar sidelong glances, simultaneously sweet and ice.

I dread the word ‘theosophy’, just as I dread the word ‘theology’, although the lilting el allows the logos to pass while arresting the gentle sophia. Ology is everywhere. But we only allow sophia under the arm of love, the wisdom love of the supposed philosopher.

But what I object to is neither the sophia nor the ology, but the theos.

I would have no objection if we kept the god in the lower case. These gods can be studied, although they now constitute less than half of the ‘real world’, the world of our interpretation. Prophetic science replaces much of the god land. And while most practitioners fail to notice that ‘matter’ as well as Spirit is now the realm of the Angels, this does not change the divine play.

Meanwhile, the God who was remote from the first has now resigned the world to the prophetic Angels and the gods, since human freedom seems to be his aim; and his presence would therefore be a debilitating imposition.

As my teachers discovered, this does not entail a rigid adherence to Law. Apart from a general standard, the Law is flypaper to catch what it will. And generally it catches the power hungry and ambitious, who turn it into an ill designed monument threatening the soul of any acolyte who worships there.

The formal law tells us what we must discover within in terms of the law. But the Law will not lead us there. Righteousness is not necessarily a more direct path to knowledge of the divine than Sin.

And there is a knowledge of the divine in the moment of Death. The moment holds three facts. There is a God. God is other. Whatever else God may or may not be, God is benevolent.

These are not facts that can be parsed. They cannot be taught, transferred, transmitted or transformed into initiatory experience. They must be experienced for one’s self.

And since the Law cannot lead us, the only knowing is Angels and gods, and the only knowledge is elements and causes, the core function of the mind. But the key is the mirror nature, since mind and world share the mirror in the moment of perception.

And the mirror precedes self-awareness. Gods and Angels are the specific signs under the reign of Spirit and prophecy respectively.

But, in the world of the everyday, which is still fixated on the single cause, so that it cannot even understand Trinity, except in terms of a causal mouse in a three cornered maze (and therefore falls into a Newtonian idea of matter and a domino theory of cause, neither of which obtain any more in the actuality of Science), it is nevertheless still difficult to get a hearing under the name of ‘theosophy’, although I suppose it’s the only culturally accurate label.

– H. T. (the Scribe)

the hermit

jtmonro@hotmail.com (Jeremy) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 17:34:00 GMT

These personae have been there from the beginning

Perhaps the separation – their distinction as separable ‘individuals’ – is a function of the ‘external’ context, the socio-cultural phenomenology, shall we say, into which our heroes were born – the other land of the Other Land.

But that does not obviate their final ‘reality’.

The ‘fiction’ is the lesser world.

the Hermit

I have synthesized several traditions, some more specific than others.

The most ancient character of my emergence begins in the voice of the Teacher.

Immersed in extraneous noise establishing the institution altogether alien and contrary to the Teacher’s dicta, nevertheless the text still now and again embodies his authentic voice.

And, while the spider religion held me over the flames of Hell because I could not believe that a man became God, the opening window of his unique sound made promises beyond the blank walls of my enclosure.

The promise is fulfilled by Thomas, prophetic student of the prophetic Teacher.

The West begins in Greece.

The urgency of the prophetic is only fulfilled in the Teacher, but the urgency apparently drives the eastern divisions of that insular sea. The Greeks take it up in their primitive way, a clarity unsurpassed in the nature of the mind’s eye. But what we project back is largely garbage. Plato saw the corollary nature of whole consciousness and thing. Aristotle misinterpreted this instance as the syllogistic word.

His mistake changes history; but the key to the tool he misidentified is the elemental description he both completed and rejected. Aristotle ‘discovered’ the fifth element, Aether, thus creating the only viable structure for Plato’s spherical insight.

Greek philosophy begins in Thales and Water, proceed to Anaximenes’ Aer, thence to Heraclitus’ Fire and, finally, with the tacit addition of Earth, to Aristotle’s Aether – his ascription for the differing motion of the Heavens, being circular, as opposed to the linear motion of the sublunar world.

Only the five elements and their subsidiary developments can explain the empirical nature of inference and analysis.

But the five elements are one of the greatest discoveries in the evolution of history – not something one can keep under one’s hat. The record of their dispersion leaves fragments and whole responses across the civilized regions of the East. Upanishad, the epitome moment of the classical Sanskrit, coincides with Greek thought. And three, then four and finally five elements appear in the Upanishad texts, their dating paralleling the discoveries, if somewhat later.

When, after the Buddhist subversion, the subcontinent regains its original impulse, particularly the Upanishadic tradition in which Gautama himself appeared, the penultimate incarnation, Shankara, has a unique student who becomes immersed in the elemental tradition. While the philosophical Vedantins become enmeshed in the dualistic toils of their anti-dualist philosophy, Sureshvara receives a brief teaching of the core trinity opening out into his own understanding, his fivefold intuition concerning the spherical nature of reality or experience.

Apart from the various modes of trinitarian interpretation that Vedantins have followed out from Shankara’s keys, Upanishad opens out into a description of the moment of experience. As such, all numbers are subsumed up to Five. Dualism finds its moving base in the appositive dance of Prajapati and Hiranyagarbha, here as the causal light and the golden egg. The dance begins from the whole and point of awareness.

But, while Upanishad touches clearly on the reflective nature of the moment of experience, the causal light only transcends the whole in terms of the whole. From the point of view of mind, pure cause is still the gift of the Greeks, the sidereal gift of the prophetic tradition.

The five elements are latecomers in Europe. But, here, Five and Three meet together to produce, once again, the unique experience of the Teacher. But now, for the first time, the experience becomes separated from direct lineages of transmission, teacher to disciple. The word enters the text. The text becomes the world. But Aristotle’s syllogism becomes the imprisoning gift, liberating the Eye by allegory, but imprisoning the Eye in an artificial reason, an arbitrary One of attenuated Symbol, as if only the word, and not the value, were the parallax of dipolar vision.

Pick the Idealists to break through the gateless gate of the West, the thousand foot wall that wraps around us, like a planetarial cinema for the Eye, until the Eye itself breaks free, recognizing Eye and eye and the self-awareness that stands between them.

This gate can only be defined by Five.

Fichte breaks through, between the Idealists of reason and ‘unreason’. The ‘irrational’ round that this breakthrough Eye shows us can never be lineal, never be sequentially causal alone. But Fichte cannot go beyond this ‘self-positing of the self’. The revered ghost of Aristotle stands in the way.

At the outset, it is not at all obvious that the five elements stand behind the Tarot Cards. The only direct indication is in the Suits, each of which contains four Face Cards and ten Numbers or numbered Cards.

The Tarot is intended as a self-explanatory text. The fact that the Golden Dawn, among other traditions, perverted the Major Arcana and exploded the Minor Arcana in terms of an essentially artificial synthesis, does not change the elemental cogency of the Cards in terms of their own tradition. While the Cards consist in twelve sets of Seven (including the Fool as an ‘empty’ set), all of the numbers and subsets contained within this frame hold equal value. Each becomes definitive and embracing at its own location.

The division between Ten and Squire not only points to the separation of the second set of Seven, but also acts as the division for the whole Suit. Ten is Five doubled, a primary meaning. Five is the natural cogency of the mind, the wholeness of the field of awareness and the moment of awareness.

But field and moment are defined reflectively: Five doubled.

Even if it were not self-evident in the Cards, Five is the necessary condition of Unity or the One. When we understand that the One is created by consciousness in the act of reflection (however much it may have prior roots), we begin to understand that the One itself is necessarily ‘composite’. But it is like Henry Miller breaking a piece off the cabbage leaf he finds in the gutter – every piece is ‘an infinity’ as well.

The five elements are five causes. Because Aristotle lacked the formally prophetic that would have carried him beyond the moment of experience, he defines Cause as Four rather than Five, an error paralleling his abandonment of the elements in favor of the syllogism and the categories.

The moment can only be defined in terms of the five causes. Every moment is five causes operating simultaneously, with the five elements or substances manifesting simultaneously as the apparent corollary for the five causes.

And only in terms of these moments can we explain the actual moment of objectivity, a moment characterized both ‘subjectively’ and ‘objectively’ by Einstein’s awakening into the Special Theory of Relativity, which shows not only that the speed of light is simultaneously finite and infinite, but also that this is the necessary corollary for the moment of observation, a.k.a., the moment of experience. Light defines moment. The dualism is empirically valid because experience begs both Cause and Spirit. But defining the shared polarities becomes defining the shared spheres, the mutual fivefold nature of the five locating elements and the five transforming causes, working simultaneously.

This is one of the gifts of Seven and Twelve, the peculiar potencies of prophecy.

My friend and mentor, the poet, sent me on this journey, by his desire to understand the consciousness we shared, the peculiar gift of Science. But, in his mind, it was always the prophetic key at the source of his poetry, something that seemed to him to be peculiarly modern, uniquely contemporary. So we have shared this journey, although he, for all his otherworldliness is far more immersed in the world than I.

Sometimes, he seems ancient, my friend the poet. But what is poetry, if not eternal youth?

– the Hermit

a dire season

jtmonro@hotmail.com (Jeremy) — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 16:14:00 GMT

[my farewell for Joe and Reed
and prayer for peace for
Ashley and those near her]

‘Celeste’

the rain reminds me of death

celeste

she who weeps without sorrow

who waters the earth with her tears

death, the dance of spirit –

each recreates his own inner world

where nothing was

he builds his city of crystal

his temple of light – Jerusalem

stone by stone

mountain by mountain

the jeweled floor of heaven reappears

in this pristine emptiness

– Jeremy

Joe DeRaymond 1950-2009

jonah@justanotherculturalvisionary.com (Will) — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 10:35:00 GMT

oil 24x30"

Joe was a political Activist and participated in the Fellowship of Reconciliation, where he was an observer in a Peace community in Columbia. He was also an elections observer in El Salvador and worked in local communities there. The community of La Loma in El Salvador named a school after him. For family here in the US this was a particularly heartfelt and appreciated honor. He participated in many protests at Fort Benning, Georgia, where the School of Americas was in operation. He spent 3 months in a Federal Prison once as a result of his protest. He is missed.

poet & knight

jtmonro@hotmail.com (Jeremy) — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 16:04:00 GMT

poet & knight

poet & knight –

who invokes whom? –

steel born and the one

brought, not by words, but

by the intention of words –

the blind Symbol that

rules fate like a slave,

bound to the wheel he

creates, the wheel he

turns: the mind – the

inchoate blind receiver

belies its asseverating

shadow as the

fractionating

world

– Jeremy

stray notes for perceval

jtmonro@hotmail.com (Jeremy) — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 20:53:00 GMT

To my cloud of gentle readers and evergrowing public, I extend my heartfelt appreciation for the numberless notes of concern on my extended absence, but I was not ill or distracted, except by concern for the dauntless Perceval and his world. If he is the double, he nevertheless dwells on the other side of the mirror. And since it is in the nature of the mirror that it moves, we must first of all define the land – establish the map – for the world in which Perceval travels and acts.

Perceval is the Knight of the Lance, not of the Grail. The wonderful text doctors tell us that the ‘graal’ was a large salver, more appropriate, for example, for a whole large salmon – one of the divinity-presenting animals of Albion – than for a single host. The focus of the ‘Grail procession’ is actually the Lance that Bleeds. At the same time, the original salver presents the bloody, severed head of a youth, perhaps the annual sacrifice covenanted by the conquest of the devastated land.

Therefore our beloved Chrétien is already corrupting the text toward the ecclesiastical. For Perceval is the embodied prophetic spirit of Albion at the transition between the late druidic and the peculiar spiritual hybrid arriving as the new insight, the new light. The frontier breaks all hybrids down into their original species, and the species here are church and gnosis. The druidic favors the gnostic. But gnosis, as it arrives, carries the core force of prophecy, extending beyond the oracular power of the indigenous priests, and offering the priestly power of self-witnessing in time to all who find the thread of gnosis.

The story of Perceval, from the first, is a jumble. The only cogency is his spontaneous recognition of knighthood. When his father and six elder brothers are killed in knightly feats, his mother takes him away, presumably as an infant, to their Welsh fortress in the wilderness. And she ordains that he shall never know aught of knighthood. Yet at his youthful play in the woods, casting his handmade javelins, he is accosted by knights, and, after mistaking them for Angels, immediately recognizes his vocation and rides off to Arthur’s Court.

[Further readings: the Mabinogion and Chrétien de Troyes.]

But Perceval is a prophetic story in itself. Each fragment in the jumble seems to point to a complete prophetic possibility. But the objectification of the prophetic, the overturning of the prophetic as vocation – personal prophecy – while completed in a moment historically, beginning what we call the common era, the emergence of personal prophecy as a formalized and cognized process had to await the peculiar expression of prophecy, to wit, science.

Now we can tell Perceval’s story. But, of course, Perceval’s story is the story of anyone who has found the thread of vocation, now that vocation itself becomes an objectified and cognized typology and potentially a taxonomic sequence of experience. At some point, we automatically pick up Perceval’s story, consciously or otherwise.

Cursed as I am with the residues of the modern, I can no longer tell the smooth allegory. Ah, for the Tennysonian eyeball and spelled tongue, to run the story down through a lush world that only whispers abstractions. But today we have to see the machinery: not only the raw struts exposed here and there, but hourly guided tours of the guts as well. At best, I can only make it a virtue, since I have already spent twenty-seven years in the rocky monastery transcribing the unwritten texts of the future, a superstructure of the analytical, wheels of Five proliferating through substance and cause to return us to the very analytical moment, the mirror in which Perceval rides.

If I have said that I spent the last twenty-seven years transcribing the texts of the future in which Perceval rides, why, my gentle reader asks, did I have to take the break for which I more or less apologized? Gentle reader, I was born into a hard world of science, a rocky country of blocks shaped by engineers, a land of plumbing and high pressure lines, of electric lights and electric fences. Purity can only follow the edge. The color of the country is gray with black lines. Tiny framed windows open out onto ‘nature’ – something, finally, to be stamped out.

One has to work backward from the hard form to the living flesh. These first books disassemble the machine, and show how the mirror stands at beginning and end. Wheels of Five wheel through each other, finally returning the world to the Eye, the worlds of Sixes and Sevens – the double world of Six, where cause and spirit play yin and yang, and the world beyond number at Seven, the world of value.

But, while they open the way, still these books stand upright and march with a measured tread. Perceval, however, rides in the palimpsest day, the world of our world, where all is simultaneous.

God bless the green world that opened the Eye of the mirror. In the deep forest, the forest dwellers prepared the mash, lit the sacred fires, lay down to witness the god. Therefore we know that Perceval himself rode to India. The sacred homa fire still burns on the hearth, reminding us of the seven sacred fires in the forest when the forest dwellers wrote their books – especially the singer’s book, with its songs and rituals, and the book of blue darkness, where we welcome the dawn.

But our crowning book is a book from our lineal past; a book from the time of Perceval himself, at least in its deepest parts, a shimmering history, gathering its prophetic meanings in the arc from Albion, where those called Celts held their ground in the last island mountains, to the southern hill, beyond islands, where the priest folk died by fire, rather than recant, while their brothers who escaped eastward turned to the true mountains and wrote their text in a jongleur’s trick, a Deck of Cards.

In that wasteland of willed futurity I fell into by my birth, I found the secret science of the line, the science of the word – ancestor land for my vocation, the plainstyle heritage of the double light. But only the Cards could rescue me from the topsy-turvy of prediction and predication, of science and the play of gods and Angels – to spread the green Earth before me, the discerning world of the journey, and unfold the sky and Stars, the guiding thread of days spent in the search for that which is only one’s self and the gifting powers for one’s self.

– Jeremy

composition with moonscape

jonah@justanotherculturalvisionary.com (Will) — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Eve Morgana finished kind of sort of

jonah@justanotherculturalvisionary.com (Will) — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 18:36:00 GMT

Well, I'm calling the painting of Eve M finished and will frame it and show it to my gallery person here in Bisbee. I'm going to put up the finished version first then follow it with the one I posted a few of weeks ago for comparison's sake.

the previous state...

Artist Statement

jonah@justanotherculturalvisionary.com (Will) — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 14:43:00 GMT

My work is grounded in
what I call the aesthetics of spontaneity.
Each brushstroke,
each variation of tone,
each texture
has value and contributes
to the overall composition.
By remaining in the moment,
spontaneous,
and without concept,
I create work which is a balance
of the subject (motif),
the medium,
and my Own thought and feeling (personality). This balance
is what I strive for
and value
in Art.

Added a new gallery of recent work

jonah@justanotherculturalvisionary.com (Will) — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 11:43:00 GMT

www.williamderaymond.net/rw.html

I am gonna grind away till I can't grind away no more.....