HERESIES – NIGHT OF ART (ART AS NIGHT)

"I have seen the dogs of wind tearing at the cliffs
The heavy linen rolling in my throat
(but I have lived in this porous house)
I have seen the wind hollow out the girders at six o'clock
the earth wandering in its tombs of space
There was a cemetery of nettles
the heavy proofs of wind assembled around the stones
I have seen the day crack
I have lived the site's days of division."
--Yves Bonnefoy, "Le Coeur-espace" [1945]*

[…]

I.

From Caravaggio to Velazquez, to Goya (the black paintings), Art as Night, the (divine) Imaginary reasserts itself, always in the Present-Present (time out of time, time inside time, time as abode/dwelling of/for Truth Itself …) … Counter-Reformation non-sense aside, if you will/wish, but a plunge (dive), anyway (any time) into Interiority, beyond appearances/things, to the source (Night/the imaginary Night), into the shadowy-dark ‘light’ of cognitive space/time, contra the bereft illusionism of Modernity, viz., the Enlightenment and its quest/travails for/towards idealizations without End/Redemption and speculation (the specular doubling of all things) without Revelation/The End in sight (…) …

II.

Manfredo Tafuri/Giulio Romano entwined (as emblem/cipher) in the erotogenic space of not-time/not-space … After broken metonymies fly home on broken, tattered wings, through aether (mind) -- through the dialectic straits (dire and foreboding), against teleological time, currents, quests, utopian visions unraveling (eschatological irruptions and ruins …) … After insurrections Left and Right, mid-stream, downstream, rarely Upstream … Post-rational, post-modern, post-post-Romantic platitudes notwithstanding, ‘here’ (‘thus’) arrives the Lost, the Forlorn, the Anti-thesis (the Antidote) -- cause and caustic corrective (criticism within criticism, Poetry within prose, Art within art …) … ‘Here’ (no-where), then, coordinates without coordinates, stars without light (origin), Night without purpose, metaphors and metonyms (death sentences), heresies, against the prosaic/prison-houses of Spirit (‘X’) …

Thus, too, and thus-wise, such cannot but help/restore Kant -- placing the still centre (revolving void) of Subjectivity at the heart of worlds (unfolding and/or unraveling …) … Such predicates as haunt language collapse at the nexus (‘X’), unproveable, yet undeniable -- the Night within night, Art within art, and self-knowledge (illumination) within darkness (knowing without knowing) …

The Night rises where the forest closes … The spectral day unfolds itself (close upon itself) into the wine-dark sea(s), the poetic calamity of illumination in darkness (thought as vision) -- closing aeons in an instant, bringing life (back) to Life (foreclosing Resurrection and Redemption) …

GK (DRAFT 01/17/07)

*Bonnefoy, Le Coeur-espace 1945, 1961 (Tours: Farrago, 2001), p. 12; trans. Kevin Hart, in The Dark Gaze: Maurice Blanchot and the Sacred (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 258 …

Online version - http://www.geocities.com/ateliermp/heresies.rtf
Additional reading - http://www.geocities.com/ateliermp/philosophy_aesthetics.html
Nightfall - http://www.geocities.com/ateliermp/nightfall.html

SMALL BIBLIOGRAPHY

Nicola Spinosa, et alia, Caravaggio: The Final Years (Napoli: Electa, 2005)
Nicola Spinosa, Ribera: L’opera completa (Napoli: Electa, 2006)
Juan José Junquera, The Black Paintings of Goya (London: Scala, 2003)
Dawson W. Carr, et alia, Velázquez (London: National Gallery of Art, 2006)
Suzanne L. Stratton-Pruitt (ed.), Velázquez’s 'Las Meninas' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)
Victor I. Stoichita, Visionary Experience in the Golden Age of Spanish Art (London: Reaktion, 1997)
___________, The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern Meta-Painting, trans. Anne-Marie Glasheen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)

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