Entangled Occasion with Eyelets #1

Entangled Occasion with Eyelets #1

The Sun is bright I wake up early

I take a photo of the shadow on the dining room wall

For centuries painting as gnawed at its arm in the hope of escaping the shackles of its own essential thingness (see Michaelangelo self-portrait as the flayed Saint Bartholemew) or in the hazy hope of jumping the train from Giotto at a station that is not designanted (see Phillip K. Dick The Commuter) where the soul resides. Self-harm (Fontana) anatomical dissection and denial (Kippenberger Heavy Guy) have not greatly helped in the quest for meaning, which has become a shameful joke often accompanied by a rueful shake of the head. Data and sensory input have no meaning in themselves and yet... and yet there is something there through the unremembered gate. A misunderstanding of Artistotle’s essence as inert object has led to the erroneous certainty (all certainties are erroneous repeat to fade) that by standing very still (see Ucello the Battle of San Romano) everything will line up and fall into perfect perspective. When it doesn't painters often feel like smashing things up.

A. N. Whitehead (mathmetician turned adventurer in philosophy) suggests that we try to reconfigure ourselves in a non-bifurcated mode of self-awareness. Tricky really as the very thing that gives us awareness (cognitive language) leads to bifurcation – mind/body, science/nature, good/bad, thought/words. Classic(al) ontology subjects change to the rule of fixed substances. Whitehead perhaps makes a simple reversal by seeing change as essential rather than an accidental adjunct to the timelessness of permanent substances (the universe as lego building blocks). To enter Whitehead's non-bifurcated realm is to rediscover essence as event rather than object. This state of becoming is perhaps what all entangled (bad) paintings seek to manifest (see Titian the Death of Acteon) and to do so with all the open trust that leaping onto the cosmic dancefloor entails. Perhaps this helps complete the puzzle of authenticity gifted us by Jean Paul Satre. The idea that we are essentially the projects we act as individuals and not a flawed projection of an idealised abstraction of ourselves. The problem of this particular puzzle is that we are trying to complete it in a representational mode, which can only conclude in certain death, the soul's tracing paper instruction leaflet having flitted away as we opened the box. This leaves us with only the representation on the box and in this mode of presentational immediacy we display reality in a "way amenable to analysis, showing only the more or less clear and distinct surfaces of the world..." Whitehead asks us to account for the no less real causal efficacy unfolding behind the scenes in reality's unrepresentable depths from which half glimpsed emotional particles coalesce.

We live in a realm that favours presentational immediacy because this works well with representational analysis (see "how would you describe your race?" tick box). The given of the subject and object are not essentially more real but they serve as a means of making analysis make sense of itself. The soul makes no sense what so ever within the realm of representational analysis and yet blood continues to be shed in the name of insisting that it can be made sense of in this mode -
such is the drive to convince ourselves that the representational mode is the correct and definitive version of perceptual reality. Whitehead's process philosophy presents an effort to retune the wireless to other stations (remember how gloriously enticing white noise permeated by brief snatches of foreign voices once sounded on the shortwave radio?)

I’m afraid of being alone Turning to stone (repeat to end)