A Pilgrim of Meaning

A Pilgrim of Meaning

Listen to me as I am when I am with myself

A feeling for the thickness of things

When flesh quivers at my call

And life consists of burning up questions.

A Pilgrim of Meaning digests the world by swallowing it in bits, chunks or whole. In a will-to-meaning that is the interaction of mental activity, social contract, the cold teeth of reality. In the inclination of stars and where the heart takes breath. With mountains lulled in light and obscene black battlements of war. When Nature’s martyred horizon is a little garden and the world is memory. When reconfiguring is the indigenous practice of healing.

A Pilgrim of Meaning has the direct address to the immediate. Like the incendiary lycoperdon or “puffball mushroom” [Gk. “wolf’s flatulence”] that spontaneously ignites through intense fermentation.

A Pilgrim of Meaning catches fire when the ego surrenders to spontaneity not only in the finitude of fragments but in such a sphere wherever and whenever it unfolds. A space in which the cognitive imagination is experienced as a “Thou”. If we let go of our identity, even momentarily, toward duration and inwardness, the very precise order of reality corresponds to a precise mode of perception. A process subject to change yet within this change something enduring and unchanging, as the final vision of the Form of Beauty outlined by Diotima in Plato’s Symposium, “itself by itself with itself – always one in form” (211b).

A Pilgrim of Meaning searches the mysteries that are the unveiled loci. Ways to amplify oneself on several registers. Polymorphic correspondences of forms and patterns, potential symbols and metaphors. The bewitching aesthetic scattered like many images in mirrors that condense miraculously, multiple facets where each section is a complete whole, a world; not joined chronologically to the next but is synchronically consubstantial with it. A world within a larger world, one to the next, tonalities extending that magically bring them into being.

A Pilgrim of Meaning sees the dialectic movement of images oscillating between revelation and concealment. Attracting as it repels, repels as it attracts at every instant. In such a way that the instant of looking disappears immediately with the appearance of its counterpart. Calling into being the space of vision as a symphony between archetypes striving to be invested with Presence. Coordinates that are not ordered in the quantitative time of events, and consequently are neither historical, linear, progressive (or regressive) but a world in the interior of each event and every duration as an instant of this Presence. A two-way movement in which the hidden or overlooked reveals itself. Arcs of descent and ascent, deconstruction and reconstruction that symbolize the ceaseless process of never-failing effusion of goings-away and returns. An oscillation between occultation and self-revelation that demands polishing to the point of transparency where the flow of images serves as a collyrium for the eyes. In the repository of the universality of names and attributes that are ontologically fit to the space of memory. To freely shuttle between paradox and ambivalence, non-action and epiphany. Gnoses that remains suspended between apprehending and the unfolding of visionary time-space unmasked by hints and clues laid out to discover something spontaneous. We communicate with the Otherness within the I, with the I as Other. An existence whose gaze is a primal passivity receptive to a proliferating corporeality of seeing. The concern is not only for meaning but the voluptuousness of vision.

A Pilgrim of Meaning returns us to reverence that provides a certain transcendence. Awakens us to another order of things. We are the captives aspiring to return home. Where we always are and always have been at the beginning.

A Pilgrim of Meaning mediates an active and contemplative life. In the stained flats of heaven cleans oneself with intention. An ideal balance that stills breath and heart. Suffused and borne by a calling from afar and calling farther onward because a small voice says amore volo ut sis: I love you. I want you to be. I will it that you exist.

A Pilgrim of Meaning asks us under what circumstances what we call artmaking in our world is meaningful. At least in terms of the meaning in the realm of sensible experience. But what is the Other Place alluded to, whereby a gesture of the brush can extend from this world to the resurrection of other worlds? Quietly and simply as a hand reaching for the almond in its shell. The dimension of this act of being is or will be the course of future palingenesis.

A Pilgrim of Meaning sees Images held in suspense and waiting. Sees they subsist pre-existent and pre-ordained in relation to the natural terrestrial world in which our thoughts and desires, presentiments and behaviors have a corporeality and spatiality of their own. Unlike the empirical realities of physical life, inspired imaginative vision is indispensable as a mirror. The epiphanic place for images of the archetypal world. Messages painted in the form of the imaginal: a language of correspondence and analogical logic by which things signify beyond themselves. To walk this path of soul is to enter the field of symbols. Turning them over for meaning until they reveal their source. Every act of interpretation repeats primordial creation.

A Pilgrim of Meaning does not invent but unveils.

A Pilgrim of Meaning climbs the ladder of ascent. Casts an open eye on the vertical dimension where it reveals its symbolic depth. Reclaiming imagination as an organ of knowledge restores sacred order to practice. A mode of knowing through Presence. Seeing through appearances towards disclosure.

A Pilgrim of Meaning does not mistake reflection for revelation.

A Pilgrim of Meaning sees the world inside out. A single faculty with the capacity to configurate, an imaginative insight synthesized into one. A cognitive function fully realized with imaginative power of extensions and dimensions, forms and colors, fully objective and real where everything has an analogue.

A Pilgrim of Meaning does not “translate” what is perceived but moves past the surface of the image to the pulse bringing to seeing the living center of synchronicities, transforming, attuning, and transcending within the mystery of its creation. A true inner perception that is not something derived from any outward looking which simply reshuffles impressions. Rather it is the innermost image seen directly through the inmost eye. The pilgrim of meaning asks: When you come upon the essence, do you still want the form?

A Pilgrim of Meaning purifies the mirror in which the Work appears. A transmutation in which perception becomes luminous, refined by the fire of the imagination, thus turning artmaking into the art of seeing.

A Pilgrim of Meaning knows the revealed form is not the conclusion of the Work but a dwelling room of the heart. To stop at the literal is to close the door of illumination.

Listen, listen to me as I am when I am with myself:

We are one thing, one constellation, one influence, one concordance, one duration. Figures and alphabets that differ only in shape and color. Wounded apples with intoxicated seeds, starry abysses floating like moonlit lakes. We are the arch of the cat against cold steel. The wing of the sparrow that lays its dark down governing the birth of plants. The heartbeat of artists only heard in the rain. We are everywhere in everything. In the spinning show of high magic and in the fount of things: the collection of ideas, exemplars, species, causes, ultimate endings and first beginnings of worlds.

The flower of meaning is a rose of many galaxies.