CXLIII

 

List close my scholars dear,

Doctrines, politics and civilizations exurge from you,

Sculpture and monuments and any thing inscribed anywhere are tallied in you,

The gist of histories and statistics as far back as the records reach is in you this hour, and the myths and tales the same,

If you were not breathing and walking here, where would they all be?

            The most renown’d poems would be ashes, orations and plays would be vacuums.

            All architecture is what you do to it when you look upon it,

(Did you thin it was in the white or gray stone? or the lines of the arches and cornices?)

            All music is what awakes from you when you are reminded by the instruments.

It is not the violins or the cornets, it is not the oboe nor the beating drums, nor the score of the baritone singer singing his sweet romanza, nor that of the men’s chorus, nor that of the women’s chorus.

            It is nearer and farther then they.

 

Ding Tuo Xuan: Support the head as if hanging suspended

The Three Sensitivities or Perceptivities (San Min)

1. The heart is sensitive

2. The eyes are sensitive

3. The hands are sensitive

 

Two fly young Russian women come out of La Bergamote and sit down on the red bench for what turns out to be a protracted conversation, carried out, for some reason, in English. It’s a varied terrain their dialogue and it ranges from boyfriends to jobs or the lack thereof, to boyfriends with and without jobs, to men sometimes mistaking them for those other horrible grasping Russian girls, to their summer plans. As for the latter two, it is only context which allows you to distinguish whether beetch refers to a disliked woman, or la playa.

 

Another Coney Alzheimers of the Times: beneath a photo of a camo’d Darth Vader of a soldier aiming a tripod-mounted machine gun mounted runs the caption: “Statistics show that the Mexican Army kills eight enemies for every one it wounds.” [from “Mexican Military Runs Up Body Count in Drug War,” May 27, 2016, A1:5]

 

I was a difference engine for the FBI

 

Friday before Memorial Day weekend in the sculpture court of the American Wing. For over an hour, you’ve been drawing a life-sized white marble statue of a woman representing “California.” In her right hand, she holds a divining rod which, according to the exhibit card, “partly covers her nudity,” and represents “good,” while in her lightly closed left hand, behind her back, is a thorny branch representing “evil.”

When you started drawing, the place was alive with tourists, but now there’s no one anywhere near you, not even a guard. Evening coming on.

The play of sun through the clouds, transmitted via the huge skylight above, has played havoc with your modeling. With the result that your drawing is less the image of an idealized woman than a play of shadows. And over the course of time, you’ve tried less to render her accurately than simply allow your pencil to become an articulation of her shifting form. Even so, plenty of erasures, since some lines always seem truer than others.

But now you look at her almost imploringly. Please stop moving. And though her face doesn’t shift a jot, it’s clear that her abdomen is gently pulsing in and out. Nor does she shift her weight. At least not yet. And there you see, as though for the first time, what you’ve known since childhood when you saw some dinosaur bones discreetly shift position at the Museum of Natural History: when people are around, the objects hold their breaths.

But if she did shift her weight, what would happen with her hands?

 

After rain and fog, in Jiangnan,

Few friends of integrity remain.

As autumn fills the shores of the Xiao and Xiang Rivers,

Clouds paint the bamboo a deep green.

Reads Lieu Renben’s inscription on a “Bamboo and Rock,” a painting by the Deng Yu, translated by Wen Fong. The title card states that Yu is remembered primarily as a prominent Daoist priest, but that he was also a “gifted painter [whose] dramatic image of young bamboo rising over covered rocks [was] created during the turbulent waning years of the Yuan [and could be interpreted] as a poignant vision of survival against the odds.” Gifted. Dramatic. Poignant. The odds.

 

Nearby, at the Met, a scroll in shades of gray: Shen Zhou’s “Autumn Colors among Streams and Mountains,” c. 1490. In his colophon Shen writes “This scroll follows the ideas of Ni Zan [active more than a century before]. Ni’s brushwork is spare, mine is cluttered. Yet though he was sparing, his meaning was ample. This is what is called ‘the unlearnable!’”

Though Shen is self-deprecating, his friend and admirer Yao Shou offers this praise: “Not much ink, but more than enough excitement.” Though one must take translations like “excitement” with a grain of rice.

 

 

Condemned to externality

 

The high cost of locust living

 

Indifference, or, more accurately, the failure to perceive difference, is not the corrective for over-differentiation

 

If “God created Man in his own image,” there will, perforce, be a splitting, a doubling, a chip off the old block as it were, implicitly depleted. It is this gap in value and in physics between the model and the copy that had dogged, or godded (even the Cynics), have it either way or both, though our ontology was set on rails long before Genesis was created, or compiled.

We will ever be at pains to compare the copy, ourselves, and most especially others, to the original and the best and most beautiful will be those we judge to be the least lacking relative to the immortal ideal. Now, forgive the crudity: how can a culture function in any way other than schizophrenically with a mind fuck like that?

And we perceive and experience our depleted condition relative to God as an actual loss of Being, for which the creation of value-ideas – such as goodness, beauty or property – out of whole cloth, is in some measure a compensation for our lesser Beingness.

Our whole cloth of our history too, is riddled with the reduction of others to the status of even less Being than our kind, or, in some cases, close to non-Being, or “bare life.”

Now if this belief in falling short of the ideal resonates within you, even in a diffuse, mediated or liberal way, take warning. Your belief will be held against you, not by some external authority: the police or a judge or a god, but rather by yourself (as well as by others seeking to diminish you). Once constituted as a Being, whether greater or lesser among mortals it matters little, for internally one stands condemned to perpetually be one’s own enemy, a creature lacking in plenitude, a Being, but not quite enough. And always insecure. Or not to be?

 

In the digital world there are no old blocks. Only chips.

 

This headline holds the upper left wing of the Times 5/29/16 front page: “Unusual Race Tests Playbook For Clinton Bid: The Traditional Won’t Do, Some Allies Say.”

Get me Artaud! Carolee Schneeman! Get me Aristophanes!

And on the right column, slightly lower down on the page: “Rise of Trump Tracks Debate Over Fascism.” Which reads in part: “The comparison was inflammatory to say the least. Former Governor William F. Weld of Massachusetts equated Donald J. Trump’s immigration plan with Kristallnacht, the night of horror in 1938 when rampaging Nazis smashed Jewish homes and businesses in Germany and killed scores of Jews.

“But though it was a provocative analogy, it was not a lonely one…”

Who knew, who knew that analogies have emotional lives? Now that’s news. Kristallnacht, like Weld’s analogy was indeed a night of horror for some, but also one of inflammatory glee for others, including those who did the rampaging, presumably.

Did the Nazis actually smash homes and businesses? Was some über-King Kong employed to step on Jewish buildings?

 

I was a lonely analogy for the NSDAP – I mean NASDAQ

 

But wait, there’s more: “Masterpieces Tucked Away to Appreciate, Not Be Appreciated.”

In which we read that: “the drab free port zone near the Geneva city center, a compound of blocky gray and vanilla warehouses surrounded by train tracks, roads and a barbed-wire fence looks like the kind of place where beauty goes to die. But within its walls, crated or sealed cheek by jowl in cramped storage vaults, are more than a million of some of the most exquisite artworks ever made.

“Treasures from the glory days of ancient Rome. Museum-quality paintings by old masters. An estimated 1,000 works by Picasso…” [Graham Bowley and Doreen Carvajal, A1:2]

 

The shape of a “scholar’s rock” is itself like the vapor caused by a droplet of water falling on a hot stone

 

Fight with things and they will win

And the spectacle shall set you free…

 

I’ve got Thesis on a cloudy day

When it’s cold outside, it’s the Antithesis of May

I guess you’ll say:

What can make me feel this way?

Hegel, Hegel, Hegel…

 

When crossing Brooklyn Bridge, take a moment to stop and smell the Roeblings

 

Democracy: the freedom to choose slavery

 

Hundred direction qi

 

Nature applauds a vacuum by clapping with one hand

 

Sensing the sensible

Telling the intelligible

Redistributing the welts

Anschauung

 

In discussing the English translation of the title of Shen Zhou’s painting: “Return in a boat in the wind and rain,’ he posits that it “would be better to keep what is literally said, not succumbing to syntax and construction: “Wind – rain – return – boat’ (feng yu gui zhou). He quotes Fang Xun’s commentary: “His brushwork is free and careless; welcoming the wind, he [has] made numerous willow branches [under] the rain; further on a sandbank; and [then] a solitary boat, [with] a garment and straw hat, as though this was found in the midst of waves.’ Someone pointing with their finger asked me, ‘But where, then is the rain?’ I replied: ‘The rain is where it is painted and also where it is not.’ [ibid. p. 129]

 

Manhattan Survivor: no one votes you off, they price you off

 

Tensegrity, mon amour

 

How to embody the spirit of a form?

Not that’s a question

 

On the location of rain in Shen Zhou’s painting, Jullien continues: The rain is nowhere isolatable and is everywhere. The un-painted is not an invisible metaphysic, of the order of the unrepresentable, because this is really a question of what is phenomenal – the rain. But rain cannot be confined and made perceptible in isolation – it is diffused and disseminated between ‘there is’ and ‘there is not’. That the art of the brush might here be said to be ‘free and careless’ (‘unconstrained’) signifies this refusal of the assignable [italics mine], circumscribing each thing in its place and its own being – the rain impregnates this landscape.

The Chinese language is rich in precious formulations which express the ambiance, or pregnancy, as when one paints a landscape in the rain or, rather, which ponders on this indiscernible by composing pairs, since a single isolating notion would always be at a loss to account for it. For example, by combining the notion of image-phenomenon (xiang) with that of breath-energy, thereby clarifying how the different orders of the figurative and the tangible can be spread in an impalpable yet uncircumscribed way. This ‘breath-representation’ (qi-xiang) conjoins in a single thought the invisible energy unfolding to infinity and the sensible manifestation which actualizes it – the word ‘atmosphere’, which corresponds most closely to it in European terms, is so inadequate… The (faulty) contrary would be to ‘attach oneself’ and to ‘stick’ to the representation (zhù xiang)… [ibid., pp. 129-30]

 

Peter Paul Rubens: Drei naakte vrouen, in red chalk on paper, c. 1620: arguably the ultimate nude(s), hence their perfection coincides with the precise moment of the submergence of the form, the impossibility of their isolation even as The Beautiful is achieved at its “highest.”

These sisters live – you accidentally typed love, then made this “correction”* – at the Boymans-van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam, and they neither solicit, nor rebuke visitors, so it’s said.

But their bodies are always willing to teach the eye, and through it, the spirit, about light and shadow, and plenitude.

* the qwerty keyboard being designed precisely for such mistakes

 

It had to be you,

unassignable you…

 

Not to ‘stick’, or ‘adhere’ (zhi), to a single word, Jullien continues, not to confine oneself within a single meaning but to release into its plenitude what, in principle, is too diffuse-disseminated to be graspable by name. No longer will one render the aspect that is defined, and in consequence marked out as particular to the thing, as an isolatable ‘this’, but that which (but this is no longer a ‘that which’) the basis of ontology will never allow us to say except in an impoverished way – not the quality or property of an in-itself, which encloses the thing in its difference (and justifies it in essence), but what, ‘contained’ and ‘hidden’, (han-xu), leaves the reference evasive and renders what is implicit inexhaustible. [ibid., p. 132]