About
Crossing the Plumb Line
The cross is older than belief in it and survives belief in it. These pieces are written in that aftermath.
The organizing architecture is borrowed from Milton, who published Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes together in 1671, set in tension and left unresolved. Crossing the Plumb Line attempts the same move at smaller scale: to build an argument and then hold it open rather than close it.
Two kinds of work sit here. The first is structural. It begins with the cross and the serpent as the two ends of a single axis, physical extension against gravity, and follows that figure as it recurs at every scale: in the body, a mirror built on a single upright spine; in the way scripture organizes its sentences and its whole canon around an unmatched center; in the shape hung at the center of the faith. The structure is real, and most of it is visible without believing anything, which is part of what it means to say the cross is older than belief in it. The method is to build that structure as far as it will go and then to be honest about what it cannot settle: whether a shape this deeply fitted to us was made by us or made for us. The symbols are biblical. Whether the reason they hold is the body alone, or something the body answers to, is the question these pieces keep open rather than the answer they assert.
The second strand turns that method on Klimt. The blog contains a unified iconographic reading of his mature corpus. Published scholarship treats Love, The Kiss, the Beethoven Frieze, and the Stoclet program as separate works in a Symbolist-decorative idiom. This reading treats them as one cruciform protoevangelium argument staged at four scales, from the 1895 canvas through the architectural deployments to the consummated form. The paintings are not offered as proof of the framework. They are what the framework, once built, lets a reader see.
This project is not written as institutional art history. It is a structural and iconographic reading by an outsider to the academy. The claim is straightforward: Klimt’s major symbolic works are more unified, more Christian, more violent, and more theologically organized than their decorative reception has allowed.
B.A. Claremont McKenna College, senior thesis on Milton’s Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes. University of Arizona J.D. Private practice attorney 25+ years.