##Header & Logo to Metaousis

 

The 'iconolect' of the "War of the Arts of Peace" (above), is what I use to sign my general 'project' in sense Sartre uses this word. It is the most generally forceful of all the Iconolects I have devised. So I also give it an unique denomination as the "Ontolect", and the sign of the "Ontos".

 

 

The 3 volumes of 44 Lectures in a Kelim bag on a cloth from Mendoza, ArgentinaThe three volumes of my 44 Lectures in a kelim bag on a cloth from Mendoza Argentina. Titled WINTER, SPRING AND SUMMER and "scripted" 1998-2015. Autumn currently being finished.

 

DIRECT E-MAIL link.

 

CREDITS: The Headline Typeface is "TOKYO DRIFTER" at ICONIAN FONTS designed by Daniel Zhodorofsky.

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"METAOUSIS" IS A NEW WORD...

"Metousiosis" is a very old one that I choose to avoid. A novelty requires a novel nomination, of which I hope to persuade you, dear Reader, in pursuit of some ideas proposed in "Life of the Mind", by Hannah Arendt.

 

She describes Heidegger as proposing that "Thinking the Truth of Being" was the ultimate ambition.

 

However Arendt also reports that for Plato the rational dialogue, which was his method of teasing out the 'truth', was not enough. Plato required that one must aim for the "Houran", which she explains Plato advises as"eating one's ideas". Although 'ontophagy' is a splendid word it is possible to be both more precise as well as usefully imprecise. My proposal is the use of the word 'Metaousis' to illuminate these amiable mysteries.

"Meta-Ousia", etymologically, is the originally Hellenic term for "after, beside, with and among "Being". But there is the sense of the incarnation of ideas as well as the sense that the purpose of the 'enfleshment' of an idea or ideas is to understand (i.e. 'think'), them better. The 'Metaousis' is a crisis, essentially of the ontic confusions of contingerncy (what is true, what is real?), which calls out a carnal event after which clarity supervenes, even if it is the sadness of 'under-standing'. One might describe it as an orgasm of the mind. It is why I use the suffix .org for this site. But it is a crisis of the Logos rather than the Eros, although the latter, being existentially prior, by several million years, must serve as the model.

 

Even here no simple return to the "truths of tradition" is possible because these "traditions" are "true" no longer due to the Cartesisn "machinery" of such as the Bomb, computers, contraception, drones and so on and so forth - as 'Ubu Roi' used to say. Our beautiful freedoms expand along with our deliberate and ugly abuse of them. The internet allows unprecedentedly popular access to 'the facts' while at the same time allowing for them to be stolen from their makers and owners as well as falsely manifested for criminal ambitions. We need long spoons to sup with these new devils. One needs to be fireproofed if one is to (as all must, willingly or not), play with fire.

Architecture has. in the past, proved useful to this subject. Architecture (which is meta-physical), must be distinguished (but not separated), from Building (which is physical). For this allows Architecture to be enormously heavy. solid and profoundly carnal (the lightweight, "flexible", disposable version is only (pace Bucky Fuller), its deliberately deracinated antithesis).

Architecture is, especially if associated with graphics and ornamentation, capable of being prolix, verbose as well as subtle with supercharged connotations. This ontic force was resisted, for political rather than Architectural reasons, by the small nations of the West such as Holland, Czecho-Slovakia and Catalonia.

Today Adolf Loos's, pre WW I, "slap in the face of the (Hapsburg), Emperor", when he stripped his Architecture of all ornamentation and scattered his windows at random across his walls, should be (now that we are a century further-on), precisely reversed. In order for the digitised corruption of the truth to be itself neutered, the truth, as known to Science and mediated by Technology has to be brought to the very forestage of Being with an unmediated carnality of cognition.

A new culture of ontic security practised by an increasing number of practitioners is required to ensure the freedom of the Generality from enslavement to a secretive structure of impalpable control. The whitened sepulchres of 'early-modern' symbolic absence are now the rat-runs for "consumers" with no other navigational aids than their VR Sets and headphones.

Only by a fully surface-scripted lifespace and the celebration of its well-understood ideas, can we defend ourselves from the indignity of becoming mere grubs supping on trivial falsehoods whose principal employment is to bend our precious vitality to their selfish, and strikingly squalid ambitions.

A 'SIGN' OF THESE 'DEFENCES' CAN BE THE CARNAL EVENTS OF THE 'METAOUSES'.

Architecture can, for example. rather easily enflesh, a.k.a. incarnate, one of the ontological absolutes: that of 'Time' whose reification was an ambition of Edmund Husserl.

 

THE TIME BEFORE TIME.

First one must inscribe infinitude. This is the time before Time existed. To have one's Being at this timeless time one inscribes an Hypostyle. An hypostyle is an endless forest of identical columns. As an Orchard it would constitute Edinnu the "Garden of Eden in the Deshret, the "Red land" or desert.

ESCAPING PARADISE. THE "INTABLATURA".

To break the timeless "sleeping Beauty" spell of Paradise one needs the cataclysms of Birth, Mortal life and Death. This "Time of Advent" is brought by the most important, powerful and critical part of Architecture, the 'Entablature.'

BEING MENTAL

The phenomenon of Being, although experienced carnally. is essentially mental. Its quality is governed by mental dimensions and instruments It is appropriate that, in the medium of Architecture, This instrument is both enormously solid and weighty yet suspended in the air and free of the Earth from which our bodily existence springs.

THE "ENTABLATURE."

This Entablature is many things. It is the Raft of the Adventurers. These are Amazons who guard, like the Vestal Virgin's the Golden Germ or Fire of the Future. This precious fire was lit from the central hearth of the mother city. It is kept secure under a pyramid of ashes.

THE "RAFT" ADRIFT IN CYPHERIA

The Raft is also known as the Raft of Reason because it both is Quadrated as well as quadrates that which it inscribes. It is guided to its unknown destination by cypheric murmurings by which it finds a spot in the trackless infinitude of the Sea of Chaos that is another, but not so habitable, time before Time.

CYCLIC TIME

This" destination" hides, under the featureless surface of the Sea, the Mundus, mound or Heap of History . The white Sun of the Future is programmed to seek it out for the Heap is "the Whole of the Past". The Heap is an accumulation of an infinitude of days and nights that are "History". The Heap is guarded by the encircling Serpent of Cyclic Time.

ESCHATALOGICAL TIME.
When the Future and the Past, or "what will be and what was", are registered. one above the other they are joined by the original stele, the "Columna Lucis" or sword of light and ineffable power. This is the agency of the Present. The sword turns the encoiling Time of Eternal Return into the Arrow of Eschatological, Modern" Time. It turns an Endless Past into a Present with a Future end, which is Death.

BIRTH OF THE ORDINE.

The Heap of History is cut open by the Sword of light. Such is the violence of this "consummation" that the "Mundus" is opened and mountains thrown-up to each side. The cleaving reveals the "Dark Sun" a.k.a. the Genius Loci. This is inseminated by the descending Columna L.ucis. The Future is mated to the Past and the Present is born; The Ascending Narrative of the "Ordine" is birthed.

INFANCY OF THE ORDINE.

The infant "Architectural Ordine" floats like a rosy lotus on the surface of the departing waters.

"OCEAN OF THE VOICE".

Rising further upwards the Ordine becomes a material pyramid, mountain or column: the central spine of the pyramidal 'heap''. From this spring four rivers, one to each Quarter. They refresh the dry land left after the departure of the sea. But these are not rivers of water. They are rivers of airy speech. They "fill' and constitute the new Ocean of the Voice.

THE NECTAR OF NOMINATION.

In the next stage the Upward travel of the Ordine becomes a Ball of Light that throws-off sparks like a Catherine-Wheel. These are splashes of liquid light that clothe the objects they strike with a nominative glow. They enable the naming of the objects born into the new world of the "Ordine".

THE "THIRD EYE".

The final stage of the Advent of the Ordine is its"capital" or "Head". This takes the form of a widely- open Eye set within a "smoking" black sphere that is also an aperture into the mind. If one looks into the cave of one of the "capital's" six such apertures one may discern the mind in its guise as the imaginary.

REIFICATION INTO THE QUOTIDIAN.

The realisation (properly the reification), of the Present by the drama of Architecture brings this phenomenon wholly "out' 'of the mental imaginary into the dimension of the carnally existential. The Raft of Reason can then no longer remain "suspended in air" as it did in its originally mental state of Futurity. It must be supported by the newly-birthed "columns" of the Ordine.

THE CARGO OF MENTALITIES.

Nor does the Raft of Reason lose its pyramid (pyre). of Ashes that sheltered the white Sun or Fire of the Future. This is continued in its newly permanent and present carnality as the "Pyramid of the Sea" . The "pyre's" face , or facade, if exposed as a Pediment has at its centre an aperture. This is similar to the inward- looking windows into the "capital" , which gives onto its "cargo" of "mentalities".

PORTER AND PORTAL.

This cargo will be at its heaviest, densest and most extensive in the pyramidicaI Pyra of the quadrating Raft. However it is also "ported", both as carried and as revealed by a "portal", on the other five surfaces enclosing the cubic spaces of the chambers created by the groups of four comer- columns of the newly-birthed "Ordine" that, are required to support the incarnated Entablature.

PROSCENIA TO THE NARRATION OF BEING.

These "cargoes" are revealed to the interiors of these cubic chambers only if framed by the members of the Ordine. For the Ordine, charged with the huge power of its "istoria" of the reification of Time and Space acts as the key to the Portal that it itself creates for these six proscenia to project a Narrative of Being.

THE APORIA OF "MEANING".

We come here to the unnecessary aporia of "meaning" The 20C addressed meaning in Architecture as if it was something immutably provided by an alien History regarded as a "given" virtually equivalent to Nature. Whereas the truth is that it is humans who put their "meanings" INTO everything. Architecture included, only to take it, when required, "OUT"' again. So the universal rule applies," Junk in, Junk out".
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The relevant question , is, as usual one of technique. How does one mediate this insemination, inscription or installation of " meanings"? And then how does one in-turn read, decrypt or extract them?

"TRICORSO" TO A "SPACE OF APPEARANCES'.'

Here, JOA's technique of the Tricorso is proposed as the means to the invention of Iconelects and Pragmalects with which to "script" the six semantophoric surfaces of a Camera lucida. This reprises, with a nice symmetry, the Idea of Hannah Arendt. She proposed these as proscenia for the "political" "space of Appearances". The Tricorso proposes the "space of Appearances" for the life of the "vita contemplativa" in its guise as Heidegger's "Thinking the Truth of Being".

THE INCARNATION OF IDEAS

The Iconolects and Pragmalects are 2- dimensional and 3-dimensional objects that are generated, by the process of The Tricorso from a deliberately phenomenological, textual, origin. They can therefore mediate the empathetic assimilation of ideas to human carnality.

EXEMPLARY "PERFORMERS"

As an example one may instance the Nine-fold square (the square itself is the tenth), of iconolects that manifest in their Cameras Lucida the phenomenology of Eschatological Time, the time of mortality. The iconoIects narrate, in their guise of the "River of Somatic Time", its" downstream" natural narrative and the as the "Republic of the Valley" its "upstream" cultural "istoria".

"METAOUSIS".

The final stage of this Architecture of Being is the "metaousis" by which the ideas, the "pathos" which wholly surround the Actives with their "Scripted Surfaces ", are placed into motion (kinesis), through the agency of " Splendor" mediated by costume, body-paint. speech, movement, 'lighting, aromas , etc. to the point at which the Figurae of the IconoIects and Pragmalects induce in the Being of the Actives the epiphanic enfleshment of their generative ideas.

"SUB SPEC1E AETERNATITIS" - .

This is the Metaousis of an Architecture of Being which 'by its ability to both assimilate densely complex ideas as well as to extend insights derived from this curious experience that enables its Actives-cum-citizens to live quietly, amiably and practically. in their Quotidian world "sub specie aeternatitis" : in the Mirror of Eternity.

 

The End of a "Skeletal Metaphysic".

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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