Seq D: Realism > Surrealism

Trompe l'oeil painting is reality's sincerest flatterer. One of realism's (not real trompe l'oeil, which requires an illusional sight gag) most accomplished practitioners, Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675), painted 35 identified canvasses during a period of Dutch global commercial and material abundance. (Six years before Vermeer's birth, his cunning countryman Peter Minuit deviously purchased Manhattan Island from the Lenape Indians for 60 Guilders ($24) worth of "trade goods" [= trinkets].) Vermeer (later called the Sphinx of Delft [see Seq 9] given the paucity of biographical information he left [although one should consider that Vermeer, being visually gifted {compare Descartes' (verbal) epitaph}, may have considered the paintings an adequate legacy]), who may have used a camera obscura to render his hyperrealistic masterpieces, was a contemporary of Hobbes (1588-1679), Pepys (1633-1703), Newton (1643-1727) and Louis XIV (1638-1715), whose troops invaded the Netherlands in the War of Devolution (1667-8) and the Franco-Dutch War (1672-8). The Concert, one of the world's material treasures, was stolen on March 18 (a significant date, given that on this day in Ga 4.569996048, according to the Venerable Bede [a Jabberwock neologist, he coined the term Adtwifyrdi], the world was created [demonstrating a sense of humor, he termed challengers to his Original Math "lewd rustics"]), Ga 4.570001990 (cut from its frame), along with three Rembrandts, from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, one of America's treasured sites, in Boston, an act of cultural vandalism (see Anapology) on par with the destruction of the Afghan Buddhas. Unlike Ingres (see*sequitur 24), Vermeer gave us no nudes (do compare Vermeer's urbanity and serenity with the visual ravery of countryman Bosch two centuries earlier in e*sequitur 46: today's air vibrant with invisible flying enlightenment, Bosch's with invisible flying fear). However, the intellectual sensuality of his paintings is intensely erotic (the mind [unoriginally, but bearing repetition] the sex organ). [Warning: sexual and drug-related content]

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Vermeer's mistress

What can I conjure?
I chase you, laughing
down cobbled streets
in humid air
to lovelit lowlands
by the sea

Who will you be?
A lady wearing fur and pigment
fertile, lifting milk and pearls
you'll drown atlantic time
with music from a clavier
you'll read love letters
your wishes will come true.

Where will we venture?
We will go back
to a plain room
in a Dutch house
built on merchandise and spice
wrapped in cannibal tapestry
from the Tropic of Capricorn

What will we do?
We'll wet our lips
we'll take our clothing off
we'll lie in a bed of down and oak
we'll make romantic love
we'll listen to the livestock
outside the open window
we'll daydream, indolent
of human heroin

Will you love me again?
The question is, will I concede
that you're not who you seem to be
my fingered hopes so delicately put
on barest pliant linen, stroked,
luminescent, hanging
on the wish that we

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e*sequitur 86: (lullaby yé-yé
by France Gall [nom; compare her compeer Traci in Seq 0], "the French Lolita" [ici, chordophonic; "La couleur des jours heureux"). What the Jains and others might make of the swastika as a sleeping position is unknown (and possibly unknowable), but it is. As the world simultaneously becomes bigger and smaller, the Jain parable of the blind men and the elephant, illustrating Manifold Predictions (the multiplicity of perspectives or Perspectivism), bears repetition:

A group of blind men heard that a strange animal, called an elephant, had been brought to the town, but none of them were aware of its shape and form. Out of curiosity, they said: "We must inspect and know it by touch, of which we are capable." So, they sought it out, and when they found it they groped about it. In the case of the first person, whose hand landed on the trunk, said "This being is like a drain pipe." For another one whose hand reached its ear, it seemed like a kind of fan. As for another person, whose hand was upon its leg, said, "I perceive the shape of the elephant to be like a pillar." And in the case of the one who placed his hand upon its back said, "Indeed, this elephant is like a throne." Now, each of these presented a true aspect when he related what he had gained from experiencing the elephant. None of them had strayed from the true description of the elephant. Yet they fell short of fathoming the true appearance of the elephant.

This, uncharitably, our condition: Blind (Respect, real blind), with incomplete data (and note information asymmetry as a lever of power). Meanwhile, the dogmatic (unconscionable canine abuse: see*sequitur 45), as Karen Armstrong says the Buddhists say, unskillful.

When exploring sleep, we encounter Gysin's dream machine ("it is speculated by scientists that dreams began 130 million years ago.... Reptiles might sleep...."), Delta waves (associated with slow-wave sleep and delirium in adults), lucid dreams, sleep temples (curative hypnosis, chanting and dream interpretation), [adult content] "going commando" ("going without underwear while sleeping can have significant benefits to the vulva" [Why, yes! this the permanent state of Reage's O {see Seq 1}]) sleep and waking style and Djuna Barnes' tribadic, atmospheric

e*sequitur 87: Nightwood
(wherein Robin, somnambule maudit, roams the streets seulement in a doomed-to-fail search for elle ne sait quoi, and where the argument that the inept weak are more dangerous that the abusive strong is floated [this thought inadvertently escaping the novel's Huysmanian/Proustian {see Seq 1} parfumerie, in which, in general, the lights are on but no one is home]. Consider, for example, the following [meaningless] vignette:

... [S]he seemed to lie in a jungle..., thrown in among the carnivorous flowers as their ration; the set, the property of an unseen dompteur, half lord, half promoter, over which one expects to hear the strains of an orchestra of wood-winds render a serenade which will popularize the wilderness.

[or, as the Laughing Gnome intones, parenthetically, {uh huh} {8-ball: "doubtful"}]), somniloquy, SRE and VPA, and dyssomnias and parasomnias, including bodyrocking, hypersomnia, et al. In the realm of sleep anthropology, artificial light usefully creates continuous sleep patterns, while naturally lit cultures segment sleep. We also meet the airy noctambulant

e*sequitur 88: Mullah Nasrudin,
whofrom this Sufi teaching story:

"I can see in the dark," boasted Mullah Nasrudin one day in the teahouse. "If that is so, why do we sometimes see you carrying a light through the streets?" "Only to prevent other people from colliding with me."

Here, too, the aptly named Cloud of Unknowing, with its paradoxical Zen prescription for "an encounter with a 'nothing and a nowhere,'" and the by now familiar binary (base 2) 1|0 ought and nought (see*sequitur 31). On a naturalistic level,

e*sequitur 89: Saami joik
(Saami [or Lapplandic] chants) penetrate one's bones. Yoiks are literally personal: "A yoik is often made for a person at the time they are born," according to Ánde Somby, Research Scholar at the University of Tromsø, who continues:

"There are Yoiks for persons, animals and land. In Saami tradition it was very important for a person to have a yoik, just as important as being given a name. Yoiking a landscape or an animal probably had a similar... significance.... [O]ne cannot own a «fellow» animal or «fellow» land."

Yoiks lead quite naturally to the monistic world of

e*sequitur 90: Therianthropy,
wherein human/animal mythological hybrids compensate for human limitations, grant theroid license and achieve spiritual union with faunal kin (we know, for example, that our genetic structure isn't vastly different from that of, say, bears). Therianthrope correlatives include such Egyptian deities (godlist here [note cross-cultural rationalisation of responsibilities - niche deities abound]; a Mbuti [see Anapology] deity, Khonvoum, "contacts people by means of [a] mythical elephant... or... a chameleon") as human-bodied, animal-headed Thoth (ibis and scribe [creator of writing, mythical librarian, psychopomp and god of equilibrium {balance}], said to have created himself through language) and Anubis (jackal), and animal-bodied, human-headed kentaurides, satyrs, sphynxes and mermaids (any potentially leading to impure reveries of anthrobestial kentauridine, sphynxian or gynopiscine paraphilia).

Animal-animal and (animal-animal-animal, etc.) hybrids are intellectual relatives to human-animal hybrids, as is human incorporation of animal form. One practitioner of such faunomorphism,

e*sequitur 91: Max Ernst,
(Ga 4.570001891-976) (aka the bird Loplop) Dadaist and Surrealist (another your cyniform e*sequitrist), created the first collage [adult content] ("Approaching puberty, or the Pleiades" [Ga 4.570001921]; and see Seq 1) novels (followed into collage by Hannah Höch ["Dompteuse" {ca. Ga 4.570001930}], Joseph Cornell [see*sequitur 33], Richard Hamilton [adultish content] ["Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?" {Ga 4.570001956}], Robert Rauschenberg ["Monogram" {Ga 4.570001955-9}; and note his scatole contemplative {thought boxes}] and other enthusiasts [including Gysin and Burroughs] of this friendly format) - La femme cent têtes and Une Semaine de Bonté, the former containing "And the butterflies began to sing" ("Et les papillons se mettent à chanter"; next Seq). Ernst, who was included in the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) show of Ga 4.570001937, settled in Sedona, Arizona, where his human scale sculpture "Capricorn" (and, illustrating cosmic scale, astrophysical depression,

e*sequitur 92: the Capricornus Void,
"with an estimated diameter of 230 million light years" [a spinning void here] [recall e*sequitur 27]. And for egoists, there are the complementary Sloan Great Wall and the Great Wall of Galaxies, the two largest superstructures in the known Universe [future readers will find this rather ancient astrophysical history] at 1.37 and .5 billion light-years long, respectively [for egoists, the mean diameter of the Earth is about 0.0425 light-seconds].)

was ultimately lost (see the Afghan Buddhas, Savonarola [see*sequitur 23] and the Gardner's Vermeer [above]). Ernst would've appreciated Spencer Tunick's advocative and aesthetically pure "human sculpture"/uncanny clonic humannequin photographs ([male frontal nudity warning] here with Greenpeace at the Aletsch Glacier in Switzerland in Ga 4.570002007) (see Seq 9): he would've found them, shall we say, surreal.

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> Seq E

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Image: Amusia
Detail of Vermeer's "The Concert," stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston.