Jonathan Price's Blog, page 3
November 2, 2023
Visitation Across the Hudson
Observations
Jonathan:
Right here, right nowThe fabric of the universe splits open,My culture breaks--What lies beyond appears
Briefly, like a crack in an egg,Dripping fluid.
How can the illusion be repaired,The unified field be rebuilt?
Realization does not come with text,Insight is not an eyeball, or a thought,Perhaps we expand by allowing,And when there is no greater goal,Surrender must be our path.
Hector Graceman (formerly the “Professor”) and Elizabeth Buchman (formerly "Crazy Jane")
THE CONVERSATION
HG: You pushed the button?
EB: Yes, it’s on record.
HG: Maybe you should say what we’re doing.
EB: OK. Hector and I have been talking and walking and telling one another all kinds of things, and we thought we’d share one or two of the highlights.
HG: And you gave me a gummy to eat.
EB: And, yes, I have given him a gummy to eat. Home-made: lime jello, lecithin, coconut oil, and indica sap, a nice smooth ride.
HG: On the High Line.
EB: Where we are and saw the…what have we decided to call them?
HG: Well, we accepted the commonly used “Visitation,” but you like calling them “Friends,” so that’s what we will call them.
EB: Because they brought us together and we are becoming… 1-2-3
BOTH “Friends.” (laughter)
HB: Well, this is what is most strange to me, the way these experiences have brought me out of myself and into a willingness to meet a stranger. It’s the oddest sense of at once having an experience of the “strange” and feeling a deep need to not be one myself.
EB: So, you are writing poetry.
HB: Yes, and that is a way of not being a stranger to myself.
EB: Read the new one.
HB: Really.
EB: Yes.
(pause)
HB: OK, I called it, “Autumn’s Drift.”
I caught the drift of Autumn
Glowing in the trees
The sun was warm upon my cheek
The water laughed in the nearby creek
And I was deep at ease.
I caught the drift of Autumn,
Or rather it caught me,
The golden leaves were floating down
Twinkling gems from a shedding crown
And my mind was loosed and free.
So I rode the drift of Autumn
Time lost track of me,
I came to earth with an open heart,
I felt invited to take part,
And my reply was poetry.
(pause)
EB: Oh I like the drift of the meter, the lull of it. You have a good reading voice.
HG: It’s amazing how shy I feel about making poems.
EB: Yes, that’s what I wanted you to talk about so I could record it.
HB: A classmate of mine from high school began writing poems during the Covid quarantine, and he sent them out to members of the class of ’59 for whom he had email addresses, and subsequently he and I made contact by phone. We had some nice conversations. And I asked him about his poetry, and he said that this was the first time he had shared them. Poetry had always been a private thing, and he said he was “shy” about it, and then he said he had a therapist once who told him that “Shyness was the outer level of the heart.” I thought that was lovely.
EB: It’s the vulnerability.
HB: Yes, exactly, and somehow the Visita---the “Friends”---have made me feel my vulnerability, and I think everyone is feeling that who has seen them live. But I think this gummy has made me feel more open and less vulnerable, less like showing myself will open me to hurt, or shame, but rather than to…EB, what’s the word I’m looking for?
EB: For me the word is “aliveness.” And it’s the next layer in of the heart, the actual feeling of being alive in the world and loving it.
HG: Is there anything deeper than that in the heart?
EB: You caught in it your poem, Horace, when you knew “rode the drift of Autumn” and “Time lost track” of you, rather than you losing track of time. You were one with the moment, and you responded with a poem that shared this moment of aliveness.
(Silence)
HG: I think you could turn that recorder thing off now.
(click)
HG: Is it on?
EB: Yes, it’s on, Hector.
HG: So say something about your art.
EB: I don’t like the word art. It rhymes with smart and fart.
HG. And heart.
EB: Yeah well…Art is a category and it is first and last a verb, and when it becomes a noun it has lost its living relation to the process of it own becoming, which is the only place the maker really feels alive, to use that word, and to which one wants to return…like your drift… that’s where making art can take me, but not into words but into my hands and eye.
(pause)
You know you can say all kinds of things about a poem, because it’s in words, and words are all ravelled up in meanings and history and associations, but pictures are like dance or music, they don’t need words and frankly don’t want them. Let’s just say I’m having fun, and if you want to use words, Hector, be my guest. What do you see?
HG: Well, I think you’re making a joke. I think you are responding to the appearance of the “Friends” by saying that there’s something “fishy” going on. I mean that’s where this all began for me, with the sense of the anomalous, that really is the sense that something is not maklng sense by any of the usual criteria. Something is “fishy” here. And I go from that to thinking of the fish in the hook of Jonah, the Leviathan, the fish that swallows up the prophet, humbles him, brings about in the end repentance. And that leads me to my own feelings of dislocation. And maybe there’s in the Visitations something that is not friendly, but foreboding, apocalyptic.
(pause)
EB: You finished?
HG: I could go on I suppose, but I can see this is not giving you any particular pleasure.
EB; Well, I can see why you called yourself “Professor,” but I suppose I have to admit that if you have to use words, those are pretty good ones.
(click)
Nagatoshi Amemiya, Ruth Asawa Through Line, in Artists Review Art, October 23, 2023, p.5.
(Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, September 16, 2023–January 2024).
The Whitney's belated tribute to Ruth Asawa says more about the museum than her work. Kim Conaty, the Steven and Ann Ames Curator of Drawings and Prints, says, in an accompanying essay, that drawing was "Asawa’s private world, a place where she could take her time to watch, listen, see, feel, and draw." How sweet.
These small drawings, the delicate paperfolds, ask to be looked at close up. They are not bold statements designed to be seen from a distance. But Conaty has made these works seem even tinier by placing them in low rows on very high walls, significantly painted white, at the far edge of a well polished floor. I read this installation as a polite dismissal of her work.
Where are her sculptures? And where is her life? Ruth Asawa, 1926–2013, began making art when held in internment camps during World War II, after the Army forced her family off its farm. At that time, white people feared that ,as Japanese Americans, her family might somehow aid a foreign invasion on the West Coast. Asawa began making sculptures with materials at hand, bending wire, making globes, circles, spirals, columns out of this resistant metal, tough but pliable, like her.
Untitled (S.270, Hanging Six-Lobed, Complex Interlocking Continuous Form within a Form with Two Interior Spheres), 1955, refabricated 1957–1958, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of Howard Lipman.
By choosing to center the show on delicate personal drawings, Conaty encourages viewers to dismiss, or undervalue Asawa’s complex, logarithmic, intensely worked life, and the otherworldly forms that emerged.
Outside of the Whitney, though, as you have probably seen on the news, I spotted this Visitation coming across the Hudson, and felt, for a moment, truly surprised, then up-lifted, glad to be free of this austere but lifeless exhibition.
--Jonathan Reeve Price and Peter Asher Pitzele
To explore the sequence of Visitations:
Visitation on a Clear Day
Visitation in the Smoke
Visitation in the Haze
Visitation Arriving at Dawn
Visitation on the Rio Grande
Visitation on a Maine Summer Day
Visitation in Brooklyn
Visitation in Midtown
About Jonathan
LinkTree: https://linktr.ee/jonathanreeveprice
MuseumZero site: www.museumzero.art
Twitter: http://twitter.com/JonathanRPrice
Instagram:
Pinterest:
Facebook:
Linked In:
Amazon Author Page:
Goodreads:
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/41600924.Jonathan_Price
About Peter
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/peter.pitzele/
Scripture Windows: Toward a Practice of Bibliodrama, with Susan Pitzele
Our Fathers' Wells: A Personal Encounter With the Myths of Genesis
October 22, 2023
Visitation Under Brooklyn Bridge
Observations
Jonathan:
Revelation is not a book,
Light has its own sound,
Clanging its tiny particles,
Like bubbles on the wave--
Insight appears, without
Force, plan, or calculation.
Let go of what you hold,
Unbend the clutching claw--
Now is time enough,
Here will do, and being
Unfolds without a mind.
Hector Graceman (formerly the “Professor”)
Sonnet for EB
I walk the streets like a prisoner set free,
Agawk at objects as if new to sight.
Total strangers nod at me;
I drift with motes in shafts of light.
My dreams are vivid. When I wake;
They linger, overlaying day.
I wander beside a brimming lake;
I pause to watch the children play.
I have become my newest friend;
Talking to myself, I am overheard.
I believe I’m going wobbly to my end,
Singing like a loony bird.
Has not age license to play the fool;
Can’t I wear a smile and bend a rule?
EB, formerly Crazy Jane
Ahh, dear man, you are a poet of some parts,How good it is that we can dabble in the arts.I am no master of word and style,But a mischief-maker with a dash of guile.Hector, Hector what the heck;I say it’s time to get on deck:This spot the Visitation madeBy the river under the Promenade.After lunch works for meHow ‘bout half past two or three?Monday and Wednesday, both will do:I want a chance to meet with you.I wonder: Do these apparitions tease
Us to a wider freedom? Tell me please.
Eye-Tracking Analysis from Jean Prix, Abstract of the paper, “Exploring one of the Visitation Images Through Eye Tracking,” in Papers in Experimental Psychology, November 1, 2023, pp 471-473.
As an image, this photo invites the eye to look up, past the grasses, to the circle, and beyond that, to the summer day. When we track eye movements, we note that the mind retraces that movement--from foreground to middle distance to the far off and back--rapidly and repeatedly.
When we interview our test subjects, we learn that they easily recognize the scene, understand intuitively that the grass is near us, and behind it is some kind of green hill, and above that, clouds. These patterns are familiar; people are accustomed to "reading" an image in this way.
And when we let people linger on the picture, we learn that they absorb--without verbalizing-- other clues to the situation: the grasses, for example, are going beige and dry at the top, though still green below--viewers do not analyze this as much as absorb the likelihood that they are looking at a moment in late summer. The clouds blowing overhead, a few distintegrating, hint at a warm breeze we might feel, if standing there.
But the disk intrudes. It attracts attention--It seems out of place. It looks different from the rest of the picture. It is not a natural form. It is neither animal, vegetable, nor mineral. But it looks as if it has been shaped by some consciousness, whether human or alien. And our test subjects attributed some kind of intention to the thing--malevolent, gracious, intrusive, but conscious. In the right side of the brain, activity rose as soon as the eye returned to explore this mysterious disk.
When we interviewed people, asking what they thought about this thing, they talked in terms of a presence. Not human: perhaps a divinity or spirit, perhaps merely an alien coming from space.
In discussion, our group singled out characteristics that distinguish this "visitor," as several called it, from the surrounding landscape. It seems one dimensional, or at least, very thin. It has holes in it. We can see through it. To judge from the report of by the photographer, the coyotes found its appearance eerie, off-putting, disturbing in some way.
When asked what the disk might mean, discussions became heated. Each participant spoke of having some strong emotional reaction, and a desire to know what, or who, this might be. No one theory won general agreement. Is it a hoax? Is it a UFO? Does it carry a message? Or is it just there, a presence somehow evading our mind's efforts to pin down what it might signify, or say? These are the questions we discuss in the final section of our article.
--Jonathan Reeve Price and Peter Asher Pitzele
To explore the sequence of Visitations:
Visitation on a Clear Day
Visitation in the Smoke
Visitation in the Haze
Visitation Arriving at Dawn
Visitation on the Rio Grande
Visitation on a Maine Summer Day
Visitation in Brooklyn
Visitation in Midtown
About Jonathan
LinkTree: https://linktr.ee/jonathanreeveprice
MuseumZero site: www.museumzero.art
Twitter: http://twitter.com/JonathanRPrice
Instagram:
Pinterest:
Facebook:
Linked In:
Amazon Author Page:
Goodreads:
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/41600924.Jonathan_Price
About Peter
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/peter.pitzele/
Scripture Windows: Toward a Practice of Bibliodrama, with Susan Pitzele
Our Fathers' Wells: A Personal Encounter With the Myths of Genesis
October 19, 2023
Visitation on the High Line
Observations
Jonathan:
Arising behind the scaffoldingIt says discard that thought,Ignore annoyance,Just be.
Yes, your temporary roof protectsyou from bolts that tumbledown from a highrise being builtabove your head. But whatprotects you from this Visitorintruding into your autumn stroll,where is the nettingthat keeps such visions out?
Hector Graceman:
EB: I haven’t written a poem for decades, but somehow I seem to need a different way to orient myself. I need words, but not etymologies; not concepts, but images that catch something in the sense I have of change.
I think the visitations may have something to do with dislodging me; and perhaps the sense of a connection with you that makes me feel less alone.
You said you wrote some poetry, so I send this with great diffidence. Should I try to make it a better poem? What would that mean? This is all my guttering candle shows.
Poem for EB
I am a stranger to what lurks in me
Like a wanderer in the underground,
Where a candle flickers; shadows flee,
Here where my footfalls make no sound.
Age can deliver strange fore-tells,
And, too, old friends are out of reach;
My sleep is dark with waking spells:
Do they harry, warn, or teach?
Is there some grist in the heart’s crypt
That I must chew and so metabolize?
Some meaning coded in my life’s script
That I must read with failing eyes?
Into this land, as half-blind stranger,
I venture, cautious, fearing danger.
EB, aka Crazy Jane
Dear Hector:
I haven’t made “art” in a. long time. Oh, I have a sketch -book and doodle and draw on a park bench among the pigeons, but more like someone singing old songs to herself. But this week, after staring at some of the visitations as things designed and patterned, I found myself at my art table where the tools of a once-upon-a-time passion have gathered dust.
I was a collage artist for a spell---seemed like my kind of mish-mash medium---and I have the old exacta knives; the self-healing mat, and lots of colored papers.
But it’s the black and white that seems to call me, so I have been doing “paper cuts”. Not circles, but almost…
I hesitate to send them to you, but who else is there? I have nothing to say about them except that while I was making them, I was playing in a way I have not been able to do for so loooooooonnnnnnngggg! Wheeee…
Riskily yours: EB
Commentary by Jeanne du Prix, in Sur la Muse, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris, 2023. (Translated from the French).
I’ve noticed that my awareness rarely watches itself. But at a moment of startled insight, I may be jolted loose from my day-to-day sense of the real, and notice the struggle that my mind and body go through, reestablishing their “reality.”
As a therapist, I am secretly pleased that I cannot define consciousness. I cannot pin it down as an object. It has no definite form, no bodily location, and no time, because when it appears, it is here and now, not then and there.
By contrast, my mind snaps pictures of the experience, capturing all the inputs of that moment--what I sensed, what I felt, the stray thoughts passing through, my relation to the people around me. That bundle of many-faceted awarenesses constituted the moment, but awareness itself passes on. Still, my mind keeps that recording in the archives, available to be linked to any other memories that happen to contain similar sensations, emotions, thoughts, relationships. Hence, one memory can be associated with a million others, and any one chain of associated memories can be called up in my subconscious, when my body or my mind notices something similar in the present, such as a parallel situation, or thought.
At such a moment, in the subconscious, I become dimly aware of these memories, particularly when my unconscious urges me to dwell on their connecting tissue--say, the passion of anger, the swelling of greed. In a way, my mind demands that awareness give life to its “reality.”
So, for me, mind is not awareness. My mind eats awareness, demands it, drives it, lives off of it.
But awareness, sudden or slow, may be the true giver of life.
--Jonathan Reeve Price and Peter Asher Pitzele
To explore the sequence of Visitations:
Visitation on a Clear Day
Visitation in the Smoke
Visitation in the Haze
Visitation Arriving at Dawn
Visitation on the Rio Grande
Visitation on a Maine Summer Day
Visitation in Brooklyn
Visitation in Midtown
About Jonathan
LinkTree: https://linktr.ee/jonathanreeveprice
MuseumZero site: www.museumzero.art
Twitter: http://twitter.com/JonathanRPrice
Instagram:
Pinterest:
Facebook:
Linked In:
Amazon Author Page:
Goodreads:
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/41600924.Jonathan_Price
About Peter
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/peter.pitzele/
Scripture Windows: Toward a Practice of Bibliodrama, with Susan Pitzele
Our Fathers' Wells: A Personal Encounter With the Myths of Genesis
October 12, 2023
Visitation at Hudson Yards
Observations
Jonathan:
I thought I was in the worldbut the world appears in me--whatever I see begins in that mirageand shapes these boards, rails,benches and even the Hudson Yards...each moment, it seems, I recreatewhat I think exists.But now your image frees me from this constant recreation--I see a sky broken open,and my own spiritanimates the molecules dancing like stars.
The Professor:
One becomes accustomed to what initially seemed shocking. One not only adapts, but incorporates. What came initially to challenge and shatter a conception of reality ends up enlarging that sense. I know I speak professorially here, but the fact is that I am referring to my own experience, my capacity, which I think is a human capacity, to incorporate (literally to bring into the body) what felt alien, dangerous, and outside the body.
My mind ---and I am thankful for it---is a speculative instrument, not just a fact based pragmatic faculty, and thus I have the luxury of playing with ways of understanding, entertaining ideas and possibilities, angles and perspectives.
But I do not think one needs to be a professor to be able to do this. As I talk to people about the Visitations, called by many names, I hear how wonder is provoked. It is as if a part of our brains, our very neurology, is being rewired---or awakened. I am like some early hominid who witnesses the taming of fire.
And hello to you, Jane, who does not seem crazy to me, for what can “crazy” mean when one of these disks soars above the city as if to remind us that sanity is merely a consensus about what we will call “real”.
My name is Hector Graceman. I am an 82 year old Black bachelor, and I have never felt younger than I do now, nor at any time did color, education, or age seem to matter less . Might we meet?
Crazy Jane
Hector Graceman! What a name. You probably know that “Crazy Jane” is a figure the poet William ButlerYeats created in his late poetry, a mask he put on. I use this as my nom-de-plume, but I am Elizabeth Buchman, 75, white and Jewish, and known as EB to my friends, quondam artist and poet of no repute. Never had a family. I’ve been a mystical sort all my life, and I admit did spend some time in the cuckoo‘s nest, but found my niche teaching art and poetry to 6th graders in PS 92 in Brooklyn. I write some, paint some, still dance some in this funky slowly gentrifying section of Brooklyn. Never went on FB, nix Tik Tok, etcetera, and wasn’t much of an internet girl until I began getting these weird posts---the “Visitations"---and then you appeared. Are you yet another level of hoax? Am I to you? And now that AI is invading our already putative realities, maybe all of this is the dream of an algorithm.
Nonetheless…I will talk to you through the virtual veils until we decide we want to meet. IF we do.
And here’s what I think.
As CJ I’ve been going on about how she’s seen these things, but the fact is, mostly I’m seeing them in posts. How I get them I have no idea, and, if I drop the “CJ” pretend, as EB I think that some canny artist somewhere is concocting these images, like collages I suppose. But what surprises me is that these images are influencing how I see-feel the world.
Well, take this Hudson Yards picture. If you remove the black and white thingy, you can say, nice photo of buildings. I happen to think the Hudson Yards are an obscenity, along with those anorectic towers on Central Park South, but as sculptural images rather than urban pluto-crass, they continue to make New York’s skyline an astonishment of geometries, but introduce these wheeling wild and snarky “anomalies” (your first word, dear Professor), and the architecture jumps into a different context and seem actually subservient to these strange forms. Figure/ground kind of thing, where the wild card trumps the stacked deck.
Not sure I’ve ever seen anything quite like this, and I begin to crave the next installment---and they are installational in a way don’t you think? Change my world. By all means.
Anyway, dear figment Professor Hector Graceman, we seem only to be able to meet via these apparitions, and perhaps we are being hijacked into a farce, kidnapped into a zombie narrative, invented into the virtual.
Still, if this is AI, it does eccentric pretty damn well.
Encore, I say. Over and Out
EB
--Jonathan Reeve Price and Peter Asher Pitzele
To explore the sequence of Visitations:
Visitation on a Clear Day
Visitation in the Smoke
Visitation in the Haze
Visitation Arriving at Dawn
Visitation on the Rio Grande
Visitation on a Maine Summer Day
Visitation in Brooklyn
Visitation in Midtown
About Jonathan
LinkTree: https://linktr.ee/jonathanreeveprice
MuseumZero site: www.museumzero.art
Twitter: http://twitter.com/JonathanRPrice
Instagram:
Pinterest:
Facebook:
Linked In:
Amazon Author Page:
Goodreads:
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/41600924.Jonathan_Price
About Peter
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/peter.pitzele/
Scripture Windows: Toward a Practice of Bibliodrama, with Susan Pitzele
Our Fathers' Wells: A Personal Encounter With the Myths of Genesis
September 25, 2023
Visitation--Blocking Traffic
Observations
Jonathan:
A sudden intervention stopped traffic, twistedthe manhole cover free,and sent it rolling down the avenue-one disk playing with another--steam roared forth, stinkingof tunnels, wet leaves, and rot.In that grey cloud, piecesof our visitor evaporated,leaving its black silhouette--an impression on the air,a sign to the unwary.
The Professor:
I was there, on 7th avenue and 54th st. My ear had been caught by the clop, clop of horse’s hooves and I turned and saw the horse-drawn Central Park carriages moving slowly uptown to take their stations at the Park’s entrances.
And suddenly, there was no sound and, with no sense of process, of something coming down or up, it was there, huge and menacing. That’s what I felt, a kind of fear as if I were suddenly in a closed room with the Angel of Death. And I did not see it roll down the avenue. I did not notice whether others saw it. I did not think they did.
Because life went on, the horses clopping uptown and the tinselled carriages with their jaunty drivers proceding across the intersection as light changed to green.
Was this event just for me? If so, how could there be this photograph? How could be there be this “Jonathan” who “makes his “Observation,” and who seems so inhumanly detached, even amused?
And equally suddenly with the arrival of the Observer and his photograph, I read my own comments after his, and then, following, the comments of some character called “Crazy Jane”. Who seems to know me, or wishes to know me.
I fear I am going mad
Crazy Jane
I was sobered by the sight this morning. My heart did not leap up---it was that bird, as if it was trying to fly up to meet the disk as it winked in the sky, then vanished like a mirage.I must have been quite near the Professor.
Apparently, he does not know that I am “following him.” Not literally. I mean I wouldn’t know him if I bumped into him, but I can see what he writes, but I don’t know how. It just comes to me in an email. The picture, the comment, and what he says. None of my friends are getting anything like this. It’s spooky.
At first, I thought it was some kind of spam, but no, either he and I are seeing the same thing at almost the same time from the same place, or we are being sent an email with one another’s comments, or …I don’t know what to think.
I pay attention to what he writes---or can it be that some thing writes what he is thinking, and he doesn’t even know his thoughts are bring recorded? And that I am receiving them. But perhaps the Professor is a fiction, designed by some diabolical AI to make me mad. Perhaps these visitors, as the commentator calls them, are generated by a computer program. Or perhaps the visitor is inviting us to make connections, like a dating app. I feel a little crazy.
He seems not to have no sense that I am shadowing him. I would like to meet him. He lives in Brooklyn. He walks on something he called the “promenade.” Maybe, I will go there one morning. He and I are so different, but my heart goes out to him. He seems to be suffering, doubting his sanity perhaps, and lonely.
That’s one of the things I’ve noticed. The sighting of these things is common now, and the scientists have exhausted all their theories. These visitors have become almost commonplace in their frequent occurrences; we have become somehow used to the strange. We are oddly both more connected in our bafflements, and at the same time more alone: each of us to make up her own mind what these things mean. For me, they are miracles; for others, they are dark omens; for some they bring about sleepless nights, for others strange dreams. I wish I had someone to talk to…like the Professor.
Maybe there is a place where crazy and sane are so mixed as to become something else. What could that be?.
--Jonathan Reeve Price and Peter Asher Pitzele
To explore the sequence of Visitations:
Visitation on a Clear Day
Visitation in the Smoke
Visitation in the Haze
Visitation Arriving at Dawn
Visitation on the Rio Grande
Visitation on a Maine Summer Day
Visitation in Brooklyn
Visitation in Midtown
About Jonathan
LinkTree: https://linktr.ee/jonathanreeveprice
MuseumZero site: www.museumzero.art
Twitter: http://twitter.com/JonathanRPrice
Instagram:
Pinterest:
Facebook:
Linked In:
Amazon Author Page:
Goodreads:
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/41600924.Jonathan_Price
About Peter
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/peter.pitzele/
Scripture Windows: Toward a Practice of Bibliodrama, with Susan Pitzele
Our Fathers' Wells: A Personal Encounter With the Myths of Genesis
September 14, 2023
Visitation--Skyscraper with Pigeon
September 11, 2023Observations
Jonathan:
Only tourists look up--That's the mantra in NYC--so no one noticed the mirror,the pigeon, or the visitation. How briefly it opened a holein the narrow slice of sky,disturbing one bird, threateninganother office tower with a 9/11. The routinely realwas broken open--we sawbeyond the envelope of blue--but after three flaps of wing,air healed up, and we returnedto hot tar and the extravagant onrushof multitudinous real individuals,who passed just as fast as our visitor.
The Professor:
I was a streetwalker on that morning a lifetime ago when disaster struck, (Dis-aster from the Greek word for star and its prefix suggesting down, meaning the disaster of a falling star).
But it was not a star that day, but death planes colliding with towers, smiting them. I walked again today the same street over which new towers gleamed. I hate them in their arrogance.
Yet today, there was no disaster; there was a pigeon—a dove---and the sighting of what I now think to call them, ”enigma.” That first event was a terrible human calculation that caused more war and death. This one…what causes it and what is it causing?
In me, these strange states, these novel knowings---the bench on a vanished Pineapple Street---or the conjunction of the hallucinatory object in the sky and a pigeon which in my mind I saw as a dove---are enigmatic.
Who was it who wrote: “Signs are taken for wonders, I would see a sign.”? I am an old man of words who is becoming a wonderer.
Crazy Jane
I was sobered by the sight this morning. My heart did not leap up---it was that bird, as if it was trying to fly up to meet the disk as it winked in the sky, then vanished like a mirage.I must have been quite near the Professor.
Apparently, he does not know that I am “following him.” Not literally. I mean I wouldn’t know him if I bumped into him, but I can see what he writes, but I don’t know how. It just comes to me in an email. The picture, the comment, and what he says. None of my friends are getting anything like this. It’s spooky.
At first, I thought it was some kind of spam, but no, either he and I are seeing the same thing at almost the same time from the same place, or we are being sent an email with one another’s comments, or …I don’t know what to think.
I pay attention to what he writes---or can it be that some thing writes what he is thinking, and he doesn’t even know his thoughts are bring recorded? And that I am receiving them. But perhaps the Professor is a fiction, designed by some diabolical AI to make me mad. Perhaps these visitors, as the commentator calls them, are generated by a computer program. Or perhaps the visitor is inviting us to make connections, like a dating app. I feel a little crazy.
He seems not to have no sense that I am shadowing him. I would like to meet him. He lives in Brooklyn. He walks on something he called the “promenade.” Maybe, I will go there one morning. He and I are so different, but my heart goes out to him. He seems to be suffering, doubting his sanity perhaps, and lonely.
That’s one of the things I’ve noticed. The sighting of these things is common now, and the scientists have exhausted all their theories. These visitors have become almost commonplace in their frequent occurrences; we have become somehow used to the strange. We are oddly both more connected in our bafflements, and at the same time more alone: each of us to make up her own mind what these things mean. For me, they are miracles; for others, they are dark omens; for some they bring about sleepless nights, for others strange dreams. I wish I had someone to talk to…like the Professor.
Maybe there is a place where crazy and sane are so mixed as to become something else. What could that be?.
--Jonathan Reeve Price and Peter Asher Pitzele
To explore the sequence of Visitations:
Visitation on a Clear Day
Visitation in the Smoke
Visitation in the Haze
Visitation Arriving at Dawn
Visitation on the Rio Grande
Visitation on a Maine Summer Day
Visitation in Brooklyn
Visitation in Midtown
About Jonathan
LinkTree: https://linktr.ee/jonathanreeveprice
MuseumZero site: www.museumzero.art
Twitter: http://twitter.com/JonathanRPrice
Instagram:
Pinterest:
Facebook:
Linked In:
Amazon Author Page:
Goodreads:
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/41600924.Jonathan_Price
About Peter
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/peter.pitzele/
Scripture Windows: Toward a Practice of Bibliodrama, with Susan Pitzele
Our Fathers' Wells: A Personal Encounter With the Myths of Genesis
September 7, 2023
Visitation at Night
September 7, 2023Observations
Jonathan:
We thought it was the moon.
The office workers had left,the cleaning crews were workingin those long dull hallways, and the unleased space--but when this visitorfloated up from some dark street,it was brighter than any fluorescent glare,blacker than the rooves below,and it rose as silently as stars.
The Professor:
Lunacy:
Having seen the photo of the disk in the night sky, I started to write my etymological reflection yesterday on the connection between the moon (Latin: luna) and lunacy (a moon-caused mental aberration), but I had a weird experience this morning and felt, for its duration, that I was out of my mind---or out of my usual mind. The experience was a sudden shift in my sense of temporal location.
I was out for my early morning walk down on the promenade in Brooklyn Heights, the river-facing buildings of the Manhattan skyline lit and flashing in the rising sun. A mother pushing a baby carriage towards me and an old couple walking behind her. I sat down on a bench to gaze down at the river where it lapped among the ancient pilings and dilapidated warehouses that used to be the thriving Brooklyn waterfront.
I must have drifted into a reverie, for the river glazed into stillness. I must have closed my eyes, for when I came out of that reverie, I looked around, and the place where I sat was no longer the promenade, but a wooden bench on a street I knew was named “Pineapple Street,” for in the old days the ships cargoes with fruit docked here and unloaded their the fruit---oranges, pineapples, apples, grapes---to the fruit markets that serviced the city. It was as if I had been transported into a past preceding my own birth, and yet I felt that I belonged here. Sights, smells, sounds…familiar ,and I knew, while in this transport, that I had lived a life there. Or I was re-living here.
I have no idea how long this lasted except to say it was long enough for me to be present to the details of a story---this old man’s story that I was inhabiting in this dream-like state of mind. I could even catch the smell of overripe fruit that hung in the morning air.
So vivid was this experience and so long-lasting that when I came out of it, I was astonished to see the woman pushing her baby carriage not yet past me and the old couple right behind her. I had been elsewhere for a long time and yet time, in the “here” where I came back to myself, had hardly moved at all.
All day long I have been rattled, unsettled, and I felt sure, without knowing how I could possibly be so sure, that this state had been catalyzed by the experience I had had two nights past of seeing the disk, not as it was captured in the photograph, but as it appeared to me like a full moon hovering over the bridges that spanned the river to the north. It was as if that experience had the effect of catalyzing what I can only call another life, a life that I knew I had had and yet had been completely hidden from my ordinary knowing. Could this be possible? Could these disks, these apparitions, in all their anomalous reality, be responsible for…what? What to call this dislocation, this well, yes, lunacy. In a dream, I was a dreamer, being dreamt… Where is my etymology now?
Crazy Jane
My days are spent in looking up;I want to see my friend.Surprise is hanging in the wings---Am I going round the bend?
More and more the folks I meetKnow this new obsessionWe share the pictures avidlyAnd giddy fresh impressions.
It’s rather like a love affairWith all the highs you get,But innocent and free of chargeAnd none of the pain and fret.
It’s like a new space opens upIn the world and inside me.The disks revive our wonder sense, And serendipity.
--Jonathan Reeve Price and Peter Asher Pitzele
To explore the sequence of Visitations:
Visitation on a Clear Day
Visitation in the Smoke
Visitation in the Haze
Visitation Arriving at Dawn
Visitation on the Rio Grande
Visitation on a Maine Summer Day
Visitation in Brooklyn
Visitation in Midtown
About Jonathan
LinkTree: https://linktr.ee/jonathanreeveprice
MuseumZero site: www.museumzero.art
Twitter: http://twitter.com/JonathanRPrice
Instagram:
Pinterest:
Facebook:
Linked In:
Amazon Author Page:
Goodreads:
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/41600924.Jonathan_Price
About Peter
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/peter.pitzele/
Scripture Windows: Toward a Practice of Bibliodrama, with Susan Pitzele
Our Fathers' Wells: A Personal Encounter With the Myths of Genesis
September 4, 2023
Visitation in Midtown
September 4, 2023Observations
Jonathan:
After work, I was staring out of the 22nd floor,tired, ready to go, when I sawthis creature, this alien, this diskslip behind the office toweracross Third Avenue at 52nd.I knew that down below,out of sight, the sidewalks were already full,people were rushing into CVS or the Lex,but I could not hear them, or even see them,they were so far below. The only sound was sirens,incessant, and the impatient honks.Who knew this visitation was there?The Daily News had no squib, and Twitter said nothing. Onlythe photo proves I was not mad.
The Professor:
guile (n.)
mid-12c., from Old French guile, "deceit, wile, fraud, ruse, trickery," probably from Frankish *wigila, "trick, ruse" or a related Germanic source, from Proto-Germanic *wih-l- (source also of Old Frisian wigila, "sorcery, witchcraft," Old English wig, "idol," Gothic weihs, "holy," German weihen, "consecrate"), from PIE root *weik- (2), "consecrated, holy."
The visitor, the creature, the alien, the disk, etc., as captured in this picture, seems to play a kind of hide-and-seek, a peekaboo with the viewer. Now you see me, now you don’t. I am reminded of the way a mother plays with her infant child, disappearing and appearing, creating desire by taking away the object of desire and then fulfilling the desire in her re-appearance.
Is it possible that this is the strategy of these apparitions, that they tease us, create an appetite for more, and yet we are not in control of their appearance? Only by looking at photographs, the after-images, so to speak, can we see that each a disclosure is actually different.
In short, we are beguiled, enchanted, touched with a sense of the uncanny--an ancient numinous--that inspires a certain kind of fear.
Crazy Jane
They tickle my fancythey tickle my sexI feel like I’m dancing on tilting decksOr waving my kerchief at a smiling childAnd letting myself go a little wild.
O the disks make me friskyAnd maybe it’s riskyBut I have nothing to lose, o no,I have nothing to lose.
They peek in my window; They tap on my doorThey come least expected,I’m hoping for more.Whatever you call themFor me, in the end,I find them delightfulAs I go round the bend.
O the disks make me friskyAnd maybe it’s riskyBut I have nothing to lose, o no,I have nothing to lose.
--Jonathan Reeve Price and Peter Asher Pitzele
To explore the sequence of Visitations:
Visitation on a Clear Day
Visitation in the Smoke
Visitation in the Haze
Visitation Arriving at Dawn
Visitation on the Rio Grande
Visitation on a Maine Summer Day
Visitation in Brooklyn
Visitation in Midtown
About Jonathan
LinkTree: https://linktr.ee/jonathanreeveprice
MuseumZero site: www.museumzero.art
Twitter: http://twitter.com/JonathanRPrice
Instagram:
Pinterest:
Facebook:
Linked In:
Amazon Author Page:
Goodreads:
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/41600924.Jonathan_Price
About Peter
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/peter.pitzele/
Scripture Windows: Toward a Practice of Bibliodrama, with Susan Pitzele
Our Fathers' Wells: A Personal Encounter With the Myths of Genesis
August 29, 2023
Visitation in Brooklyn
September 30, 2023Observations
Jonathan:
Into the jumble of Brooklyn, behindthe bridge, we saw it descend--behind us, the Watchtowerhas turned into offices, and around usthe tourists rush toward Chinatown,but in the maze of architecturethe visitor slips downpast the water tower,into the hot September street.
The Professor:
The word bio-morphism is composed of two Greek roots: bio=life and morphe =form. When a new word is composed of two pre-existing words (or in this case two Greek nouns), the resulting term is called a portmanteau.
The term was minted in the 1930’s and applied to a form of abstract art (itself an off-shoot of surrealism)--See: Arp, Klee, Miro, Gorky, et al-- which was on the one hand fanciful and at the same time suggestive of life forms. (By contrast the work of Ferdinand Leger might be called mechamorphic –my coinage---referring to machine and concrete forms that are put together in irregular ways).
What does this have to do with our present subject? Discernible in the disks are sinuous life-like forms, sometimes figural, sometimes serpentine, sometimes avian or aquatic. At the same time, these forms are distorted, suggestive, and often writhingly animate (as in the present instance).
Were one to hazard a guess about the origins of these forms as they appear in our atmosphere, the conclusion must be that in some way they are imitative of forms we recognize here on earth, but are dream-like, contorted, compressed, and intertwined.
These images are presented as wholes, as if we were studying some life form under a microscope. Most appear organic, but in their lack of symmetry---at least as we commonly understand the term---they resemble nothing definite in the natural world. They are bio-morphic, not biological.
Whatever created them seem to be playing on the familiar-terrestrial, but distorting it in some way that feels alien. To say nothing of their apparitional status that associates them with visitations, UFO’s.
Crazy Jane
I like overhearing strangers when they glimpse one of the visitations.
I was walking across Brooklyn Bridge just last week, and there it was. An infectious astonishment washed over the walkers who became, instantly, gawkers.
There were shouts and fingers pointed. I saw a grown man cry, and an old woman laugh. Like me. The sheer joy of something inexplicable interrupting the ordinary. How we hunger for mystery. I do. Just when I thought nothing could distract me from climate change---euphemism, Professor---Ukraine, politics, etc etc and so forth,---something out of the blue that chases the blues away.
Tra la tra ka-kloo,ka-lay, I chortled in my glee. Wonderland.
--Jonathan Reeve Price and Peter Asher Pitzele
About Jonathan
LinkTree: https://linktr.ee/jonathanreeveprice
MuseumZero site: www.museumzero.art
Twitter: http://twitter.com/JonathanRPrice
Instagram:
Pinterest:
Facebook:
Linked In:
Amazon Author Page:
Goodreads:
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/41600924.Jonathan_Price
About Peter
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/peter.pitzele/
Scripture Windows: Toward a Practice of Bibliodrama, with Susan Pitzele
Our Fathers' Wells: A Personal Encounter With the Myths of Genesis
August 23, 2023
Visitation On a Maine Summer Day
Observations
Jonathan:
Goldenrod and Queen Anne's Lace,the late summer blooms, and Maine wateras warm as it will get, that's whenthe visitation landed behind the trees,turned transparent, and in a momentfled.
And who was watching, silhouettedagainst the meadow? What head had second sight? Do we perceive it now?Or imagine? Or reject it whole?
Thus our doubts erasethe mystery.
The Professor:
Duration, from the Latin durus meaning hard or steadfast. From which we get endure, as to undergo a hard (painful) condition, and unendurable : hard as in difficult to the point of torment or even madness.
The commentator tells us this visitation “in a moment fled.” Its duration was brief. But for some who see these fleeting “visitations” it’s the very brevity of their duration that can be hard, the difficulty of too little rather than too much. This one remained long enough to turn transparent, as if to show its mutability. So, it teased us into thinking they may be like chameleons, alive. Do they rotate, spin on an axis, and what is their weight and thickness, their actual size? We see them as small at a distance, large up close, but we only have a single angle of perception and then they are gone. The very quality of now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t makes many people doubt their eyes. Uncertainty can become hard to bear, to be teased can be a torment.
Crazy Jane
They’re playing a game of peek-a-boo, Now you see m, don’t, then do.Trick of light or shadow? WhoCan say for certain what? Can you?
Sure, I wish they’d stay awhile,For each time they bring a smileAs if animated by some guileTo delight, to charm, to rile,
All I know, and I’ll make it snappy,Every sighting makes me happy.
--Jonathan Reeve Price and Peter Asher Pitzele
About Jonathan
LinkTree: https://linktr.ee/jonathanreeveprice
MuseumZero site: www.museumzero.art
Twitter: http://twitter.com/JonathanRPrice
Instagram:
Pinterest:
Facebook:
Linked In:
Amazon Author Page:
Goodreads:
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/41600924.Jonathan_Price
About Peter
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/peter.pitzele/
Scripture Windows: Toward a Practice of Bibliodrama, with Susan Pitzele
Our Fathers' Wells: A Personal Encounter With the Myths of Genesis
