large large storie

‘tous les mois sont cruelles comme les avrils / EN FIN DIVINE EN FAITES MINIME’ – A1 sized water color deposit of a 12 hour LASIDO (AudioSpace AS4) session.

the audio i drew ¹there’s hours of meticulous pencil drawing underneath the paint that ‘summarized’ the pencil layer into oblivion 😉 and painted to is AudioSpace 4 designed for use in the David Jones research:

well, i consciously made it suitable for receiving whatever the Cathedral reading of ‘In Parenthesis‘ will lead to but in fact the only thing a bit particular about it is that it has a guitar in the lead.

however, in the LASIDO world that constitutes a real paradigma shift, comparable to the Battle of the Somme marking the coming of age of the Modern War Machine and the quantification of humans to the pounds of meat required to silence an enemy machine gun.

the thing is made very much in the manner or at least the spirit of Pavel Filonov’s work. i started out drawing freely to the audio in the lower left section and from there fantasy structures grew till the arms-reptile heads popped up and the page emerged in its full architecture with the 3-fold fountain-flower thing growing out of the kissing girl’s crown. no conscious intent present at any point, i just let the drawing do it’s drawing and i am pretty much the spectator of whatever happens through my hands.
the audio’s main function is to keep my mind off any ‘artistic’ scheming or denotable ‘subject matter’.

in this context it is important to keep in mind that AudioSpaces are real spaces, they happened to be the case when the virtual SaNDGRaPH machine was running the LASIDO AS4 code that i prepared, and can be made to be the case again, so like any ‘real’ space they are in themselves completely devoid of ‘meaning’ .

I am stressing this point here because it is, i believe, congruent with David Jones’ lifelong thinking on sings and the function of the particular. right from the outset the ‘In Parenthesis’ text explicitly refers to the use of military orders as linguistic code to make things happen, to create not sotospeak, but effectively create for instance the ‘Battle of the Somme’ reality in the known and now commemorated space-time coordinates of Mometz wood.

in the work of Jones this os of the utmost importance because this insight facilitates his anamnesis theory building with the Catholic Eucharist as pivotal point that in his eyes forever defines Western civilisation.

one could call that Jones’ WO I ‘revelation’, what the war experience ’taught’ him, but it is not a lesson because to experience is, is to know it, and if you haven’t experienced it, you cannot understand, let alone learn it.

as i now slowly come to understand it, the Jones approach to the same artistic questions that occupied the minds of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, is, if you allow me this bold assertion that is quite meaningless in the end, much more home grown from hard experience and based on intuitive insights than the top down application of positions taken in highly theoretical debates, however brilliant and successful the Eliot, Pound and not to forget Joycean ‘answers’ turned out to be.

of course like any other ’thing’ an AudioSpace acquires meaning from the moment any human hears or uses it ²whether or not that is the case when only i have heard it, is a question that could entertain you for a life or two, i guess.