Disfiguring

 

Jan 5, 2026, 9:03PM

Ah-Ha! Just when I think I’ve figured it out…Not.

 

                                   yesterday's sunrise, taken with the camera’s “default” setting

Maybe moving into my 80th year I’m finally learning to look through, maybe to revalue the quick take or the disappointment, perhaps to imagine a conception possibly drawn from the other world. The “figured-out” more likely marks the activity of presumption and delusion, but rather than throwing it out, consider it as an opportunity to “disfigure.” The really important things like beauty, truth, love and the other 96 Names for God all surpass human containment. Claiming to grasp them descends into all manner of trouble; yet when problems are recognized and this brings a humbling recognition of human limitation--then  comes the chance of surrender to the beyond. And, by Grace, the Divine just might allow a whiff of the ecstatic.

same image edited to remember and imagine possibility of spring, etc

This venture beyond the bounds of cognition invites the play of imagination, and opens a free space where interpretations guess and dance with uncertainty. The figures that have ruled as unquestioned reality, as absolute right, get unmasked in  “disfiguring.” This term finds provocative elaboration in Mark C. Taylor’s Disfiguring: Art, Architecture, Religion. Taylor explores and richly illustrates with contemporary artists, also connecting with philosophy and theology, as he develops the process of finding sacred ground by breaking idols that block access to creativity and compassion. How can we engage the modern condition without sinking into despair and alienation?

same image edited for black and white setting

“Modernism’s perfection is always a ‘violated perfection’; its purity is impure from the beginning, indeed, before the beginning. Modernity is infected by an other it both refuses and cannot refuse.

One of the figures of this irrefutable other is figuration. Modernism’s disfiguring is not only an aesthetic strategy; it is, as we have seen, a moral crusade. The struggle between figuring and disfiguring is the strife between madness and civilization. Inasmuch as it re-presents sensuousness and irrationality, figuration represents the primitive, infantile, feminine, and mad that modern civilization is constructed to refuse. The refused, however, never goes away. Constituting itself in and through acts of refusal, modernity needs what it nonetheless cannot bear. The refused eternally returns to disrupt and dislocate the structures constructed to control it. 

At its height, modernism’s search for purity is violated by the eruption of surrealism. . . 

The goal of surrealism is to reclaim the rights of the imagination by releasing the strange forces that inhabit the mind. These uncanny powers constitute madness in the midst of civilization and folly at the heart of reason. By soliciting the return of the refused, surrealism attempts to subvert modernism’s repressive puritan ethic. . .

Against modernism’s preoccupation with purity, order, rules, reason, clarity, and function, surrealists set impurity, disorder, transgression, irrationality, and uselessness. Such concerns are hardly reasonable; indeed they are folly—‘les folies les plus vives.’ Forever incomprehensible in any system—be it philosophical, religious, or economic—the folly of surrealism is the ‘non-knowledge’ that Bataille associates with the ecstasy of ‘inner experience.’ If the proposition (non-knowledge lays bare) possesses a sense—appearing, then disappearing immediately thereafter—this is because it has the meaning NON-KNOWLEDGE COMMUNICATES ECSTASY.’ 

(pp. 232-233, 235 in Taylor, quoting Bataille, Inner Experience, p. 52; emphasis in original).

Perhaps reading Taylor has encouraged my play with photo editing and its application to other stuck places in views of life past, present, and future. The snapshot offers a limited perspective dependent on the camera’s default setting and the photographer’s point of view, focus, zoom…so much like the mind’s view that has its own default settings, often unexamined, that control and limit understanding, action, and love for others as well as for self. So let's figure, dis-figure, re-fuse, play on...