Last Commented Art Blogs (253)

Of goodbyes and
Forgiveness
Gentle breezes stroke
Gentle cheek, kissing
As old friends do
If the fountain fills with
Joyous tears

Hermeneutics the art of interpretation has tons of literature on it. Here I am concerned about how it can be devised into a methodology. Here are some methodological tools for the art of Hermeneutics.

(a) Philosophical Etymology
Now what is Philosophical etymology? Etymology is searching for the root meaning of words and Philosophy comes from Philos love and Sofia wisdom. Let’s analyze Plato’s allegory of the cave using tool of Philosophical etymology. In Plato’s allegory of the cave, people are standing in a dark cave and they are separated by a wall; yet they are able to sight luminescence of blinding light on other side of the cave. This allegory is used explain the theory of forms that is we are imperfect copies of a perfect world. Analyzing Plato’s allegory in a postmodern sense can give us insight that the cave was Plato’s repressed and its external luminescence was in fact a projection of Plato’s vision to a metaphysical transcendence. This vision is highly narcissistic and couched in a language of absence if analyzed through structural conjectures of the language.

(b) Phenomenological Ontology
How can we adorn the garb of Phenomenological Ontology on the art of Hermeneutics? Phenomenology for a lay man means the contents of consciousness. Ontology refers to Being and its presence. I would like to say that Presence and Being is PROCESSUAL meaning that the structural presence of being is always dynamic and in the process of creation. This can also be explained as processual teleology. Teleology refers to a purpose of something. The presence of Being as processual involves historicity and temporality. Let me try to use an example from my own life. A UK friend of mine sponsored my ticket and invited me over there. I was thrilled on the prospect of visiting Stratford Upon Avon the home of Shakespeare and also visiting art galleries. When I went to apply for the VISA, I became the subject of ridicule. The officer a white treated me as a colored coolie. Seeing that I do not have a bank account or money and seeing that I am highly qualified he dismissed me with a curt: “good day”. In the UK consulate my BEING was created by another with a colonial bourgeoisie mindset as native who is colored and who doesn’t deserve to be given the right to travel to the land of colonized. History, prejudice against Asians and mind that’s warped in the grand narrative of colonial mindset created an identity for my being, an identity that hurts my skin and color. I was judged and labeled unfit due to no fault of mine. The creation of being by external factors can be interpreted in hermeneutics as a BEING IN PROCESSUAL ONTOLOGY.

(c) Deconstructive Theology
Deconstruction was pioneered by its Guru Derrida. Deconstruction is more than Philosophy and encompasses a trans-sense narrative which questions the Binary construction of all Meta narratives or grand narratives. Now what is Binary Construction or Binary divide? Let’s take the case of study of Semitic religions. Semitic religions like Judaism, Christianity Islam and Zoroastrianism assume the presence of God. God and light are privileged where as darkness and the devil are marginalized. Semitic religions tend to terrorize and manipulate the BEINGNESS of a believer by SIN and DIVINE punishment with HELL for the unrepentant soul. Deconstructive theology examines how language is constructed as a Binary Divide and it exposes the faulty nature of language as being a privilege of sense in meaning and nonsense of being marginalized.

I have been reading into the Beat Generation writers especially Ginsberg and Kerouac. I am fascinated by their leanings towards the Counter Culture movement, their passion to experiment with drugs and achieve liberation through altered states of consciousness, their echo for free libidinal revolution and their offers for nonviolence and peace. However what I can’t digest is their veering towards Eastern Religions and their morbid attraction for their rites and cults. The steering of their ships to Eastern mysticism is considered by me as their myopic fascination with the ecstasy of the East as Western foreign outsiders. Though I am living in the East, my mind has been brought up in the liberal Hellenic culture of the West. Language, Philosophy, Art and Culture of the West has deeply fascinated me and inspires my mind to innovate and create fictions, poetry and philosophy. I, being an Easterner live in a culture that’s highly conservative, orthodox and ritualistic. None of the devotees of Eastern Religions would feel to tempted to adopt, follow the patterns of life and living adopted by the Beatniks. My South Asian Experience with Eastern mysticism had been an infliction of wound on my being. Hinduism or Buddhism and its devotees in East do not follow it as the BEATNIKS did. Beatnik adoption of Hindu or Buddhist mysticism would be blasphemy for religious devotees of the East. Yes, I will try to live the ideal of Nietzsche’s Dionysian element of rhythm and ecstasy. The Philosophers of the West have inspired me to be a creative being and embrace a living of creative hedonism.

In the centre of the Book there’s a great hole, a fathomable one that signifies an absence.
I will do a favor to God by freeing his hand and writing my name in the Book of Life.
Speech! Don’t subdue the voice that writes.
The book that calls out Heaven is a Hell too.
My inner time is a marriage of thoughts.
You can destruct structure to chaos and also mould a meaning that’s creative.
Meaning is an o*gasm when it’s saturated.
Is there a mystery in God’s Voice? There’s nothing lurking.
You are God when you are playing with meaning.
Discourse of the book is penetration; dialogue is o*al and floral.
If the book has to yield to me, I have to storm into a battle of interpretations.
The closure of the Book is death and the beginning of an opening to life is writing.
I cajoled her book and she opened her text to me; it became a flower of becoming, intensely, poetic, lyrical and blossoming.
Playing with signification is Eros; succumbing to signification is Thanatos.
If I yield to the book, I become death.
I am never in the poverty of words, thoughts or feelings.
In the world there’s a confirming majority and a creative minority.
Solitude is never silent; it’s a labyrinth of creative thoughts.
Convenientialism is a post post modern philosophy. Anything and everything goes with it.
There’s no truth to knowing: There’s only an experience to existence.
I have to fictionalize my novel into the art of an aesthetic experience, akin to abstract painting and fugal music.
To make love to a woman is like painting and composing music.

Eros is the urge to tune to the ID and to compose music.
A woman is an edifying flower of meanings.
Temptation, I have made you permissive with freedom.
In the beginning was the word: in the now it’s a human reading and deconstructing it.
The cops of Bangalore have been beasts to me. They are the meanest bastards I have come across.
I don’t give a life to God; in the end I die. Yes, there’s writing remaining immortal.
I am never in the poverty of words, thoughts or feelings.

Forbidden as meaning, is legalistic, medicinal and political. You can subvert it in post modernism.
Knowing or experiencing meaning is transcendence
If Wisdom is Godly then enjoying its meaning is being earthly.
I cannot forgive or forget; I am like the Devil to repay my debts.
Materialism is not an ideal or idol; it’s a sumptuous necessity for the belly

Tropes are figures of speech. The most common are the metaphors and similes. A metaphor is comparison between two objects one being the Tenor of comparison and the other being the Vehicle. For example: My body is a wounded and politically bonded Palestine. The body is the tenor and the description of the body: Palestine is the vehicle. A simile uses like or as, for example strong as a lion. What would be the effect of a reader who reads into the metaphor? I would like to use my own term: “CONOSCEANCE” CONOSCEANCE has been derived from Connoisseur and Séance. It has three levels of meaning. These levels of meaning occur, when the trope is being unraveled. One is sensate meaning, the second is intelligent meaning and the third is the aesthetic effect, the feeling of beauty or repulsion. The sensate meaning is related to the senses. The intelligent realm of meaning is related to the forming of an idea and the aesthetic realm is that of pleasure or revulsion.

Museaphor is a new species for the Metaphor. It has got its inspiration from the Pataphor.
Now what is a metaphor? A metaphor is a comparison between two things. For example: The Book is peacefully sleeping, meaning the Book has never been read. The Book is the reality on which the figurative description peacefully sleeping stands. The Book is the tenor of the metaphor and peacefully sleeping becomes the vehicle.
Now what is a Pataphor? A Pataphor is a new species of an extended metaphor and comes from Pataphysics of Alfred Jarry. A Pataphor can be explained as the creation of a secondary reality from an already created Metaphor. For example: Ice shattered my thoughts and she shattered the ice is a Pataphor. Here ice is used as a metaphor and is figurative in the first context but in the second it becomes an actual description of reality.
Museaphor has got its inspiration from Pataphor but unlike it, it is the process of creating a secondary metaphor from a primary one. For example: Politically Palestine is a volcano and so also her Palestine is also a volcano. In the first Metaphor, Palestine as a volcano describes a volatile political situation and the second Palestine describes her as being hot.

Blue at Noon by Georges Bataille is a fascinating avant garde novel. In this essay I would like to deconstruct the way in which women are portrayed. Most of the Women except his wife and Desire are sluts. The prominent whores featured in his novel are dirty (Dorothea) and Xenia. The entanglements of the protagonist with these women are symptomatically pathological. The protagonist betrays devastating hidden oedipal fantasies. The relationships with these women are more intricate and denser than remuneration for occupying the pleasures of the bed. The protagonist takes great pleasure in the disgusting and the revolting. For example: Dirty is drunk and puking and at the same time she exposes herself nude. Sometimes the protagonist becomes an archetypal feminine. For example he sobs: when he gets a letter from his wife. All his relationships with sluts are erotic a melancholia, a fantasy of longing which ceases to be fulfilled. He portrays whores as tender, loving oedipal objects on which he can gratify his emptiness, his angst. The novel takes places in three places, England, France and Spain. In France he encounters Xenia. He is very ill at that time. Xenia though a whore goes to a great extent of nursing him back. The amazing thing is that he does not feel grateful but treats her with intense repulsion. In Spain he encounters Desire. The Spanish revolution is going on there and she has intense communist views. Though he becomes close to Desire, he treats her like a wretch. He has no interest in her intellectual proclivities. There are no scenes in the novel which are sexually graphic. Drunkenness, puking and nudeness become orgies for the mind of the protagonist. Though the novel is experimental, the narrative is straight forward and goes on from the beginning to the end. The protagonist is an erotic Sisyphus who is tormented by the weight of his s*xual entanglements and finds release of his emotion through sheer repugnance. The pleasure of the bed has become a narcotic stone which is rolled down by him in mental stupor. The protagonist is always in state of psychological fornication. As a work of Art he is Picasso’s bull who is limpid and strangulated by his own emotions. The author creates whores who are fond of him. The creation represents a maternal, oedipal reaching out. Is it a kind of oedipal narcissism that the author suffers from? There is no political consciousness for the protagonist. He maintains a stormy silence when Desire discusses ideas about communism. The creation of the psychology for the whores in his novel is a dystopian archetype. The women are his ideal and yet they are repugnant to him. Eroticism for the narrator is one of morbid loathing and ironically a state of ecstatic pleasure. I as a reader, I am totally ignorant how whores interact or behave. Of course I have had my chances but I have failed to follow upon them. Yes in the end, I feel whores are humane and can have genuine feelings.

God is kind to me is a hyperbolic idiom to signify that all things are going well. For example: God has been kind to me in my life.

God! Do you have to be virtuous and so pious? Why make me feel ashamed with the concept of sin? What good is life if life on earth is a misery? I become repentant, yet you are not kind to me. Why mock at me with goodness? Why can’t you tolerate my inequities? Why can’t you grace my fortunes? I am not the nails that have crucified you. I am not the hands that have been washed in public proclaiming that you are innocent. I did not betray you with thirty pieces of silver. I have not liked the wife you adorned me with. When you say that: I am the way: truth and the life: it makes no sense. I have searched my within and found an abyss of angst. David committed adultery and yet you forgave him. Since 2013, I have been living with a b* of a wife in a rut. Lord why don’t you feel pity for me? Is there room in your heart for the fruit tender kindness? Have you forsaken me forever to live in my misery? God, I am heartbroken, weary and tired with the ways of men and with you. Solace is an existential worm.

But then you could tell me ....

BTW I need more than good vibes, I need more hours in a day