Prudence in Hell 030
The Stripping Bare / A Note on Orphism
The Stripping Bare
You’ll have to excuse me, as I do a lot of metathinking —thinking about how and what I think. I have been pondering the outsize influence that the history of psychoanalysis and Surrealism have had in my thought.
Such the shape of my Zwischenraum, my clinamen, my driving tension, my "cultural-schizophrenic oscillation", my Pathosformalen sind "Dynamogramme": in a nutshell. That’s the space I transduce, around the baroque (wrapped in Bacon).
So that’s the composition of my inner and scale-shifting inner isosceles triangle: the baroque, psychoanalysis, Surrealism. Length of legs may vary.
What would you call that transduction?
—The stripping bare.
My new writing is resplendent because it’s stripped bare. I strip bare like Burroughs cut up. I strip bare like Roussel Wrote A Certain of his Books.
It’s a mechanic. I have found my technique.
A Note on Orphism
I have brought up Orphism a number of times and I want to dwell a little further on it. As I first hinted at In Art Considered as a Non-State Actor, it strikes me as a viable synthesis in aesthetic theory, perhaps even a missing link.
Orphism is the future –what I think of as the marriage of the Dionysian and the Apollonian– but it’s of all the aesthetic inclinations also the most dangerous.
It is not a belief system. It’s like Freud missed the drive for stealing from heaven and stealing from hell.
So I’m trying to delimit Orphism, and my roadmap goes something like this
—it’s very rough—
The Apollonian is order.
The Dionysian is exuberance.1
The Orphic is transgression.
These are the three aesthetic Beatitudes; another isosceles to ponder.
Marcel Duchamp. La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même (Le Grand Verre). 1915–1923. Oil, varnish, lead foil, lead wire, and dust on two glass panels. 277.5 cm × 175.9 cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia.
Dionysus brings exuberance even to the Olympic Pantheon by forcing everyone to reshuffle their thrones. He is the 13th seat where there were only 12.