The Six-winged Seraph
THE SIX-WINGED SERAPH: A NOVELLA
ABSTRACT
Part and parcel of the project “Not-I/Thou: The Other Subject of Art & Architecture,” the novella traces six months of travel in Europe, in 2013, in pursuit of the alliances and experiences intrinsic to the overall multimedia project (traveling exhibitions/multiple publications) surveying the wreckage of late-modern, neoliberal global culture — or, Capitalist End Times.
Divided into three sections, entitled “Northwest Wales,” “Northwest Croatia,” and “Northwest Greece,” the tale (somewhere in-between a novella and an anti-memoir) involves the peregrinations of Brother X, a self-styled mendicant-scholar in pursuit of what he calls the Immemorial. Derived from his somewhat ad hoc or oblique studies of “Franciscanism” (a study conducted on the fly, discursively and non-discursively, and through the archaeology of modern subjectivity), the novella/anti-memoir ultimately surveys the means to extract the dynamic and signature principles (versus the rules) of late-Medieval monasticism as they reside in forms of present-day individualism (subjective autonomy) in alliance with collective (direct) action — political, cultural, and otherwise.
The three idylls cover both a lyrical and artistic interpretive relationship to Nature and the Real, plus the surrationalist excess given to all encounters…
