The Scrapbook Ritual

At this instant my desk is covered with numerous paintings, notes, scriblings, fragments of my 'geklieder' of the last ten months or so.

"'Kliederen" is a unique dutch word for making a mess with paint, it's past particle 'geklieder' is all the more remarkable a word because it contains 'gek' (mad) and lied(eren) (song(s)).

These notes and general messing around are not intended to be included in any 'artistic' production.
They were required for Cathedral investigations, notes while i was reading, meticulous investigations in the order of the pictorial line.
I do not claim any talent as a painter, don't want to have anything to do with the world of art galleries and so forth.

The Cathedral however is extremely sympathetic to amateur painting, people painting their cats and dogs and children from photographs and talking to each other at shows. My father is an amateur painter, but he's into oil-painting. I hate oil-paint, it's messy and toxic. I only use watercolors and some ink, preferably Marie's Water Colours, a very cheap set of 12 tubes made in China. I'm secretly hoping Marie will once call on me to thank me for promoting her Paint like this.

There should be some marie-ness involved in the production of Her Water Colours, no?

Some of the more elaborate paintings are covered with thick layers of boat varnish to improve their visual on screen representation when scanned. Believe it or not, hand-painted pictures covered with boat-varnish render better then without. I believe it has something to do with the scanners light rays being reflected within the varnish layer, creating a more 'natural' look and feel to the resulting pixels.It is very important that at their time of online use, pictures should be rendered on our poor screens as best as possible. Hence the boat varnish.

The ritual of pasting all these pictures and notes in an A4 size scrapbook, (actually it's just sections now, they will have to be bound manually later on) is a very important stage in processing Cathedral Garbage. The lack of Grounding of the 'running' Cathedral in materiality is here being compensated for by forcing the garbage producing machine (me) to go over its production again, reecycling it in an entirely new context. My memory is being used as a prototypical garbage processing unit. Sure, a mock-up of what would be a working set-up, but it already has some of the functionality.

This is not editing, what i'm doing i'm not choosing what goes in or not, i'm letting myself be guided by how the things turn up as i fold paper after paper and glue the things on. I have to stop regularly because the varnish gives me terrible headaches. There is a huge pile of these things to go through, i have been sloppy, running behind on processing.

I am selling all this garbage, but naturally nobody wants it.
Calling your production garbage, as well as excessive modesty, are part of the Cathedral Protocol in dealing with the outside worlds. These worlds are much larger that the Cathedral Plane, so one needs to resort to 17th century politeness protocols.

In the 17th century a large chunk of publishing resources would go into these protocols, and letters were often elaborate polite introductions to two words of actual communication.

No we haven't advanced from there, not in that respect, i don't buy that.

Making your stuff next to unsellable by deliberately mis-promoting it is another Cathedral strategy. It needs to be backed by action, like pasting it all in a selfmade book, i'd have to ask gigantic prices to avoid underselling my fellow amateur painters, so that adds to its unsellability.

However there are no strict rules, you need to balance your level of adherence to Cathedral Code with whatever your practical situation dictates. It wouldn't be fair to my family for instance if i didn't go 'n rip out anything from the Scrapbooks that anyone would be willing to pay anything substantial sum for.

The Cathedral's logic is not of scarcity but of excess. We are in the luxurious position to be doing this, you have to be considering what made, what is making this possible every inch of the way you move about. The Cathedral's logic implies a moral code through recursively returning in the instance of it's Authoring Process.

There is a filtering and dynamic adjustment going on all the time, Cathedral membranes should remain wet. If things dry out it's time to quit (cfr. Heraclitus on wet souls).

Anyway, it is amusing to be thinking that books that were once used to bring new information to wide audiences, should now be used to protect Cathedralic Garbage from the very same audiences.


Yes, sure, why ever not?