fly on by

fly on by so many means
where on stands up and down be seems
a foot in the sky and the earth
no one is one to many dearth
or two so few as you eyes
your sky held earth tempest cries
and as death searching nights keep
what deep reach is schizoid leap
from mirror reality's broken sleep
surrenders fragment rendered reflection
dark saying dieing light cast conception
a shadow reach without grasp within
this selfless self where we have been
like a hole in a hole this

John Hinds
Feb. 1972

Thoughts on Performance "Art"

There is this thread over at American Digest.

I wonder if they grasp what Art is.  Certainly its not self-loathing. Art is a question put to being itself.  The first question.  It doesn't expect an answer, is blind to an answer.  That is the purview of Religion which is the first fractalisation of Art as a modality of sentient life. Religion acknowledges Art's question and claims possession of the answer which it posits in an absolute other. This parsing of the truth from the whole of being is failure.  But I digress.

What gets my attention is the assertion at the link that performance art mistakes pain for meaning.  I'm thinking if it mistakes pain for meaning then it is a form of self-loathing, which expresses some deep seated guilt, which is an off-shoot of fear.  Well, fear is a mode of idea which in turn is a mode of thought.  Thought is a mode of consciousness, which is a mode of being.  And, Being Is, or, The Real Is.

The self-loathing subjects are far from - many stages deep - into the descending levels of these modalities of The Real.  They Own - are bound up in Having - not in Being.  You can see it in their decidedly care worn faces.

Yes, even a pile of excrement might in a certain light have a bit of shine to it.  But that doesn't make it beautiful.  It just makes it a participant of beauty of the very lowest order.

It used to be that the cream rose to the top.  Nowadays its the opposite and the piece in question puts that on full display.  A shiny thing gets your attention but if it has to give you a jolting shock to do so then its no more than the shine on the excreta.

There is a recurring theme in our culture.  I've thought for a long time that its rooted in Christianity, and Islam too, and farther back in ancient Bronze age belief, this discarnate longing, the Daemonic in nature, an insatiable desire, also known as Don Juanism.  The Religiously posited absolute other is nothing but an expression of Aristotelian geocentric cosmology.  Perfection is "above", "beyond" the ken of fallen man. The source of guilt is man's station, below the perfection of the Heavens - his estrangement; the parsing of Truth from the whole of Being, Reality, and fixing it in the "Heavens".  Guilt is the source of fear, self-loathing, a "sickness unto death". The infinite regress of dystopian dreams in which we are embedded is nothing but a fractalisation of that old Aristotle model of The Real. If nothing else we are eternally bound to this wheel whose spokes we hug and kiss, truly, a sickness unto death.

"I Believe" - G. V. Desani

Friend Todd Katz has posted a .pdf of Professor Desani's paper "An Indian View of God, Cosmos, Love, Marriage, Sex, et cetera".  It is linked on the samples page at Desani.org.  Click here for that page.  There are several other papers linked there.  A direct link to the "I Believe" .pdf is here.  I quote from the paper:

"In the late ‘60s The Illustrated Weekly of India published articles by “an especially selected panel of Indian religious leaders, artists, writers, philosophers, scientists and politicians,” under the broad title “I Believe”. Each contributor was encouraged to described his or her personal philosophy by answering the same set of questions. G.V. Desani’s response (below) was published Dec. 7, 1967.

"Desani later adapted his article plus his edited summaries of the responses of other participants into an academic paper for the University of Texas Philosophy Department and the UT Center for Asian Studies. The title was "An Indian View of God, Cosmos, Love, Marriage, Sex, et cetera."

And, I consider this next excerpt particularly germane to me personally:

"People who go about asking questions about “God” and demanding satisfaction – without realizing it – request answers to all these questions [see above] and more. To put them off with, “… ‘God’ is a word, a symbol, a concept, a construction by the consciousness, a creation of the mind of man,” or “ … is a cipher, something intuited, a ‘no, no!’” could be an evasion, a subterfuge, and “no! no!” would be an item quoted from an Upanishad. Some pious folk, on the other hand, are satisfied with the authoritative answers given by the founders of religions. By accepting personal testimony, such people are said to have “faith”.  Folk so blessed should not ask anybody questions about “God”. They should look up their scriptures.

"I happen to presume, however, that everybody at all believes in “God”: if the word means the highest value. It is by one’s highest value that one weighs and measures the worth of anything at all. So – bringing this abstruse term within the compass of empirical knowledge, hence discussion – money is “God” for most people I know.  Power is “God” for some: ego, assertion, conquest, possession – including possessing people, their “love” is covered by the term."