Driven by a Bright Clarity

*…and, when we call him a maker of images,*he will ask us what we call an image. Plato, The Sophist, 239-d*Paint in order to understand.**Understand in order to paint.*Anselm Kiefer, 2005

Lead me to a world that begins where language ends to the beauty of the rose that teaches the nightingale to singthe Palace of Presence that changes appearance from the mind’s haze of terminals to the spiral destiny of sighs so deep to round me right equally of stone or thunder’s shot when the evening threshold rises to supply all insufficiencies.Drop me off in the courtyard of knowledge that I may be tutored in Intimacy by the partless airwhere image matches elation at the highest gratuity and darkness falls back on itself at the end of the yearThe Night’s aura sketched by angels upon the eyelidsno less vital and effective than the Lords of All Things Earthly.Imagination nourished and educated. With reverence, respect, and awareness enhanced rather than detracted from mystical insights. At the cost of scatteredness, even if occasionally treating conceived worlds as if they were the products of dreams, it paves the way for an epistemological shift from static viewing to revelatory vision where every beauty reflects some quality of soul.Imagination and memory play an active role in the apprehension of significance and meaning. Not to be mimicked but in-rolled and howled out. An arbitrary force of larger patterns on the sleepless dreamer that comes and goes all too sudden like summer’s day rain, its desuetude mottling many a sky.In the retort of reflectiveness elements of experienced realityconnections between discreet events practice and self-recognitioncosmological-ontological questions about the human conditioninflames a new perplexity the return of which is hungrily given in this beggar’s realm with the hiss of high passionsto catch the voice as the heart bones break burn or return to this world in sweeping strokes split brush or rag rolling in paint and water dark. From the crack of my eye the Face of thingsout of the expansive well-source of configurations a crotch of squawking crows flapping before dawn blaze like an underlip when seen against the sunrim and end point that yearns to be known giddies the soul and slowly grows warm.The Visible World. All-comprehensiveness allowing for the existence of the conceivable. A new preparedness minds our former lives all share. Self-unfolding modalities combinations modes of displayrebalancing and renewalAll Naming.Between sensuous finitudes infinite meta-valueseeds at zero Greeks’ aisthesis [“aesthetics”]that also means “breathing” Spirit and cosmic body perfection blown by winds of grace no thinking, final cause, resolution no conscious intention, explanation just vision… … lifting corners of the veil. Everything disclosed fading time shattering light resembling without resembling currents boundless and beyond trembling foundationalalive. Alternating emptiness and fullness in a kiss-proof worldencounters and transformations door-swinging reveriesbrushes, crayons, sticks applying paint and scraping it off advancing for as long as forever ishilarity and horror that lie in us too deep to utterAll light is one but a thousandfold colorthe live heart on a diamond grinding at the sky’s edgewith the pursuit of pure sight suddenly shudders.The “mirror” guarantees the objectivity of the images and the phenomena which inspires them. A mystical catoptric according to the capacity to apprehend. An authentic speculation that reflects back onto the artist. Bearing in mind “speculation” in its etymological origin is “mirror.” The intelligence of such reflecting in its functioning which reflects as it reveals. *The mirror that is the inner being and the place and form which it takes.*Traces a reality which transcends both plane of sense and plane of thought. Represents the most subtle, inward, and essential. The aesthetic, ethical, intellectual, and spiritual making of the invisible world visible. An “as if” seeing that occurs though imagination. “Imagination” meaning not simply imaginary or unreal, but the creative act and perceptual faculty that clothes pure meanings or ideas. Spiritual realities in sensory forms. Meanings in workable shapes and colors. Responsible for authentic visions and their interpretations, the supra-sensible reality of knowledge. *Mysteries singing live.*The imaginal world (mundus imaginalis) that is between the world of matter and spirit, visible forms and intelligible meanings. Where the studio is a bridge and a place to imagine and be imagined. The interworld standing between two other realities and defined in terms of both. A vast meadow morning where the descent of meaning lives in the symbolism of language, ready to be received. The inner perceptible reality in contradistinction to outer appearance. Wakeful to the “dream-vision” of our ever-remaining that grants us credence, its “imaginization”. The framing of “knowing” as Ibn Arabi (1165-1240 ) “the Great Sheik” writes, *You yourself are an imagination.*Creative doings back to their origins. Understanding by recognizing aspects of existence and appearance, not just the basic elements of art making. Back to their archetypes that make working metaphysically transparent. Perceiving something larger: the nondual unity that is immanent in the forms created. Foreign to reason intuiting the intermediary reality standing between spirit and body. Intrinsically ambiguous and multivalent it opens as a flower of unknown essence.Without Presence our natural monochrome life is vapid and meaningless. Instead of moving everything in the cosmos - from the wing that unfurls in our vertebrae to birds of new intoxication – it is all the soul we can evoke. Shaped by revelation, not by the identity of the artist. Bringing out opaque aspects that veil the transparent or reflective, while integrating and changing the blood. The mind follows later, in the wake. Multiple perspectivespearls of meaning-remembrance across time-space reception-recognition the farther one travels inwards. Active Imagination sublimates and condenses, spiritualizes and embodies. Neither completely of mind nor of matter. Not the slave of the calculative faculty but the organ of intense visionary perception. The “location” where gnosis or supreme state occurs as intellectus sanctus. An indwelling fraught and sublime that sees as central its dominant place in experienced reality. In order for metaphysical, anthropological, psychological, aesthetic or other teachings to pass from the theoretical level to that of events of visual revelation, all data of sense-perception and abstract intelligibility must be apprehended. The process of eclipsing the apparent vision so the hidden may appeara way of seeing Paracelsus (1493-1541, Swiss physician, alchemist, lay theologian, and philosopher of the German Renaissance) called *astronomia caelestis…**…the astronomy that looks for signs in the Inner Sky.*A perspectivism in which the ground of everything, in whatever mode, may be found. The knowledge of something bound to the interpretative distances when observed. True understanding demands poetic madness to encompass the epistemic realm of aesthetic experience.Structured by an invisible geometry conducive to indefinite plenitude.An art of the Infinite where we are an image among imagesdriven by a bright clarity.