draft
work in progress
The hard. solid threads of gold light that separate Francis and Christ remind us that the apparently direct hit of the light from an image --which we read as drawing us into the realm of the observed -- in fact is a goad, keeping us at bay. Giotto represents and exhorts the observer to meditate not only on the Stigmatization, but on all the moments when a divine hand asserts its authority over an observer by impressing an image on the body. According to Giotto and the Pope, God alone chooses the way the image hits, whether by way of the searing, penetrating wounds given to the chosen saint or by way of the superficial impressions, which we now know temporarily burn themselves in reverse into the impulsive, consuming, and rejecting retina of the eye.
In the latter case, even when the visual signal aims right for the vital organs, the hit alone is too soft, the signal too weak to catapult the observer, body and soul, into the projective circuit. Only his thinner, lighter sentiments make it through. In his edified, defeated state, he properly submits himself to the higher authority of those endowed with more permanent, if still incomplete and even erroneous or reversed impressions of the distant, inaccessible, and often apparently arbitrary God. The painter, the story-teller, and the saint, can at best, simply re-impress the reversed, imperfect impress given by the God who holds himself not within, but behind the surface of the visible, encased in the protective shell of the object.
In the year 1300, the object, stealing tricks from its enemy, perspectival reading, had naturalized its own, contained existence. In doing so it appeared to bring to a close the search for a tool of prayer to embed the resistant, but penetrable mind of the observer into the threatening field of conscious, perspectival reading or imitative prayer. In moving toward the tool, Bonaventura and Giotto had both constructed immediate, concrete pictures capable of impressing church dogma on the thoughts and feelings of a child as much as of a knowledgeable student of theology. But the forms of these literary and pictorial aids of prayer do not describe a visible, reproducible figure that embodies, and is determined by, the ideal state of prayer as the contemplative, active, internal and external imitation of Christ.
Giotto, in his counter-tool, breaks the visible figure of the reading circuit apart. The instant of imitation flares up into visibility only after detaching itself from the atmospheric, temporal act of imitative prayer as it diffuses itself in space and traverses time. Bonaventura, by contrast, had already pressed out to the furthest point of the imitative circuit and been forced into retreat. Bonaventura sought not only a window, or figure opening into, but material entry into the uninterrupted circuit of the purified, figural signing of Christ.
That is, as Bonaventura tracks the relative movements of imitator and imitated in time, he also describes how this movement intersects with another form of figural movement -- the pouring of light, legibility and transparency into space. As the imitation progresses and the linguistic sign sucks back down into its source in the sensory index, the figure, expanding in visibility, opens up to receive its own readable history . But when the energy or spirit of naming, retracts into seeing and finally implodes at the material site where naming, seeing, and being fuse in the miraculous explosion of the wounds, Bonaventura, the common, rational, perspectival reader, must shield his eyes against the blinding light and close his ears to the thunderous roar of the never uttered name. Even before Giotto’s overt, polemical attack on the observer who imagines he can spy on the mechanics that creates the magic effect of read presence, Bonaventura had already snuck a peak behind the curtain and had failed to discover a wizard of Oz.
The tool of prayer depends on fully visualizing the contour of the filled-in, closed circuit of perspectival reading and imitation as it passes through and between the relative positions of reader, observer, figure, and distant body, returning back to reader. To close the loop, Bonaventura would have to configure the place where, and the instant when, the read body returns to the reader, as being overlaps with, instead of eclipsing seeing. He would have to be inside of and, at the exact same moment, see before him the shared, infinitesimally thin surface in the continuity of time between absence and presence, where absence and presence read through the sensed index as difference passing into sameness.
A fully materialized object that embodies the whole act of imitative prayer, would out-perspective perspective, for to produce the tool of prayer is to create the impossible and the unimaginable: an non-objective object, sanctioned by orthodoxy, that visibly reads as the sameness of surface and depth, language and sensation, coherence and incoherence, self and other, space and time, God and human. Even in the most sanctified moment of divine presence in the Holy Communion -- when, according to orthodox doctrine, the eucharistic wafer and wine become the actual, rather than merely the symbolic presence of the blood and the body of Christ, the self-signifying sign conceals itself under the visible skin of the mundane objects of wine and wafer. But if a believer were to take Holy Communion on the hypothetical visible surface that closes the imitative circuit, he would be forced to see, to taste, to smell, and to swallow the actual body and blood sacrificed for his redemption.
As if to hammer home the apparent impossibility of this violently confrontational, ontologically impossible hyper-perspective, Giotto ends the imitative process by transfixing the observer at a distance from the object of imitation. Giotto reminds the observer of his perpetual confinement in his own partial blindness, that is, in the limits of his own subjective sense response in which the already known object crowds out the visible presence of the seen, and the visible presence of the seen crowds out the already known object. Perhaps the tool of prayer does exist for one instant for one man, Francis, who spoke of the mysterious, unutterable secret given to him by God during the Stigmatization; but the act of deployment consumes the tool and its form leaving no trace. Like the Dominican friar, Francis, in Bonaventura’s account, is both speaker and spoken to in his own, private, if spied-on spectacle of language-making.
In this case, though, the solution circles back to bite the tail of the problem. For this is the solution to the problem of how to prolong the blue instant into yet more than the hour to which it can expand in a person's mind, how to claim it for a space outside a time in the very eye of the hurricane of time's jurisdiction, a site where there is generative, absolute silence, refusal of sides, perfect liminality, always. A demilitarized zone legal to, and in fact revealing, the laws that rule how forms come to be.
cont. at
confluenza5.blogspot.com
