{"title":"Geometric versus Meat-Ineffable (1994)","authors":"Stan Brakhage","doi":"10.2307/25304803","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"From \"time...en dit\" There are two pictorial extremes of human thought process--The Geometric and (what I like to call) Meat-ineffable...no \"the\" before \"Meat\"--inasmuch as raw cells are such a diversity of impulse as to defy hierarchy. To be sure, it is such diversity-of-cells' electrical arcing which hatches The Geometric also, but it does so in spite of the originating cell structure irregularities--as an act-of-spark, I'd guess, or rather in organized emulation of the energies of their synapse process...as an Ideal, so to speak, of the \"straight\" energetic snap-line between two cells, the triangle between three, square four, soforth on up the scale of \"hedrons\" until a \"circle\" can be inferred. It is all (i.e. Geometrical Thought) inferred, inasmuch as meat energies move in waves, as pulse: but the inference is intrinsic to Humans, existing only in Nature where Humans are-as anyone knows who has flown over wilderness and then, from an airplane window, spotted the beginning of Farm or Town. The so-called geometrics of the bee-hive, or of the flies' eyes, are (upon closer inspection) mere approximates of such as the Human Mind imagines--and then \"reads into\" the microcosms of Nature--as are the idealized circles of suns, the rectangles of rock formation, or those fractured symmetries of the Crystalline so prized by humans, all approximations of The Geometrical Mind (including Towns and Farms) which when presented to human sensibility are prized simply because the imaging of them (through the viscous meaty orbs of human receptivity) is more easily absorbed as corollary of a mental ideal than, say, the ordinarily overwhelming multiplicity of most of Nature's irregularly globular and disjunctly fretted entanglementof-curves impinging (via radiant waves) upon the senses. The Human Mind has fashioned its Ideal in despite and despising of its self's pulp of animal being-an ordering at the expense of cell's self...a bureaucracy of...a veritable facism of...sense's sense of self. Language is but an offspring of this mode-of-thought, for all words are but signs evolved from, and implicit in, the geometries of thinking. Contrarily, and as an antidote to the rigidities of The Geometric, Meat-ineffable is that steady inclination of the brain to mimeticize its intrinsically variable shapes as visible manifestations resistant to either name or category but true (in its variability, to begin with) to the very organic mode (as distinct from process) of its own existence. Whether there are, or are not, straight lines in Nature is beside the point: we are too viscous to receive them as such...thus they must, if that IS The Ideal, be invented by thought. Words are, at scratch, but a glyphic extension of Geometric thought inasmuch as words can be seen as signs which (certainly as hieroglyphs) abstract the phenomenological input of the visible world. These signifiers later evolve to make oblique reference to ear's intake, as the tongue is given further (and more abstracted) cues for mouth reference to invisibiities (as when hieroglyphic cultures compound noun-like picture- glyphs to express the tensions of actions and transitions): it only remained for the cultures with curving and coiling glyphs, such as the Arabic, to extend nomenclature into the utterly abstract. If the term \"Picture\" is defined as \"a collection of nameable shapes within a frame,\" then it can be seen that the whorled and coiled insides of hearing have allowed the indefinable shifts of cell-life to mimic themselves, again-to allow Meat Conscious to begin again to express its self-shapes in picture making. But once \"Picture\" is defined as \"a collection of nameable shapes in composition within a frame,\" then the ordering of those shapes inexorably comes under laws, as it were, of compositional logic; so that the ordering increasingly implies connective lines, triangles, squares, so forth, of compositional logic, thus The Geometric herds pictorial forms with near-absolute authority over every Meat shape within the Geometric grid and (as these are \"nameable shapes\") herds each Geometrically disposed reference of shape to external World. …","PeriodicalId":42508,"journal":{"name":"CHICAGO REVIEW","volume":"47 1","pages":"47"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1000,"publicationDate":"2001-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.2307/25304803","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"CHICAGO REVIEW","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.2307/25304803","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LITERARY REVIEWS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
From "time...en dit" There are two pictorial extremes of human thought process--The Geometric and (what I like to call) Meat-ineffable...no "the" before "Meat"--inasmuch as raw cells are such a diversity of impulse as to defy hierarchy. To be sure, it is such diversity-of-cells' electrical arcing which hatches The Geometric also, but it does so in spite of the originating cell structure irregularities--as an act-of-spark, I'd guess, or rather in organized emulation of the energies of their synapse process...as an Ideal, so to speak, of the "straight" energetic snap-line between two cells, the triangle between three, square four, soforth on up the scale of "hedrons" until a "circle" can be inferred. It is all (i.e. Geometrical Thought) inferred, inasmuch as meat energies move in waves, as pulse: but the inference is intrinsic to Humans, existing only in Nature where Humans are-as anyone knows who has flown over wilderness and then, from an airplane window, spotted the beginning of Farm or Town. The so-called geometrics of the bee-hive, or of the flies' eyes, are (upon closer inspection) mere approximates of such as the Human Mind imagines--and then "reads into" the microcosms of Nature--as are the idealized circles of suns, the rectangles of rock formation, or those fractured symmetries of the Crystalline so prized by humans, all approximations of The Geometrical Mind (including Towns and Farms) which when presented to human sensibility are prized simply because the imaging of them (through the viscous meaty orbs of human receptivity) is more easily absorbed as corollary of a mental ideal than, say, the ordinarily overwhelming multiplicity of most of Nature's irregularly globular and disjunctly fretted entanglementof-curves impinging (via radiant waves) upon the senses. The Human Mind has fashioned its Ideal in despite and despising of its self's pulp of animal being-an ordering at the expense of cell's self...a bureaucracy of...a veritable facism of...sense's sense of self. Language is but an offspring of this mode-of-thought, for all words are but signs evolved from, and implicit in, the geometries of thinking. Contrarily, and as an antidote to the rigidities of The Geometric, Meat-ineffable is that steady inclination of the brain to mimeticize its intrinsically variable shapes as visible manifestations resistant to either name or category but true (in its variability, to begin with) to the very organic mode (as distinct from process) of its own existence. Whether there are, or are not, straight lines in Nature is beside the point: we are too viscous to receive them as such...thus they must, if that IS The Ideal, be invented by thought. Words are, at scratch, but a glyphic extension of Geometric thought inasmuch as words can be seen as signs which (certainly as hieroglyphs) abstract the phenomenological input of the visible world. These signifiers later evolve to make oblique reference to ear's intake, as the tongue is given further (and more abstracted) cues for mouth reference to invisibiities (as when hieroglyphic cultures compound noun-like picture- glyphs to express the tensions of actions and transitions): it only remained for the cultures with curving and coiling glyphs, such as the Arabic, to extend nomenclature into the utterly abstract. If the term "Picture" is defined as "a collection of nameable shapes within a frame," then it can be seen that the whorled and coiled insides of hearing have allowed the indefinable shifts of cell-life to mimic themselves, again-to allow Meat Conscious to begin again to express its self-shapes in picture making. But once "Picture" is defined as "a collection of nameable shapes in composition within a frame," then the ordering of those shapes inexorably comes under laws, as it were, of compositional logic; so that the ordering increasingly implies connective lines, triangles, squares, so forth, of compositional logic, thus The Geometric herds pictorial forms with near-absolute authority over every Meat shape within the Geometric grid and (as these are "nameable shapes") herds each Geometrically disposed reference of shape to external World. …
期刊介绍:
In the back issues room down the hall from Chicago Review’s offices on the third floor of Lillie House sit hundreds of unread magazines, yearning to see the light of day. These historic issues from the Chicago Review archives may now be ordered online with a credit card (via CCNow). Some of them are groundbreaking anthologies, others outstanding general issues.