God is a Purely Visual Goal

This essay was discovered among the personal affects of the yet to be identified "Urban Surrealist...author of the manuscript "Orange: The Diary of an Urban Surrealist."  The essay is published on this blog as a virtual annotation of the book itself.  Additional materials selected from the Urban Surrealist's personal collection will be posted here on occasion as they become available. ed.



Virtual annotations from the novel Orange: the Diary of an Urban Surrealist

More information on Orange: The Diary of an Urban Surrealist 


Part One: God is  Purely Visual Goal

God is a purely visual goal.  Meaning God is a purely symbolic idea, our visualization the infinite until now expressed usually in words.  Not unlike the concise expression of the same idea represented by the number eight drawn sideways, this "visual" notion of God permeates human consciousness as we strive to create the visual idea of the self.

The visual self is an abstraction, a picture of ourselves multiplied along the infinite continuum we imagine exists outside the boundaries of our bodies. The visual "God" is in a sense the opposite of this idea, existing in the form of an entire picture, or as the "medium" for exposition of our visualized selves. This visual self exists as a composite of our self-conscious "illustrations."  Memories that project the images and symbols of our visual self backwards, and forward in time.  But the visual God remains untouched by this interior subjectivity, instead existing merely as idea which is best characterized as "pre conceptually known."

In A Sickness Unto Death, Soren Kierkegaurd called this the "primitively organized self," what he characterized as our emotional predilection to comprehend without literally "knowing." Similarly in Mircea Eliade's Yoga a Yogin finds "Primordial Unity" as a "source of everything that wants to manifest itself." In I, Thou, Martin Buber explored the "Inborn Thou," that "instinctively expands to the universal."  All examples of an instinctual awareness of the limitless self expressed solely thought language.

Yet substitute the "visual" for literal expressions and this instinctual sense of an infinite other finds form.  The "primitively organized self" becomes a "visually organized self."  "Primordial Unity" is transformed into a "Primordial Vision." Similarly, the "Inborn Thou" is expressed as an "Inborn Picture."  This illustrates in one sense the paradox of language, but also the idea that God is language visualized.  A visual, perhaps holographic aspect of language that reflects the natural recombinant imperative of the human mind.

And as our minds are reconstituted toward the infinite visual goal, progress is measured not simply through ideation, but active construction of contexture...meaning boundaries, apportioning....

Religiosity is a process of forming boundaries on the limitless horizon of the mind, not virtual of course but liturgical. But religion is a different technology of consciousness. The "visualization" of infinity is as much about re-definition of both the boundaries and potential of the self as it is about comprehending the divine.

Arthur Kroker noted in his seminal CTHEORY interview that "the dominant form of consciousness in the world today is television (pg. 64).  Later he introduces the idea of the "televisual self"

"...Technology's great appeal is the fact that it allows you to get rid of your memories, to rid of your minds.  and in exchange it gives you in fact other memories, and many other minds and many other selves - our televisual selves...I view television now as the preliminary phase in preparing the masses of humanity for virtual reality." (pg. 64)

Thus as our visual self is engaged by a variety of technologies of consciousness, we become abstract ideas of which we are cognizant. Our visual self is duplicated and remaindered through mediums which are plausibly infinite...television, the internet...all encumbered by the screen. Thus the visual self find expression of perpetual reiteration in a continuum that is both limitless and bounded, a paradoxical state that assuages our mortal anxieties.