"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.