Moira

While we are discussing synchronicity, I should report another example in my own case of the retrospective loops and repetitions of time, an effect associated with fate, destiny, meaning. Perhaps part of what our inquiry is about is how one life and career more or less concluding offers lessons or paradigms from which younger generations might learn, at least to notice the kinds of patterns that might operate in their own projects. The question is how knowing such models in advance could be useful for directing one's own choices.  

Daybreak, 130

  I will discuss my recent remake of mystory in a separate thread. It updates Noon Star, itself a remake of the original Derrida at the Little Big Horn. In the remake I discovered the primary gesture unifying my Image of Wide Scope (IOWS) (terms and methods to be unpacked later). The gesture is the throw (throw down), blow, stroke, cut, all gathered in the term coup (in both its French and English usage). Researching coup, I tracked down Nietzsche’s “Iron hand of necessity shaking the dice box of chance” aphorism, to arrive at Aphorism 130 in Dawn of Day (Daybreak), the full text providing context for the gesture: his example of hazard or chance world interrupting a world of intentions or purpose is a scene of a slate tile falling from a roof to crush one’s plan (one’s life).  

Moira (1969)

To discover this context produced an epiphany, revealing a relation with a large oil painting made during graduate school, 1969, one of the few paintings I ever made. The scene represented in my painting from 1969 was exactly what Nietzsche described, but substituting a flower pot for the slate, inspired at the time by a news story of a man in the city killed this way.  Nietzsche identifies it with Greek Moira, which conducts to Derrida’s op writing, moirae effect of deconstruction as solicitation or shaking of concepts to expose their foundations (discussed in my book, Applied Grammatology, 1985). Derrida's usage referred more directly to Mallarmé's famous Symbolist poem, "Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard," (more later). The throw of dice itself figures the chance and luck dynamics of the "world" we are constructing. Thus I now have a title for this painting (Moira). The mystery is why I enshrined this scene, some intuition moved me to select it out of the endless feed of daily news reports. 

  A related mystery, another intuition, was the number 17 on the city bus in the scene. Why "17"? I always assumed the number was arbitrarily chosen. Then in researching the star icon as the IOWS in Noon Star, I learned that the Tarot Star card in the Major Arcana is number 17. The Surrealist Andre Bréton even devoted a book to this card.

  Before I knew all these details, I used Moira as the cover image for the collection of essays, Electracy (2015).