A Frequency Manifesto

In the near future's rejoinder to epochs past, history will be told in Hertz. 

We will measure all manner of events and actions, nouns and verbs, entities and objects, emotions and imaginings according to their corresponding audial emissions or frequencies, and other forms of resonance not always seen but felt. 

In daily life, we will look for tonal matches, complements and competing values at the inner and outer rings of things, through a comprehensive, sensorial awareness of the interplay between colors, words and waves of energy. This awareness will be referred to naturally and freely, as if there had never been another means of narrating cellularly networked connections among inhabitants of a living world. 

Those truths of existence which were once only implicit—that everything is energy, that, in a multidimensional weaving of timelines, strands appear and disappear and become integrated or understood based on vibrational encoding—will openly serve as the basis for new circumstances and ideas. This will be made possible by widespread cognizance of laws of signatures and One, but also, for example, through an immediate capacity for cymatic visualizations, advancing what Flusser described as our ocular image-screens and which serve as representations of existing meanings that can then be further cathected or activated via human attunement. 

(Human attunement refers to an organic trajectory in consciousness, not attained through the transmogrifications of the artificial and externally engineered, although that will be occurring simultaneously).

Images and text, symbols and signs: such civilizational master tools will be turned back on their wielders as dowsing devices geared in reverse. Alphabet is goddess is ____ [blank]. "Reading" for essence, essence being detected rather than "discovered," we animate with discerning fluency.

Notes

Attending countless art-adjacent talks relating to themes of care, interdependency, climate change, more-than-human experience, magic, alternative knowledges and practices of collectivity over recent years, I have often found myself disappointed by the alienation of what is said and spoken, encouraged and promoted, articulated with sophistication and varying levels of sincerity, through academic and material languages originating in traditions Western and non-Western, from concurrent and emphatically pivotal developments in contemporary mysticism and universal human consciousness that are transpiring in the invisible and etheric realms. 

That is a blanket statement, but it does seem to me that there is a preference in my professional circles, or at least in their adult versions, to engage with our moment solely by attending to its tertiary challenges (to ecology, the political economy) and mediating motifs (mechanisms of communication, rituals of presentism); to its overall and eschatologically depressive 'vibes'. To epistemically integrate the very real after-effects of solar flares, planetary transitions and epochal shifts is equated to the popularization of "astrology in an era of uncertainty," as in, interpretively reduced to 'woo for cope'. The turns and churns of these times thus become impossible to vocalize from a position of erudition, clarity and strength, that transcends -isms (doomer and otherwise) and buzzword cliches, that defies obligation to hermeneutical tidiness while nonetheless cohering with precision. Although of course such obstructions to eloquent expression do, like any, serve a metaphysically necessary purpose of dampening overwhelm in the face of too much "now".

And yet: there is no small number of colleagues with feet in both worlds. A weird one, but, McKenna's adage about strangeness was also Ralph Rugoff's. For those like myself who are on the younger end, discursive oppositions and supposed disciplinary disjunctions barely endure. In every Zoomer a spark of Giordano Bruno, to meet a paradigm of rapid absorption and assimilation. But information being "out there", and internalized "in here", is no guarantee of theoretical convergence. As ever, tracks run parallel without becoming perpendicular, in ways that (perhaps beneficially) foreclose a packaged avant-garde. For example, Ingo Niermann’s The Monadic Age, with its observational philosophy of a swing towards self-sustenance, self-sovereignty and micro-trend-based tribes, corresponds quite closely to the 2027 narrative arc, to the rise of 'rave' children prophesied by Ra Uru Hu through Human Design. Indeed, Niermann's volume and related 'Army of Love' project could be interpreted as that movement's academic apologia, if only we were not so bifurcated. 

That includes in how we tell our tales. Because what was once a drawn out indexical process of giving shape to story will become increasingly instantaneous, modes of documentation must reflect a growing frequency-reliant approach. 

PG

To practice, writing again. Remembering the book I found of Guston memories some years ago in Oslo, a book I did not buy and an experience I did not quite compute but that is circling back now with all things 2022. I don’t understand how the time is meted out (falsetto) but I do understand Guston and I do love him and wish perhaps that I was born not in mid morning but at night so I could be more nocturne than diurnal and paint on his clock, too. It’s silly to wish, I thought I was long past wishing until I wrote that out. Want is more like it and really in fact I don’t want, wouldn’t change a thing. The book was a paean collected from his friends and this morning accounting for the dregs of a water spill, necessary clearing spill upon my desk I found among survivors one of my little blue note cards, probably from late spring on which I had inscribed:

When you start working, everybody is in your studio—the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas—all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you’re lucky, even you leave.

John Cage to PG.

And beneath it:

Personal elaboration: first of all, not sure where “I” am always to begin with. And isn’t it, to be very old fashioned, a dialing of the radio…

Last year stranded me without Influence so I was forced to unlearn it or to be shaped by other things. I do think there are of course priors in the paintings but I am liking what Jeff Wall said in a recent recording: that all of art history is to be called upon at will simply as energies always contemporary, always alive and something from the past is as alive as its animated use value or currency of transformation in the now. This seems apt and always and I liked hearing it vocalized and I would like to enunciate that which fits the bill, comes to mind. 

Seasonal diet

McFlurry moment Ps & Qs. This week started off strong with one of those unexpectedly very good Sundays where I happened to prepare myself the whole morning for the evening’s conversations. I am thinking about vows. For instance in November 2022, watching Fanny and Alexander on a big comfy couch in the middle of Maryland hiding from everyone else I said to myself and on Twitter I would never again do a family Thanksgiving or a large family Thanksgiving the same way, in order to make that one more palatable, and the following year, pouf my grandfather is dead and we hold a funeral and a funereal catered meal at my cousins’ grandparents house. Presided over by a woman, their grandmother, who passed suddenly two weeks ago now and that’s that. I like to go to Germany on these occasions, it feels like the correct gesture of tonal shift. Ava says to meet the malaise by beading a friend a wooden bracelet and I think about the metaphor and I think over which friend. I make a new vow, not to be treated in certain ways any longer, not to be passive to things like ingroup behavior performed for my alienation and not to apologize for what is mine in all kindness, that is not a violation of someone else’s order, and is not equal to petty or attached. No mercy November being Xafya’s expression, an insistence: not be taken for granted and so on. Primary teachings as another social life cracks open. Giving thanks to you, my neighbor says, splitting the spliff. We could end there but more remains to be said and who am I to deny excess. It’s Christmas time and Whitney Houston time and Mad Men time again.

Anoretic

In painting we have both the glitch and the irreducible. For my last critique yesterday, I decided to become legible, briefly, and they liked it. They got it, perhaps too much, though, because by getting it they missed the point that the paintings are about "getting" or rather not getting it. Basically I gave too much carrot, I tell my friend who knows these things in the debrief after (carrots, by the way, are now being recalled for e-coli in the US, though we are not in the US, at least not physically speaking). It could be a trap the friend says, but a good trap. The music of the trap. That’s genre painting for you. In any case peaceability doesn't always feel good in the end. Meanwhile power outages and dropped objects, doors clashing and interpersonal clang. 

Might this be painting

Or, my painting versus writing dance. Dorothy Dandridge, in Carmen Jones, via Bizet: you go for me, and I'm taboo but if you're hard to get I go for you. Rachel Cusk (19:01) on a former classmate who was a virtuosic violinist and a terrible painter but was nonetheless determined to be one, forcing herself to become. Discipline, rigorous motivation shapes molten talent. And then what. First reaching into, then outstretching past, the present.