Post 6: Systems Trials
31 March 2025// Pages 172-207There is a picture of the page of a book but I’m showing you this instead, because it looks exactly like this, and I’m pretty sure is a reference to it:
This is Robert Fludd’s void before God creates light in Genesis. Something had be to there, a something that was a nothing, for God to create into. “God doesn’t rehearse” according to the Frightbearing Society, he just draws back a little into himself. The narrator’s charge at the banquet-turned trial is this: he is creating a book that does not inscribe a direct referent, he is making un-meaning. What we are reading upsets the system of reference; he might as well, the text notes wryly, be one of the book-burners from Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.
This is also hitting a little close to home right now. First of all, the instability. I live in an America that is made unstable directly by the movement of files, the dismissal of what a certain oligarch sees as mere symbolic servants. I could go back to the “old capital of Prussia”-- I have an EU passport and dear friends in Berlin. But people don’t know “whether to look left or right” there either. And I would be, of course, subjected to the Schattenfroh-appropriate contradiction of being called antisemitic Jew for having objected to genocide in Palestine. The narrator is being torn apart by various Boschian chimeras. It wouldn’t be that bad, but after many years of having received German government funding in various forms, this is what would happen to my grant applications in Berlin now. My apologies to DAAD, I guess, or rather my lack of penitence.
Like God, I haven’t rehearsed today. This is because I had to take migraine medication which loosened my muscles too much to put on my pointe shoes. Humans can’t cope with constant change in the world, the narrator tells us, we ignore the Heraclitan River never being the same twice by fusing it into one continuous image. I do this, but I also slam my toes into paste boxes to approach Platonic forms of lines I will never reach. Pointe shoes are handmade, like written books. You sweat and sometimes bleed a little into the canvas, animal paste, and satin, and the shoe molds to your foot, becoming every dance that has ever been danced in them, each pious tendu. They actually don’t hurt as much as people tend to think, but breaking in new ones, especially Russian ones that are notoriously hard, does hurt.
It's the hurt that’s part of the process. The narrator is torn apart bodily in various ways. He remembers Knecht Ruprecht. Knecht Ruprecht is one of the companions of St. Nicholas in Germany, along with Krampus. Maybe this is just my particular experience with various worldly, secular, and urbane art historians in the German-speaking world, but I was always given to understand with a mild shrug of amusement that this is the sort of thing they still do in Bavaria. Knecht Ruprecht carries a bag of ashes and if necessary, a birch switch to hit children who have been bad this year with. He is accompanied by Krampus, who is essentially Christmas Satan.
If this wasn’t fucked up enough to start with, Ruprecht shows our doubting-Thomas of a narrator the pain of hell inside his bag one year. That’s what art does, the book tells us, takes drastic measure to “trigger the effects of commiseration”. You wanna know what it’s like to be crucified? What it’s like to suffer? You doubt that it hurts all that much? That’s why we have crucifixions, like this very un-Bavarian one I stood in front of in the Met recently, with a bunch of Italian monks, which was hilarious set dressing.
This a crucifixion by Fra Angelico around 1420, but the grouping of the many figures at the foot of the cross is something we see more often in Northern and Netherlandish manuscript work. The tempera the flesh is painted with goes grey over time, which I actually sort of like, the grey-drained Christ. If I were going to come to Jesus, I’d do it for art like this, for nails that drip a still-potent red blood onto the craquelure of the gold ground. The stakes of making images and words that describe images in Schattenfroh is this; all of salvation.
But I found Panofsky and Riegl instead, I guess, and don’t even take the nails out of my pointe shoes, because they keep the shanks stronger and support my feet. The foot support is the problem on the Cross too, not so much in the arches, but if there isn’t a platform under the feet you’d die of asphyxia from the gravity pulling your body and ribcage downward relatively quickly rather than over three days due to blood loss. Anyway, the narrator and I, and the book he’s making and we’re reading, are all on trial for the same thing: instead of finding the suffering of Christ, we found the system instead. We want to unfurl how it means back on itself.
You can watch nice girls with a variety of pastel leotards and long hair they usually slick back into buns for class ripping the nails out of their pointe shoes on YouTube. They grip them with pliers like a determined Krampus with a naughty child’s leg. They take razors to slice the arch piece, the shank, and beat them again and again against doors and walls. I do this too; otherwise they’re loud onstage, fail to give to the impression of effortless floating, hard to manipulate with the required dexterity. Like everyone else, I take a lighter and singe the edge of ribbons and elastics so they don’t run. The agents of the Frightbearing Society at the narrator’s trial all have furnaces in their bellies. Knecht Ruprecht has his ashes. You need fire and blades and pain because the stakes of representation ae just that high. And when you choose to unpick those stakes? Well that’s dangerous to the ordering of the world.
Bring on the proceedings. I’m not looking for salvation-- I would prefer to know how the layers unpeel themselves.
-- A.V. Marraccini
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