ultimate reality
{ this is an art review i wrote in 2006 for CATATAC magazine }
Title
Ultimate Reality (Dark Matter Zero)
Essay
-you might even say, ‘hyper-rational,’ over-analyzed, antiseptic generalizations are the foot-stones we have both willing and unwillingly laid beneath us, but “beneath the paving stones, the beach.”
An Ultimate Reality is not out of reach. It is nearer now then ever before. It is phosphorus tapping beneath our fingertips, but phosphorus glows brightest only just before it dies.
ULTIMATE REALITY by JIMMY JOE ROCHE
- is vertically symmetrical resembling/imitating our own physiology. Burning, glaring, beaming lights-music battling and invasive.
The line of symmetry down the center is the most drastic and intense as it is almost impossible for one to focus their attention anywhere else, but it is this space which lacks content entirely. Like the space bar on a keyboard, it is void. Without this void there would be no intelligible focus, and with no intelligible focus, nothing but trembling, desperate inertia; the viewer would be left isolated, dismissed, and literally left staring into an abyss.
What Ultimate Reality lacks is sentimentality or nostalgia for a hypothetical magic/mythic past that has been alienated over centuries of psycho-spiritual neglect. Ultimate Reality is an exoticization of a magic/mythic past without future-like watching a drama unfold hundreds of miles away through a kaleidoscopic telescope, the narrative vaporizes into omniscience and any connection to an actual (or imagined/Hollywood) event is improbable.
But the search for meaning in the attempt to see/k Ultimate Reality is comical, dumbfounding, ineffably vacant of capacity, if not totally retarded, inbred, insane. Ultimate Reality is not familiar, warm or comfortable. The result of viewing Ultimate Reality is isolation. The focus: the genius is absence, dark matter, the unquantifiable space that lies in the center of the screen, the center of human being.
Hollywood is the Eden of iconographic production. Arnold Schwarzenegger, as an actor (and similarly as a politician) mutates human experience into a single icon: an intelligible understanding. He is good. He is bad. He is warrior. He is demon. These characters are brought to the level of an emotional/psychological singularity where the viewer has full grasp of the icon’s history and intentions. Ultimate Reality is a kaledoscopic translation or presentation of these roles. The viewer can no longer quantify full meaning from the serial batch of icons being projected, overlapped, interlaced, spliced and reflected before them. The conventional rug is being pulled from beneath them and they are sent soaring into an abyss of abject meaning where the only locatable singularity is themselves.
Imagine that Ultimate Reality is a tower and at the apex of the tower there is a point. Mathematically the Point is an interesting subject to extrapolate psychological metaphors from. It is at once dense, singular, and vast, unknowable. It is of paradoxical contemplation. Now imagine ascending, regressing, inverting, exploding toward the apex of the tower. As you approach the infinite/finite point, its expansive singularity becomes more clear (this is good, you are approaching your aesthetic being) but this clarity also brings to your intelligence the complicated lace-work that is Ultimate Reality which, from a distance, appears to be simple in form. In this way the journey and the destination are one and the same: as you approach clarity things get more complicated.
Clarity, singularity, ULTIMATEREALITY, does not lie outside of the individual; it can not be grasped with hands or meditation (meditation-attempts to use the mind as a hand, reaching for transcendental truths; but the hand is an availing and unavailing organ, it makes what it can not truly grasp.) Clarity, singularity, ULTIMATEREALITY, can be reached by unmediated recognition of the self, the aesthetic, at every individual core which lies dormant until investigated like a wave particle in quantum mechanics; the only way to tell if it is there is to look at it - it only exists because you see it exist.
If we imagine that somehow there is an Ultimate Reality, is it a tower or a pit?
A line or a cube?
Is it is it or is it is not?
Is is is is is is is is?
If we imagine that somehow there is an Ultimate Reality that Wii are out of touch with, then my hypothesis is that it is vast, it is dense, and it is always present. The inability to live in the moment is what partially defines Existentialism. If we imagine that somehow there is an Ultimate Reality it is an instance, an eternity, that is accessible by individuation only - inspecting yourself so intensely that you lose sense of time. It is anti-being.
You see, I am nothing, I fill the room.
