LXIX

 

And Su Dongpo, “Remembrance”:

To what can our life on earth be likened?

To a flock of geese,

Alighting on the snow.

Sometimes leaving a trace of their passage.

 

WARNING:

SUBJECT FREEZES BEFORE OBJECT

 

My heart is capable of every form.

A cloister for the monk.

A shrine for idols,

A pasture for gazelles,

The pilgrim’s kaaba,

The tables of the Torah, the Koran.

Love is the faith I hold.

Wherever turn His camels,

Still the one true faith is mine.

– Ibn ‘Arabi

 

Quondam iterum Whitman:

The ostant evanescent,

The substance of an artist’s mood or savan’s studies long,

Or warrior’s, martyr’s, hero’s toils,

To fashion his eidolon.

 

Of ever human life,

(The units gather’d, posted, not a thought, emotion, deed, left out,)

The whole or large or small summ’d, added up,

In its eidolon.

 

The old, old urge,

Based on the ancient pinnacles, lo, newer, higher pinnacles,

From science and the modern still impell’d,

The old, old urge, eidolons.

 

The present now and here,

America’s busy, teeming, intricate whirl,

Of aggregate and segregate for only thence releasing,

To-day’s eidolons.

 

These with the past,

Of vanish’d lands, of all the reigns of kings across the sea,

Old conquerors, old campaigns, old sailors’ voyages,

Joining eidolons…

 

 

Densities, growth, facades,

Strata of mountains, soils, rocks, giant trees,

Far-born, far-dying, living long, to leave,

Eidolons everlasting.

 

Exalte, rapt, ecstatic,

The visible but their womb of birth,

Of orbic tendencies to shape and shape and shape,

The mighty earth-eidolon.

 

All space, all time,

(The stars, the terrible perturbations of the suns,

Swelling, collapsing, ending, serving their longer, shorter use,)

Fill’d with eidolons only.

 

The noiseless myriads,

The infinite oceans where the rivers empty,

The separate countless free identities, like eyesight,

The true realities, eidolons…

 

Deep down, the bourgeoisie knows that its class function: that of murdering and stealing from others, is wrong.

Dimly, the bourgeoisie suspects it is the true criminal class. But to realize this would destroy its capacity to function, and therefore to exist. So it invented cops – an “occupation” we wouldn’t have at all if the bourgeoisie wasn’t scared to death of its own shadow.

Once constituted, the cops serve as the projective and projectile force of the displaced terror of the bourgeoisie in the face of its own existence. This force is channeled through an organized intermediary tribe of officially-sanctioned thugs whose individual constituents are prone to panic, not least since they often feel – and, because of their role, potentially are – personally threatened. It is because the bourgeoisie dares not become aware of its nature that the cops, transmitting and amping up this received fear with some of their own, often erupt in homicidal rage against the object the bourgeoisie has substituted for itself: the black man.

 

The bourgeoisie believes itself to be white.

And “whites,” enough of them, anyway, believe themselves to be the bourgeoisie.

How then, can the executions, whether on a gurney in a prison, or on the streets, not continue? For legality, and the system of law itself, in such a case, can only be a manifestation of an undiagnosed, therefore untreatable, social psychosis.

 

Keep calm and eidolon.

 

Not this the world,

Nor these the universes, they the universes,

Purport and end, ever the permanent life of life,

Eidolons, eidolons.

 

Beyond thy lectures learn’d professor,

Beyond thy telescope or spectroscope observer keen, beyond all mathematics,

Beyond the doctor’s surgery, anatomy, beyond the chemist with his chemistry,

The entities of entities, eidolons.

 

Unfix’d yet fix’d,

Ever shall be, ever have been and are,

Sweeping the present to the infinite future.

Eidolons, eidolons, eidolons…

 

[The] landscape has value only if you are internally available: “If you approach it with a spirit of woods and springs, its value is high,” but if you approach it with and “arrogant” and “wasteful” gaze, inevitably, “its value is low.” Says Jullien in The Great Image, quotng Guo Xi.

 

Allow space for movement.

 

I was a Platonic solid for the FBI.

 

The profound writer learns to disengage “reading” the world from “knowing” it. She embraces the former and renounces the latter. He avails himself of availability. She remains available to non-knowing, to non desiring.

 

Yeah, I was out of touch

But it wasn’t because I didn’t know enough

I just knew too much

Sang Gnarls Barkley, “Crazy”

 

Disponabilité, mon amour.

 

Occupy nothing.

 

The nonobjectness of the landscape [to painter who makes heresef available to it, as with you Brother Writer]…has to do with the fact that the landscape proceeds from a silent osmosis between outside and inside (“spiritual encounter,” “tacit harmony”…) upstream from any attentive and deliberate perception. In other words the painter does not approach landscape as a perceiving subject. It is by virtue of the relaxed state of his person [the writer], to which he knows how to gain access, no longer urging, no longer governing, that a spirit dimension is released on its own from the materiality of forms. [Jullien, The Great Image…]

 

The prophet and the bard,

Shall yet maintain themselves, in higher stages, yet,

Shall mediate to the Modern, to Democracy, interpret yet to them,

God and eidolons.

 

And thee my soul,

Joys, ceaseless exercises, exaltations,

Thy yearning amply fed at last, prepared to meet,

Thy mates, eidolons.

 

Thy body permanent

The body lurking there within the body,

The only purport of the form thou art, the real I myself,

An image, an eidolon.

 

The very songs not in thy songs,

No special strains to sing, none for itself,

But for the whole resulting, rising at last and floating,

A round full-orb’d eidolon.

 

By approaching, by making myself available to the nude as landscape – shan-shui, mountain(s)-water(s) – the body deobjectivizes before and within me. Our encounter becomes one of reciprocal breath.

 

 

Se détend, mon amour.

On the narrow surface [of the painting] [or, Sister Writer, on the page], a foot square, heaven and earth, mountains-waters, and all that exists rule themselves. Shitao, quoted by Jullien, The Great Image…

 

The inconsolable wail of the hook and ladder.

 

So many thumbs hooked, so many necks bent, heads angled forward, pulled inexorably toward the little oblong black hole.

 

Which genocide are you on?

 

So not, so not, mon amour.

 

Neether, nyther

Geezer, geyser

 

Ucello’s Battle of San Romano, announces in the tripartite imperative (before even the tempera(te) egg cracked upon the slipery slope of oil) that the Western “perspective” on the art-science of painting – as in all essences subject to our perception-analysis-cogitans – is one of confrontation: a war between mathematical order and the most fantastic clutter. And that this war, and rumors thereof, suffuses the entirety of the discourse, right, left, ninety-nine and one percenters.

Could there have been a World Trade Center without the phalanx, without the bristling array of spears in mindless, near parallel, aestheticized repetition?

But what, O Filippo Tommaso Dick Cheney, what confronts us when the ideal of battle itself dies? How to find a perspective, much less a line of Appeles, in so much dust?

Eidolons, holy eidolons.

 

Eidolostan, mon amour.

And Nagasaki.

 

Speaks doll

That satin

Latin

 

Eidolons, we don’t need no stinkin’

 

For upstream from this confrontation with itself, the self, with the object, with the supra-meta-subjetive Muses and their sister Fates (who do different things with scissors than Matisse) lies the starting point of painting, of writing: the Qi/breath, which need not be battled – how Pyrrhic would that be? – but rather “wants” to be regulated, refined, distilled within an undivided body-spirit that draws life from the same font as the painting, as the phrase.

 

And yes, Courbet worked from photographs in depicting The Origin of the World.

 

But wait, Sister Painter, Brother Writer: you don’t invent Mount Taishan. The clouds lift, and you see it.