Showing posts with label Logres. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Logres. Show all posts

Friday, April 22, 2011

6. The Inself Border. Good Friday Riding Westward. Leaf Meditation.


Can  word be both text and the image,  graffiti over-top? We cannot deny the inself in three dimensions even if it lives in four. The truest representation is the sculpted. A scientist claims to the artist, "you made the leaf, but I discovered it," but the sculptor replies, "you described it, plucked it, preserved it in glue. It is a construct of your mind and mine," but neither of them did. Neither have traveled to that far country from which when you return you cannot speak and if you did no one would believe.

  The Branch cries out to the image seen and the word spoken and the word longs to be seen. Fraktur text and image twine these together, Concrete poems, vispo pretend  to do it on paper and type. Blake illustrates. We must know the leaf inself alive. The botanist who presses a leaf  must know the leaf alive, but image and word are incompatible.

 The Cover

So the Inself concedes the Out as leaf, or in human terms, mask, a covering of face for what exists but cannot be seen. It can't be seen because it is thought which does not exist in language, but in image
This is all Levinas before I knew him.
Walking one side of this border, up against it, cross immediately the other side.
The Speech of Corn

Twine a poem about a branch,
it will not leaf.
Tendrils do not speak.
 The Inself  speaks the plant.
What is the speech of corn?

What says aloe? Every thing has breath. Plants breathe light. THOSE WHO LOOK TO HIM ARE RADIANT.  I will consider in my dwelling place like a clear heat upon herbs, a cloud of dew in the midst of harvest.

 At Altamira many millennia of horses and bulls had no words, but rhythm and color. They had no language, nothing written the stones cry.  Breuil says art was an extension of hunt, the worship of life, a celebration.

 These matter when the content is greater than itself. The words show something more than mundane. Why else make the effort?  Charles Williams designs the figure of a woman and stretches it over the kingdom of Logres, over all of Europe (see the endpapers of Taliessin Through Logres, Oxford, 1938), like the Cave at Altamira and its bison, except Williams' Europe is Logres, Arthur's kingdom, and did not exist as the bison in the real, or it did and now only remains expressed on the cave wall, as the bison, Williams' Taliesin.

Inself sounds like Inscape. A true statement about Hopkins is that "seen from one point of view Hopkins' work is some dozen nearly perfect lyrics. Seen from another perspective it is a heterogeneous collection of documents...but within this seemingly chaotic mass we can detect a certain persistent structure." J. Hillis Miller. This describes life on the borders. 

Take the border between image and word.
The verbal is the interior leaf,  
images the internal sense,
the leaf inself of the seen,
the leaf inseen of the self.

ATTIC OR BASEMENT

Inquiry into this folk mind grasps for the unseen paradox that if unknown and unsigned, how art, anonymously more than itself,  multiplied b...