"Call the roller of big cigars ..." Skippy screams out over the void. Then he wakes up and he's still in Paris and in a puddle of clothes on Pooler's floor. Adriane is coiled around someone in Pooler's bed and Skippy is hoping that's Pooler but very little from the night before is percolating. There is a Still Life hanging on the wall over the bed and suddenly it all comes back. Pooler had been arguing about the Romans and whether or not you should include their murals of grapes, figs, wine, fish, goblets etc in the Genre: Still Life. I was inclined to puff up the category but Pooler kept touching on the oldest Bugaboo in Art Theory: Intentions. What was the artist thinking when he created the work? Jesus, I told Pooler, if you based reality on Intentions then god himself would have a lot of explaining to do. Artists are unconscious oafs for the most part & have no idea what they're doing until it's done. And even then they can't really put it into words . . . It was Xmas, I think, or maybe the day before or after. Adriane liked to drink and we figured it was rude to let her drink alone. So a week of days got folded into a very blurry chunk. I had my own hotel but I kept passing out in Pooler's studio on the Quai des Grands Augustins. Most of what I remember is that Pooler talked Adriane into our plan.
We needed a human skull and 2 long-bones. They needed to be old - 400 years or so. Lucky for us this was Paris and the City owned millions of skulls & at least a billion bones. Dream cities are always Nightmare cities when the dreams decay. Paris has golden facades and rats the size of anteaters. The wine is great but there's feces in the waters and rivers. Churches everywhere - all empty. But at least when god left Paris he left the lights on - and that's probably the Frenchist of things: Light and Shadow.
Click the butterfly 3 times and get sucked in.
The Frogs and their dichotomies: Shadow and Light, Yin & Yang, the Raw and the Cooked. Skippy rolls over on the cold French floor and goes back to hating Claude Lévi-Strauss. That fucker studied Myth like a Jeweller. Every culture produces myths with the same underlying structures, he said. Narratives were not free underneath, but instead were hewn to kinds of Order which the mind already possessed at "a level at which a kind of necessity becomes apparent, underlying the illusions of liberty." The gods were formed from the same Orders which formed Table Manners, both preordained by Semiotic logic.
It was the Spring Festival of Equal Nights and the team was gathered for fresh squooze, buckets of spuds, and bible-study. Skippy brought Jelly Rolls & Homo Fabrikeur was bundled and assembled for the Scarf Mission. Homo Fabrikeur is the Antitype to the Type Homo Faber. In Typology a Type is a “concealed form” which is only suggestive & implied, while its Antitype is the subsequent “revealed form” of the previous Type. The Bible is written in the Rhetoric of Typology so that what is “concealed” in the Old Testament is subsequently, and like the Equinox, inevitably, “revealed” in the New Testament. Homo Faber [man the maker] first transformed “nature” by conquering fire - the sine qua non of the development of all future tools.
Click 14 & Meet the Marshall
He took the spirit from the elements and invested them in his tools. Homo Faber imprisoned the rest of the spirit left in matter by changing matter to his will. Homo Fabrikeur, by ReSpiking the Land - an Antitype of St. Michael the Archangel Spiking Satan to the earth - frees trapped spirit and empties it out back into the Site, into the elements from which it was taken: earth, water, fire, and air. Typology, like its child History, is never done. Every Antitype becomes the Type of the next orbit. Equinox is a good day for a mission on the 45th Parallel - it’s halfway between everything.
So it is important to emphasize that this is not blasphemy or a pile of beer-cans on the beach. We are not mocking Jesus or his Church. We are not Anti-Christian. Typology is a form of Rhetoric; it is a way of investigating propositions about the world and man’s relation to the world. Systems of Typology postulate ‘Truths’ which are continually coming into being because the Universe is not done; it’s not finished. Mythology is a bridge which connects the Universal to the Local. A myth is composed of two tensive threads, like the Scarf above, one connects it to its Type which is a more global and universal expression of the meaning-content of the myth. The other thread of the myth connects it to the local nexus where ‘living myth’ must find a local expression of this meaning-content. The first thread is taut; it’s tight. No massive movement is allowed which would pull the myth off its center. The second thread is much more tensive; it’s loose. This is the ‘Discursive’ thread of the myth, the thread which allows the myth to stretch and cover ‘local’ necessities. When the Discursive thread is ratcheted up too tight by dogma, by doctrine, by fascist tendencies, then the conditions are ripe for Heresy. The Discursive thread produces Antitypes, local expressions in time & space of a universal meaning. Kenny La Roche is just another Antitype of the Type which Aldous Huxley called “The Perennial Philosophy.” It’s a new bloom from an old root.
In the 14th century treatise on Alchemy, Summa Perfectionis, is written: “what Nature cannot perfect in a vast space of time we can achieve in a short space of time by our Art.” Men with such ‘art’ are fascists by ‘nature.’
Paris is largely a Gated-Community. The tourists love the broad Avenues, having no idea that Hausmann planned those grand Boulevards so that the Army could seize the streets quickly during those cyclical times of Revolution & Insurrection. Hausmann rebuilt Paris from a Military Perspective and a Modern one at that. City Walls no longer kept the Armies out. The Modern City, Hausmann knew, had to be designed around efficient Media for channeling armies both thru the city and into the city when the enemy already lived in the cities. Fuckin' unwashed hordes. If you believe - the way Skippy and Roland Barthes do - that a City is a Text whose composition is fraught with Meaning, then you can learn how to Read that Text and understand what our Public Spaces are really saying about their Sitz im leben and about the Zeitgeist which molded them. Gates are Binary. They are perfect Lévi-Straussian Oppositions. They can keep you out or let you in. They Sign. They Signify. They are loud-mouth Semiotic pricks and you can't shut them up. Every Passerby is assaulted with their Signified - their Message. Pooler and I and Adriane certainly were. We were cognitively bruised by this Civic bully which fronts the Palais de Justice on the Île de la Cité. Fuckin' Gate looks like a New Jersey Pimp. Doric columns, balustrade, triumphal wreaths, Royal cartouches, filigree & wrought-iron pomp. All dipped in Gold. Pooler pointed out the line of Swastikas and for a moment we actually questioned whether or not the French were conscious of those Icons from their Nazi past. But then we laughed. As if they ever forgot. Fascism gets in the Soul and when it does it spins out transforms of itself - especially in Architecture which is the oldest and most public of Monkey Art Forms. Paleolithic paintings are older, but they were executed in dark caves and never meant for the hordes to see. It's only when the Monkey starts building, starts stacking his shit up, that Art aims itself at the people and not the gods. Architecture is pure Propaganda. It's meant to be seen. When a civilization designs a Gate like this it can't shut itself up. Like the severed heads of all those Frog saints, it babbles on an on about beliefs & fears which are louder and deeper than Death itself. Adriane is Frog-Marxist to her pretty little core. She said that the Palais Gate always made her shiver and then angry. On this site the French Guillotine lopped the heads off thousands of Nobles. Now their heads live in the Gate and keep calling for their Cake. They say the Head of John the Baptist shouted two words as it bounced before the prophet died and it shut up.
Claude Lévi-Strauss. defined Structuralism as "the search for unsuspected harmonies across cultures." He believed that in all cultures the purpose of Myth was to provide a Meaningful Model which could overcome contradictions. Life continues, but then it dies. So the Myth gives us an Afterlife where Life can go on. Rain gives us Corn but the rains haven't come. Dance, you drunk fuckin' pagan!
Click 7 to check your Xenophobia
God turns out to be the Necessary Medium between contradictions. Why else would he have ordered our Monkey Minds around Binary Opposites? And then given us the Means to make Myth to Merge those Oppositions in one New Model after another? Well, maybe she was drunk.
"Unsuspected harmonies ..."Claude Lévi-Strauss died on a cool November day in 2009. He was 100 years old. Like his predecessor, the Sociologist Émile Durkheim, he had spent a lifetime exposing the unconscious structures which both ordered and defined Monkey Social Systems. But unlike Durkheim, Lévi-Strauss believed that "it is not the social phenomenon that shapes the cultural and intellectual phenomenon, but vice-versa - it is rather the intellectual categories that take part in shaping the social reality." Claude spent a Century trying to show how it is the "Spiritual" which held precedence over the "Physical." The Monkey Mind organized the "corporeal and social" and did it Systematically. The System ran on Binary Oppositions. The Raw and the Cooked. The Fresh and the Decayed. The Moistened and the Burned. Ouzi Elyada - another Communications Professor - gives us this overview of Lévi-Strauss's basic theory: We do not measure and understand our world as passive observers. Gnosis about the "real world" is not discovered "in a pure empirical manner." By our observations we take an active part in constructing reality. We bring to the world certain biases and predispositions. We see the world thru a "conceptual skeleton" complete with categories. Trés Kantian, for sure. What knowledge we get out of the world is the result of a collision between "the researcher's cognitive classification structure and the observed phenomenal world." Claude believed that the world existed without us and that it was real and that it had both a structure and an organization. But, he said, the Monkey cannot access this reality or comprehend it without the "mediation" of the Monkey's Cognitive Structure. So it's the Monkey's "intellectual thought pattern which endeavors to put the world in order via a procedure of observation and classification." And it is that Classifying Capacity which he found to be Universal in Man. The Savage Mind thinks like the Modern Mind, he said, but with a crucial difference. "Scientific thought deconstructs reality, however, the savage mind is holistic; it seeks ways to understand all types of nature, and contains fields which science deems nonresearchable, fields pertaining to faith, magic, imagination, and subjective experience. To this end, the savage mind employs the existent. It is a type of BRICOLAGE, improvisations based on available materials and tools." The Savage Mind organizes and analyzes thru Myth. Its tools are Allegory & Analogy, Typology & Juxtaposition. The Modern Monkey organizes thru Observations, Measurements, Experiments, and Theories. Mystery loves mud.
The Roman concept of Xenia paintings presuppose Lévi-Strauss by 2,000 years & nicely illustrate his theory. They too are based on the Binary Oppositions between the Raw and the Cooked. Between Nature & Culture. Claude called this type of thinking: "The Logic of the Concrete" for the way it could lead from Natural Categories to Cultural Categories, from the Concrete to the Abstract. Look at Genesis and its Binary structures: Darkness separates from Light. Heavens separate from the Air. Earth is divided into 2: Land & Water. Water divides into Sea Water & Rain. Sea Water is Bad - Rain is Good. Thus a Concrete category Water yields an Abstract category: Maleficent - Beneficent. Kind of like how Chinese forms Abstractions from Concrete Ideograms: the glyph for a Tree is a Tree. The glyph for a Forest is 2 Trees. The glyph for Dense is 3 Trees. The Logic of the Concrete.
But wait! It's not that fucking simple. Not that much of the world - of Reality - can be carried by Binary Categories alone. Conceptual Categories - like Man & God - often contain not only the Polar Elements but also "anomalous categories" which lie between the Poles. So the category Man-God easily slips into: Man - Angel - God, where the "Mediating" element shares traits with the Poles but is something distinct between them. As Elyada says: "The Anomalous Categories are typified by a surplus of Meaning; they are more intricate and posses a higher Semiotic power." Oh oh oh. Demons are coming! These pesky fuckers challenge our Binary conceptions of reality and their Meanings. So they must be resolved. "Every culture tries to control these categories by defining them as 'Taboo' or `Sacred' categories." Mythopoesis follows. "At times, the anomalous category functions as a link between two poles perceived as scary and dangerous: thus, for example, the figure of Christ is an anomalous category of Sanctiy, linking the earthly and the heavenly, just as the figure of the vampire links the living with the dead." Nature is transformed into Culture thru Mediation & Myth - thru Cooking. Myths have Rules, and as Marshall McLuhan has shown, so does Mediation. Both follow this dictum: There is no Text without Context. Monkeys draw Meaning thru their Innenwelt - their inherited and socially constructed filters which Nature has Evolved into their 3 pound Brains. Nature puts it in there thru its Umwelt - those parts of the Environment which Monkeys need to master & manipulate to survive. The Mediation between them - between Umwelt and Innenwelt, between Nature and the Mind - is handled by Symbol Systems. Like Language & Art as they ooze thru Emotion. The Romans painted murals which illustrated Food in 2 Categories: Given by Nature as a Gift, and Wrested from Nature as Work. These they linked to the concepts of Host and Guest. These they linked to Social Responsibilities. These they linked to ...
Click on the E8 Lie Group button to the right to follow Spinoza & his Deus Sive Natura. Click on the Pan button to the left to wallow in Paganism. Click on This to get to Page 13: The Mechanical Bride.