CXXXV

 

An’ then, funnely enough, ‘e went down the tube…

 

Miss Mahalia Vidalia

 

There is another dialogue I would like to develop here, less with China than with contemporary art… Because it is the artists, not the philosophers, who are the first adventurers, or let’s say pioneers of thought. Philosophy, as we know, is always a late riser. [François Jullien, This Strange Idea of the Beautiful, Michael Richardson and Krzysztof Fijalkowski, trans., Seagull Books, 2010. p. 3]

 

Ogilvy and it doesn’t mather

 

I was a little wooden palmesel for the FBI

 

M train to Hystoria

 

The sound of one hand laughing

 

There is what a thing is, and there is what a thing potentiates

 

There is what a place is, and there is what the place lends possibility

 

For example, what is it possible to think in France in 2016. What could be thought there in 1889? (Of course even 1889 is absurdly broad.) And what constitutes France, then, now and at all moments in between?

Take General Boulanger par example…

 

What lends one human energy, or a given class of human energies, more or less importance, greater or lesser value, than another?

 

Boulangism, mon amour

 

 

The bread at Votre Artisan Boulanger is very good. As are the croissants and pains au chocolat.

Raymond Losserand, the man for whom the street is named, though he almost certainly ate bread, was not himself a boulanger, rather an artisan-furrier. Born in 1903, he joined the Communist Party in the ‘20s, served as a local city councilman in the late ‘30s and joined the resistance movement in the wake of the Nazi occupation. Arrested by the Gestapo in May, he was shot by a firing squad in October 1942 and is buried in Père-Lachaise. His wife Louise Marié, “Louisette,” also a member of the resistance, was arrested at the same time. Deported to Auschwitz, Louisette was transferred to Ravensbrük, then Mathausen, from which she was liberated in May, 1945.

Discerning eyes will note that in the photograph above, the sheaf of wheat on the shop sign has not been gathered into a fascio. It remains loosely bundled: it has structure, but retains its flexibility, and each stalk its distinct individuality within the group.

Wheat potentiates what?

 

I was a Greek Ideal of Beauty for the FBI

 

Rue des Thermopyles

What sort of bread gets baked between the “hot gates”?

 

Ever since Parmenides’ radical separation, the West has been at pains to build a bridge between being and nonbeing: KrazyGlu, suture, whatever.

Galloping Gertie. Rosie the Riveter.

Eucharist and poor Shrödinger’s Kat.

But what if the threat is a premise? Can a separated existence exist?

 

If ecotourism, why not Vandotourism where, for a few extra bucks, you get to smash up other folks’ cultural legacies? Like if you find a sphinx with a nose, go for it, bro. Or Aphrodite with a head on her shoulders…

The pump don’t work ‘cause the Vandotourists…

 

Man of Sorrows: Christ simultaneously dead and alive, displaying (!) the woulds of the crucifixion yet standing upright.

Fear the Walking Dead

Revelation as zombie apocalypse

 

USDA approves the distribution and sale of “chiggen®,” a “food product” that is simultaneously flesh, yet not flesh; meat, yet something other. But it’s guaranteed psyche-free.

 

Rank begets rancor

 

The fleshy Episcopal priest at the next café table addresses his blousy companion: “It’s clear in my mind that clearly we need to bring people together and let them ping off each other.”

 

I was a Pre-Socratic Anato-mist for the FBY

 

Some further palaver you don’t catch, but then the priest’s blousy (feathered blousy) interlocutor says: “I think priests are the most important resource,” which, over the espresso machine hiss sounds, like “racehorse.”

 

I was a vernacular tabernacle for the FB-uh-oh

Tent city, yo

 

A school group of about twenty eight-year-old kids streams past your bench. They’re talking volubly amongst themselves. “Remember,” one boy asks his companion, confidingly, “when your were little…?”

 

I have a dream: that the little white babies who pass your bench in strollers or carriages will be pushed by their parents or brothers or sisters, aunts or uncles.

I have a dream: that the infirm or elderly of any race will be cared for by members of their own family, or by friends.

I have a dream: that the nannies and home health aids will gain the time and resources to nourish their own lives and to be more present among their loved ones.

I have a dream –

 

Après moi, le dél–yuge

 

So shake you bam bam to de Socalypso rit’em…

 

Be careful when ordering the Chicken Parmenides: one minute it’s there, the next…

 

Do fungi have sporegasms?

Say Grace, Goodnightie

 

Stereotypology, also know as pre-disfiguration

 

La vie, c’est un bel voyage, n’est pas?

 

Hypostatize and fly with me

 

We of the so-unwild yet savage West, exiled and auto-forced to wander endlessly (?) through a wilderness of Principles

Lions & Tigers & Bearz & Koncepts, oh my!

 

Could one say that Titian’s “Punishment (Flaying) of Marsyas is beautiful? A beautiful painting. Beautifully painted?

Certainly there is a love affair with paint going on, if not with torture. This late work is not without the (inverted) element of sadomasochistic eros. The satyr, his head upper body turned frontally, does not seem particularly displeased as a comely, nude woman works with her blade on one of his nipples. He retains a quality of robust virility. If one didn’t know the subject, one might think he was taking an upside-down haircut. Can a hoofacure be next?

Whereas Apollo, shown fully-clothed and fiddling effetely off to the side looks nothing, in face or proportion, like the ideal kourous we’ve seen in a thousand statues and vase-paintings.

So, Sr. Vecelli, what r u saying?

Or, as I suspect, are you doing what the best Western artists do: steal beauty from the clutches of Plato, again, and again, and again…

And by sacrificing Truth, thereby fructifying the earth, as Masyras’ blood is said, to have done, by Ovid and others.

And then, Eleusis. And the sheaves of wheat representing its rites, which we have also seen, even unto Rue des Thermopyles.

 

All corn suggests wheat, all metal suggests gold, all birth suggests human beings. So, purportedly, preached Meister Eckhart (Sermon 29), right around the time of South German flagellation movement – if history serves.

 

So, uh, could one also refer to the High Middle Ages in Europe as the Minstrel Period?

 

It’s not de metrics, it’s Demeter

 

Trust me, children, there are way more than three stooges

 

Tierra del yuge

 

The Road to Hypostasis

            Starring Crosby, Hope, Lamour and a cast of billions

 

Including one Gregor MacGregor, believe him or not: great great nephew of Rob Roy, would-be colonizer of Panama, staunch republican defender of New Granada, and yes, Cazique of Poyais… who began his life in 1786 in Glengyle, on the north shore of Loch Katrine, and died some sixty years later in Caracas, where he was interred with full military honors in the cathedral of the newly-minted Venezuela.

 

“All Cretans are liars,” said the Cretan

 

De Pulchro et apto, On the Beautiful and the Fitting: Augustine’s (lost) first treatise, c. 380

 

Ah Bartleby, Ah Pulchritude! Amen.