draft work in progress
#minimal difference
#Giotto
#fresco
#art as knowledge
#paragone
#art as poetry
#anomaly
#Mobius strip
#minimal difference
#Giotto
#fresco
#art as knowledge
#paragone
#art as poetry
#anomaly
#Mobius strip
*****************
GIOTTO'S YET MORE DIVINE COMEDY
(detritus of a dissertation trying
to surrender to the will of its thesis)
The surface reads as strangely flat, like a retinal image in a machine that does not yet know how to read in perspective. The way that the saint's body is locked into the landscape, his torso precisely contained in the triangular recess, his hand centered in the inverted triangular facet beside it, the way the many different triangular shapes mirror each other, as the blue cloud seems gently to inhale and exhale as the dipping swelling, script-like lines that contain it rise like erratic melodies pressing toward, even as they meander around their path to an inevitable conclusion —- all this conspires imperiously to direct the mind and eye to the formal play at the surface even as the narrative space remains intact.
If you were to add atmosphere, as this artist usually does, suggesting added distance in depth, between adjacent forms, the scene could look quite naturalistic, but the cloud of otherworldly light that surrounds the seraph has apparently burned off the atmosphere away, and there are no shadows, so the distortions due to perspective seem irrational. It’s the world Alice finds down the rabbit hole, the hermitage a dollhouse the saint must squeeze into.
As all art this image crystallizes the catastrophic
otherness of all images --
while merely telling of its doing this at the same time
corralling everything into art's catastrophic cause
slurping up the world into the slippery surface of no dimension between sign and thing,
the gesturing landscape like a cloak worn by the bodies,
lovers being each other, but minimally displaced
divided only by this infinitely thin film
an image, an image of all images,
experience returned to the very instant it finds language,
just as language creates a replete world
already in the beginning felt in every fiber and suffused with thought,
where an instant later this surface splits sight and thought diverging more and more drastically with every gain of distance from the source.
Or when you first learn language,
maybe the delight and the wholeness linger awhile.
Returning to that moment now though
goes against everything you thought could happen.
Your mind roars in protest.
The beast has lured you into his palace.
You will escape, or you will stay and get to know the beast,
then kiss the beast, and possess the redemption
that now hovers before you
as a cold, dead theory of itself...
I hear it tear like the curtain rent in the temple,
a shriek of horror fills the universe.
I must face it. I can't fix it. The genre will not cohere.
I am two people who will not cohere.
until this cry that will not die
restores this bridge uniting beauty
and truth and everything...
continued at
If you were to add atmosphere, as this artist usually does, suggesting added distance in depth, between adjacent forms, the scene could look quite naturalistic, but the cloud of otherworldly light that surrounds the seraph has apparently burned off the atmosphere away, and there are no shadows, so the distortions due to perspective seem irrational. It’s the world Alice finds down the rabbit hole, the hermitage a dollhouse the saint must squeeze into.
As all art this image crystallizes the catastrophic
otherness of all images --
while merely telling of its doing this at the same time
corralling everything into art's catastrophic cause
slurping up the world into the slippery surface of no dimension between sign and thing,
the gesturing landscape like a cloak worn by the bodies,
lovers being each other, but minimally displaced
divided only by this infinitely thin film
an image, an image of all images,
experience returned to the very instant it finds language,
just as language creates a replete world
already in the beginning felt in every fiber and suffused with thought,
where an instant later this surface splits sight and thought diverging more and more drastically with every gain of distance from the source.
Or when you first learn language,
maybe the delight and the wholeness linger awhile.
Returning to that moment now though
goes against everything you thought could happen.
Your mind roars in protest.
The beast has lured you into his palace.
You will escape, or you will stay and get to know the beast,
then kiss the beast, and possess the redemption
that now hovers before you
as a cold, dead theory of itself...
I hear it tear like the curtain rent in the temple,
a shriek of horror fills the universe.
I must face it. I can't fix it. The genre will not cohere.
I am two people who will not cohere.
until this cry that will not die
restores this bridge uniting beauty
and truth and everything...
(Thanks to Charles Stein,
whose swelling banks induced,
and whose breathing technique
and whose breathing technique
is more than assisting, the messy birth
now in progress
of the recalcitrant embryo.)
*****
continued at
