When a Bird Decides Not to Eat from Your Hand

……………

Rhapsody
by Cynthia Huntington

Beat it with a shoe
because it can’t talk, because it won’t shut up,
because it makes those noises about its loneliness
endlessly. Beat it with a shoe
over and over, beside the door, on the balcony;
beat it because it’s yours,
because you’ve had enough. Beat that shoe
your foot’s orphan, like a leather club
against its side, around its head, with short sharp blows.
Beat it to make it stop crying.
Show you mean business.
Because it’s dumb, because you told it once
or a thousand times; beat it because it ought to know
better by now. Beat it with a shoe
because it feels good —
beat it until it feels good.
Beat the crap out of it. Beat it senseless. Beat it
within an inch. Because it’s worthless and dumb,
shitty, and loud, and dirty.
Beat it because there is pain in the world.
Beat it because it’s yours.

……….

---

……………

Part of Eve’s Discussion
by Marie Howe

It was like the moment when a bird decides not to eat from your hand,
and flies, just before it flies, the moment the rivers seem to still
and stop because a storm is coming, but there is no storm, as when
a hundred starlings lift and bank together before they wheel and drop,
very much like the moment, driving on bad ice, when it occurs to you
your car could spin, just before it slowly begins to spin, like
the moment just before you forgot what it was you were about to say,
it was like that, and after that, it was still like that, only
all the time.

…..

---

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Slang

… Modern life, tumultuous and full of speed, dynamic and full of contrasts, comes to batter furiously at this delicate and luminous edifice, which emerges coolly from chaos. Do not touch it: it is done; it had to be done, it will remain.

This is from the essay ‘The Human Body Considered as an Object’ by Fernand Léger (1945):

One of the most damaging charges that can be made against contemporary modern artists is that their work is accepted only by a few initiates. The masses cannot understand them.

There are several reasons for this situation. The minority of privileged individuals who can be interested in these works is made up exclusively of people who have the leisure to see and look, to develop their sensibilities. They have free time at their disposal.

In 1936 and 1937, I had an opportunity to talk about these issues in working-class and community centers. “You work for the rich,” they shouted bluntly at me. “We’re not interested in you.”

Their objection was wrong because it was too simplistic. The matter is a little more complicated.

The situation is created by the existing social order. Factory workers and clerks have very limited leisure time. They cannot be asked to spend their Sundays shut up in museums. Private galleries and museums close their doors at the very time when the workers leave their shops, their factories.

… The people have a poetic sense in themselves. They are the men who invent that ceaselessly renewed verbal poetry — slang. These men are endowed with a constantly creative imagination. “They transpose reality.” What then do modern poets, artists, and painters do? They do the same thing. Our pictures are our slang, we transpose objects, forms, and colors. Then why don’t we meet each other?

On the other hand, if you examine the backgrounds of creative artists, you will see that all or nearly all of them come out of a working-class or lower-middle-class background. So what? Between these two poles, however, there is a society that does absolutely nothing to bring about this meeting. The masses are rich in unsatisfied desires. They have a capacity for admiration and enthusiasm that can be sustained and developed in the direction of modern painting. Give them time to see, to look, to stroll around.

… Of the various plastic tendencies that have developed during the past twenty-five years abstract art is the most important, the most interesting. It is not at all an experimental curiosity; it is an art with an intrinsic worth, one that has come to fruition and that responds to a demand, because a certain number of collectors are enthusiastic about this art. This proves that the abstract tendency is part of life.

I believe, nevertheless that it has contributed all that it can contribute.

… The danger of this [kind of art] lies in its very loftiness. Models, contrasts, objects have disappeared. What remains are very pure, very precise relationships, some colors, some lines, some empty spaces without depth. Respect for the narrow, rigid, sharp vertical place. It is a heroic attitude that flourishes in a cold greenhouse.

… Modern life, tumultuous and full of speed, dynamic and full of contrasts, comes to batter furiously at this delicate and luminous edifice, which emerges coolly from chaos. Do not touch it: it is done; it had to be done, it will remain.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

These Complacent Dodos

… My students accustomed to classes in which their instructors explained themselves, explained literature, and in fact left nothing unexplained that could possibly be explained, and now confronting a teacher who apparently couldn’t or wouldn’t explain one blessed thing, and especially not the one blessed thing they were there to have explained to them, were understandably puzzled.

This if from an essay ‘Poetry and Meaning’ by Howard Nemerov first published in 1978. He’s feeling a bit peckish:

What I have to say to you is very simple; so simple that I find it hard to say. It is that poetry is getting something right in language, that this idea of rightness in language is in the first place a feeling, which does not in the least prevent it from existing; if it is subjective, which I doubt, it is not “merely subjective” (as students say, and o dear how often they say it); that this feeling of rightness has largely been lost, if not eagerly assaulted with destructive intent, by people who if they ever wake up are going to find it extremely hard to recapture or even to remember what that feeling was.

… I am a most inefficient teacher of verse-writing — but imagine what a monster an efficient one would be! — and term after term, no matter what resolutions of patience and goodwill I began with, three weeks later I found myself saying to the students about their productions such things as: But it’s not right, it just simply isn’t right … and even more cruelly on occasion: if there’s nothing right what’s the use of trying to say what’s wrong with it? And sometimes I would rhapsodize to my poor class about how poetry was simply language doing itself right, language as it ought to be, language as it was in the few hours between Adam’s naming the creation and his fall. The whole art of poetry, I would say, consists in getting back that paradisal condition of the understanding, the condition that says simply “yes” and “I see” and “it is so.” Naturally enough, it doesn’t happen often. But it does happen.

My students accustomed to classes in which their instructors explained themselves, explained literature, and in fact left nothing unexplained that could possibly be explained, and now confronting a teacher who apparently couldn’t or wouldn’t explain one blessed thing, and especially not the one blessed thing they were there to have explained to them, were understandably puzzled. All the same, they behaved very kindly about it. At most, the ones inclined to philosophize would point out to me that my criterion of rightness could never be defined and in any event was merely subjective.

Meaning I could never prove anything was right.

… It is by some such process as is represented in the changed meaning of such a word as subjective that the mind has reached its present most familiar predicament, ludicrous and pathetic by turns, whereby a learned discipline begins its course of studies by excluding as far as possible all feeling, including especially the feeling of interest, curiosity, pleasure, delight that prompted the study itself, and winds up several years and thousands of pages later plaintively asking itself about human values and wondering where they are to be found.

… there is always present a temptation, which we almost always yield to, to make our experience of poetry both more intellectual and more pretentious than it is or ought to be. There is a somewhat comic, somewhat vulgar and mercantile, aspect to our serious and no doubt well-meaning endeavors to convince others and even possibly ourselves that the experience we are getting from poetry is certifiably profound, lofty, sublime, organic, harmonious … even pleasurable. You may supply other adjectives, from whatever schools of criticism, as you care to.

Without denying that our experience of poetry is sometimes one or more of those things, I think it proper to acknowledge that it is not always like that, and may not often be like that. A primary pleasure in poetry is surely something low enough to be beneath the notice of teacher or critic — the pleasure of saying something over for its own sweet sake and because it sounds just right.

… I am not at all certain it is so important for each of us to have the same ideas about the same things, even if it is that particular species of what Lovejoy called “metaphysical pathos” that more than anything else informs and sustains the university and the culture. What is important to each of us is to have the idea of rightness, to grasp it feelingly. If we do not have it, perhaps poetry is not for us; music goes on though many are tone-deaf and few have absolute pitch; absolute pitch has never been accused of being subjective on that account. If you are in the presence of a greater vision than your own — Shakespeare’s for instance — and do not see what he is talking about, you don’t say he sees nothing, for that would be like telling a microscope that it exaggerated.

At this point in the essay Nemerov offers two examples of  bad poetry; two poems where “nothing went right at all.” One is from one of his students (with the student’s permission) and one is from Poetry Magazine. I can assure you that they are both magnificently awful, but I don’t have the heart to include them here. I will say that the two poems and Nemerov’s comments had me laughing to tears. I rejoin him post slice-and-dice:

… Maybe from examples such as these we can see the beauty even of wrongness, that from it we infer that a right way of doing things does exist, even that many right ways of doing things must exist, even as from the idea of getting lost we infer the existence of roads and destinations.

Amazingly, no sooner has he finished thrashing those to poems, Nemerov turns around and writes:

… the posture of the literary mind seems these days to be dry, angry, smart, jeering, cynical; as though once people had discovered the sneaky joys of irreverence they were quite unable to stop. This is one typical process of Shakespeare’s tragedies, where the intelligent and crafty young destroy the stupid old and, with them, the sacred something that these complacent dodos by some accident had in their charge, and the intelligent and crafty young at last, as Ulysses says, eat up themselves.

And so on. Nemerov gradually runs out of grumpiness over three more pages, finally trying to right himself by ending — somewhat incongruously — with ” … and of all this something kind and good may come one day. Or so I hope.”

My most recent previous post from Nemerov is here.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

 

The Work of Many Hands

… Standards of perceptual reliability are ineliminably intersubjective. Left to my own devices, I do not know what I am missing.

This is from Considered Judgment by Catherine Z. Elgin (1996):

… Epistemology’s failures prove surprisingly inconsequential. We continue the cognitive quest, undaunted by our apparent inability to properly characterize its objective. We differentiate between justified and unjustified claims as a matter of course. And we stake our lives on our assessments, even if we lack a conception of justification capable of backing our claims.

This does not mean that we are right. We might be victims of the blind confidence that lures soldiers into battle and lemmings to the sea. But perhaps not.

… In building a system of thought, we begin with a provisional scaffolding made up of the relevant beliefs we already hold, the aims of the project we are embarked on, the liberties and constraints we consider the system subject to, the values and priorities we seek to uphold. We suspend judgment on matters in dispute. This ramshackle structure is not expected to stand by itself. Major improvements may have to be made.

… No mere castles in the air, systems in reflective equilibrium are tethered — not to Things in Themselves but to our antecedent understanding of and interest in the matter at hand. Coherence provides justification in the system; the tie to initially tenable commitments, justification of the system.

Does reflective equilibrium then consist in coherence with a consistent, suitably comprehensive class of initially tenable commitments? This too is problematic. Since initially tenable commitments have a presumption in their favor, they are not to be given up without reason. If nothing but conflicts among themselves supplies such a reason, there is no ground for repudiating such commitments unless they clash. In that case initially tenable commitments are irrevocable if cotenable. But it is unlikely that all infelicitous initially tenable commitments succumb to conflicts with their peers. So a policy dedicated to preserving every survivor is apt to reinforce and perpetuate error.

… Sustaining and underwriting initially tenable commitments may require additional commitments we are loathe to make. … We might, of course, treat the difficulty as an outstanding problem, expecting that in due course, it will be solved. Often this is a reasonable attitude to adopt. But in the long run our inability to formulate an account we are willing to endorse (or a tenable reason for thinking none necessary) casts doubt on the commitments we began with. Ultimately, their failure to seed a system we can countenance discredits such commitments.

… The system that vindicates a commitment need be in no one person’s ken. The scientists who collectively establish that the rain forests are being despoiled rely on one another’s expertise in much the way the amateur relies on others. The various agronomists, hydrologists, botanists, and zoologists are not likely to be privy to the constellations of commitments that render one another’s findings tenable. Nor are they apt to be able to validate the statistical techniques, calibrate the instruments, or vindicate the methods they use to establish their own findings. Together they do what none can do alone — construct a tenable ecological theory. There is then a division of cognitive labor. Rather than relying exclusively on considerations in my ken, I draw on the expertise of others, and they in turn draw on mine.

Why not hold each person individually responsible for supplying first-hand evidence to support her own cognitive commitments? In that case, much of what we purport to know is not in fact knowledge. I do not know that water is H2O, that mountain gorillas are an endangered species, that flying is safer than driving.

…What matters is not a commitment’s source, but its sustenance.

… An individual’s grounds for a commitment consist of considerations he is in a position to adduce, including chains he trusts.

… Perception is often held to supply epistemic access to its distinctive objects. Here if anywhere, it seems, I ought to be able to fend for myself. I cannot. For on my own, I have no way to determine whether my perceptions are reliable. I cannot, for example, tell directly by sight whether I am color blind. Regularities I discern enable me to make and sustain color ascription. … Only when I learn that other people draw distinctions I cannot discern do I discover that my color ascriptions are untenable. Nor could I discover on my own that I am tone-deaf, astigmatic, or blind. Standards of perceptual reliability are ineliminably intersubjective. Left to my own devices, I do not know what I am missing.

… The cognitive systems that underwrite my commitments are community property. Like a medieval tapestry, they are the work of many hands. It follows that the locus of tenability is the community, not the individual. Understanding and knowledge are collective accomplishments.

… ‘Understanding’ is a better term [than 'knowledge'] for the epistemic achievement that concerns us here. Not being restricted to facts, understanding is more comprehensive than knowledge ever hoped to be. We understand rules and reasons, actions and passions, objectives and obstacles, techniques and tools, forms, functions, and fictions, as well as facts. We also understand pictures, words, equations, and patterns. Ordinarily these are not isolated accomplishments; they coalesce into an understanding of a subject, discipline, or field of study.

Understanding need not be couched in sentences. It might equally be located in apt terminology, insightful questions, effective nonverbal symbols, intelligent behavior. A mechanic’s understanding of carburetors or a composer’s understanding of counterpoint is no less epistemically significant for being inarticulate. Even a physicist’s understanding of her subject typically outstrips her words. It is realized in her framing of problems, her design and execution of experiments, her responses to research failures and successes, and so on. Physics involves a constellation of commitments that organize its objects and our access to them in ways that render those objects intelligible. Understanding physics is not merely or mainly a matter of knowing physical truths. It involves a feel for the subject, a capacity to operate successfully within the constraints the discipline dictates or that challenge those constraints effectively. And it involves an ability to profit from cognitive labors, to draw out the implications of findings, to integrate them into theory, to utilize them in practice. Understanding a particular fact or finding, concept or value, technique or law is largely a matter of knowing where it fits and how it functions in the matrix of commitments that constitute the science. But neither knowing where nor knowing how reduces to the knowing that that traditional epistemology explicates.

Knowledge is supposed to be an all-or-nothing affair. Either you know that p or you do not. But understanding admits of degrees.

… Far from being primordial, facts are derivative of considerations of other kinds. Only in light of decisions taken, values espoused, options exercised, and methods applied do we have a framework that fixes facts. Still, once that framework is set, the facts it fixes are independent of, and may be contrary to, our beliefs and desires. Classical physics set the stage for the Michelson-Morley experiment by determining what makes for a physical fact and how such facts may be discovered. It did not thereby dictate the experiment’s result. Indeed, the unanticipated outcome of the Michelson-Morley experiment contributed significantly to the downfall of the system that engendered it.

Here again, the parallel with more familiar cases of construction is helpful. We may build a chair by executing a well-laid plan that incorporates tenable views about what is wanted of a chair and about how the relevant objectives can be met. Still, whether the resulting chair wobbles and whether it will support a two-hundred-pound man are matters of fact, independent of our beliefs and desires about them and independent of the beliefs and desires that informed the chair’s construction.

Constructionalism provides the resources for generating tenable cognitive systems satisfying a variety of epistemic desiderata. It does not, however, guarantee that all our epistemic objectives can be simultaneously met. Indeed, it forces us to recognize how often trade-offs are involved in achieving understanding of any kind.

My most recent previous post from Elgin’s book is here.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

 

Seven Minutes

… people are thinking, “What is this shit?” and then they get angry or frustrated or whatever, and then, after about seven minutes of this, they begin to actually give up or surrender or listen or turn their attention inward; they acquiesce to the situation …

This is from A Critical Cinema 5: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers by Scott MacDonald (2006). This is from his interview with Tony Conrad:

[ ... ]

Conrad: … I had decided to produce one one-hundred foot roll of film that would include the forty-seven arrangements of [all] black and [all] white frames that I had in mind. I shot that roll, got it developed, then had the lab make ten prints. I wanted each of the forty-seven variations to be repeated ten times. I cut each of the ten rolls apart into forty-seven pieces and then spliced them together into the right order.

I didn’t know much about splicing. I’d bought an 8mm splicer for two dollars — the 8mm splicer was fine because 8mm and 16mm essentially have the pins in the same place — and a roll of perforated splicing tape, and I was off to the races. It took a very long time to make these five hundred splices, because in my enthusiasm and inexperience I was almost obsessively careful.

I’ve always thought of The Flicker as a kind of bizarre science fiction movie, as a space that you can enter — in the way that you enter the narrative space of a regular Hollywood movie — and go floating off into some weird dimension, and then come back. I constructed the film very carefully so that you’re inexorably moved, very deliberately and very systematically, into an experience completely out of the ordinary, where perception is dramatically altered. If you look around the theater during The Flicker, you find that everyone is somehow made strange.

And then, I wanted to move you, relentlessly, back out of that space, back into the normal world. That is, I wanted to exhibit the power of the medium by showing that even if you wished to, you couldn’t stay in that space, that it was under the control of the film — well, under my control — and that you had been drawn into and driven by the film, in some very important way. For me the authority of The Flicker, its regulative impulse in relation to the audience’s experience, was a very crucial element. I wanted people to lose themselves and to understand that they lost themselves in that world.

MacDonald: For me, The Flicker has always felt like an adventure film — a little like King Kong [1933], which was the formative film of my childhood — in the sense that there’s a moment of real fear as the film begins to take you over, when you’re not sure whether you’re going to be able to handle what’s coming. There’s a moment where you’ve got to decide you’re going to stay or get out.

[ ... ]

MacDonald: Before you shot the original roll, were you able to do tests and check out each sequence perceptually?

Conrad: No, I had no way to do that. I didn’t own a camera. I didn’t own a projector. I didn’t own anything. I had that borrowed camera for only a few days. So I really didn’t have any way to actually find out anything ahead of time, though I did have a pretty good idea of what would happen.

Once I had the prints, all I used was the splicer and a piece of lumber with two screws in it. I’d put each little reel from the lab on one side, and on the other side I had a big reel where I wound up all the film. My little splicer was in the middle.

MacDonald: The warning that begins the film is on-screen for a long time, accompanied by this nice old-time music. I’ve always wondered whether its function is not just to warn epileptics but to create excitement in the audience.

Conrad: Well, a whole mix of thinking went into that warning. I’d contacted the American Epilepsy Association, and the head of the seizure clinic at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. He told me, “If you put a notice up there, people are going to be having ‘seizures’ who aren’t epileptics.” His experience was that a lot of the people who came to the clinic for seizure treatments were epileptic wannabes. Well, I didn’t think about it that way; I had had a friend — a brilliant African-American student at Harvard — who drowned during an epileptic seizure, so I took them very seriously. Of course, this is the reason I had contacted the doctor. In any case, I felt that if the warning were to be for real, then I had to leave time for someone to say, “Oh, well, let’s see, actually that’s me being warned; I’d better leave,” and then to explain to his girlfriend or whoever why he was leaving, and still have time to actually get out of the theater.

But, also, I had a sense of timing about the whole film. Remember, in terms of extended-duration art experiences, I probably had had as much experience as anybody in the world at that time — other than the other musicians I was working with. We were doing long-duration music where you had the problem of “nothing happening,” a complete novelty at that time. Here was a long-duration film. I didn’t want people to be in a “Hey, let’s get it on!” kind of mood. I wanted them to be compliant, so that the little thing that was going to happen would be a surprise, something that they would understand as going on — not just passing by, as Arnulf Rainer does. In other words, only one thing would be happening, and the audience would notice it, in part because almost nothing had been going on before.

I knew from my experience with long-duration music that once you start the performance, the audience waits to see what’s going to happen, and after a couple of minutes, people are thinking, “What is this shit?” and then they get angry or frustrated or whatever, and then, after about seven minutes of this, they begin to actually give up or surrender or listen or turn their attention inward; they acquiesce to the situation …

MacDonald: Or they leave.

Conrad: Or they leave — fine, if they’re going to leave, I want them out of there. I don’t want them carping and carrying on through the whole thing. So I wanted The Flicker to start off with the warning, followed by the long, slow credits, and then by the opening moment of the film proper, a completely blank screen, so that, finally, about seven minutes into the film just a little something would begin to happen.

My most recent previous from a MacDonald interview is here.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

People Will Say to Me …

… Why am I risking it this time and provoking the Gods, so to speak?

This is from The Preparation of the Novel by Roland Barthes (2003). These are from Barthes’s lectures given between 1978 and 1980 at the Collège de France:

… Dante: “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita.” ["In the middle of the journey of our life."] Dante was thirty-five. I’m much older and have gone far beyond the mathematical “middle” of my life’s journey (and I’m not Dante! Take note: the great writer isn’t someone you can compare yourself to but someone whom you can, whom you want to, identify with, to a greater or lesser extent). — But the line, so magnificently direct, inaugurates one of the greatest works in the world with a declaration of subjecthood (Writer = “I do not repress the subject that I am”). → That declaration says: (a) Age is a constituent part of the subject who writes; (b) that midway point clearly isn’t mathematical: for who could calculate it in advance? It relates to an event, a moment, a change experienced as meaningful, solemn: a sort of “total” realization of precisely the kind that can determine and consecrate a journey, a peregrination in a new continent (la selva oscura), an initiation (there’s an initiator: Virgil — we’ll have ours). Now, for my part, although I’ve gone far beyond the arithmetical middle of my life, it’s today that I’m experiencing the sensation-certainty of living out the middle-of-the-journey, of finding myself at the kind of juncture (Proust “the apogee of the particular”) beyond which the waters divide, taking two divergent ways [côtés].

[ ... ]

… On the level of the Fantasy, it is as it were physically impossible to conceive of (to desire) a mediocre work, that is, one that belongs to an “average” → the novels sent to me for review: OK, but why this particular story rather than any other? In my view, the most important factor when it comes to recognizing a work (which is to say, quite simply and materially, to reading it): that it should emit a sense of necessity, that it should release us from skepticism. “Why? Why not?” (“Necessity”? — Perhaps what makes meaning proliferate: so that after reading is different from before).

… However, in order to go a little further into the Fantasy (that is, in order to be able to envisage coming out the other side, into Reality, I need to try to look candidly at my aptitude for writing a Novel (my “faculties”); my only strength (at the moment) is my desire, the obstinacy of my desire (even if I’ve often “flirted” with the Novelistic; but the Novelistic is not the Novel, and this is precisely the threshold that I want to cross). At any rate, I can immediately see that there’s a certain constitutive weakness within me, a certain incapacity to write a novel (cf. a subject whose constitution prevents them from playing sport, who can’t play the piano because their hands are too small, etc.) = weakness of an organ → I’ll tell you which one: Memory, the ability to remember.

… Is it possible to make a Narrative (a Novel) out of the Present? How to reconcile — dialectize — the distance implied by the enunciation of writing and the proximity, the transportation of the present experienced as it happens? (The present is what adheres, as if your eyes were glued to a mirror). Present: to have your eyes glued to the page; how to write at length, fluently (in a fluent, flowing, fluid manner) with one eye on the page and the other on “what’s happening to me”?

This is actually to go back to that simple and ultimately uncompromising idea that “literature” (because, when it comes down to it, my project is “literary”) is always made out of “life.” My problem is that I don’t think I can access my past life; it’s in the mist, meaning that its intensity (without which there is no writing) is weak. What is intense is the life of the present, structurally mixed (there’s my basic idea) with the desire to write.

… Even so (I “daydream” over problems): whenever the mind formulates an alternative — loathing the trap it presents and savoring the simplification; for, when it comes down to it, choosing is easier than inventing — a third form should always be considered. Figure: something that seems impossible at first may turn out to be possible after all. In this case: possible to conceive of a Novel through Fragments, a Novel-Fragment. Such novels probably exist — or some that come close to it: everything hinges on the dash, on the site, on the flux, on the page upon which the caesura of the discontinuous is marked; …

[ ... ]

… People will say to me — it’s been said to me: by announcing it, you’re taking a huge risk, a “magic” risk. To say something out loud, in advance, is to destroy it; to designate too early is to attract bad luck. (Don’t count your chickens). Ordinarily, I take this kind of risk very seriously; I never allow myself to talk about the book I’m going to write. Why am I risking it this time and provoking the Gods, so to speak? Because the risk is bound up with the mutation I spoke of (Middle of Life’s Journey): that mutation effectively involves the consideration of a kind of Nothing left to lose. That’s in no way the motto of a “desperado” but rather of the search for a considered counterpart to an expression that’s so French (which haunts the conduct of the French): “to lose face” — French culture being more a culture of shame than of sin. Whether or not I write a novel, whether or not I fail in my attempt to write one, this isn’t a “performance” but a “path.”

… Tao: what matters is the path, following the path, not what you find at the end → “Begin, even without hope; proceed, even without success.” (It’s also a Sartrean saying).

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

 

There Is No Reason

This is from The Experience of Freedom by Jean-Luc Nancy (1993; 1988):

… on the one hand, there is no being between existents — the space of existences is their spacing and is not a tissue or a support belonging to everyone and no one and which would therefore belong to itself — and on the other hand, the being of each existence, that which it shares of being and by which it is, is nothing other — which is not “a thing” — than this very sharing.

… In no way and on no register of analysis will one avoid the excess of freedom — for which heroism and ecstasy are in fact also figures and names, but these must not obscure other examples, such as serenity, grace, forgiveness, or the surprises of language, and others still.

Essentially, this excess of freedom, as the very measure of existence, is common.

… If being is sharing, our sharing, then “to be” (to exist) is to share.

[ ... ]

… To use the terms that haunt all of Kant’s thought, there is no reason that there should not be chaos and no reason that anything should appear. If something appears, it is therefore not through “reason,” but through its freely coming. And if existence, somewhere, appears to itself as subjectivity, which also means as “reason,” this is also through its freely coming.

My most recent previous post from Nancy’s book is here.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

The Notorious Ping-Pong Match

‘Then how do you tell when the game is over?’
‘That’s a good question,’ was the breathless reply.

… Giving a response that provides for no further response is just like giving your partner in a ping-pong rally an unreturnable serve.

Continuing through The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia by Bernard Suits (2005). Skepticus and Grasshopper are now discussing the conclusions they can draw from the stories just told about Sneak and Drag:

Skepticus: … And now, Grasshopper, perhaps you would like to draw the moral from their two comedies of error.

Grasshopper: Certainly. It is that while reverse English can be used to invent or devise games (for that is precisely what Sneak and Drag did), reverse English is no part of what a game essentially is. What Heuschrecke pointed out to his patients was that they could play dramatic games without having to exploit real-life situations, was it not?

S: Yes, it was. Their cure consisted precisely in their coming to accept that fact.

G: But exploiting real-life situations — at least in the ways that Sneak and Drag did — is the same as applying to those situations the principle of reverse English. When Sneak duped others so that he could be playing a part, their being duped was not his primary goal but an occasion or pretext dramatic impersonation. And when Heuschrecke pointed out to him that he could play his games just as well — if not better — without duplicity, he was also pointing out that he could play these games just as well without reverse English. Similarly, of course, with Drag. When Drag realized that he could play his games without putting English on real life, he stopped being a nuisance and a bore, but he did not stop playing games.

S: So that all we have done in our pursuit of reverse English is to start a hare.

G: Not entirely, I think. For first, I suspect that even if reverse English is not very relevant to games as such, it may be  highly relevant to play as such, and perhaps we can consider that possibility further on another occasion. And second, even if we have started a hare with respect to games, that hare has evidently led us to our real prey. For at first it seemed that the performing of assumed roles was the essence of the kind of game we were trying to capture. Then, with the case history of Drag, it became apparent that one could play this kind of game equally well by performing proprietary roles. As Heuschrecke pointed out, the important thing in a game of this kind is not that one assumes a character other than one’s own, but that the moves one makes be good rather than bad — that is, moves which keep the game going instead of terminating the play. And I suggest that the principle of prolongation rather than the principle of reverse English is what we were really after all along.

S: Yes, Grasshopper, I took in Heuschrecke’s point about prolongation when he made it. But I must say I found it then, as I find it now, a strange thing to say about games.

G: Why is that?

S: Why, because it seems to mark such a striking contrast to the ways in which games are actually played. To work to prolong a baseball game would be to violate the spirit of the game; for example, intentionally to fumble a fly so that the side at bat would not be retired and the game could continue longer.

[ ... ]

To develop his argument, Grasshopper returns to Kierkegaard’s Diarist (the story of the Seducer):

G: … once [the Diarist] has decided to play the game of Seduction, we find the Diarist cautioning himself against succeeding too soon. The greatest danger to the game is that the girl’s ardour for the Diarist may become so great that she will succumb without the necessity for any further campaigning, and so the ‘seducer’ must, from time to time, throw cold water on her growing passion, though not so much, of course, as to extinguish it altogether. He is, that is to say, continually postponing completion of the game. He keeps moving back the finish line, as it were, so that the race will not end. And when it does end, the Diarist realizes that he will experience not the exaltation of victory but only ‘a certain sad satiety.’

S: The Diarist reminds me of the lines of Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn: ‘Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss, though winning near the goal … / Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair!’

G: Yes, Skepticus, for it expresses the ideal of the Diarist: forever will he chase and she be chased.

S: And chaste.

[ ... ]

G: … there appear to be what I should be inclined to call open games.

S: Open games?

G: Yes, games which have no inherent goal whose achievement ends the game; crossing a finish line, mating a king, and so on. Games which do have such goals we may call closed games.

S: And the game that Kierkegaard’s Diarist was playing was an open game?

G: Yes, except that in playing his open game he was exploiting an already existing goal-governed enterprise — the seduction enterprise — by delaying indefinitely completion of its normal goal. Like Sneak and Drag, the Diarist was playing a two-person, two-role game where the other person was not a player but an unwitting and involuntary performer of the other role. … [Yet] … it is no part of an open game that it must involve such exploitation. This fact became clear in the notorious ping-pong match between Smith and Jones.

S: What ping-pong match?

G: The one I am about to describe to you. Smith and Jones were the two remaining finalists in the celebrated Ming Cup (or Vase) Playoffs, and an enthusiastic group of fans had assembled to watch the match. Smith served, and the first game began. It bade fair to be an excellent match, as the ball flew back and forth between the contestants. But when, after five minutes, no point had been scored, the audience became restless, and some grumbling began to be heard. And after another five minutes it became clear that the players were not trying to score points against one another at all. They were simply trying to keep the ball in play.

‘Come on, play the game!’ was heard on all sides.
‘We are,’ Smith called back to the crowd.
‘That’s not ping-pong,’ was the angry rejoinder.
‘No, it’s not,’ put in Jones. ‘It’s a different game.’
‘But how do you decide a winner?’ cried another spectator.
‘There is no winner in this game,’ Smith answered.
‘Then how do you tell when the game is over?’
‘That’s a good question,’ was the breathless reply.

Just as the Diarist had made a game out of genuine seduction, Smith and Jones made a new game out of standard ping-pong. And just as the spectators of the Ming Cup Playoffs were nearly beside themselves with frustration at the contestants’ failure to get down to the business of scoring points, we may imagine that the object of the Diarist’s attentions was affected in a similar way by the dilatoriness of her ‘seducer.’

[ ... ]

S: Except [in open games], of course, for two moves, the first and the last. The first move is solely evocative and the last is solely responsive. Otherwise, the game could neither begin nor end. And so there could be a game with just two moves:

FIRST MOVE: Never darken my door again!
SECOND MOVE: Very well, Goodbye for ever.

And this would evidently be the shortest game of this kind that one could play, for all other games would have a middle as well as a beginning and an end, and the middle moves would be combination responsive-evocative moves.

G: Quite right. But we should also notice that the shortest game is also the worst kind of open game that could be played. Giving a response that provides for no further response is just like giving your partner in a ping-pong rally an unreturnable serve. This is admirable in the closed game of ping-pong, but in Ping-Pong Rally it defeats the purpose of the game.

[ ... ]

S: Very well, Grasshopper, I am convinced. Let us, then, begin anew the search for a definition which will cover both open and closed games.

G: That will not be necessary, Skepticus. It is quite clear to me now that the original definition* will do very well for both types of games.

S: But Grasshopper, how can that be? The original definition* requires that players of games be seeking to bring about a specific state of affairs, but for players of open games, as we have seen, there is no state of affairs they are striving to achieve. They are simply committed to striving indefinitely.

G: I think you say that, Skepticus, only because you are taking un unnecessarily narrow view of what constitutes a state of affairs. In a ping-pong rally there is a perfectly clear state of affairs that the players are striving to achieve. It is the state of affairs which consists in the ball’s being in play.

S: Oh.

[ ... ]

G: … Then let me ask whether you have doubts about the definition’s adequacy on any other score?

S: Yes, Grasshopper, I have one. It is a doubt about your account of lusory attitude.

To be continued.

[*The 'original definition' was/is: 'To play a game is to attempt to achieve a specific state of affairs [prelusory goal], using only means permitted by rules [lusory means], where the rules prohibit use of more efficient in favour of less efficient means [constitutive rules], and where the rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity [lusory attitude]. I also offer the following simpler and, so to speak, more portable version of the above: playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.’]

My most recent previous post from Suits’s book is here.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Completely Alone

…  “When you start working, everybody is in your studio — the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas — all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you’re lucky, even you leave.”

This is from Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist by Caroline A. Jones (1996):

… “Studio” brackets off, but does not disclaim, all the meanings of “study.” It brackets them off to enlarge a meaning reserved for the discourse of art, viz.: “Working room of a painter, sculptor, photographer, etc., often with skylights or windows specially designed to secure suitable light.” Unlike the English word “workshop,” the French atelier, or the Italian bottéghe, the word “studio” (functioning at present in all these languages) describes an individual space, the room “of a painter, sculptor, photographer.” However humble, the studio is the domain of a single artist — even if other persons should occupy the space, or other functions occur there. To the extent that it is X’s studio, it is the domain of X’s authorship, the space in which a given X constructs himself as the independent creator/author of a unique product identified with his name.

… Anthony Hughes makes the crucial point that our investigations of “the studio” are always tied to our existing (modern) assumptions regarding authorship, intellectual property, and the function of facture in signaling those concerns. Thus, “misconceptions about the nature of many twentieth-century studios have tended to be projected onto the past,” and “great masters tend to appear [in modern writing] as frustrated moderns who fretted against the constraints of their age and whenever possible escaped from necessary commercial drudgery to take creative refuge in some real or metaphorical inner studio, a sanctuary [for this] thwarted drive.” Read in reverse, Hughes’s reassertion of “the studio” as a space for complex social interactions and collaborative productions serves to underline the modern insistence on the solitude implied by the term.

… The romance of the studio is enacted in a private space that gives capacious breadth only to one mind and provides room for only one pair of hands … Both mind and hands of the individual in the studio participate in the creation of the work of art as a statement of autonomous genius. That this romance had particular (if not peculiar) appeal to Americans might be imagined, by its congruence with the ideology of individual pioneers (an ideology that concealed, and conceals, more structured and centralized power, an ideology of stubborn individuals who nonetheless benefited from state policies and land grants, an ideology of freedom-loving loners who somehow coalesced almost seamlessly to form the advancing front for Manifest Destiny around the world).

… The spontaneous brushstroke (or the sensual fingerful of clay on the sculpture) has no boss, no patron, no mouths to feed. The studio as a space for unencumbered individualism is figured in that freely applied paint; the sensuality and generosity of excess pigment conveys broader freedoms that are very appealing, even if they are circumscribed by the narrow boundaries of an individual taste. We are invited by the artist to identify with that freedom, to be constructed as that individual, in viewing his art. In that case, the more heroic the better, we say.

The continuity of this ideological identification between the brushstroke, the individual, and the studio is compelling, a strong thread picked up time and time again in the developing rhetoric of modern art. In trying to define “the liberating quality of abstract art” for a group of art professionals in 1957, Meyer Schapiro … located this heroic individualism in the paint itself. As the following quotation from Schapiro makes clear, the painterly brushstroke symbolized the individual in opposition to “ordinary .. work”; “Hence the great importance of the mark, the stroke, the brush, the drip, the quality of the substance of the paint itself, and the surface of the canvas as a texture and field of operation — all signs of the artist’s active presence. … All these qualities of painting may be regarded as a means of affirming the individual in opposition to the contrary qualities of the ordinary experience of working and doing.” (Emphasis added.) Artists themselves were sympathetic to the conjunction of paint and individualism (and later, depoliticization).

[line break added to make this easier to read online] By 1951, the pairing was an article of faith; in Robert Motherwell’s words, “it is only by giving oneself up completely to the painting medium that one finds oneself and one’s own style … such is the experience of the School of New York.” Giving oneself up and finding oneself: dismantling and reconstructing the individual through the painting and viewing dynamic — these themes weave through the discourse, always implicating the studio as the privileged site of origin for the solitary creative process. Philip Guston conveys this in a wonderful image he credits to John Cage (master of Silence), depicting the studio not as always empty, but as always emptying: “When you start working, everybody is in your studio — the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas — all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you’re lucky, even you leave.” Imaginatively leaving one’s own studio is perhaps analogous to annihilating one’s past — eradicating conscious individuality in order to reconstruct it in the painting at hand. The painting then becomes the only presence in the empty studio.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

 

Past Beauty

………

This is the middle verse (of three) from:

………

Brown Circle
by Louise Glück

[ ... ]

I don’t love my son
the way I meant to love him.
I thought I’d be
the lover of orchids who finds
red trillium growing
in the pine shade, and doesn’t
touch it, doesn’t need
to possess it. What I am
is the scientist,
who comes to that flower
with a magnifying glass
and doesn’t leave, though
the sun burns a brown
circle of grass around
the flower. Which is
more or less the way
my mother loved me.

[ ... ]

………

---

……….

These are the first six and a quarter lines of the much longer poem:

…………

Salmon
by Jorie Graham

I watched them once, at dusk, on television, run,
in our motel room halfway through
Nebraska, quick, glittering, past beauty, past
the importance of beauty,
archaic,
not even hungry, not even endangered, driving deeper and deeper
into less.

[ ... ]

……….

---

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/