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In an unprecedented scientific discovery, researchers have now verified that the black hole at the center of our galaxy is acting as an intense energy accelerator.

Cosmic rays and high energy particles are continuously bombarding the earth, electrically charging our atmosphere, reacting with the electromagnetic fields surrounding the earth. Scientists have been looking for the primary source of this accelerated energy for decades, and the new age community has ascribed evolutionary significance to these energies, pointing to 2012 as a key moment when we can have full and direct access to this energy.

To scientists and spiritualists alike, there is deep curiosity about what is happening at the innermost reaches of our galaxy.

In an unprecedented scientific discovery, researchers have now verified that the black hole at the center of our galaxy is acting as an intense energy accelerator. The H.E.S.S. (High Energy Steroscopic System) Observatory in Namibia, Africa is run by an international collaborative team made up of 42 institutions in 12 countries, and has or decades been mapping the very-high-energy gamma rays emitted from the center of our universe.

“A detailed analysis of the latest H.E.S.S. data, published on 16th March 2016 in Nature, reveals for the first time a source of this cosmic radiation at energies never observed before in the Milky Way: the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Galaxy, likely to accelerate cosmic rays to energies 100 times larger than those achieved at the largest terrestrial particle accelerator, the LHC at CERN.” [Source]

A new mapping of these phenomenon identifies a relatively small concentration of super high energy gamma rays focused at the very center of the Milky Way, pointing to a link between energy acceleration and several key objects found in this region.

“Somewhere within the central 33 light years of the Milky Way there is an astrophysical source capable of accelerating protons to energies of about one petaelectronvolt, continuously for at least 1,000 years”, says Emmanuel Moulin (CEA, Saclay). [Source]

The evidence now indicate a massive black hole at the galactic center, known as Sgr A*.

The centre of our galaxy is home to many objects capable of producing cosmic rays of high energy, including, in particular, a supernova remnant, a pulsar wind nebula, and a compact cluster of massive stars. However, “the supermassive black hole located at the centre of the Galaxy, called Sgr A*, is the most plausible source of the PeV protons”, says Felix Aharonian (MPIK, Heidelberg and DIAS, Dublin), adding that, “several possible acceleration regions can be considered, either in the immediate vicinity of the black hole, or further away, where a fraction of the material falling into the black hole is ejected back into the environment, thereby initiating the acceleration of particles”.  [Source]

Cosmic Energy and Human Consciousness

Many thinkers and spiritualists have attributed significant meaning to the cosmic radiation emanating from the center of our galaxy, often ascribing the evolution of human consciousnessto the earth’s temporal relationship to the source of these energies. To many, the year 2012 was supposed to mark a turning point for humanity, as the earth was to begin moving closer to the galactic center, increasing our proximity and openness to cosmic radiation that would nourish consciousness and push us toward evolution.

“The Earth is leading the ascension of mankind. And she made her ascension on the 12-12-12 date. She is now positioned in such a way that she is drawing direct information from the Central Sun. Without such a perfectly orchestrated astronomical repositioning, universal information would remain restricted to the linear reality that currently exists.

On December 21, we suddenly gained access to all points within the Universe. This has automatically opened our world to the intelligence and information that has been present on these other worlds all along. It has opened the doorways to our infinite potential.” [Source]

While not exactly scientific, this viewpoint does compel the imagination to wonder what does lie at the center of our galaxy, and what is the central driving force of the intense radiation coming from? And most importantly, how does this information affect human consciousness?

New research by British scientists at the Royal London Hospital shows that sodium bicarbonate can dramatically slow the progress of chronic kidney

Sodium bicarbonate is not only an excellent agent for natural chemotherapy, bringing as it does higher O2 levels through increased alkalinity to the cells, it is also one of the most basic medicines we have for kidney disease. New research by British scientists at the Royal London Hospital shows that sodium bicarbonate can dramatically slow the progress of chronic kidney disease.[1] We don’t need a thousand years of tests to understand something as simple as water and it is quite the same with bicarbonate, which is always present in the best drinking waters.

Bicarbonate acts to stimulate the ATPase by acting directly on it.[2]

The simple household product used for baking, cleaning, bee stings, treating asthma, cancer and acid indigestion is so effective in treating kidney disease that it prevents patients from having to be put on kidney machines. The findings have been published in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology. Bicarbonate is a truly strong universal concentrated nutritional medicine that works effectively in many clinical situations that we would not normally think of. It is a prime emergency room and intensive care medicine that can save a person’s life in a heartbeat and it is also a supermarket item that you can take right off the shelf and use for more things than one can imagine – including diaper rash.

Dr. SK Hariachar, a nephrologist who oversees the Renal Hypertension Unit in Tampa Florida stated, upon seeing the research on bicarbonate and kidney disease, “I am glad to see confirmation of what we have known for so long.  I have been treating my patients with bicarbonate for many years in attempts to delay the need for dialysis, and now we finally have a legitimate study to back us up. Not only that, we have the added information that some people already on dialysis can reverse their condition with the use of sodium bicarbonate”.

John, a dialysis technician at the same center as Dr. Hariachar, who used to be on dialysis himself for 2 years as a result of kidney failure, had his kidneys miraculously start functioning to the point where dialysis was no longer needed. He states that he was prescribed oral doses of sodium bicarbonate throughout his treatment, and still takes it daily to prevent recurrences of kidney failure. Dr. Hariachar maintains though, that not everyone will be helped by taking bicarbonate. He says that those patients who have difficulty excreting acids, even with dialysis using a bicarbonate dialysate bath, that, “oral bicarbonate makes all the difference.”

Kidneys Produce Bicarbonate

The exocrine section of the pancreas has been greatly ignored in the treatment of diabetes even though its impairment is a well documented condition. The pancreas is primarily responsible for the production of enzymes and bicarbonate necessary for normal digestion of food. Bicarbonate is so important for protecting the kidneys that even the kidneys get into the act of producing bicarbonate and now we know the common denominator between diabetes and kidney disease. When the body is hit with reductions in bicarbonate output by these two organs,’ acid conditions build and then entire body physiology begins to go south. Likewise when acid buildup outstrips these organs normal bicarbonate capacity cellular deterioration begins.

The kidneys alone produce about two hundred and fifty grams (about half a pound) of bicarbonate per day in an attempt to neutralize acid in the body.

The kidneys monitor and control the acidity or “acid-base” (pH) balance of the blood. If the blood is too acidic, the kidney makes bicarbonate to restore the bloods pH balance. If the blood is too alkaline, then the kidney excretes bicarbonate into the urine to restore the balance. Acid-base balance is the net result of two processes, first, the removal of bicarbonate subsequent to hydrogen ion production from the metabolism of dietary constituents; second, the synthesis of “new” bicarbonate by the kidney.[3]

It is considered that normal adults eating ordinary Western diets have chronic, low-grade acidosis which increases with age. This excess acid, or acidosis, is considered to contribute to many diseases and to contribute to the aging process. Acidosis occurs often when the body cannot produce enough bicarbonate ions (or other alkaline compounds) to neutralize the acids in the body formed from metabolism and drinking highly acid drinks like Coke, Pepsi and we are even seeing reports on bottled mineral water being way too acidic.

Acid-buffering by means of base supplementation is one of the major roles of dialysis. Bicarbonate concentration in the dialysate (solution containing water and chemicals (electrolytes) that passes through the artificial kidney to remove excess fluids and wastes from the blood, also called “bath.”) should be personalized in order to reach a midweek pre-dialysis serum bicarbonate concentration of 22 mmol/l.[4] Use of sodium bicarbonate in dialysate has been shown in studies to better control some metabolic aspects and to improve both treatment tolerance and patients’ life quality.Bicarbonate dialysis, unlike acetate-free biofiltration, triggers mediators of inflammation and apoptosis.[5]

One of the main reasons we become acid is from over-consumption of protein. Eating meat and dairy products may increase the risk of prostate cancer, research suggests.[6] We would find the same for breast and other cancers as well. Conversely mineral deficiencies are another reason and when you combine high protein intake with decreasing intake of minerals you have a disease in the making through lowering of pH into highly acidic conditions. When protein breaks down in our bodies they break into strong acids.

Unless a treatment actually removes acid toxins from the body and increases oxygen, water, and nutrients most medical interventions come to naught.

These acids must be excreted by the kidneys because they contain sulfur, phosphorus or nitrogen which cannot break down into water and carbon dioxide to be eliminated as the weak acids are. In their passage through the kidneys these strong acids must take a basic mineral with them because in this way they are converted into their neutral salts and don’t burn the kidneys on their way out. This would happen if these acids were excreted in their free acid form.

Substituting a sodium bicarbonate solution for saline infusion prior to administration of radiocontrast material seems to reduce the incidence of nephropathy.[7]- Dr. Thomas P. Kennedy
American Medical Association

Bicarbonate ions neutralize the acid conditions required for chronic inflammatory reactions. Hence, sodium bicarbonate is of benefit in the treatment of a range of chronic inflammatory and autoimmune diseases. Sodium bicarbonate is a well studied and used medicine with known effects. Sodium bicarbonate is effective in treating poisonings or overdoses from many chemicals and pharmaceutical drugs by negating their cardiotoxic and neurotoxic effects.[8] It is the main reason it is used by orthodox oncology – to mitigate the highly toxic effects of chemotherapy.

Sodium bicarbonate possesses the property of absorbing heavy metals, dioxins and furans. Comparison of cancer tissue with healthy tissue from the same person shows that the cancer tissue has a much higher concentration of toxic chemicals, pesticides, etc.

Sodium bicarbonate injection is indicated in the treatment of metabolic acidosis, which may occur in severe renal disease, uncontrolled diabetes, and circulatory insufficiency due to shock or severe dehydration, extracorporeal circulation of blood, cardiac arrest and severe primary lactic acidosis. The acid/alkaline balance is one of the most overlooked aspects of medicine. In general, the American public is heavily acid, excepting vegetarians, and even their bodies have to face increasing levels of toxic exposure, which help turn the body to acidic pH conditions.

the INTELLIGENCE OF PLANTS

“Even atoms possess a certain measure of intelligence.” ~Thomas Edison

“To begin to understand the gorgeous fever that is consciousness, we must try to understand the senses and what they can tell us about the ravishing world we have the privilege to inhabit.” ~ Diane Ackerman

Michal Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and The Botany of Desire, has pointed out that for the longest time, even mentioning that plants could be intelligent was a quick way to being labeled a ‘whacko,’ but it turns out plants can learn, communicate, and even feel. They can also see, smell, and remember. This is definitely not news the biotechnology industrywants highlighted.

Do Plants Have ‘Brains’?

In an emerging field called plant neurobiology, a bit of a misnomer since plants don’t have neurons or brains, we learn that people who play music for their plants or understand that our actions can affect a plant’s nutrition, for example, are not ‘whackos’ at all.

Plants have analogue structures to our brains and neurons. They have a way of taking in information and even sharing it with other plants. Normally you need a brain to do that, but as we’re learning in our evolving understanding of consciousness – not necessarily.

Plants even ‘feel’ emotions like pain – as when a caterpillar is about to munch on its leaves – so no doubt, they know when they are about to be doused in toxic agrochemical poisons.

It is also a bit of a shocker considering that almost a million acresof the Amazon forest have been wiped out in recent years, killing all sorts of plant and animal life in the process, when you realize that trees in forests actually talk to each other. A network of mycelium mushrooms growing on the forest floor act like the Internet, providing an information superhighway to trees in forest systems. Trees share nutrients and information though this mutually beneficial relationship with a single organism.

With GMOs destroying the micro-biota and killing genetic diversity– this could mean we are literally gagging the trees, and flowers.

“The Gaian ecosystem, the self-organized system that we know as Earth, came into being with the emergence of the global bacterial community. That bacterial community still is the foundation of this world. It is Gaia. It is the interconnected network of millions of bacterial biofilms, individual bacteria, and symbiogenic, bacterially generated, complex life-forms that lies deep within the crust of the Earth (perhaps by as much as 5 kilometers), covers the entire surface of the planet, and extends at least 50 kilometers above the Earth’s surface. The Earth itself is around 4.5 billion years old but sometime in its first half to one billion years of existence bacterial life emerged.” ~Stephen Harrod Buhner, author of Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Beyond the Doors of Perception into the Dreaming of Earth

What the “powers that be” are doing to the plants is exactly what they are attempting to do to us – make a docile, information controlled, automated, robotic-like populace that is easy to control, and easy to sicken.

Only, plants are possibly even smarter than WE are.

In addition to having a sense of hearing, and taste, as well as the ability to learn and remember, feel pain, and communicate, they also sense gravity, the presence of water, and can feel when an obstruction is in the way of its root system, impeding its growth. A plant’s roots can even shift direction to try to avoid such obstacles.

Plants Learn from Experience, Why Can’t We?

Biologist Monica Gagliano from Western Australia presented research that suggested the mimosa pudica plant can learn from experience. Merely suggesting a plant could learn was so controversial that her paper was rejected by 10 scientific journalsbefore it was finally published, but the proof is there for all to see.

In addition to creating compounds that are anesthetic to us, you can put a plant ‘out’ using anesthetics traditionally used in major surgeries. They don’t have nerve cells, but they can even produce neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin. These are theneurochemicals of happiness.

Plants also even respond to our emotions. plants react to the thoughts (good or ill) of humans in close proximity and, in the case of humans familiar to them, over a great distance. She proved plants even remember information longer than bees do.

Plants have problem-solving ability, and remember stressful events, but they also exemplify an inter-connectivity with a surprisingly complex range of electrical activity and rhythms. They might even be able to predict when earthquakes are imminent.Trees may work with the earth as a dynamic body to communicate any number of important pieces of data.

The Intelligence of Plant Immunity

Taking all this into account, how can we ignore scientific work which suggests that biotech chemicals harm a plant’s immune system? (The shikimate pathway is involved with the plant’ssynthesis of certain amino acids and is adversely affected by herbicides like Round Up).

It is, after all incredibly similar to how our own immune system works.

An initial experience with insects or bacteria can help plants defend themselves better in future attacks by the same predator. So while a mustard plant might not respond the first time it encounters a hungry caterpillar, the next time it will up the concentration of defense chemicals in its system that turn its once-delicious leaves into an unsavory, toxic meal.

University of Missouri scientists call this ‘priming,’ but it is just one of many hundred plant intelligence phenomenon we are just beginning to understand. If a plant responds to vibrations would it not respond to weed-inducing mono-cropping and copious use of pesticides and herbicides?

“We can imagine applications of this where plants could be treated with sound or genetically engineered to respond to certain sounds that would be useful for agriculture,” said study author and biologist Heidi Appel.

Yet again scientists are eager to tinker with something that is already much more sophisticated than they even know.

Plants Grow in Alignment with Fibonacci Code, Divine Geometry

Furthermore, plant growth is governed by the Fibonacci sequence. This is a form of divine geometry.

The Fibonacci sequence governs the placement of leaves along a stem, ensuring that each leaf has maximum access to sunlight and rain. If you look straight down along a stem, the leaves (or branches) emerging from it will spiral such that when you count from one leaf to the one that lines up directly below it, the number of leaves between them and the number of times that group of leaves spirals around the stem will both be Fibonacci numbers. When biotech companies start meddling with this Divine plan, they alter the perfect sequencing of leaves, the perfect number of flowers that appear on a stem, and so on. The Golden Ratio becomes warped by Monsanto, Dow, Syngenta. Et al.

The double spiral that appears in all plants from cacti to pineapples to pinecones is part of the Divine plan for creation. Biotechnology is not.

The Music of Creation

Some, however, do seem to get it.

The reason plants respond to human emotions, and even harmonious vibration, such as those found in certain musical pieces, is because they are part of a larger intelligence. In the creation story of the Vishnu Purana, the first thing to manifest at the beginning of our cosmic cycle is cosmic intelligence. From this cosmic intelligence emanates the individual intelligences of all existing entities in the universe –  this means plants, too.

Elias Tempton, a grower of cannabis, plays Chopin for his plants for nearly ten hours a day. He says in comparison to plants he doesn’t play classical music for, his cannabis plants had, “thicker skins and were more turgid in their leaf structure.”

Matt Lopez, the master cultivator for Northern Lights, shares the same practice. “I constantly play music for my plants and even when I leave for the day I have music playing for them all night.” During the day, when Matt is in the growhouse, he plays everything from Johnny Cash to opera. But when he leaves for the day he leaves the marijuana plants with classical music, like Beethoven or Mozart. “I’ve read that plants respond to sound waves and vibrations, and that’s what makes them grow. It helps the plants grow faster.”

If plants are so intelligent, we owe it to ourselves to create a more hospitable environment in which they can grow.

The cosmic energies in the electromagnetic spectrum that we’ve termed cosmic rays, gamma rays, etc., are constantly drenching earth, bombarding us with their frequencies of energy and entering into our bodies and consciousness

V. Susan Ferguson, Contributor
Waking Times

The cosmic energies in the electromagnetic spectrum that we’ve termed cosmic rays, gamma rays, etc., are constantly drenching earth, bombarding us with their frequencies of energy and entering into our bodies and consciousness. Here within us, they are transformed and metaphorically ‘sacrificed‘ through the subtle mechanisms of our seven Chakras. This transformation feeds and fuels the projections of ‘appearances’ that are consequently generated as holographic realities for us to enjoy and experience on the earth plane.

Geoengineering of the earth’s ionosphere, blasting holes in it, and scattering tons of toxic metals into our atmosphere has horribly skewed our environment and caused a catastrophic state of earthly disharmony. This once perfect and delicately subtle nurturing relationship between cosmic ray waveform frequencies, which feed all life on our planet, and the primordial Cosmic Fire and the human Chakra system is now being disrupted on an industrial scale. 

What is now being received from interstellar space, the vast heavens, and digested by most humans on planet Earth is no longer what was originally intended for us. Nature exists and functions within the sacred harmonies of the eternal, traditional, metaphysical principles that are the substratum of the apparent universe. Tampering with this transmission, the Cosmic Fire, will bring inevitable catastrophe.

Disconnected as we are now from the once pure nourishing mother’s ‘milk’ of the cosmic rays, which is our sacred ‘cosmic food’, all of mankind is slowly going mad, running blindly towards omnicide and the inevitable collapse of the biosphere.

From my research in Rig Veda and the available textbooks on the ionosphere and plasma physics, such as ‘Kinetic Theory of the Inner Magnetospheric Plasma‘ by Dr. George V. Khazanov, and other texts, I’ve come to appreciate and deeply revere the awesome and subtle connection between cosmic energy and consciousness

No wonder the ancient Rishis worshipped cosmic and cosmogonic principles that were later interpreted as deities, the gods. The study of infinitely intricate complex mosaics, of conglomerates and labyrinthine tangles of interconnected wave-particles moving, dancing and pushing up against each other via temperature and velocity, is in my view, a perfect representation of God’s Infinite Mystery, the eternal creation in motion.

Taking only one example, Dr. Khazanov of the Goddard Space Flight Center, the Heliophysics Science Division, describes in ‘Collisions with Superthermal Electrons‘ [4.4.2] the transforming of ‘suprathermal’ electrons to ‘thermal’ electrons relating to the discussion of the electron component in near-earth plasma:

“Basic processes of the electron formation in the ionosphere are the ionization of neutral components of the upper atmosphere by solar radiation [solar wind, etc.]…The excess energy from the ionization process goes to ion excitation and enters into the ionospheric plasma in the form of kinetic energy of the produced electron reaching values of hundreds of electron volts… the newly born suprathermal electrons experience a series of elastic as well as inelastic collisions with the ionospheric particles and finally transform them into thermal electrons with energies of the order of tens of percent of electron volts.” – Khazanov 1979

The above is only one description of the magnificent mysterious actions taking place within our near-Earth plasma, and these exchanges of energy are occurring all around us every moment, even though most remain unaware of such illusive divine wizardry. 

Khazanov admits, “The extremely complicated structure of the kinetic equation for electrons precludes one from finding its solution not only by analytical methods, but even numerically. It is thus necessary for the analysis to make certain simplifying assumptions…”

Therefore as a basic simplification, he has given mathematical functions to suprathermal and thermal electrons in the near-Earth space plasma.

Khazanov: “Collisions cause energy losses of suprathermal electrons and their slow transition into the regions of lower energy. This process of energy losses or thermalization ends up transforming suprathermal electrons into thermal electrons.” Khazanov’s statement expressing the processes of plasma physic reminds me of Rene Guenon’s discussions regarding the ‘solidification of matter’ as the Cycles of Time descend into further density. Matter tends to degrade and eventually dissolve.

Surely there are a few of these plasma physics mathematical wizards who are in complete reverential awe of the Creator, as I am. Why have their theories, discoveries, and intricately complex equations been turned to such appalling destructive use and terrifying weaponry? Why is this technology being used to destroy?

Plasma physics is the new priestcraft of our era and these men are its priests. Our current Kali Yuga is in dissolution mode. In the ancient Rig Veda, there is one Sanskrit word RODASI for heaven and earth in the Rig Veda. The Seers knew that heaven and earth are inseparable. They “saw” the Truth, SATYA. The ancient Rishis understood the life-giving relationship, the sacred inter-connection, and essential inter-dependency between man on earth and the cosmos, meaning the spectrum of energies wandering, flying through, traversing heaven’s innumerable galaxies.

The following verse illuminates the mechanics of this Cosmic Law:

Rig Veda VIII.30.2

The thirty-three modes of cosmic energy are lauded and praised here on earth, yet in space they are deadly. Here on earth they are sacrificed, transformed for our benefit into the transmission of light waves that flow through the sense faculties.

JACKSON POLLOCK

Jackson Pollock, Echo: Number 25, 1951, enamel on canvas, 91 7/8 × 86". © The Pollock-Krasner Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

ONE HALLMARK OF GREAT ART is its ability to simultaneously command attention and confound interpretation. Work like this draws us in but ultimately frustrates our attempt to reduce the experience to anything like a definitive reading. We might call it Zeno’s paradox of meaning: The closer we get, the more numerous and splintered our frames of reference become. Jackson Pollock’s art is great, and, unsurprisingly, its interpretative terrain is marked with multiple (sometimes diametrically opposed) arguments. His work epitomizes critic Harold Rosenberg’s “action painting” thesis as much as it satisfies Clement Greenberg’s formal imperatives. It triggers Michael Fried to think through opticality while also embodying Rosalind Krauss’s theory of base materialism. Pollock’s work negates metaphor, per T. J. Clark, while at the same time broadcasting postwar American ideology, as Serge Guilbaut maintains. And all this says nothing of its impact on makers, its enormously influential modeling of novel scales and means for painting as well as new types of artistic performativity.

No wonder, then, that this formidable and demanding practice is often analyzed in limited, manageable parts. Traditionally, the paintings Pollock made in a remarkable three-year run from 1947 to 1950 have garnered the most scholarly, critical, and artistic attention. This period—the middle, and some would say apogee, of his career—contains the most obvious internal consistency, and the dripped abstractions he developed at this time are benchmarks of twentieth-century art. Neither the Surrealist-inspired paintings he made before nor the stylistically diverse works he subsequently produced have commanded as much collective scrutiny or debate. But thankfully, this has begun to change. “Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots,” a jewellike show focusing on Pollock’s 1951–53 work, on view through March 20 at the Dallas Museum of Art, is both a sign of this shift and a catalyst for fresh considerations of Pollock. Offering a penetrating investigation of the first few years of Pollock’s woefully understudied late phase, “Blind Spots” is truly singular and provides a much-needed opportunity to test received notions about late Pollock against the work itself.

Bracketed by the months immediately following his one-man show at Betty Parsons Gallery at the end of 1950 and his accidental death in August 1956, Pollock’s last phase is filled with difficult work and has proved recalcitrant to extended analysis. One reason for this is that the paintings and drawings in that period look and feel quite different from those that came immediately before. The Parsons show was a harbinger of the changes to come. In this exhibition, Pollock debuted his most ambitious and most obdurately nonreferential paintings; installation shots show a trio of oversize canvases—Autumn Rhythm: Number 30, 1950; One: Number 31, 1950; and Number 32, 1950—anchoring the exhibition. Filling the space floor to ceiling, these three monumental dripped abstractions dominated the architecture of the gallery as much as they have the artist’s subsequent critical reception. Their distinctive pictorial conflation of figure and ground, their gestural grace and raw, corporeal power, defined the terms of what we mean when we say “classic Pollock.” However, as much as these paintings embodied the full promise of the artist’s distinctive pictorial idiom, they also exhausted it. The sparest painting in that group, Number 32, 1950, shows his vernacular stripped down to its most skeletal, monochromatic fundamentals. In realizing this big, black, spidery web, Pollock reached a formal and technical degree zero. Pollock’s wife and closest viewer, artist Lee Krasner, famously said that after these works, he “couldn’t have gone further doing the same thing.”¹ “Blind Spots” picks up at this pregnant moment, assembling the largest group of late Pollocks ever presented in a museum.

In early 1951, Pollock returned to work by going back to the basics, retrenching to make a group of medium-size ink drawings. Some of these works are nonreferential, while others contain figurative elements reminiscent of his earlier work. Letters appear in some places, as a kind of cryptoscript. By restricting his palette to one or two colors and working at a smaller, more intimate scale, Pollock explored new directions in an elemental, relatively low-stakes, and even private way. The Dallas show contains a number of these drawings, and one particular pairing offers an evocative object lesson in this group of important transitional works. Two untitled sheets from 1951 are shown side by side, allowing attentive viewers to determine that these pages were originally stacked one on top of the other. Because of the exceptional absorbency of the Japanese mulberry paper Pollock used at the time, the lines and blobs of ink he drew would bleed from the top sheet down through to the one underneath. This created an image on the lower sheet that was a ghost of the first.² Historically, it has been the imagery of these drawings, and the subsequent paintings they engendered, that has seemed most important, but given the artist’s intense engagement with devising new means of imagemaking throughout his career, the technical novelties of these works mustn’t be overlooked.

In particular, the distinctly Fordist one-after-anotherness of the transfer process should be factored into any assessment of the drawings, and of the paintings that immediately followed. In these paintings, which Pollock began producing in mid-1951, the subtly but unmistakably mechanistic aspects of the works on paper are literally writ large. Filling a turkey baster with thinned commercial black enamel and wielding it like a giant fountain pen, Pollock worked on long, uncut bolts of cotton duck, making images he called “drawings on canvas.” Studio shots from Pollock’s barn that summer show rows of these so-called black pourings—several discrete images per length of cloth—within the regular matrix of standard-width canvas. They look like photographic prints hanging in a developer’s darkroom. Copying, doubles, and seriality course through the artist’s 1951 production, complicating traditional readings that prioritize the uniqueness and supposedly personal, unconscious expression of the artist’s “return to figuration.” Pushing the reproductive logic that underpins the works on paper, the paintings, with their compartmentalized images regularly placed in strips, look as if they had come off a conveyor belt: iterations from the Pollock painting machine.

To be sure, some art historians have previously found resonances with mass production in Pollock’s work, but the discussion has generally been limited to his earlier dripped abstractions. I am thinking of Krauss’s note that abstract painters’ work bears the “mark of the multiple” and Clark’s remark on its “robotic” character. William Lieberman notably characterized 1951 paintings as “cinematographic.”³ But the relationship of mechanism and mass production to late Pollock hasn’t been fully analyzed, either historically or theoretically. The late work presents an ample opportunity for new investigations in this area. In particular, the ways in which the drawings and paintings of 1951 incorporate the logic of film (if not exactly that of the “cinema”) are significant and manifold. June of that year saw Hans Namuth premiere Jackson Pollock, the famous film of the artist at work, shot at the end of 1950. This film both amplified Pollock’s role as a media star and exposed his signature technique to intense scrutiny, with a notable section shot from underneath a piece of glass on which Pollock painted. Even without taking recourse to the biographical drama surrounding the filming (in whose immediate aftermath Pollock took his first alcoholic drink in years and repeatedly, drunkenly called Namuth a “phony”), we know that the experience of being filmed made a dramatic, perhaps even traumatic, impression on Pollock.

This experience surely informs much of Pollock’s work at this time. Is it too reckless an exercise to readUntitled (Black and White Polyptych), ca. 1950—or related works such as his vertical compositions from the same time or Untitled (Red Painting 1–7), also ca. 1950—as filmic? Characterized by regular, ruler-drawn, penciled “cels” filled with abstract imagery, these paintings recall the regular spacing and specific aspect ratio of film strips.⁴ Without, strictly speaking, representing film, these “cels” have an inorganic uniformity that bespeaks the iterative character of successive frames and of mechanical reproduction more generally. Consciously or not, Pollock here echoes a visual format that was both personally vivid to him and universally recognizable. Indeed, it is tempting to see these “filmic” paintings as figuring a particular frame within which we might situate most of Pollock’s post-1950 work. By then the artist was all too aware of himself as a painter “in reproduction”—not only because his works were already being used as fashion backdrops (as in the images of the Parsons show that Cecil Beaton shot for Vogue) but also because of how his own image as paragon of postwar American individuality circulated in mass media (for example, the famous Life magazine profile asking, “Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?”). The complex relationships between mass media, the spectacle, and artistic production became paramount to American artists in the mid- to late ’50s. Pollock’s work here begins some of these investigations.

In his piece “Notes on Gesture,” Giorgio Agamben offers one way to theorize the import of what Pollock’s uniquely gestural techniques signified in the larger social field, and how Namuth’s film crystallized the attending stakes. Agamben argues that “in the cinema, a society that has lost its gestures tries at once to reclaim what it has lost and to record its loss.” Though he certainly wasn’t talking about Pollock specifically, Agamben argues for film’s unique capacity to capture gesture—which for him entails the physical means of human movement—and hold it as a repository for a society mourning some loss. It’s an oblique argument but seems painfully pertinent, as Pollock was filmed at the very moment his own gesture—so closely identified with his artistic identity that it was called his signature style—was exhausting itself. Further, Agamben links this concept of gesture with a type of reflexivity—for him, it is a mise en abyme of self-reflexiveness (“the exhibition of . . . the process of making a means visible as such”)—that resonates strongly with modernist preoccupations. In this sense, I can’t help but telescope the complex relation of gesture to the making-visible of means into the film that makes visible Pollock’s gestural means. Lastly, when Agamben further describes gesture as means without ends (“means that, as such, evade the orbit of mediality without becoming, for this reason, ends”), I see a remarkable rhyme with Greenberg’s fundamental prescription that painting should pursue its own specific means. Greenberg’s ideas were of course well known to Pollock and indeed, sometimes parroted by him.⁵ While the links between Agamben’s formulations, Greenbergian aesthetics, and Pollock’s work begs further attention, the Italian philosopher’s name-checking of Kant and his concept of “purposefulness without purpose” seems one pertinent place to start.

If Pollock’s output in 1951 found the artist wrestling with the implications of an individual, expressive subject alienated from his gestures—through their entry into mass media, their mechanistic character, or their zero-degree logic (or a combination of the three)—Pollock soon focused on these painterly means as such. This is evident, for example, in Number 5, 1951 (Elegant Lady). In this large canvas, Pollock explores a panoply of approaches to mark-making: A field of somewhat regular dots in the upper-right-hand corner creates an even, diffuse tonality, while the amoeba-like curve at the upper left shows how the dripped mark, if thick enough, can assume a figural quality. The looping teardrop forms running vertically left of center delimit shape in more traditional ways, and the rows of x’s at the bottom edge veer toward writing. Such experiments with the different ways a mark can signify and perform—the way “drawing,” “painting,” and “writing” can all converge and diverge—appear in much of Pollock’s work of the early to mid-’50s.

Significantly, Pollock had worked in an almost identical manner at another pivotal moment. In the mid-’40s, before fully pursuing the dripped technique in earnest, he made several drawings that recorded a similar experimentation with diverse pictorial languages. Coming at a comparable moment in his career—one of transition—these drawings reveal an important precedent for the kind of semiotic consciousness and formal experimentation Number 5, 1951 demonstrates. One of these early sheets bears particular mention for its striking commonalities with Number 5, 1951. An untitled 1947 drawing is filled with almost identical thickening lines, agglomerations of small loops, pictographic forms, crosshatch marks, and protozoa shapes. Not only is the sheet clearly an example of the sort of “early images coming thru” Pollock described in the “black pourings” works—indeed, Number 5, 1951 seems like a readaptation and expansion into the more public realm of painting—but it functions as an important prototype for the kinds of fundamental formal examinations that Pollock undertook at moments of great upheaval in his approach. This becomes even more compelling when we realize that Pollock revisited this particular sheet at this time. Although he had already signed and dated the work in 1947, Pollock inscribed, dated, and initialed the drawing again in 1951, demonstrating that he had recently had it in hand and perhaps that he felt it was newly relevant to his current work. It is possible that Pollock had the earlier drawing explicitly in mind while painting Number 5, 1951. Their resemblance on levels of form and operation reveals that Pollock’s strategies at related moments of artistic change held constant through his career. These kinds of operations—as opposed to specific styles or imagery—are what ultimately constitute the governing logic of Pollock’s late production. And yet this is not the prevailing story of these works in the existing literature.

The striking gesture of signing a work twice, and the internal split a reinscription implies, foreshadowed things to come. The fact is that even as Pollock explored new directions, all of his work from 1951 on was pervaded by acutely self-aware retrospection. If the artist’s “black pourings” married early imagery with novel techniques, the work that immediately followed saw him revisit the dripped abstractions that had made him notorious. These latter-day drips went on view at Sidney Janis Gallery in 1952; more than half of the works in that exhibition are gathered in Dallas. Convergence: Number 10, 1952 and Number 12, 1952are the largest and most ambitious canvases of this new group in “Blind Spots” (Blue Poles: Number 11, 1952 is the third major piece from this time but, unfortunately, didn’t travel from Australia). Convergencemost clearly shows how Pollock would rethink the terms of his prior production. Far from a nostalgic reprise, this revisitation fiercely detourned his past idioms. Comprising two formally distinct registers, the painting began as a typical black pouring, and an explicitly figurative (though overworked) image characterizes the first layer. Pollock then submerged this campaign beneath a marbled network of dripped pools of colored paint, as if to overlay a painting from 1949 on top of one from 1951. Like oil and water, these layers repel each other in formal disassociation.⁶ Convergence is an image of the present occupied by a past that, although pervasive, can never be integrated or assimilated. In this top layer of dripped paint, Pollock literally broke the spectrum into its fundamental parts, laying down the three primary colors with the two neutrals, black and white. In a return to a kind of chromatic fundamentalism, Pollock began working with unmixed and undiluted color. In contrast to both the natural, “autumnal” palette of the 1950 dripped abstractions and his more recent penchant for austere blacks, the five colors here look artificial and disjunctive. When people refer to the proverbial “colors not found in nature,” they are referring to colors that are found in a store.⁷These are manufactured colors—ready-made. In Convergence, chromatic dissonance rather than organic harmony prevails: Color is consciously presented as something given rather than controlled, as material fact rather than metaphor. If elements of the past are to reappear in the present, Convergence seems to argue, they would do so disassembled and separated, if not also ironically.

Jackson Pollock,Convergence: Number 10, 1952, oil on canvas, 7' 9 1/2" × 13'. © The Pollock-Krasner Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

The other noteworthy exhibition Pollock mounted in 1952 was a miniretrospective, organized by Greenberg. Retrospective exhibitions famously generate mixed, even contradictory feelings for living artists. On the one hand, the opportunity to survey the breadth of one’s achievement can be intensely satisfying, providing a brief respite and a moment to rest on one’s laurels. At the same time, however, it can trigger a feeling of panic—a sense that time is short in light of what one still wishes to accomplish. Judging from the works he produced—unfortunately, his public statements about the exhibition have been lost—Pollock’s retrospective experience was more motivating than celebratory.⁸ The inclusion of signal canvases from the early to mid-’40s showed him several of the paths he had forgone when embarking on the project of the dripped abstractions. Seeing eight major paintings brought together renewed Pollock’s ambition, and all the paintings he made in the following year and a half were in explicit dialogue with these older works. The retrospective provided an opportunity to formalize the process of reviewing his earlier production that began with the “black pourings” and to develop it as an operative strategy moving forward.

The paintings Pollock made in 1953 and 1954 were shown in what was to be his last solo gallery exhibition of new work. In most cases, they directly correspond to individual pieces in the retrospective, with Pollock reinhabiting earlier styles and rejuvenating former strategies. Sleeping Effort, 1953, was certainly among the earliest of the paintings executed in the wake of the retrospective, and it is virtually identical to The Key, 1946, in almost every important aspect. Roughly five by seven feet, both canvases are oblong and contain two figurative forms, one vertical and one horizontal, filling their frames. They are mirror-imaged, however: The vertical figure in The Key is at the right, while the standing “figure” in the later painting is to the left. Their compositions imply direct contact, like the peeling off of a print from an etching plate. Defined by the same painterly syntax—a kind of cloisonnist device in which a linear network of solid lines encloses areas of turbulent and contrasting color—these paintings also share a shallow, shadow-box-like pictorial depth. The two works are also identical in terms of paint handling: Areas of thick, swirling impasto, in which colors are often brushed into one another without mixing, contrast with passages in which the paint has been scraped away with a palette knife. The greatest similarity, however, is in the artist’s use of color, with both paintings built on the same tension between warm yellows and cool blues and greens. These chromatics are punctuated by high-key reds, and the lowest third of each painting is a ruddy brown. While these discrete color families are generally separated by the linear network, when colors do blend, they do so in specific, identical ways. In short, the precision with which Sleeping Effort recasts The Key is remarkable. Almost as remarkable are the correspondences between other works from the retrospective and canvases Pollock produced in 1953. Number 2, 1949, haunts Frieze, 1953–55; Number 9, 1950 is transmuted intoUnformed Figure, 1953; and elements of Totem Lesson 2, 1945, recur in Easter and the Totem and Ritual, both 1953. While none of these works are on view in “Blind Spots,” considering these pairings with that exhibition in mind makes it easier to see that there is a strict system organizing these correspondences, a system whose product is myriad repetitions and reproductions.

But perhaps Pollock’s most remarkable and significant response painting in his last years is Portrait and a Dream, 1953. One of the highlights of the Dallas Museum of Art’s collection, it anchors “Blind Spots” by filling the exhibition’s final wall. Here, Pollock not only seems to comment on his most majestic black pouring, Echo: Number 25, 1951, he also figures his retrospective process more generally. The painting can be read as picturing and embodying the strategy of critical self-examination that characterizes his late work as a whole. Portrait and a Dream is an enormous long canvas characterized by two distinct zones: an oversize dripped head “portrait” on the right, with a single eye trained leftward toward an abstract form rendered in a dexterous black poured line. The looping strokes and tight tonal areas of delicate marks of this “dream” section betray the distinctive and specific pictorial lexicon of Echo. Read narratively, the two sides of Portrait and a Dream depict a person looking at a painting, that person being the artist himself. Pollock reportedly told his therapist the image was a self-portrait, and he notably posed for a photograph before the work in a manner that explicitly draws this equivalence.⁹ But if relying on the hearsay of an analyst and the artful composition of a photographer seems the argumentative equivalent of loading the dice, the painting itself tells us the portrait is Pollock. Crossing the central divide of the canvas, a single, solitary line strays ever so tenuously from the left zone across to the right, becoming the first mark to define the “portrait” and, in so doing, showing to whom the “dream” belongs. Like an umbilical cord that genetically connects Pollock (the man) to the Pollock (the painting), this dripped line gives form to the artist’s fantasy that he still had access to that private reserve of unconscious material—those “dreams”—that fueled the early images ultimately recurring in works like Echo. But it depicts that fantasy as fantasy—a floating vision next to the dreamer’s head, like a thought bubble in a comic strip. Portrait and a Dream not only presents images of an earlier painting and the artist himself, it pictures and questions some of Pollock’s most basic assumptions about artistic identity and underscores the processes of critical revisitation and reconfiguration at the heart of his late works.

Such analytic self-consciousness diverges significantly from the popular image of Pollock as a man unconsciously “in” his work. Indeed, in retrospect, the approach characterizing Pollock’s working strategies from 1951 to 1956 seems as close to the cool analytics of an emergent neo-Dada as it does to the overblown pathos associated with AbEx. It seems incontrovertible that after 1950, Pollock, as the generation of artists who followed him would also necessarily do, began to reckon in a variety of ways with his dripped abstractions’ effect upon the course of advanced painting. And perhaps he also began to reckon with how the reception of those celebrated paintings—their mass dissemination and their connection to the image of the artist-celebrity who produced them—might affect the course of advanced art in general. Pollock after 1950 was not an artist who had “lost his stuff,” as Greenberg would aver, but one working through his own oeuvre with a studied willingness to return to the past and upend it. While a nuanced picture of this important period is just now beginning to emerge, one thing seems clearer than ever: The first post-Pollock artist was Pollock himself.

Jordan Kantor is an artist and a professor at California College of the Arts in San Francisco.

NOTES

1. Lee Krasner in B. H. Friedman, “An Interview with Lee Krasner Pollock,” in Jackson Pollock: Black and White, exh. cat. (New York: Marlborough-Gerson Gallery, 1969), 7.

2. Bernice Rose provides a detailed, and foundational, account of the technique and sequencing of these drawings in Jackson Pollock: Drawing into Painting, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1980). Further technical notes can be found in each individual drawing entry in Jackson Pollock: A Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, Drawings and Other Works, ed. Francis V. O’Connor and Eugene V. Thaw (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978). Further, Stephanie Straine contributes an essay analyzing the drawings in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition: “Beyond Work: Pollock Drawing,” inJackson Pollock: Blind Spots, ed. Gavin Delahunty et al. (London: Tate Publishing, 2015), 101–13.

3. Rosalind E. Krauss, The Picasso Papers (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), 128; Timothy J. Clark, “Pollock’s Smallness,” in Jackson Pollock: New Approaches, ed.Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1999), 29; William Lieberman, introduction to Jackson Pollock: Black and White, 5.

4. Thanks to Graham Bader for helping me theorize this relationship to film cels.

5. Michael Schreyach offers an interesting reading of the Namuth film, which revisits the idea of “ventriloquism” in Pollock’s public statements in his “Intention and Interpretation in Hans Namuth’s Film,Jackson Pollock,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 48, no. 4 (2012): 437–52.

6. Indeed, if conservator James Coddington’s hypothesis that the colored paint is Magna is confirmed, this analogy would be as literal as it is visual. James Coddington, “No Chaos Damn It,” in Jackson Pollock: New Approaches, 112.

7. For an analysis of one artistic response teasing out the “readymade” characteristics of Pollock’s use of enamel, see “Negative Capabilities: Branden W. Joseph on Claes Oldenburg and Jackson Pollock,”Artforum, April 2013, 230–39.

8. The audio track of the interview Pollock gave during the retrospective’s Bennington College run, for the television series March of Time, remains unrecovered.

9. This account comes from Elizabeth Wright Hubbard, Pollock’s therapist at the time, as quoted in Francis V. O’Connor, Jackson Pollock: The Black Pourings 1951–1953, exh. cat. (Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1980), 20.