LV

 

The West: Nature.

China: The natural.

 

Land(e)scape.

Get thee behind me, Eden.

 

All spirit, no body. Weightless. Transcendent. Moongolf, mon amour. Zero-G. No earthbound downtown, only heaven, revelation and ever Up-up-upton.

And yet… the void, the place of “is not,” which, classically, nature herself [?!], in company with Parmenides, Plato and Aristotle abhors. For the latter, the void was not only a lack of being, but a logical absurdity.

For Lucretius, according to Jullien, the void is a place both “intangible and immaterial (locus inane vacansque) existing at once as vacant space between bodies, permitting their displacement, and as an interstitial space ‘mingled with things themselves,’ thus allowing their penetration, causing their greater or lesser compactness, explaining their greater or lesser density, their greater or lesser weight, and so on. Lucretius recognizes the existence of the void…but only with respect to bodies. In fact, it is by relying on the void that he can explain that only bodies exist.”

 

 

But then, paddling back two and a half centuries upstream of Upton, we find Hogarth’s The Weighing House:

 

  Explained as follows:

          A.        Absolute Gravity.

            B.         Conatus against absolute Gravity.

            C.        Practical Gravity.

            D.        Comparative Gravity.

            E.         Horizontal, or good sense.

            F.         Wit.

            G.        Comparative Levity or Coxcomb.

            H.        Partial Levity, or pert Fool.

            I.          Absolute Levity, or Stark Fool.

 

Silly cone implants.

 

Implanticide. Implantitude.

 

The body is the land we must (e)scape to enter the realm of the spirit.

 

The dematerialization of Venus. Up, up, up!

 

All this and ISIS too.

 

Landscape: “a fragment of land subject to the authority of the gaze.” Selon Jullien The Great Image… p. 122.

 

“If your view is limited, what you see is no longer complete.” Wang Wei, “Xu hua,” ibid.

 

All landscapes lunar.

 

Didja hear the 1 abt the Zoroastrian manicurate?

 

Device for the lovelorn.

 

Globalization. It’s just modernity metastasized.

And capitalism was bad enough when it was Frankenstein’s monster. In the book, he dies. In social life, he turns zombie, then goes viral.

And every place that was not the West – every landscape that, by hook or crook or tide of crap we modernized – what were they to do with our modernity besides adapt to it, make mutant forms, and send them back – not home to roost, but to peck and rend?

And there wasn’t any love in the sending, so there won’t be in the receiving, not in any of it – no – nor democracy, nor compassion, nor freedom, nor that ugly shibboleth liberty.

As that gaze, merciless in its discrimination, now turns on us. To be, or not to be? No longer a question for us to decide.

And, though they are gone as a political movement, swept into the dustbin of history, the laconic motto of the Kampuchean “democrats” yet resounds: It is no gain to keep you. It is no loss to lose you.

Esau, it is said, renounced his birthright for a mess of pottage. Which most of us would rather do than starve and that’s the animal reality of it. But America, when it considered brotherhood, fleetingly and only as a concept, then thought, But I’d rather have a slave, and in that moment, sealed its face.

 

What is the nature of reality? is not the same question as: what is the reality of the natural?

Similarly, what is reality? is not the same question as: how does reality deploy?

 

If another world exists, however “spiritual,” we may tend to devalue the world in its infinitude. We may even trash it in order to leverage ourselves beyond, to whip ourselves free of its pull and into another world which is better by simple virtue of its being out there.

And here, dear friend, at the instant when another world detaches as a separate essence, is where transcendence converges with suicide.

 

No murder without idealization.

 

The eye can penetrate. The eye can be violated. It can also embrace.

 

Science = God carried on by other means.

 

Because we have acquired the habit of being partial and particular, we have “deaccessioned” much of our capacity to perceive the world in its silent, invisible, coherence. Which remains coherent in its plenitude with our without us.

 

Viz: the first anti-masque, the dance expressing the natures of the presenters.

Fancy How like you this device?

Opinion ‘Tis handsome, but –

Laughter Opinion will like nothing.

Novelty It seems new.

Confidence ‘Twas bold.

Jollity ‘Twas jocund.

Laughter Did I not do the fool well?

Admiration Most admirably…

From The Triumph of Peace: A Masque presented by the Foure Honourable Houses or Innes of Court. Before the King and Queene’s Majesties, in the Banqueting house at White Hall, February the third, 1633. Invented and written by James Shirley, of Grayes Inne, Gent.

 

Fill-ossify.

 

Can one really say that breath is nothing?

I think, therefore I am?

I breathe, (uh-oh, no syllogism).

Ah yes, there is something we can say:

Spiro, ergo cogito (nullam periodam)

 

Over the course of the months, this unscrolling text has continually surfaced several recurring questions:

Are there alternative ways of structuring consciousness to those with which we are familiar and to which English and other European languages lend themselves?

If so, how might we gain access to these other structures?

What is the relation between perception and breath, the two channels by which we connect to the “outside”?

Is there a way that language – even English – and images, may contribute to developing not uniformity, but rather coherence of consciousness and social practice – within the globalization initiated by Western thought and carried on through European language?

 

At Tarallucci you overhear a tourist woman telling her breakfast companions about her visit to the WTC memorial. She began walking toward the Freedom Tower, thinking she was not far distant and would arrive at any minute, but found it was “like walking toward a mirage.”

 

Is the skyline of a great city, particularly one situated by the ocean, an attempted simulacrum of a mountain range?

Jullien, in his comparative study of Western “landscape” painting and Chinese depictions of “mountain(s)-water(s)” (shan-shui), says: What characterizes the mountain, as we know, is “greatness” (of the compossible), and what characterizes water, by virtue of its movement, is “life.” The water is the mountain’s “arteries” and the mountain is beholden to water for its “animation”; the mountain is the water’s “face,” what makes it perceptible, and water is beholden to the mountain for its power of “seduction.” The mountain embraces and structures, and the water circulates and flows. When mountainsides are encircled by clouds, the mountain shoots up in “height.” The water, which meanders away only to reappear farther off, gains in “depth”… At the same time the mountain finds expression through water and vice versa, permeated as they both are by the same rhythmic pulsing. The waves rise and fall like mountain summits, and the rows upon rows of mountaintops fade away into the distance, without interruption, like waves. [The Great Image Has No Form, or On the Nonobject through Painting, pp. 122-123.]

 

Res extensa, res cogitans. House Descartes. Think outside the Bachs? What if we were to take a further step still, and move ourselves beyond the res?

 

All we have is breath.