WRITINGS

Award-winning writer Djelloul Marbrook hails Franck's The Transparent Bride as "an exquisite

blueprint for evolution.... one of the most important metaphysical and philosophical meditations

to have been written in the last fifty years. A breathtaking vision."

Author Robert Sardello says of Franck's writings, "not something to simply be read through, for they are more in the nature of extremely deep contemplations that have to be felt by body-soul."

"A mastermind whose ideas are thrilling, quirky and daring."  -Lex Hubringer

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Titles available on Amazon:

The Transparent Bride: Engaging Evolution Through Conscientiously Ardent Conduct

Mantras and Musical Solutions: Imaginative Chemistry and Transformative Intent

The Art of Porosity: Freeing Experience Through Tactile Imagination

Number & Spell: Magnitude, Entities and Value With Regard to Supersensible Draw

The Holy Bodies Circuit: Votives, Colloquies & Reliquary

Drawing In The Luminous Frontier: Embracing the Foundations of Unbornness, Embodiment and Afterlife

A Book of Dances: Selected Performances 1992-2014

Exercises In Romantic Understanding

Stillness In Motion:  The Vestibular Motets

Lungs Give the Wind Direction: Dancing the Hidden Emissions of Sense

In Some Intrinsic Way Everything Bends Toward Infinity: Visual Descants, Billboards and Public Displays

As Above Inside Out Below - Projective Mythologies and Liminal Dynamics

The Painted Trout: Streamside Affinities and Uncommon Hatches

Fishing Mind, Fishing Body: Addressing the Soul of Angling

All-Nite Tackle Box

Wasque Blues and Squibnocket Stripers

The Little Firmament: Introducing Projective Mythology, A Cosmology Primer For the Upper Waldorf School

Ethers Unfastened, Ashes Aroused: Projective Cosmology and the Interior Of Substance

The Budh &Ray Art Books:

2 IN One EYE – An Anthology of Appearances and Art Actions

An Archetextural Digest – Artifactual Maneuvers and Indefinite Art

Magical Agreements – Art Incidences & Intrasensory Conduct

Absorbing Directions – Aesthetic Traction & Vivifactions

New Bodies – Configuring Attitude To Articulate Artifact

The Substance Of Feeling: The Aptitude For Art Implicit In World Conception

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        excerpt from The Transparent Bride:

                                          Of Reflection

In the toilet of Venus is a dove bearing no resemblance to a winged creature.  If sometime a seraph is portrayed in symbolic form, what happens when the eternal fluctuates?  Or when the Unseen coalesces becoming suddenly visible? If through seeing one discovers the inner meaning of reflected physiognomy, do we step into the same image twice?  Of our own soul’s features can it be said that we see double? What is a thing reflected?

Ask Teresa of Avila while her body, impetuous and vibrant, shudders in ecstasy.  Or go ask Alice when she’s ten feet tall.  In fog, a figure moves in mist as if a drop trying to create a lens.  Enveloped from the periphery, light becomes intimate within the grays of boundary.  Like a mouthful with nothing inside save the precious space of open lips.  Spit moves the tongue, as surface to wonder.

Angels are bewildered by optics. Seraphim are refracted by speculums.  By an undercoating of silver beneath glass mirrors are made.  In a quiet moment, with a full basin and adequate light, shaving the face illumines the revelations of physiognomy. What’s sharpest is most noticed:  the razor’s edge, the figure of the face separate from its connective fascia, the vapor-laden glass above the water.  Facing the soul with a blade can amount to fine art.

In Savonarola’s Speculum Physiognomie we can read how the starry heavens modify men’s character and appearance.  The soul is obsessed with the necessity of the body and full of misgivings when ruled according to its limitations.  Unlike those who are mad because they fear their shadow, some rejoice at the slightest luster.  Then there is the story of a man who “heard” sad music whenever he saw anyone wearing eyeglasses. Sad music, he must have mused, bends the Muse in a minor key.  Did he believe bespectacled persons diminish the brightness of their tonality?  Or, was the distance of another’s cornea to a manufactured lens too great an abyss for the fellow’s poor heart?

The famous clock in Prague, with its celestial procession and progression of saints, hosts a skeleton opposite several figures. One of them has a moneybag while another holds a mirror. The weight of money contrasts the diaphanous palette of the looking glass. The former is symbolic of what lives in the past, the weight of history and all that has been accumulated. The latter is representational due to its reflective capacity inviting the future.  The mirror is flooded by direct light, driving its content away from the source.  With all flesh evaporated, the skeleton simply floats. Skeletons are immortal but they have no life for the future.  They are but dry metaphors for the inevitable yet-to-be.

Yet we continue believing in metaphors of the seen, of the unseen, of the not-ever-to-be-seen. Of the marble slabs on the outer walls of the treasury of St. Mark’s in Venice we find in relief peacocks, assorted field creatures, gryphons, dragons and so on. The Venetians were indeed bewitched by the splendor of Byzantium’s imagination.  Not so much the mythological creatures but the intricate geometric traceries on the walls and floors were the emblems of mind in the acts of those artists.  Life is simulated, otherwise it wouldn’t be life.

When the philosopher, David Hume, asks in his appeal for empiricism for us simply “take a look,” he never meant, to be sure, to include a world of gryphons, dragons and succubi.  However, when Goethe asks us to observe the phenomenon of edge-spectra, most of us become a bit curious, ready to seek a prism to encounter blues and yellows in polarity.  Disintegration and magic have always been ornery.

Calla lilies have a thick pollen-laden stamen thrusting through a creamy vortex.  The yellow of pollens soothingly has no questions, no reflections.  Yellow juts back toward the origin of sight not so much seeking rest as itself being a form of rest.  On the other hand, gray lead invites the history of inquiry.  It is the drabbest of metals, mysteriously bendable, occult as it is non-precious.  No wonder the spagyrics manipulated it, postulated it as a cousin to the prima materia and felt that within its depths, if duly uncovered, lies the Holy Ghost.  Lead is the color of the true God’s hair.

In the Secret of the Golden Flower (the Chinese Hui Ming Ching) it is said that the “shapes formed by the spirit-fire are only empty colors and forms.”  Shapes as empty colors beg the question of colors.  Are they clothing for shape?  Or perhaps, more aptly, afterimages in the after-burn of archetypal sight?  To posit color as a secondary quality is akin to proclaiming vision dead.  But, after all, vision is dead.  Sight is to the seen as the corpse to vanity.

In the stages of metamorphosis the eyes can be traced as protrusions of the brains.  Like precious, viscous stones they are worn as ornaments set precisely into the skull.  The eyes themselves do not speak.  Cannot speak.  They pose silent, regal, clothed in nakedness.  But look at every twitch of the surrounding tissue and its glances!  The robes of the eyes reflect that which skin and sinew animate, insinuate, predicating the transit between personality and “inner life,” optics and physics.  The eyes are dressed in the world’s clothing, borrowed from the force of Athena and blown as glass. 

On the day of his discharge from the University Clinic for Nervous Diseases in Leipzig, Daniel Paul Schreber imagined he had lost thirty or forty pounds, however the scales showed that he had actually gained four pounds.  But after leaving in good health, eight years later, in 1893, he returned to the clinic.  His symptoms of anorexia and paranoid dementia were again waxing.  In the years up to his death, Schreber had to be force-fed.  He believed that he no longer had a stomach and that his bowels had disappeared.

Spheres, tears, liquid wavelets accept the play of light on their surface while secreting horizons thrown back upon themselves.  Water is an archetypal element.  Some have maintained, the archetypal element.  But really, is water elementary?  Or is it a refraction of that which condensates somewhere between flame and hard rock?  By the flow of Gaia’s blood, the clear bosom of Selene, water is the primary wet, a damp soaked something, a remembrance of everything, a draught of the numinous.  The waters of life, the Essene Jesus tells us, may cleanse us through the mouth, the bowels and the spirit.  It is itself the primordial surfactant.  No wonder leading detergents are sold under the brand names such as Joy or Cheer.

Or Tide.

Due to the attractive force of the moon as the earth rotates, each section of the watery envelope, which is the sea, at some point comes in line with the moon’s pull.  In consequence, a pulsing is begun which starts where the water is deepest and where there is least land to interfere. This place is actually somewhere in the southwest Pacific.  From there, the pulse or tide travels outwards west toward the Indian Ocean then northward to the Atlantic and upward into the Arctic Seas.  Venus was said to be born in the foam of the sea’s waves, in the change of tides.  Dropping a pebble in a pond and watching the expansions of circles is a sure way to catch the blue of her eye.  Her pupil is the transparent dimpling the surface; the concentrated rings describe her iris.  It is no wonder Mars is a red planet: All irony is reflection.

The moon, ironical in itself, is born of reflection. Indeed, the disassembly of its imagery is the basis for the integration of what becomes sensible in reflected form.  To wit, what you at first see you have yet to meet and what you are to meet is that which you unwittingly already see.  And for all that, doves were earlier mentioned.  Often associated with the soaring spirit, the dove often typifies the form of the Parakletos, Greek for intercessor, intermediary, literally one who may call or invoke. The transparent member of the Holy Trinity. In the dove’s league too is Hermes, bearer of news, messages, visions, and often a variety of eructations issuing forth; like primary combustions releasing a subtle matter from the cosmos.  No wonder it’s at Whitsun that the holy dove fires away at the crowns of the Apostles.  Fire, fire heads on fire!  That’s the message.  Afterwards, the Apostles appear released from their pathos, wimps no more, each renewing the light of the body and the origin of words.  Nakedly they follow the naked Christ who seems to have exploded his own molecular coherence.

The moon is a queer thing, hermetic in its cyclic dressing and undressing.  We say the “dark side” of the moon, the hidden surface, the imagined hidden surface saturated with the bulk of its mystery.  Luna.  Her name alone causes us to slither a tongue on the upper palate ending with an ever-so-soft throaty exhale.  Among the many lunar phenomena, babies seem to drop from uteri in greater numbers during the fuller phases of the moon.  Is there a push upon their brains and skulls plopping them into the earthy, chthonic realm?

The alchemists declare that silver is the metal of the moon.  One can imagine that in every mirror is a moon, in every brain a mirror, in every mirror a push back into the face of who is looking. In the so-called “letters of correspondence,” medieval minds identified the brain as the corresponding organ to the moon. Did they understand the moon’s reflective nature as being analogous to that of heady evocation?  What actually would the brain reflect?  Like the head straining to remember, does the moon in its pregnancy strain to push out the contents of the uterus? 

“You can bend it” is how a popular toy’s malleable nature is advertised.  “Bend over” the physician commands before examining the prostate.  “Hi, I’m Ben Dover” many a high school sophomore cajoled, or felt he were cajoling, an attractive schoolgirl unaware of the innuendo.  When the same schoolboy “flashes a moon” he does so bent over.  Little does he reflect that to reflect means “to bend” and what he reflects is of little credit to his expression.  His animadversions are benign but nevertheless sit like a hemorrhoid, dangled.

Ah, to ponder the buttocks!  Rising, jiggling, listing in the spaces of our dreams and longing.  For all that bisected lunation there swells the bum, the hindmost delight.  It acts like a mirror reflecting our desire back to us.  Flaubert, an expert on the moon and desire has his character Salammbô, while contemplating the heavens, extend her arms and chant to the moon:

“O, Rabetna!  Baalet!  Tanit!... Anaites!

Astarte!  Derceto!  Astoreth!  Mylitta!  Athara!

Elissa!  Tiratha!... By the hidden

symbols... by the resounding tindrels...

by the furrows of earth.. by the eternal

silence... by the everlasting fruit fullness...

Ruler of the shadowy sea, and of the azure

shore, O Queen of all watery things, hail!”

after which she sways dropping down in prostration.  Flaubert means for us to imagine her rump, high and heaving.  Young, pure, perfume laden, exquisite feeling rises from her depths:

“... like hot flushes, heavier than the

vapors arising from a volcano – voices call

to me; a fiery globe arises in my breast;

it suffocates me.  I seem about to die, when

extending to my very feet – thrills every

atom of my being – it is a caress which

envelopes me – I feel myself crushed as if

a god spread himself over and above me.  Oh!

I long to lose myself in the night mists – in

the ripple of the fountains, in the sap of

trees, to leave my body, to be but a breath

of air – a ray of light and glide through

space unto thee, O Mother!”

•  •  •  •

Reflection thus enters the sublime. For now we must abstract from its spell.  We must fix a cube around our rational emanations lest they too strongly unfasten from their anchor.  The powers of myosis are called upon to gather our periphery.  Though a fiery globe rises in our breast, we draw a solid imagination around it to obstruct the reflux and dampen the chances of frenzied discharge.  We pray for a center and beseech long-departed martyrs to uphold us.  Quietly we regain our breath and steady our heartbeat.  Glare is once again dismissed as obstructive, colors once again are predicated as attributes, childbirth as fact and function. Friends with eyeglasses are embraced; we dare not think about it.  Water is easily poured into a tumbler then brought to the mouth.  Invoking the buttocks and joking about genitalia bow to prayer and injunctions of virgin saints.  Effortlessly, without worry, the moon sets for both poets and sailors.  Against reflection, the business of looking into mirrors grows ever more unnoticed and more commonplace.  This, all this, notwithstanding an empty orb, a skeleton bearing no resemblance to a bony thing, watching.

•

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Art Books by Budh &Ray

2 IN One EYE – An Anthology of Appearances and Art Actions

For the artists Budh &Ray, the formality between object and concept, subject and percept, detonates into a meteoric burst of conflations, freewheeling assemblages and delicate subterfuge. With minimal filtering between the folds of hypnagogia and tactile imagination, their pageant of synesthetic sensibility and visceral semiotics soars on visions of luck and grandeur. Like the effects of surreal interpolation—only all too real—everyday contexts in 2 IN One EYE are morphed into “baffling” or “released” depending on the perspective. Here is the first of the Budh &Ray art books introducing their assemblages, performance art and texts.

An Archetextural Digest – Artifactual Maneuvers and Indefinite Art

From a heightened synesthetic aptitude nurturing the founding of a restaurant-music venue to a mystical approach to formal logic and sensual contact... from a hands-on hands-off relationship with endless surface-play and purposefully uncompleted projects to curating Imagination itself... An Archetextural Digest presents more than just a sampler of Budh &Ray's artwork. Here we meet textural sensibilities blown from mystery and ideality as they're being tactically seduced into lyricism and artifact. All from their thoroughly flexible nose for art.

Magical Agreements – Art Incidences & Intrasensory Conduct

In this gallery of incidences and conduct the artists Budh &Ray engage awakened sleep, the not-yet of appearances, transpersonal glow and sources of reverie… shaping resonances between objects and color, words and silence, intelligence and beneficence. Heedless of appearing sophomoric while addressing perspectives regarding predication and method, Budh &Ray here circumscribe “art” and its reincarnations, position ideation by way of surprise, explore the ignition of inner tremble... through the beheld surface.

 

Absorbing Directions – Aesthetic Traction & Vivifactions

 

Positioning through medium-grade synesthesia and spirited self-improvisation, Budh &Ray endeavor to stir intention with aesthetic traction; to present their aspirations thru supernal orientations. Their work, initiated especially through touch and smell, embraces the “outside” of things by way of inward appointments: Left and Right emanate their limbic resonance; Up and Down configure their vertical travels; Forward and Back, the hidden geometries. From the frontiers of ardor, the cosmos’ own coordinates provide their means for dreaming inside of things. Here, amplifying their exceptional attitude, they portray a horizon of intimacies, aiming to vivify the Unseen

New Bodies – Configuring Attitude To Articulate Artifact

Finding that they’ve been dreaming inside one another, Budh&Ray’s inner-inner gathers a whirl of excitement. The moisture is perfect, the glow exudes a fragrant prospect. They awaken in the course of donning their surface, presenting a standing wave approaching the outside.  Seeing that mythic is as mythic does, they hatch themselves out of the egg, a feat of atmospheric spark. Inside-out, they climb into the unimpossible. Attitude diffusing, nosing about, a flexible proposal spawns a primal moment. At this point, the world offers itself as the seeming it elects for them to unseem. “It all has to do with how it can be done,” Budh&Ray muse, as their perception blossoms a festival

 

The Substance Of Feeling: The Aptitude For Art Implicit In World Conception

The very suggestion of image surfaces intimacies between textural buoyancy and bearing, density and deep fixity. With a sensitivity sparking a backdrop of impressions, a yet-to-open eye feeds the vision of it all, sending shivers into an array of resplendent feeling. Receptivity and all its underlay dresses to aspire. In this moment, Budh &Ray cross the threshold into objects. They soon fathom how this is attitude become substance for fashioning the world. This is aptitude demonstrating a way to begin. The Substance Of Feeling gathers once again a stirring and inspirited display of Budh &Ray's performance art, assemblages, text, paintings and projections.