For all you graphic designers out there who are wondering where I got the font for my name, BRYAN RAY, which appears across the top of this blog as a masthead, I will now reveal the secret:
All I did was photograph my address from a piece of junk mail that I received (a physical paper, not a digital file — it was from a credit card company offering a competitive rate of usury), and I isolated my name and blew it up. That's why it's so mercilessly legible: it's not attempting to have an attractive style; it's more concerned with being efficient to auto-print and easy to read for postal employees (including the electronic eye), as it was made for mass mailings.
Obligatory image
Here's the next page from my book of 308 Drawing Prompts (the previous page appeared on October Thirteen); the prompt for this present image was "Gingerbread man".
THE SYMBOL OF SYMBOLS
Because I speak with the tongues of men & of angels, I am as corroded brass, or a tinkling cymbal.
—St. Paul, to the Corinthians (I Cor. 13:1)
Other philosophers waste time on chickens and eggs. I prefer to ask: Which came first, the word or the thot? Cuz it’s like art and life: the influence runs both ways. Art imitates life imitates art (I only started with art here because it comes first alphabetically) as words follow thot follows words. Whereas eggs hatch into chickens that bear eggs of their own which grow into egg-laying chickens.
“For me children and the begetters of children,” as Whitman always sez. “I shall visit the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me,” as the LORD thy God always sez (Exodus 20:5).
. . . the unseen is proved by the seen,
Till that becomes unseen and receives proof in its turn.—from “Song of Myself” (sec. 3)
So we have art and life imitating, and words and thot following, and chickens and eggs growing fruitful and multiplying (grinning and bearing). Are all these verbs interchangeable? Can we equally say that eggs follow chickens, and that art brings forth life? What interests me is that, even if we decide both clauses of our question deserve negative answers, nothing can stop my mind from thinking about these hypotheticals: I envision them mentally: I imagine them. And that’s how words bring forth life inside the fancy, which escapes eventually, somehow, tho never unscathed. The brain bends what it mates, like water bends light.
(And when did egg-birth become live-birth? When did the bearing being become the shell?)
Now if the aforesaid “LORD thy God” calls Christ his “word” because that particular mortal “stands for” or symbolizes deity, then what does God call Adam? He claims that he fashioned Adam as a self-duplicate, a xerox copy, not a fun-house mirror. Or at least the text of Genesis makes that claim.
The LORD God fashioned Adam in his own image, as a living idol of God created he him: fully male, without a trace of femininity. (Genesis 1:27)
So here we have words on a scroll imitating the creator of man imitating his own divine nature by way of mortal flesh. (In ancient Hebrew, “Man” and “Adam” are the selfsame word.) And it makes one wonder: Is Jesus of Nazareth the revision of Adam of Eden, or Adam’s second coming? Are both skewed reflections of the LORD God; or is one more accurate than the other — no refraction but a perfect reflection, so they’re both exactly right? Maybe Adam and Jesus are twins like Christ and Satan.
Since Adam brought forth death, Adam gestated also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in Jesus shall all be made alive. But every man in his own order: Jesus the firstfruits; afterward they that are his seed when he comes. Then, at the end, Jesus shall deliver up the kingdom to God, even the Father; when God shall have torn down all rule and authority and power, even the rule, authority, and power that was lent unto Jesus. For Jesus must reign until his Father, the LORD God, hath put all enemies under his feet. And the final enemy that shall be destroyed is death. For God hath put all things under the jurisdiction of Jesus; however, when God says that all things are cast beneath Jesus, it is manifest that God himself is excepted from this demotion; for God is the one who is implementing the great reshuffle: he is the Boss which did make all things subservient to his Firstborn, in this act of cosmic nepotism. And when all things shall be subdued unto Jesus, then shall Jesus also himself be made subject unto his Father, the Ruler of Heaven, who subserviated everything under his Son in the first place, so that VACUUM ALONE may be all in all. (I Cor. 15:21-28)
Photograph yourself having fun at a party and post the image on your favorite social network. Now wait one week and then attend another party and have more fun; paint a self portrait of this latter event and photograph that and post that on a less-photo-friendly social network. (An example of such a network would be one where people are prone to post more text than images — say, most people use this “less-photo-friendly” network to share news articles and then argue about them in the comments section.) My point is this:
Both of these photos are you, in a certain sense, and yet, in another sense, both of these photos are NOT you. The main difference is that your self-portrait was an oil painting done by hand, so, in comparison to the initial snapshot, which depicted an actual human (a representation of divinity), this second snapshot preserved, as in amber, a painting: the poetic revision of a human (a representation of a representation of divinity), hence at least doubly distant from its main source, God, and thus it (the shared photo of your oil-based selfie) is judged to be more impressionistic and subjective by professional art critics, who are the voice of reason; plus you were able to plenish the background of your work with unclad nymphs without breaking the network’s policy against pornography; since, for some reason, visions of bliss are permitted only when they are more than twice removed from reality.
& you can see where I’m going with this: Why only twice removed? Yes, for it’s impossible for us not to wonder (the words themselves are luring us here) if what we call The Only Living God might not be a representation of something even more abstract, which had to empty out an area of its own existence in order to “make room” for the birth of its signifier; just as its emblem, God, in turn, had to suck in a modicum of his own quintessence — specifically one infinitude (his feminine aspect) — so that our world could bang forth, or bump into itself or whatever: fill the abyss, keep expanding onward and outward until the LORD in heaven is more disease than host.
Yet I don’t even trust that this abyss IS an abyss: it fails my purity test because who hung those eyes within it that meet one’s gaze? A real abyss would simply bar the possibility of being observed, if it wanted its privacy. The fact that it allows us to admire it proves it’s not nothing. Maybe the first mind that ever invented itself, the great chicken-egg of ur-thot, strove to become its own symbol and sadly succeeded, and now it’s trapped in us oddballs. — I’ll let Job give the anti-benediction (26:4-7; 13-14).
To whom hast thou uttered words? and whose spirit came from thee?
Dead things are formed from under the waters, and the inhabitants thereof.
Hell reclineth naked before him, and destruction hath no covering.
He stretcheth out the north over the empty place, and hangeth the earth upon nothing.
By his spirit he hath garnished the heavens; his hand hath formed the crooked serpent.
Lo, these are but parts of his ways: only a still small voice; yet WHO CAN STAND THE THUNDER OF HIS POWER?
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