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The proper technique in technical philosophy
A technical philosopher with good technique is a
fraught, freight train that the truth, a
rambling man — all roads lead to roam — happens
to catch a ride on. Technically, the
philosopher can only reveal what happens beside
of her and on top of her and inside of her,
where the truth runs and crawls and sleeps.
Tomes of technical pseudo-philosophy have failed
to glimpse the truth by aiming directly for the
target and being blinded by the light. If these
so-called philosophers really loved knowledge,
they would have gleaned enough of it to know not

to do that. Once blinded by the light, they can
only cobble up a theory that is so hard to
justify they must spend their whole life trying
to do so, only to have their arguments deposed
in the next generation, until, in the next
generation, those depositions are deposed, and
then their theory is recovered, until the next
generation deposes it again.
At least some technical philosophers leave it at
that, but others mix up their blind-sighted
technical theories with practical advice that
usually contradicts the theories, but as Hitler
advises, and it seems to work, the more self-
contradictory and absurd one's approach, the
more likely to garner a following. It seems
that regular bombardment with these

contradictions so numbs the brain that it can
no longer recognize the same idea seen from
different perspective in different contexts —
though so far it can still recognize material
objects. It is a cyborg, but not yet fully a
machine. This mix of "humanist" and technical
philosophy can get very entrenched and difficult
to depose over many generations. It's like a
biological weapon causing widespread brain
damage in the educated classes that trickles
down to the population at large.
I might be a humanist, but that's not my job.
I'm a technical philosopher who uses the proper
technique. The proper technique is just to be a
freight train carrying useful cargo, and by a
fluke the truth catches a ride on one, and if

not, the philosopher gains much knowledge
indirectly, just by performing a useful task and
earning the respect owed to a human being.
That was my intention, and no-one was more
surprised than, when of all things, the truth
started running along beside me, then hopped
aboard and wiggled inside of me. If I ever had
seen it coming right at me gazing into my
headlights and I into its, we would have
crashed, and I doubt I would have survived.
So please don't think that all personal stories
I tell represent any attempt to humanize
philosophy. I'm only showing the truth running
beside me or crawling inside, or hopping around
on the roof, as I glimpse it sidelong, or hear
it, or feel it inside of me. Those who see it

out there, at a distance from themselves in a
world out there in which they are not visible,
and they're face to face with it, again, are
blinded by the light and then they run right
over it.
*******************
…my whole life converged on this finding, but to
cut as quickly as possible to the necessarily
excruciatingly slow motion punch, as time is
running out on our rootless world, I'll begin in
the middle — nel mezzo del cammin di nostra
vita,..
…mi ritrovai per
una selva oscura. Indeed, like Dante
confronting the gates of hell, I had lost all
perspective, and by all accounts others had too,
though they were better at faking it. Yet
simultaneously it occurred to me inchoately that
I'd been situated and situated myself
fortuitously to suss out the sources of
perspective, objectively speaking, however I
might have indeed to harrow hell to do it. I say

inchoately, because when the question of the
origins of mathematical perspective in
Renaissance paintings grabbed me, it hadn't
occurred to me that visual perspective has
anything significant to do with psychological
perspective. Mainly, while roaming around
greater Rome during the summers while in
architecture school, I fell in love with the
paintings in which perspective first appeared.
At that time of my life, again, I felt greatly
un-anchored, assaulted by the harshness and
unforgivingness of life when not subject to
meaningless flights of distracting joy that life
was sure to punish me for with the pain
seemingly (but only because I lacked all
perspective, let alone the hawk's supremely
evolved variety able to spot a prey that far

away) resistant, however high I turned up the
flame on the Bunson burner in my laboratory, to
the chemical conversion that my marvelously
masochistic mom had mastered to turn pain into
gain. (She — the late great Missouri state
representative S. Sue Shear — took an ice cold
shower every morning and refused novacaine at
the dentist.
Suzy Shear — no sushi in the matrix stayed
pinker and more delicious to the bitter end, and
when the machine finally slurped her up, it
belched, smiled and got God to grace the heavens
with a night of shooting stars to welcome her
soul as we watched from the roof of the Park
Tower condominiums overlooking Shaw Park and the
endless sea of green where the Ozymandian you're

about to meet had landed decades ago, he who
found himself lagging behind as that consummate
go getter, Sue, she herself, biked up ahead of
him, and his heart leapt into his throat as it
suddenly occurred to him — I'm going to marry
that girl!
Flash forward to June in the 1980's, when yours
truly, whose aforementioned daddy did well
enough by her with his modeling dough enterprise
— he manufactured the cheap imitation of Play-
doh on sale for half price at Woolworth's, but
it might have been closer to the Platonic play-
dohnic original, but that's for a flashback to
the flashback after I've saved the world's
perspective in the nick of time — to send her
back East for a higher education, booked a cheap

flight via Iceland to Italy for the requisite
architect's tour.
It, as in Italy, rushed at her, who'd known and
grown into life as a bland midwestern suburb,
and crushed her like a tidal wave, the force and
impact of its difference back then unharnessed
by electronic mediation — the chirping birds of
all the Italian words gathering pecking and
swooping all around the grand squares made for
gods and men mingling, with the fountain waters
hushing in alto voce when not babbling with the
birds of the words, the maximally masculine
power of the rusticated palaces with the
maximally feminine grace of their elegant
ornament. A world made by and for art uber
alles, centuries old art like the music of its

era so keen to take on the biggest and darkest
and soften every blow, every surface quite
perfectly balancing — it might sound high
falutin, but this is how it works — rationality
with sensuality and vice versa. To me it
justified my long standing spoiled brat refusal
to accept or invest seriously in the depleted
world I'd known, daydreaming of some place that
would not thwart every desire before its
ultimate fulfillment.
I hail from a long line of spoiled brats who get
everything we want, considering. Italy for me
was my version of the America that my immigrant
grandparents found — just what they always
wanted! — to escape from poverty and pograms, It
was the somewhere over the rainbow in the form

of the premonition of the Saint Louis arch that
my father blew over from Kansas, to the greenly
glowing — due to lichen and moss in the river,
the tornado turbulent skies, the sea of green
treetops that ripples out to the horizon in the
view from the eyes in that aluminum rainbow's
keystone when you ride the ferris wheel elevator
up through its viscera — city where a grandly
doomed Ozymandian such as booming King Harry, a
gimmick and gadget man in his own circus, could
find his pot of gold — just what he always
wanted! —— and some cartoon characters to boss
around, save from wicked witches, and impart
confidence and wisdom to — just what he always
wanted! —— before ballooning back to Kansas,
though alas the balloon just went up up and away
to a place so distant this is the only show he

so far stars in, by way of the unprecedented
resolution of my telescope. (And I'm commuting
between Kansas (my Brooklyn garden) and Oz.)
So you see I'd been genetically and culturally
conditioned to get exactly what I wanted — not
just believe in the land over the rainbow, but
also land there. What people, even my friends,
seem not to get, is that seeing through your
dreams and laughing at them only verifies their
resilience in surviving all manner of scorn and
deconstruction. They are that they are. These
however minorly mythic stories of ours are the
bones of being, and you can fortify your
illusions of the solidity of things all you
want, but in the end they are mere illusions
embedded in your very stilted arrangements of

data filtered to sustain the illusions; but
dreams, the more they know themselves as such,
are as real as reality can ever get. There's no
escaping, either, the uncanny catholicity, as
you will see, of my cipher-hood. As Karl Jung
bravely insisted, evidence however defiant of
reason as we know it, cannot be ethically
suppressed. Such evidence suddenly pouring in
through a long unnoticed hole in the roof giving
way after decades of erosion has forced more
than one militant atheist suddenly to his knees
praying to avoid a death of cold in the downpour
that resists all cries of — gimme shelter! Calm
down ex-atheist graduated at least to agnostic.
As Buddha says, it's not about coming in from
the cold, it's about learning to dance in the
rain.
I didn't need to learn, I was a natural born
Gene Kelly, where every beautiful boy I met
whose heart I broke or vice versa, gave
sufficient plot to warrant the tap dance. I was
working on the script, tearing it up over and
over, sometimes silently or openly sobbing in
grievous frustration, but I'd found the setting.
Italy back then verified that this ideal of
which I'd dreamt possessed a physical form and
so was in this manner too real, or potentially
real — though the gap between the usual world
and this world was so great only supernatural
events and characters could render it credible.
That was interesting — that the darkness of
usual reality had to be a thing applied, not

reality itself, as reality could appear in such
a much lighter form.
Like Giotto, I studied and practiced
architecture because I like, trust, and believe
in making things not just tearing them apart and
deconstructing them, and perspective is a
construct you can construct things with. I
intuited what I came to believe overtly, that
nobody knows anything worth saying until he can
make something with it. I don't romanticize the
artist, I simply give the artist credit for what
the artist actually is and does. Those who call
this romanticizing would just prefer to deny it
as they shrink from the call of Martin Luther
King to everybody to ascend to an artist of

whatever science or craft they master, the art
of medicine, the art of brick laying, the art of
mothering, the art of dishwashing, etc., and
also the art of art making, as likely as any
other to fail in its aspiration to art, but at
least by wearing the label it attests to the
aspiration, and maybe that's all art is, an
aspiration inducing movement from a relatively
un-dreamy here to a dreamier there, realized
instantly in the awakening of a mustard seed of
faith in the minimal difference awakening the
aspiration to leap over the hairline crack that
feels like an abyss — as who today dares to eat
a peach, not just process it? Among the
intelligentsia, a positive act is a travesty.
Artists only get away with it because critics
process it as a critical act made of positive

gestures, rather than vice versa, which is the
truth.
I gravitated to the topic of perspective as a
topic of research when I decided to delay
construction for a while, widen my perspective —
such as it was — nobody lacks absolutely ALL
perspective, I only relatively did — and study
art history more deeply.
We now tend to disparage perspective as a tool
for stamping out deadly facsimiles devoid of any
aura, but that's because perspective's been
kidnapped, as it were, by the white slave trade
and forced into this degraded service. She
herself, not a thing, but a way of making things
relate to one another, such that even what gets

upstaged or overlapped is still implied — and in
monocular, the most mathematical perspective,
whatever appears, near or far, is equally crisp
and clear as a harpsichord, even as the forms
diminish by the harmonic proportions that rule
musical harmony — is indeed just visual music,
how lovely! On visits to Venice I noticed that
Palladio creates in his luminous, numinous
churches visual music so purely perspectival you
can hear it with your whole body including your
ears — where, as you will come to see, I have a
fleeting form of synesthesia, where I can't
pinpoint, say, the enduring color of a sound,
but I know I see it intermittently, and then I'm
flooded with metaphors keen to chase down the
effect. Maybe I contracted it from getting mixed
up in perspective's origins, which can give you

Lucy in the sky with kaleidoscope eyes syndrome,
especially if you're prone to flashbacks from
your hippy days or toddlerhood. But sometimes
the trip starts going bad. I got good at playing
with perspective, but had no idea how to work on
it.
You see, after contracting a sickness unto death
of being sick to death of adding up dimension
strings and wearing out toilet templates in an
architecture office, graduate school in art
history to me resembled the Renaissance
hospitals so relatively pleasantly equipped, the
Vasari reports in Lives of the Artists, that the
infirm preferred to languish there than recover.
The authorities, though, in both Renaissance
hospitals and modern graduate schools, keep a

sharp eye out for imposter patients. I wouldn't
be allowed just to hunker down there, as I took
all the time it really takes to heal of all that
worldly wounding as I went on and on crooning
that quote of Uccello — oh what a lovely thing
is perspective! They called me to catch some
kind of fish that others too could consume, I
would have to learn the seas well enough to get
a bite on my line that would stir me into
feverish pursuit of the biter, and by this catch
a bug that would justify prolonging my stay in
the hospital, (And by the way, as a professional
phN (nurse of philosophy), I profess that the
whole world needs time in this hospital, time to
heal, including catching the bug that assures
there will be time here to perform all the tests
and get to the bottom of what ails us, that's

why I'm inviting everybody into this hospital
bed.)
So in quest of the best stocked waters for
catching the fish bug I needed never to finish
Huck Finnishly fishing, playing hookie as a
living, I read widely and deeply on the subject.
I study the psychology and metaphysics of
perspective, perspective as a symbolic as well
as physical form, perspective that rattles, then
squishes like melting marbles in the marble
mouthed mutter of the theorists, who
occasionally spit out a cloudy orb that
resembles and actually operates as a crystal
ball. The discovery of perspective, notes Irwin
Panofsky, signifies the birth of the modern,
scientific paradigm of knowledge. That is, it

officially enacts the transfer of truth revealed
in the sacred, living Word and the living,
rooted, poetic words that are its minions — this
wildly fluid sacred world ordered into some
submission by clerics — to the businessmen and
scientists for whom names boil down to
arbitrarily formed labels attached to measurable
phenomena pinned down to coordinates in a matrix
(and here you will get to choose the blue pill
or the real red pill). At this transfer, the
world once one, shatters into fragments of that
merely remembered phantom of wholeness, as
hoards rush in to gain legal ownership of as
many fragments as they can, the sooner the
better, as the numinous glow of the fragments is
swiftly degrading.
Of course, it's not quite as simple as that. In
truth, nothing is but thinking makes it so, and
the perpetrators of modernity, as of antiquity,
can only control the mind of humanity so far.
Many clumps and clots of the sacred word made
world remain intractably un-mixable however high
you crank up the osterizer setting — because in
truth it takes two not only to tango, but for
either potential tangoer to exist. Where
there's yang, there's yin. The attempted
homogenization of space and reduction of being
to an undulating screen saver pulls up out of
the depths the Renaissance proto-cowboy, the
rugged, untamable individualistic artist, who
evolves into the fully flowered American cowboy
of which the Italians are so understandably
fond. The aforementioned white slave trade —

that kidnapped perspective — after binding its
hands and feet, whisks perspective away from any
genuine religion and spirituality that the
market cannot exploit, but before that
kidnapping, the early discoverers and
practitioners of the method face backward to the
sacred source.
For these Renaissance cowboys, playing good,
God-fearing guys, like sheriff Matt Dillon on
"Gunsmoke", musical harmonies made optical mean
mystically inspired. Heroes of their dramas,
the Renaissance artists turning the whole world
into very moving picture shows seize the spot of
the observed to fix the public at a distance
that brings them into perfect focus. Before
Alberti publishes the method in 1414,

Brunelleschi creates a demonstration reported by
Manetti. Brunelleschi has viewers hold up a
panel with a perspective painted on the back and
look through a hole in the panel at a mirror
reflecting the painting, then compare it with
the thing painted, in one panel the secular
Signoria, in the other the sacred Florence
Baptistery. Perspective creates a theater after
all, all the world's a stage, and you can freely
choose your perspective, your role in it, your
very identity, or, if they're not awake — so if
you're not, wake up! — choose them for another —
like when Brunelleschi and some pals find a
drunk carpenter asleep in the public square,
bring him to one of their homes, dress him in
fancy clothes, and when he comes to, address him
as a nobleman.
In perspective the sacred word made world isn't
dead, it's just liberated from single readings;
a truth you take with a grain of salt is still
true,
Oh what a lovely thing is this perspective! If
only we could get back to the bridge that those
Renaissance cowboys built to situate themselves
in the pre-post-erous present and have it all.
But Panofsky, Elkins, Edgarton, Crary, Damisch
etc. etc. have sliced, diced, blended, baked,
fried, and cried over perspective without
finding a way back to inhabit its heh dey, more
enlightened that the Enlightenment, which
privileged the rational over the sensual,
tipping to the right handed side as if drunk on

reason. I certainly had no inclination to write
a theory thesis molded of minor observations
mingled in second hand quotes meant to verify
the dogmatic conclusion that conclusions are not
allowed, especially dogmatic ones.
In fact, I honor all that theory — nothing under
the sun doesn't have some good, as well as bad
in it — so when I noticed it wanted to devour
itself in its tangle of tautologies, instead of
serve as a cash source to lazy scholars, I
surrendered to its own impulse to do so. Good-
bye critical theory. Yes, your tropes helped me
scale some seriously steep slopes, up a thousand
plateaus, but now they're all frayed and cannot
even speak to a peek of the peak I seek, and so
— I permit you to check out of my life. Sigh.

There she goes, down into the abyss. With
critical theory a lot more permanently dead to
my, by this resolution to drown her, newly
shrunk head even than God, whose resurrection
following an even more severe nailing is often
reported, what could propel a doctoral thesis to
the distant last page of itself? I required a
McGuffin, a thing a plot turns on, to catapult
itself up and down the parabola of the terrible
parable that everything is.
Or to put it another way, I just desired to make
a small, but real contribution to my field — as
a botanist seeks to discover a new species of
bacteria or fern, as in A New Leaf, where Walter
Mathau plays a playboy who marries an heiress
botanist, played by Elaine May, and carefully

plots her murder, but instead of letting her
drown, as planned, he dives into the waterfall
and saves her, for he has fallen in love with
her, she who radiates the prospect of
immortality that accrues to one who discovers a
new species of thing that then takes on her
name. Such radiance alone could induce such a
rake to turn over a new leaf. So I decided to
radiate such irresistibly sexy, reasonable hopes
that my discovery of a new species of
perspective on perspective might one day be
published in an article or book that bears my
name — as sure as I left that slipper behind
after my dance with the prince from a
Renaissance fresco that night under the stars at
the summit of Siena gazing out over the Tuscan
countryside shrouded in magical mists.

Seek and ye shall, leave no stone unturned, not
even one marked — beware scorpions, do not turn
over this stone! Just stand ready with your
scorpion spray, the march of knowledge, hair of
the dog that bit us, must go on. I guess a part
of me still clung to the ancient adage. In my
heart, though, I'd given up, but just kept
roaming around the library flipping through the
card catalogue and languishing in the stacks
until I could come up with another plan day.
One day I came upon an article that piqued my
interest. In it, the scholar William Hood
described an eleventh century Dominican prayer
manual called De Modo Brandi, or How to Pray
that Hood discovers in the archives of San

Marco, where Fra Angelico paints his celebrated
frescos. The illuminations in the manual depict
friars spying on Saint Dominic as he gestures
before a Crucifix, and in so doing displays
consummately appropriate, pointedly legible
emotions and responses, these illuminations
precursors of the emoticons that are now
supplied above the facebook like button to
express sadness, wonder, horror.
Just as the facebook format limits one to the
generic, unambiguous response, so the text
instructs the friars to imitate the expression
and gesture of each emoticon illuminated in the
manual, and so achieve, one by one, the proper
series of emotions in the proper order. A
fascinating historical find revealing the early

medieval roots of carefully controlled and
codified, contemporary emotional life, and also
going far to explain the otherwise curious
compositions with gesturing friars in Fra
Angelico's frescos. However, determined to catch
a bug that will allow me to languish in the
cushy Renaissance hospital of graduate school in
art history without selling my soul, I'm chiefly
taken with how perspectival the illuminations in
the manual appear, how spatially advanced, quite
similar to the frescos of Era Angelico, which
turn out to be not other than sophisticated,
refined illuminations of the prayer practice.
Piero della Francesca, centuries after that
prayer manual appears, defined perspective as
not other than the definition of the distinct

roles of viewer, object on view, picture plane,
and here it was already happening. The manual
demands the friar desist from immediate response
and situate himself at a clear distance from the
subject on view, the mediating saint as imitator
of Christ playing a kind of picture plane on
which the image of the subject appears, a
telescoping perspectival space naturally arising
to illuminate the procedure. The friar imagines
himself in the role of the saint, the saint
identified directly with Christ, and by this the
friar projects himself into better and better
roles in the perspectival theater of the prayer
practice.
This is a new leaf, a novel vista — the Veronica
vista! — to the oldest origin of Renaissance

perspective yet pinpointed. My advisors highly
approve, and I earn a grant to dig up more
examples of the prayer manual in the Vatican
Library — in the courtyard of which, by the way,
a fully stocked bar open in the morning — as the
library closes at one pm — assists in that
relaxation and openness so necessary for
research. Maybe a bloody Mary helps, where I
think it's in smelling and holding those
uncannily magnetic medieval manuscripts that the
holy grail begins to cast its spell over me. I
was also doing zen sitting at the time, and I
briefly ascend to enlightenment one afternoon,
when, after a sitting, I lifted my gaze and
widened it to embrace the space around me, and
suddenly it occurrd to me that — I AM! in such a
thunderingly obvious, yet utterly surprising way

that nothing else mattered. I AM, and it is
good! It is delicious! — which really helped
(until the effect had fully dissipated in a few
hours), as my ex-boyfriend, who sent me off to
Italy with an ambiguous kiss, had once again
dropped the ball, making me feel like an even
uglier than usual American compared to the
insanely elegant Italians at large. To make
matters worse, it had been dawning on me that I
just was not cut out for, and was even ethically
against — for myself, as I clearly had no
special talent for it — wallowing in the purely
academic aspect of academia. In my heart I knew
I had no inclination whatsoever to cobble up a
dissertation out of some artifacts and an idea
that, however pretty good from a purely
academic, academic stand point, could, let's

face it, really be explained in a few paragraphs
— just by piling on references and obfuscating
elaborations to so called clarify it, but just
make it prohibitively boring to read — as just
punishment for the luxury of getting to think
about what interests one, as one languishes on a
fellowship in the luxuriously healing,
government funded hospital of graduate school in
the humanities.
What secretly excited me about my finding of
Hood's article went beyond the albeit adorable
prospect of giving my name to a rare new vista
known only to eccentric students of the
herbology of art, I wanted to get back there, to
the fluent life that flowed in those Renaissance
paintings. I was just like that crazy guy who

since a kid had been secretly working on a time
machine in his basement to reunite with his dead
father, (and though he hasn't yet found his
father there, he finally he got one to work)
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/2016/07/05/
meet-the-scientist-on-a-quest-to-reunite-with-
his-dead-father/
I can't, and I didn't want to wrap the chicken
wire of my merely good enough idea, to them, in
gobs of gooey paper mache grotesque enough to
scare away the goblin of my failure to
communicate my deeper desire and ambition with
the prison wardens. It's not that I knew yet or
had even these failing words for what I was
actually feeling though. I still thought I was
seeking the well known passage to India of just

another way to avoid writing up my dissertation
just yet; but in fact I was already hot on the
scent of a far far more novel America, the holy
grail, the very mysterious conception of
perspective, restoring the missing link between
ancient and modern worlds, returning our
fractured world to wholeness, the open sesame,
too, by which I could cross over from scholar of
art to artist, which is one who pulls the sword
from the stone. — accept no substitutes that
call themselves by that noble name. This would
be more like finding the cure for cancer while
trying to invent a better toothpick — the
Veronica toothpick!
You see, some fairy dust from those medieval
manuscripts had indeed rubbed off on me, and I
was already slipping into their world, where
Peter the Chanter, preaching around the time
that the first manuals of the Dominican prayer
method appeared, remarks "he who prays is like
an artisan who knows how to use his tools."
Anyone who knows dogs knows that words aren't
needed for a creature to possess and act
according to all the most refined human
emotions; and meanwhile animals without language
tend to be a lot better at doing things and
finding things at a great distance than humans
tangled up in in language with its blindingly
prejudicial categorical hooks do. In the
creative act, one indeed reverts to a pre-

linguistic animal. If one in this state susses
out and digs up a very distant thing by
seemingly super- or sub-(depending on your
perspective) human powers, uncreative people, or
even people not quite soooo…. creative
(descending to soooo… creative indicates the
word has fallen from its much admired height and
plunged to the pejorative, but don't be so sure
it can't hold its breath long enough to swim to
a distant shore, and climb the tallest mountain
over there; a prophet is never known in her own
country) tend to get quite mistrustful, added to
which creative (or receptive) animals
notoriously find it difficult to translate our
findings into human language, so please bear
with me. And do understand that my translation
of my process as a creative animal into

descriptive human language, in retrospect, is
probably not even as accurate as the translation
of a dog's experience into human English in Call
of the Wild.
And so from a human perspective it might be
said, so to speak, that it had begun to dawn,
again, without words, on my then fully reverted
to creative animal self, that I sloughed off all
the other criteria and was concentrating on my
time machine. I wanted to get back there and was
seeking the genealogy of the modern world to
reestablish its roots and its rooted life.
Meanwhile, I was already making contact with
those seeking to perfect the sacred one, to
manifest its apotheosis, and necessarily give
rise to something novel strongly rooted enough

to survive, We were seeking and converging on
the same spot. Moreover, in our doggy way,
while on the quest, we knew everything that
language, along with the merely five senses,
filters out to reduce the surely at least an
eleven dimensional world to only three.
Being lowly animals we knew and embodied the
highest truths that wordy humans had merely
glimpsed, that being on the quest we had already
arrived. I had already arrived at the origin of
perspective in just kicking away all the
temptations not really to seek it, but to seek
something else that would not require such a
deep regression, that would skirt what I took as
the divine decree to know myself as a cipher to
the the whole modern world admonished by its

first father, Socrates, to know itself. As for
the medievals, the act of earnestly seeking to
perfect their tools of prayer and arrive at the
apotheosis of the sacred world was the most
perfect form of prayer already. Then magically
— yes this is how we animals, we sub-human
creatives, do it — the thing we seek appears in
the palm of our hands. Eventually in reading
this book, if you decide you want what it
offers, you will return to this spot to drink
from the holy grail at its fount, All that comes
later, returning to before, is just how it flows
from the fount, as it constantly recreates its
own beginning.
Of course there are many paths and many grails,
but this one has a peculiar feature. I am the

wuss warm cipher, the sibyl, of, for what it's
worth, the mean cold modern world. My personal
quest is that of all of modernity, again, for
what it's worth. My redemption is that of
everybody who considers him her or itself a part
of everybody in the modern multiverse, as well
as being part of any of the indigenous universes
in it, those universes multiverses from their
own perspectives. I'm not too fond of the
modern world or proud of being its cipher, but
until I give it up and go live in the forests
foraging for nuts and bugs without a tv camera
following me, which is impossible, I've chosen
it in choosing not to commit suicide yet more
expeditiously than it might well be doing
already. For me it is that it is, the only is
available to me, and it is my charge to love

what is. Not only because the "The only living
thing is yes." (ee cummings), but because love
can be magically redemptive. In my loving it, it
might even stand a chance for reform, or at
least to die nobly. Whoever participates in
this electronic elevator system to the summit
and the dregs has chosen it and to be a member
of its body. As per Muhammed Ali's — me we.
To return to the nuts and bolts of my quest lest
I lose the careful looking that is the perpetual
finding —
In those remarks above Peter the Chanter showed
respect to the aspiring artisan/artists in their
ongoing quest for the tool perfectly honed to
the task, the way a flute is honed to, and in

fact creates, the previously unknown phenomenon
of flouting.
The thing that was sought, the tool so honed
that it would marry prayer to the instrument
that facilitates it would create a new kind of
experience.
The same way discovering the piano in the quest
for a better harpsichord creates a new thing
altogether with its own standards, something new
under the sun, yet clearly it's there from the
beginning, so easy is it to recognize as a part
of us, as a fulfillment of our desire to be all
that we are, softly softly, so every note can be
heard, no note lording it over any other, all
joyously serving the music, the chords and notes

able to sustain themselves until they all bleed
into one another in consummate self-forgetting.
To recognize the artist's quest for the
instrument of prayer that would discover the
essence of prayer as much as the piano discovers
the essence of what makes us us — the thing all
these clamoring clicking keyboards would click
out if you asked them what they prefer to be,
its infinite nuances what all like buttons would
like to express — makes perfect sense if you
consider what's meant in this context by prayer.
It means not just to establish — or pretend, as
in act as if one is establishing in hopes to
rise to the occasion — connection with the
source of being, but, by the gospel
proclamations and admonitions, to imitate the

source, to create presence out of absence in
partnership with it, to repair broken,
incomplete, or erring perception. In short, an
instrument transforming prayer into a thing
accomplished in the very use of that instrument
would amount to a toot of the magic flute in a
boot up the magic mountain, the trip a sip from
the holy grail.
So, while investigating the origins of
perspective, the eyes of the computer, that is,
a mechanical method translating optical input
into type-able dots defined by coordinates in
Cartesian space, I begin, as some evidence
disclosed already affirms, to track a very
different process with a very different goal,

the quest for the holy grail which — spoiler
alert, and buckle your seatbelt — is more like
the quest for a hot poker to blind a guilt-
ridden king, release his inner vision, and set
his soul free, but then in this twist on the
tale, Zeus sends down this son to tell us the
gods are within us, but people don't like that,
they don't want the responsibility, so they nail
him; but Jesus so loves humanity that he asks
Zeus if he, not to waste a golden opportunity,
can stand as a sacrifice to cover all the
world's guilt. Zeus, though obsessed with
justice and retribution, is a nice guy at heart,
says — heh, good idea, okay! and by this, the
wall between inner and outer vision comes
tumbling down, and then the good king, his sight
restored, can have his cake and eat it too; and

everybody would live happily ever after were it
not so hard to replace one operating system with
another when people confuse the operating system
with the thing itself.
It's like you need experience to get the job
that will give you experience, where the foolish
company thinks it's not a greater risk to avoid
all risk; so the new operating system, however
much brick and lip service is laid and paid to
it, just sits there in the box by the computer,
where even far and away the highest number of
card carrying Christians, not to mention
atheists and everybody, is lost in the archives
of paganism. That paradigm that gives birth to
modern science-ism, where you must put out your
eyes — that is, reduce them to scanners of data

obtainable and verifiable by other means — to
tally up the results with the psyche ruled by a
chaos of irreconcilable conflicts obviating
vision, is the official one. It seems like
madness to put faith in the other, where, in
trust and love, the eyes have it — because
vision gathers thought and light and everything
together, and quite naturally matches the way we
are and live in the splices, before we're
transfixed into line drawings on vases embodying
the conflicts the gods inflict on us, or after
we're released from such transfixion by daring
to risk data loss by installing a novel, really
the original operating system and rebooting. Or
maybe we're in one of the transitional operating
systems. But we're skipping way ahead.

As we descend back to where we were in order to
climb up properly, though, let me set up the
telescope at a different angle for one more
higher longer view.
You see, the reason I'm succeeding, as you shall
see if you cannot yet believe, in tracking the
most fully embodied and rigorously conceived
genealogy of perspective where others fail is
because, though I don't yet fully know it, I'm
an artist, by which I can identify viscerally
with the artists' quest in order distantly to
identify it and give words to it, as a scholar —
by which, as it begins to come together, my
advisor cries — my dear, you can't do
everything! That's greedy. You must leave
something for us. I'm bastardizing both, mixing

up languages that to him are like oil and water.
And the art world, when I fly there, responds
similarly. Why explain how, you've arrived!
Burn the bridge, it's already far too crowded in
this corral. You're ruining the mystery. That's
what they used to say, and some still do say,
about science, but science, I mean science
itself not the worship of science, protects the
mystery. And just as art is spice of life, not
some other thing, so it is the soul and
intuition of science, not some other thing, they
are more like different states of the same
substance, one is ice or gas, one is water, and
to be scientific, demonstrations of this fact
are in order. So as you notice, I've set up a
table and am — cover your eyes, you'll be ruined
forever if you watch, the hairs of your soul too

will turn white as a snowy night — tossing some
icey science into the water of art as you watch
it melt to appear as the very same thing, No no!
don't do it! It is prohibited! It will be the
end of the world! You will topple the sacred
pyramids!
Thus do the pigs who now run the chain of animal
farms manage to create their own intractably
mystifying mythologies to preserve all the
diverse, walled subdivisions of the subdivisions
of the subdivisions, with their vertical
pyramidal social orders by the wide muddy
riverism of nihilism. Don't get me wrong, I'm
not against pyramids that arise naturally when
the meritorious compete for the pinnacle, and
only one wins, then three manage runner up, nine

come in third, etc., although I balk even at
that kind of pyramid scheme for some time.
You see, in first approaching the history of art
scientifically and anthropologically, charmed
more by anonymous illuminators than overplayed
canonic artists, I've succumbed to the trendy
idea that all artists, however high born, land
equal. I'm still seduced by science-ism, which
dispenses with the ineffable, which moves toward
reducing art to escape and entertainment. Here
science, allowing no exceptions to prove its
rule, no competition with its claim as the sole
instrument of knowledge, has begun to mystify
its own process of de-mystification, turn anti-
dogma into a dogma, Such over-stretching grows
self-destructive and eventually suicidal, and if

an anomalous cell begins to heal against the
prevailing disease, the disease fights back and
punishes this pariah. The disease, trapped in a
limited set of dimensions, is healthy to itself.
So it takes a long long while for me to
assimilate and accept, and I'm still, as you
see, having quite a lot of trouble communicating
what my long long gaze finally worries out —
this golden thread running through the tapestry,
as the narrative emerges displaying artists
competing for the chance to plant the flag on
Mount Olympus — Giotto ahead, beneath him Simone
Martini, the Lorenzetti brothers, Fra Angelico
(on the other side of time) and so on down the
pyramid.
This band of ever more self-aware and self-
defined artists pursuing the holy grail resemble
soldiers in the Oath of the Horatiai. To reveal
the transcendent and offer this gift to the
world, they agree to compete with animal fervor,
they'll play at a hunt by the rules of the game.
Unleashing a blood thirst for what quiets blood
thirst, they're serious and not about to be
stopped. Because they're not science-ists, they
can be scientists as well as artists. They're
systematically carving away and dispensing with
everything that is not the holy grail in order
to reveal it. At least by gradually coming to
define their project in this way, I'm able not
only to make sense of the continuous trajectory
that leads to the discovery of perspective, but
to find and sip from the holy grail, which

accounts for what's either a halo or a
radioactive glow. And which allows me to slay
the dragon, that is, to hack away the hackery by
clip clip clipping at a clipper's pace over
these waters whose skein is so complex I could
be midway through grocery shopping at Red Hook
Fairway, my cart parked by the prepared food
concession, and now leaning over the rail gazing
into the infinitely layered veils, the
undulating diaphanous skin of the sweetly
lapping, mercuric tv static of the dusk drenched
glittering gown worn by the whale that's the
Gowanus bay.
Okayyy! Check the hull for damage after that
storm, smell the air, so clear, so bright, not a
cloud in the sky. Please, stand up and stretch

and enjoy the view. Look there's an island that
must have amber waves of grain, cows, and grape
vines on the other side of those hills, for in
my periscope I behold a table spread with bread,
cheese and wine — and no cannibals that I can
see yet — way off there in the distance. We can
resupply there, before heading to our final
destination tonight, then in sight. Okay, back
to your stations mates. Anchors away! You don't
even know your knots? Lord have mercy! I guess
we better stay anchored while I teach you the
knots that hold up the sails of this vessel.
Now listen up, this is an important knot.

We're taught that artists are forced to adhere
to the theological program; only in the secular
world are artists free to speak their own minds
in their work. All lovers of sacred art who
bother to look into it soon learn that is just
flat wrong. The artists back then study and
embrace the sacred content, as these tropes
could not be better woven ropes for climbing up
the mountain for the view they seek. In their
day, authorities and the market have not yet
crunched out of the data a rigidly codified
version of the poetic, fluid reality that
artists at work inhabit, Authorities and the
market have not yet systematically confined
"truth" to catalogued catalogues of puzzle
pieces classified by every imaginable criteria,
except the one that works, the one that

recognizes the anomalous nature of each piece,
including the anomalous contours it shares with
a few fast friends for life, as it finds and
locks into the reassembled puzzle and reveals
the image of the whole, the epiphany, As long as
the eyes don't have it, or any other senses, you
take all the pieces you can stuff in your
pocket, and use them to illustrate your
classifying system, colorism, line-ism,
impressionism, expressionism, etc. These
classifying systems eventually work to suggest
patterns that adumbrate the image of the whole,
and one day — aha! — it dawns on somebody to cry
— it's a puzz… but before she gets the word out
the authorities have gagged her and dragged her
out of the lucrative art production factory. Art
does not mean anything! Art is! — they cry,

which once was a good corrective, but now as the
sails waft sloppily, it's time to come about,
and veer in the other direction — because art
has widely regressed to optical stimulation and
decorative filigree with shallow, if any poetic
evocation, it stifles instead of triggering
imagination.
However the clerics play the crude precursors of
the data crunchers that crunch out the presently
operating system, for pre-ism artists, the
sacred tradition, intrinsically a work of art
and an art practice itself, plays more than
works. Translucent to the original principles
and tricks of conjuring up something out of
nothing, this sacred tradition uniquely demands
and provides tools for the embodiment of the

divine and visualization of the invisible. That
practical embodiment is also fraught with
alchemical magic in which all true artists
believe, because we have experienced it.
By contrast, there are many regulations of art's
content today that might not originate in the
artist's conscious choice or any understanding
of how an artist by nature thinks and functions.
To conform to current criteria of sanity,
artists add our stamps to authorize that dry,
codified world inherited from early medievals
however it discredits our experience and
proclivities and dismisses our intuitions and
responses as goofy and flakey — as if the
Renaissance never happens, as if its airy neo-

platonic philosophy were not known by its
fleshy, marvelous fruits, but by the myopic
deconstructions of the envious modern
philosophers who don't have the guts or the
skill to base jump in flying squirrel suits.
It's as if an implacable, monomaniacal dark age
god just seamlessly flows into the implacable
monomaniacal principles of probability and
evolution. And artists, under the watchful eye
of science and its protectors spread through
high culture monitoring submission to this new
true god, are not so distant kin to medieval
ones allowed to blow off steam by scribbling up
obscenities in the margins of the manuscripts or
adding offensive appendages to the gargoyles
grinning ghoulishly on flying buttresses. The
artist can play the wild man, a sub-

intellectual, emotional being, whose work with
her hands precludes minding her mind, just as
the hand specialist leaves the brain to the
brain specialist,
But the hand specialist in truth is just as
brainy, just as the brain specialist is hands
on. The art of anything, which the science of it
only serves, involves meticulously logical
processes that artists master while
simultaneously maintaining emotional
responsiveness, as when composing or learning to
play a complex piece of music. All these
archaic words we speak and language itself
appear to correspond to such an integral world,
but current usage scalps language to serve
science as thing apart, the ruler of the world,

as if knowledge means anything at all until it
is applied. This rule of science confers on
everybody categories that do not fit the art-
made world we experience, and language at large
is discredited, incapacitating everybody.
A labyrinthine medieval bureaucracy under any
other authority is still just that. And is
mental torture really so much nicer than
physical torture? Boxers say that it's easier to
lose when there are physical wounds, not that
I'm ready to go there. My ego isn't that wound-
able.
At least some artists today run on a parallel
track with the resistant medieval artists, the
ones who in uncovering the holy grail are
gradually evolving a bludgeoning stick into a
hammer to build a house, but the authorities
don't notice and keep using it to bludgeon and
train everybody else to do the same, in fact,
prohibiting other readings of the stick — whose
handle, I mean what pulls you into the image's
field, can be softly curvaceous and
imaginatively wrought, however sharp the edges
of the facets of the womping part, which can
also be cut into a blade and sharpened, should
you be contemplating heresy against the
implacable source of being.

And so, to recap and build a bridge to the next
island, at the changing of the guards of truth,
a modern prophet hears one of the fiercer agents
of a remote, implacable god who calls all the
shots — free will a likely scam by this scheme —
cry out from a host of vegetal and animal
tissue, then etch into stone the irrevocable,
implacable principles of evolution — discovered,
in fact, with the kidnapped, enslaved tool of
perspective, It's only right to mention here
that, however sadly sequestered, perspective as
a slave, a mere technique torn from the womb of
the gestating holy grail, performs many
beneficent and useful functions. To it we owe
the microscope, the telescope, and all the
microscopic and telescopic images of the tracks

left by the present, and all the healing elixirs
addressing issues that appear in these images of
the tracks. The downside is that we've lost
touch with, and many no longer believe in, what
leaves the tracks, the fleeting staying naked
present, known only in true ("oh what does that
mean? get over it!") works of art, intuitions or
flashes in one's peripheral vision, conjured up
by parables and metaphors that elliptically
allude to it. And legend holds that a sip from
that holy grail, the present, has more healing
power than all the modern medicines we can
manage to get down. Having sipped some I can
taste the truth of it, but I still can't quite
digest it. At an early age my gut learns to live
on the bites of data, but maybe my work among

others will inspire parents and teachers to feed
their children wholer fare.
So the formalists later analyze the ornamental
aspects of these images functioning as zennish
bludgeoning sticks and name the different gothic
schools by the qualities of the line, etc.
Sometimes an imaginative preacher reads
edifying, pious stories into the strange,
incomprehensible (All artists are crazy, that's
a given.) contours on the shape. Artisans with
technical ability win accolades by elaborating
contours in flamboyant frivolity, where total
surrender to the implacable releases its
merciful leniency, by which Saint Francis, say,
constantly sings and dances and calls his band

God's fools, (Or, in the later evolution of the
ornately handled tool used to bludgeon us now
not with the dark age god, but with the
irrevocable implacable theory of evolution,
total surrender releases the free for all and
frenzy of sublimely meaningless and joyously
ridiculous post-modern art.)
Not there's anything wrong that. The artists in
quest of the grail, though, are in an Apollonian
more than a Dionysian mood. They focus on the
gospel passages that allow, if not demand, not
so much surrender, but negotiation and
partnership with the original ordering principle
and his principles. Not that the elixir wouldn't
have Dionysian qualities, but as I see their
quest for the tool of prayer almost aligning for

some while with our quest for the origins of
perspective, I suspect that they'r after
intoxicants similar to those that induce the
aforementioned drunken ecstasy of the painter
Uccello, who falls in love, as I do, with the
pristine musical mathematics of it.
Still, all` the aforementioned obfuscation
enables the development of many different kinds
of ornate and beautiful, zennish sticks, some so
lovely they could never be used to bludgeon, all
the exquisite medieval works we see in museums
today; and it also mesmerizes the eye and mind,

allowing these Apollonian artists to persist
unnoticed in their deviant desire not to deviate
or be distracted by any decadent delight, but to
hold to the straight and narrow path winding up
the mountain to the summit.
So with the flamboyant formalists, the
imaginative preachers, and all the ulterior
modes and manners, artists in quest of the
grail, their efforts and faith fed by the
encouragement in the gospels, could keep
developing the magic flute in the open, even
funded by corrupt or distracted authorities,
blind to the details, sight itself by many
considered an impediment to spiritual vision —
just as acutely attentive vision is generally

considered an impediment in historical research,
though you can get away with it if you aren't
unlucky enough to stumble on the holy grail.
Meanwhile, more and more carefully controlled,
official modes of discourse form and reform
themselves to assure that if anybody then or now
ever happens to enter, retrospectively, into the
process that reveals the form, that tracker
could never be able to recognize this absolutely
anomalous phenomenon, the holy grail, if it were
right before his or her eyes. It would blend
right into everything else, its qualities
appropriated by known objects, such as works of
art, which are allowed to look like no known
thing without being the reconstituted, original
holy grail that jolts them all into unveiling

their nature as just cut ups of the same
immortal jellyfish.
But there is a hole in everything, no place
under over or in the heavens above is so dark
and empty that there is not some light there, or
potential for light, as my finding of the holy
grail, in spite of all their colossal efforts to
hide and deny it, is presently already
attesting. Scientists onto this truth — that no
emptiness is so empty it does not harbor
generative potential — help explain to us how
something can come from nothing, which all
artists experience; and as artists humbly look
to science to verify our experience, so
scientists need to identify with artists to own
the experience they verify — thus to bring truth

down to earth, back into the human heart, where
alone this implacable power can be tamed. The
creation of the universe out of nothing now and
now and now is within us, as Saint Thomas
Aquinas notes, riding the coattails of the
artists in quest of the holy grail, or some were
riding his until they climb up his back and take
off from his shoulders.
So all the aforementioned obfuscation enable the
development of many different kinds of ornate
and beautiful, hammer-like bludgeoning sticks,
some so lovely they could never be used to
bludgeon, all the exquisite medieval works we
see in museums today; and it also mesmerizes the

eye and mind, allowing these Apollonian artists
to persistent unnoticed in their deviant desire
not to deviate or be distracted by any decadent
delight, but to hold to the straight and narrow
path winding up the mountain to the summit.
The artists in closing in on the object of their
desire begin to educate the whole world into
opening its eyes, but still, except possibly in
hermetic circles, everybody conveniently blinks
when the actual, desired object flashes into
view, and history rushes past it without
noticing. Had this aversion been averted, could
it have averted the black plague? Will history
learn? It sometimes does.

It is like, actually, more than like, it is so
that the mainstream of history parts and goes
two ways around it, and if the branches are
being to reunite, I'm almost the only evidence I
see of it — so necessary it is to avoid all
contact with something so extraterrestrial.
Yes, all avenues were sealed, no chance of a
leak. Nobody would ever get there. Nobody. Yes
yes Emily, I'm nobody too!
Now remember, like a river, we've only been
talking about where we are to keep moving
forward. To recap where we are, if we're them —

more properly, they — we're tinkering around
thinking we're looking for the holy grail, the
perfect tool of prayer with a hotline to the
source of the universe; or we'll say that in
retrospect, because nobody is consciously doing
that, they're just playing night watchman as the
paint makes its way to the canvas as the tool of
prayer, able to see through the walls and spy on
other efforts, gradually perfects itself. If
we're us — more properly, we — we're tinkering
around thinking we're looking for the origins of
perspective.
Anyway, for now, let's go back to being they,
thinking that they're looking for the perfect
tool of prayer, or not so much thinking, or
looking, as being vehicles of a process

unfolding through them. As they, we've already
arrived at the illuminated Dominican prayer
manual, the illuminations and written
description showing how to re-embody the best
living model of the best known model of the
corpealized divine — such a refined tool of
prayer that the manual is boldly entitled,
simply, How to Pray. The method by the way does
not require faith in anything but the human
imagination of the divine as a tool of the
manifestation and realization of the imagined on
earth here and now. It is a catholic as much as
Catholic practice. (Just because America lands
first on the moon, doesn't mean America has a
right to own the moon, and so too the holy
grail, but I suppose it does lay claim to the
vehicle it built. I'm not stealing the vehicle

Catholicism built, just borrowing it, because
nobody there seems to be using it, and it's
getting rusty.) Is there a yet more perfect way
to pray, somewhat objectively speaking, one that
yet more automatically fosters maximum closeness
or identification with the source and outpouring
of everything, as one thing. and nothing, three
in one. To try to get the bugs out, that it
function as a tool of prayer more perfectly, let
us try to get inside the head of the paint as it
analyzes in order to perfect the process.
The world of roles the manual creates is a
stage, but the play's not yet the thing. The
friar is lost in the role, but he's also lost in
space. He only has the name of a character:
observer. The observer will play the observer.

Then the friar will stop being that character.
He will then play the gesturer. The gesturer
will then allow himself to shift into the role
of the empathizer. The play is happening
nowhere. The constellation that joins these
nodes is a tale almost as remote to the
experience of them as a big dipper or an archer
is remote to Van Gogh's living, burning balls of
fire.
The Dominican procedure is a highly
contemplative practice, and completely
submissive to given language. That is, the saint
is looking to locate himself in one of the
approved, fixed roles representing known,
defined states of being -- observer, gesturer,

empathizer, where the act of moving between
these states is a technical problem of no
concern. You want to get to the base as fast as
possible, and stay there, until being there long
enough catapults you instantly over to the next
state.
So here the dance of prayer not only resembles a
baseball field, the game itself is similar.
That game similarly privileges contemplation and
stasis, where you want to get on a base, where
it's safe, a known, legal, authorized place,
described and approved by the trusted
authorities, as fast as possible, and you want
to get home, where it's even safer and quieter,
you want to get back to the quiet and safety
enough to steal a base. It's eternal

damnation, the black void, you're fleeing when
you're between the bases. Where it's safe and
still, there's time to reflect, to contemplate
the situation. Meanwhile the field is charged by
subtle signals passing among the players spying
on each other, the way the friars spied on the
saint, to analyze, and imitate, and even
possibly one up the model. Many are called and
few are chosen to win salvation. There might be
a fixed number of places. You want your friends
to get there with you. Only one team will win
the world series. All the sages agree. It's a
hard path to the top of the mountain, and many
fall by the wayside. Facts are facts.

Pretty most all modern life's processes are now
implicitly or explicitly codified in this
procedural way, as a discontinuous circuit with
defined nodes or goals. Take art reception. You
intercept the message from the artist, it
ricochets off you, you storm into the fray,
first sliding into the authorized base,
"observer", then you make or steal your way into
the authorized base of identifying with work,
then the base of doing something with it, then
getting somebody buy what you're doing with it
-- you're home! Don't get delayed between the
bases. That's not the game. This isn't soccer
or basketball. That's a whole different game.

In seeking the grail, we are embracing the
illumination of the nodes, but disparaging the
discontinuity, and we are disparaging also the
exaggerated disparagement of the space between
the nodes in so privileging them. We are moving
toward the repleteness of an unprecedented, all
visual experience, the melting of crystallized,
physical signs and the condensation of vapid
significance in a single fluid field, a patch of
the visible world refusing to allow us to undo
its wholeness and fluidity, its un-fixity and
flux, where be is finale of seem. Somewhat
miraculously appearing on her canvas, quite
astonishing the night watchman, as if the paint
had really thought this through as carefully I

had, the story that follows is the next tool for
getting us there, and we should not be presently
concerned with its literal verity or anything
else about it. This is not to say that it's a
metaphor; even modern science can accept the
proposal that the "god within Francis" produced
a vision, then an "hysterical symptom" arose
within his body, though the specific nature of
the symptoms stretch beyond the credible. But
anyway we're not interested in what the story
represents, but only what it can do to mediate
the appearance of the holy grail, which anyway
dissolves in its field the distinction between
word and world, fiction and fact (though
respectful of carefully gleaned historical
records involving first hand witness). And
remember that life first appears supernatural --

I'm sure it quite scandalizes the proteins -- at
its origin, but they soon see that it can only
be the next logical step, and fall right into
service.
Whatever species of thing the story is, it's the
next logical step in the full replenishing and
re-saturation of the visible with language long
strayed from its field, and vice versa. It's
the story of the Stigmatization of Saint Francis
of Assisi. A story which moves from base to
base but also defines the space between the
bases, mediates between a procedure and a tool
defined process that encapsulates the story.

... one morning about the feast of the
Exaltation of the Holy Cross, while he was
praying on the mountainside, Francis saw a
Seraph with six fiery wings coming down from the
highest point in the heavens. The vision
descended swiftly and came to rest in the air
near him. Then he saw the image of a Man
crucified in the midst of the wings, with his
hands and feet stretched out and nailed to a
cross. Two of the wings were raised above his
head and two were stretched out in flight, while
the remaining two shielded his body. Francis
was dumbfounded at the sight and his heart was
flooded with a mixture of joy and sorrow. He

was overjoyed at the way Christ regarded him so
graciously under the appearance of a Seraph, but
the fact that he was nailed to a cross pierced
is soul withh a sword of compassionate sorrow.
He was lost in wonder at the sight of this
mysterious vision; he knew that the agony of
Christ's passion was not in keeping with the
state of a seraphic spirit which is immortal.
Eventually he realized by divine inspiration
that God had shown him this vision in his
providence, in order to let him see that as
Christ's lover, he would resemble Christ
crucified perfectly not by physical martyrdom,
but the fervor of his spirit. As the vision
disappeared, it left his heart ablaze with
eagerness and impressed upon his body a

miraculous likeness. There and then the marks of
nails began to appear in his hands and feet,
just as he had seen them in his vision of the
Man nailed to the Cross...His right side seemed
as if it had been pierced with a lance and was
marked with a livid scar which often bled, so
that his habit and trousers were stained.
I'm astonished on finding this story after a
vague hunch about the Dominican prayer procedure
bearing loosely on the origins of perspective

leads me to look into other devout theories and
representations of imitation. I've assumed that
any origin found would be one of many equally
significant origins equally unworthy of the name
origin at all. But I seem to be spiraling into a
vortex more significant than others.
Yes, I think I must be dreaming when I notice,
on reading this story, that the hovering vision
in Bonaventura’s story is, in fact, not other
than the perspectival image, whose construction
from a vanishing point at the highest point of
heaven to hover at a fixed distance from the
arrested viewer, Bonaventura is careful to
delineate. The perspectival image appears at a
particular moment the cycle of un-reading the
image to return it to the body from which it

projected. At this moment the image stops and
presents itself to Francis, lost in wonder
before the unfamiliar, composite, outlined form,
waiting for the viewer to undertake the
assimilating, integrating act of reading and
understanding. Behind it, still visible (if the
descent of the vision has been swift enough) or
visibly remembered, lingers the splaying trail
of the image as it has descended from its
vanishing point.
Here is born, in and along with perspective, the
modern work of art that arises in juxtaposing
contradictory forms to create initially
illegible chimera, and then critics and
historians come along and decipher the sub-
conscious narratives and drives that produce and

lend meaning to these haunting dreamy images
working to disintegrate the disintegration, to
un-cohere the incoherence of the viewer's world.
Here is born the discipline of art history, the
arresting of the image to appreciate, wonder at
it, and to come to understand its meaning, and
the discipline of science, which reveals such
novel monsters, that they finally read as
functional instruments in the unfolding scheme,
and that of modern philosophy, when the image
fades away, and you begin to understand.
Indeed the whole modern world takes off from
this dreamy account of the archetypical story
appearing to mediate the transition of the honed
procedure of prayer into the perfected prayer
enabled by the holy grail. Where the Dominican

procedure defining authorized nodes of
experience establishes the terms of
specialization, leading to the discontinuity of
modern experience, the Franciscan story puts
forth the perspectival construction that, as a
process, sews it all back together; but soon the
images that are products of the process, as
earlier mentioned, are kidnapped for the white
slave trade; but it isn't very nice for
iconoclastic moderns to call them trash or
kitsch. They just need to escape and find their
way home so the music and meaning of the method
shines from and within them again, as Bettina
Magi in her earnest, poetic perspectives from
cowboy film stills, does just by refusing to
call so long abused and raped perspective names
and make fun of her, but just flat loving her.

Now Bonaventura's story begins to light up the
field and sew the modes together, but still it
also reaffirms the discontinuity demanded by the
temporal fixation in the procedure — first he
observes, then he understands, then he
identifies. In instrumentalizing vision, which
the story deploys only to discard — the vision
must first fade away to allow the important
event to happen — Bonaventura has not removed
the key roadblock on the path to the holy grail.
The so sought tool of prayer would have to take
the binding perspectival appearance, the
continuous verb — from the descent of the vision

from the highest point in heaven to the
disappearance of the sewing needle behind the
fabric to its reappearance in the emergence of
the visible wounds — and bind it to a noun,
something like the way the piano takes the
binding practice of playing Bach on a
harpsichord and transforms it into a piano
playing Bach, and then Beethoven bound to
conduct the whole world in a Hymn to Universal
Brotherhood, but more so.
So in terms of the process that was unfolding,
the artists' quest for the perfect tool of
prayer, the holy grail, the story plays just a
way station, an embryonic form that as Saint
Francis said represented a scandalous secret. In
terms of the gestating tool of prayer, a fetal

chimera half reptilian half human with the head
of science and the body of poetry, a weird mad
monster mother that the modern world would have
to hide in the attic as it groans grievously,
many suspecting it of conspiring to set the
house on fire. Oh no, we don't have a mad
mother hidden in the attic, protests the modern
world. We only have rational fathers like Saint
Augustine who carefully divide signs from what
they signify, and whose universal insights can
be clearly separated from the rationally willed
mystical faith that has nothing to do with them.
The father's sperm consists in a tiny fully
formed homunculus implanted in the womb of the
mother, a non-contributing receptacle. All
that's generative and and creative accrues to
the rational, projective yang element. Don't LOL

too hard. Did you know that the first views
through the microscope actually crystallized
this theory, as the homunculus had never before
been witnessed, but those hellbent to see it
managed to with the help of the microscope.
Finally though the microscope won over its
abusers.
And my microscope is winning too. In fact this
story by Bonaventura, this embryonic monster of
whose body we are all members, this schizoid
chimera that is the modern world, snatched from
the womb before it could develop into the holy
grail — luckily there's a twin left behind —
might have spontaneously generated without any
input from Augustine or any yang force besides
word itself. The mad mother is a metaphor. We

ARE this chimera, this embryonic tool of prayer
wrested from the womb of the artists' quest and
kept alive first with magic potions, then with
electrically wired implants, as the cyborg in
spirit evolves to cyborg in substance.
Out in the world, that is, we're this doomed,
one can only hope, monster, but as the twin
still in the womb gestating into the tool of
prayer, the holy grail, we are consummately
beautiful, we are the very essence of hope.
Let's take another look at the echocardiogram.
Bonaventura's story, the story in which we who
are born again as the non-evil twin, are
sleeping peacefully in the womb awaiting birth

as the holy grail, reflects not only on the
everyday, projective practice of reading space,
but also the ongoing practice of constructing a
common language, which determines what objects
exist in visible space, that is, what ideal
forms are mirrored below. Bonaventura not only
illuminates the construction of the sense date
of the observed, but he also shows us the a-
priori linguistic filter that determines which
forms vision will pick up, which lights will
break into the visible sphere.
In everyday life, the figural presences in the
act of appearing read as already existing

objects -- evocations of past phenomena, fixed
and encoded in memory and indexed by words.
To create a common world, we cannot disinter
from language either ourselves or the figures
coming into presence around us, but we can
burrow through to the figures and scrape off
some of the dust around them. By showing
phenomena in the very act of consuming and
regurgitating language and vice versa,
Bonaventura finds a way to read the figure
directly from inside the thick, muddy medium of
absent, objective phantoms, or figures fixated
in language.
The attempt by Bonaventura to unrivet, rather
than to disinter the figure, in fact, has a

precedent in the language of the Gospels read
not as a collection of signs and symbols of past
events, but as a tool for re-embodying language
and restoring presence (including the present
affect of absence). The evolution of language
from distancing weapon to a tool of reparation
of experience in the Gospels is similarly, but
far more thoroughly, analyzed by Elaine Scarry
in The Body in Pain, the Making and Unmaking of
the World. When I happened to read her book
right after I had written the first version of
this one, I felt as if I were acting by a script
she already wrote. Traumatized, I fell into a
death like sleep, then awoke refreshed and
relieved that she'd done that work, and now I
could go further.
Bonaventura's story does not un-rivet the figure
by jerking it free of language. The figures in
the story defy language by offering themselves
to it and turning the other cheek. They perform
the counter-embrace that loosens the grip of
the opposition.
Bonaventura's novelistic fragment paints a
moving picture of the continuous process by
which the two lovers, words and things, come
together to produce newly authoritative words
and things. The nocturnal tryst climaxes at the
instant when an instantly legible whole, in
being read as such, displaces its components. To
waste the precious time of words and the
precious space full of things on haggling over

the question of which came first, the word of
the text or the image of the thing, is an
exercise Bonaventura leaves to the rhetoricist
scribes and the materialist pharisees. He
surrenders to change, he seems to be a verb,
never to accomplish it finally, but always to be
accomplishing the shedding of the difference
between us and our so-called different stories
and so-called different theories and theologies,
as reading no more differs from becoming, even
becoming the story of making words itself
flickering and fading in and out of view, slowly
moving, ever-changing, quivering moon shadows
filtering through distant leaves, as we no more
differ from our changeling spirits, as art no
more differs from its history, as seeing no more

differs from becoming, that is, loving, as the
bottomless fount of never pours into always.
We're observing something that is melting the
lens by which we observe it by bringing itself
into focus, rendering the lens that leads us to
it obsolete. The novel lens isn't yet, but is
becoming a kaleidoscope catching, dispersing,
and ordering the light, and that's all there is,
which we always knew, but now it must be sinking
in, because we're starting to see it, outside of
time, stolen into the heart of the enemy camp,
outside of self and other, then and now, them
and us...
Given that we live in language, the most
immediate, bodily, sensual thing we can do is to

experience the bodily immediacy, the sibilance
and sensuality of words as they sink down into
themselves and point to their limits, the point
on the horizon and the line from us to it, just
a line to hang the zigzag of sailing on, so it
won't fall apart and become some other thing.
Meanwhile language in presence includes feeling
all the absence of it present, the tinkling of
thinking, the phantoms clinging to the winding
and twisting ladders of logic. Mother Mary
whispers, let it be.

So as I'm now identified with the yet unborn
twin, I notice it is fast developing out of a
chimera into an integral self-sustaining being,
but it's not there yet.
The story is a way to evolve the procedure of
prayer with its voids between socially approved
bases or stations into an instantaneous enduring
phenomenon like flouting with a flute or singing
with a voice or dancing with a body, where the
dancer becomes the dance, the flouter the flute,
the voice the song, in this case the lover
becoming love or god, all manifest, all visible,
on earth as it is in Dante's heaven, the instant
you sip from the holy grail that hovers before
you, radiating. Not an abstraction but a
replete, embodied appearance that presents

itself originally rather than representing
itself, though it must rise out of, and be
reflected, from somewhere not of this world, on
the shards of memory falling from, but some
still clinging to it.
But, to be practical, to turn around and cloak
oneself with another's being precludes seeing it
head on, that's why when Francis puts on the
wounds to make them happen from within, the
image seen from without disappears. A flute can
perfectly embody the desire for a flute's music
because music is invisible, because it's the
flute's way of playing not its image that
perfectly embodies the desire for the flute's
sound. But surely a visible thing cannot realize
the continuity of music, the way it confronts

you and inhabits you all at once because music's
disembodiment, its nature as a fleeting,
invisible verb is the very essence of it,
whereas the opposite is the case with an image,
which crystallizes the verb into a noun. The
loop from base to base joining nodes of the
process must break to enable the transition from
watching to identifying with the watched. Come
on, There's no such thing as the holy grail,
it's only a symbol.
Understandably, that is the official take on
things, where, as you remember, the artists seek
the holy grail in defiance of the church
authorities interest in using images more like
zennish bludgeoning sticks.

To this end, in a papal bull, Pope Innocent III
officially declares the authenticity of the
Stigmatization, but then, as if announcing a
miscarriage in the gestation of the tool of
prayer, advises all believers to imagine the
moment when a divine impress simply stamps the
saint from without, as if Bonaventura's story
has died in the womb.
The Pope does not just seem here to scorn my
quest for the holy grail as not other than a Don
Quixoti-esque farce, but goes further. He blocks
Bonaventura's reading of the Stigmatization as
an event produced interiorly, in the empathy of
the saint and his scandalous capacity to melt
into the being of Christ, having projected the
apparition from what Jesus insists is a god not

out there but within us -- as if Francis,
receiving by giving, according to his famous
prayer, brings the Stigmatization on by his own
efforts. Instead, the papal bull features a
wholly passive Francis and an active Christ
coming down from the sky demanding surrender.
A series of vivid imaginings of the event
surrounded the Pope's declaration, but none more
perfectly obedient to the pope's bias than the
weapon, by the workshop Giotto and now in the
Louvre, of human subjection to the power of the
divine as carried by the church.
Here Giotto shows off that skill that causes his
master Cimabue to swat at a fly Giotto paints on
the panel. He uses and advances all the latest

techniques to make the officially named bodies
appear as real as possible, and yet he could not
be more indifferent to any naturalistic
organization of space, the not yet named and
codified. Yet, when he binds Francis to Christ
like a puppet on strings with golden threads
that transmit the wounds, he takes great pains
to make sure the wounds are reversed, as would
happen in the case of a stamping from without,
the metaphor used by the pope. So the rays
connect the right sided wounds of Christ to the
left side of Francis, and the left to the right.
However irrationally the space is conceived,
with other objects presented as symbols rather
than bodies, this does open up some space in the
image, as it naturalistically conveys the effect
of a shower of rays from one body to another,

just as it features the fact that an object must
appear at some distance from the viewer in order
to come into focus, the golden rays as they
mirror visual rays functioning as dividers that
insist on the visible as well as spiritual
separation of Christ and Francis even in their
communion, an imperfect one, as the image is
reversed. A perspective, by contrast, would
reconstruct the image of the wounds from the
original principles of its appearance. So all in
all, in thwarting the quest for the grail, this
image arrests both scientific and artistic
progress. By all accounts Giotto, disheartened,
abandons it and lets his students complete it.

With the authorities convinced they've aborted
it, the gestating twin sleeps, dreaming of
paradise, like Wallace Stevens does on a Sunday
morning, mourning the fate of the twin, and
fearing it, And how will it react to the birth
of a competitor?

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draft part 1 dec1 2016 1 V for T

The proper technique in technical philosophy

A technical philosopher with good technique is a

fraught, freight train that the truth, a

rambling man — all roads lead to roam — happens

to catch a ride on. Technically, the

philosopher can only reveal what happens beside

of her and on top of her and inside of her,

where the truth runs and crawls and sleeps.

Tomes of technical pseudo-philosophy have failed

to glimpse the truth by aiming directly for the

target and being blinded by the light. If these

so-called philosophers really loved knowledge,

they would have gleaned enough of it to know not

to do that. Once blinded by the light, they can

only cobble up a theory that is so hard to

justify they must spend their whole life trying

to do so, only to have their arguments deposed

in the next generation, until, in the next

generation, those depositions are deposed, and

then their theory is recovered, until the next

generation deposes it again.

At least some technical philosophers leave it at

that, but others mix up their blind-sighted

technical theories with practical advice that

usually contradicts the theories, but as Hitler

advises, and it seems to work, the more self-

contradictory and absurd one's approach, the

more likely to garner a following. It seems

that regular bombardment with these

contradictions so numbs the brain that it can

no longer recognize the same idea seen from

different perspective in different contexts —

though so far it can still recognize material

objects. It is a cyborg, but not yet fully a

machine. This mix of "humanist" and technical

philosophy can get very entrenched and difficult

to depose over many generations. It's like a

biological weapon causing widespread brain

damage in the educated classes that trickles

down to the population at large.

I might be a humanist, but that's not my job.

I'm a technical philosopher who uses the proper

technique. The proper technique is just to be a

freight train carrying useful cargo, and by a

fluke the truth catches a ride on one, and if

not, the philosopher gains much knowledge

indirectly, just by performing a useful task and

earning the respect owed to a human being.

That was my intention, and no-one was more

surprised than, when of all things, the truth

started running along beside me, then hopped

aboard and wiggled inside of me. If I ever had

seen it coming right at me gazing into my

headlights and I into its, we would have

crashed, and I doubt I would have survived.

So please don't think that all personal stories