Orintheory

Who is that giant bird that visits me in costume. That speaks between it's beak, that makes sounds through it's lips, that regurgitates to feed like schools do. Who is that giant bird? Rimbaud, Corta'zar, my mother? All gone like matches. Then it flew away and left it's costume for me.

Galeano and Corta'zar

"When I die, old lady, take my clay if you can and fashion a mug with this refrain. If you thirst for me drink; And if it stops at the brink, that will be kisses fromyour old man." -G

"Hermenegildo Bustos, Indian of this town of Purisima del Rinco'a. I was born on 13 April 1832 and I painted my portrait to see if I oculd on 19 June 1891." -G

"1496. La Concepcion. Sacrilege.
Bartholomew Columbus, Christopher's brother and lieutenant, attends an incineration of human flesh.
Six men play the leads in the grand opening of Haiti's incineration. The smoke makes everyone cough. The six men are burning as punishment and as a lesson; They have buried the images of Christ and the Virgin that Fray Ramon Pane' left with them for protection and consolation. Fray Ramon taught them to pray on their knees, to say the Ave Maria and Paternoster and to invoke the name of Jesus in the face of temptation, injury and death.
No one has asked them why they buried the images. They were hoping that the new gods would fertilize their fields of corn, cassava, boniato, and beans.
The fire adds warmth to the humid, sticky heat that foreshadows heavy rain." -G

"It isn't that they're questions are particularly abstruse (a horrible word, thinks Lucas, who tends to heft them in the palm of his hand and familiarize himself with them or reject them depending on the color, the smell, or the touch." -C

"...obsessed by something that his intelligence was not equal to comprehending, but which floats slowly into his music, caresses his skin, perhaps is readying for an unpredictable leap which we will never understand." -C

Passive

I had to look up passive. I've twice been told that I and most artists write in a passive, nonchalant artsy way by the same mysterious photographer, so I had to look up passive and it's paradigm's (one of the definitions of paradigm means showing a word in all it's different inflections). I know, of course, what passive means, but I thought this photographer was just being ironic, because the act of writing to me, served as a negation of the act of being passive. I thought it was part of the artist label, sitting passively taking notes in your head for the masterpiece. Rimbaud's only ticket to this savage side show. I laughed because I found it funny. He even wrote "Logical Fallacy" somewhere along one of the margins of some ridiculous children of the revolution farce we were participating in, so I really thought this guy had the whole ironic thing going. I didn't really think much about it, but now it's been repeated so there must be some sort of real reason that word passive keeps coming up. I can't take offense nor can I feel complimented because I'm really not sure of all of the meanings of passive. I know this photographer is rather savy with words (He beat God in scrabble swear to...well I believe him anyway).

The first thing it says in my dictionary after the pronounciations is "see Passion" So I looked up passion. The first thing passion says is "see Patient". Patient says "see Pathos". I liked where this was going.
Pathos- The quality or character of those emotions, traits, or experiences which are personal, and therefore restricted, transitory feelings as distinguished from those which are universal. This is exactly in line with the Chaos theory idea. The results are non-linear, traversing that boundary of universally accepted scientific predictability. Go with this one.
Pathos is the root word of pathetic (Oh man, No don't go with this one) which is one of those words that has taken on a derogatory meaning but who's definition is nothing of the sort, like stereotype. To be pathetic is to affect tender emotions, or an expression of anger. There's a kind of P circle that starts with Painter--> to Passive--> to Passion--> to Patient--> to Pathos--> to Pathetic--and then back to Pathos. I guess its more of a loop but it ends with Pathos.

So what did that mean. Passive. Passive- 1. not active but acted upon. Without emotion or excitement.

That couldn't have been the inflection that was meant. Although I could see myself grouped into that category of thinkers not doers. I have plans to take over the world and write books that dissappear while you read them but I haven't acted on them. If this was the meaning it's terribly introspective and should receive my nonemotional nonexcited gratitude and respect.

Passive-2. (Chemistry) Inactive; inert. Not showing strong affinity; as red phosphorus is compartivley passive.

This would be rather poetic and quite wonderful. It wouldn't be a very positive thing to say about a writer but it would be wonderfully conceptual. The visual of this red phosphorus comparatively passive poet, alone in a orangish candle lit room, pencil in hand paper on desk, laboring over that first word. A relationship by blood (affinity) that is not very strong to these words that lay inert inside the mind. I'll buy it. If I were you mister photo, I'd go with this one. It's a way of saying your amazingly talented bordering on profoundly not inclined to writing.

Passive-(Medical) a deficient vitality and lack of reaction in the affected tissues.
We're taking a turn for the worse now. The effect of the material produces hardly any reaction whatsoever. This could be interpretted as a laugh response. If I say your passive and you laugh it show that there is hardly any reaction whatsoever toward the elusive adjective of passive, resulting in a nervous reaction, an easying over of uncomfortability at your lack of etymology. If I had only had a dictionary with me. Damn you word wizards.

Following these are a long list of words begining with passive. Passive congestion, passive iron, Passive movement, Passive obedience. Only one of them caught my attention, but I had no real emotion towards it.

Passive voice- A form of verb, which expresses the effect of the action of some agent; as in Latin, decour, I am taught; in English, she is loved; the picture is admired by all; he is assailed by slander.

I really like the play on decour, I am taught, she is loved. It's the most difficult defintion to apply to the label Passive writer. Perhaps I should leave this one to you.

Lectura, Locura

I was reading about the Chaos Theory and I was wondering how it could translate to the response of an audience to a painting. The Chaos theory states that there are things in nature like Eclipses that are relatively predictable and for those mathematical equations can be developed relatively easily. These are what much of science was based on. The conditions of external forces are easily controlled or of little consequence to the outcome. These are ideal circumstances. But for things like cloud formations, earthquakes, and wind tunnels in city's with cars and people and temperatures maintaining inconsistent speeds and heat and unpredictable gusts and obstacles, the outcomes are less predictable. To Chaos theorists, this just means that ordinary systems are more complex than the ones that scientists had originally focused on. So, part of nature can be defined by linear equations, which just means they have an answer, a clear and definite answer, the hollywood ending to a movie, the kiss, the cure, the moral justification, the "it was all a dream?" of science. The Chaos theory equations result in indefinite answers or what is called fractal geometry. The answers are constantly changing partly because the parts are always changing. They produce endless approximations of a fluctuating scale which produces a sort of answer.
I'm sure that the Chaos theories that are being employed are much more complex than anything I've written so it's unfair for me to try to draw from it's characteristics something about a painting but it's worth a try.
Is the response to a painting predictable? Would painting response be part of the first group of science or the second? I hope it's the second. I'd like to think that the responses are fractal, multiplying themselves from negative infinity to the east west north and south nonlinear geometry of our minds. I suppose it depends on the painting and the viewers personal history. Perhaps on the mood they're in, the other things they've seen, the type of work they may expect from you, their relationship to painting, the temperature of the room, how long they've been looking at damn paintings. I went throught the Ufizzi gallery in Rome in about 40 minutes. I couldn't look at another Virgin Mary or St. Thomas again for weeks after. I'm more interested in how to produce that fractal geometry response in people than list all of the variables that could make a person like or dislike a painting.
It's important for me to make a distinction here that... well I'm sure it will prove to be less of a distinction and more of a confusion as to what the heck I'm getting at. I'm not talking about Quality, which by the way derives from the duality of good and bad. I'm talking about that fractal geometrical response. I think that there's a break to be made and it's a fine line. For the painting to have this desired reaction, that cataclysmic event that begins those synapses, the painting must have some sort of conceptual base. Or maybe I've just put my foot in my mouth. The Chaos theory itself shows that out of order comes chaos and out of chaos a similiar pattern of order emerges. So perhaps that single sunflower of Egon Schiele, or Van Gogh, Klimt, can have the impetus for this fractal reaction. They could have that reaction but only because Schiele's flower is alone and dying, Van Gogh's is full of life, around others, and Klimts is masked in a facade of other flowers and decorative...ahh decorations, and something can be drawn away from them in comparison to their lives and their paintings. I was hoping that a pattern would emerge if I just kept rambling, but I suppose I'm being pretty linear, so I'd have a long way to go before anything emerged.

Hopscotch?

I thought about using something like hopscotch or duality but duality sounds stupid and is really too broad. How could I begin to write anything? But it is this dualistic nature of creation in any form that so interests me. Robert Pirsig contends that it is Quality that underlies all matters of discourse and life in general and I'm not really in a position to back up my statements as well as he is, but this seems like a good place to begin conceptualizing. I'm mainly speaking of the duality between conceptual and aesthetic creation. The duality roots itself so deeply in all things that it could be the foundation, underneath Quality, underneath rhetoric and dialectical, underneath objective and subjective authority, and underneath history and it's epistomology. This is my first post. I'm hoping that I've pigeon holed myself enough to consistently contradict everything I've written thus far, sticking me in and argument resolved only by my own dualistic schizothymic characteristics.