book found in tunnel on route to see Basquiat, ITIN ’05
I am always asking myself how information technology may or may not have effected the shape of our bodies and minds. I am particularly obsessed with scroll cultures and codex cultures… That act of splitting a circle in half and turning it into a storage machine (a book). There is violence to cutting pages, but also a sort of biological metaphor. Charles Mingus the Third got me thinking about Laurie Anderson again with his kind comments on Boink Boink. She did this word piece about how the Chinese view the ears as vestigal featuses and use them in accupuncture accordingly. The image is wild because it makes Freud’s trifecta split of conciousness quite physical on the head (where as Jungian duality is reflected in the split of brain and spine)… really you have to read the body as a book: left page, right page, and in the middle the spine that holds it all together. Of course if the Chinese are right than your face (read identity, or ego) is just a spine holding together two dead babies: alpha and omega Kubrick space babies no doubt.
It is these rambling thoughts on scroll into codex that makes the cruciform (particularly the simple graphic northern European variety) so damn facinating. Obviously the Christians did not invent the form of the cross. The Romans most likely hung Jesus on a T…but a t is still a cross as long as you don’t get Roman on it and try to Capitalize it… so T…(its no accident that the Swiss got rid of serifs) The asians pretty much built their religion(s) and philosophy(ies) on a T, or Tea anyway and isn’t Tea what kicked off our revolution?
And let’s not forget the flowers: “Poppies, poppies,” says the wicked witch of the West (to be played by the Queen of England). The cruciform is ancient and mystical. The Buddhist Swastika is a spinning cross. What is it about splitting the world by two axis (while drinking wine,or tea) that makes man smarter and closer to God?
The Cartesean World View… the fact that opium is the chemistry of human joy? What?
It seems to be a way of organizing the mysterious circular universe into a thing man can quantify and grasp. It seems to relate to the Fibbonacci sequence and the gridding out of a spiral… the golden ratio (a cross is only a cross cause it’s the right shape to nail a man onto)… the understanding of flower petals and pine cones.
Buckminster Fuller pointed this out to me in his book:The Critical Path (this was the only book I could read when I had my first major depression… somehow my parents and brother found Bucky in a small book shop with no one around… talk about magical visions… out of respect my stingy father bought a hard cover copy and had bucky sign it… the book sort of saved my life… and it is odd how the path metaphor is so present in my work). He argued the cartesian grid, or square (all the beatnick delight in mocking squares is no accident) was finished and we should move back towards the Egyptians who organized on triangles. He, however, advocated a more complicated geometry using hexagons. The satanic overtones of a HEX (we’ll cover and levitate the pentagon in part 2) are really alluding to its pagan, or non Christian/European derivation. If it aint white kids, it’s the devil’s work. You’ll find that a lot in European technical thinking before (and after) the enlightenment. The Rennaisance was really just learning again what the Church had forced everyone to forget. Let us now thank certain folks like the Jesuits and the Swiss and a few Benedictines and mostly the Arabs who hung on to those old books. They were easy to store, or Europe would still be in the dark ages, and we’d all be speaking Chinese and reading scrolls…. Oh wait, you kind of are….Hmmmmm back to the future?
Iron Poppie, Park Slope ironwork detail, anonymous metal worker, circa 1900