RUDIMENTS, pt. 671
(the stuff that ruined our world) - pt.2
The entire idea of what caught
me up in all this had to do with
'Art' producing vision. Or perhaps
Vision producing Art. As in, yes,
Hidlegard of Bingen, who made
picture books - but pictures
of fantastic voyages people
had not yet seen, and things
that purported to help them
in envisioning Revelation;
which was, remember, quite
startling and unheard of before.
A certain clarity of understanding,
called as 'intelligentie claritate
percepta' brought forth the ideas
which only later were picked up
by cathedrals and grand churches
with their large stained glass
and gigantic rose windows. The
poet Rilke once said 'every angel
is terrifying.' Just imagine.
-
Scenes from Revelation became
a new visual vocabulary - the
'viewer' knew what was meant.
It became an unspoken world,
one into which people suddenly
found themselves communicating;
church lingo, the errant nods and
shortcuts of doctrine. Each person
still feared Death and finality as it
stalked, but now they had images.
In that respect - and easy to transfer
to my own world - the NY streets
and my own pictures of my own
fantastic thoughts commingled,
so as, if for nothing else, to get
me by. (My problem was, at that
late date and stage, there was no
impending Second Coming. All
that excitement was pretty much
gone). Gog and Magog may have
been somewhere all around me -
rats in the sewers; grime in the
subways; the people, dying, in
parks and gutters; but I never
really saw them. I was living,
aloof to all that. I watched the
jazz guys sweat - they would
sweat a lot, and I'd think of
the old bluesmen and field hands
playing their strings and fiddles.
They too sweated, hard and harsh
under the cotton-field master's
gaze and lash. I knew New York
as - in my mind - a slave state.
Slaves and field hands crying
out their souls.
-
Hildegard made claims NOT to
any drawing ability or imagination
of her own, BUT a 'fiery light of
exceeding brilliance,' which brought
her scenes, 'permeating my whole
brain and inflaming my whole heart
and my whole breast.' Whew!
Pretty torrid stuff. (Her rapturous
experiences, as reported, had the
late neurologist Oliver Sacks
saying that her visions must have
derived from the auras and visual
scotomata of migraine headaches').
But he did say no matter how banal
or meaningless to the majority of
people this can seem, it can become,
in a privileged consciousness, the
'substrate of a supreme ecstatic
inspiration.' So it was with her.
-
None of this may make much sense
to you, but you have to understand
how I think : I was able to convert
my presence into an equivalent,
medieval monasticism which
accepted all these things as both
significant and (quite) real. My
answer to the world was to deny
that world the reality it so screamed
about, and Hildegard's metaphorical
terrors worked just right. She did
all this - by the way - in a culture
which, way back then, denigrated
women. They were prohibited
from priestly roles, and they were
discouraged from preaching and
counseling. There was, as well,
the old bane of the medieval
fascination with, and fear of, the
'dangerous' powers of the female
body - virginity as independence
from patriarchy. 'Group them
together, and put them away' as
it then went. 'Get thee to a nunnery,'
indeed, they said. In all of my own
respects, I was monastic; I lived a
monastic, fearful life. I walked
close to buildings, staying in,
towards the walls, so as not to
intermingle. I remained, as I said,
aloof and afar. Solitary. John of
Patmos was told 'Write what you
see,' and he wrote Revelation.
In Hildegard's own words, the
way it occurred to her was, 'gazing
with great fear and trembling, at
a heavenly vision, when a great
splendor resounded a voice
from Heaven, saying, 'Say and
write what you see and hear.''
Prophecy was a textural
production. Curiously, what
her 'visions' were broken into
were spatial/temporal imaginings,
of a sort of non-artistic working.
Broken space fields, elaborate
scenes interconnected and with
human and divine beings inter-
acting and transforming across
space and time.
-
Hildegard was imaginative in
ways that her contemporary,
Joachim of Fiore, was not, at
all. Joachim, dealing with the
same material - Revelation
and all those scenes and bloodied
canopies of fever'd-transcription -
took a linear, sequential, almost
mechanically anal, approach to
the same material - grids, the
horizontal sequences of time/event,
the design attitudes of script
integrated within the flow of
decorative and letter design. It
was very strange how they
juxtaposed these things, yet
remained unaware of each
other. His picture thinking bore
no resemblance to that of
Hildegard. Perhaps (flipping
time backwards again) it was
more akin to William Blake,
but even that doesn't truly
hold up. The way it all 'appeared'
(ha) to me was that Hildegard,
at the year 1120 or so, had
advanced 'abstract' art by her
visual context; while Joachim,
running with the same material,
proclaimed a stark, dense,
'art' more dependent on the
logical aspects of the mind -
line-directions, follow this to
that, sort of art : what I used
to call 'Tree On a Bridge' art.
He advanced 'traditional' art;
that of straight-through and
diagrammatical thinking. In
my opinion? The stuff the
ruined our world.
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