Mystery Tramp

The most important, most extreme, and most incurable dispute is that waged in us by two of our most basic strivings: the one that desires form, shape, definition, and the other, which protests against shape, and does not want form. Humanity is constructed in such a way that it must define itself and then escape its own definition. Reality is not something that allows itself to be completely contained in form.
Form is not in harmony with the essence of life, but all thought which tries to describe the imperfection also becomes form and thereby confirms only our striving for it.
That entire philosophical and dialectic of ours takes place against the background of an immaturity which is called shapelessness, which is neither darkness nor light, but exactly a mixture of everything: ferment, disorder, impurity, and accident.

(Gombrowicz).

Apollo and Dionysus, Cain and Abel, Athens and Jerusalem.

The msytery tramp, the bohemian in a no-man's land, the great upland traveler, seeking that sweet golden clime...intoxicated by the stangeness of the world, knowing that the stars are windows to other worlds; that there are doors beind these doors of perception.

Beneath our official selves, beyond the adult, rational, social , respectable world of appearances there lurked immaturity, irrationality, anarchy which occasionally comes to the surface, jostling for space, nudging to one side the dry bones of conformity, questioning the authenticity of customs, beliefs, culture, ideology, continuity, the past.

The last iconoclast. Intoxication, when most people are intoxicated by themselves. Walking under the open skies, refusing system, or being conformed to the world. Walking , to dissolve previous selves, to loosen up his being. Walking to exhaustion, until one has worn down one's soul, caught a glimmer of a different state of consciousness.

The wild man has always fascinated civilisation. Undomesticated, outside the borders of the known world, he is the stranger par excellence...the refugee, the escape artist. Stateless, he passes through all places as if they were bridges. Fate is a direction , a story to be written on a blank sheet of paper or, even better, sung; the ink is not dry.

He tarries near rivers and streams because these remind him of the promise of the sea, of far away destinations. The desire to be elsewhere is overtaken by the desire to not be. Let the lights go out in the dusk. And what of it if no-one knows who I am? Contempt for the solidities of the world is followed by a love for them, just as affirmation must follow negation.

To be committed..to what? To not being committed? To the deep blue sea rather than the tired earth? To the fantastical and the improbable, not to pin one's hopes on the final resolution of problems. A solution is only another problem. Must one reject seriousness, and the wisdom of the ancients, the men in hats and "sustained joy". Profane illumination lasts but a moment, like the fireflie's.

An overturner and a re-mapper of settled geographies, and genalogies. He thus lends himself especially to rereading in different contexts, since his work is all about how life history offers itself by recollection, research and reflection to endless structuring and restructuring in both the individual and collective sense.

This disruption of stable patterns, the fixed image, 'identity', is a 'sound thought', a nomadic thought. It is late in the day, the world is settling down into its place, like a cloak falling to the floor. Perhaps one can summarise a life in a single gesture, perhaps a final flourish will make things clearer and the pieces will finally make sense. But only maybe.

The late work: Not the final notes of evening, the summing up one's finest and deepest thoughts ; nor the completion, the circumscribing of reality in a coherent picture, a settling of
accounts or a grand attempt to bring all that had gone before into some sort of resolution, harmony. Not to be concerned about the timeless or the withering gaze of time. Instead, a return to long forgotten and displaced motifs and themes; a turn to new openings and fresh insights, the charting of unbounded territory, a mind that still delights in ambivalence, contradtiction, indeterminancy...a soul that is still in love with the fire of the world....

There are no final moments; each moment is a final moment.

He passes whole towns and cities and even though they be built of gold and silver, for him they remain ephemeral, dream-like..more so, the inhabitants. The city of quartz is a sparkling illusion, behind its thousand diamond facets is a world that crystalises and then splinters, fragmenting his vision. Theirs is the never-ending world of authority, of tireless boredom, a repetitive, monotonous life. The great winding down of our thoughts, the sapping of energies, until they become but marionettes, de-void of the capacity to imagine anything new. They live exclusively "in" time whilst he gives no thought for the 'morrow.

What we do and think is filled with the beings [ruins] of our fathers and ancestors.
Childhood, on the other hand, is a time without flight, an "I" without death. But man, the great mid-point , the 'barzakh', the intermediary, falls and becomes time; each action, each thought , now occurs at the intersection of the "past" and the "future"; the stones, the sea, the trees: these are our past, we their future; by our very nature we are restless. Each birth opens up a new universe, but so does each death... each gesture changes the meaning of all previous gestures, each name the significance of those that have passed, those that will come.

The city closes in on him. The frontier has moved inwards. He sees the desert in her eyes, the wilderness in his heart. He becomes sceptical of scepticism itself since it is nothing more than a settled position, something to be subverted. Without totally abandoning his naivete he becomes modern, understanding that to be so is to live without the absolute; there is no completion, and his 'house' must always be without a roof (like Terminus). But the whole earth is a mosque.

How to escape oneself....one...self? The tramp is a jester , a trickster, because he mistrusts the stabilised world, the establishment, the "iron laws of symmetry", and convention, codes, the cold congealing of assumptions and self-evident axioms, decorums and familial pieties, class and social hierarchies. More than anything he floats through life, undoing, uncreating himself. Meaning, the ancient curse, must be abandoned. Maybe. He follows and scatters clues that lead nowhere and even destiny cannot read this anomaly.

He tramps the landscape because he knows that it will fashion, from its infinite potentialities, his beloved....somewhere. He reads its lines like one would a face, searching for fate. But one should not look too closely for the signs.

We have no tolerance for the undifferentiated fact, bare reality, pure sensation, the moment we confront chaos- which is to say raw uniterpreted reality-we look for signs of order, pattern, meaning. Look up at the cracks in a ceiling for what may or may not be a sign, a portent, saying to ourselves "maybe it is an arrow, mayb..,maybe not". Pursue some or all of the possible signs and you may find yourself the dupe of a cosmic joke. Think about the possibilities on offer..you will feel oppressed , overwhelmed by the way meanings turn out to be misleading or irrelevant.

Form and finish are to be avoided-even though they provide a temporary shelter against randomness, chance, and chaos. They are a violation of our nature which is radically open..the open road of our future is a frontier with wide empty spaces. The tyranny of form, the dizzying array of formal boundaries,..even to confirm that we are "free", "spontaneous", "authentic", we subordiante ourselves to the language and thought of society. These deviations from the norm are predictable, even desirable for modernity which relies on a radical transformation , melting away of anything that is 'solid'.

We must be more and less than we are. The mystery tramp negates any sense of formal identity, ridicules it. Fissures in his character are nothing...nothing compared to agape, agape. Consistency is a virtue of small minds and his thoughts, like a poet's, ramble on, without any direction or goal. Digreession and sudden irruptions of insight, wild improvisation is his inscrutable way. In this, the wild vagrant will give up the ghost of rural tramping and step into the jazz age...

A life that is unpredictable, unmechanical, discontinuous with anything that has gone before, surreal, a life dedicated to improvisation. Nothing is 'given', we are what we make of ourselves and no-one could see that this idea of freedom would lead to the most terrible nihilism, to a garrulous but vacuous and endless posturing...a finite self with infinite desires. The dream of unbound freedom, the smashing of the old world's constraints has, quite remarkably, led to the most rigorous compulsions. As if the self, the vagabond mentality, is now a slave of its own desires.
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/features/story/0,11710,1370298,00.html

The de-sacralization, de-mythologisation of the world can be achieved, not through philosophical discourse, but via ridicule and laughter. The order of the world can be inverted, turned inside out with the aid of the carnivalesque, the cabaret, and mocking irony.

They speak an urban language of simultaneous sensations and speed, of anonymity and masquerade, of gendebending and transience, of exuberant pleasure mixed with anxiety..faint threat haunting wicked joy. The threat is of totalitarian order, mechanism, but also of the inevitable, rapid passage of all things, including love. Through stupidity and innocence and naivete, one could oppose the violence of the world, un-write the necessities it imposes on us. Might not the seductive allurement of entertainment, decadence, frivolity, lightness, be an antidote to the really dangerous dreams that fascinate manking and hold him spell-bound, those of the solid world: money, power, ideology, distinctions, binaries, hierarchies, and its constructs of mythical moral purity, a paradisal language, uncorrupted time?

Poetry

A few lines, from other places...

















These grasses must be made
Of her who often prayed,
Last century, for repose;
And the fair girl long ago
Whom I often tried to know
May be entering this rose.

So, they are not underground,
But as nerves and veins abound
In the growths of upper air,
And they feel the sun and rain,
And the energy again
That made them what they were!

(Transformations, Hardy... for a blue star, Marh)

The iceberg cuts its facets from within
Like jewelry from a grave.

But he sleeps on the top of his mast
with his eyes closed tight...
The spangled sea below wants me to fall
It is hard as diamonds, it wants to destroy all.

As we lie down to sleep the world turns half away
through ninety dark degrees;
the bureau lies on the wall
and thoughts that were recumbent in the day
rise as the others fall,
stand up and make a forest of thick-set trees.

(E.B)

Now may one hear it still from afar,
words reach their goal ,
though sound and music fade.
Is it not still the tent of scattered stars
the high transfigured world that love has made?

(Goethe)


Earth poetizes, field to field
with trees interlinear, and lets
us weave our own paths around
the plowed land, into the world

Blossoms rejoice in the wind
Grass stretches out to bed them so softly
Heaven goes blue and greets mildly
soft chains the sun has woven.

People go about, no one is lost-
Earth, heaven, light and forest-
Play in the play of the Almighty.

(H.A.)


The water seems suspended
above the rounded gray and blue-gray stones.
I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same,
slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones,
icily free above the stones,
above the stones and then the world.

If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.

If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.

(E.B.)

Alone beside the sea
like a mind alone in the universe,
her reason like man's
the sum of it how to get a meal.

A mind restless seeking,
a more restless flesh returned,
unrest and sleep without a gleam,
music delirium, and an hour of rapture

The hour of rapture is the clear hour
that comes from the darkened blind brain,
horizon-breaking to the sight,
a smile of fair weather in the illusion.

On the bare stones of the shore,
gazing at the slipperiness of the sea,
listening to the sea's swallowing
and brine rubbing on the stones.

Alone in the vastness of the univesre,
though her inaccessible kin are many,
and bursting on her from the gloom
the onset of the bright blue god.

I am with you, alone,
gazing at the coldness of the level kyle,
listening to the surge on a stoney shore
breaking on the bare flagstones of the world.

What is my thought above the heron's?
the loveliness of the moon and the restless sea
food,and sleep, and dream,
brain, and flesh, and temptation.

Her dream of rapture with one thrust
coming in its season coming without stint,
without sorrow but with one delight,
the straight, unbending laws of heron.

My dream exercised with sorrow,
broken, awry, with the gliter of temptation,
wounded, morose, with but one sparkle,
brain, heart and love troubled.

(The Heron, Sorley Maclean)

The Choice

I walked with my reason
out beside the sea,
We were together but it was
keeping a little distance from me.

Then it turned saying:
is it true you heard
that your beautiful white love
is getting married early on monday?

I checked the heart that was rising
in my torn swift breast
and I said: most likely;
why should I lie about it?

How should I think that I should grab
the radiant golden star,
that I would catch it and put it
prudently in my pocket?

I did not take a cross's death
in the hard extremityof Spain
and how then should I expect
the one new prize of fate?

I followed only a way
that was small, low, mean, dry,lukewarm,
and how then should I meet
the thunderbolt of love?

But if I had the choice again
and stood on the headland
I would leap from heaven or hell
with a whole spirit and heart.

(Sorley Maclean, for....?)

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells Stones ring;
like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves--goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came.
Í say móre: the just man justices;
Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is--
Chríst--for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.

(G.M. Hopkins)

Broken Circles

Art as a broken circle:

We intuit unity; from out of the mass of moving, conflicting, fragmented tendencies we draw a sense of the world and our place in it-as if by mapping the contours of space we could imagine, describe, circumscribe a soul. From the fabric of given materials we weave a pattern. Art clarifies and distils something about the human condition, presents it as a coherent reality and not a just a sequence of random and unrelated happenings, discontinuous events; a self-enclosed 'picture' , reality as a 'limited whole', an arrangement that corresponds to the way things really are.

Art is the aesthticisation of time, bringing the presence of the timeless to the surface. The classical ideal of harmony, plenitude, and perfection is at once an image of Totality and Knowledge. But with the Greeks, who still know how to dance, lightness prevents order from ossifying into the rigidity of a late civilisation, characterised by heaviness, gravitas. How to reconcile pleasure, the unlimited, with the truth except through proportion and regularity: Apollo: light and order.

Whether art can truly represent the suffering, pain, remorse that also go up to make a human life is questionable; objections to art are not, in this case, "puritanical" ones but 'sound' ones: there is a life that escapes us, feelings that are displaced when put in words; art distorts, is too removed from the wounds of time. The image-ridden consciousness offers to put right, make sense of, the myriad stands of our being when a ruthless honesty requires us to sometimes face the void...art as the myth of consolation, redemption, can appear to deal in surface realities, a lower form of consciousness, eikasia, that holds us spellbound, roots us to the ground, petrifies our souls, like Medusa. Art is a false attempt at immortality, offering us the fire in the cave instead of the sun.

The Platonic objection: art is removed from reality, creating an image of an image of the eternal Form. Art that is displayed exists in an even more rarefied air, abstracted from life,
community and ritual, something that can be 'consumed' in a solitary moment of contemplation or reflection, increasingly tilted more towards the psycholgy of the artist or our personal, individual reaction to it and less to a 'shared symbolic order'. From here it a short step to being enmeshed in an alluring world of fantasy and dreams. One can imagine, with fascinated horror even, terrible acts of cruely but kindness and goodness can not be the subject of art. (rowan moore)


At the same time, the "brokenness" refers to the fact that we can never grasp the whole truth, that we see through a 'glass darkly' and that all experience is not communicable at once: we live but through one life (even though we dream of bilocation), one that is radically incomplete and one that is only tangential to other lives, other levels of reality. This is the ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy. (Rosalind)

We desire more than anything to be frontiersmen, dimly guessing that the real truth is on the boundaries. We seek a new orientation, not to measure ourselves in shadows against the central axis, hieroglyph of the known. Majesty, 'jalal' rests on what is not said, on a certain reticence and unknowingness. All great art is a synthesis of this truth and of beauty; there is a poignant, heart-rendering beauty in what cannot be expressed but only felt, in our awareness of loss and absence. The sublime in art, music, is the northern element; the perceiving of something, someone, that doesn't come 'home' moves us, touches us: to learn to live with strangeness, to reconcile oneself with not being reconciled, to perceive a unique soul, their panache, a person irreducible in her appearance, a distinct "who", not a "what", means, at times, a restrained gaze,

If art, as an image, represents the static vision of perfection, the creative ability of the artist, shaman, the rhapsodist, to draw forth, make manifest, the hidden meaning to our lives then it surely also obliquely hints at the fundamental mystery of all that is not related to vision. Tell it, but tell it slant. Can art, which is about 'presence', exist without great absences? Can a life be led without gaping holes?

The broken circle is the recognition of two fundamental tendenies in the psyche: space and time, essence and existence,(one might even say sedentary and the nomadic mentalities); spirituality as "bliss", an eternal order, an angelic state of being, or spirituality as an endless journey. The
'gaps' in the circle point to an understanding that we can only be aware of a certain segment of reality, and that , therefore, we always have to be tentative, open to surprise,bewilderment, and wonder, that our lives are a constitution in the making, the soul a moving stream of images, not a museum. The 'nomadic' element can never lead to a settling on a final reconciliation..truth must be a series of veilings and unveilings, the 'ceaseless reward'.

Better to contemplate
The blank page
And leave it blank

Than modify
Its substance by
So much as a pen-stroke

The 'gaps' are breathing spaces that allow us to imagine other worlds. At the boundaries of the known we

But something lights up in our mind when we are told metalworking was the the "barbarian" or nomad, art par excellence, and when we see these masterpiece of minor art. These fibulas, these gold or silver plaques, these pieces of jewelry, which concern small movable objects..object in motion..They do not enter the relation of form-matter...They give colours the speed of light, turning gold to red and silver into white light..they are of the order of free action, related to pure mobility and not of the order of work with its conditions of gravity, resistance, and expenditure...Metalworking, jewelry making, ornamentation, even decoration, do not form a writing, even though they have a power of abstraction..filigrees and gold and silver plating...Scythian art, linked to a nomadic and warlike economy that simultaneously made use of and rejected commerce (reserved for foreigners).

Islamic art is the silent exteriorization of a contemplative state and ..reflects no ideas, but transforms the surroundings qualitatively, by having them share in an equilbrium whose centre of gravity is the unseen....Aniconism, by precluding every image inviting man to fix his mind on something outside himself and to project his soul on an 'individualizing' form, it creates a void. The proliferation of decoration does not contradict this quality of contemplative emptiness; on the contrary, ornamentation with abstract froms enhances it through its unbroken rhythm and its endless interweaving. Instead of ensanraing the mind and leading it into some imaginary world, it dissolves mental 'fixations' , just as contemplation of a running stream, a flame, or leaves quivering in the wind, can detach consciousness from its inward 'idols'.

Paradise is an eternal springtime, a garden pepetually in bloom, refreshed by living waters; it is also a final and incorruptible state like precious minerals, crystal and gold. Persian art sets out to combine these two qualities: the crystalline state is expressed by the purity of the architectural lines, the perfect geometry of the arched surfaces and the decoration of rectilinear forms; as for the celestial springtime, it blossoms in the stylized flowers and fresh, rich and subdued colours of ceramic tiles.

Islamic art: the sense of rhythm and the spirit of geometry...parallel to an art with interlacement, double spirals, triple vortices, continuous swastikas and so on in Northern Europe...the continutiy of the interlacement invites the eye to follow it, and vision is then transformed into rhythmic experience accompanied by the intellectual satisfaction given by the geometric regualrity of the whole...

[on the mihrab, cordoba]...this arch and its framework were to become henceforward inseparable, for they fulfill one another and provide a mutual equilibrium like joyful expansiveness tempered by the 'sense of eternity' , or like fervour and justice , or love and wisdom.