Dove descending interior old Augustus Lutheran Church Sanctuary, founded by Henry Melchior Muhlenberg, c. 1743 Providence (Trappe) PA, 18 Sept 2012.

09 April 2020

Extras and Revisions


Notes of a  fellow of the Marfa Research Institute
In this underground of the most advanced predictors of human behavior, including interstellar travel as much as exploration of the inner alogical world, we are drawn to the alogical because it represents ourselves in some way and because Orcs represent ourselves in some way. Witness all the means of predicting, divining the future from casting sticks, cards, coins to liver dissection. Anything but live in faith, which requires something more, or less. We look into the Orc because we would look into ourselves even as we deny it and us. So I thought to set down here some of this inner world to go along with the plenteous outer so very rosemaled upon their chests and ours. For this celebrated event, on the first of every year, we gather to explain to all sympathetically minded a society of humanity with no grand design except to know ourselves and our civilizations, which are hardly important since they are artifacts we ourselves made.
Decoration-Oracles, which we call ORCs for short, had begun history much before Egypt. And whether you attribute them as those offspring of the sons of god who went in to the daughters of men, or prefer both to a portmanteau, a baggage of traditionally carried belongings as much as the body itself, this chest containing its valuables of heart and lung, which we should no doubt call the hard drive, in addition to its ambiguity, had a surface aspect of such creature/artifact that it resembled a rosemaled decorated immigrant chest. Yes, it is as if you carried yourself in a bag, or were yourself a bag. This body bag caused all the trouble seeing as it predominated the brain, the will and the soul, all of which societies became the vortex of the innermost principles of the world. And even if none or few were aware of  it that is why New Year's Day is my favorite of all, since there is utter silence exhaustion of the outer forms. As they boast, where there is alcohol there is no cold, nor sleet, nor snow. There'd be snake dancing that night. So fill your gobbets, toast dark night and silent morning! And then take pity on this world where everything grows shorter, day, time, life, memory, tribulation.
Help in cracking the Orc schist must begin not with geology or furniture or psychology, but with fondness for ornamentation that is made evident by examples, so to call those decorations of the body bag as such, as if bag and chest  were furniture of a kind, chest and chest, which demonstrates a simplicity, a slippricity of the whorlicle mode,  an oracle made and not made, interpreted in simple lines and sturdy construction as if made for everyday, whose object of representation were a quiet transparency in which inner reposes in outer corresponding dimensions. There comes a point when the enclosed panels of parrot-like birds with tulips and fuchsias, a color ground of red brown, Amish blue, cypress green is made impossible to represent without overarching sorrow. For how has such been lost, and why? Who knows. Are inner and outer opposed in order to deceive? When the blood rushes into the skin the inner movement is visible. The ventricles of the heart and the inner parts revealed in such  designs as raised unicorns, but  also rampant upon the tulips and lilies, square panel flower sprays in a vase, medallions circled with overlaid six-pointed stars,  pomegranates  and carnations; you get the picture, are much easier to observe  in the outwardly visible, but only if the inner movement is intimated. As though the outward color were the inner's leave taking, and the form was its fugitive hiding place. A hint that raises hair on the neck as if the bridge between inner and outer had been revoked form space.

Flaking Under Flex-There is much debate of this purpose and purposes to nurture society and much effort at finding out it's cause, since the last thing believed is that the sons of god went in to the daughters of men. The ink spioloed over that conundrum has not ceased. Like the blood that runs away from the surface revealed in a sudden pallor, invocations of the notwithstanding, for a long time there was attempt to trace whether the cracks in the finish, a kind of varnish or sheen over the decor, were superficial or deep inside the natural coating.  This always begins with interrogations, inquisitions. Statements taken a hundred times go back and forth,  as  if pacing in a room above us going back and forth and we hear the echo, we hear the sound thereof.

 My Prisoner of Chillon, as you walk back and forth in your by-chamber, what gives rise to these questions but your own nature and every additional accident of thought repeated again just to bring out this one aspect of dispute? If we imagine a chest as a shell or carapace, one worn where the shell flexed with vibration, around the edges near the F-holes, its craquelure steadily advancing between the breasts, we may say right up also into the middle of the back, then we conjure that there the thing came apart where shoulder meets belly, from the back down, as if a sacred script were stamped in the original, beautiful and clear, legible to all. Then in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye is discerned on the breast a piece of armor in the form of a heart, or some such, on which one can read all about it, especially since then the figure draws attention to itself. If you sense some impending calamity, some crack in the cosmos from this, read on. That self knowledge is so dangerous as to draw out in time this memory before memory, like ragpickers and collectors differentiate value from trash.
Some think this is caused by flex of differentials in the dermal layers, that the sealed uncured layer inhibits drying while the outside fully cures, being exposed. When it is held up to the light as though it were a lens, and projects an image of itself onto its exterior, as the outer layer dries faster it shrinks, causing fissures which take years to occur. Is the inner picture too refined to look upon, woven from the delicate too insubstantial to be immediately seen? But once they begin they are unstoppable.  If the surface is flat the crackling looks a lot like tiny linear fractures which refract in moving light, and a very crisp flaking.

So fasten your gaze upon this distraction, and it is a reflection too which must be drawn aside to view that within. These flexes are the oracles themselves, which our civilizations have sought for millennia, sometimes called bone script, to be read or interpreted by the knowing. Thus begins the hazardous conflict which presumes some skill in its greatest enjoyment, that leaves behind these footprints, not only, but the very coracles of wisdom themselves. We train thus to see every day this scale that covers all or part of the Oracle body but not the scalp, which depending upon interpretation of its helmet like crust some call it pigmentation, and may imply a disordering, which has nothing to do with this world. Indeed whether it is disorder or high order, the highest order of the senses is why some thought it monstrous that there should live in that head a lodger who has nothing to do with this world, but lives out a lonely life unknown, but who is certainly the object of our observation, our interest, our passion, to know what we cannot know, to do what we cannot do. We are such creatures ourselves.

Water is air, air water, or earth, or fire, it is all the same in this head that receives telegrams from both sides, the outer and the hidden deep, looking long and attentively to discover whether there is not another face within the faces that it meets. Since the same dissonance occurs in all art until it is better known we should not soon prejudge. To our eyes the classic carapace resembles an adapt with a  helmet and mantle  that displays a sheen, much like that spiritual armor which you shall be permitted to convey. This face inside the face, that looks out the way an immigrant looks toward a new land while remembering the old, these days a maquidore, or as it were a rail splitter who understands what it is. We shall need a special eye to see it, painstaking, persistent, compelling, to probe inward, and benevolent too. Do not fail benevolence in your candor. For in the deep this makes breathing easier. What it is we seek, they seek, but in the present instant and past it into the moment we turn the corner and disappear. Whatever the case, we feel safe to take the thing as a being an earthy subject of phenomena we know as heart and light, for it has a heart and in this sense it must be sensitive to light. So it is possible to find those with exteriors as firm as rock, but who have spolt their safeguards to pass the hidden curiosity, discontent with the external and the superficial, who search the heart and the hidden, to know the invisible image.

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