Right before I left Holland we were in the Wildeman drinking a draft called `Moeder Overste’ - Mother Superior - dark, bitter, with a lot of bite. Pooler was riffing off the bruine kroeg - the smoky brown - and he was doing Spengler and color values as physiognomy. “Atelierbraun, Skippy. Studio Brown - that’s how you know when it’s over.” Ozzy knew that color was a psychodimension with spiritual ambiance. Art to Spengler was pure message, pure code, a pure squint into the soul of the times. Spengler, as a Menschenkenner, saw color like this: Blue/Green were the colors of the heavens and the seas as well as the fruitful plain. As green falls away to blue it draws the viewer out. As a time they show the shadow of the southern noon. They approach evening. They are, in landscape, remote mountains. Blue/green are atmospheric, not substantial. They are cold, disembodied, expansive, distant, boundless. As actions they create space. In music they are the basso-continuo. Aerial. Unillumined. Unactual. They pull us out into the remote. Transcendent. Boldly spiritual. Non-sensuous. They are background. Aloof. Faustian. Monotheistic. They speak of “loneliness and care, the present as related to the past, and a future of destiny as the dispensation governing the universe from within.” Blue and green were Catholic colors which passed for destiny.

Red and Yellow were pure Pagan. They are noisy colors filled with social life. Greek colors of the agora. The colors of holidays and social life. Warm. Linear as opposed to Aerial. They press in on us. They are material, actual, the near. They are also sexual, full-blooded, magnetic. They are popular colors of the crowd and children and of women and savages. They are Apollinian, Euclidean, polytheistic. They are the foreground of the spirit.

Gold is not a “nature color” - it does not appear in the rainbow. It’s unearthly. It’s a Magian background and thus outside of nature. Gold says: God. It’s a “raised” color. It makes the eye slide off surfaces and substance. It dematerializes. It’s a metallic gleam. Gold speaks of Alchemy, Kabbala, the Philosopher’s Stone, Holy Scripture, the Arabesque. It announces the presence of the divine spirit.
"Rembrandt turned brown into a Sacrament."
Yes he did, Skippy. He lived a few doors down from the Spinozas in Mokum A. Rembrandt chose to live in a Jewish Hood because Jews - when you let them be themselves - were both startlingly different, and startlingly the same. The 2 Jewish Hoods in the time of Spinoza and his neighbor Rembrandt were colorful and the artist used both the Jews and their Hoods over and over in his paintings. This is his portrait of a local Rabbi and Skippy is giving odds that it's Rabbi Morteira because Skippy's image of the Kabbalist Rabbi Aboab has been filtered thru his Romantik haze and he sees Aboab as eternally younger and with a wild hairy halo-like penumbra like Dylan on the streets of New York.
Then inevitably - which is what Spengler is all about - came Atelierbraun. Studio Brown - which gradually in the West subdued all other colors and which began its reign with the last years of the 16th century. This is the color which “carries the battle of Space against Matter to a decisive close.” Brown dissolves the “tangible presences of the sense-world . . . into ethereal semblances. Its discovery marks the zenith of the Western Style.” Studio Brown is Protestant and speaks of Lear and Macbeth. It strips nature of its substance. It’s the portal into the Nigredo. A pure brown light is outside the possibilities of nature. Ozzy finds in brown “almost a religious profession of faith.” As a color it possesses the meaning of life. It is nostalgia for what has been lost, a memorial for what is gone - the Soul. Rembrandt turned brown into a sacrament. He saw in it the “twilight of the high-vaulted Gothic nave.” Brown is the music that Beethoven wrote for strings - while the woodwind called up illumined distances, the brass - which assaulted you with their nearness and substance - were associated with Red/Yellow. You could hear Blue/Green in the Neapolitan bel canto, in Couperin, in Mozart and Hayden. But the Brown you heard in the strings of Handel and Beethoven. As Spengler wrote: “The tone of an old fiddle is entirely bodiless.” Brown yearns for something missing. It’s Romantic. Brown is the color of the dispossessed soul. It’s right before Black so it’s the end of the matter.

Physiognomy is the art of judging character from facial features. It’s also a form of divination based on a reading of the Signs - all the features of the world which surf its surface, its face. Physiognomy is a way to reveal the character of abstract entities. It’s Spengler’s favorite word. And Kenny’s. Pooler, who has the largest talent for language in Kenny’s crew, laid the word out like this: Physio is from a Greek word for face. Gnomy is from the Greek word gnomon which means judge or interpreter. A gnomon is a stick or a pillar which you set in the earth so that it will cast a shadow and you can `judge’ or `interpret’ time. All those Greek and English words come from the Indo-European root gno which means to know. The root gno gives us words like Gnosis and Narrate, Normal and Nobel. Kenny took his and our name from that root but in the place he took it from it didn’t mean to know but to name. There’s a German form of gno which became a Causative Verb kannjan which means to make known. When that form moved into Old English with the Saxon invaders it reappeared as kenna which had shifted its primary meaning or interpretation to a secondary interpretation thru a linguistic process called “formal poetic metaphor” - which means that the Necker Cube pops and another, slightly different, yet entirely possible and plausible cube takes its place in our reality. Kenna - now in its English dimension - meant to name. Ken and Kenny come from this source. We have linguistic licence to be totally mad nomenclators.
This is a portrait of Baruch Spinoza but it's not a Rembrandt. All of Holland had fallen in love with Art in their time. Everybody painted. Everybody posed. Amsterdam was the capital city in a country which had suddenly become the richest Mercantile empire on earth. It was as if everyone suddenly wanted a record of god's gifts to the Dutch - so they painted everything. Every canal, every house, every bunch of flowers, or Natura Morta of half-eaten fruit, every table groaning with their produce. "I'm Rich Biotch!" is Dave Chappelle's signature Sign-Off. Mokum Aleph knew the truth of that sentiment deeply. Roland Barthes - who once summed up everything worth knowing in 2 sentences: Nothing is Natural. Everything is Discourse - found the rosy fat cheeks of the Dutch in their Portraits to be the Signature of the Zeitgeist. God loves Me - and I'm the Proof.
"I'm Rich Biotch!"
Spengler said: “All modes of comprehending the world may, in the last analysis be described as Morphology. The Morphology of the Mechanical and the Extended, a science which discovers and orders nature-laws and causal relations, is called Systematic. The Morphology of the Organic, of History and Life and all that bears the sign of Direction and Destiny, is call Physiognomic.” So the Morphology of the Organic is the “Way of the Arrow,” the Chosen Arrow.
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