Through The Vanishing Point - First - Sensory Modes

As the Western world has invested every aspect of its waking life with visual order, with procedures and spaces that are uniform, continuous and connected, it has progressively alienated iteself from needful involvement in its subconscious life.

Our manner of juxtaposing a poem with a painting is designed to illuminate the world of verbal space - speech - through an understanding of spaces as they have been defined and explored through the plastic arts - sculpture -. The verbal medium is so completely environmental as to escape all perceptual study in terms of its plastic values. Everybody can talk, but few can paint. A dialogue between the different forms and qualities of the sister arts of poetry and painting needs no defense, but there has been little exercise of such a dialogue, especially with particular references. There has been some speculation from time to time on the lines of ul pictura poesis. The advantage of using two arts, both poetry and painting, simultaneously is that one permits a journey inward, the other a journey outward to the appearance of things.

(ICONIC modes) POETRIE ---> INWARD

OUTWARD<--- PAINTING (ILLUSTRATIVE modes)

The continuity of interface and dialogue between the sister arts should provide a rich means of training perception and sensibility.

SENSE <---> SENSIBILITY

We hope that the jagged edges of our iconic thrusts and queries will serve to open up, rather than to close, the imagery of the perceptual field.

In many of the sections of the book the reader will encounter a concern with the differences between iconic and illustrative modes in art and poetry. It is our purpose to provide a contemporary audience with the tools for discovery of a common ground among the manifestations of art in the world. Though the artistic intentions of the primitive artist and the Renaissance artist may be poles apart, the artistic effect under all conditions is a situation that serves to highten percetion. All the arts might be considered to act as counterenvironments or countergradients.

= COUNTER - GRADIENTS (the absence of a clear-cut boundary between one category and another, for example between cup andmug in semantics.)

Any environmental form whatsoever saturates perception so that its own character is imperceptible; it has the power to distort or deflect human awareness. Even the most popular arts can serve to increase the level of awareness, at least until they become entirely environmental and unperceived. (like the every day objects in POP ART) A liberating perspective on the art's effect upon human limited sense of foresight.

HUMAN's have a peculiar sense of foresight. It manifests itself in the ability to endure time for a goals in the far future. Nature has no foresight in itself other than what evolution's fines product is able to deduce from its investigation.

THE RETURN OF FORMAL SPACE

To be continued