An Aesthetic of Rescue

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Telling the truth has saved me but I know there are several varieties of truth about the same act. This particular site was intended to tell the truth while other sites I manage  argue different kinds. All play to their own music within me, turning fiction into poetry and poetry into fiction. Riddles native to the telling of renaissance poetry drew me early and distilled with personal experience. The distance is great between thought and words, trying not to think, but thinking.  I took a green pumpkin to the shop to remake it ceramically, but after preparing the skin and  molding it to the pumpkin the clay  tore in several places. The final effect of the tears was appealing, and after several layers of impasto and lamination fabricated with oxides and patterns implanted by tools, palm fronds, it turned into not a pumpkin at all, but a bag tied at the top with a piece of clay string. On a second try it was an open bag of torn, weathered carpet, which in extension became a series of "bags".  The broad strokes have some kind of general image but no plan, like the best fiction writing on this site constructed in hearing the music, which came little by little in aural accidents and continual seeking of the ear,  or with a visual. image.Another flowing context is the submergent heart you are born to, if you are, and then find in the linens retrieved from the attic, as clear an image as needed, but what it means has to felt in the life, in the body, in physiological changes in the psyche that when triggered go all on on their own to completion. Like the clay.  Internalized these become what they will, but the image in all the linens and frakturs make the fact plain. 

 

That these are concomitant with mystical Boehme letters is irrelevant  to the fact of the experience of the air clogged with spiritual beings, so take it for granted that the study of texts can produce such effects, it rather defeats them, like the dark brow head shots of the patrons of the Weiser bookstore. Why do the rich and the royal seek alchemy? Because they have no other means of life while the seraphim swirl everywhere in invisible air.

Many of the effects of the skeins of clay take long to appreciate and do not translate well in a photograph of their subtlety, like the grey effect of the strip of Dave's porcelin on Mr Rushmore next to the white figure that so sets off the white shino.

 

 Transcendence. The pathos of form in a world of color and figure in action, smooth surface and  rough unglazed stasis of the natural. Both action and stasis express the transcendent the way notes and rest, inhale, exhale, start and stop. These may coalesce where they emerge into identities of their surroundings, tree, air, water earth.

Some explanation for the method can be given. The idea generally is to give form to the formless, the invisible, the unknowable, meaning the spiritual world. Many of the ceramic murals explore this by bringing but not quite bringing a picture of what really exists that cannot be seen. The writing does it by posing linked identities, one in one world one in the other, that have similar names but are unknowable to each other except from some third narrative view.This teasing the brain tries to make sense of unknown patterns by making them into the known even though the two worlds exist untranslatable to each other.

The digital substitute of a screen for the face is like the perfect pot on the wheel made symmetrical without tears, idealized, for the wheel destroys imperfection before the fact of its existence, or means to, the way the digital substitutes the individual with the crowd. The wheel, the perfect balance is untrue to ourselves. We are disproportion and torn and this  is our glory-- it is our redemption in more than symmetry.

All of the ceramic on this site presupposes the precariousness of life, the parable of being human, the highest created being, once realized. Writing seeks the same, as empathetically as clay. That's because thought is the highest art and poetry its best expression. Reflections that occurred in the course of this year lag behind the works, but in the Duties of the Heart of Bahya ben Joseph ibn Pakuda of Spain, c. 1080, the last and tenth gate on The Love of God has many instances of precognition, serendipity and synchronism with the Preparation of the Heart that the "gates” constitute human spiritual life.

“Constant consciousness that He contemplates your secret and your open life, that which is hidden within you and that which is seen. [Always bear in mind] that he guides you, has compassion on you, knows your deeds and thoughts—those concealed and those revealed, in the past and in the future, that he reassures you and shows friendliness to you.” Duties of the Heart, tenth Treatise, 33.

“When you arrive at such a stage that you remove Him from your thoughts and senses (ie, give up the possibility of conceiving or imagining His essence) because he is not thus to be apprehended, and you realize Him in the evidences of His activities, as though He were inseparable from you, you will have reached that limit of the knowledge of Him which the prophet exhorts us to attain in the text (Deut 4.39) “Know this day, and lay it to thy heart, that the Lord, he is God in heaven above and upon the earth beneath; there is none else.”

-- If a piece is not precarious why should it exist? She is precarious and he is too, but what other reason do they have to be? We have long since fallen away from the norm and even the paranorm. They have become the same. The precarious balances the edge. First it was solid, stable, but taken to where it began to fall, just intervening in its collapse, it was shifted and pulled, for remember it is a hollow cylinder when all is said and done, and while the photograph may not show it, because the work is not a photograph, the cylinder, some 27" tall in origin, can collapse from the various strength and weakness of its sides in the imprecise pressure of its stretching, and most from the need for it to totter there and be pulled back from the brink. Reduced from its origin by even a third, which will be further reduced by the fire another tenth at least, it is a rescue.

Look at the stars to bring them to the earth, this is that knowledge of the worlds, a kind of medieval  quantum, all stories told with Breugel, Giotto, spiritual beings everywhere which  would not identify until looked with the thought, the figures are seraphim.

 

2.

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Archie Johnson and The Las Vegas Seraphim Collection
Archie Johnson stopped by and produced pics from the Las Vegas Seraphim Collection. He came to the apartments below where the paintings were but then said he should tour the upper three stories, unfinished, rickety, dangerous with catwalks but traversable. The house had never been properly finished off, just enough so it wouldn’t get too wet in the rain. Visited many times in these venues, it had been acquired but never improved much, so to view The Seraphim Collection in situ is a challenge. I Had been up there myself so it was more or less possible. There are so many more parts and pieces he didn't photograph. It's a little like the old Barnes, the only other place I saw pieces crammed and crocked together, crowds milling shoulder to shoulder to pass them. Obviously they they can’t do that in Vegas. Without apology the name tags are also missing. As for the photography, if was a variable cloudy day when Archie passed through.


This approach to life and art is experimental. One book I took out three times before I understood its importance and found the part that mattered to me, Vanuccie Biringuaccio, Pyrotechnia, where the roots of mines were compared with the roots of trees and the golden age a material form of them. This document is unbelievably  now online in a PDF, although the translation I used was Richard Eden's of 1540. With the serendipity applied to hundreds of instances that inform these searches, always remembering the search term is most important.My search terms are supplied by continual reference to the first moment of my being when I was formed by Messiah.
This site is unadvertised. It is sometimes like a journal. Perhaps the writings form a loose assembled inquiry. Since I have just been reading Either/Or, liking the Preface and the very first part, this could be an assemblage of some ideas about faith and the self. Kierkegaard's takes on Don Juan and Tragedy strike me as pedantic and dull, but he has a lot to say about the poet in that first section before he abandons him. Of the ceramic creations that have occurred in the last decade, some at Forms of the Formless, one piece at a time for critique, these show a part of myself not otherwise seen.

 

 

 The Oxford poets in Weimar c. 1929 and following, Spender, Auden, etc. prefigure  our visit to Weimar-America materialism and its later censorships of oppression about a hundred years later. Hence, other that saying so, we traverse  with ALL THE FIGURES WALKING HERE AS MEDITATIONS OF THE STATES OF HUMAN SUFFERING AND INTERCESSION FOR THE SUFFERING OF THE SINS OF THE WORLD.

Some Examples of this aesthetic occur in guided accident, prophetic dialogue, privileging of surface, native/alien interface, double coding, narrative subversion, hijack, cross-column reading translation. It’s there and 1) I write it down as best I can.  2) The image  of the finished piece of the vision of Pisceus Piano Rhinoceros is like the translation of a text, it’s arbitrary, edited. The finished Rhino is too big to fit on the piano but time and space are not particularly important in vision landscapes. What if somebody writes or makes something that’s not a vision? what do we call that. Invention? Imitation.  But a baby is not a vision, a baby is real and it embodies all its future like a seed that grows into a tree. A vision is indeterminate before its expression, but when it emerges it chooses a style, or one is chosen for it by the man. One attractive style is the playful-weary tone and almost-spoken element. This occurs by divining it from the words through which are sought the spirit of the writer--and hence the spirit of the original author we translate. To reproduce the original, particularly with a first-person narrative, it becomes very important to find the right voice, so it is said, refrain from making a translation dead by missing out on all the texture and drama of the text.