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FORWARD

The Frame of Reference: A Curios Bond Between Word and Image *

A “Storied” Structure: De-constructing the Metaphor of Language

A WORLD TREE

Now the whole Earth was of One language and of common words…

– Genesis 11:1

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A LEXICAL EDIFICE – or the Ground Work of Being; like a Picture of Space & Time – or just a Riddle Inside of a Rhyme?

AN ENIGMA OF UNITY

The Whole, the Part, and the ONE; as in the “Image” of God

“The world is a system of inseparable differences.” – Alan Watts

“We are One – but we are not the same…” – U2

A COMMON SENSE: PICTURING THE “ALL” OF LANGUAGE

A Hermeneutic Circle

OUR POSITION IN THE WORLD is a lot like the “situation” of a whole unto its part – which in reference to itself – requires some kind of an observer – to tell that there’s a kind of difference. Whereby like a part is to its whole (were it somehow broken down as in to pieces) – as a picture of our current situation – this “position” of ours (now ) would equally be the place in which we find ourselves (at present): Wherefore by the virtue of this “image” (which is the order of its lo-gic) – being where we are – we would someway find this “picture” to be obvious.. Therefore cur-rently speaking – as a picture of the present situation – it would also be the premise from which our story (both) departs – and (so) must finally return.. Whereby ONE could also say (according to such a fundamental end): This is where we are – and that is why we’re here. One might even say (according to the LANGUAGE which we have): Such would be the “telos” at “our moment”.

LIKE THE PARTICLE TO THE WAVE: It is simply because both part and whole are members of the very same unity – that in some fundamental way – they would be also ONE (and the same)… While it is likewise for the moment (being now ) – as chance would someway have it – it appears as if it’s “WE” who bear that testimony. And while to some that’s plain as day, if it also were the premise for our-selves – then the simple fact of its “ALL” would be entirely self-evident – if not overtly obvious… So that by working as a whole – and “being part” (i.e. how our manifested end achieves itself, its so-called “golden mean” per se) – it would be somehow in accordance with the fundamental dictates of such a LOGIC… So that likewise – in the end – in its “characteristic” way (such that it is pictured – by “a wording” – of its language) – such a plain (but) working principal could also equally describe (to us) the picture – that’s “our world”… Which would be also just to say: That it is someway to portray (for us) the elemental nature – of the structure of correspon-dence – which in-turn describes our universe; and in some fundamental logic of its own (which is its LANGUAGE) – that would be the role of “human being”.

One might even say – it’s “common” thread …

Continue on to Chapter 1: “THE SPECTACLE OF THE WORLD”

Depiction of the Wall of Jericho, Farhi Bible c. 1366

* Refer to the short video “The Treachery of Images”

Chapter 6: THE SLANG OF AGES

Ainsoph, this upright One, with that noughty besighed him zeroine… To see in his horrorscup he is mehrkurious than saltz of sulphur.

– James Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake (261.23-26)

PREGNANT WITH A MEANING

“The medium is the message” – Marshall Mcluhan

In his “Le Mystère Des Cathédrales” – Fulcanelli introduces the enigmatic term “Cabala” (to be distinguished & juxtaposed with the Hebrew Kabbalah) as a way to refer to a special category in the use of common language. Derived from the Latin root “caballus” (meaning horse, as with the Spanish word caballo), Cabala (as he describes it, however similar to the ear as the Hebrew Kab-balah) is “an arcane Latin term possessed of rich and vivid history”.. According to his narrative – this Cabala should be regarded as a kind of “horseplay” or Tom foolery; a homo-phonic form of lexical assonance which he calls “a parley or dalliance”, one whose very form or substance could be someway characterized to have a spirited “life of its own”.. Fulcanelli further goes on to write that this so-called horseplay (Cabala) has been known at other times and other places by other names and that together as a whole – they can all be somehow characterized by a certain inclin-ation towards an “oblique” style and free-form play on words. He further assures that the style in which “it speaks” is clearly recognizable – if one has “eyes to see or ears to hear”. And further still – that this Cabala was not only just a spirited play of words, but could be equally character-ized as a special form of cant or argot: A proverbial “slang of ages”. *

As if all roads lead thru Rome Fulcanelli goes on to compare (this) Cabala to (that) Kabbalah by claiming it to be the more universal of the two – placing the former firmly under the rubric of a “phonetic cipher”. And when it is at play – “acting” (on the one hand) as a hermeneutic tool, while performing (as the other) as a common thread of elementary meaning (much in the manner of a Rosetta stone) – it comes to someway “re-present” that essential “thing” which both frames and circumscribes the fundamental unity of every form of language; drawing upon word similarities and semantic assonances (such as homophones, puns, polysemes, and tropes) while employing them as “symbolic tools for expanding the expressive reach of words”. Being much like the free-form style of modern day hip-hop, techniques falling under its rubric have been known at other times (cloaked in legendary guises) through such effervescent titles as the Langue Verte of the Hermetic alchemists, the twilight language of tantric Buddhism, or those fabled winged words of song renown of bards like Homer – or what some might call the language of the birds.

The author further goes on to say that as a hermeneutic tool, the phonetic Cabala is a short-hand way to understand the “gist” of alchemical texts and symbols – and that when combined with the study of word roots (etymology) “it can configure the mind in such a way to have an ev-er deepening and richer set of associations from which to draw, while expanding the semantic space open for contemplation”. He further writes that this broadened expansion of the faculty of language can reverse the “Babel effect” of the confusion of the tongues “by connecting to a level of mind (or of unity ) from which individual languages are but partial projections”.

“Beware of Greeks bearing gifts” – Virgil

NOW RIDDLE THIS:

A Concealment of Concealment

Finally – it is through the logic and example of this “horseplay” (or Tom foolery) that Fulcanelli leans deeply into the storied meme of the Trojan Horse – characterizing the timeless epic tale as a symbol (or the sign) of “a recursive pun which ‘masquerades’ itself as a veiled metaphor”…

Which would also mean to say: That as a thing – as a “token” or the “sign” for the hidden carrier of meaning (i.e. somehow as its object or its icon) – our “polytropic” horse delivers its semantic payload much like the rebus or a palindrome; referring back onto itself in ways which are both oblique as well as obvious… Much as would the notion of an “embedded” concept be some way assonant – to a thing that’s somehow “pregnant” with (a) meaning.

Continue to Chapter 7: DRAGON OF THE ECLIPSE

* “Slang of Ages” – refer to Walter Becker

Chapt 1: The Spectacle of the world

“Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.”

– Max Planck

“… the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth.”

– Niels Bohr

Samsara and nirvana are One.

– Nagarjuna

WE ARE ALL OBSERVERS: Watchers. On-looking participants in the spectacle we call “the world”. In the arena of life’s day to day affair, we pay the world our casual regard – its ubiquitous presence is taken to be a given; habituated as we are to its comings and its goings – our world (in its manifest appearance) is a thing that most of us (most of the time) take for granted… And perhaps this is a part of our nature; that “part” of the way of things which somehow characterizes the way things are.

Breaking The (Classical) Mold

But while complacent we may be (as watchers and lookers-on) – as a “witness” to an omnipresent spectacle, we humans are also creatures of imagination… So riddle this: Within a myriad of images with all its correlated phenomena, looking outward at our world through our window of the eyes – do we simply find what we “appear” to see? Or is it (more) that we see – what we expect to find ..?

Which way does it seem to you?

WHO can say – and the question is more than just rhetorical. When it comes right down to the “chicken or the egg” of it – perhaps it’s because we imagine there to be no “apparent” context in which the two “views” can be teased apart – that when it’s down to what is seen – there would be little to distinguish the one proposition from the other. Like an artful sleight of hand (as if “seamless” or invisible) or the rhyme of a well-timed word bound-up in the rhythm of a tortuous riddle (as if someway we’re “entranced”) – the reflexive question challenges our assumptions by comparing the “vantage” provided by one’s view point to “the situation” of one’s point of view – as if to ask whether (in the end) the two views could ever be “disentangled”.

So much for objectivity… Like being in a kind of Mexican standoff with our “selves”, this curious circumstance of our own perceptual quandary appears to be somehow wired-in to our experience – and therefore seemingly unavoidable… But just like Schrödinger’s elusive cat – however unsettling this may be for us – it is only but the gist of an inexorable dilemma with profound implications for “our human situation”.

Side-stepping for the moment any of its quantum implications (or “uncertainty”), if we take our rhetorical exercise another step further it can all come down to the sim-ple, larger, and more intimately related question of whether an “objective” material world can exist “out there” – independent of ourselves; before we are in the picture to see it. A curious question indeed, but one that few of us ask given all its practical-ities… But regardless of what we may think of it, or however absurd it might appear, and despite all our time spent searching for definitive answers – we will still remain befuddled… Why? Because if we cast as wide a net as possible to ask that broadest of questions: Can the existence of the world be disentangled from the presence of our on-looking selves? – inevitably we will find and must eventually admit – that we cannot escape the “semantics” of our own predicament. Namely – that the existence of a questioner is pre-supposed by “the question” – and that “a who” is out of neces-sity – caught – within the rhetorical frame.

It is as if the querent (our “who” that is in question) – the hypostatized person that’s implied by our subject’s object (or conversely speaking by our object’s subject) – our hypothetical “self” (so to speak) – were somehow at the fulcrum of a peculiar sort of crossroad or rhetorical chiasm; suspended & juxtaposed, or someway superposed at a point midway between mirrored or opposing views (to have someway become “lo-calized”). Looked at systemically or taken as a whole – like an unusual series of twists and turns in an odd sort of maze – in the end – one can not definitively say if it is the world or the mind that perceives it which comes first.*

It’s like the ordinary palindrome, or simply not seeing the forest for the tree… In the arena of life’s day to day affair – “the question of our consciousness” – would appear to be wedded to a habit for complacency.

Continue on to Chapter 2: THE SHOW THAT NEVER ENDS

The Kerykeion

* Refer to the article: Does the universe exist when we’re not looking?

Header image: “Hand with Sphere” by M.C. Esher (Self Portrait)