Picturing Mind: Paradox, Indeterminacy and Consciousness in Art & Poetry (Consciousness, Literature and the Arts 3) (Consciousness, Literature & the Arts)

Picturing Mind

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General Editor:

Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe Editorial Board:

Anna Bonshek, John Danvers, William S. Haney II, Amy Ione, Arthur Versluis, Christopher Webster

Picturing Mind Paradox, Indeterminacy and Consciousness in Art & Poetry JOHN DANVERS

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2006

Cover Design: Aart Jan Bergshoeff The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 90-420-1809-7 ISSN: 1573-2193 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2006 Printed in the Netherlands

Contents Preface

7

Part 1

Introduction – an opening, an entering

11

Part 2

The knowing body: art as an integrative process of cognition

17

Part 3

Interrogating appearances: being, seeing & showing

Part 4

The mutuality of existence: drawing, emptiness & presence

65

Part 5

Picturing mind – writing being

101

Part 6

The self as open-work: permeability, incompleteness & revisibility

131

Part 7

Mind, the real & the other

159

Part 8

Where we are: locus of mind-in-the-world

191

Part 9

The ! the One & the Many: mysticism, art & poetry

261

Part 10

The discontinuum of consciousness: ambiguity, indeterminacy & multiplicity

313

A leaving, an unending. A folding, an unfolding

345

Bibliography

353

Index

363

37

Part 11

* For Philippa, Joanna, Tom and Jenny *

Acknowledgements I am very grateful to the research committee of the Faculty of Arts, University of Plymouth, for awarding me a sabbatical semester in which to do most of the writing of this book, and to colleagues in the Faculty for their support and comradeship over the years. I’d like to thank the following journals, publishers and organisations for allowing me to include revised versions of, or extracts from, papers in this volume: NSEAD & its journal iJADE for most of an essay, The Knowing Body: Art as an Integrative System of Knowledge, (1995) and for extracts from, Towards a Radical Pedagogy: Provisional notes on Learning and Teaching in Art & Design (2003); ISSEI for extracts from book reviews (1998; 2005); and Trentham Books (2004) for extracts used in Part 6. I’m also grateful for having participated in the affairs of ISSEI (International Society for the Study of European Ideas), particularly its conferences, over many years, and for a stimulating association with Daniel Meyer-Dinkgrafe, the editor, and other members of the editorial board of, and contributors to, the internet journal, Consciousness, Literature and the Arts. Many thanks to Pat and Dave for a few weeks of quiet reflection and good reading in Pat’s studio in Colorado. Finally I’d like to thank all those students with whom I’ve explored many of the ideas in this book. Any merits the book may have are largely due to countless stimulating interactions with enquiring minds in seminars over many years. On the other hand the many faults of the book are entirely my responsibility.

Preface It might be useful to the reader to know something of the compositional history of this book and to have a brief outline of the main themes. A first draft of Part 2 was written back in 1994 and published in 1995. (Danvers 1995: 289-297) In revising it for this volume I realise that much of it still seems to be relevant, providing as it does a nonspecialist framework with which to think about perception, the embodied mind and art as a mode of knowing. At the time, and to some extent still, there was/is a widespread view that the primary function of art was/is as a mode of expression, a vehicle for the display and direct transfer of emotion or feeling from the artist to the viewer via the art object. This seems to me to be only one side of the story and needs to be counterbalanced by another narrative articulating the cognitive function of art - if art is to be taken seriously as a mode of doing, knowing and being. Part 3 is based on notes and papers written between 1995 and 2000 when my own art practice was focused on the making of drawings and paintings that analysed the ways in which we encounter objects as perceptual and cognitive events. At the time I considered myself as making a very small contribution to the long history of still-life painting, a tradition which, in my view, still has much unfinished business in relation to investigating and celebrating how we engage with a world that has material physicality at one level and yet is also a field of immaterial energies at another level. Part 4 takes a step further some of the ideas and issues arising from the practice of observational drawing and painting, exploring the ways in which we exist as interdependent participants in a field of relationships. Buddhist concepts of sunyata, ‘emptiness’, and tathata,

8

Preface

‘suchness’, are discussed in relation to the sceptical dialectics of Pyrrho and Nagarjuna. In Part 5 art and poetry are analysed as modes of picturing mind and writing being, ways of opening and disclosing what it is to be part of the consciousness of the world. Examples of works by Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage are considered within a framework of the poetics of Philip Whalen and Charles Olson. Part 6 expands on the idea of art as a way of picturing mind by analysing Umberto Eco’s proposition of the artwork as “open work” and Barthes’ theories about “readerly” and “writerly” texts. A theme of the self as open work is developed as a way of thinking about different aspects of consciousness, being and becoming. Reference is made to the work of the artist Helen Chadwick, and to MerleauPonty’s ideas about art as a process of embodiment and participation in the world. These ideas are discussed in relation to reflections on incompleteness, openness and revisibility – another thematic strand that weaves its way throughout the whole book. In Part 7 notions of otherness and the real are discussed in relation to a number of examples of artworks and poems by R.S. Thomas, Robin Blaser, Robert Duncan, Minimalism, Ad Reinhardt and others. The arts are considered as potential ways of gaining empathic access to otherness, particularly with a brief reference to Fred Wah’s thinking about hybridity and colonisation. The idea of nature as other is explored as an aspect of the thinking of Heidegger and Gary Snyder. Part 8 explores many different approaches taken by artists and poets to nature. The arts are considered as a locus of mind-in-the-world - how we are and where we are as beings sharing a planet with other beings. Themes of mapping, walking, journeying, emplacement and being-inthe-world are discussed in relation to a varied array of examples: from the writers and poets Guy Davenport, Gary Snyder, Kenneth White, David Abram and Charles Waterton, to the artists Richard Long, Susan Derges, Ian Hamilton Finlay, John Wolseley and others. Ideas drawn from Goethe, Ruskin and studies of shamanism and Palaeolithic cultures, are used to frame and shed light on the different examples.

Preface

9

In Part 9 the particular modes of consciousness that have become known as mysticism are explored in relation to contrasting descriptive analyses proposed by William James, Bertrand Russell, Thomas Merton, Heidegger and others. Mysticism is considered as a particularly intense state of awareness and cognition, articulated and realised in the writings and artefacts produced by artists, poets and mystics within many cultures. Ideas about unity, unknowing, ineffability, infinity and the metaphysics of light are discussed in relation to examples of accounts of mystical experiences within the Christian, Taoist and Sufi traditions, and in relation to the art and poetry of Anish Kapoor, James Turrell, Agnes Martin, Jorge Luis Borges, Kenneth Rexroth and others. Part 10 continues many of the themes already introduced and considers these as they are manifested in particular modes of construction and composition in the visual arts and poetry. Ideas about the discontinuum of consciousness are discussed alongside indeterminacy, contradiction, perspectivism, revisibility, non-dualism and associative thinking - as qualities and principles that energise and direct many forms of practice in the arts. Reference is made to the work of John Cage, Thomas McEvilley, Anne Carson and Richard Rorty amongst others. The final section, Part 11, briefly condenses many of the above strands of thought into the notion of a contrarium – a clearing in which apparent contradictions, conflicts and paradoxes are held in a state of indeterminacy and open possibility. A visualisation of the contrarium is presented in diagrammatic form – a suggestion of what might be called an aesthetics and poetics of indeterminacy. NB. An important dimension of the book, almost a contrary text, are the images and more unusual textual episodes that are presented as a visual counterpoint to the main body of the text. These showings offer different perspectives on, and manifestations of, the themes and ideas outlined above. All the images are made by the author. They have been deliberately left without annotations to emphasise their visuality. As quiet interruptions to the hum of the text I hope they provide a parallel stream of openings and clearings - other ways of picturing mind.

Part 1 Introduction of the spangled mind

An opening, an entering It is a misty late January day and the first white camellias are just coming into bloom. A blurred penumbra of light hovers about the delicate petals, faint emblems of a springtime yet to come. As I walk I think of the book just beginning and my thoughts are as scattered as the torn strands of bark that litter the shadows beneath a pair of eucalyptus trees swaying elegantly in the breeze. All around me there is birdsong, sounds of moisture dripping from high branches and the occasional bark of a dog. These sensations and scattered thoughts form unique patterns that exist for a moment and then dissolve one into another. Each pattern is a moment of becoming, a shifting current of attentiveness and engagement that, for loss of a better word, I call my “self”. This book is made out of many such patterns. It charts an unfolding of thoughts and images within a dynamic sensory field that is complex and ever-changing. To make some kind of constancy out of inconstancy is an ancient human endeavour, linking us to palaeolithic ancestors who first took spit and charcoal to inscribe their presence on the walls of dark caves. Just as those early glyphs and drawings were superimposed upon each other in a layered history of doing, knowing and being, so this book is a layered history of ideas, images, beliefs and questions.

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Introduction

Seen in another way the book represents a particular topography of mind, a particular way of picturing and thinking about the world in which I am a temporary participant. Ideas about practices in art and poetry are interwoven with reflections on philosophies of art and poetics. Occasionally another strand comes to the surface: thoughts about ways of learning and teaching in the arts. These linear narratives are punctuated by a more poetic non-linear discourse that includes experimental texts, drawings and photographic images. The book is organised in a way that emphasises the interdependence of these strands and in a way that reflects the sudden shifts of awareness and thought. I realise that it may be seen as a distant cousin of the medieval tradition of the florilegium, a collection of extracts from many sources put together in a way that is like a bunch of flowers. G.R. Evans (2002: xxiii) mentions that Clement of Alexandria compares his own collection, Miscellanies (Stomateis), to the diversity of flora in a meadow, each flower and grass contributing a distinctive form, colour and tone to the variegated field. I like the idea of the page as a field of diverse texts and images, each one having its own distinct morphology, a collection of voices speaking with varied rhythms, diction and point of view. Within this collectaneum miscellaneum, (ibid: xxiv) many themes, ideas and strands of argument are presented as a mosaic or scrapbook, from which we draw our own conclusions, make our own chain of connections (concatenatio) and encounter with surprise unexpected juxtapositions and discontinuities. Maybe Robert Duncan is referring to, and extending, this medieval tradition in his own poetics, arguing in favour of the poem as a “melee” rather than “a synthesis”, the poem as a field of many voices. (in Hoover 1994: 29) I hope the present volume will be considered in a similar way. * Some of the most stimulating engagements of my life have been with many of the individuals and ideas discussed in this book. I hope that I convey to the reader something of the excitement, enjoyment and critical uncertainty that I feel in encountering the minds of these artists, poets and other thinkers from many different times, traditions and cultures.

Introduction

13

The making of art and poetry involves both a sustained interrogation and a celebration of all aspects of human consciousness, from the minutiae of everyday experience to the most profound ideas, beliefs, feelings and actions - which may, of course, be found in the most humdrum details of daily life. Artworks of all kinds present us with analogical fields and zones of interpretation within which we can share and exchange experiences – artefacts, images, poems and texts as tokens of being here, being in a particular place, passing through, & recollecting later where we’ve been. In the end of course all drawings and writings are just smudges of dirt on a surface, pulses of light hitting our retinas, squiggles of line and colour and tone – puzzles of image and text – a layered index of journeys and experiences – a celebration of doing, enquiring and being.

In writing a book like this I’m trying to make something that will be of interest to three constituencies of readers: academics and researchers who will be expecting the usual academic conventions to be applied; artists, poets and other practitioners who will be looking for ideas and interesting ways of thinking about practice; and an audience of general readers who may be curious about the arts and about ways of interpreting and making sense of what artists do. I’m trying to

Introduction

14

address all of these constituencies, while at the same time constructing something that exemplifies at least some of the ways of thinking discussed in the book. Thus the work, like many academic texts produced over the past few years, is a hybrid. In places there are short passages of argument, analysis and critical comment. These are interposed with brief images, digressions, quotes and passing thoughts that are not intended as a cumulative argument, but rather as a series of condensations or illuminations – a kind of sequential collage that pictures or exemplifies what Carson, through Sappho, refers to as “the spangled mind”. (2003: 357) I do this in the spirit of David Bohm’s remark that “theories should be presented like poetry because, like poems, theories are insights, acts of perception, rather than hard and fast conclusions”. (in Ione 2002: 175) *

To some extent any book, however academic or “objective” in tone or content, is also part of an ongoing autobiography. And the autobiographical project which is anyone’s life is subject to continuous revision and reiteration, a project full of inconsistency and discontinuity. I’ve made no attempt to disguise such discontinuities, indeed I hope, that the book can be seen as a testimony to revisibility and changes of mind. I’m not the product of such changes of mind, I am these changes of mind. We are all involved in a process of continuous transformation, an unfolding of identity set against changes of context, situation, intentions and beliefs. I hope the various aspects of the book convey something of these qualities. *

“…of the spangled mind” In the notes to Anne Carson’s (2003: 357) radical translation and revisioning of Sappho’s fragments, she discusses her interpretation of Sappho’s opening phrase, which she takes to be, poikilophron. Carson considers this as referring to Aphrodite’s ‘mind’ (phron), a mind that is characterised as being, poikilos: “many-colored, spotted, dappled, variegated, intricate, embroidered, inlaid, highly wrought, complicated, changeful, diverse, abstruse, ambiguous, subtle” – in other words a “spangled mind”.

***

Part 2 The knowing body: art as an integrative process of cognition “Scientists […] do not deal with truth […] they deal with limited and approximate descriptions of reality”. (Capra 1992: 22)

Introduction Many contemporary scientists and philosophers of science argue that science is not so much about constructing theories which progressively reveal the true nature of things, but is rather about formulating limited and approximate descriptions or interpretations of the events, processes and systems which constitute reality. This suggests a convergence between science and art - in the sense that artistic production, in many cases, can be seen as an attempt, through analysis, invention, reformulation and synthesis, to construct approximate descriptions and interpretations of reality. In this section I explore some of the ways in which such descriptions are formulated, and relate this process to the wider question of how we should think about knowledge and perception. My aim is to raise issues and questions rather than to formulate a linear argument. I draw upon research in a number of fields - particularly in ecology, systems theory, the philosophy of science, and the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and his interpreters. I argue for a way of thinking about art as an integrative process of cognition based upon three important factors: our fundamental participation in the world as knowing bodies; the perspectival nature of our interpretations of the world; and the particular ways in which we integrate perceptual and conceptual enquiries through the making of art. I also trace some of the changes

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The knowing body

in the ways in which knowledge is described and formulated within modernist and postmodernist paradigms, and suggest how these changes support a revision of our views about the cognitive implications of art. * The visual arts as forms of knowledge It could be argued that too much emphasis has been placed upon the visual arts as forms of self-expression, and that this emphasis has led to a neglect of the wider functions and significance of the visual arts, both in cultural and educational terms. I’m thinking here of the expressive theories promulgated by Collingwood and Worringer, and the expressive aesthetics exemplified in the ideas and practices of artists such as Klee, Kandinsky, Munch and Pollock. At the centre of expressive aesthetics lies the belief that the purpose of art is to express emotion as directly as possible, to transfer emotional feeling in all its purity and intensity from artist to audience via the artwork. Whether this is possible and how we could know if the expressive transfer had taken place are questions that immediately arise. Although this is not the place to explore these issues, we can note that despite the centrality of expressive aesthetics to modernist practices and the subjectivist legacy they bequeath to contemporary culture, such theories and practices are problematic and should not be left unchallenged. Although the visual arts do undoubtedly have a role to play in the expression of feeling, many expressive theories tend both to neglect other means of representing feelings and emotions, and also tend to confirm the preconceptions of many academics that the visual arts are marginal to the mainstream of education. In order to counteract the distortions brought about by this situation it is useful to think of the visual arts not primarily as forms of expression but as forms of knowledge (and artists as formulators of knowledge) alongside literature, science, music and philosophy. This provides a more inclusive way of categorising and thinking about art and, at the same time, a return to a way of describing the visual arts that was prevalent prior to the early decades of the 20th century. In earlier centuries artists were seen as contributing to the whole spectrum of human knowledge by picturing human and non-human

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spheres of existence in iconic, indexical and symbolic images. Artists produced visual and spatial narratives that were modes of analysing and describing the world - showing us different aspects of the world, how human beings are in the world, what we do and how we think and feel about ourselves and the world about us. The obsession with expressing emotion that characterised much of the art produced from late eighteenth century romanticism, through to the many forms of twentieth century expressionism, was closely associated with the development of modernism and its excessive emphasis on subjectivism, individualism and the almost pathological cult of genius. This narrowing of the parameters of artistic activity (at least within the avant-garde echelons of high-art) was both extreme and relatively short-lived. Since the 1960’s, the expressive/self-expressive aesthetic, although still operational (particularly in popular perceptions of art and the artist), has become only one of many ideas, methods and practices that compete within the cultures of postmodernism. * What do we mean by knowing and knowledge? The terms know and knowledge have a complex etymological history. Two distinct roots can be traced: to know by the senses; and to know by the mind - from which at least three meanings developed: •

Firstly - to recognise; to identify; to be able to distinguish (one thing) from (another);

•

Secondly - to be acquainted with (a thing, a place or person); to be familiar with; to have personal experience of (something); and,

•

Thirdly - to learn through observation, information or inquiry; to find out; to be conversant with through study or practice; to acquire skill in; to have a clear or distinct perception of.

Knowledge, also refers to a branch of learning; a science; or, an art. It is self-evident that these definitions accurately describe many of the diverse functions of drawing, painting, sculpture or other visual constructs, and suggest a much more comprehensive view of their significance. *

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The knowing body

Being, knowing and embodiment These commonly accepted definitions and usages are couched in very general terms, however we need to establish a more precise conceptual framework within which our understanding of knowledge can be located, shedding light on the processes by which we gain knowledge in everyday experience and through the making of, and engagement with, the visual arts. At the outset we have to establish a location for the processes of coming to knowledge - an existential and physiological context without which knowledge, consciousness and being are mere abstractions. If we are not to perpetuate the mind/body dualism which has characterised and bedevilled Western philosophy for many centuries, indeed if we are not to amputate the mind from the body, we have to begin by recognising that the primary site of each mind is a particular finite corporeal body. A secondary site could be identified in the form of the many constructs, messages and markers which the mind/body externalises and presents to others - all human production could be said to constitute this secondary site - a body outside - a shadow of the primary site. This corporeal body is the locus of the mind's operations, providing its sustenance, systemic foundation and contact with the world. The concept of the disembodied subject/mind reduces the subject/mind to a fantasy, a rather implausible ghost or abstraction. It is important therefore to think in more holistic terms, to see the embodied subject/mind in interrelationship with other embodied subjects. It is also important to acknowledge that though we can speak of the mind and body as separate entities, we ought never to make the mistake of believing they are anything other than integrated systems, operationally active only together - mutually sustaining, validating and energising. It follows that philosophically we need to stress the way in which epistemology and ontology are interwoven, that our knowledge is acquired through our being-in-the-world, or as Paul Crowther (1993: 41) writes, describing Merleau-Ponty's view, “our knowledge of the world is gained through our body's exploration of the world”.

The knowing body

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* The knowing body Knowledge is rooted in our needs and intentions, and in our responses to the situations in which we find ourselves. As we negotiate and learn to handle the world we assimilate and construct a body of knowledge which informs our attitudes and actions. The primary site of knowledge is within the purposive consciousness which inhabits, or, more correctly, is embodied as a particular physiological entity (my body: your body). Knowledge is externalised in a secondary site comprising the products of human learning - the constructs, messages and markers referred to earlier. Included in this externalisation are the bodies of knowledge which constitute the visual arts - paintings, sculpture, films, photographs, installations and performances. Knowledge can be described as referring to two or three spheres of experience: •

knowledge of the world;

•

knowledge of oneself; and

•

knowledge of a transcendent, transpersonal or ultimate reality - God or the Ground of Being in Christian mysticism, Brahman in Hinduism, or sunyata in Buddhist terminology.

The latter perhaps having meaning for only a minority in our secular and materialistic Western culture, but certainly of great importance to many in the past and from other cultures. The maxim of Aristotle that, “there is nothing in the mind that was not first in the senses”, bears witness to the longevity of the view that all knowledge, ultimately, is afforded by the mediation of the senses - the embodiment of perception. However, it could be argued that a number of distinct categories of experience are involved, each qualitatively different to the others. For example: •

the senses (perception);

•

the mind (rational and discursive thought);

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22

•

the spirit (the eye with which we look at God, and the eye with which God looks at us) - all of which are integrated, unified and interdependent.

Intuition could be placed in either, or both, of the mind or spirit categories dependent upon the conceptual and cultural frameworks being applied. * Coming to know - the senses We come to know about the world through our perceptions of it through the butterfly net of the senses. This process can be described either with reference to the classical five senses (sight, touch, hearing, taste, smell) or to the more sophisticated models proposed by perceptual psychologists and neurologists. James Gibson (1968) suggests a model in which the senses are described as five interdependent perceptual systems: •

Basic orienting system: the inner ear - specifying the direction of gravity and the beginning and ending of body movement;

•

Auditory system: vibrations of air on the ear drum, specifying the nature and direction of auditory events;

•

Haptic system: receptors in tissues and joints, specifying posture and movements of limbs and muscles, and touch at the surface of the skin;

•

Olfactory system: taste and smell working together;

•

Visual system: specifying the structure of ambient light.

All these systems overlap and interact to provide as much information as possible. Gibson stresses that this is an information-based network, rather than sensation-based. Pliny, writing in the 1st Century AD, would no doubt have agreed with him, for he describes “the mind as the real instrument of sight and observation”. (in Gombrich 1977: 12) The senses provide information to the brain which is already partially ordered, selected and interpreted - rather than indecipherable masses of raw sensory data. The basic orienting system and the haptic system are particularly important in proprioception - the body's awareness of

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itself - while the auditory, olfactory and visual systems are important in exteroception - awareness of the external environment. It is important to note that even in Gibson’s systems view of perception there is a tendency to separate the perceiving subject from the objects of perception. The perceptual systems are viewed as interactive and interdependent but the relationship between these embodied systems and the ambient world appears estranged. Gibson stresses the need to consider the senses as active interdependent systems of enquiry, concerned with finding out, investigating, exploring, sorting and making sense. Bronowski (1988: 364) writes: The world is not a fixed, solid array of objects, out there, for it cannot be fully separated from our perception of it. It shifts under our gaze, it interacts with us, and the knowledge that it yields has to be interpreted by us.

According to Crowther, (1993: 41) Merleau-Ponty argues that our “fundamental contact with things arises from a practical synthesis from our handling them, looking at them, using them”. Crowther (ibid: 42) summarises Merleau-Ponty's theory of perception in the following terms: The body articulates the world into meanings by grasping it through the integrated operation of the senses, and relating what is thus grasped to its past and future life. In this sense perception is creative.

Capra (1992:124) makes reference to the ideas of the neurologists, Maturana and Varela, that, “the world is brought forth in the process of knowing”. They believe that all doing is knowing, and all knowing is doing. They argue, like Merleau-Ponty, that knowing is an activity, a process, a participation, an encounter, a relating to. The dividing line between perceptual activity and mental activity is shifting and illdefined, and the subject of much scientific debate. However, it does seem that perception itself has selecting, categorising and unifying functions. Analysis, evaluation and synthesis appear to take place to some extent at the origin of input. The mind and its functions repre-

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sent further levels of refinement and interpretation of perceptual information, and new stages of evaluation, decision-making and storage. Perception, memory, thinking and doing all contribute to the prospective and speculative activity of coming to know the world exemplified in the arts as well as the sciences. Similarly these factors are all utilised in knowing oneself - but it is important to remember that the classical senses must be extended to include proprioceptive systems such as the haptic and basic orienting systems. Coming to know God or acquiring knowledge of a reality immanent within, or beyond, the “veil of appearances” which is our everyday reality, is a process too complex and contentious to enter into here but suffice it to say that many would argue that it is possible - once more through the medium of the senses and the powers of the mind, coupled with divine grace, faith and a contemplative giving-up or dissolution of the ego (to use Christian terminology). * Perception, memory, connectivity & consciousness: Edelman & Ramachandran I’d like to jump from a consideration of perceptual and cognitive systems to a brief discussion of ideas put forward by neuroscientists like Gerald Edelman and Vilayanur Ramachandran, as they add another dimension to our understanding of the ways in which our embodied minds function. Edelman and Tononi, (2000) distinguish between two kinds of consciousness: “primary consciousness” and “higher-order consciousness”. The development of primary consciousness in humans and some other animals involves an evolutionary shift that enables these animals to remember the common features of a variety of percepts, in order to construct what Edelman refers to as a “concept”. It is the ability to hold a “concept” of this kind in the mind that enables an animal to learn from its experiences and to modify its behaviour accordingly (for instance, to recognise perceptual cues, previously encountered, that signal “danger”, and thus to take avoiding action). As Edelman and Tononi (2000: 109) state, “The ability to construct a conscious scene is the ability to construct, within fractions of seconds, a remembered present”. This, they argue, is one

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of the defining characteristics of emerging consciousness. If evolutionary selection adds to this important characteristic, the ability to codify and share perceptual data and memories through the use of language, of whatever kind, then higher-order consciousness has been established. Edelman and Tononi provide detailed evidence to support the very crude outline I’ve given here. They argue that when narrative capabilities emerged and affected linguistic and conceptual memory, higher-order consciousness could foster the development of concepts of the past and future related to that self and to others. At such a point, an individual is freed, to some extent, from bondage to the remembered present. (ibid: 195)

A vast new realm of possibilities opens up. The ability to experience the present in relation to past and future enables the “individual” (and maybe it is at this evolutionary stage that an individual develops the potential to recognise its individuality) to plan, to imagine different futures for itself, to categorise and discriminate with great sophistication and subtlety compared to a creature with primary consciousness. “Concepts and thinking flourish”, and emotions, beliefs and desires arise out of the enormously increased complexity of activity within the brain. (ibid: 204) In this rudimentary account of the evolution of consciousness we have reached a kind of consciousness that we recognise as like our own. Edelman and Tononi refer to this state as “the incomparable richness of being: the complexity and informativeness of conscious experience”. (ibid: 29) Ramachandran (2003) approaches the development of language and thought from a different perspective. He describes one important element in the development of higher-order consciousness in terms of what he calls, “cross-modal abstraction”, an ability associated with particular neurological functions in the brain. The capacity of the brain to abstract common denominators from a profusion of sensory inputs lies at the heart of the whole process by which language and thought arise. Ramachandran argues, eloquently, that underlying the linguistic ability to use metaphor to relate the common features of two apparently very different kinds of entities (for instance, “the world” and “a stage”), lies the ability to recognise a common characteristic of, on the one hand, a shape, and on the other, a vocal sound. As an example of this kind of “cross-modal abstraction” he describes an

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experiment in which respondents are presented with two shapes: one, an irregular curvilinear form; the other, a sharp-angled form. The respondents are asked which shape is “booba” and which is “kiki”. 9598 per cent pick the curvilinear form as “booba” and the sharp-angled form as “kiki”. This is true even with respondents who are nonEnglish speakers. “The effect demonstrates the brain’s ability to engage in cross-modal abstraction of properties such as jaggedness or curviness”. (Ramachandran 2003: 84) * Subject and object as unified system or field If we examine the writings of phenomenologists (particularly Merleau-Ponty), Gestalt theorists, psychologists of perception like James Gibson, neuroscientists like Edelman and Ramachandran, philosophers of science like Kuhn and Capra, and a number of Buddhist thinkers some similar attitudes are evident. For instance: •

an emphasis upon a holistic 'systems' view;

•

a stress upon interactive interdependence (eg. of subject and object, or different perceptual systems); and

•

an emphasis upon process.

When we look at perception we can see how these attitudes affect understanding of the relationship between subject and object, perceiver and perceived. While Gibson formulates a systems view based upon five perceptual systems, we could go further and argue that the primary system involved is that which integrates subject and object, observer and observed - the energised, activated relationship between perceiver and perceived needs to be considered as the primary system. Linguistically we can divide this systemic relationship into “subject” and “object”, “me” and “the world”, but in reality they are indivisible. Perception, mind and consciousness are functions of the interaction and fluctuating tension between body and world - in a sense they are the skin, the surface belonging as much to the environment as to the individual. Just as quantum physics illuminates the interactive processes between apparently separate subatomic particles or events teaching us that the distinctions and divisions we make are to some extent arbitrary and always conditional- so the experience of percep-

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tion, of coming-to-know our world, also presents us with the basic features of interconnection and indivisibility. David Bohm, (1989: 55) the quantum physicist, writes: We suggest that there is indeed a meaning to a reality that lies outside ourselves but that it is necessary that we, too, should be included in an essential way as participators in this reality. Our knowledge of the universe is derived from this act of participation.

The observer is always part of the observation. To put this another way: I look out at the world through a part of the world. The world looks at a part of itself. I am part of the world's perception of itself. Or: we gain knowledge of the world, of what is, through our implication in the world, through our assimilation into the world. In a sense we are the consciousness of the world, of what is. * Knowledge and networks Capra and others have pointed to the “network” as an important diagrammatic icon of the new thinking in science; it is also significant in relation to our understanding of knowledge and the visual arts. Capra argues that as we perceive reality as a network of relationships, our descriptions, too, form an interconnected network representing the observed phenomena. In such a network there will be neither hierarchies nor foundations. (see Capra 1992: 133) This sounds like a prospectus for postmodernism! The network, as a whole, constitutes a multifaceted, multivalent and ever-changing body of learning, description and interpretation. Any part of it, taken in isolation (be it scientific theory or body of artworks), provides a limited and approximate viewpoint - which is all any of us (individual, group, institution or class), can propose. The notion of some kind of objective certainty, or of a holy grail of ultimate truth, sought by many and found by only a privileged few, can be seen as a potentially dangerous misconception, or an irrelevant fantasy.

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* Achieving coherence and making sense All knowing involves the utilisation of processes of selection, evaluation, analysis and synthesis. It is obvious that these characteristics of coming-to-know, of ordering and making sense, of achieving coherence, are as typical of the arts as of the sciences. And while music may be questioned as a way of knowing about the world this is no more debatable than the case of pure mathematics. Both certainly generate constructs which model or represent states of coherence or relative incoherence. And in the case of music many have argued that it also models in a programmatic or impressionistic manner states of mind. Liebniz suggests a provocative analogy between numbers and music: “The pleasure we obtain from music comes from counting, but counting unconsciously. Music is nothing but unconscious arithmetic”. (in Sacks 1985: 195) All knowing also involves the construction of propositions, models and schema which are functionally related to our activities in the world, and which are in a continuous process of modification and revision. The repository of propositions and models which is a culture, is only a reflection of that repository of propositions and models which is an individual mind. The organisation of material into a pictorial construct or system of visual signs (for instance, a painting or sculpture) is analogous to the process of ordering sensations and experience through the perceptual systems and the mind. There is also a close analogy between the process of making a visual construct and a view of learning as a selftranscendent project fundamental to life. Fritjof Capra (1990: 309) relates learning to biological development and evolution: Living organisms have an inherent potential for reaching out beyond themselves to create new structures and new patterns of behaviour. This creative reaching out into novelty, which in time leads to an ordered unfolding of complexity, seems to be a fundamental property of life.

The speculative nature of learning, taking risks in order to enter new states of knowledge, is also a primary feature of the making of art both in relation to the minutiae of handling materials, (for instance:

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modulating colour across a surface; modelling a form in clay; or finding the “right” marks for a passage of drawing), and in relation to the development of ideas or a philosophy of practice. The cognitive, perceptual, affective and performative qualities required to make a coherent and significant visual construct, are as profound, as diverse and as subtle, as those required in any other branch of learning. * What kinds of knowledge do we find embodied in visual constructs? If the visual arts constitute bodies of knowledge, what kinds of knowledge do we find in them? A brief list may indicate some of the variety and scope evident in even a cursory examination (these fields of knowledge are not mutually exclusive and are likely to coexist in the work of a particular artist). Specific sensory information about the visible world Artists provide sensory information about the visible world in terms of colour, tonal values, surface texture, qualities of light and atmosphere. For example, Constable's empirical approach - encapsulated in his well-known statement: Painting is a science, and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature. Why, then, may not landscape painting be considered as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but the experiments? (in Gombrich 1977: 29)

Eugene Fromentin, writing about Jacob Ruisdael, describes the way in which Ruisdael gathers and represents information about the natural world, especially the sky: “He curves and spreads it, measures it, determines its value in relation to the variations of light on the terrestrial horizon”. Fromentin also mentions Ruisdael's “circular field of vision”, the painter's “grand eye open to everything that lives”. (in Alpers 1983: 29) Svetlana Alpers (1983: 122) writes of Dutch painting in the 17th Century:

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The knowing body The aim of Dutch painters was to capture on a surface a great range of knowledge and information about the world. They too employed words with their images. Like the mappers, they made additive works that could not be taken in from a single viewing point. Theirs was not a window on the Italian model of art hut rather, like a map, a surface on which is laid out an assemblage of the world.

Specific structural information about the visible world This kind of knowledge is the product of analytical enquiry and observation, and is concerned with understanding the patterns and structures which underpin the world of appearances. Work in this category tends to present us with systems and essences and is concerned with taxonomy as much as description. For instance, the mathematical, geological and anatomical knowledge developed and stored in landscape and figure paintings, sculptures and drawings from the late 15th century onwards. The anatomical drawings of Leonardo, and Stubbs' drawings and paintings of horses are obvious examples, but a comprehensive listing would be vast and would have to include the work of Cezanne and the earlier work of Mondrian, as well as sculptors as varied as Michelangelo and Degas. Ruskin expressed a view similar to Constable's notion of art as a branch of natural philosophy, however he encouraged artists to develop an acuity of perception which would identify the inner structural properties of the natural world, rather than the surface detail. (discussed in depth in Walton 1972) Systematic two-dimensional models of three-dimensional space Knowledge of this kind includes the countless forms of perspective and projective systems (Eastern and Western), and the modelling of solids. The visual arts share this epistemological territory with mathematics and geometry. The ideas and drawings of Piero della Francesca and Brunelleschi can be considered alongside Pythagorus and Euclid as ways of formulating systematic diagrammatic models of three-dimensional space. Three-dimensional analyses of the interaction between volumes, materials and mass in space Although the European traditions of sculpture between the gothic and modern periods seem predisposed to descriptive realism (which places

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more emphasis upon ocular veracity than tactile truth), all sculpture to some extent models the operation and experience of the haptic and basic orienting systems, affirming our experience of corporeal weight within a gravitational field - a celebration and analysis of embodiment. Examples include works as varied as, Michelangelo’s David, Rodin’s Burgher’s of Calais, de Kooning’s Clam Digger, Caro’s Early One Morning, Rachel Whiteread’s House, as well as ancestor stools produced in Ghana and Inuit shamanic masks. Representations of subjective human experience Knowledge acquired through reflection and speculation about what it feels like to be a certain person in a certain place at a certain time encompassing psychological, existential and spiritual domains. This includes ontological knowledge encoded, enacted and interrogated in a huge variety of works produced by artists as dissimilar as Rembrandt (the self-portraits), Van Gogh, Francis Bacon, Bill Viola, Frank Auerbach, Giacometti, Helen Chadwick or Cindy Sherman. Presentations of what might be the case, what might happen or has happened The speculative domain of the imagination - of visual fictions, fables, prophecy and historical reconstruction. Examples range from the work of Titian, Rubens and Blake to Dali, Joel Peter Witkin, Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri and Paula Reago. The latter two categories tend to present knowledge of ourselves, as against knowledge of the world. Presentations of the thing-in-itself or “objecthood” There is also a category of art production characterised by its explicitly non-representational intent. The work of artists who aim to assert the “objectness” of the object, the presence of the concrete, material substance of the world. The “art of the real” - as manifested in certain minimalist/process artists. This could be seen as constituting an attempt to generate situations in which we gain unmediated direct knowledge of the world, of what is - though many would argue that this is impossible. Examples include minimalist works produced by Don Judd, Richard Serra, Carl Andre. The sacred Kaaba in Mecca

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could be seen as another example within the non-representational framework of Islamic art. The famous Japanese temple rock garden of Ryoanji or the one-stroke ink drawings of Nantenbo, can also be seen as a manifestation of tathata or ‘suchness’, a showing of that which is within a Buddhist context. * Art and science: concrete and abstract Of course the visual arts, in the main, present knowledge in concrete forms (indices of the body and its operations), through physically insistent materials and processes, which are themselves functionally linked to the maker, and the processes of manufacture. The knowledge developed by the unified, interactive field of body/mind/environment is itself embodied in artefacts and processes which are themselves part of the interactive networks which constitute their context, site and audience - a system or field of relationships. Although I’ve been arguing for a high degree of congruence between the visual arts and the sciences it is also worth considering one or two points of potential difference. Science aims at a level of abstraction in its knowledge, a position in which generalisations are possible, beyond and above the level of specific cases. Science aims in some way towards theories which are applicable, if not universally, then at least to as wide a range of cases and situations as possible. The tendency (the danger if you like) is towards disembodied knowledge, whereas we could say (in polarising the possibilities) that the tendency in the visual arts is towards “overembodied” knowledge, that is hyperspecificity – a situation in which knowledge obtains, or is present, only in that particular object/situation/case, and has no applicability, relevance or even accessibility to other individuals or situations. This is the extreme subjectivity scenario in which highly subjective content has, and can have, no cognitive significance to anyone else, perhaps because it is encoded and enclosed in an arcane or private field of gravity, which, like a black hole, might draw in but not radiate energy (in this case illumination or knowledge). Of course this degree of collapsing or imploding subjectivity could be argued as an absence of any cognitive dimension

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at all, on the basis that knowledge which can only be known by one person (the artist/maker), cannot by definition be verified or recognised as knowledge by anyone else. This would constitute a closed system - which many would argue is the case with some kinds of artefacts and processes, which deny access by virtue of their hypersubjectivity. * Knowledge, modernism and postmodernism The way in which knowledge is described, categorised and formulated has changed radically over the past century. Most recently this shift can be seen in terms of the modernist/postmodernist divide. Increasingly our study of knowledge is feeling the impact of holistic, systems-based thinking evident in the sciences, and increasingly in the arts. Modes of organisation, process and relationship have become the focus of attention and enquiry. Fields of energy, indeterminacy, dynamic interaction and interdependence are now emphasised and valued, while the more deterministic emphasis upon establishing laws and certainties governing inert solids and substances has been questioned and found to be unsatisfactory. The paradigm shift (if that is what it is) from a Newtonian mechanistic, atomistic worldview, to a worldview grounded in systems and process thinking, is evident in the ways in which we engage with knowledge, and in the cultural morphology of postmodernism. This shift in the way knowledge and learning are viewed, constitutes a move from a kind of epistemological absolutism to one of contingency and relativity. In the former there is a relatively clear sense of what is established, fixed, orthodox, and, by implication, true, as regards bodies of knowledge and the objects of knowledge. In the new scenario contingency, approximation and limitation are seen as necessary conditions of any viewpoint or position. No single position can be seen as holding a monopoly of truth, indeed diverse and multiple viewpoints are affirmed and valued. The modernist approach can be described as being essentially linear and oriented about a vertical axis. Emphasis is placed upon achieving understanding through a progressive development which is essentially

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teleological and compartmentalised. There is a movement towards an accretive accumulation of information and knowledge. On the other hand the postmodernist approach tends to be non-linear, or multi-linear, oriented about a lateral axis, emphasising connection, relationship, interdependence and complexity. The web of energies and relationships which characterises the world of nature is reflected in the multifaceted and perspectival character of human understanding. (See Part 10 for more on perspectivism). Knowledge is always conditioned by the location, purpose and outlook of the knowing subject. The process of knowing is essentially interpretative, never absolute. * Summing up In this survey of some of the issues and ideas about knowledge, interpretation and the visual arts I have suggested that the cognitive function of art parallels that of the sciences. I have identified some of the ways in which the visual arts present us with embodiments of knowledge in the form of processes and artefacts. We have seen how this knowledge is the product of human participation in the world through the medium of the body and its processes. We also recognised how knowledge is inherently perspectival, an interpretation arising from our participation in the world. This acknowledgement of the interpretative basis for our knowledge, embodied in artefacts and processes, led us to recognise the importance of integration and coherence in the way we make sense of the world and in the way we make art. Finally we have seen, I hope, how the integrative nature of the models, constructs and processes manifested in the visual arts promotes a re-integration in the observer - a reformulation of experience, a re-constitution of the self and a re-interpretation of what is. Perhaps we can also see the way in which all observers, that is all of us, are participants, spiders if you like, spinning the web of interpretations which constitutes culture. ***

Part 3 Interrogating appearances: being, seeing & showing A few years ago I was reflecting on Carel Fabritius’ painting, The Goldfinch. I was wondering how an image so small and so prosaic could absorb and sustain so much looking, so many centuries of attention and pondering. A large part of its appeal seems to lie both in its material presence (as a painterly construction) and in its ambiguity as a record of how we encounter both an actual bird and a representation of a bird. Fabritius displays to us something of how perception, representation and interpretation are interwoven. The representation is compelling and ‘true to appearances’ while at the same time asserting its material presence as oil paint. The choreography of paint and gesture is not intended to fool us into thinking this is an actual goldfinch. We aren’t expected to be deceived. But we do seem to be invited to marvel at the processes of perception and cognition and to recognise the complexity of seeing and picturing. Part of my own response is described in this brief text: Here it is captive light fastened to blue shadows, crumbling pale skin of wall, shafts of gold between bars of deep black Pinned to its hour a taut smudged form turns bluntly towards a painter’s eyes.

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* Introduction In this section I examine some of the preconceptions and assumptions attached to the practices of observationally-based drawing and painting. My intention is to shed a fresh light on an ancient practice – that of representing the world of appearances (and disappearances) and to challenge the notion that this is a relatively simple business of reproducing what’s “out there”. Questions are raised about the idea that this involves a relationship of separation, division or dualism. In considering the ontological and epistemological implications of observationally-based art practices I also explore some of the relationships between art practice and experience, and between theory and practice. Existential, phenomenological and Buddhist viewpoints are interwoven with strands of postmodern poetics. It is axiomatic to this discussion that the art works being considered present us with iconic and indexical signs of being, and constitute a topography of mind. It would be reasonable to interpret what I’m saying as suggesting that there is still a lot of unfinished business in the field of observational drawing and painting. That it is still a viable practice in the early twenty-first century and is unlikely to be totally eclipsed by digital technologies or conceptualist ideologies. Indeed the more we learn about neurology, perception and consciousness the more interesting and relevant these modes of manual representation become. * Observational realism - the pursuit of “likeness” Standing in the margins of the modern/postmodern mainstream, and in a sense oppositional to it, lie a range of practices, disciplines, ideas and images which maintain and revitalise a distinctively European tradition of observational realism – an engagement with the world that presents us with iconic and indexical signs of being. Central to this realist tradition, or traditions (for there are many distinctly different approaches at work here), lie three important beliefs: one, the paramount value of lived experience; two, the need to acknowledge and encounter a reality outside the self which is resistant to our own actions and ideas, and which poses both a challenge and a support to human existence; and three, a desire to interrogate and

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celebrate the appearance of that reality as it is mediated through experience, through the interdependent processes of perception, cognition, intuition and action. In the traditions of observational realism, the pursuit, or construction, of the real, perception is a multi-dimensional activity - a creative process of doing, making and interpreting. It is also an integral part of the process of becoming, the unfolding of identity and the construction of self. Realism, at least since the time of Cezanne, has been concerned with analysing and celebrating the flow of perceptual experience in all its complexity and evanescence. Painters like Cezanne, Giacometti, Coldstream, Lopez-Garcia and Auerbach are engaged in scrutinising the subtle micro-processes of becoming as they are revealed in our perceptual negotiations with the world, with the other. The activity of drawing and painting from observation is both a process of deciphering and re-presenting, and, more fundamentally, a participatory process of bringing the world to consciousness. In a sense these artists draw the world into being. They negotiate with the stuff of the world to determine what is and how it is. In doing this they maintain an openness to what’s real and outside, the materiality of existing things. In this kind of practice the subjective being of the artist encounters the otherness which enfolds and permeates our subjectivity. The reciprocity of self and other, and the mutuality of observer and observed, add complexity to the business of trying to make a likeness - the “real” is not a given, an absolute unchanging realm, it is instead the mutual coarising of perceiver and perceived in the activity of perception. * The popular vocabulary used to discuss observational drawing and painting When we attempt to observe and represent the world we experience a situation full of contradictions, ambiguities and complexities. We tend to recognise the world as something apart from us. We divorce seeing from our other sensory functions, and we tend to separate our perceptions from our thinking processes. These tendencies mask or obscure our actual condition which is that we are in, and of, the world – participants rather than spectators.

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All artists who draw and paint from life, who attempt to represent what they perceive through the manual application of pigment on a relatively flat surface, have to confront these complexities. The vocabulary that is often used to discuss observational or realist practices is indicative of how such practices are conceptualised by both practitioners and the general public. Typically we talk in terms of a person painting or drawing directly “from observation”, “painting what they see”, “working from life”, “depicting the world of appearances”, or, maybe, “empirically constructing a representation of their immediate visual field”. Such practitioners are seen as exponents of a long and historically significant tradition of descriptive, realist or “retinal” painting, which may now be in its death throes – a guttering candle of out-dated orthodoxy whipped by the winds of modern and postmodern culture. According to this well-established view the painter produces a resemblance or likeness of the object of his or her vision, an illusion of substance, space, volume, surface and light. An art of mimesis or imitation. A mirror held up to nature. A window on the world. In C.S. Peirce’s terms, an iconic image. The painter constructing a convincing reproduction of something seen, or a cunning deception, reminding us of what it’s like to view the world with one eye closed and one’s head held in a vice! In these popular views of realist painting there is a clear distinction between observer and observed, the seeing subject and the object of sight. The painter as spectator makes a representation of external reality, a reality outside, beyond, at a distance. Truth is a function of the faithfulness of the correspondence between the representation and that which is represented. In philosophical terms this constitutes a picture theory of truth, and a realist theory of perception. These terms present us with an over-simplified and misleading description of what have always been complex, ambiguous and problematic processes - the processes of perception, cognition, and their constant symbiotic companion, the process of representation.

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* A participatory view of observation and representation in painting – a practitioner’s viewpoint For the painter these processes of perception, cognition and representation are participatory and improvisatory. As I look back at notes made as I worked at observational drawing and painting I am confronted with a personal history of the problematics of representation. They remind me how complex are these activities and how difficult it is to represent perceptual experiences and to engage in a discourse that does justice to the complexity. Here are some extracts from my working notes: How can we separate what we perceive from what we know - the perceptual from the cognitive? To pretend that the eye can be somehow divided from the mind is nonsense! Some days I gaze and see only the strangeness of the thing-in-itself, forever out there, ungraspable and inviolate. An encounter with the web of appearances spun by our spidery minds - a web which is a function of our relationship with the world but which is also a screen behind which the world displays itself to itself! Maybe there are moments when that screen can be gently nudged to one side, like a curtain in a faint breeze, and then we can encounter the splendour of what IS - Tathata - suchness. What is the threshold of discernibility, the point of recognition, the moment at which we grasp what a thing is? Where is the subject/object divide, the discontinuity between me and what I observe? We have the sensation of looking, the visual-spatial-perceptualcognitive field is activated, the territory of enquiry resonates - and maybe it's “my” volition which activates it, my desire to find, make sense, relate to.... but, it feels as if there is a unified relational field within which my actions, thoughts and feelings are embedded - part of the countless shifting relationships, interactions and probabilities which make up an indeterminate universe of possibilities (of which the “I” we refer to, is just one set or combination). The painter is involved in a dynamic contemplation of an object, a questioning of its existence, status, materiality - its presence in the space - a space which we also occupy and move through, see through and are sustained by. It's the complexity of the experience that's so engaging: you're in a space, surrounded by it (a room). You're trying to make sense of a part of that space, but you can't separate it from its surroundings (which are your sur-

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Interrogating appearances roundings). The visual field constitutes one set of data, but it’s the interactive system of the whole sensory/cognitive field which you're experiencing and analysing. And all of this is still only part of a larger process which includes the way in which the experience and analysis are embodied, through the apparatus of representation, into a painting which both challenges, delights and informs the viewer - causing the viewer's perceptual/cognitive systems to resonate with the codes and signals and contours of the painting thus becoming themselves participants. What I see is itself a representation, a retinal image, an excitation of the cerebral cortex. When I draw I’m trying to make a culturally viable representation of a selective array of infinite possible representations within the chemical factory that is my brain. From second to second, minute to minute, I am a shimmering transcriber of changing sensations, pulses of light, ambient sounds, bodily movements and touches. And what emerges from these chemical, biological and cultural interactions? Smudges of dust on a pale surface!

These notes suggest both the complexity of the process of drawing and painting from direct observation and the problems attached to adopting an overly dualistic or binary approach to the interface between subject and object. As I perceive the object before me I become aware of the mutuality of perception, the interdependence of subject and object. The hand holding the charcoal, the marks appearing on the paper and the objects of perception inhabit a shared spatial field - they are functions of the seamless reciprocity between the interwoven energy fields which constitute this small part of the world. The drawing being made is an analogical and indexical trace of my mindbody negotiating, handling and participating in the world - a world which is profoundly “other” on the level of material, biological and chemical structure, but simultaneously a part of the cognitive/perceptual field (“me”) at the levels of subatomic and neurological fields of energy. I seem to remember reading that Cezanne once said: “man is a shimmering chaos”, and we are - a shimmering chaos in an infinity of chaos or multi-dimensional complexity - which is all that there is. The philosopher, Bryan Magee, adds his own observation on the theme of mutuality of being: “We are beings in amongst and inseparable from a world of being, existences in an existing world, and it is from there that we start”. (1987: 258)

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You could say every observational painting poses a question, rather than makes a statement. “Is this how it was? Is this what was seen or thought or felt? Is this what actually happened?” The painting becomes a laboratory in which appearances are interrogated. The practice of the painter involves a doubting intensity of looking, such that the common-place becomes extraordinary and familiarity is inhabited by strangeness. Another layer of complexity that arises in considering these matters is the false distinction that is often made between drawing from direct perception and drawing from memory. In a later section we’ll see how difficult it is to separate these concepts, prompting a leading neuroscientist, Gerald Edelman (2000: 107-110), to use the term “the remembered present” as a more precise and accurate description of how memory is implicated in perception and cognition. (see Part 2) * Observational painting as enquiry into “the real, resistant & experienced world” In our experience of things-in-the-world we seem to encounter volume, solidity, materiality, substance – yet the appearance of substance is deceptive when looked at through three different lenses. Firstly, through our perceptual experience we discover that the object is not a static stable entity but a dynamic part of a continually changing field of perceptual and interpretative activity. Secondly, through our cognitive processes, particularly scientific modes of enquiry, we encounter at the sub-atomic and quantum levels a world of interpenetrating energies and forces. Thirdly, in considering our existential condition we find our own identity or self to be anything but a fixed, finite, object-like construction – rather it is a matrix of at times contradictory moods, feelings, thoughts, processes which somehow cohere but are open to continual revision and transformation as we negotiate changing circumstances and conditions. Our position as observer is more transparent, indeterminate and inseparable from what we observe than might at first be assumed. Thus “objects” are events or fields of relationships, transactions between observer and observed. They have no enduring substance or self-identity, no permanent essence. They are relative, impermanent,

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and ever-changing. And observational paintings present us with iconic and indexical images which are the products of an engagement with these event fields. Robert Hughes (1990: 214), describing the coded morphology of Auerbach’s paintings, writes: the clear purpose […] is to clarify Auerbach’s struggle, not to ‘express himself’, but to define the terms of his relations to the real, resistant and experienced world: which is what art must do […] if it is to be more than chatter.

Some of the above ideas about painting and drawing from observation can be linked to ideas about experience, thought, perception and notions of the real put forward by a number of poets from the 1960’s onwards. In exploring their ideas we can see, from another angle, more of the complexities and paradoxes that surround our relationships with the world - our entanglement in the unfolding mystery of being with other beings in amongst the fabric of things. We share our existence with beings who have purposes, needs and corporeal presences that are not ours, and we exist in a world that has a profound disinterest in our presence and an enduring materiality that is both our habitat and spatial/temporal reference. Engaging with this materiality gives rise to questions about reality and otherness, how we experience and how we represent or express changing fields of consciousness. Art sheds light on the multi-facetted revolving dancehall globe which is human experience and projects its infinite reflections (which are poems, pictures, drawings, songs). It urges us to look here, listen to this, feel the texture. Attend and learn what it is like to be human, alive to so much. And as the mirrored globe rotates we are turned and re-orientated and re-established. Some kind of dissembling and reassembling takes place. We are continually revising who we are, how we are and what we do. We re-invent ourselves in the world, find our engagement renewed, our being deepened and magnified. Art, in these kinds of painting and poetry, acknowledges this revisability and is an important agent of the process of self-constitution, a process of bringing together, integrating and making coherent. And the coherence or integration is dynamic, active and exploratory, not

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passive, sedentary and fixed. It is also distinct from science in that it rarely presents us with an explanatory exegesis. As Bronowski argues (1978: 60): “Science offers explanations [but] art carries a kind of knowledge which is not explanatory”. It may interrogate, celebrate, condense and transform but it rarely explains. * Engaging with otherness Camus (in L’Etranger) writes of “the benign indifference of the universe”.

In a painting by William Coldstream measurement is a central concern. And the measure is set against what’s out there. It is the material world (which is also at the sub-atomic level the immaterial world) that provides the gauge, template and otherness. The making, looking, thinking and enjoying are a function of his surrender to that other - the object or person in the space beyond, yet inhabited by, Coldstream and his brush. It is this inquisitive seeing which is significant. An attention to the whole visual and spatial field, and to the interwoven processes of representation (which is the conceptualisation of sight). And this attention to measure, measurement, distance, proportion and interval is not an attempt to fix the seen, to hold the view with a kind of painterly forceps, but a celebration of the improvisatory flux of seeing and being. The marks and dashes littering the surface are an index of this improvisational encounter. These words of Euripides come to mind: For only to be alive and to see the light Is beautiful. Only to see the light; To see a blade of young grass, Or the grey face of a stone. (in Walker 1988: unnumbered last page)

And it is being up against the otherness of the grass and stone, the grassy and stony light, which is crucial. For our being-in-the-world is predicated on our being somewhere, on our inhabitance of a space, a hole in everything that we are not (to paraphrase the sculptor, Carl Andre).

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In a more poetic voice, I try to say something about this by adding my own words to part of the third of Samuel Beckett’s, Four Poems, 1948 (Beckett’s text in italics): What would I do without this world faceless incurious and all that involves of another hand up against the face resistant as granite to a pleading self folding each lapping wave of consciousness back towards an unknowing ocean where to be lasts but an instant where every instant spills in the void the ignorance of having been and that ignorance is all we are somehow foundered against what we can never be without this wave where in the end body and shadow are engulfed all stemmed against obliteration stoned as a cliff against moments of tide what would I do without this silence where the murmurs die

The painter becomes the consciousness of that observed reality which is his subject, making conscious, through marks & stains, the substance of what it is to see, to be aware like the poet Yvor Winters (in Gifford 1974: 81): “[…] in an empty place / I met the unmoved landscape face to face”. Or, as Beckett describes Arikha’s practice: “Siege laid again to the impregnable without. Eye and hand fevering after the unself”. (Beckett et al 1985: 10) Side-stepping the self in order to fully attend to, and represent, the thing/other, is important to painters like Arikha and Giacometti and to objectivist poets like George Oppen and Charles Reznikoff. In Reznikoff’s words (1976: 20): “Poetry presents the thing in order to convey the feeling. It should be precise about the thing and reticent about the feeling”. In his poem, Of Being Numerous, Oppen writes, “There are things / We live among and to see them / Is to know ourselves”. (1976: 147) In another poem, This in Which, Oppen refers to, “The small nouns / Crying faith” (in Harding 2004: 17), and it is “the small nouns” that

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the objectivists wished to celebrate in small acts of poetic realism. They sought to honour the other as manifested in the material world of things – a world of substance, weight, texture, spatial extension, suspended in light and shadow. According to Harding (2004: 17), Oppen was fully implicated in this “faith”, which he could only describe as the belief “that consciousness exists and that it is consciousness of something”. Not a prayer then, but a wish to speak of the world’s being there and his being able to know it.

This could easily be applied to Coldstream, Arikha, Giacometti, Lopez-Garcia and other observational painters. * Perception, participation and improvisation The processes of perception involve an interaction and a tension, between determinacy and indeterminacy. The focus of our attention is inscribed with intention and determinacy, while the peripheral field is permeated by indeterminacy. There is always an improvisatory quality to perception. We speculate, try out, and guess and test our perceptions. The head tilts and sways to negotiate the visual and haptic space, to bring edges into line, to corroborate a notion that it's one kind of surface out there and not another. As we perceive (and in the perceptual disciplines of drawing and painting from observation) we're not formulating certainties or dealing with absolutes. Rather we're involved in conditional, improvised negotiations within a speculative field of sensations, ideas, memories, assumptions and intentions - a fluid stream of energies, codes and conjectures. It is this handling of the world which characterises our most intimate awarenesses - an improvisation of being and knowing which is embodied in the handling of paint, and in the pictorial conventions, signs and gestures orchestrated into an observational painting - a painting which embodies a transaction or negotiation with the world, or rather renders visible a particular set of transactions in a world of transactions.

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The primary characteristic of perceptual experience is that it is improvisatory, involving a constant oscillation between trial and error, guessing and checking, inventing and deconstructing, taking risks and exercising caution. These interactions are fundamental to our beingin-the-world, to our sensing and knowing. This is how we are. The history of painting from life is a history of critical enquiry into, and a celebration of, these processes. Each painting embodying an improvisatory dance of perception, cognition and representation.

The morphology of a painting resonates with the syntax of interrogation. The painter asks questions of the world, and in the world. Just as perception is not a passive but an active process, so the process of painting is animated by the need to find out and to try out, to enquire and to interpret. This interrogation of appearances takes place in an actual space, a particular site, and the painting becomes a pictorial

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transcript of that spatial encounter. Or, to put it another way, the painting is an analogical map of a particular physical and cognitive field, framed, informed and inscribed with the painter's history - a continuum of speculations, beliefs, premises and assumptions which position the mind as surely as certain spatial co-ordinates position the body. Arikha (in Beckett et al 1985: 81): Painting a portrait from life is a re-arrangement, through one’s inner form, of someone’s shape […] equivalent to the reorganisation of sand by the wind […] it’s provisional but intensive […] a sort of seismic trace.

Painters such as Arikha, Giacometti and Cezanne attempt to actualise, rather than describe, perception and cognition in the materiality of drawings and paintings. This actualisation opens up to us the complexity of seeing and representing, enabling us to engage with our own perceptions, representations and interpretations, as the painters grappled with theirs. * The false dichotomy of subject and object We are active participants in the world, rarely passive spectators or recipients of what the world throws at us. In a sense we constitute the world, or at least we participate in its constantly evolving form. Yet we can also feel the tension of separation. The process of looking, which binds us to the world, also renders us apart - generating in us a sense of division between us and the world, me and everything that is not-me. The painter, and observational paintings, deliver a kind of commentary on this sense of separation, while at the same time reminding us that the separation is an illusion, a product of an essentially linguistic frame of reference, validated by generations of Cartesian and Newtonian thought. When I sit here in this room for hour after hour there comes a point at which I can no longer say, “I am aware”, but rather that, “there is awareness”. The relationship is not between me here, and the world out there, but rather, here is the world and my aware-

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ness/consciousness is a part of it, dissolved into it. This is very different to the feeling of me cocooned in my bubble of subjectivity versus all those things and objects out there - me versus my exaggerated sense of the otherness of the world. An extreme version of this is described in Sartre's novel, Nausea, in which the sense of otherness infects even the protagonist's sense of himself - his own hand described as an object not belonging to himself - the ultimate alienation or dissociation. In the work of Giacometti, Auerbach, Coldstream and others there is a sense of connectedness, kinship and inseparability. However, separation, brokenness and the sense of otherness haunt these painters. The process of representation illuminates the tension between our sense of belonging and our sense of separateness. In constructing the painting a tension arises from the painted forms and marks as they signify, describe and assert their material presence. An alternating current of ambiguous relationships, statements and questions is generated. The painting exists as a dialogue between the illusion of separation and the unavoidability of connectedness. * Coherence and integration Our participation in the world, grounded in our body’s improvisatory dialogue with its surrounding space, is characterised by a need to make sense, to establish coherence and understanding. This is true of our most intimate perceptual processes and of the grand speculations we make about ourselves and the cosmos. And this process of improvisation and participation is inherently active. Our perceptual and cognitive models of the world are always changing, continually being revised and reformulated in the light of experiential activity. Because of this the marks, lines and smudges in a painting can be seen as denoting co-ordinates of probabilities in a dynamic field, rather than defining fixtures and substances. Merleau-Ponty (2002) argues that as embodied subjects we are implicated in the world, we are beings-in-the-world, rather than detached observers. Our perceptions of the world arise from within the

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world and they are always incomplete, changing as we move and explore. There can be no certainty or finality to our perceptions, nor to our selves. We are always open to an unfolding of our being-in-theworld. As far as Merleau-Ponty is concerned we are continually making and re-making ourselves. Giacometti’s resolve every morning to begin again, to scrub out yesterday’s painting and to start afresh, is symptomatic of his recognition that the perceptual object can never be finalised and that his own emerging self-identity was somehow bound up in the endless process of renewal through perception and representation. Observationally-based painters acknowledge the revisibility of perception and the making of art as an important agent of selfconstitution, a process of bringing together, integrating and making coherent. And the making coherent is a dynamic, active and exploratory process, not passive, sedentary and fixed. It embraces complexity, diversity, change and reformulation within a field of cultural and historical connections and affiliations. * Language and experience. Merleau-Ponty (2002) considered one of the fundamental aims of phenomenology to be to re-engage with the pre-reflective world, a world of non-mediated appearances. This pre-reflective world is a world of pure and un-formalised experience – an experience that is pre-linguistic, or non-linguistic - what Husserl refers to as “that as yet dumb experience”. (in Merleau-Ponty 2002: xvii) An experience of the undifferentiated seamless reality of all that is. This position is radically different to the views of many contemporary critical theorists, many of whom argue that there can be no prelinguistic experience of the world. The theologian Don Cupitt (1994: 46) presents an extreme version of this position: nobody can have conscious experience unless some kind of language or sign-system has turned her sensations into perceptions […] we are always inside language. We have no entirely prelinguistic experience or access to reality.

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In a similar vein Richard Rorty (1982: xx) argues against the idea of getting “back behind language to something which ‘grounds’ it, or which it ‘expresses’, or to which it might hope to be ‘adequate’”. Even if we agree with Cupitt and Rorty and believe that no-one can have an unmediated experience of reality (indeed we might ask what this could possibly mean - surely experience itself is the mediation) to assume that this mediation is primarily linguistic is a literary conceit based upon a misguided assumption that verbal conceptualisation and discourse have imposed their colonising power over all realms of human activity. Merleau-Ponty and others remind us that the primary processes of mediation are located in our neurological and perceptual systems - the pre-reflective apparatus of engagement with which we negotiate our bodily participation in the world. This can be linked to the Buddhist view that “reality itself has no meaning it is not a sign, pointing to something beyond itself”. (Watts 1965: 166 - my italics) To engage with reality is to go beyond, or to pre-empt, signification. There is something beyond language: the unself. Syllables hardly render it more visible

spat at the world

We could argue that in this kind of direct engagement with what IS events and things (which are particular kinds of events) have no intrinsic identity or self-existence. A continuum of sensations and unutterable experiences distinguish this pre-reflective domain from the linguistic sphere. Identities dissolve, merge and re-emerge. Evidence for this quality of experience can be found in the writings of mystics and poets, in dance, music and the visual arts. In Hindu and Buddhist terms, and in terms of much of modern physics, the world is a fluid continuum of interpenetrating energies in a state of endless play (lila, Sanskrit, ‘play or cosmic dance’). Though we are of this world, grounded in it, our consciousness of self generates an illusion of separateness. One of the primary agents in the construction of our sense of self and of this sense of separateness, is

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language. Indeed there is a kind of equation in Buddhism involving three terms: nama, rupa and maya. The term nama refers to the processes of naming, classifying and trying to grasp the ungraspable fluid forms of ‘reality-as-it-is’ (rupa). These attempts (so typical of language), which can never be realised in any deep sense, generate the profound discontent and dissatisfaction referred to as maya - sometimes translated as 'illusion'. (see Watts 1989: 41-42) These ideas can be linked to Merleau-Ponty's (2002: xvii) thinking: “It is the office of language to cause essences to exist in a state of separation which is in fact merely apparent”. Our use of verbal languages involves us in two diametrically opposed processes. The divisive, classificatory structures of language (particularly the Indo-European languages) don't fit the seamless continuum of reality, the world, or of our experience. Verbal syntax breaks up, sub-divides and fragments what is ultimately indivisible (an indivisibility acknowledged by physics, ecology, and by various religious and philosophical traditions). However we then have to use this language to speak of things and events and of our experience in a coherent way. We have to use a divisive syntax to make connections and relationships, to rebind and unify what we are constantly pulling apart! This paradox at the heart of our use of language creates a tension and an ambivalence in our relationship to it. Jack D. Flam (in Ashton, Buck & Flam 1983: 11) writes: The language of [verbal] discourse is linear, and in using it we find ourselves hard pressed to talk about more than one thing at a time; pictures, on the other hand, are tabular, and colours and forms can have meaning in several often seemingly contradictory ways at once.

Of course poetry often subverts the norms of linear language, generating ambiguity, contradiction and an open field of meanings that is more typical of pictures and images within the visual arts. However Nelson Goodman distinguishes between images as “dense” systems, and texts as differentiated systems, acknowledging the dense integra-

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tive structures of pictures unified into material gestalts - actualised, specific and objectified. (in Mitchell 1994: 345) * Drawing and painting as processes of de-categorisation – releasing the unnameable The codes and conventions and materiality of paintings are not easily aligned with those of verbal languages. While there is a tendency in verbal language to divide and categorise the indivisible and uncategorisable, a painting or sculpture has a tendency towards synthesis, and towards affirming the concrete immediacy of visual and spatial experience. Paintings can present us with indivisibility, inviting us to encounter and participate in a unified perceptual and cognitive field the embodiment of undifferentiated experience. To shed light from a very different angle on these matters it is useful to consider ideas drawn from the Madhyamika school of Buddhism, particularly the work of Nagarjuna. The Madhyamika shares the Buddhist view that human suffering and dissatisfaction (dukkha) is caused by our tendency to conceptualise the real, to mistake the concept for the thing, to be unable to cope with impermanence, relativity and the fact that nothing has an enduring self-identity. According to Murti (1980: 209-228) “the essence of the Madhyamika attitude […] consists in not allowing oneself to be entangled in views and theories, but just to observe”, to attend, to be present. The Madhyamika method is to “deconceptualise the mind and to disburden it of all notions, empirical as well as a priori”. We can only know the real, in the sense of have contact, engagement or experience of it, by cutting away the layers of theories, ideas and views which through idealisation and conceptualisation form all-pervasive cataracts which prevent us from clear sight, or which muffle our ears, anaesthetising our whole being. To the Madhyamika the real is “free from all predicates and relation. It is Sunya, [‘empty’] devoid of every kind of determination. [It is] invariably defined as transcendent to thought, as non-relative, non-determinate, […] non-discursive, non-dual”. The real is undifferentiated, uncategorisable and unnameable. (See Part 4)

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Painting, and many kinds of poetry which constitute a critique of language, can act as a buttress against the “reduction of the real” (Blaser 1974: 38) which is a characteristic of much of mainstream philosophical/literary ‘theorising’ in the West. Painting and poetry can resist the reifying power of what Heidegger calls “calculative thinking”. (in Batchelor 1990: 38-40) In some kinds of photo-realist paintings forms can become so conclusive in depicting an object, that the object is pinned down - in a sense obliterated or obscured or NAMED so comprehensively, that the object becomes subsidiary to the label. The picture becomes too definitive. A kind of nominative visuality removes the uncertainty and revisibility of perception and representation, fixing the evanescence of perceptual experience in a false and reductive exactitude. This quality can be seen in photorealist paintings by Richard Estes and some of the early works of Chuck Close. However in the later work of Close and in works by Magritte and Victor Burgin these reductive tendencies are problematised and interrogated . In the case of painters like Auerbach, Coldstream, Arikha and Lopez Garcia the aim is not so much to define or categorise or pindown, but to release the presence of the object, and to dissect the processes of perceiving, knowing and representing. Andre Breton is reputed to have been contemptuous of Giacometti’s decision in the 1930’s to work from life by painting a human head. Giacometti wanted to construct a likeness – a visual analogue of the phenomenological encounter with a head – but for Breton a head was a head - something obvious, familiar - a generic human form that is well-known and unsurprising, and therefore of little interest. But what is a head? There is a general physiological definition - which is almost a Platonic abstraction - but this head in front of me, what is it? A matrix of infinitely varied qualities of headness, of personality, of fluctuating appearances. And out of the head like twin searchlights the gaze. In Giacometti’s opinion it was the gaze alone that distinguished the head from a skull. Even my own head, that I see reflected in a mirror or represented in snapshots in a family album, is something I take for granted - rarely examining it in detail, except perhaps when

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I’m injured or unwell. This familiar and surprisingly heavy part of my anatomy is actually unfamiliar and relatively unknown to me. But when I begin to draw it, to study its shapes and surfaces, its contours, volumes and colours, it becomes another country to be explored, mapped and re-constituted in pigment on paper. I notice its distinguishing features, the particular bumps and hollows, hues and tones, that identify this head as being different to my wife’s or my child’s or any of the millions of other heads in the world. The activity of drawing releases the headness of this particular head in a way that surprises me. I am confronted with the strangeness and otherness of my own head, such that the words “my head” become curiously meaningless. The nominal categorisation of a corporeal presence is undone and I no longer have a name for what I encounter. I can only perceive and show through the medium of the drawing. While Wittgenstein once referred to naming as the “baptism of an object”, (in Fineberg 1995: 214) Philip Guston (ibid: 398) said of his headlike black and white compositions of the mid sixties: “if I think ‘head’ while I'm doing it, it becomes a mess […] I want to end with something that will baffle me”. Guston, talking to Harold Rosenberg in 1966, also quoted Paul Valery: “a bad poem is one that vanishes into meaning”, adding: “In a painting […] it vanishes into recognition”. (ibid: 398) What he seems to have meant was that the painting (or drawing) should disturb the usual comforting chain of encountering and recognising which the naming of things often exemplifies. Instead of recognition being a process of assuming and presuming, of unthinking familiarisation, it becomes a de-familiarising process of reformulation and making strange. For Guston painting an object was not done to define or categorise or label or pin down, but to release the un-nerving presence of the object - a doubting intensity of looking, such that the common-place becomes extraordinary and familiarity is inhabited by strangeness. The otherness of the material world is affirmed and encountered in an activity of non-discriminating attention. Drawing and painting become processes of actualisation and de-categorisation that release the thingness of things from the binding structures of names and verbal discourse.

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I attempted to evoke this process of de-categorisation (as seen in portraits by Auerbach or Giacometti) in the following extract from a text entitled, 9 June 1992: Prompted by a Giacometti portrait: Something unknown, not knowing, unseen but clearly seeing ....... To look and feel in the same face that unexpected presence of familiarity turned inside out - the sudden elusive signature of strangeness

Painters like Giacometti urge us to beware of “naïve realism” (Blaser 1974: 37) – a realism that seeks to reduce the complexity into simplicity, the unexpected and inexplicable into the expected and explicable – to explain and to transcend, to become detached from the movement and substance of the actual. Instead they attempt to show the complexity of perceiving and experiencing, of confronting the unnameable

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real. They give material form to Lawrence Weschler’s idea (1982: title) that “seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees”. * Seeing, showing – the silence before words We can see some of these ideas and issues at work in the poetry and poetics of Robert Lowell and Tess Gallagher. Robert Lowell writes: The painter's vision is not a lens, it trembles to caress the light. [....] Pray for the grace of accuracy Vermeer gave to the sun's illumination stealing like the tide across a map to his girl solid with yearning. We are poor passing facts, warned by that to give each figure in the photograph his living name. (from Epilogue, in Lowell’s last collection, Day By Day – in Schweizer 1997: 165)

According to Harold Schweizer (1997), Lowell considers the painter as somehow doing more than, or transcending, the action of the camera lens. Some kind of grace is achieved by which Vermeer can give a living name to things seen. A poetic naming which is qualitatively distinct from the processes of categorisation or taxonomy. And perhaps poetry can pronounce a “living name” by overcoming its function as a label. A return to a prelinguistic non-discriminatory vision which the painter pictures but which poetry can only convey through a subversion of language's other functions and effects. In another poem, Shifting Colours, Lowell attempts to “perceive without the imposition of poor measures and meaning […] to see with the grace of accuracy”. (Schweizer 1997: 167): I see horse and meadow, duck and pond, universal consolatory

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description without significance, transcribed verbatim by my eye.

As Schweizer comments: “such writing yearns for its own obliteration”. (Schweizer 1997: 167) Tess Gallagher, in her poem Moon Crossing Bridge, writes, “don't mistake my attention / for the merely aesthetic”.(Schweizer 1997: 179) Attending and “being there” aren't passive conditions they are active often difficult processes. Attending through picturing is a task, a discipline, a rigorous kind of observance. In Zanzibar recently I visited a Hindu temple. The resident priest showed us around. His rudimentary grasp of English and our lack of any Swahili or Hindee made it difficult to communicate verbally. But it did not prevent him showing us what was there. Indeed our attention was enhanced by not speaking. These silent showings were profound and memorable. Showing, like seeing, is not powered by words. Its disclosures are a testimony of light entangled in filaments of nerve. Our knowing bodies improvise meaning and value out of the barest materials of sight and touch. And this we can order and make sense of without description - a presence felt, seen and recognised before the ivy of words has time to cling and fasten. Gallagher again: […] the great illiteracy of rain keeps writing over my days as if to confirm the possibility of touching everything (ibid: 183)

There is a yearning here for the silence of seeing, of picturing, of showing - a state of grace beyond or before words. How we turn even in literature to showing rather than saying, to the poetic actualisation rather than the prosaic description:

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It is not easy to explain the way a blackbird does or a leafless elm or a shadow more insistent than its parent thing. A yearning to experience, to know, through poetry as through painting. An attempt to experience the silent empty non-dualistic reality of being there. Attending to what is. How to approach, to disarm the reality, to give something of density, to make a shadow equal to the light

Anthony Hecht, (1993: 244) in his poem, The Venetian Vespers, asks “what is our happiest, most cherished dream / of paradise?” and answers “to escape / From time, from history, from evolution / Into the blessed stasis of a painting”. Elsewhere in the same poem (ibid: 239) he writes, “To give one’s whole attention to such a sight / Is a sort of blessedness”. Near the end he adds, “I look and look, / As though I could be saved simply by looking”. (ibid: 247) And Charles Reznikoff, (1976: 109) who entitled his New & Selected Poems: By the Well of Living & Seeing, uses similar language in his short poem, Epilogue: Blessed in the light of the sun and at the sight of the world daily, and in all the delights of the senses and the mind; in my eyesight, blurred as it is, and my knowledge, slight though it is, and my life, brief though it was.

* John Berger (1996: unnumbered) gives us this image of poetry; Word by word I describe you accept each fact and ask yourself: what does he really mean? […] Birds like letters fly away

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O let us fly away circle and settle on the water near the fort of the illegible.

*

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* Paintings give us highly specific insights into the ways in which we handle, negotiate, explore and make sense of the world we both inhabit and interpret. Paintings as embodiments of contact, touch, learning and enquiry. Tokens of involvement, rather than tombstones of detachment. I look across the table and see what seems to be the skin of an object, a discarded membrane, faintly opaque yet gathering in transparency as if in a kind of shyness the material which was the thing has retired into another life, leaving only a memento of its presence. This skin is not dead, or even inert, it glows with a faint light which illuminates a possible future and an impossible past. Though it recalls other presences and things it disavows any kind of identification. This ghost of an object, nameless and intangible, fires the field of vision yet refuses to be consumed. It shows but does not speak. *** Post-Script Another reason for continuing with this seemingly marginal activity of drawing from observation is the recognition that the massive growth in new technologies and the virtual realities, symbolic fields or veils of appearance they engender, actually increases the need to acknowledge and celebrate three important phenomena: firstly, the primary conditions of our corporeal existence as bodies in space; secondly, the interplay between perception and cognition as bodily processes; and thirdly, the embodiment of knowledge and experience in physical artefacts which themselves inhabit a place in the world - artefacts which are emblematic of the body's memory of itself – “carnal formulae”, to use Merleau-Ponty's haunting phrase. (in Crowther 1993: 42-43)

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It is important to remember who we are and how we are in the world, and not to forget the house we each inhabit - a house of thinking flesh and feeling bone. ***

Part 4 The mutuality of existence: drawing, emptiness & presence “Beware of clinging to one half of a pair”. Huang-Po (in McEvilley 2002: 468)

Introduction In this section I continue with the theme of drawing from observation, widening the frame of reference to include ideas drawn from Buddhism, Spinoza, the Pyrrhonist school of early Greek sceptical philosophy and other sources. The intention is to emphasise the interdependence and interpenetration of all that exists and to raise questions about the belief that we each have an essence that is separate from all other essences, a self that observes a world out there. The contrasting, but interrelated, ideas of ‘emptiness’ (sunyata in Sanskrit) and ‘suchness’ (tathata in Sanskrit) are used as tools with which to think about how we are implicated in the world and how art and poetry can be considered as demonstrating presence within the flux and mutuality of existence. * What I see is itself a representation, a retinal image, an excitation of the cerebral cortex. When I draw I’m trying to make a culturally viable representation of a selective array of infinite possible representations within the chemical factory that is my brain. From second to second, minute to minute, I am a shimmering transcriber of changing sensations, pulses of light, ambient sounds, bodily movements, spatial co-ordinates, histories of looking, archives of remembered images. And what emerges from these chemical, biological and cultural interactions? Smudges of dust on a pale surface!

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* Still-life I’m looking at some objects set up as a still-life for drawing. When I’m drawing I see patches of colour and tone in a field of changing light. I see edges defining shapes, contours formed by irregularities in spatial distribution, volumes defined by gradations of tone and focus, and I observe planes, grain and textures signalled by varying reflectivity of surface. I’m attentive to nuances of shadow, to directions of forms, to angles of tilt against horizontal and vertical axes. I notice where shapes are in relation to each other, how one form meets another and how the conjunctions of forms can be described by one line – a line that signifies an edge by dividing and uniting two shapes. In my drawing I constantly move from the detailed weighing-up of position, to the plotting of spatial relationships, to a sensing of the balance, proportion and veracity of the whole drawing. The longer I look the longer I draw. Each time I return to the drawing I notice something that needs changing and each time I look at the still-life I see something that was not how I thought it was. As I breathe my view changes. As I move my head the visual field is subtly reconfigured. There is no end to this process of changing perception and representation. Each drawing is always unfinished, a trace of attentive engagement with an evanescent perceptual field. For most of the time I’m not thinking linguistically. Words don’t often come to mind. When they do it is often as questions: can this be right? Is this too dark or too light? Should I erase this area or move this line? Occasionally words arise as expressions of surprise or realisation: Oh, I see that’s how it is! Goodness, I was completely mistaken! How red is that! * Still-life, again Once again I’m looking at the same set-up of still-life objects. On this occasion I’m not drawing. I’m using words to describe what is before me. I see a deer skull, various stones, bones and flower-heads with stalks. I notice that the stones are of three kinds: large smoothlyrounded pebbles from a nearby beach; flat flakes of shale dug up from the garden, sharp-edged and dull brown in colour; and lots of small gravelly stones in shades of ochre, brown and grey. The large rounded

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pebbles are either evenly mottled or marked with distinctive shapes, often deep purple-grey against pale blue-grey. The skull is broken. A large part of one side is missing. Sharp edges catch the light against the shadowed recess of the missing side. Pieces of jawbone are lying flat in front of the skull. I notice another smaller skull, pale and finelyformed, to the left and behind the large one. I wonder what kind it is. The dried-up flower heads and attached stalks belong to a large poppy. They look brittle and contorted. These objects lie on a rectangular horizontal surface, draped in a canvas that is attached to the wall behind. The canvas is stained in brown and reddish patches, with bold dark-grey leaf shapes printed here and there, and small chevrons arranged in double lines around a square. A bag hangs to one side. A tall lamp casts bold shadows. The whole arrangement is against one wall of a studio room that contains many other objects in stacks, on shelves and in trays. The words I’m using are tokens of things, conceptual labels classifying what I see into categories that can be used for many quantitative and qualitative processes of description, analysis, narrative and speculation. Thinking linguistically in this way is a very different process to the process of drawing. We use each process to do different things and each process exemplifies a different state of consciousness, and different ways of knowing and being in the world. In both drawing and wording, in representing my perceptual activity in marks and words, I become aware of relationships that bind together my perceptions and the “things” I’m looking at. My movements change the field of vision. What I see is conditioned to some extent by what I’m looking for, as well as what I’m looking at. The objects in front of me are also perceptual events, changing patterns of light filtered and processed by an embodied mind. The observer is intimately implicated in what is observed. As I sit looking at the still-life I realise that it is anything but “still”, rather it is a dynamic network of relationships that constantly shifts and reorganises itself as I change my position spatially and cognitively. I notice how my glance moves backwards and forwards, left and right, up and down. I scan the field of vision in a continuous dance of attention, shifting seamlessly from detail to detail within an

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emergent whole. In this complex field I can focus on particular objects or details but I can never shut out the immediate surroundings. Indeed I realise that each object is an integral part of its surroundings. Without its surroundings it would be infinite in size or extension, or it would not exist. Object and surroundings, figure and ground, are mutually existent. They arise together or not at all.

This mutuality of existence is a central insight of Buddhism and from it various philosophical discourses and practices have emerged. I’d like to explore two terms and concepts in particular, to see how they can be used to frame and elucidate the experiences of interacting with the still-life as just described. The two terms are sunyata and tathata. Sunyata, is often translated as ‘emptiness’ or ‘voidness’ (sunya is ‘empty’ or ‘void’). Tathata, is usually translated as ‘suchness’, ‘thusness’ or ‘thatness’. On the face of it they seem to be at opposite poles. Surely there is either emptiness or there is suchness? In fact these two concepts are interdependent and despite the apparent contradiction they are two sides of one wafer-thin coin. *

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Sunyata – ‘emptiness’ The ideas surrounding sunyata are articulated in great depth in Nagarjuna’s Sunyavada, or ‘Doctrine of the Void’, otherwise known as the Madhyamika or Madhyamaka, the “middle way” that, according to Watts, “refutes all metaphysical propositions by demonstrating their relativity”.(1989, p.62) Even the idea of sunyata itself, is relative and ‘void’. It cannot be called void or not void, Or both or neither; But in order to point it out, It is called ‘the Void.’ (from the Madhyamika Shastra, in Watts 1989: 63)

According to Murti, at one level the Madhyamika approach is a “critique of all philosophy”. (1980: 123) He writes: The essence of the Madhyamika attitude […] consists in not allowing oneself to be entangled in views and theories, but just to observe the nature of things without standpoints. (ibid: 209)

This should not be interpreted as anti-intellectualism. Dreyfus provides a wonderful account of the rich culture of intellectual debate, analysis and critique within the Tibetan Buddhist monastic context. However the purpose of this individual and collective intellectual endeavour is to expose the contradictions and dualities inherent in any conceptual position. Dreyfus describes the situation as follows: [In relation to conventional truth] we distinguish a pot from other objects, such as a table, the maker of the pot, and the self who sees the pot. In discerning these conventional objects, we proceed through dichotomies such as self and other, agent and object, pot and nonpot, and the like. In this way we divide the universe of knowledge and reify these differences, as if these objects had their own essence and existed independently of each other. These dualities enable us to classify these objects and appropriate them, but they distort reality, for the objects do not in fact exist in the ways that we hold on to them. This distortion in turn leads to suffering created by our grasping at objects, which gives rise to attachment, aversion, and so on. To free our minds, we need to undo the dualistic tendency to grasp objects by reifying differences. To succeed in this effort, we need to realize that

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Dreyfus points out that this ‘emptiness’ (sunyata) should not be seen as a conceptual object, for that would be to continue with what has already been identified as a false or mistaken understanding, this emptiness is not another type of object, a kind of supertruth, which could be approached by differentiating it from other objects. It is also not simply a rejection of the conventional, which would amount to a negative reification […] To understand emptiness requires that one free oneself from any reification, negative as well as positive. (ibid: 240)

Within Buddhism there are many different practices which are used to realise emptiness. These range from the intellectual dialectics of the Tibetan Madhyamika tradition, to the use of koans in Rinzai Zen, to vipassana meditation in the monastic traditions of south-east Asia, to the practice of zazen or shikan-taza (‘just sitting’) in Soto Zen. These practices, and the discourses, disciplines and ethical codes that are integral to them, are used to release the participant from the bondage and misunderstanding that conventional, dualistic, objectifying thought engenders. Such practices are aimed at “depriving the mind of any object to hold onto,” this “leads it to relinquish its habit of conceptualizing reality in dualistic terms”. (Dreyfus 2003: 241) As Dreyfus points out this should not be seen as a denial of the reality of the material world or of our thoughts, beliefs and feelings. Because objects are beyond determination, they are not completely nonexistent. Hence, they can be said to exist provisionally or conventionally. Emptiness does not cancel out the conventional domain but relativizes it. (ibid: 241)

In other words, as objects only exist as discrete “objects” by convention (having no separate essential existence) they do have a conventional status or existence. Realizing sunyata or emptiness is to realise that the conventions of dualistic thinking, interpretation and evaluation are conventions. They do not accord with the undifferentiated, nonrelational, tathata or suchness which is the actual.

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Thus, rather than considering conventional distinctions unimportant, people who have realized emptiness cease to absolutize them, seeing them as fluid, fragile, illusionlike, and interrelated. (Dreyfus 2003: 241)

Crook (1990: 19) suggests that maintaining awareness of things as they appear in conventional terms while simultaneously recognising that they are empty of self-subsistence is one of the great conundrums of life: One of the most difficult aspects of Buddhist training was to see the world, at one and the same time, both in the perspective of the conventional entitiveness of things, and in the perspective of their emptiness of selfhood in a world of interdependent origination.

This holding in mind of two apparently contradictory states or perspectives is similar to the way in which we have to deal with, on the one hand, our sensory experience of objects as material substances, and on the other hand, our knowledge through quantum physics of the indeterminate and insubstantial energies that make up apparently substantial opaque objects. These distinctly different views reflect two different levels of order, two different magnifications of observation and two different models or descriptions of what is, in actuality, undifferentiated and irreducible. * Emptiness & the still-life This takes us right back to the still-life because in some ways drawing can be used as a practice to realise emptiness, in the sense that as we draw we become aware of the conventionality of distinctions. We realise how artificial are the distinctions we make, particularly verbally, between one colour and another, one tone and another, one object and its surroundings. The lines and marks, smudges and stains, that we use to create forms are conventions, grounded in perceptual processes of selection, shifting focus, and the identification of resemblances, concordances, differences, dangers and potential sources of food. The complexities of artistic representations within the Western tradition, from the late nineteenth century onwards, are attempts to enact and picture the complexities of perception and representation – drawing attention to the coded conventionalised nature of each mode of representation. The faceted mosaic-like

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brushstrokes of Cezanne constitute one system of “conventional distinctions”. The heavy impasto gestures of Auerbach constitute another. And the apparently more photographic smoothly articulated brushwork of Vermeer constitutes yet another. It would be foolish to describe one as being more correct than the others, or more truthful, or more realistic. Each artist draws the line in different ways, dividing, classifying, connecting and encoding the world in different sets of pictorial conventions. In doing so each artist is being highly selective, including and excluding different aspects of the visual field. In some ways the wrongness would come in believing that one or other of these artists was right, correct or more truthful. Each offers a relative and limited picturing of the world. Our conventionalised descriptions, analyses and interpretations can, and do, take many different, sometimes contradictory, forms. And these differences can, and do, generate conflicts. Realising or becoming aware of the conventionalisation engenders tolerance and understanding, an acceptance that all descriptions, opinions and beliefs are relative, conditional, and ultimately flawed, incomplete and revisable. This can take the heat out of situations in which conflict is arising, fostering mutual respect and an acknowledgement that there may be a meeting of minds if we look through, behind or beyond our differences. We can recognise how our attachment to particular attitudes, positions and beliefs, is just as misguided as anyone else’s, if we assume that our attitudes, positions and beliefs are somehow absolute and unconditional. It is not that we no longer believe in this or that, or that we always defer or yield to someone else’s viewpoint. A realisation of the emptiness of all attitudes, beliefs and positions, can lead us to take a wider view, a less intransigent position, and to seek mutual understanding rather than to reinforce mutual misunderstanding. A realisation of sunyata does not imply ethical neutrality or nihilism – though it has occasionally been misunderstood and misused by those in power (Japanese kamikaze pilots are said to have made use of Zen training). The ethical frameworks of the many Buddhist traditions, however different they may be in emphasis and cultural articulation, retain a profound respect for each other and for other religious and philosophical systems and beliefs. One of the difficulties in categorising Buddhism as a religion or philosophy is this deeply ingrained non-

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attachment to any particular viewpoint or system. Just as Wittgenstein once described philosophy as “an elucidation of language”, (rather than a system of new ideas or theories), so Buddhism can be seen as an elucidation of the relative nature of all religions, philosophies and languages. Translated into ethics, the realisation of emptiness, leads to the valuing of tolerance, respect, dialogue, peaceful co-existence, religious and philosophical freedom, and the valuing of social and political structures that enshrine and promote such qualities. Intolerance, disrespect, authoritarianism, violent enforcement of power and the subjugation of others, and socio-political structures that enshrine and legitimise such qualities, are not valued and have to be worked against using appropriate upaya, ‘skilful means’ – that is, through non-violent persuasion, argument and example. In some extreme circumstances limited defensive violence may be considered as the least harmful means of responding to a violent action – but as in any ethical framework these matters are the subject of debate and differences of interpretation. Some Buddhists would argue that violent force, especially the taking of life, is always wrong. Others argue that the idea of doing the least harm to the many is a middle way between absolute pacifism (whatever that might be) and the use of force as a ready solution to problems or conflicts. Probably most Buddhists would agree that the use of violent force is always symptomatic of failure, misunderstanding and an over-attachment to one position or another. In the literature and lore of Buddhism the ineffability of emptiness is evoked or conveyed through suggestion, metaphor and direct action. Koans, such as Joshu’s “mu” or “the sound of one hand clapping” are both ‘skilful means’ (upaya) that push us towards the realisation of emptiness, and images that show us the conventional and relativistic nature of language, rationality and habituated behaviour. The ineffability of emptiness, by definition ungraspable, uncontainable and inexpressible in language, can be experienced. The attempt to show to others, or point towards, this experience leads Zen practitioners to employ a vocabulary of paradox, strangeness and instability. The inexplicable violence or absurdity that erupts in some Zen anecdotes is not there to provide narrative colour or to be unconventional, it is

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there to jolt us into realising how much we are ensnared by convention and by classificatory and dualistic thinking, and to prod us into seeing through this web into the suchness of existence. * Emptiness & deconstruction Dreyfus (2003: 241-245) traces some interesting connections between Derrida’s deconstruction and Madhyamika dialectics, while at the same time pointing out the profound differences between the two philosophical methods. Dreyfus argues that Madhyamika practices of dialectical debate and analysis can be characterised as deconstructive, in the sense that such practices are used as a “self-subverting approach” to prevent the reification of emptiness, to undermine the tendency to turn an insight into the essenceless, conventionalised interdependence of all categories and concepts, into another essence or categorisation. However the purpose of these practices is to bring the Tibetan monastic practitioner to a realisation of the insights developed and maintained by Madhyamika Buddhist traditions. The maintenance and passing-on of traditional knowledge and values is paramount. As Dreyfus points out this is very different to the postmodern questioning and subversion of traditional narrative truths, readings and closure, in favour of an endless process of interpretation and destabilisation of meaning. Seen from the Madhyamika perspective, postmodern deconstruction “can be read as representing a nihilistic discarding of conventional distinctions and thus a stance to be avoided”. (Dreyfus 2003: 242) Madhyamika ideas and practices, and sometimes Buddhism in its many forms, have often been portrayed as being nihilistic. However the dangers of nihilism have long been recognised and strategies have been developed to identify and avoid nihilistic tendencies. In Madhyamika dialectics the shooting-down of all positions, essences, positives and negatives, binary categorisations and other forms of intellectual rationalisation, are a means to the realisation of sunyata, not ends in themselves. In inexperienced hands or outside the ethical framework of Buddhism these practices could indeed lead to nihilism, disorientation and delusion. Such risks are well known to Madhyamaka, which has taken great pains to distance itself from nihilism. The very name of this philosophy is meant to

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underscore that it is the Middle Way between eternalism (ie., reification) and nihilism. Emptiness is not nothingness. It entails not the demise of the conventional world but the assertion [and realisation] that it is just that – conventional. (Dreyfus 2003: 242)

On the other hand the Madhyamika thinker, Nagarjuna, shares with Derrida a belief in, “the essenceless and hence enigmatic nature of existence and the indeterminate and provisional character of interpretation”. (Drefyus 2003: 243) The indeterminate character of interpretation is a reflection of the indeterminate nature of reality or tathata – a term that we will turn to soon and consider alongside sunyata. * Drawing again: becoming and being There are times when I’m drawing in the studio and I reach a moment at which I’m stuck, I don’t know what to do next, or I’m reflecting on what I’ve done, or just sitting with no particular purpose, just being there. Unintentionally I become more contemplative and undemanding. I’m no longer asking questions or trying to see more accurately or gauge proportions or measure this or that angle. I’m in the space. There is no longer any linguistic meta-thinking going on but I am intensely awake, alert, attentive to the whole perceptual/spatial field. Thoughts occasionally arise but they dissipate just as quickly, leaving no footprint or turbulence. The discriminating mind dissolves and a different state of consciousness arises. There is no longer a “me” observing objects outside of me, there is no separation. There is only the flux of sensations, a shimmering river of light, pulses of sound, evanescent states of being. There is no hanging-on to what is there. No sense of ownership of experience. Rather a letting-go, being an integral part of an ongoing process. Being instead of becoming. Time seems to be suspended, the march of personal history gives way to a light-footed dancing on the spot. Somehow a non-discriminating awareness has arisen. A kind of intense indifference, in which there are no distinctions, divisions, boundaries and things. Only a lucid state of presence in a vibrant field of energy. Sometimes this is a momentary experience, occasionally there may be a few such moments over a longer period. Sometimes the experience continues while my hand moves over the paper and the drawing seems to happen of its own accord. Then, quite suddenly, the discriminating

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mind kicks in again. I return to analysing, turning-over ideas, spinning a web of questions and intentions. Often, even after the intense experience has evaporated, there is a continued lightening of consciousness, I’m hanging-on to thoughts and sensations less firmly, some quality of the other state of mind persists. Often the drawing flows more fluently, until, imperceptibly, the old self returns, interesting incidents become distractions and I feel somehow apart from my surroundings once more. This kind of experience is not uncommon. It happens to many people as they draw, or undertake any kind of artistic practice, or work in the garden, or walk, play sport or learn a new skill.

There may be a connection here to something that the poet Chase Twichell mentions in an article on Basho, the haiku poet. She writes that she (Twichell) was trying to achieve what the poet Elizabeth Bishop called, “a perfectly useless, self-forgetful concentration”. (Twichell 2002: 61) We can also relate this to an idea of Lawrence Weschler, (1982) who wrote a book about the work of the sculptor Robert Irwin, entitled,

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Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees. A title that encapsulates one of the disciplines of drawing, that is, trying to see through the assumptions and habits that come with naming and categorising what is, in its raw presence, unnameable and uncategorisable. * Impermanence Another perspective on the whole notion of sunyata, the mutuality of existence, is provided by consideration of another aspect of Buddhist philosophy and practice: the recognition and analysis of the impermanence of all things. Just as all objects (material and intellectual) have no autonomous existence, no self-subsistence, so they have no permanence. All things are in process of change. Existence is a flux of chemical interactions within ever-changing fields of energy. Material structures, chemical, biological and man-made, are impermanent at both the sub-atomic level of quantum physics and at the level of cosmological phenomena like stars and galaxies. We ascribe enduring qualities and relative permanence to things, in order to categorise and analyse them in verbal and mathematical languages, and to isolate them as objects of desire and attachment. We tend to pay no attention to the ceaseless change around and within ourselves. The Buddhist practice of ‘mindfulness’ counteracts this tendency by developing our attentiveness to change in all its manifestations, including the flux of perceptions, thoughts, images, desires and moods, we call our self. It is worth quoting Henepola Gunaratana (1992: 39) at length as he describes our situation in a succinct and dramatic way: As you read these words, your body is aging. But you pay no attention to that. The book in your hand is decaying. The print is fading and the pages are becoming brittle. The walls around you are aging. The molecules within those walls are vibrating at an enormous rate, and everything is shifting, going to pieces and dissolving slowly. You pay no attention to that, either. Then one day you look around you. Your body is wrinkled and squeaky and you hurt. The book is a yellowed, useless lump; the building is caving in. So you pine for lost youth and you cry when the possessions are gone. Where does this pain come from? It comes from your own inattention. You failed to look closely at life. You failed to observe the constantly shifting flow of the world as it went by. You set up the collection of mental constructions, “me,” “the book,” “the building,” and you assumed that those were solid, real entities [But] you can tune into the constant change. You can learn to

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The mutuality of existence perceive your life as an ever-flowing movement. You can learn to see the continuous flow of all conditioned things. You can learn this. It is just a matter of time and training.

Gunaratana, is a highly respected Sri Lankan teacher, trained in the vipassana meditation traditions of South-East Asia. He uses the simple language of the popular training manual but he is describing a fundamental characteristic of existence. He points to the relativity and impermanence of all things and to the ways in which we fail to recognise relativity and impermanence, attaching ourselves instead to a belief in separateness and permanence. The phenomenological techniques of vipassana meditation, zazen and other forms of mindfulness training, develop in Buddhist students the ability to attend to consciousness in a precise and disinterested manner. They enable the practitioner to be aware of the flow of experiences, the ceaseless stream of thoughts, images, feelings and desires that occupy the mind for so much of the time. Through this kind of disciplined attention (very similar to the drawing practice described earlier) the practitioner learns not only to watch the flow of phenomena but also to recognise the habits of reification, attachment, projection and repression that we use to try to avoid confronting the conditions of our existence. With persistence, patience and a kind of unlearning or undoing, this disciplined attentiveness leads to a different experiential understanding of who we are and how we, to a more compassionate understanding of the habits of attachment and avoidance that lead us into dissatisfaction, frustration and conflict. Such techniques have been developed in many religious, philosophical and psychotherapeutic traditions, I have only focused on the Buddhist examples because I have some experience as a practitioner in this field – though my experience has been woefully erratic. After thirty-five or more years I still feel like a beginner, though a beginner with more patience and compassionate scepticism than I had ten or twenty years ago. * Tathata – ‘suchness’ So, to the other side of the wafer-thin coin! We have seen how reality can be considered as sunyata, empty of all essences. We have seen how our dualistic and relational patterns of thought and language, both

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construct and affirm a misguided view of reality, leading us to become attached to objects, material and mental, as if they were self-subsisting discrete entities. And we have seen how impermanence is a condition of existence. Another way of thinking about reality is demonstrated in the use of the term tathata, a term that points to the ultimately undifferentiated, non-dual and non-relational ‘suchness’ of existence. With the idea and experience of emptiness comes a realisation that our conceptualisation of the world involves discrimination, differentiation and categorisation. As we think and verbalise we divide the world-asit-is into parts, things, this and that, object and ground, object and self, me and you. As the Agama Sutra puts it: “Because this thing exists, that thing exists. If this thing doesn’t exist, that thing doesn’t exist”. (Harada 1998: 59) The existence of things, objects, concepts and signs is relative, conditional, and a function of interdependence. As previously mentioned this interdependence is sometimes expressed as “dependent co-arising”, what I’ve referred to as the mutuality of existence. However Buddhism proposes that through disciplined attention, mindfulness and ‘right thinking’ we can also experience the presence of undifferentiated reality or tathata. Alan Watts (1989: 67) points out that the Sanskrit root of the term tathata, is the word tat (‘that’ in English). He suggests that this may be “based on a child’s first efforts at speech, when it points at something and says, ‘Ta’ or ‘Da’.’ He speculates that: Fathers flatter themselves by imagining that the child is calling them by name – “Dada” or “Daddy”. But perhaps the child is just expressing its recognition of the world, and saying “That!”

However the term arose, tathata, is another key concept in Buddhist practice. In affirming the importance of tathata Buddhism recognises and celebrates the reality beyond, or rather before, the labels, concepts, words and any conventionalised dividing-up of what is. Buddhist practice affirms and realises the possibility of another mode of experiencing, a way of encountering the suchness of everything asit-is, a non-discriminatory mode of consciousness that dissolves, subverts or burns through linguistic thought. This pre-nominal, prelinguistic or non-linguistic mode of experiencing is not an experience of a transcendent, absolute or ideal reality, in the Platonic or Hegelian

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sense (though it may seem as if it is very similar). This reality does not stand outside of where we are, or beyond our everyday world. It is where we are, here and now. Buddhist practices are only ways of waking-up to the here and now, the everyday, being-here, the extraordinary presence of what is – tathata or suchness. * Turning aside – echoes of Spinoza As I reflect on some of the insights of Madhyamika philosophy I keep noticing echoes of Spinoza’s thought. Although Spinoza was, by all accounts, a mild-mannered, honest, tolerant and prudent man, muchloved by those who knew him, even by many of those who disagreed with him, his ideas were extremely controversial. Although he was born a Jew and was obviously a religious man who wrote a lot about God, he was rejected by both the Jewish and Christian establishments – many of whose congregations considered him to be an atheist or a dangerous subversive. If he hadn’t been able to live quietly in Holland making his living by polishing lenses, he would have had a difficult time living anywhere in Europe. The Dutch government was very tolerant of independent theological thinkers – something that was not true of most seventeenth century European governments. (Russell 1946: 592-603) So what were the ideas that Spinoza was putting forward that disturbed so many of his contemporaries? In the Ethics, which was published just after he died in 1677, he argues for a new way of thinking about God, nature and human moral behaviour. He maintains that, “There is only one substance, ‘God or Nature’; nothing finite is self-subsistent”. (Russell 1946: 594) Individual entities, objects or things are all “merely aspects of the divine Being”, (ibid) whose being is infinite and therefore must include everything. It is only the infinite everything, the universe as a whole, that is “self-subsistent”, the one infinite undifferentiated substance. Every thing can only be a part of that totality, a subsistent aspect of the whole, dependent for its existence on all the other parts of the whole. According to Quinton (in Magee 1987: 101) Spinoza is only logically developing Descartes’s definition of substance as “that which requires nothing but itself in order to exist”. For the deeply religious Spinoza this meant that, in Quinton’s words, “the only true substance is God”. Therefore for

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Spinoza, the infinitude of God means there can be nothing outside of God, because if there were anything outside God it would follow that God had boundaries and was therefore finite. “If God is infinite then God must be co-extensive with everything”. (Magee 1987: 102) Looked at from another perspective, if “nature is the totality of what there is,” (Quinton, in Magee 1987: 102) then both God and Nature must be infinite and therefore they must be identical, one unitary substance. The idea that every thing is only an aspect of one infinite undifferentiated substance can be seen as articulating, in a very different cultural, historical and geographical context, similar insights to those we have seen in Madhyamika philosophy. It is only by conventions of thought and language that objects, ideas and things can be considered as separate or discrete, for in truth they are all interdependent aspects of an infinite and indeterminate reality. The realisation of this conventional state, the interdependence of what may appear to be independent entities, or in Spinoza’s terms the lack of self-subsistence, is a realisation of sunyata, emptiness. And the whole, the totality of all that is, Spinoza’s God/Nature, can be described in Madhyamika terms as tathata, suchness. Of course, they are different because they are integrated into very different cultural and religious frameworks, but even allowing for the differences it is interesting to see some similarities in the ethical applications of these ideas. According to Russell (1946: 596), “Spinoza, like Socrates and Plato, [and, we might add, the Buddha] believes that all wrong action is due to intellectual error: the man who adequately understand his own circumstances will act wisely”. The Buddha’s entreaty to his followers, “to know thyself”, and the importance placed on the use of upaya, or ‘skilful means’, and “right understanding”, are indicative of the Buddhist analysis of human dissatisfaction and suffering as being caused by ignorance, delusion or misunderstanding. Understanding comes through disciplined attention to how things are in the world, through practices that develop the critical powers of the mind leading to an intense clarity of consciousness. The Buddhist term, “enlightenment”, is a state of seeing into the relative, conventionalised reality maintained by linguistic structures, rationalisation and reification, and also a clear recognition of the misguided beliefs, values and behav-

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iours that arise from treating this reality as a true or absolute state of affairs. Our desire to own or consume what we have reified and divided into objects, causes us endless frustration and dissatisfaction. We are trapped in our dualistic thinking. We want to hang on to what is passing, clinging to fictional substances temporarily held apart from everything that is. This misguided habitual attachment to any part of the whole, as if it were truly separate and self-subsisting, is a failure to understand the mutuality of existence – sunyata, the interdependence of everything. Right understanding, in the Buddhist sense, involves an ability to see more clearly the provisional nature of linguistic categorisations and conventions, leading to a lightening of consciousness and release from over-attachment. These misguided attachments to objects (houses, cars, money, status, roles, ideas, beliefs and values), as if they were absolutes, can be linked to what Spinoza describes as our bondage to “the passions”, those reactive emotions like hatred, anger, fear and envy, “in which we appear to ourselves to be passive in the power of outside forces”. (Russell 1946: 598) Russell quotes Spinoza: “An emotion which is a passion ceases to be a passion as soon as we form a clear and distinct idea of it”. (ibid) In other words, once we understand and accept the relative nature of reality we no longer feel an obsessive attachment to any part of it. Russell: “In so far as a man is an unwilling part of a larger whole, he is in bondage; but in so far as, through the understanding, he has grasped the sole reality of the whole, he is free”. (1947: 598) Another aspect of Spinoza’s thinking that upset Christians and Jews alike, was his view that even sins and other moral failings, in so far as they were an integral part of the whole, are only sins and failings seen from the finite perspective of human beings. As Russell puts it, “In God, who alone is completely real, there is no negation, and therefore the evil in what to us seem sins does not exist when they are viewed as parts of the whole”. (1947: 594) This does mean that the notion of “sin” has no meaning or value within the realm of human affairs, it only points to the relative nature of sin, however conceived. Sins and moral structures are not absolutes. This relativism contributed to Spinoza’s wise generosity of spirit. He advised that we should develop the “active emotions” including happiness, love and tolerance, which

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are grounded in understanding, rather than cultivate (or repress) the passive emotions such as anger, resentment and frustration, which are caused by conditions or circumstances outside our control. And the highest of the active emotions “is what he calls ‘the intellectual love of God’, the emotion that attends metaphysical understanding, a comprehensive grasp of the nature of the world as a whole”. (Magee 1987: 106) It is no surprise that Spinoza did not expect God’s love to be returned. He thought this a foolish expectation reflecting a misguided belief that God was an object apart, another being with finite qualities or emotions. As Magee (1987: 107) eloquently puts it: No one has any difficulty, [Spinoza] said, in understanding that a person has a passionate love of nature, yet we should consider such a person mad if he wanted nature to love him back. Now because nature and God are one and the same, the same thing is true about God. It is conducive to our happiness to love God, but meaningless and absurd for us to expect God to love us.

This sense of wonder and respect, grounded in profound contemplation, is accompanied by an awareness of the benign indifference of the universe/God. The universe is not here for any purpose outside itself, for there is no outside. Nature/God is without intentions or determinate actions. If I remember rightly, this echoes the words of St. John of Damascus: “God is the ocean of indeterminacy”. * Echoes of Boehme These ideas of Spinoza’s about God as Nature, Nature as God, echo the insights of many mystics within different religious traditions. Jacob Boehme (1575-1625) wrote of the indeterminate ineffability of God. Using a dialectical method not dissimilar to the Madhyamika, he points towards God as “the one sole existence”, the undifferentiated ground, or ‘unground’, of being – maybe what we’ve been referring to as tathata. For it cannot be said of God that he is this or that, evil or good, or that he has distinctions in himself. For he is in himself natureless, passionless, and creatureless. He has no tendency to anything, for there is nothing before him to which he could tend, neither evil or good. He is in himself the unground, without any will towards nature and creature, as it were an eternal nothing.

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There is no pain or quality in him, nor anything that could incline either to him or from him. He is the one sole existence, and there is nothing before him or after him by or in which he might draw or grasp a will for himself; neither has he anything that generates or produces him. He is the nothing and the all, and is a single will in which the world and the whole creation lies. In him all is alike eternal, without beginning, equal in weight, measure and number. He is neither light nor darkness, neither love nor wrath, but the eternal One. (Bohme 1930)

This is a powerfully lucid and poetic evocation of the undiffentiated suchness of being, as experienced by a German protestant master shoemaker. Employing and extending the theological vocabulary of his time and place, Boehme conveys the immediacy of his insights we get a taste of his consciousness raised to a level of intensity that pushes language to its limits. Ralph Waldo Emerson, (1911: 5) writing from a “transcendentalist” position, condenses these ideas into one phrase: “there is one mind common to all”. And he argues, in a way that Spinoza, and possibly Boehme, would have agreed, that nature is its correlative. * Realities & reality It is evident from what I have already written that there is much confusion surrounding the term “reality”. Indeed it is obvious that we use the term in different ways to mean different things in different contexts. There are many “realities” rather than one. I’d like to clarify the way I’m using these words. I have drawn attention to two particular uses of the term reality. One, is to describe the conventional differentiated realm of appearances, in which we recognise and categorise things, objects, ideas and forms as separate entities. In a sense this is a meta-reality, a human construction, maintained by language, conceptualisation and classificatory patterns of thought. It is within this realm that we describe, analyse, theorise and interpret. We weave this reality in ever more complex and dense layerings of conventionalised thoughts, signs and behaviours. It is a semiotic web that has enormous power, enabling us to do a huge variety of things. It is a web that is known as maya in Sanskrit, a term that refers to nama, ‘to name or classify’, and rupa, ‘forms’ – ‘the naming of forms’. This reality of human constructions, descrip-

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tions and stories is tangible and dynamic. It presents a universe that is a reflection of us. It is real in a relative and conditional sense. So long as we recognise that it is woven by us, an aspect of our own selfconstruction, it is useful, we can be creative with it and produce noble ideas, theories and artefacts. But if we lose sight of the fact that it is a human construction, a reality woven of signs, ideas and dreams, we can find ourselves in deep trouble, afflicted by hubris, uncontrolled desires and alienation from our environment. We become entangled in a web that we have spun, unable to extricate ourselves, convinced that the web is the one reality of many truths. We are seduced into believing that our own sparkling iridescent construction is all that there is. To return again to the skull in the still-life we can see the seductiveness of believing such things. When I write or say “skull” I separate an object from its field of existence. I create a phantom object removed from the continuum of relationships and processes that are integral to it. If it is taken to be the true state of things, the apparently clearly defined, discrete, self-existing skull is a verbal/conceptual illusion. I am deluded into a false sense of certainty about what it is, where it is and how it is. I begin to see an object rather than a set of relationships in an indeterminate field. This enables me to produce a particular kind of simplified iconic diagram, an emblematic abstraction of the skull or a verbal taxonomy. Linguistic conceptualising enables us to do things, to converse, to share or exchange narratives and views, to construct useful systems of thought, description, measurement and analysis. But we must keep in mind that these discourses and practices are sets of conventions, constructions or abstractions that reify differences, dividing and objectifying what is actually indivisible and ineffable. Which brings us to another mode of the real – the undifferentiated reality of everything-as-it-is, the other, suchness, Spinoza’s God or Nature, Boehme’s unground, the locus of our being-in-the-world - the one non-relational discontinuum of being. On one level, of course, this reality, as a concept, is also a socio-cultural linguistic construction. But as an experience, a mode of consciousness, an actuality, it is qualitatively different. It is what is left when all the talking stops, the remainder, what is beyond the pale of discourse, the apophatically insistent presence that hums and vibrates at the margins, or at the

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silent centre, of language. It is the Ur-reality, the alpha and omega of being. The ineffable state of unity described in paradoxical language by mystics and poets within many traditions. According to Blyth, (1964: 172) “mysticism is the experience of an ever-present, aboriginal oneness. It is the reunion of the I and the not-I”. We can only point to this state beyond opposites and dualities, or show it in actions or metaphors, or come to a realisation of it. In the polarised shadowlanguage of ontology we can equate differentiated reality with becoming, and undifferentiated Ur-reality with being. But the Urreality is also the linguistic reality! The idea of emptiness (the void) has itself to be deconstructed and subjected to dialectical analysis. In the Madhyamikasastra we find this summing up of the position: It cannot be called void or not void, Or both or neither; But in order to point it out, It is called ‘the Void’. (Watts 1989: 63)

Similarly, in the Prajnaparamita Sutra, we find the famous statement, “Form is emptiness and emptiness is form”. (see Suzuki, in Loori 2002: 67) But we should not attach ourselves to this statement for it is also the case that “form is form and emptiness is emptiness”. Becoming attached to any of these statements is to believe in them as objects, as absolutes. Only by letting go of the reifications and differentiations inherent in our linguistic conceptualising will we experience the fluid indeterminacy of being. Only by realising abstraction can we realise actuality. Which is why, after we exhaust all the possibilities of debate, analysis and dialectic, we are able to realise emptiness. Merton writes, (1968: 38) Buddhist meditation, but above all that of Zen, seeks not to explain but to pay attention, to become aware, to be mindful, in other words to develop a certain kind of consciousness that is above and beyond deception by verbal formulae – or by emotional excitement […] Deception due to diversion and distraction from what is right there – consciousness itself.

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Buddhist practices aim to bring us back from abstraction to the actual, and there are modes of drawing and poetry that can be used for a similar purpose – to realise the actual in all its indeterminacy and impermanence. * Kitaro Nishida As I read Thomas Merton I come across his review of Nishida’s first book, translated into English as, A Study of Good, 1960. Kitaro Nishida (1870-1945) was an eminent Japanese philosopher who articulated Zen Buddhist insights and ideas in terms closely aligned to the existentialist Christianity of Jacques Maritain and Gabriel Marcel. Merton writes: Like Merleau-Ponty, Nishida is concerned with the primary structures of consciousness […] The starting point of Nishida is a ‘pure experience’ a ‘direct experience’ of undifferentiated unity which is quite the opposite of the starting point of Descartes in his cogito. (1968: 67)

Merton argues that, in contrast to Descartes’ objectification of consciousness and self-awareness - the separating out of a self that looks at the world from the standpoint of a detached thinking observer - Nishida proposes that: what comes first is the unifying intuition of the basic unity of subject and object in being or a deep grasp of life in its existential concreteness “at the base of consciousness.” This basic unity is not an abstract concept but being itself. (ibid: 68)

And, as Merton points out, this “fundamental reality is neither external nor internal, objective nor subjective. It is prior to all differentiations and contradictions”. (ibid) It is the undifferentiated and irreducible state of what is, the actuality of being. * Scepticism and Madhyamika – Pyrrho and Nagarjuna Even a cursory encounter with Madhyamika thinking is likely to bring to mind some of the insights, methods and aims of Greek scepticism. It may be useful and interesting to step sideways from the track we have been following in order to briefly explore a stretch of territory that has recently been mapped in a sustained manner by Thomas

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McEvilley in his pioneering book, The Shape of Ancient Thought. But in order to get our bearings some preliminary remarks about scepticism may be helpful. According to Julia Annas (2000) it is important to clarify the meaning of the term “sceptic” and to separate out its popular negative associations from the Greek philosophical traditions that provide us with the word. The Greek term skepticos means, not a negative doubter, but an investigator, someone going in for skeptesthai or enquiry. As the late sceptic author Sextus Empiricus puts it, there are dogmatic philosophers, who think that they have found the truth; negative dogmatists, who feel entitled to the position that the truth cannot be found; and the sceptics, who are unlike both the other groups in that they are not committed either way. They are still investigating things. (Annas 2000: 69)

This undecidability or indeterminacy regarding notions of truth is a fundamental characteristic of the sceptical approach, particularly as articulated by Sextus Empiricus. Enquiry is always open-ended, knowledge is always revisible, subject to changing experiences and the flux of life. According to the sceptics: Real enquiry, thorough investigation, will reveal that the situation was more complex and problematic; we turn out never to have reason to commit ourselves one way or the other, and so end up suspending judgment – that is, having a detached and uncommitted attitude – to whatever the issue was. (Annas 2000: 69-70)

Questions always spawn other questions. There can be no closure or finality because there is no possibility of absolute knowledge. Our perspective on anything is always relative, situated here or there. Just as when we view the still-life, a slight tilt of the head, or movement backwards or forwards, changes the array of tones, shapes and colours in our field of vision. The longer we perceive and represent our perceptions the more we come to understand our fallibility and the more we relish the indeterminacy which leads to endless surprise. There is no definitive drawing just as there is no terminus for our investigations.

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Likewise we can always find evidence and ideas to support both sides of an argument. Rationality is a very effective tool, but it is effective in many different directions, giving us a rational basis for believing many apparently contradictory things. Rationality is therefore both too powerful and too weak to help us in selecting what we can rely on as a certain or lasting truth. All we can be certain of is that in the pursuit of peace of mind, or happiness, rationality, as a way of binding together the evidence we have gathered into a convincing argument or justified belief, is of very limited value. No argument, truth or belief is dependable or resistant to change, transformation and contradiction. Only the sceptic, who realizes the futility of commitment to belief, is tranquil; rigorous investigation brings suspension of belief [and, we might say a lessening of desire and attachment] and this brings the peace of mind that had been sought in the wished-for answers […] But [peace of mind only arises] by not looking for it, merely being there when it arrives; and it arrives as a result of the rigorous investigation that makes it impossible to commit yourself for or against any position. (Annas 2000: 70)

This is remarkably similar to the Madhyamika dialectic that shoots down all positions, arguments and statements in order to bring the participant to a realisation of the ‘emptiness’, indeterminacy and relativity of such positions, and thus cut the chains of attachment to them. It is these kinds of connections which McEvilley (2002) examines in his scholarly comparative analysis of ancient Greek and Indian thought. * The Historical Context Underpinned by thirty years of detailed research McEvilly makes a very convincing argument, not only for a vast network of similarities between the Eastern and Western traditions, but also for tangible dialogues, mutual influences and cross-currents between many thinkers and schools of thought. The trading relations between Greece, Asia Minor and the north-western regions of India, and the direct military interventions of Alexander between 330 and 325 BCE, were accompanied, according to McEvilley, by intellectual, philosophical and cultural interactions. (2002: 349-358)

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Evidence of settlements of Greeks in city-states (poleis) in north-west India, probably with the cultural apparatus for Greek education, maintenance of language and intellectual pursuits, is provided by McEvilley and his many sources. These include rock-cut inscriptions found in Kandahar in the late 1950s and 1960s, which are written in “good scholarly Greek of the period, not an outdated or barbaric Greek”. (ibid: 360-361) The inscriptions, are executed in “goodquality, mid-third-century carving, indicating that this Greek community was in touch with the mainstream Greek world”. The evidence of the inscriptions, along with other archaeological evidence found at the sites, suggests that the inhabitants probably lived in ‘the Greek manner’ until at least the third-century. McEvilley argues that profound similarities exist between the Pyrrhonist traditions of Scepticism and the Madhyamika Buddhism of Nagarjuna and others. He maintains that mutual influence and philosophical interaction is the most likely explanation for the similarities of dialectical method, argumentation and the exempla used to support arguments. (ibid: 498) He also notes the following: current scholarship among Hellenists places Sextus [Empiricus – the encyclopaedist and voice of the Pyrrhonist sceptical tradition] in the late second and/or early third century A.D., and the current view of Buddhologists places Nagarjuna in exactly the same time frame. It is, in other words, probable that the two great ancient deconstructivists, East and West, were alive at the same time. (ibid: 455)

It is likely that Pyrrho (c.360-c.275BC) had been a painter before he began his philosophical studies and he may well have accompanied Anaxarchus on Alexander’s campaign, perhaps as far as India. (Annas 2000: 70; Russell 1947: 256) As far as is known he then settled in his native city, Elis, “surrounded by a group of admirers, but hardly seeming a head of school”. (Brunschwig, in Craig 1998: 845) Like Socrates, Pyrrho wrote nothing, and we are dependent on later writers for our knowledge of what he thought and how he acted - especially Sextus Empiricus, who wrote his Outlines of Pyrrhonism probably in the second century AD. (Annas 2000: 70) *

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Similarities. Parallels. Echoes. McEvilley provides many examples of the similarities between the traditions of Scepticism and Madhyamika Buddhism. I will discuss a few of these as they add a number of interesting dimensions to the themes we’ve been exploring. McEvilley outlines the purposes of the sceptics’ dialectical method in terms similar to those used by Annas, and we can see again the striking correspondence with Madhyamika ideas and practices. According to McEvilley, Democritus, Pyrrho [whom he refers to as Pyrrhon] and Sextus, were part of a countertradition to the lineage of Parmenides and Plato. The latter used dialectical argument to distinguish between the conditional realm of phenomena and the unconditional realm of absolute reality (Platonic ideas), on the other hand the Pyrrhonists used the dialectic as, an antilinguistic or anticonceptual force that would blow away what the Cynics called the smoke or mist of opinions and value judgments and restore attention to phenomena in themselves. In the one case, [Plato et al], phenomena are considered unreal; in the other case, conceptualization about phenomena is considered unreal. (McEvilley 2002: 420)

Through dialectical analysis all opinions were shown to be relative and conditional, full of distortions, imbalances and false categorisations, thus shaping “parts of experience to one model while repressing others” (ibid: 420) that may be equally valid. McEvilley outlines the purpose that energises the sceptical method, as follows: The study of counterarguments to one’s own opinions was meant, according to Sextus, to lead to a general state of epoche, “suspension of belief,” which could lead in turn to a state of inner freedom from the domination of linguistic categories (aphasia), which in turn will steady into an effective balance (arrepsia) which is naturally and effortlessly followed by a state of imperturbability (ataraxia). (ibid: 420)

The purpose of the Madhyamika, according to Candrakirti (another Madhyamika thinker), is to, eradicate the innate tendency of conceptual thought to construct reified notions of being (bhava) and non-being (abhava). Such reified concepts lead to dispositions (samskaras) which keep one involved in the tumult of opinions. One who attains a middle position between Being and non-Being … is said to have attained enlightenment and freedom. (McEvilley 2002: 456)

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There are two sayings that are directly attributed to Pyrrho. One refers to the lack of any essential self-existence, the “nondifference of things”. McEvilley translates this saying as: ‘Nothing really exists, but human life is governed by convention’. (ibid: 451) Brunschwig’s version is: ‘things are entirely undifferentiated, undetermined and undecided’. (1998: 847) This echoes similar ideas in the Madhyamika tradition. The second saying is: “Nothing is in itself more this than that”. (McEvilly 2002: 451) Once again this is remarkably similar to the Madhyamika advocacy of dialectical deconstruction to expose the interdependence of all opinions, views and statements. McEvilley reminds us that a key text of the Madhyamika is Nagarjuna’s Madhyamakasastra, or the Treatise on the Middle Way. He argues that “middle way” here refers to the indeterminate state between A and not-A. (ibid: 455) Pyrrhonist sceptics and Madhyamika Buddhists affirm the importance of the liminal position between A and not-A, positive and negative, Being and non-Being. As McEvilley puts it: Yes and No, [are] equivalent to the passions of grasping and fleeing that make life a tumult, the position in between being the calm at the eye of the hurricane, as it were. (ibid)

To assert any proposition, Yes or No, is according to Nagarjuna, to be in error. (ibid: 456) Between positive and negative, this and that, arises the undifferentiated state of aphasia, “freedom from the domination of linguistic categories” (p.420) that, according to Sextus, is a characteristic of “mental balance”. (ibid: 458-459) Both Madhyamika and Pyrrhonist traditions use dialectical methods to expose the relational and dualistic nature of appearances as constructed by language and argument and to enable their respective students to realise the indeterminacy or suchness (tathata) of things. Things, being of no fixed nature, are outside the distinction between Being and non-Being, which is an essentialist dichotomy, and are similarly outside of the categories of language, which are also rigid and essentialist. (McEvilley 2002: 458)

It is interesting to note that the Greek term used by the sceptics to denote the indeterminacy of things, the lack of essence or self-

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existence, is aoristia, ‘lack of boundary or definition’. This may be seen as corresponding quite closely to sunyata in the Madhyamika tradition. McEvilley points out that the indeterminacy of things makes them ungraspable in epistemological terms. Having no self-existence, things cannot be “circumscribed by concepts” or defined or grasped by linguistic terms. This ungraspable, ineffableness is what the sceptics call akatalepsia. (ibid: 458) In both traditions the dialectic operates “on three levels – ontological, epistemological, and semantic or language-critical”, (ibid) revealing the limitations of linguistic construction and argument. “Both schools felt that what is usually called philosophy is a veil of words which cuts the mind off from the reality of experience”. (ibid) The silence, indeterminacy and ineffability that arise when we are extricated from our dependence on, or attachment to, the web of language, are affirmed as positive qualities that are more likely to lead to, or accompany, enlightenment and imperturbability. The critique of linguistic conceptualisation is accompanied by an affirmation of direct experience. Our attachment to linguistic categories and concepts leads us to be disturbed, to “take sides” or, as McEvilley puts it: [the] emotions or passions may be set going by words attached to events rather than directly by events themselves – by nomos or convention […] rather than by physis or nature. (ibid: 421)

In the practice of drawing from observation we encounter the ungraspable indeterminacy (akatalepsia) of the shifting fields of perception, cognition and representation. Not only are there no fixed boundaries or definable essences (aoristia) of those phenomena we are attempting to draw, there are also no fixed forms or symbolic formulae with which to represent phenomena. Only out of the improvisatory dialectic of the drawing process itself, can provisional encodings and showings be made. These will always be partial, transitional and revisable, never impartial, absolute or finished. Each time we draw, if we are trying to actualise our experiential participation in the world, we have to destabilise our patterns of response in order to subvert the normalising power of visual conventions. This is why exercises in which students draw with their non-writing hand, or with eyes closed, or with an unfamiliar implement are used by many drawing teachers to confound assumptions and undermine habits of representation. Not

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that we will produce a more true, more accurate or more realistic drawing, but rather, that we will recognise the conventionality of modes of representation (nomos) and the indeterminacy of nature (physis). In both the Pyrrhonist and Madhyamika traditions, and in some kinds of drawing practice, linguistic conceptualisation is turned against itself, using dialectical methods, in order to point to, or realise, nonlinguistic states of consciousness, to encounter the actual. Paradox, contradiction, nonsense, unorthodox marks and unfamiliar gestures are employed to burst the dualistic bubble that reifies and distorts as it refracts being through its transparent and mirroring skin.

* The use of koans – a dialectics of absurdity Koans, like Hakuin’s, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” or Hui-Neng’s, “What is your original face?” are now the stuff of clichéd commentary or comedy. But within the Zen tradition, particularly the Rinzai school, they have a crucial role to play in a radical dialectical method that forces Zen students to experience the absurdities and paradoxes that arise within the web of language. Such methods are used to cajole, trip-up, push the student into realising emptiness and encountering suchness. The koan is used to pull the linguistic concep-

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tualising rug from under our feet, to flip us over into suddenly experiencing the undifferentiated, ineffable concreteness of existence. In a kind of philosophical or existential slapstick manoeuvre the Zen teacher uses the koan to bring the student face-to-face with a realityconsciousness that is pre-linguistic, immediate and wholly indeterminate. Hui-Neng’s ‘original face’, Bankei’s ‘unborn’ and Suzuki’s ‘beginner’s mind’, point to a state before words, concepts, rationalisation and description, a non-symbolic engagement with what is. In attempting to use the mind to try to grasp or analyse the mind, we behave like a dog chasing its own tail. Rationality, language, argument and opinions are self-generating modalities of thought. They add to themselves in ways that may be interesting, exciting and stimulating, but they only enhance the desire for more excitement and stimulation. Attachment to dualistic relational modes of thought leads to ever greater disturbance, dissatisfaction and unease. Pyrrho and Nagarjuna provide us with uroboric (self-destroying) methods with which to cut the chain of relational thought that takes us nowhere. The koans employed in Zen practice provide us with another mode of liberation from the circularities of linguistic argument and either/or positions. The practice of focusing the mind on trying to solve a koan as if it were a puzzle, leads the mind to run in ever tighter circles until the spinning grows unendurable. We realise the absurdity of trying to grasp the ungraspable. At some point, having exhausted the rational, conditional responses to the koan, each one turned down or brushed off by the Zen teacher, the student hits a linguistic or conceptual brick wall. A point is reached at which the futility of such a chase is realised and the student lets go of the desire to “solve” the unsolvable. In this state of exhaustion or resignation another mode of consciousness can arise of itself, as sceptics and Zen practitioners say, unbidden and unlooked-for. In the Zenrin Kushu, a collection of Zen poems and aphorisms, the paradoxical nature of setting out to realise emptiness is evoked as follows: You cannot get it by taking thought; You cannot seek it by not taking thought. (in Watts 1989: 136)

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Only by no longer grasping at essences and relinquishing the desire for answers can the sceptic states of epoche and aphasia, be realised. Descriptions of these states echo the accounts of Zen students experiencing sudden insight (satori) into the emptiness of all things (sunyata) when they are at the end of their tether, no longer able to grasp for the right (or wrong) response to the koan: But [peace of mind only arises] by not looking for it, merely being there when it arrives; and it arrives as a result of the rigorous investigation that makes it impossible to commit yourself for or against any position.(Annas 2000: 70)

No matter how many times the dog bites itself, eventually it has to give up, licking its painful tail or falling asleep in exhaustion. * Hanging over the precipice - letting-go There is a Zen story in the collection of koans assembled by the Chinese master Ekai (also known as Mu-mon - 1183-1260) that highlights the conundrum faced by the Zen student. The collection, a key text in the Rinzai school of Zen, is entitled, Mu-mon-kan or ‘The Gateless Gate’. In order to appreciate the significance of the story we need to know that Bodhidharma is the name of the revered first patriarch of the Zen tradition, who carried the message and practices of Buddhism from India to China, where Zen became established as a dynamic tradition. Also, we need to be aware that opportunities for enlightenment may only arise once, or rarely, in a person’s life, so a Buddhist would dearly want to take up the opportunity if it arose – as it does here when a man is asked a question in the spirit of a koan. The Zen master, Kyogen, once said: “A man hangs by his teeth from the branch of a tree leaning out over a precipice. He is unable to grasp the branch with his hands, or to get a foothold. He is stuck. Another man asks him: ‘Why did Bodhidharma come to China from India?’ If the man doesn’t answer, he loses his chance of liberation from the wheel of attachment and becoming; if he does answer, he falls and loses his life. What should he do?” (my retelling of a version in Reps s.d.: 94-95)

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There is no solution to this existential puzzle, no logical way out of what appears to be a metaphysical impasse. The Zen student can only gnaw at the problem until all possible responses have been rejected. Maybe then some action or gesture will be made that demonstrates to the teacher that an understanding of sunyata and tathata has been actualised in the student’s behaviour, in the way life is lived. The move from an intense exercise of will, the exaggerated pursuit of a desired goal or objective, to a non-intentional acceptance or resignation, is a feature of many accounts of the arising of undifferentiated consciousness or states of imperturbability. In the Taoist tradition this connectionless connection comes across in the term, wu-wei, which means literally, ‘not’ or ‘non’, ‘action’ or ‘striving’. In other words ‘doing by not-doing’, not forcing or striving for a particular end, but simply allowing things to happen of their own accord. This notion is expressed in the following well-known stanza from the Zenrin-Kushu, an anthology of poems compiled by Toyo Eicho, in the fifteenth century: Sitting quietly, doing nothing, Spring comes, and the grass grows by itself. (in Watts 1989: 134)

We are not being advised to do nothing or to be carried along by events subject to the whims of others. We are only being advised that changes of attitude or consciousness, are often resistant to force or will or imposition, indeed striving often reinforces the state from which we are hoping to be released. * Drinking the void In his translation of the poem by Su Tung P’o (also known as Su Shih), The Weaker the Wine, Kenneth Rexroth provides an excellent summing-up of much of what has been written in this section. His translation begins: The weaker the wine, The easier it is to drink two cups. The thinner the robe, The easier it is to wear it double. Beauty and ugliness are opposites,

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But when you’re drunk, one is as good as the other.

And it ends: Good men are their own worst enemies. Wine is the best reward of merit. In all the world, good and evil, Joy and sorrow, are in fact Only aspects of the Void. (Rexroth 1971: 72-73)

***

Part 5 Picturing mind – writing being “This poetry is a picture or graph of a mind moving”. Philip Whalen poem, Since You Ask Me. (in Whalen 1999: 50)

Introduction In this section I examine the ways in which art and poetry provide us with visual and textual manifestations of a mind at work – sensing, thinking, imagining, enquiring – spinning a web of representations, utterances, songs and showings that enable us to sense the shape and quality of consciousness at the threshold between an embodied self and the energy field of which it is an integral part. A consideration of the work of Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, Philip Whalen and Charles Olson is used to shed light on the ways in which the mind is pictured and inscribed into images and texts. A brief analysis of John Cage’s interest in ‘no-mind’ (wu-hsin in Chinese) acts as a counterpoint to the main theme. * Cy Twombly, returning to Rome “not as a stranger” It is a rare sunny morning in a very wet August. I sit at my desk with a few books open before me. They are catalogues of exhibitions by the American artist, Cy Twombly. Twombly was born in Virginia and moved to Italy in 1957. He has lived there most of the time ever since, marrying into an aristocratic Italian family. Looking at the reproductions of drawings, paintings, collages and sculptures I remember some notes made a few years ago when I was trying to clarify my own response to his work. The notes describe in a disordered but immediate fashion some of the qualities of Twombly’s work that most struck

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me at the time. (The passages in italics are taken from Varnadoe 1994, and they include fragments from letters written by Twombly and quotes that he cites in relation to his own work.) Born 1928, in Lexington, Virginia. Neo-classical Palladian architecture, Jefferson’s “Monticello”, sensual languor & lingering romance of fallen grandeur - all aspects of the Southern country in which Twombly grew up. In 1951 Twombly enrolled at Black Mountain college where he encountered John Cage’s ideas. Pictorial poetics grounded in literature. Eroded ancient surfaces. Irrational ritual & fetish. Erotic grit liquid gestures. Roman ruins. White song of experience. Crumbling chalk, bleached bones. Curling loops of lines, scratched repeated scars, claw-marks faint tremors to turbulence. Illegible signs & assertive words. The reality of whiteness may never be analysed. Whiteness of becoming. A crisis of sensation or release or ecstacy. Sept. 6th 1952: finally in Rome / a large room overlooking the Piazza di Spagna / walked miles / so excited to see everything at once / work each morning in my room then site see in the afternoon / then to Florence for awhile & Venice Scumbled clouds, fluttering hearts. Signature, place & date as pictorial testimony. Fragments of names. Naming as ritual evocation of being, of time, of human presence, of place. Oct. 15th 1952: a week in Florence / return to Rome not as a stranger John Crowe Ransome, the poet, wrote a book entitled: The World’s Body. In it he said: An idea is derivative & tamed. The image is in the natural or wild state / we think we can lay hold of the image & take it captive, but the docile captive is not the real image but only an idea, which is the image with its character beaten out of it. Undated, Tangiers: just returned from digging at a Roman bath / North Africa is covered with wonderful Roman cities. Searching for city of light. Sweeping dust aside. Clouds of dust inscribed with images & texts. Scratched signs of passing time, Europe’s debris & bones.

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Words of George Seferis: sun’s in your eyes , birds on your shoulder / dawn / birth / vast dilation of time / you were remade drop by drop / worn thin you search for the light. Now we whitewash the floor & walls & ceiling - we remake ourselves moment by moment – scattered castles washed away with each tide.

Much of Twombly’s work from the late 1950’s onwards, includes words, phrases, names and other references to classical Greek and Roman culture. The textual elements sit alongside, on top of, or beneath, an array of marks, gestures, stains and scribbles, orchestrated within a complex visual field. Bursts of highly saturated colour punctuate a ground of creamy whites, delicate pinks and pale blues. There is a sensuality to the work that is redolent of warm surfaces touched by generations of hands. Twombly uses the vocabulary of Abstract Expressionism, expanded to include his own distinctively agitated line and idiosyncratic handwriting. Over and over again we encounter references to the ancient history, culture and geography of his adopted Mediterranean home. We get a sense of what it is like to be a North American emigrant taking up residence in a place where history, legends and myths seem to be inscribed into actual buildings, walls and gardens. The ruins are a visual and tactile literature of epic events that have been torn, trampled and quoted - and used as a measure of harmony and loss by generations of visitors. Twombly provides us with a record of his passionate exploration of this territory, a territory that is both physical, spatial, intellectual and psychological. We are shown what it is like to be in this place, for him to reorient himself away from a northAmerican locus and to make a home in southern Europe. He gives us a cognitive map of his presence in this land of grand narratives and earthly delights. He pictures a process of assimilation, surprise, acculturation and growing familiarity, as he puts down roots over a period of forty years or more. Metaphors, of war, journeying, displacement and coming home recur in phrases drawn from classical literature – phrases scribbled into the liquid paint with the urgency of someone wanting to note down quickly a passing thought. In Adonais, 1975, we find these phrases, which come from Shelley’s poem with the same title: “He is a portion of the loveliness which once he made more lovely / He has out-soared the shadow of our night”. Twombly

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seems to share with the Romantic poet a conception of beauty as a passing thing that seems always to be slipping from our grasp. In Pope’s neoclassical version of the Iliad, in Virgil’s Eclogues and Spencer’s The Shepheardes Calender, Twombly finds a beauty that is both corporeal and abstract, of skin and spirit. Metaphors of body, place and thought are combined on to painted surfaces that analogically picture his embodied mind. In Twombly’s work we find a characteristic of many of the art works I’m interested in, that is, the way in which they present us with iconic and indexical signs of being, while also constituting a topography of mind. These characteristics can be related to particular modes of composition and interpretation in poetry. The interaction between these modes of picturing and writing the world (mind) also provides the dynamic for establishing a kind of associative, analogical hermeneutics which I’m using to reflect on my own work and the work of others. These are some of the ideas and issues I’ll be exploring in this section. I probably ought to mention that in my mental landscape Cage and Beuys rub shoulders with Ruskin, Sesshu and Samuel Beckett, and the unknown makers of palaeolithic art work alongside poets like Rexroth, Hopkins and Snyder. Reproductions of Rauschenberg’s Dante drawings lie on the table alongside The Maximus Poems of Charles Olson and The Open Field of Kenneth White. * Writing Being Painting, drawing, poetry and other arts can be considered as modes of transformative experience, and as “seismic traces” (in Beckett et al 1985: 81) of being and becoming. But this should not be taken as necessarily supporting an expressive theory of art. Indeed the poet Robin Blaser (1974: 38) argues against the tendency to reduce poetry to the “expression of the man, the expression of the personality [which is poetry as] invented thought, the unreal, the fictive, […] the transcendence that is not attached”. He argues instead for “poetry as primary thought”, a way of experiencing - part of the body/mind active in the world – a mode of being and coming to know. Poetry and art are indices of openness, of experience unfolding in the making. A

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process of realisation – both making real, making reality - and realising the self. What Rilke might have meant by his phrase, “we are all bees of the invisible”. (Blaser 1974: 41) This brings to mind Charles Olson’s argument (in Allen & Creeley: 186) against the tradition of Greek philosophy – the tradition of Socrates’ “readiness to generalise”, Aristotle’s “logic and classification”, and Plato’s idealism, with its separation of form from content. This tradition tends to push lived experience into the background – until it becomes a kind of existential wallpaper against which the furniture of abstraction, generalisation and categorisation stand out as real objects. We’ll return to Olson later in this section. Art shines a light on human experience, urges us to look here, listen to this, feel the texture. Attend and learn what it is like to be human, alive to so much. And as we participate in the dynamic field of the artwork we are turned and re-orientated and re-established. Some kind of dissembling and re-assembling takes place. We re-invent ourselves in the world, find our engagement renewed, our being deepened and magnified. And as we compose so are we composed. For composition involves the making of ourselves as much as the making of something else. The painting or poem or piece of music is a vehicle (amongst other things) for the process of self-constitution. Artworks can also be seen as agents of contact, touch, learning and enquiry, and as associative and analogical fields or zones of interpretation. Poems or artefacts acting as tokens of involvement, rather than tombstones of detachment. Davvetas, (1987: 22) describing Twombly’s work, explains that: The Greek word for painting, zographike, is a compound of the words graphike (‘writing’) and zoon (‘living being’) […] this word means (for the Greeks at least) […] the art of writing down life […] a desire on the part of Being to inscribe, to sketch what is most impressive or surprising in life (that which is […].

*

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* Picturing mind The term “picturing mind” refers to both a mind that makes pictures and the making of pictures that are enactments or analogues of mind. I’m using mind here in the Buddhist sense of the whole body/mind field of consciousness – including perceptual sensations, emotions, thoughts and moods. Morris Croll describes an informal prose style, developing in the 16th Century with Montaigne and others, that can be applied to other kinds of poetry and art processes and products that: “portray not a thought, but a mind thinking”. (in Bernstein 1986: 587) Which echoes Montaigne himself saying: “I stray from the path, but it is rather by license than oversight. My ideas follow each other, but sometimes it is at a distance, and they look at each other, but with an oblique gaze”. (in Bernstein 1986: 587) Artworks that exhibit these characteristics are enactments of a mind at work and play, mapping both the interwoven threads of reiterated themes, images and ideas, and the discontinuous unrelatedness of whatever comes to mind or excites the sensory field. Coleridge’s notebooks manifest these qualities in precise profusion. As Perry observes (2002: viii), “the Notebook’s moment-to-moment life testifies to quite a different sort of truth: not unity and encompassing synthesis at all, but his mind’s immense and multiple activity, in all its unmeeting extremes”. Though Coleridge seems to have yearned for a unity, a grand synthesis of ideas, his notebooks testify to a more radical and unusual achievement: the realisation of a grand disunity that accommodated the “myriad-mindedness” of his own consciousness. His interest in Spinoza stems largely from an almost morbid fascination with Spinoza’s struggle to find “the reconciliation of ‘the many’ with ‘the one’ – of a plurality with unity”. (Perry, 2002, p.viii) However, in Coleridge’s own thinking and writing, it is the plurality that shines through. In a haunting phrase Coleridge refers to his work in the notebooks as the activity of “the self-watching subtilizing mind”. The notebooks record the unfolding of thoughts, impressions, feelings and sensations – what Coleridge described as “the flux and reflux of the mind in all its subtlest thoughts and feelings”. (Perry 2002: vii)

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Charles Bernstein uses Croll’s observation when exploring the philosophical implications of a strand of 20th Century art which is concerned with the “mapping of consciousness”. In his view the value of this writing for epistemological inquiry was the alternative model of mind it provided to the rationalistic constructions of neo-classical and quasi-scientific discursiveness, since the organisation of words and phrases, [or marks, forms and images] and so the picture of the mind, is based on the perceiving and experiencing and remembering subject rather than on the more expositorily developmental lines of the “objective” and impersonal styles that picture the mind (and self) as a neutral observer of a given world. (1986: 593)

The work of poets and artists as diverse as Robert Rauschenberg, Charles Olson, Joseph Beuys, Anne Carson, Cy Twombly, Robin Blaser, Yannis Kounellis, John Cage and Lorine Niedecker, expose the complexities and idiosyncratic characteristics of the human mind. They plot the concrete dynamics of a consciousness which cannot be represented (let alone explained) by the careful linear orchestrations of rational discourse but have to accommodate indeterminacy, irrationality, discontinuity and what we neatly refer to as “changes of mind”. These sinuous multi-dimensional qualities of a conscious experiencing mind cannot be reduced to the serial linear construction of rational discourse, reasoned argument, or simple figure/ground pictorial structures. Collage, montage and bricollage are more accurate analogues for mind, consciousness and thinking. And as Bernstein (1986: 596) puts it this is thinking considered as a “sixth sense […] A perceiving/interpreting dimension or function” which works with, alongside and around the other sensory systems, not in a directorial or autocratic role but as an active agent of inter-connection, projection and synthesis. * Philip Whalen’s poetic method Philip Whalen’s notion of the poem as a “graph of a mind moving” implies that the text becomes a thing-in-itself, the mind-in-action, rather than as descriptive of something else – though it may be that too! Scalapino, introducing the Selected Poems, suggests that in Whalen’s work “the writing is the mind’s operations per se. It’s playfulness, for one thing”. (in Whalen 1999: xv) This playful quality is something that can often be seen in the work of Cage, Twombly,

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Carson and Blaser. There is a nimbleness of movement, a lightfootedness of thinking that enables these artists and poets to cover a lot of ground without leaving a heavy footprint. Themes, ideas, issues, questions and images are concisely brought into the open. The thinking is associative, alive to contradiction, multiplicity and ambiguity. There is rarely a sense of finality or conclusion. Non sequiturs are common. Ideas are on the move, slipping from point to point, returning, circling, taking a new direction. Scalapino suggests that in Whalen’s writing the disjunctive qualities of thoughts as they move and unfold testify to “the occurrence of time as being, or being as time”. (in Whalen 1999: xvi) The writing is both an enactment and a history of thought and of being – of becoming. As Scalapino notes, (ibid) there is something conversational about Whalen’s poetry which is also true of Cage’s writing and much of the poetry of Carson. There is an intimacy of tone and structure, though without any sense of cloying self-expression or confessional disclosure. The language mixes street-vernacular with academic reference, diaristic notation with the open confidentiality of a love-letter. There is a sense that the reader is known and welcomed into the writing as it happens. The fluidity of thought, of ideas and images coming and going, is exemplified in the writing and in the expectation that the reader will be active rather than passive, complicit in the construction of meaning and a participant in the playful and improvisatory development of the work. Whalen, like Kerouac, was aware of the similarities of compositional method between his own writing and jazz composer-musician’s like Thelonius Monk. Whalen (1999: xvii) suggests that Monk’s works are extracts from a continuously unfolding music that is “going on all the time”. “You see him listening to it when he’s out walking around / it’s going all the time”. The music reflects the improvised indeterminacy of life as it is lived and remembered and reflected upon. According to Scalapino, (in Whalen 1999: xvii) One of Philip Whalen’s poems might be written over a period of several years in a notebook, then typed and chopped into separate lines which, arranged on the floor, are comparisons of different moments or periods of time and his mind at those times.

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Although Whalen claimed his poems weren’t “collages” they do have the structural density of collage and the disjunctiveness of image and fragment that collage displays in the hands of , for instance, Rauschenberg, though perhaps without the tonal and thematic harmony of the analytical cubist works of Picasso and Braque or of Schwitters’ merz constructions. Most of the poems are dated, adding to the sense of an unfolding history or becoming. Sometimes Whalen’s writing is as terse and evocative as a haiku by Basho or Issa: Early Spring The dog writes on the window with his nose 30:iii:64 (Whalen 1999: 97)

More usually Whalen’s poems are like Thelonius Monk’s jazz compositions. They have the feel of extracts from an ongoing dialogue or inscription – like journalistic jottings or scenes from a travelogue – one well-known sequence even has the title, Scenes of Life at the Capital. Given the variety and unformulaic character of his work it is hard to typify, but here is an extract that conveys the flavour. The title is itself very Whalenesque: Plums, Metaphysics, and Investigation, a Visit, and a Short Funeral Ode, In Memory of William Carlos Williams: Smog this morning Hot soupy sun The mailman brought all the wrong letters The air stinks, the birds are in somebody else’s yard Boys left a yellow broom in the plum tree (the plums are still green, however) I hear the Scavengers’ Protective Association complaining about the garbage cans, I worry about the fragility of my verses their failure to sound fresh and new

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By God, here’s the garbage men stealing green plums! (Whalen, 1999: 85)

Whalen’s playful irreverence, comedic sensibility and world-weary joie de vivre are on full display. The mind is at work and visible – full of tentativeness, passing anxieties, momentary surprises and extraordinary ordinariness. * Rauschenberg’s ‘XXXIV Drawings for Dante’s Inferno’ Around 1959-1960 Robert Rauschenberg produced a series of drawings, using a wide variety of media, entitled, XXXIV Drawings for Dante’s Inferno. The drawings employ a repertoire of forms, techniques and media that Rauschenberg had been using in his work at the time, though unusually they are focused on a literary narrative that provides a thematic unity to the series. Other works by Rauschenberg at this time tended not to be in series and usually each piece had a distinctiveness that wasn’t imposed but arose out of the compositional process itself. Materials, objects and images picked up by Rauschenberg on his New York walks and his readings of popular literature, newspapers and magazines were utilised in the production of drawings and prints, and in “assemblages” and “combines” that were both sculptural and painterly. The Dante drawings are very small, approximately 14.5 x 11.5 inches. Although they vary a lot in formal structure the whole series has an improvisatory and playful quality that complements the serious theme. Dante’s adventures are translated into a series of visual tableaux that combine comic book exuberance and overt storytelling with more obscure references and associations. Each white page is treated as an open field in which newspaper images, typographical forms, pencilled cross-hatching and watercoloured gestures constitute the visual incidents that evoke the Dante drama. Occasionally arrows indicate direction and progression but overall there is no sense of linear narrative in each drawing. We are confronted with a visual field that demands multiple readings, digressions and interpretations. Each drawing enacts and evokes a brief period of associative thinking and material organisation on the part of the artist. We get a sense of Rauschenberg’s mind at work, finding images, selecting material,

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placing, moving, overlapping, layering and erasing or painting over with opaque white or coloured washes. As in the case of Whalen’s poetry the drawings can be seen as a “graph of the mind’s movement” full of discontinuities, surprising juxtapositions and odd rhythms orchestrated into a complex non-linear structure. Each drawing brings together diverse materials into a provisional order that suggests both simultaneity, remembering and the now. While the drawings refer to history and events, both in Dante’s narrative and in Rauschenberg’s contemporary media culture, they are drawn in the present tense. The synchronicity of consciousness is displayed within each page, while a more linear progression is suggested by the succession of pages, each one subtitled, Canto I, II, III, and so on. Rauschenberg invites us to participate in the activity of drawing, composing, ordering and interpreting. Very little is dictated by the artist. We aren’t being told what to think or how to respond. We are presented with states of indeterminacy, in which we have to think and respond. We meet both Rauschenberg (and perhaps Dante) mind to mind. The drawings invite us to enter the mental territory of another human being and to see and explore a mindscape that is both similar and yet very different to our own. We see the distinctiveness of Rauschenberg’s patterns of thinking and his particular ways of ordering and composing. We see what he notices, values and how he makes connections. We get a sense of the tenor of his perceptual and cognitive activity as it is enacted and made manifest in the work. In our engagement with the drawings we encounter the multiplicity of Rauschenberg’s mental operations and the dynamic networks of thought, visualisation and culture that form and inform his particular presence in the world. * Charles Olson, projective verse and composition-by-field – a manifesto In 1950 an essay by the poet Charles Olson was published in Poetry New York. Entitled, Projective Verse, this brief text was enormously influential on the radical poets of the USA. Olson (in Scully 1966: 282) takes a stance in the essay against what he sees as the longstanding dominance of “closed” verse, a kind of writing that foregrounds surface style and form at the expense of method and content. He also

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takes issue with poetry as “the private-soul-at-any-public-wall” or what Keats refers to as “the Egotistical Sublime”. Olson argues in favour of a poetics in which content determines form and poetry becomes more than self-expression. He wants to see an open kind of verse in which the form develops according to the rhythms of thought of the poet and content emerges from “that place where breath comes from” – a place which, for Olson, is somehow not the ego or self, but a source of energy outside the poet. Olson puts forward three “simplicities” that anyone writing projective verse, or “OPEN verse”, or “COMPOSITION BY FIELD”, will recognise as crucial to the making of a poem. (Scully 1966: 272) Delivered in Olson’s typically cryptical, conversational style, these “simplicities” constitute both a manifesto and a statement of compositional method organised into three related points. The first refers to the “kinetics of the thing”, the importance of considering poetry as a transfer of energy from “where the poet got it (he will have some several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader”. (ibid: 272) This sounds like a straightforward statement of expressive theory in the Collingwood or Kandinsky tradition: art consists of a direct transmission of emotional feeling from artist to audience via the artwork. But this is not what Olson has in mind. He emphasises that “the poem itself must, at all points, be a high energyconstruct and, at all points, an energy-discharge”.(ibid: 272) The poem is a kind of electrical battery, holding concentrated energy within itself and releasing it as required by the user. The poet organises the holding and releasing of energy through the orchestration of breath in syllables and lines. “And the line comes […] from the breath, from the breathing of the man who writes, at the moment that he writes”. And it is “the PLAY of a mind we are after”, enacted and displayed in the breath, in the “swift currents of the syllable” and in the dance of the line.(ibid: 275) To affirm the importance of the breath, Olson puts forward an interesting etymology: “Is” comes from the Aryan root, as, to breathe. The English “not” equals the Sanskrit na, which may come from the root na, to be lost, to perish. “Be” is from bhu, to grow. (ibid: 274)

Olson’s second “simplicity”,

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is the principle, the law which presides conspicuously over such compositions, and, when obeyed, is the reason why a projective poem can come into being. It is this: FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT. (ibid: 272)

In “composition by field” form is never predetermined. Forms are never to be taken down off the shelf and filled with a particular content. This was one of the bones of contention between Robert Duncan and Olson. Duncan’s use of a wide variety of historical poetic forms (particularly sonnets and ballads) was anathema to Olson and smacked of a return to the straightjacket of “closed” verse, the kind of preformed subjectivist construction he detested. For Olson, “style is the man” (in Davidson 1991: 128) and to take on the style of another is somehow to be untrue to oneself. To decide at the outset to write a poem in sonnet form is to attempt to force the genie into a bottle, to push the organic clay into a constricting mould and to formularise the liquidity and changefulness of a man’s life. Presumably to produce a poem that happened to have a sonnet form as a result of composition by field would be entirely honourable, as the form was not predetermined and had arisen organically out of the content. We can note in passing that Olson uses a dualistic vocabulary that assumes a separation between form and content, which is also typical of the formalists and closed versifiers with whom he takes issue. What distinguishes one from the other is that Olson is against the imposition or adoption of predetermined forms, while practitioners of closed verse are not. Davidson points out that Olson’s position affirms, “a certain Coleridgean faith in the organic synthesis of ideas and form”, while also asserting the power of “the creative will over a world of fluctuating ideas”. (Davidson 1991: 129) I’m not sure that Coleridge, or Olson, would entirely agree with the latter remark, as they both seemed to conceive of creativity as a flux of ideas and images, temporarily connected by associative and dissociative thinking in which the individual will was somehow sidestepped, transcended or subverted. The third of Olson’s “simplicities” refers to “the process of the thing, how the principle can be made so to shape the energies that the form is accomplished”.(Scully 1966: 273) For Olson this is a process in which

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“ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION” (ibid: 273) – a statement he got from Edward Dahlberg. This process involves an ongoing openness to whatever arises in consciousness, a willingness to engage with whatever comes to mind: at all points […] get on with it, keep moving, keep in, speed, the nerves, their speed, the perceptions, theirs, the acts, the split second acts, the whole business, keep it moving as fast as you can…in any given poem always, always one perception must must must MOVE, INSTANTER, ON ANOTHER! (ibid)

The urgency of the statement is typical Olson. He is enacting and exemplifying the very process he advocates. The syntax, typographical layout and exclamation marks are formed by what he is urged to say, a statement that is noted down as it arises in the mind. The objects which occur [sensations, thoughts, etc] at every given moment of composition (of recognition, we can call it) are, can be, must be treated exactly as they do occur therein and not by any ideas or preconceptions from outside the poem, must be handled as a series of objects in a field in such a way that a series of tensions… are made to hold.” (ibid: 276)

The field of the poem or artefact becomes an analogical field in which mental operations are mapped as they occur in all their complexity, multilayerings and ambiguities. In a sense nothing lies outside and whatever comes to mind can be included in the emergent structuring of the work. As far as possible Olson is aiming for immediacy, conviction and a directness of speech that is as close as he can get to the manner and tempo of thinking and perceiving. * Some implications of Olson’s poetics – a poetics of cognitive immediacy Olson is critical of the “subjectivism” that has “excellently done itself to death”.(ibid: 280) He adopts and modifies the term “objectivism”, (the movement associated with Oppen, Zukofsky, Niedecker, Reznikoff, and less directly Williams and Pound) coining his own term “objectism”, which involves,

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According to Olson the previously dominant (but now dead) poetics of lyrical self-expression is the product of a distorted relationship between man (and Olson usually means the male of the species!) and nature, a relationship of separation that means the poet “shall find little to sing but himself, and shall sing, nature has such paradoxical ways, by way of artificial forms outside himself”. (ibid: 281) Olson seeks to change this situation in which “artificial forms” mirror the artificiality of our conception of how we stand in relation to nature – how we stand apart from, rather than a part of, nature. The poet (and thus the poem) can derive energy from nature if, paradoxically, “he stays inside himself, if he is contained within his nature as he is participant in the larger force”. (ibid) This re-configured relationship, in which human being is participatory in nature’s being, leads to a situation in which the poet articulates, enacts or “projects” energies from outside himself – he projects something of the energy field of nature. “It is in this sense that the projective act, which is the artist’s act in the larger field of objects, leads to dimensions larger than the man”. (ibid) It also leads to a compositional process in which “his [the poet’s] shapes will make their own way”. Despite Olson’s oftcriticised “macho” arrogance, his projective poetics is grounded in a kind of ecological aesthetics. Human beings can give voice to the energy fields of nature (in which they participate) if they listen as participants rather than as spectators divided off from nature by artificial aesthetic codes and forms. Returning to the breath (and “breath is man’s special qualification as animal”) means returning “to that place where breath comes from, where breath has its beginnings” – in other words to nature.(ibid: 281-282)

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“I am no Greek” - from The Kingfishers (in Weinberger 1993: 123) In his 1965 essay, Human Universe, (in Allen & Creeley 1967: 185196) and in other statements and references throughout his work, Olson rails against the influence and tradition of “the Greeks”. He sees this tradition as being constrictive and as leading to a false perception of how things are in the world, particularly the place of human beings in the world. He is critical of the Greeks’ notion that “all speculation [is] enclosed in the ‘UNIVERSE of discourse’”. (ibid: 186) “[Universe] is their word, and the refuge of all metaphysicians since – as though language, too, was an absolute, instead of (as even man is) instrument”. The turning of language, particularly logic, into an end in itself, marks a decisive turning away from the phenomenal world of direct experience – a substitution of the abstract or ideal for the actual. Olson goes on to say that the Greeks’ notion of discourse, in which, “logos [is] given so much more of its part than live speech”, removes us from the two phenomenal universes that really matter and to which we need to return – “the two a man has need to bear on because they bear so on him: that of himself, as organism, and that of his environment, the earth and planets”. (ibid) For Olson, three aspects, or “inventions”, of Greek discourse “hugely intermit our participation in our experience, and so prevent discovery”. The first is, “Socrates’ readiness to generalize, his willingness (from his own bias) to make a ‘universe’ out of discourse”. Instead of “logos, and the reason necessary to it”, being tools that we must “master” in order to do and think in specialised abstract ways, they become ends in themselves – “final discipline”. (ibid) Beyond logos and reason, “is direct perception and the contraries which dispose of argument. The harmony of the universe, and I include man, is not logical, or better, is post-logical, as is the order of any created thing”. (ibid) In other words nature is post-logical, or alogical, and to try to define or describe it as an extension of human logical discourse is both hubristic and divisive. For Olson, the actuality of experience, of consciousness, of being-in-the-world is more important and more “real” than logos, and abstraction, rationalism and generalization take us away from the actual. While Socrates is held responsible for the substitution of discourse for “direct perception”, Aristotle is seen as providing the technical means

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for this process of substitution and separation, namely, “logic and classification”. The centrality of logic and classification to the (western) human intellectual enterprise, and to the mindset of generations of philosophers, artists and poets, is something Olson deplores, because they have “so fastened themselves on habits of thought that action is interfered with”. (ibid) Action, that is us acting and being present in the world, is also interfered with by Platonic idealism and its separation of form and content. The realm of Ideas becomes more important than the realm of human experience, abstraction becomes more important than actuality – adding to our sense of disengagement and separation from the complex and multi-facetted, alogical, realities of our consciousness in nature. Logic, idealism and classification distort by generalising, abstracting and separating-out, by disengagement from the continuum of direct experience. For any of us, at any instant, are juxtaposed to any experience, even an overwhelming single one, on several more planes than the arbitrary and discursive which we inherit can declare. (ibid: 187)

For Olson, there is only one absolute, if there are any, and it is “this one, you, this instant, in action”. (ibid) It is this which is at the heart of Olson’s poetics – a desire, a yearning for a “restoration of the human house” (ibid: 189) by restoring our presence in the world, a presence that ignites in each moment of consciousness, signified by the ways in which we act, perceive and hold ourselves in relation to nature and other beings. The affinities between Olson’s ideas and aspirations and those of phenomenologists like Husserl or Merleau-Ponty, and with pragmatists like John Dewey, or process philosophers like Heraclitus, Whitehead and Bergson, are obvious. All emphasise the centrality of consciousness to philosophy, all recognise that change is a condition of our being in the world and all are critical, in very different ways, of idealism, abstraction and rationalism. They all draw attention to our participation in the world and offer ideas as to how we can be more attentive to, and more openly integrated into, the processes of nature. At the beginning of Maximus Poem V, Olson has this, dated January 15, 1962:

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120 A Later Note on Letter# 15

In English the poetics became meubles – furniturethereafter (after 1630 & Descartes was the value until Whitehead, who cleared out the gunk by getting the universe in (as against man alone & that concept of history (not Herodotus’s, which was a verb, to find out for yourself: …. ……with Whitehead’s important corollary: that no event is not penetrated, in intersection or collision with, an eternal event The poetics of such a situation are yet to be found out (Olson 1968a: pages unnumbered)

What Olson seems to be saying here, in a manner that is both elliptical and direct, (simultaneously baroque and realist), is that the tradition of the Greeks embodied in Descartes’ empirical rationalism (the Discourse on Method was first published in 1637) had become part of the intellectual furniture of English culture, and continued so until Bergson, Whitehead and others come along, conceptualising humans experientially as beings integrated into nature’s processes of becoming. In this view time, and history, consist in an infinitely complex interweaving of processes - processes that are both changeful in themselves and endlessly providing opportunities for more change. The rationalist determinism in much of Olson’s “Greek” tradition is pushed aside in favour of a more open-ended indeterminism that affirms “contingency, emergence, novelty, and creativity [as] among the fundamental categories of metaphysical understanding”, (Rescher 2002) and as characteristics of human existence. Olson’s love of the contemporary Maya - and “love” isn’t too strong a word to describe the affection and respect evident in the Mayan Letters (1968b) and elsewhere in his writings - is partly the result of

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how they seem to reside in their world rather than as we seem to be as spectators, always with one foot outside the door or with our minds keeping up a commentary (rationalising, classifying and idealising) about our experiences rather than experiencing directly. The desire to re-establish poetry as a mode of experiencing is what links Olson to other poets and songmakers, from Blaser and Spicer, to Rothenberg and many unnamed tribal poets, to Fred Wah and back to Coleridge, Hopkins and Cummings. All of these poets share a belief in poetry as a way of voicing the world, a way of picturing consciousness that is our presence in the world. They would no doubt share the yearning and questioning that drives Olson to ask: There must be a means of expression for this, a way which is not divisive as the tag ends and upendings of the Greek way are. There must be a way which bears in instead of away, which meets head on what goes on each split second, a way which does not – in order to define – prevent, deter, distract, and so cease the act of, discovering. (1967: 188)

In Olson’s hands these aspirations and methods often give rise to a poetry that is simultaneously provocative, erudite and hard to fathom, displaying a very public, almost confrontational, intimacy. His letters and essays have the same qualities. We come away, even when we are at times confused or perplexed, with a strong sense of a particular human being’s presence in the world, a sense of the body, breath and mind of a man of considerable learning, whose prejudices, assumptions and ideals are candidly and forcefully stated in a manner that brings to mind Samuel Johnson. Olson reminds us that he is geographically and culturally situated within an east coast, North American, western context, yet he is also eager to look outside that context to move poetry to a less egocentric subjectivist position. His poetry is often recondite, even esoteric, in its references, with a seductive use of demotic speech and marvellously contorted syntax. Sometimes the particularities of Olson’s experiences and his reluctance to generalise or abstract from them, can lead us, paradoxically, to search for keys or commentaries outside the poetry as a means of access and understanding. The particularities of Olson’s “direct speech” and his attention to the unfolding of consciousness can

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generate an opacity and obscurity that characterises the man while at the same time enclosing his meanings behind walls that can be impenetrable and unclimbable. I am excited to encounter these walls and to glimpse the garden within, but I may well wish I could enter through an OPEN or more welcoming door. Perhaps the letters and essays provide a more accessible hinterland in which we can retain our bearings, while the poetry is a more forbidding territory in which we see Olson’s mind stripped of cues and clues, without the apparatus of handshakes and welcomings that conversation and dialogue tend to include. However in all his writings Olson succeeds in opening-up new territories of mind and place, and in articulating and deploying a compositional method that has proved enormously useful to many poets working since the 1950’s. As an example of Olson’s poetics in action here are two more extracts from The Maximus Poems. Note how the words and phrases are distributed across the page, both horizontally and vertically, taking shape within the open space or field of the page. Olson makes use of the capabilities of the typewriter to precisely orchestrate the spatial layout of words, phrases, images and ideas. Lines, dispersed across and down the page, are determined by the poet’s breath and unfolding perceptions, and in turn act as a score for our readings of each poem. A shifting network of connections and associations develops as the page is scanned, more akin to the participatory engagement with a painting than with a poem organised in more traditional lines. The poem as visual field becomes an analogue for the field of consciousness or mind. The first extract comes from Maximus Poem IV (Olson 1968a: pages unnumbered): Maximus, March 1961 - 2 by the way into the woods Indian

otter orient

“Lake”

ponds

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(exhibit

The Cape Goliard first edition of Maximus Poems IV, V, VI, is large format (11x8 inches) and this passage sits in the upper half of an otherwise empty page. It reads like a highly condensed annotation, a travellers note, in which the ambiguities of “orient” (in the sense of the “east” and to position oneself geographically) are juxtaposed against the descriptive topographical details that convey both a sense of physical place and cultural affiliation (with native Americans and animals). In this context, being in nature, Olson presents another ambiguity – his desire both to be “shown” (maybe where he is, culturally and geographically) and to show himself. These can be read as notes to himself, reminders of what he’s about, his desire to reorient himself away from the western tradition of separation from nature and towards the traditions (exemplified, in this instance, by native Americans) that conceptualise human beings as animals within nature. The cultural/geographical interface is a prominent feature of the whole sequence of Maximus Poems and my second extract is a further illustration of this underlying theme. This passage also comes from Poem IV. It is the second half of a poem spread over two pages and is more orthodox in layout and syntax. However it does convey Olson’s concerns with place and with placing himself as a bodymind within a geography that is not European. Olson comes back again and again to the question of how to establish a new socio-cultural position that takes account of the move made by European emigrants to the eastern seaboard of the USA and the opportunity to conceive a new polis that draws equally on indigenous cultures and ecologies. Olson appears to have devised the cover of the Cape Goliard edition, which shows a schematic map of the earth before the huge mass of Gondwanaland split apart to form Africa and the Americas separated by the Atlantic Ocean. Maximus to Gloucester, Letter 27 [withheld] …. No Greek will be able to discriminate my body.

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An American is a complex of occasions, themselves a geometry of spatial nature. I have this sense, that I am one with my skin Plus this – plus this: that forever the geography which leans in on me I compell backwards I compell Gloucester to yield, to change Polis is this (Olson 1968a: pages unnumbered)

* John Cage – picturing no-mind If we turn to John Cage we find our ideas about picturing mind turned upside-down. Cage returns again and again in his conversations and writings to Meister Eckhart and Huang-Po. In his reading of Chu Ch’an’s translation of, Huang-Po’s Doctrine of Universal Mind (1947) Cage was particularly taken with the paradoxical idea of ‘nomind’ (wu-hsin, Chinese; mushin, Japanese). Huang-Po, like many Zen masters, was concerned to liberate his students from the reflexivity and circularity of thinking-about-thinking. He pointed to the

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absurdity of trying to use rational analysis and argument to solve problems that are the product of excessive dependence on rational analysis and over-intellectualisation. Trying to use the mind, in this sense, to work on the mind, is foolish – it only adds to the problem. ‘No-mind’ doesn’t refer to blankness or absence of thought, let alone empty-headedness, it is a shorthand term for the practice of a kind of directness or spontaneity that is epitomised in the ink paintings of artists like Sesshu, Hakuin or Nantenbo. Disciplined in the ways of Zen, these painters exercise a gestural fluency that comes from a profound unity of thought and action. The pictorial form is enacted in a swift stroke of the brush. There are no second thoughts. No clinging to the idea or intention beyond the moment at which it simultaneously arises and is realised. In this sense ‘no-mind’ is the state of mind in which things are done without attachment to passing thoughts, in which mind and body are working fluently together unhindered by the doubts, anxieties and uncertainties that are the product of overattachment, habit and obsessive thoughts-about-thoughts-aboutthoughts. Being free of the entanglements of the “monkey-mind” (the everyday discriminating mind) requires a constant mindfulness, a nondiscriminating attentiveness to the NOW, a sharpness of being-at-one with the world without clinging or hanging on to misleading conceptualisations of the world. These misleading conceptualisations include the idea that the world is broken up into discrete entities and that these entities somehow correspond to the arbitrary classifications and divisions that are generated by linguistic thinking. No-mind is ontological and epistemological nondualism. Cage translates the practice of no-mindedness into a compositional methodology that presents sounds as sounds rather than as symbols or tokens of expression. He argues that sounds are separate from, and in a sense unrelated to, the meanings, interpretations and responses that arise when we hear them. Sounds are sounds. They are nothing less and nothing more than themselves. They are what they are. He considers one of his functions to be to “liberate sounds from abstract ideas and […] to let them be physically uniquely themselves”. (Nyman 1999: 42) His role as a composer and writer is to act as an

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agent-provocateur for clear listening, non-discriminatory awareness and open-mindedness. Cage considers the members of an audience to be creative participants in a dynamic aural/spatial continuum in which sounds occur, not as a vehicle for ideas, but as moments of experience – unique and neverto-be-repeated. He urges, prompts, seduces or occasionally forces an audience to attend to what is happening, to engage, to become aware. He often constructs or orchestrates situations in which the audience attend to ambient (unplanned, uncomposed, indeterminate) sound as if hearing it for the first time (for instance, his notorious piece, 4'33" – often referred to as his “silent” composition). The “noise” of everyday life, usually excluded from “serious music”, is included and reconsidered or reclaimed as music. We are given an opportunity to recognise the “empty and marvellous” (a Zen expression) beauty of our everyday sound world. The gap between life experience and musical experience becomes indistinct. Our cultural categorisations are destabilised and we are encouraged to examine and change our assumptions, beliefs, ideas and values. I remember hearing Cage in a radio interview many years ago, saying that three of his most important experiences early on in life were: feeling that he wanted to change the world, realising he might not be able to, and deciding that he could change the way he looked at or experienced the world! The practices of non-attachment and of non-discriminatory awareness that are integral to no-mindness enable us to step outside the control of the egocentric “little-mind” and exercise our “true nature” as agents of “big-mind” or “beginners mind” – terms often used in Buddhist discourse. We are freed of the fixations and anxieties of clinging, of what Erich Fromm (1979) refers to as the “having” mode of existing, and we are able to realise what he calls the “being” mode. Cage’s method is process-based. He gathers materials (actions, words, sounds, paint, etc) and sets in motion a rigorously adhered-to compositional method. Once this structuring process has been chosen it is followed through to whatever formal enactments (rather than conclusions) are realised. Cage as agent, author or auteur determines the process but accepts whatever occurs – however surprising, discordant, messy, harmonious, dull or exciting it may be. His compositional processes “imitate nature in her manner of operation”, a phrase he

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took from Coomaraswamy and to which he referred many times in his long career. (Cage 1966: 194) The use of coin-tossing, I-Ching hexagrams and other chance or “aleatoric” methods, enables Cage to enact no-mindedness in relation to sound, words and visual forms. The music, texts and paintings that emerge from these processes of determined indeterminacy present us with enactments of beginners mind. Cage orchestrates his materials and forms in relation to the unformed undifferentiated ground out of which they come to our attention. In the case of music, sounds unfold in time against the ground of an ambient sound field – a field we often refer to as silence, but which Cage considered to be “unintended sound”. In the case of texts, words are arranged in relation to the spaces of the blank page. The interdependence of sound and “silence”, word and white page, brush mark and paper surface, is something Cage emphasises over and over again. The forms of a musical composition are those aspects of the auditory field that we attend to and value within a given period of time. There is nothing essentially different or distinctive about musical sounds as considered in relation to non-musical sounds - just as there is no essential distinction between garden plants and weeds. The former happen to be the sounds/plants we value and attend to, the latter are those we don’t value or we choose to ignore. By blurring the boundaries of these categories, or by affirming their interdependence, Cage reminds us of the artificial distinctions we make between art and life, and between music and noise. Cage’s insistence on the importance of the undifferentiated ground/silence out of which all forms/sounds arise and to which they all return, is reminiscent of Meister Eckhart’s Grund or ‘ground of being’. Cage makes reference to Eckhart in many of his writings and conversations. In the Indeterminacy section of Composition as Process (Cage 1966: 39), the Ground of Meister Eckhart is repeatedly mentioned as being a state in which the composer/musician/audience can identify with whatever eventuality arises in the course of a performance. He writes: Turning away from himself [the performer] and his ego-sense of separation from other beings and things, he faces the Ground of Meister Eckhart, from which all impermanencies flow and to which they return. “Thoughts arise

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Picturing mind – writing being not to be collected and cherished but to be dropped as though they were void. Thoughts arise not to be collected and cherished but to be dropped as though they were rotten wood. Thoughts arise not to be collected and cherished but to be dropped as though they were pieces of stone. Thoughts arise not to be collected and cherished but to be dropped as though they were the cold ashes of a fire long dead.”

In all aspects of his work Cage presents us with situations in which we can exercise no-mindedness and demonstrations of Cage’s own attempts to achieve no-mindedness and to stand in the groundless ground of Meister Eckhart. According to Pritchett (1994: 46) Eckhart believes an inner emptiness – which he refers to with such words as ‘silence’, ‘ignorance’, ‘unselfconsciousness,’ or ‘unknowing’ – is necessary for the realization of God. To be in such a state, Eckhart says, is to have true spiritual poverty, to be completely detached and indifferent to the will, knowledge and desires of the self.

Whatever the extent of Cage’s realisation of this state, it was undoubtedly a state he strove to realise in himself and in others. He used art as a ‘skilful means’ (upaya in Buddhism) with which to wake us up to the extraordinariness of being and to perceive what IS with clarity and a sense of profound acceptance. * Coda I - Wittgenstein We can link these compositional modes in poetry and the visual arts to Wittgenstein’s philosophical practices. In his Notes on Logic, he writes: “Distrust of grammar […] is the first principle of philosophising. And, by extension, of poeticising”. (Perloff 1996a: 17) in the Philosophical Investigations, he resists imposing an artificial continuity on his own thinking and writing, even an organic linearity, because it would constrain his criss-crossing, disjunctive patterns of thought what Perloff calls his “revisionary” methods of composition. This process of sustained uncertainty and indeterminacy becomes a tacit benchmark of a new kind of philosophical practice, which involves both a critique and a revisioning of language through the use of anecdote, enigmatic utterance, associative imaging, seriousness and playfulness, assertion and counter-assertion. The need to destabilise, to jolt the reader out of his or her preconceptions and intellectual

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comforts becomes an important part of Wittgenstein’s philosophical project. * Coda II Art practices which picture the mind, condensing and externalising experience, are, almost by definition, improvisatory, unsystematic and complex - resistant to closure and explanatory analysis. They are characterised by concreteness and specificity – an actuality which defies abstraction and generalisation. In Hermit Poems No 9, Lew Welch (1973: 77) voices a similar idea: I saw myself a ring of bone in the clear stream of all of it and vowed always to be open to it that all of it might flow through […]

Somehow, even now - even as capitalism extends its suffocating uniformity over the globe and the only alternative to passive head-inthe-sand liberalism seems to be some kind of fundamentalist closure or dystopian ennui - this still seems to be an important aspiration: to recognise the interdependence of ontology and epistemology in our becoming as agents of art and poetry - a holding together of being and knowing in a state of unfolding lucidity. And this moment-by-moment forming of the work is inclusive of many kinds of practice and experience – for instance: sudden insight, extended reverie, critical analysis and reflection, subjective epiphany and intertextuality. The work becomes a “sedimentation of mind” - a phrase of Robert Smithson’s – both as sedimentary product and the process of sedimentation itself. Or, to put it in another way, we can think about the collaborative making of art and poetry by artists, poets, active participants and readers, as writing being, picturing mind. ***

Part 6 The self as open-work: permeability, incompleteness & revisibility “This open or indeterminate presence, the indefinite nature of man, in Vico’s words”. A.R.Caponigri. (quoted by Blaser 1975: 301) “There is no language for being”. Kenneth White. (quoted by Padmakara 2004: 51)

Introduction In this section I explore the idea that perceptual systems, artworks and the “self” all share qualities of permeability, revisibility and incompleteness - qualities that can be linked to Merleau-Ponty’s theories of perception, Umberto Eco’s idea of the “open work” and Barthes’ notion of the “writerly text”. I also briefly touch on some of the implications of these ideas for learning and education. The text is organised in a series of discrete units that shed light on this theme from different perspectives. There is no linear argument, in the usual sense. Instead there are multiple associations, cross-references and examples, orchestrated in a way that enacts and reflects upon the idea of an open work. The reader is invited to participate in the construction of meaning and interpretation. * Image: a trainride with Montaigne I’m on a train, early morning, travelling from Exeter to Paddington. Outside mist and low cloud and silver light infusing distant hills. After a night spent turning over ideas about identity and becoming, I’m only half-awake. I listen to the usual collage of sibilant voices, conversa-

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tions coming and going, wheel swish and whoosh of passing trains, hiss of rain, sneezes, whispers. And this field of sound is curiously like my own field of thoughts as they rise and fall, condensing into shape and then dissolving into incoherence. I turn over the pages of a newspaper and come across an article by Martin Kettle entitled, “We all have one thing in common – our differences”. Kettle (2004: 24) refers to Montaigne’s essay, On the Inconstancy of Our Actions, in which he criticises the habit of even the best writers who, stubbornly [try] to weave us into one invariable and solid fabric […] Anyone who turns his prime attention on to himself will hardly ever find himself in the same state twice […] Every sort of contradiction can be found in me, depending upon some twist or attribute: timid, insolent; chaste, lecherous; talkative, taciturn; tough, sickly; clever, dull; brooding, affable; lying, truthful; learned, ignorant; generous, miserly and then prodigal. I can see something of all that in myself, depending on how I gyrate; and anyone who studies himself attentively finds in himself and in this very judgment this whirring about and this discordancy. There is nothing I can say about myself as a whole, simply and without intermingling and admixture.

A woman talks to her mobile phone: “I need to get back. No one is feeding them”. She laughs. Outside an orchard is illuminated by sunlight between dark shadows. Cows in a field are suspended in mist, heads pointing north. Above them two crows head south. The chemistry of mind is alive with all this – Montaigne, inconstancy and conversations of mist and light. * Image: artwork as open-work An open igloo made of metal struts and sheets of glass stands in a gallery space, with a bare-limbed branch protruding from the top. The artist, Mario Merz, calls it: Igloo with a Tree. The story-maker inside us begins to stir. We see it as a statement about the colonisation of tribal peoples, or the expropriation of vernacular architecture by late modernist European high art, or a witty juxtaposition of tree and arctic houseform. The ancient symbol of a tree of life points to some kind of resurrection of ethnicity in the face of global capitalism. The structural simplicity of the shelter points to a post-industrial age of subsistence architecture in which we endlessly recycle materials. We shudder at the way the branch seems to be trying to escape the

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glass-toothed dome, a leafless dying gesture of resistance, memorial to a way of life no longer sustainable. We notice how the glass reflects back at us our own image as coloniser - a consumer eager to find a new taste to stimulate our easily jaded palettes. And yet we can also see through the glass, through the domed form, taking in the rest of the room, seeing other spectators consuming the art in the same hurried manner. We voice all these stories and more. And none seems more true than another. There is no mono-meaning, no single content or point - only multiple stories woven around the spare arcs of metal, planes of glass and filigree of wood. There is also wordless wonder, perplexity or surprise, a mute engagement or silent encounter with the artwork. In the end it defies consumption, it is both meaningless and meaning-full, valueless and invaluable. Umberto Eco (1989) provides us with a way of articulating and rationalising our varied interpretations of Merz’s glass and metal structure. The igloo can be seen as a perfect exemplar of Eco’s idea of the “open” work. According to Eco the “open” work constitutes “a field of open possibilities” (ibid: 86) arising from “its susceptibility to countless different interpretations which do not impinge on its unadulterable specificity. Hence, every reception of a work of art is both an interpretation and a performance of it”. (ibid: 4) Eco refers to Pousseur, who “observed that the poetics of the ‘open’ work tends to encourage ‘acts of conscious freedom’ on the part of the performer and place him at the focal point of a network of limitless interrelationships”. (ibid) In an open work we are invited “to make the work together with the author”. (ibid: 21) According to Eco open works are “unfinished”. He gives examples of open works by the composers Luciano Berio and Karlheinz Stockhausen, suggesting that “the author seems to hand them on to the performer more or less like the components of a construction kit”. (ibid: 4) Eco adds that “every work of art, […] is effectively open to a virtually unlimited range of possible readings, each of which causes the work to acquire new vitality”. (ibid: 21) Open works tend to be evocative, suggestive, ambiguous and indeterminate as to meaning and interpretation.

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Eco’s poetics of the open work can be usefully applied to a diverse range of artworks in music, theatre, literature and the visual-spatial arts. A few examples of the countless artworks that are made fairly explicitly within a framework of open construction and participatory interpretation include: most of the music, writings and later curatorial projects by John Cage (eg. Rolywholyover: a Circus, planned by Cage but only realised after his death in 1992); Einstein on the Beach (1976), a landmark musical collaboration between Philip Glass and Robert Wilson, in which an unfolding series of tableaux (that are as significant visually as they are musically) generate a complex collage of sounds and images with no conventional plot or narrative; B.S. Johnson’s novel, The Unfortunates (1969), a collection of twentyseven discrete sections of text, which, apart from the first and last section, are intended to be read in a random order or in whatever order the reader decides; artworks by Joseph Beuys (eg. the Eurasia series of performance/lecture/illustrations from the 1960’s); sited public works by Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer, often including fragments of text or controversial statements; Anthony Gormley’s, Field series, beginning in the late 1980’s, in which the artist invites people to make small hand-sized “heads” out of clay which are then displayed (sometimes in their thousands) in galleries or other public locations; and Susan Hiller’s work, At the Freud Museum (1992-94), a collection of discarded objects of no monetary value, arranged with texts in boxes displayed in a large glass cabinet (or vitrine). In this work Hiller makes a connection between the archive of domestic and other objects in The Freud Museum at the London house where Freud once lived, narratives suggested by the collection, and dreams. The viewer is invited to interpret, reflect upon and “make sense” of this collection of disparate materials, which is open to multiple readings and “ways of seeing”. * Roland Barthes: “readerly” & “writerly” texts In his book S/Z, Roland Barthes (1990) analyses a short story by Balzac, entitled Sarrasine. His analysis leads him to identify multiple meanings, codes and signifiers within the text. Readers normally combine these various strands together into a supposedly “cohesive, centralized meaning”. (Luco 1999) Barthes calls this kind of textual reception an example of a “readerly text” (lisible) in which the power

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appears to reside with the author, the reader is relatively passive and the connotational aspects are subordinate to the denotational. Denotation refers to “the most literal and limited meaning of a word, regardless of what one may feel about it or the suggestions and ideas it connotes”. (Cuddon 1999: 215) Connotation refers to “the suggestion or implication evoked by a word or phrase, or even quite a long statement of any kind, over and above what they mean or actually denote […] a connotation may be personal and individual, or general and universal”. (ibid: 176) Different groups of people may recognise very different connotations in relation to the same word. Barthes suggests the writerly text (scriptible) as an alternative to the readerly text. When presented with a writerly text the reader is encouraged, or forced, to become an active participant in the production of meaning. “A ‘writerly’ text […] makes demands on the reader; he or she has to work things out, look for and provide meaning […] a writerly text tends to focus attention on how it is written […] it calls attention to itself as a work of art”. (Cuddon 1999: 725-726) Barthes writes: The writerly text is ourselves writing, before the infinite play of the world […] is traversed, intersected, stopped, plasticized by some singular system (Ideology, Genus, Criticism) which reduces the plurality of entrances, the opening of networks, the infinity of languages. The writerly is the novelistic without the novel, poetry without the poem. (1990: 5)

The readerly text is grounded in sets of conventions and codes (for example: framing the novel, the detective story and other genres), while the writerly text is more elusive and avant-garde. Well-known novels, “classics” like David Copperfield or Treasure Island, often within a realist genre, tend to be perceived as readerly texts, while more ‘difficult’ or ‘experimental’ novels like James Joyce’s, Finnegan’s Wake, John Barth’s, Giles Goat Boy, or B.S. Johnson’s, The Unfortunates, can be seen as writerly texts. However, an active, analytical, inquisitive reader can transform any text into a writerly text! Whether avant garde novels by Joyce, Barth or Johnson are really any less grounded in sets of conventions and codes than a “classic” novel is an open question. It seems to me that they have simply adopted different conventions and codes, or established new ones that are then adopted or broken by other novelists.

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Barthes argues that the writerly text is indeterminate in meaning, open to a plurality of readings, based as it is on the “infinity of languages”. (1990: 5) In relation to the writerly text the reader becomes an active locus of meaning-making, the reader is a participant in the writing, collaborating with the nominal author in the construction of the text. These ideas of Barthes have also been useful in relation to the visual/spatial arts. Some kinds of artefacts do present a relatively straightforward “narrative” or set of meanings (say realist paintings or Impressionist landscapes), while Duchamp’s Fountain or Emin’s Bed provoke a more active process of meaning-making and make more demands on the audience – particularly, in these two cases, in relation to how we decide what is, or is not, art and how we think about art as both an object and as a process of signification. Barthes and Eco shift the locus of power in the discourses of art away from the author/artist and towards the reader/audience who becomes an engaged producer of meaning rather than a passive consumer. Barthes talked about “the death of the author”, but he might equally have referred to “the birth of the participatory reader” - though both of these statements are over-simplistic and suggest a binary opposition between readerly/writerly and closed/open, while the reality is more a spectrum or continuum of possible relationships between reader and text. Like Wittgenstein, Foucault, Derrida other so-called postmodern thinkers, Barthes and Eco believe that we should be more analytical and sceptical in our engagement with discourses of all kinds. For all these thinkers meaning is not something fixed, essential or given. Instead meanings are multiple/plural - open to endless changes and revisions of denotation and connotation, determined by different communities at different times and in different places. Language is a social construction reflecting a plurality of perspectives, beliefs, values and power relations. * Living and learning as open-work - a multitude of stories Eco’s idea of the art object as open-work can be applied to the wider sphere of human action and relationship, particularly the field of education, where the processes of learning and teaching can be seen as

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open-work leading to unpredictable stories, meanings and changes of mind. In this view of education, learner and teacher are active participants in personal and collective acts of story-making, and learning is always indeterminate as to outcomes. Rather than consumers of education we are producers of learning - enacting or performing our learning within a field of open possibilities. Given that much of our social life, particularly education, is highly institutionalised, a number of questions arise as to the viability of the notion of living and learning as open work. How can we, each in our different ways, resist the encroachment of narrowly-focused utilitarianism and determinism in so many fields of human activity? How can we maintain a more emancipatory and transformative view of life – life as an unfolding of learning about ourselves, each other and the world about us? How can we keep sight of the need to develop ourselves as social beings by engaging critically in mutually rewarding relationships with others - exchanging experiences, values and beliefs through stories, images and other cultural activities? And how can each of us develop our unique current of consciousness within the great ocean of human being – how do we become more fully alive to ourselves, to each other and to the world in which we live? In order to become more fully alive, to be open to experience and to reconstitute ourselves day-by-day we need to find ways in which our gifts, skills and aspirations can be identified, developed and exercised within a conceptual framework that is questioning, critical and analytical - yet attentive, celebratory and able to sing. We need to be able to distinguish between important and unimportant needs, and to separate out the strands of manipulation and coercion that all social institutions deploy. We need to embrace the discontinuities of life and the endless puzzles that engage us as inquisitive beings, and we need to relate to each other in ways that are indeterminate and open enabling those we meet to interpret, to make meanings and to demonstrate their own particular perspective through surprising stories and inventive actions and forms.

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* Image: Theosophists teach that primeval man is a vast dispersed being. (from the poem, Apprehensions, in Duncan 1970: 36) * Self as open-work We can also use the idea of the open-work to refocus our thinking about notions of self, identity and subjectivity. Heidegger provides one starting-point for thinking in this way. At one point in his book, Irrational Man (1990: 217), Barrett is discussing Heidegger. He writes: My being is not something that takes place inside my skin (or inside an immaterial substance inside that skin); my Being, rather, is spread over a field or region which is the world of its care and concern. Heidegger’s theory of man (and of Being) might be called the Field Theory of Man (or the Field Theory of Being) in analogy with Einstein’s Field Theory of Matter, provided that we take this purely as an analogy.

In Heidegger’s view human existence involves “being-in-the-world”, an active field of being that Heidegger calls Dasein. As Barrett points out, we can think of this like a magnetic field, yet without a solid magnet at its centre. We are implicated in the world whether we like it or not. There is a fundamental permeability to our being-in-the-world. Our being involves reciprocity with a dynamic, ever-changing, ambient space that gives form and meaning to us as we give form and meaning to it. Dasein means to be there – or perhaps, as we might more commonly say in English, to be in the here and now. In Barrett’s words: Man does not look out upon an external world through windows, from the isolation of his ego: he is already out-of-doors. He is in the world because, existing, he is involved in it totally. (1990: 217)

In this sense we could be said to be agents of consciousness in the world, the world being conscious through us. Each of us presents a distinctive worldview in so far as we are located at different points within the wider field, yet we offer shared perspectives in so far as our

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fields of being conjoin, inter-flow and eddy around each other – as currents do in a stream or river. * Revision & reiteration We can also look at the self as an open field of accretive activity, a building site of infinite revision, reiteration and rebuilding. We are all revisions of each other and of the first homo sapiens who noticed that they weren’t each other. Revisions. Reworkings. Retellings. Reiterations. We show and speak ourselves in many different ways, yet all are variations, reiterations, reworkings and reshowings of themes, patterns and structures that are recognisably of this bodymind, this locus of becoming, knowing and doing, this current of being, this manyroomed house of bone and light. * Image: self as ocean The “self” is a multi-dimensional construction – metaphorically more like an ocean or a cloud than a tree or substantive object. It is not an “it” but rather a dynamic set of interdependent processes – like currents, tides, chemical interactions, solutions and dissolutions, drifts and waves and ripples of light. This oceanic self has within it knots of tangled linguistic and emotional seaweed, flitting thought-fish that dart about (rapid and hard to catch), deep mood gullies beyond the reach of surface sunlight, passing bouts of shark-anger, delicate sensitivities like the finest coral, drifting clouds of luminescent joy, moments of starfish surprise, jellyfish paradoxes, slippery eel selfdelusions… but this is all metaphor and association, taking us away from the indefiniteness of becoming.

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* Concordances A few months after presenting a paper that touched on the idea of the self as open work I spent time thinking through this idea in order to include it in this book. As often happens in these situations the mind becomes sensitive to coincidences, to peripheral concordances and connections. While glancing though a Buddhist journal I encounter a reference to Kenneth White’s “philosophy of ‘open systems’ and ‘open being’”. (Padmakara 2004: 51) As we inhabit and give voice to the world it is no surprise that we notice similar patterns and rhythms. As we travel through common territory, we notice the same distinctive rocks, hear the same mournful cry of circling buzzards and sit down in the same places of rest. And these places and sights and sounds give rise to similar ideas, ideas that we convey in similar phrases in a common tongue. * Image: another trainride The green pulse of trees, bushes, fields – rapidly scanned as they flash past the train window – infuse my thoughts and feelings. There is nothing irrelevant to consciousness, only the ebb and flow, expansion and contraction, of object and ground, attention and inattention. * Being & becoming “Being” can be thought of as consciousness-for-itself and in-itself, whereas “becoming” is consciousness projected into the world or, consciousness-of-the-world and in-the-world. While becoming is historical, set in time, being is somehow ahistorical, out of time. Being has no history. Becoming is history. * The language-train As always the language we use to try to come to grips with experience is imprecise, constricted by its own history in such a way that we can only hint at what we mean, point in a certain direction, set a process of interpretative construction in train and then stand back and watch in surprise as the train careers down unseen tracks, ending-up in destina-

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tions that were not those we intended. Language has a momentum of its own, an organic energy and complexity that is unpredictable. * Beckett’s “mess” Beckett told Tom Driver in a 1961 interview: We cannot listen to a conversation for five minutes without being acutely aware of the confusion. It is all around us and our only chance now is to let it in. The only chance of renovation is to open our eyes and see the mess. It is not a mess you can make sense of. (in Perloff 1996a: 133)

The “renovation” that Beckett may have had in mind is a process of renovating our selves, reconstituting the subject. If renovation is to happen, if we are to reconstitute ourselves, we need to open our eyes, see the mess and let in the confusion! * History & beyond: being & becoming I recently participated in a discussion about notions of “becoming” with a group of postgraduate students and research staff. Most were sympathetic to the idea of the self as process and to the experience of selfhood as a moment-by-moment experience of becoming. One participant was very resistant to the idea of not having an essential core or true self, arguing that this was the only way to account for an enduring sense of identity. Without this, he thought, none of us would have anything to “hang on to” and none of us could be held responsible for our actions. Two students, quite correctly, raised the problem of identifying something that could be used to stand outside “becoming”. In order to identify a category “becoming”, there has to be a category that is “not becoming”. It seemed to me that we could make a distinction between being and becoming, the former in some ways ahistorical (ocean), the latter historical (waves). Though both of these terms constitute a relative dualistic frame of reference, both could be seen as equally problematic or illusory in relation to the notion of what is or ‘suchness’ (tathata in Sanskrit) – that which is unframeable by language, relative concepts and dualistic thinking. (see Part 4) *

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Consciousness ebbing & flowing We perceive an object glowing with all the insistent force of its vibrant ISness, and yet it also moves with the pulse of our own perceptions, our attentiveness - the modulations of our scanning senses. Consciousness expands and shrinks according to changes of habitat and place, ambient conditions, our will and body-states. We open and close, embrace and resist, accept and deny – moment-by-moment, day-by-day. As poets and mythweavers we aspire to an openness of consciousness, to an expansive field of sensing, imaging, associating and connecting. As statisticians, bureaucrats and followers of others we constrict the field in order to control, manage, reify and neutralise the otherness of the world and its beings. Edelman and Tononi (2000: 22) acknowledge the changing scope or breadth of consciousness: “When we let sensory input freely take possession of our conscious states, paying no attention to this or that in particular, consciousness is as receptive and broad as it is natural and effortless”. This observation by two neuro-scientists coincides with the ideas and practices of Buddhists involved in zazen meditation, as well as many other schools of religious thought and the experiences of mystics the world over. The exercise of disciplined undifferentiated attentiveness is something that underpins many forms of meditation and prayer, and many kinds of drawing practice within the visual arts. Attending to the visual/spatial field of consciousness as accurately and directly as possible - trying to see around perceptual habits and assumptions in order to gain a clearer, less encumbered view of the world – is an aspiration of many students of observational drawing in those art schools where such practices are still part of the curriculum. This kind of disciplined attentiveness is fundamentally philosophical. It involves a phenomenological analysis of the dynamics of perception and of representation. In my own practice of this approach to drawing I have noticed how my visual acuity develops alongside a calm and disinterested engagement with the world. The desire for analytical exactitude in relation to the visual field seeps out into a more critically reflective attention to ideas, statements and behaviours – in myself

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and others. There is an obvious connection here between this kind of drawing practice, philosophical analysis and forms of meditation developed in many religious traditions. One can spend a lifetime analysing and refining one or another facet of one’s conscious experience [including] the attainment of blessed states of pure, unencumbered perception. (ibid: 22)

Although Edelman and Tononi make this statement, they seem unsure about whether such “blessed states” are possible. “It is nearly impossible for us as humans to revert to or even contemplate a state of consciousness that is completely free of the self”. (ibid: 24) But “nearly impossible” is a suitably cautious position to take, recognising that in some individuals, who have undergone lengthy training or who have a particular and, probably very rare, aptitude, it may be possible. * Against reductivism I take down from the shelf John Cage’s book of conversations, For the Birds. I open it at random and this is what I read: The function of art at the present time is to preserve us from all the logical minimizations that we are at each instant tempted to apply to the flux of events. To draw us nearer to the process which is the world we live in. (Cage 1981: 80-81)

* Consciousness, self & fluid systems In relation to consciousness, to being and becoming, it is useful to take a systems view. From a systems perspective we can see that an excitement or activation of a part is an excitement or activation of the whole – the “whole” in this case being both infinite and indeterminate, for there are no boundaries to consciousness in an absolute sense, only the changing, fluctuating margins or periphery, where awareness or thought dissipates into the otherness of the world or beings. This is chaos or complexity theory, the “butterfly effect” translated into the realm of human consciousness. We see something that delights or puzzles the eye, and the bodymind is delighted or puzzled. We hear sounds that intrigue or disturb us and our whole being becomes intrigued and disturbed. There is no confinement, only mutuality

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between interdependent neurological systems. The sensory, mental and imaginative spheres of consciousness are dynamically interactive. This why when we come out of a particularly stimulating concert, everything we see and hear and think hums with a revitalised energy and freshness – the darkness vibrates, the silence murmurs with potential. It is also why when we are in love, (the ultimate systemic excitement), the whole world seems different. Our states of consciousness are a function of our participation in, and interrelatedness with, the world, through our sensory and cognitive systems. As self-conscious human animals we exist in a state of perpetual becoming. Our perceptual and symbolic memory gives us a sense of a past and our cognitive volition gives us a sense of a future, and our present being is framed within these temporal possibilities or horizons. We have a sense of becoming, of moving in time towards another state, of changing and being in process. This often gives rise to a sense of being in transition, of being in-between, on our way to another state. This can be both pleasurable and productive and, at times, lead to dissatisfaction and a sense of incompleteness. Disciplines that refocus attention on the here-and-now provide an important antidote to the negative effects of our sense of temporality, paradoxically they re-ground our experience of becoming in a profound sense of apparently timeless being. William James coined the phrase “stream of consciousness” and it still has viability as a description of the field of becoming. It points to a sense of change, to a movement through time and a sense of continuity. Despite the flow of events and experiences, James points out, “we retain a sense that the self remains the same while our existence continues”. (in Lodge 2002: 14-15) David Lodge (2002: 14) suggests that, “recent scientific work on consciousness has stressed its essentially narrative character”. The idea of the self as a quasi-literary fiction has taken root in many areas of philosophy, psychology, cultural theory and semiotics. One interesting paradox in this account of selfhood is the obvious fact that the self is both a narrative construction and somehow the author of, or authorial voice within, that narrative. We are simultaneously the unfolding story, the story-maker and the primary storyteller.

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Yet the story also has a momentum of its own. We are born, we find ourselves here without intending to be, we undergo many experiences that seem not to be of our making and eventually we die. At times we feel ourselves to be agents of our particular self-narrative, while at other times, we feel as if we are being written by events, circumstances and other “external” factors or forces. Ideas of destiny, karma, fate and “God’s work” have been used to make sense of these seemingly uncontrollable elements within our self-narratives. The stream of consciousness encounters rocks, changes of gradient and direction, and feeder tributaries that determine, to some extent, the character and quality of the flow. The story we are is formed by the interaction between self and circumstance, organism and environment, stream and valley. Our story is as much dialogue as it is monologue. We are narratives of interaction, mutuality and reciprocity, as well as narratives of volition, independence and individuality. Lodge (2002: 31) identifies another interesting characteristic of the sense of self-as-narrative, that is the gaps, discontinuities or unknowns that occur within the stream of consciousness. He suggests that consciousness is “a narrative full of lacunae. We are conscious of existing in time, moving from a past that we recall very patchily, and into a future that is unknown and unknowable”. While memory is the material or medium of our self-narrative, the forgotten and the unknown give shape and outline to our story. We are as much the product of what we have forgotten and do not know, as we are of what we remember and know. In a sense each of us is a hole or gap in everything we are not. The image of each of us suspended in, and supported by, a “cloud of unknowing” is both powerfully poetic and analogically accurate. This via negativa or negative theology of consciousness provides a counter-tradition to the strand of beliefs and ideas which tend to assert the individualistic autonomous character of the self, identity and personhood. (I explore this and other aspects of mysticism in Part 9)

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* Unlearning, unknowing and letting go What is it to know? Are learning and knowing synonymous? Is to learn to know, or is it to be with not-knowing - to be dynamically resigned to uncertainty and to an open-ended series of speculations? Unlearning is an important process within art education - a disciplined letting-go of habits of thought and practice. Unlearning, unknowing, letting go and wordlessness can be seen as modes of being and doing (or undoing) that contrast with, though dynamically related to, rational, acquisitive, worded and cognitive modes. Learning and unlearning involve destabilisation, transformation, change - processes of dissolving opacity, undoing knots - but only to move to the next knot, the next eddy in the flow. All we can do is exchange one conundrum for another in a process that is more akin to free association than logical progression or problem-solving. * Image: We are thinking bones – muscles of imagination in a field of light.

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* Consciousness and the “phenomenal body” In Part 2, I discussed ideas about the “knowing body” and I’d like to return to this theme from a slightly different perspective. In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty (2002: 66) provides a working definition of his form of phenomology: “to rediscover phenomena, the layer of living experience through which others and things are first given to us”. His revised phenomenological perspective is based on the centrality of the body as the subject of perception. The term Merleau-Ponty uses for the embodied subject is “the phenomenal body”. (in Craig 1998: 322) In his view body and mind cannot be separated. He argues that “all consciousness is, in some measure, perceptual”, in that it draws upon our habitual sub-personal experience of the world. (ibid: 323) Merleau-Ponty extends his philosophy of embodiment to include language, which he describes as a form of “anonymous corporality” (ibid) – a kind of second body – enabling us to project our ideas and perceptions beyond our selves and to share our lives with others. In his book, Critical Aesthetics & Postmodernism, Paul Crowther (1993) provides an excellent analysis of Merleau-Ponty’s ideas, from which the following comments are drawn. According to Crowther, Merleau-ponty believes that, “our fundamental knowledge of the world comes through our body’s exploration of it. Consciousness is not a purely mental phenomenon, but a function of the integrated operation of all the senses”. And perception doesn’t deal in “pure sense data, but nodes of ‘meaning’ which emerge as a foreground […] against the background depth of the whole perceptual field”. (Crowther 1993: 41) Perception is thus “an encounter with ‘meanings’”. “Things impress themselves upon the body […as…] intersensory presences or ‘emblems’ of a certain style of being”, (Crowther 1993: 41-42) or as Merleau-Ponty (1964: 50) puts it: “I perceive in a total way with my whole being: I grasp a unique structure of the thing, a unique way of being, which speaks to all my senses at once”. As Crowther (1993: 42) puts it: “Our knowledge of the world is thus founded upon the body’s relating and habituating itself to things. Such encounters will leave behind them not so much mental ‘pictures’ or memory-images as ‘carnal formulae’”, structures made from all the sensations and experiences of the subject.

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The acquisition of language, of course, facilitates this sedimentation and enables “carnal formulae” to be projected in thought or imagination even when the things or situations that originally gave rise to them are not present. (ibid)

And the visual/spatial arts constitute other, particularly effective, ways of projecting “carnal formulae”. Crowther (1993: 42) argues that in Merleau-Ponty’s thinking, “perception is creative, the body does not find meaning pre-existent in the world, but calls such meaning into existence through its own activity” – our handling of the world. And this activity is, “for the most part, pre-reflective; the body operates amongst, and upon, things, persons, and situations without being explicitly and directly aware that it is doing so”. A lot of the neurological activity happening within our bodies doesn’t surface as part of our conscious awareness. At any one moment we are unaware of much of what is going on in our brain and nervous system. Merleau-Ponty argues that our fundamental modes of being, knowing (and doing) are pre-linguistic, or non-linguistic. The body knows, makes meaning, before the intervention of language, and conceptualisation. Meaning comes before language. According to Paul Crowther, in Merleau-Ponty’s thinking about art, we find that the artwork is defined and given its rich meaning by virtue of occupying a unique half-way position between perception and reflection. Unlike ordinary language and abstract thought, it has a sensuous immediacy that comes close to that of our fundamental perceptual contact with the world. Unlike perception itself, however, it preserves and articulates the most crucial “invisible” scaffolding of the situation it is expressing” [the “carnal formulae” referred to above]. (Crowther 1993: 51-52)

At the centre of Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetics (which was never developed as a comprehensive theory – he died ‘mid-career’ in 1961 at the age of 53) lies his view that art is an organic, seamless development of the processes of perception. Art is one of the ways we handle the world – a very special kind of handling (he argues) – but nevertheless one of the ways in which our body inhabits and explores and articu-

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lates the world. The artist’s handling of a medium (the material of his or her art) is but an extension of our perceptual handling of the world. As such, it is, like other modes of perception, an agent and negotiator of meaning. It is probably because he brought the body to the foreground of his philosophical thinking that he wrote with such immediacy and sensitivity about the visual and spatial arts. Merleau-Ponty argues that we are active participants in the world and of the world, not passive observers, outside, removed or separate from the world (which is the position taken by much of Western philosophy since Plato). And as embodied subjects exploring and “handling” the world, we each can have only a particular perspective or view of the world at any one time. This means that truth and experience and knowledge are always contingent. We can never have an allencompassing view. Our view will always be incomplete, and therefore we can never be certain about the truth of our view, only of a degree of probability and ambiguity ingrained in our perceptions. There can be no absolute, final truth or knowledge or experience of anything. This is a form of “perspectivism” – with profound social and cultural implications. (see Part 10) Merleau-Ponty takes this idea further in considering artworks. He suggests that the artistic construct or artefact, is not just a product of a particular mode of representation or interpretation. It is rather a site of endless processes of representation, interpretation and signification – processes that are enacted every time someone engages with the work. So there is a constant interplay between modes and moments of interpretation. The work occupies, or is, a zone of interpretation, and interpretation is a complex activity involving: perception, engagement, recognition, response, critical awareness and re-presentation. Merleau-Ponty stresses the social nature of these processes. The zone of interpretation of the artwork is energised by “embodied subjects” who meet and interact, exchanging signs, meanings and messages. The artefact is both a product of embodiment and a social construct – a product of the mutuality of perception and experience. As Gary Brent Madison (1981: 169) points out, Merleau-Ponty believes in the indivisibility of the subject and the world, they “constitute one single system and are correlates of each other. The world is the field of existence, and existence is being in the world, a project of the world”.

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(There are some similarities between this view and that of Spinoza, and ideas about the mutuality of existence discussed in Part 4) * Image: many-mind & no-mind He thought he knew who he was, but he was wrong. Whenever he thought deeply, tried to get as far as he could into his mind, he found there was no one there, or there were many there, a choir of voices, singing different songs but in some kind of loose harmony – as if they knew each other very well, most of them having sung together for most of their lives. But a new voice was added every now and again, going back to the early days when everything was new and the songs were only just beginning. Sometimes this is how it seemed as he felt inwardly and thought deeply. But on many occasions the voices grew quieter and a vibrant silence was experienced. There was no one at home, yet he felt at home. There was no song, no choir and no solitary singer. Yet he felt more intensely alive, more awake and aware than at other times, and more assured of being there, existing in a fullness that seemed to be overflowing with possibility and an emptiness that seemed to be all there could ever be. * Plot or no plot? Writing about the work of B.S. Johnson, Jonathan Coe (2004) argues that Johnson had no time for “plot” because, in Johnson’s words, Life does not tell stories. Life is chaotic, fluid, random; it leaves myriads of ends untied, untidily. Writers can extract a story from life only by strict, close selection, and this must mean falsification. Telling stories really is telling lies.

Of course, Johnson is talking about plotted stories, stories with predetermined structures, stories that do not include Beckett’s “mess”. As I see it life is full of stories but they are indeterminate in structure, content and meaning. They are intricately interwoven threads in a complex multi-dimensional fabric. Each life has no plot or predetermined structure and life-stories are improvised in relation to encoun-

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ters with other life-stories and through participation in the changing ecologies of environment and culture. * Becoming – tomorrow draws us on – spiked on time’s sharp arrow David Cooper (1999: 3), in his critique and re-interpretation of existentialism, Existentialism: A Reconstruction, writes: First of all, human existence is said to have a concern for itself. As Kierkegaard puts it, the individual not only exists but is ‘infinitely interested in existing’. He is able to reflect on his own experience, take a stance towards it, and mould it in accordance with the fruits of his reflection. Or, as Heidegger would say, humans are such that their being is in question for them. Second to quote Kierkegaard again, “an existing individual is constantly in the process of becoming” [so we always have to consider human beings in relation to] the projects and intentions which [they/we are] on the way to realising […] As Heidegger puts it, the human being is always “ahead of himself”, always unterwegs (“on the way”).

Or, according to Ortega y Gasset, a person’s existence, “consists not in what it is already, but in what it is not yet […] Existence […] is the process of realising […] the aspiration we are”. (in Cooper 1999: 3) This emphasis on the projective, intentional dimension of becoming belies the popular view of existentialism as being entirely concerned with the “now”, the moment, the eternal present. The future always beckons, drawing us forward on the journey of life. Becoming in this sense is also anticipation, expectation, a looking forward – whether with hope or dread. Beckett’s, Waiting for Godot, (1965) dramatises the tension between the present and the future, portraying Vladimir, Estragon, Pozzo and Lucky as characters whose sense of the interminable present is skewered on the arrow of time, sharpened and barbed with dreadful optimism and hope. Godot is tomorrow, the next day, the next moment, the treadmill of becoming. Beckett’s gloomy humour is one response to this situation. Pozzo: “Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time! It’s abominable!” (1965: 89) And the final lines: Vladimir: “Well? Shall we go? Estragon: Yes, let’s go”. Followed by the stage direction: “They do not move”. (ibid: 94) The curious conjunction of happenstance events on the remorseless

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escalator of life, generates an absurd logic that gives Waiting for Godot its unique bite and power. The next moment, tomorrow, going on and on, and the hopeful despondency they induce, continually draw the protagonists away from the present moment, which seems always humdrum, mundane and a waste of time precisely because the future has them in its grip. * Helen Chadwick’s, Ego Geometria Sum In Ego Geometria Sum (1982-84) the British artist, Helen Chadwick constructed ten objects out of plywood, each with photo-emulsion images on the visible surfaces. Displayed on the walls of the gallery were a companion series of photographs of Chadwick herself interacting with the objects (carrying, holding, lifting, turning). Chadwick writes (1989: 9): Suppose one’s body could be traced back through a succession of geometric solids, as rare and pure as crystalline structures, taking form from the pressure of recalled external forces… the incubator, laundry-box, font, pram, boat, shoe, wigwam, bed, piano, desk, horse, temple, high school, door… and if geometry is an expression of eternal and exact truths, inherent in the natural law of matter and thus manifestations of an absolute beauty, predestined, of divine origin… then let this model of mathematical harmony be infused with a poetry of feeling and memory to sublimate the discord of past passion and desire in a recomposed neutrality of being.

Chadwick’s text and Ego Geometria Sum itself, make references to psychology, personal history, memory and feeling, counter-balanced by ideas of mathematical order, geometry and absolute beauty. Chadwick seems to be seeking a resolution of what are often seen as opposing or mutually exclusive qualities (eg. feeling & mathematics), a bringing together of rationality and intuition, impersonal geometry and personal memory, “in a recomposed neutrality of being”. This is not the hyper-subjectivist discourse of romanticism or expressionism, nor the modernist formalism promoted by critics like Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried. Chadwick stands to one side of the symbolic order she is employing. She takes a quasi-scientific or “objective” stance toward her memories and subjective experiences, juxtaposes these against the abstract forms of geometric solids in a way that encourages us to question how

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identity, desire and feeling are ordered and reconstituted through “the fiction of remembering”. Alongside these concerns with autobiography and socialisation (notice how the images/objects reflect particular social moments or points of change - incubator, font, pram, etc.) Chadwick also plays with some of the uneasy relationships between the traditions of flat-surface imagery (photography) and sculptural objecthood - traditions and disciplines which tend to be treated separately within modernism. Photography and sculpture, image and object, are deliberately integrated into a new kind of “narrative of material objects, equivalents for selfhood, within a bounded safe place [where the] minutiae of personal history are collapsed into an idealised universe. (Chadwick 1989: 11) Thirty years are reduced to ten geometric solids, exactly determined by what took place at a particular point in time. These “accidents of matter” constitute the past, the collisions between my body as a growing child and a succession of everyday cultural objects… These fugitive traces offer evidence of the passage of time, the effects and constraining influence of socialisation […] The abstract geometry embodies the principles of permanence. (Chadwick 1989: 11)

In emphasising the body, socialisation, fertility and what she calls “our inherent bisexuality” (ibid) Chadwick is representative of a shift from the masculine, patriarchal, not-to-say macho world of subjectivist modernism to a postmodern culture that, at its best, is more sensitive to questions of gender, sexual identity and feminist thinking. Chadwick doesn’t accept the “subject” as a given. She questions the idea of an essential self as the source of authenticity and “selfexpression”. Instead she gives us a series of material embodiments of the process of self-construction. Our subjectivity is the product of our interactions with the world, our being-in the-world and our interactions with others. Our subjectivity, identity and sense of self, are social, cultural and personal. They are as much public as private. In Chadwick’s work the subject and the self are considered as fields of possibility, they are “open” in the same sense that Ego Geometria Sum can be considered as an exemplification of Eco’s idea of the open work.

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* Perception, artwork & self – incompleteness & open-endedness Heidegger’s concept of “Dasein”, Barthes’ notion of the “writerly” text and Eco’s idea of the “open” work, suggest useful ways in which we can relate ideas about perception and our being in the world, to ways of thinking about artworks and ourselves as “open” works. These ideas also relate to Merleau-Ponty’s thinking about perception, the artwork and the self. In Merleau-Ponty’s work, as in the writings of Heidegger, Barthes and Eco, there is an acknowledgement, indeed a celebration, of incompleteness and open-endedness. Perceptual activity is always in a process of revision and reformulation. We modify our perception of something as we move around, scan, pick it up, taste it, smell it, listen to what it does if we shake it or bang it against something else. We gain experience of it and become familiar with its qualities, which are also qualities of our interactions with it. The reciprocity of perception is fundamental to our experience of the world. There is no end to the possibility of enhancing our experience, we are only limited by the extent and depth of our attentiveness. Likewise with the artwork – there is no end to our perception of it or to the stories we can weave about it. Our interpretations are revised, reformed and sometimes wholly transformed by further encounters with it. This open-endedness of possibility is always present, in some way, in our transactions with artworks. Conditions can affect this state of possibility. For instance, in a physical sense we may be unable to touch the surface of an art object or we may only be able to experience an object or a performance through reproduction. On the other hand we may read or be told something about an artist or an artwork that predisposes us to view them or it, or think about them or it, in a certain way. The artwork itself may be presented to us in a way that encourages or discourages a variety of possible responses. A lack or surfeit of supplementary information may leave us feeling either without a starting-point or point of access (though what we perceive is always a starting-point) or we may be overwhelmed by too much supplementary information or by information that is too dictatorial or definitive. These physical modes of contact (or distancing), our previous knowledge and experience, and our emotional and intellectual states, all frame and effect our ability to engage with an artwork. The openness of the relationship between artworks and our selves

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fluctuates with time, circumstance and the rhythms of attentiveness and mindedness that we bring to each encounter. In relation to the self we can see how incompleteness, instability and openness also apply. The self as process, rather than as object, is in continuous construction. We weave and compose as we are woven and composed. There is no end to self-construction except in death, and even then we might consider the finite ego-self as being dissolved into, or reformed as, another kind of construction which is the network of objects and stories we have made in the world and the memories and stories associated with us that are made in the minds of others. In this sense our artefacts and stories, our bodymind, are continued, revised and absorbed into the collective stories of a culture, into the unfolding communal mind. ***

Part 7 Mind, the real & the other Robin Blaser speaks of “the unrecognised disaster of a world devoured into the human [form]”. (in Nichols 2002: 30) “It is this deep blankness is the real thing strange. […] The contradictions cover such a range”. (from the poem: Let it go, in Empson 2001: 99) “Far away the writhing city Burns in a fire of transcendence And commodities. The bowels Of men are wrung between the poles Of meaningless antithesis. The holiness of the real Is always there, accessible In total immanence”. (Kenneth Rexroth 2003: 545)

In this section I discuss ideas and experiences of the “real” and the “other” in relation to the arts and human consciousness. Is it useful, significant or valid to speculate about, believe in and experience an “outside”, a realm that exists indifferent to the ways, perceptions and constructions of human beings? If it is, how can we re-establish and affirm the importance of this realm as a counter-balance, frame of reference and measure for our human domain? And how can we develop modes of articulation, rhetoric, discourse and action that take account of a reality that is both a flux-field of energy and light, a realisation of mind and a concatenation of matter? How do we resolve the apparently opposing ideas of constructivism and realism, anthropocentrism and ecology, the abstract/ideal and the actual?

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We live in a culture in which social-constructionism dominates critical thinking about science, the arts and philosophy – this is a positive development in that we recognise, and take responsibility for, the arts, philosophy and science as contingent, relative and endlessly revisable human constructions. The pursuit of, or belief in, “the truth”, or a knowledge that is absolute and unconditional, is widely seen as problematic or even dangerous – despite the flowering of forms of fundamentalism that are premised on a belief in absolutism and one truth (however different and contradictory these absolute truths may be). However there are also dangers in pushing constructivist ideas and beliefs too far, such that the universe is considered as residing within, or constructed by, human mental and linguistic activity, and that there is nothing other than this realm of human discourse. It is important to acknowledge at the outset that there are many kinds of otherness, including, nature, a transcendent reality or order, nothingness, the gods, God, other human beings, other beings, other races, another gender, the unconscious, death, even, in Nausea, Sartre’s study of alienation, the otherness of one’s own body. In the following notes I’m going to consider particular ideas of otherness in relation to nature and indeterminacy, and to set these alongside ideas of ‘the real’ as articulated and enacted in the work of various poets and artists. Although mysticism is often portrayed as an encounter with otherness – the otherness of God, the divine, a transcendent reality – it is also recognised that the mystic encounters the oneness of everything, the mutuality of existence, the indivisibility of all that is. In the latter case there is no other - otherness is an illusion or delusion arising out of misguided belief or limited understanding or a distorted view of how things are. (Aspects of mysticism are discussed in more detail in Part 9) * Nothingness as Other In his remarks on nothingness as a concept within Pascal’s thinking and within existentialist philosophy, Barrett (1990:116) argues that “the idea of Nothingness or Nothing had up to this time [Pascal’s

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time] played no role at all in Western philosophy”. This is a very bold statement, excluding as it does an important strand of Christian theology (which Barrett may not consider as philosophy), that is the apophatic tradition or the via negativa – both of which are discussed in Part 9 of this book. Setting aside this omission Barrett does point to the tendency, particularly in the tradition of Scholastic philosophy, to consider the Nothing, nihil, “as a purely conceptual entity, an empty abstraction that lay at the farthest reaches of thought”. (ibid: 117) Barrett goes on to argue that it is with Pascal that Nothingness (Barrett employs the upper case) becomes an experiential reality. Pascal encounters the contingency of his being, a state or condition which is rendered meaningful and profound in relation to the awareness that we are always on the edge of “non-being”. This realisation hit Pascal (pardon the pun) when he was almost flung through the open door of his carriage as it swerved on a road by the Seine. The possibility of instant annihilation haunted Pascal for the rest of his life. The contingency of being born here and now, and at the same time the possibility of ceasing to exist at any moment, are the primary conditions that all human beings have to face. Barrett argues that Pascal is anticipating a central concern of later existentialists like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Heidegger. For Pascal, Nothingness is the ultimate other - that which stands outside, beyond, or contrary to, a person’s life – as such it is also that which defines or delimits our existence. While Pascal thinks of Nothingness, as nihil, the ultimate negative that defines being as the positive, Barrett argues that for Heidegger, Nothingness “is a presence within our own Being”. (ibid: 226) It is not outside of Being (again Barrett uses the upper case) but an integral part of human Being. The difference between Pascal and Heidegger can be explained by a profound shift in the conception of Being as articulated by the two thinkers. According to Barrett, Heidegger conceives of Being as a field that is not co-extensive with a particular human body: My Being is not something that takes place inside my skin (or inside an immaterial substance inside that skin); my Being, rather, is spread over a field or region which is the world of its care and concern. (ibid: 217)

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Heidegger calls this field of Being, Dasein – which can literally be translated from the German as ‘being-there’. In Heidegger’s view Dasein is without essence, it is indeterminate, a field of possibilities, some of which can be actualised by an individual in the course of his or her life. To find ourselves thrown into Dasein, aware of the contingency and indeterminacy of our existence, is also to be aware of the ever-present possibility of Nothingness within ‘being-there’. As Hamlet puts it, “to be, or not to be, that is the question” – both options are integral to Heidegger’s idea of Dasein. He also considers Dasein to be a clearing or opening in which entities become present, or, as Zimmerman puts it, “the openness in which presencing transpires”. (1993: 244) Death, non-being, is one of the possibilities open to me at any time. According to Zimmerman (ibid: 242-243) the clearing or opening which characterises human being is itself a kind of absence or nothingness, a space in which “things can present themselves and thus ‘be’”. Heidegger argues that the space of Dasein is also a social space, ‘being-there’ is also ‘being-with’, we are together in Dasein – overlapping, as it were, in our fields of “care and concern”. Hence, in contrast to Pascal, Nothingness, or “absence” as he sometimes refers to it, is not for Heidegger a manifestation of otherness, rather it is a part of Dasein, our ‘being-there’. Connections can be made between Heidegger’s Dasein as openness or clearing, ideas derived from Merleau-Ponty about the artwork as a zone of interpretation, (see Part 6) and Umberto Eco’s idea of the “open work” (a term I’ve used elsewhere in this book, in the extended sense of the self as open work – see Part 6). In each case reference is being made to the artwork, to ‘being-there’ and to the self as a nexus of possibilities, a dynamic space within which potential is actualised or not, interpretations are formed and re-formed, actions are modified and reframed, stories and images are revisioned, and beliefs and values are endlessly revised. There is also a connection to the idea of the contrarium (see Parts 7 and 10) as a locus of contradictions, paradoxes and unresolvable polarities – a field of liminal experience, of becoming, of betweenness, in which irreconciliable oppositions are recognised and handled as manifestations of the indeterminacy and mutuality of existence.

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It is important to note that nothingness as used above is not a synonym for sunyata, ‘emptiness’, as used in Part 4 of this book. * In his poem, Thing Language, Jack Spicer brings together an image of the indifference of the ocean, to which no one attends, and the field of poetry, an ocean ‘of white and aimless signals’, to which no one listens. This ocean, humiliating in its disguises Tougher than anything. No one listens to poetry. The ocean Does not mean to be listened to. A drop Or crash of water. It means Nothing. … …Aimlessly It pounds the shore. White and aimless signals. No One listens to poetry. (in Blaser 1996: 217)

* Can nature, in its indeterminacy, be considered as the ultimately indefinable Other? In The Song of the Earth (2001), Jonathan Bate discusses the idea of nature as other. He refers to Adorno’s recognition that “even to talk about the beauty of nature is to violate what he called the ‘non-identity of nature as the epitome of the non-human’”. (151) Bate cites Adorno’s remark, in Aesthetic Theory, that: As an indeterminate something, natural beauty is hostile to all definition… As Valery remarked, “the beautiful may require the slavish imitation of the indeterminable quality of things.” (ibid)

Bate returns a number of times to the question as to why the “otherness of nature” isn’t more central to discussions about the “other” in cultural theory and literary criticism in particular. He asks, “why the recovery of the repressed ‘Others’ of woman and black in cultural criticism since the 1960’s has not generally been accompanied by a recovery of ‘nature’, the original Other”. (ibid: 35) While not really answering this question he does highlight the way in which the terms “woman” and “black” have been linked to “nature”:

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Hence the common association of “woman” and “black” with closeness to nature, with instinct and biology, of “man” and “European” with rationality and with transcendence of nature. (ibid)

Bate goes on to analyse these familiar stereotypes as they arise in the work of Rousseau, the Romantics, Shakespeare, and more recent authors including Aime Cesaire and Edward Kamau Brathwaite. He considers the figure of Caliban as emblematic of many of the issues surrounding the use of a colonising language (English and other European tongues) by the colonised. Caliban has to “write back” in the language “bequeathed to him by Prospero” (ibid: 82) – a language that Caliban and all peoples who occupy what Wah calls a “hyphenated position” (see below) have to reconfigure, destabilise and hybridise in order to be able to speak. In order to avoid the assimilative tendency in language - the way in which a colonising language suffocates dissenting voices - a process of defamiliarisation has to take place, a reclamation of meanings, rhythms, metaphors, diction and vocabulary such that the otherness of the colonised speaker/writer is retained and projected into the dominant discourse. Of course, an obvious problem with any notion of otherness, including nature as other, is that we are in danger of perpetuating a potentially misleading binary opposition, affirming both a sense of either/or and a sense of separation between humankind and nature – a dichotomy that does not fit with the idea or experience of humanity as one dimension of a polymorphous nature – an integral part of the natural world. This ambivalence in our attitude to who we are and where we are can only be resolved by recognising that we are both a part of, and separate from, nature – depending how we use the term “nature”. Heidegger (from The Question Concerning Technology) sums up the situation regarding one aspect of otherness very succinctly: Man […] exalts himself and postures as lord of the earth. In this way the illusion comes to prevail that everything man encounters exists only insofar as it is his construct. This illusion gives rise in turn to one final illusion: it seems as though man everywhere and always encounters only himself. Nature is the Other, the Outside, that stands as a reminder that this is an illusion, the hubris of a humanity that forgets wherein it dwells, on what ground

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it stands, what air it breathes, what other beings co-inhabit its spaces. (in Bate 2001: 68)

It is one thing to think or feel we are a part of everything, it is quite another to think we are everything! Bate uses Heidegger’s point to support one of the main arguments in his book, namely that the: Land, the ocean, the polluted air, the endangered species – cannot […] speak for themselves. The ecocritic [and, presumably, the ecopoet] has no choice but to speak on behalf of the Other. The ecocritical project always involves speaking for its subject rather that speaking as its subject: a critic may speak as a woman or as a person of colour, but cannot speak as a tree. (ibid: 72)

Speaking for other species and the biosphere as a whole is indeed an important role of the human in the current state of environmental uncertainty, something that has to be done with care and respect for the otherness of these subjects. However, in relation to Bate’s latter point, there is a danger here that for a white male even speaking as a woman or as a “person of colour” could be seen an act of suppression, alienation or simply arrogant presumption – a neutralising or token assimilation of the voice of the female or ethnic other. * Elsewhere in Song of the Earth, Bate refers to Adorno’s remarks about nature as the indeterminable, and ultimately indefinable, other. He suggests that “Adorno recognised that even to talk about the beauty of nature is to violate what he called the ‘non-identity’ of nature as the epitome of the non-human”. (Bate 2001: 151) Bate seems to agree with Adorno that the poet faces a daunting task in trying to come to terms with the indeterminate “silence” of nature. How can we describe, evoke, picture or speak what is indescribable and indefinable? Yet this is what artists and poets attempt to do using all manner of subversive and destabilising strategies. Bate quotes from Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory: As an indeterminate something, natural beauty is hostile to all definition […] As Valery remarked, “the beautiful may require the slavish imitation of the indeterminable quality of things”. (ibid)

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We can see here a connection, perhaps somewhat surprising, between Adorno, Valery and the ideas and practices of John Cage, for Cage (1966: 194) also uses indeterminacy as a compositional method with which “to imitate nature in her manner of operation”. We might also add that while Adorno applies his remarks on indeterminacy specifically to nature, indeterminacy is a characteristic of all things, as I’ve been arguing throughout this book. * Bate’s idea that the poet has to find a way of speaking for the other-asnature, while being intrinsically problematic, can be supported by examples within the writing of poets as diverse as Thomas Hardy, Wordsworth, Annie Dillard, Kenneth Rexroth and R.S. Thomas. Mary Oliver, in her poem, Sleeping in the Forest, adds her own quiet voice to this congregation: …I slept as never before, a stone on the riverbed, nothing between me and the white fire of the stars but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths among the branches of the perfect trees. All night I heard the small kingdoms breathing around me, the insects, and the birds who do their work in the darkness… (Oliver 1979: 3)

In this kind of writing a balance has to be struck between anthropocentric personalisation and empathic imagining. The danger is always that nature becomes too domesticated, too soft and furry, and that we lose sight of the indescribable otherness that inhabits the described. R.S.Thomas sums this up in the doubled image of a barn owl as “soft / feathers camouflaging a machine” - a machine that “repeats itself year / after year”. (Thomas 2001: 319) In a similar vein Rexroth reminds us of the indifference of stones, the remote otherness of the geosphere, “the cold and cruel apathy of mountains”. (Rexroth 2003: 161)

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* R.S. Thomas The Welsh poet R.S.Thomas spent a lifetime making poems out of his experiences as a priest ministering to his rural congregation. Births, deaths and hard-working lives are recorded, celebrated and analysed in a terse yet passionate speech that situates these passing lives within the ancient topography of the Welsh hills, and against the timeless silence of a God who often seems as remote and obdurate as a rock face. Many of Thomas’s poems seem to rise out of a knot of conflicting forces. The poet’s relationship with God is at times a “combat” in which Thomas’s own beliefs and values seem to be tested to breaking point. In a poem entitled, The Combat, Thomas (2001: 291) writes, “We have wrestled with you all / day, and now night approaches, / the darkness from which we emerged / seeking”. And when the seekers emerge they find that God seems to be absent: “And anonymous / you withdraw, leaving us nursing / our bruises, our dislocations”. The latter phrase could be taken as a precise description of the poetpriest’s role – to nurse the bruises and dislocations of his people. Thomas rails against “the failure of language” to name, describe or comprehend God, and against the inability of science or any human endeavour to tell us “who you are’. God is the ultimate Other, an unfathomable presence, which is often an absence, that beckons us while at the same time “belabouring us with your silence”. At the end of their lives the people, and, we imagine, Thomas himself, “die / with the knowledge that your resistance / is endless at the frontier of the great poem”. Somewhere in the interstices of Thomas’s drystone sentences, in the pauses between lines and in the shadows between images, is the presence and absence of another Being. The poet pits his craft and his theological guile against the resistance of this divine Other, that is always retreating into darkness or light whenever the words seem about to frame its silhouette against the page. Thomas spends a lifetime trying to get at this presence, a presence that is also an absence, chipping away at the infinite resistance with his urgent syllables and his poetics of stone, hard labour, resignation and unexpected grace. Thomas enacts a surgery of the soul which few poets have attempted, tracing innumerable defeats and disappoint-

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ments, rare epiphanies and long nights in which he seems to have been forsaken by a harsh and unforgiving God. Thomas reminds us that there will always be a gap, almost an incompatibility, between the otherness of nature and God, and the affairs of human beings, “The poem in the rock and / the poem in the mind / are not one”. (ibid: 95) However long the poet or scientist struggles to map the universe, which is also the face of God, success will not come. The Unreachable will always recede into the darkness, an unnavigable country. Thomas offers his poems as both a fiery rebuke and a fitful supplication, somehow to draw God out of His muteness into a listening and a speaking, into a dialogue that affirms the existence of both parties: …And I would have things to say to this God at the judgement, storming at him, as Job stormed, with the eloquence of the abused heart. But there will be no judgement other than the verdict of his calculations, that abstruse geometry that proceeds eternally in the silence beyond right and wrong. (ibid: 331)

While Thomas writes within a theological framework and in a language that is deeply inscribed with Biblical images and references his thinking is also informed by contemporary developments in science, cultural criticism and philosophy. His writing is full of paradoxes and perplexities. He takes the critical stance of someone who has studied the play of ideas in history and realises that while a position may have to be taken, all positions are fallible and partial. In Thomas’s worldview the potential polarities of God and human, word and silence, faith and doubt, self and other, are seen as relativities contained within an infinite and indeterminate unknown. He is always quick to deflate exaggerated spirituality and intellectual hubris, and to recognise the consolations of art and the everyday: I engage with philosophy in the morning, with the garden in the afternoon. Evenings I fish or coming home empty-handed

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170 put on the music of Cesar Franck. It is enough […] (ibid: 325)

The “coming home empty-handed” is typical of his, at times, jaunty grimness! Thomas views art and poetry in many ways: as a tower of Babel; a struggle to bridge the unbridgeable gap between God and human, self and other; an enquiry into the absurd contradictions of life; a howl of protest at these irreconcilable polarities and unrealisable aspirations; and as a memorial to all of these. In The Gap, (ibid: 324) Thomas imagines a nightmare of God. Humans erect a “tower of speech” that grows ever higher, until “One word more and / it would be on a level / with him; vocabulary would have triumphed”. God ponders on how he could rest “on the edge of a chasm a / word could bridge”. God’s inaccessibility is threatened. But he looks in the dictionary they are using and notices that “There was the blank still by his name of the same / order as the territory / between them”. This blank space in the dictionary is reassuring to God. He realises that the “tower of speech” is a manifestation of “the verbal hunger for the thing itself”. And he knows that that “verbal hunger” will never be satisfied. There will always be a gap between the thing and the name, the world and the word, the space in the dictionary and God Himself. Thomas tells how the unbridgeable gap “is the grammarian’s / torment and the mystery / at the cell’s core, and the equation / that will not come out”. No matter how narrow the gap becomes it will always be there. The Other in all its forms will always be unreachable and indescribable, yet as an absence or a presence it will always beckon. All poets, artists, scientists and philosophers can do is to build their towers and look “over into the eternal / silence that is the repose of God”. * Nature/Other: Snyder & Rorty We can link Heidegger’s distillation of the nature/other issue to comments by Gary Snyder and to the ideas of the poet Robin Blaser. In his essay, Is Nature Real, Snyder (2000) refers to the “genuine Other, the nonhuman realm”, and claims that many Western intellectuals are “anti-nature” because they see the so-called “natural world” as a social construction, that is, a human construction. In the eyes of

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Western deconstructionists there is no sense of nature as Other or as a reality that has presence and actuality. Instead it is seen as an abstraction or as a commodity or resource that is an extension of, or projection of, the human realm (that is our own desires, imaginings and fears). Despite some similarities between social constructivism and Mahayana or Madhyamika Buddhism, Snyder argues that there are profound differences (see also Part 4 of this book). While the Western constructionist tradition tends to devalue nature, dismissing it as either a fiction or a commodity, Buddhism accepts the ontological reality of the realm we inhabit with other beings - a spatially extensive domain alive with processes and powers that are nonhuman. However, as Snyder notes, Buddhist thinkers and practitioners also recognise that our contact with, and participation in, the universe is mediated in many different ways: our seeing of the world is biological (based on the particular qualities of our species’ body-mind), psychological (reflecting subjective projections), and cultural construction. (2000: 387)

But the purpose of Buddhist practice is to enable individuals to “examine one’s own seeing, so as to see the one who sees and thus make seeing more true”. (ibid) Through meditation techniques like zazen, disciplined attention and phenomenological analysis, aligned with a carefully developed ethical code, practitioners come to see the biological, psychological and cultural structures which frame knowing and being, and the ways in which these structures are maintained by human desires, fears and attachments. To be unable to recognise these structures, and the cords of attachment that bind us to them, traps us in a vicious circle of delusion and dissatisfaction. It is only by seeing clearly these structures and attachments at work in us, becoming “enlightened” as to the actual state of things, that we can engage with the world with equanimity and freedom. Paradoxically, Western social-constructionism and deconstructivism, can be viewed as simultaneously de-materialising, reifying and idealising nature. The notion that ‘nature’, suitably apostrophised, is only a linguistic construct, a term that only has meaning in relation to other linguistic binaries (nature/culture, human/nonhuman, natural/unnatural), de-actualises nature and turns the world we inhabit into an abstraction within a discourse of abstractions and human projec-

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tions. As Snyder writes: “In the past, the idea that the external world was our own invention came out of some variety of idealist thought”. (1994: 29) One of the many positive features of recent constructionist thinking has been the recognition that all knowledge is perspectival, (see Part 10) that is, that we all look at things and ideas from different positions, and that we need to take account of these different positions when we put forward our own views and in developing understanding. But sometimes this emphasis on recognising multiple perspectives or viewpoints, as advocated by thinkers as different as Rorty, Derrida, Eco, Barthes, Dennett and Kristeva, can be accompanied by a failure to recognise that we always see and think from some position, that we are located somewhere in the scheme of things, and that we look at something from a particular position. Richard Rorty’s (1999) emphasis on science and the arts as providing “descriptions” rather than “grand-narratives” or precise explanations of the ways things are, is a welcome acknowledgement of the contingency and revisibility of human thought. But a description necessitates something to be described, and this aspect of his descriptive theory is often not mentioned or downplayed – not least by Rorty himself. “Descriptions”, “perspectives” and “positions”, within the discourses of constructionism, are often treated as if they floated in a vacuum, unrelated to the Other that stands outside human discourse – whether that Other is nature, reality, another human being, a stone, a bird, a star, a language or language itself or death, or, for that matter, the otherness of growth and decay, or the virus that afflicts us or the benign bacteria that lives in our gut. The universe exists regardless of our descriptions, an indifferent Other against, and within, which we live our lives like motes of dust in a sunbeam. To come at this from a slightly different angle I’d like to consider a few statements by Rorty – a philosopher I hold in high regard as an articulate exponent of the social constructionist position. In Philosophy and Social Hope (1999: 48) he discusses statements like: “Everything is a social construction”, and “All awareness is a linguistic affair”. He takes the former to be a characteristic slogan of the European tradition, following on from Foucault, while the latter is typical of recent American developments in philosophy. He states that both statements amount to much the same thing, namely “that we shall

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never be able to step outside of language, never be able to grasp reality unmediated by a linguistic description”. While this may be seen as a fairly innocuous statement, it does beg a few questions. For instance, what is meant by “grasp”, by “reality” and by “description”? As I’ve already suggested description implies or necessitates a something to be described. If all that can be described is another description then the idea of never being able to “grasp reality” is redundant and we are in the realms of tautology and infinite circularity. Rorty seems to recognise this point and tempers his own position as follows: Both [statements] are ways of saying that we should be suspicious of the Greek distinction between appearance and reality, and that we should try to replace it with something like the distinction between “less useful description of the world” and “more useful description of the world”. (ibid)

“The world” remains as a shadowy entity, lurking behind innumerable more or less useful human descriptions. But in deciding which descriptions are more or less useful we often have to consider which descriptions enable us to do things in the world and with the world. The relationship between “world” and “description” is as important as the relationship between one description and another. If by “to grasp” Rorty means “to describe” then his statement is self-evidently true. If by “step outside of language” he means we can never describe something except by using some kind of language, then again he is stating the obvious. Though we could add that there are many situations in which we can point to something or show something without describing it, and we have all had experiences that defy description. Not being able to describe something does not invalidate or erase an experience nor does it mean that something does not exist. Likewise the powerful argument made by pragmatists like Rorty, that we can never have complete and certain knowledge of the world, a true picture of how things are, should not lead us into assuming that there is nothing to be pictured - that we are somehow all that there is, an ever-changing array of descriptions, concepts and linguistic structures, conjuring up the world in whatever form it suits us. This is the hubris that Heidegger and Snyder bridle against, a tendency to abstract and disregard the existing universe, the ever-changing forms in which fields of energy materialise from moment to moment.

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* Occasionally in my notes I find examples of my own dissatisfaction with the reality-as-social-construction viewpoint. Here is one such example: It could be argued that the hubris of contemporary (modern and postmodern) social constructionism, an anthropocentric humanism so pervasive and enveloping that we can’t see through it or out of it (“of course, that would be impossible”, I hear constructionists saying), may well account for the rootlessness, the unpositioned transcendentalism of much current thinking, action and being. As if we exist no-where, no-place, no-time. The evaporation of a sense of other, outside, reality, in which we participate, rub up against, find ourselves located whether we like it or not, leads both to political ennui and inaction (for politics is only about words, claims and counterclaims, a set of fictions within fictions, variations of discourse that do little to change material circumstances because there are no material circumstances), and to a sense of unreality – as if we live virtual lives within a virtual insubstantial universe. Environmental awareness, concern and action slip down the agenda insofar as we convince ourselves that the environment is somehow unreal compared to the reality of human culture. The “world” becomes an abstraction rather than the spatially substantive habitat of countless beings – as Snyder (1969) puts it, our “Earth House Hold”.

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* The otherness of the object – the quest for the thing-in-itself Imagine you’re walking in a city park, following a lawn-edged path between trees and bushes. Suddenly your eyes and body are drawn to a dark cube that sits implacably on the earth. As you get closer you notice that it is only slightly taller than you and about as wide as your outstretched arms. It is square, made of a metal that is tarnished and mottled, non-reflective and unassertive. It sits there, occupying space, an index of gravity, manufacture and geometric uniformity. There is no decorative embellishment to disturb the symmetry or to relieve the smoothness of surface – although the metal has a patina that suggests time, age and the effects of weather. The object seems to resist the mind’s usual habit of inventing stories and metaphors to frame and consume what is seen. This alien ‘thing’ has weight, substance and materiality in a way that is different to our own. We feel its stillness, solidity, heaviness and cold surface against the mobility, lightness, sensitivity and warmth of our own body. In a curious way it affirms our aliveness in contrast to its own inert and obdurate otherness. For a time, in the early nineteen-sixties, a number of artists working in the USA made objects that had many of the qualities of our imagined cube. Coming into public prominence in 1966 with an exhibition entitled, Primary Structures, at the Jewish Museum, New York, a movement known as Minimalism or ABC Art, included artists who tried to strip away the subjective emotionalism of painters like Jackson Pollock, Willem De Kooning, Franz Kline and Mark Rothko, in favour of a geometric art of cool lucidity – an art centred on objects and “facts” rather than on personalities and feelings. Robert Morris, Sol LeWitt, Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Richard Serra and Tony Smith (who made a sculpture in 1962 entitled, Die – the singular form of Dice - very similar to our imagined object), were associated with these developments, and for a time were very influential within the late modernist art scene. Another artist Mel Bochner, writing about this kind of art, quoted Husserl, “go to the things themselves”, and Hume, “no object implies the existence of any other”. (in Battcock1969) The intention was to make objects that affirmed “objectness” or “objecthood”, the singularity of things in the world. Objects that gave rise to an immediacy of

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response in those who experienced it – a perceptual wholeness or gestalt that was pre-linguistic or pre-conceptual. The object (and it was sculpture rather than painting that dominated this period of avantgarde activity) asserted its uniqueness and material presence, so insistently that story-making, rationalisation, aesthetic theorising and symbolism became redundant or unimportant. The silent simplicity of the thing, stripped of its connotations and intellectual embellishments, stood as the real, the outside, the object in contrast to the subject, the other in contrast to the self. Of course we may see the quest for the thing-in-itself, as hopelessly misguided. While Kant (see Honderich 1995: 436) argued in favour of the idea of things-in-themselves (noumena), as a necessary precondition of a realm of appearances (phenomena), he also argued that we can only know things as they appear, not as they are in themselves. In Kant’s view things-in-themselves are transcendent and unknowable. The idea that the object, which for the Minimalists constituted the immediately apprehensible stuff of the world, was, for Kant, a transcendent unknowable, is one of the paradoxes that reminds us how different are the interpretations we weave about the world. * Marjorie Perloff reminds us that Wittgenstein, the architect of linguistic/analytical philosophy, acknowledges in the Tractatus that, “The world is independent of my will”. (Perloff 1996a: 134) * The “other”, “outside” and “real” in the poetics of Robin Blaser, Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan We can extend this line of thinking in another direction – leading us, perhaps paradoxically, to make connections between picturing mind, the construction of self and the voicing of the otherness of the world. The poet Robin Blaser quotes his friend and fellow poet, Jack Spicer (speaking to a group of poets in 1965) describing “poetry as coming from the outside rather than from the inside”.(1996: 273) It is a dictation of the moment. An utterance of the world, rather than an utterance of the personality (though it may be that too) - the otherness of reality speaking through the poet. What Gary Snyder in a radio

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broadcast once referred to as “the stuttering voice of revelation”. In this kind of approach to poetry and art (for we get it in the work of Twombly, some of Rauschenberg, Yannis Kounellis, Giacometti, Charles Reznikoff and in the drawings of Joseph Beuys, and in Cage’s music and prints), we encounter what Blaser refers to as a reopened language [that] lets the unknown, the Other, the outside in again as a voice in the language…The safety of a closed language is gone and its tendency to reduce thought to a reasonableness and definiteness is disturbed. (Blaser 1996: 276)

Although this might seem like a rehashing of Romantic notions of the poet’s muse speaking through the poet, it is different. In the case of Romantic inspiration – the muse is usually figured as inside the poet, and the complementarity of this other, deeper, self is articulated in another voice (female - anima) speaking from inside the (male) poet rather than, as Blaser argues, a giving voice to something outside, to the outside/nature/other. This notion of the poet giving voice to an outside is, in many ways, a return to an earlier Greek and Latin way of thinking that inspiration is divine, coming from the gods. In both the rationalistic determinism of the preformed work, (the separation of idea, concept or design from the made form, in say, the writing of a sonnet, fugue or haiku), and the irrationalistic subjectivity of expressionism in its countless forms, there is a tendency to resist the demands or even the existence of the outside, the other, the unself. The former by avoiding the existential uncertainties of an exploratory mode of composition, the latter by wrapping the personality of the artist around everything such that the other is squeezed out and any kind of outside is denied. Both are forms of enclosure keeping the unself at bay. According to Spicer, speech is between two silences […] It does not break our contact with the things, but it draws us from our state of confusion with all things in order to awaken us to the truth of their presence.

Blaser adds,

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Mind, the real & the other I wish to take it back to the composition, the ontology, the beginning of a language that is full of the world. It is within language [in this kind of poetry] that the world speaks to us with a voice that is not our own’. (Blaser 1996: 279)

Blaser argues that the poem or artwork presents an “exhibition of the world” (Heidegger’s phrase), or more precisely an unfolding of awareness, not of the individual against the world, but of the world through the individual. What Buddhist’s rather grandly call the “cosmic mind”. Artworks arise through a process of emptying, being attentive and open to all kinds of otherness. (see Blaser 1996: 279) We become the consciousness of the world rather than the consciousness of our self, though paradoxically we encounter in this way the “open or indeterminate presence, the indefinite nature of [humankind]”. (Blaser 1996: 301) Dante, (in De Monarchia, suggests that (quoted by Robert Duncan 1968: flyleaf): “The universe ‘speaks to us and in us, and we but imitate in what we call our language the real speech which surrounds us, out of which, indeed, we are born’”. He refers to: “God’s art, which is Nature”. For Duncan, the universe speaks through the poet in many voices. In The Venice Poem, he writes: “I am like an empty shell / tortured with voices. / Alone, I know not where I am. / I cry out. / My voices answer”. (1968: 83) He often refers to conversations with “companions”, dialogues with other voices in many forms and stylistic modes – a distinctive characteristic that establishes Duncan’s polyvocal identity as a poet. Speaking as a poet, Robin Blaser (1974: 38) argues against the tendency to reduce poetry to the “expression of the man, the expression of the personality [which is poetry as] invented thought, the unreal, the fictive, […] the transcendence that is not attached”. He argues for “poetry as primary thought” which has “density”, as opposed to poetry in the tradition of Pope, which is “an idea system [with] imagery, metaphor, and so on [as] adornments of those ideas”. Pope’s is an instrumentalist project, poetry as didactic vehicle.

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Blaser opposes this use of the poetic “not as operational, not as actually dense in language itself, not as literal to experience so that language itself is experience and part of the mind, part of the body” – a mode of being and coming to know. In Blaser’s view poetry and painting expose us to the real, they are indices of openness, of experience unfolding in the making - poetry as realisation. What Rilke might have meant by his phrase, “we are all bees of the invisible”. (in Blaser 1974: 41) Blaser, (1996) in The Practice of Outside, argues that “poetry is necessary to the composition or knowledge of the real”. For Spicer and Blaser poetry is “an act or event of the real, rather than a discourse” about the real. (Blaser 1996: 271) Blaser describes how Spicer sought to lose the “I” and “to gain what he variously called a dictation, the unknown, an outside” – in other words to find a voice for, and in relation to, the unself or other. (ibid: 272) Blaser’s ideas bring to mind Charles Olson’s argument against the tradition of Greek philosophy (going back to Socrates’ “readiness to generalise”, Aristotle’s “logic and classification”, and Plato’s idealism with its separation of form from content) a tradition which foregrounds “logos” (discriminating language) and reason, pushing lived experience of the instant and tangible real into the background – a kind of existential wallpaper against which the furniture of language stand out as virtual objects. (in Allen & Creeley 1967: 186) Poetry and painting can be instruments of the real extending out from the Greek’s enclosed “universe of discourse”. Olson writes, “Beyond [logos & reason] is direct perception and the contraries which dispose of argument. The harmony of the universe, […] is not logical, or better, is post-logical”.(ibid) And the universe is purposeless energised by a cosmic playfulness (lila, in Sanskrit – what we might now call ‘playful chaos’) in which indeterminacy is more pervasive than determinacy and complexity is more characteristic than simplicity. The universe is brimming with random events and casual arbitrariness in which short-lived episodes of linear determinacy are continually being absorbed back into the state of endless play.

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The aspiration to openness, the desire for poets, or perhaps poems, to be instruments of the real, crops up in the work of many poets. As an example here is Lew Welch, (1973) in Hermit Poems, No 9: I saw myself a ring of bone in the clear stream of all of it and vowed always to be open to it that all of it might flow through and then heard 'ring of bone' where ring is what a bell does.

* Another approach to the question, what is the real (the real as other), is taken by Slavoj Zizek, whose ideas are discussed by Miriam Nichols (2002: 37). According to Nichols, Zizek’s notion of the real is, the site of the impossible, the real is that which cannot be undergone. It is the exterior surface of specular consciousness (inseparable in Moebius fashion from the ‘interior’), and as such it would include materiality, futurity, and death – the nothing that withdraws from every appearance of something.

Or, in Blaser’s terms (1993: 117): at the edge of the words the silence at the edge a move ment

is the Other of my words

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- from Blaser’s poem, Image-Nation 5 (erasure

Zizek’s notion of the real as a place that can be “neither occupied nor avoided” (Nichols 2002: 37) is also the real of the other, the material world, the something that is not us. The real, in the form of death and the future, is also the unknown and indeterminate, a field of potential or possibility, just as the material universe (the other) is indeterminate, a field of energies in a state of constant change. Nichols argues that Blaser’s mode of construction, in the form of the serial poem, is also indeterminate, “without a telos – a wandering that does not know where it is going, but only where it has been”. (ibid) The real is, in Zizek’s view, the impossible, something at, or beyond, the borders of consciousness. At this point ideas of “real” and “other” coincide. The other is seen as that which is outside language, its double or polarity or generative field. In his essay, Recovering the Public World, Andrew Mossin argues that the other, and the real, “is present and primary to our speaking”, (in Nichols 2002: 161) The language of poetry is positioned “at the interface of visible and invisible, thought and unthought” (Ed Rasula, quoted by Mossin in Nichols 2002: 161) – and, we might add, self and unself, knowing and unknowing, self and other – the doubling skin which is inside and outside. […] the words do not end from the adventure

but come back the body is at the edge

of their commotion […] words foment a largeness of visible and invisible worlds they are a commotion of one form (from Blaser’s poem, Image-Nation 5 (erasure, in Blaser 1993: 113 & 117)

This “commotion” of words takes place at the meeting of inside and outside, self and other, a liminal “largeness” at the intersection of “visible and invisible worlds” where one being meets the “other”.

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One difficulty or paradox with both the Blaser and Zizek uses of the term “real” is that, although the “other” and the “outside” fit this notion of “the space we cannot occupy”, the “real” also has to accommodate the notion of what exists, true as opposed to false, a quality of reality – a reality in which we are implicated and in which we reside – the space we do occupy! Also Zizek’s idea of the real as the unoccupiable space, that which I am not and cannot be, leaves us with the sense that we are not real, which is again awkward in relation to the popular use of the term. In some ways Zizek’s “real” might be more usefully considered as another form of the “other”. * Ad Reinhardt’s Via Reductiva Imagine that you’re in a gallery of contemporary art. It is a light, unadorned, rectilinear space – a typical white cube. As you stand inside the doorway you glance around the room and notice a series of black squares on the walls. As you walk into the space you estimate that each black form is about five feet square. Moving up close to one of the squares you can see that it is a canvas painted very evenly and smoothly across the whole surface. There are no observable brush marks. The black seems to suck the light out of the space around it. It seems to be an unfathomable emptiness, confounding the eyes’ capacity to determine depth and the mind’s capacity to find form or meaning. As you move to the left to approach the next painting your eyes catch a slight shift of light, a subtle change of tone in the painting you have just been looking at. By moving your body left and right, and by looking more attentively, you realise that the flat surface consists of two kinds of black: one, matt, dense and deeply absorbent to light; the other, very slightly reflective and micro-tonally different to the other. As you begin to absorb these differences in blackness, something you had been unable to perceive only a few moments ago, you notice that the subtle changes of reflectivity and tone mark out the shape of a symmetrical cross within the square of the painting. The cross is just visible from one position, invisible from another. It seems to materialise out of the blackness, to hover precariously in the field of vision and then to evaporate as you move to left or right. Even as you look at the black cross in a black square it seems not to be there, a negative charge or anti-luminescence against the assertive white walls of the gallery. The ‘shape’ in the field of blackness, (here it is a cross

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but in other paintings it may be a band or a simple grid), seems to be a liminal form, on the threshold between presence and absence – or, as Yves-Alain Bois puts it, at “the limit of almost”. (1991: 11) Reinhardt seems to be describing his own work when he writes about, “painting that is almost possible, almost does not exist, that is not quite known, not quite seen”. (in Bois 1991: 29) For a number of years in the sixties and early seventies of the last century, this sight confronted visitors to many of the exhibitions of Ad Reinhardt’s work. Since the nineteen-forties Reinhardt had enjoyed a certain notoriety amongst the small New York art community for caricatures that satirised and ridiculed the pretensions and arguments that divided the various factions and cliques. Reinhardt was particularly cutting about the failure (as he and others saw it) of the Museum of Modern Art in New York to support (that is, to purchase and exhibit) radical contemporary art – particularly geometric abstraction. Reinhardt himself had developed a form of this kind of abstraction by stripping away what seemed to him to be increasingly irrelevant, that is: colour, in the usual sense of colours orchestrated in some way across the pictorial field; line and shape, formally organised as an “interesting” composition; and texture modulated across the surface of the painting. In other words the deployment of those complex distinctions and differentiations on the canvas that are usually used to delight the eye of the viewer. In Reinhardt’s case these are considered as distractions from something much more important, an encounter with the irreducible otherness of the painting as both object and subject of seeing. Presenting us with not quite enough to make us certain of what we are looking at is Reinhardt’s way of asserting the emergence of the visible and the invisible, the no-thing-ness that is the thing, the absence which is also presence. As Reinhardt remarks (his writings are extensive, including many lists of characteristics of art, expressed as what is and what is not): Darkness in art is not darkness. Light in art is not light. Space in art is space. Time in art is not time. […] The nothingness of art is not nothingness. Negation in art is not negation. (in Bois 1991: 127)

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This sounds like a contrariness that might disguise a kind of aesthetic fundamentalism, a chipping away that eventually reveals an essence about which we can be certain. But Reinhardt ridicules the pursuit of essences or truths in art, or in religion, or in art as religion. He uses contradiction and negation to destabilise the reader (and the viewer of his paintings), to subvert any attempt at explanation and rationalisation of visual art, and to bring us back to the actuality of our encounter with artefacts. He does this in a manner that recalls the practices of Madhyamika Buddhism or Pyrrhonist scepticism, and the negative theology of many mystics. Bois notes that Reinhardt was a reader of religious texts, particularly about mysticism, while at the same denying that art had anything to do with religion. (Bois 1991: 28-29) In his essay, Art-as-Art (first published in Art International in 1962) Reinhardt states, in his usual vehement tone: The one thing to say about art is its breathlessness, lifelessness, deathlessness, contentlessness, formlessness, spacelessness, and timelessness. This is always the end of art. (in Bois 1991: 122)

Only three years later he states, just as vehemently, that “the end of art is not the end”. (ibid: 127)

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* Robin Blaser’s essay, The Practice of Outside, (1996) moves with a kind of fumbling clarity, always in a state of unfolding, the indefiniteness opening out in such a way that we can see the creases and can never get rid of them. As when a tightly crumpled piece of paper, opened out, displays its history, the creased and possibly torn evidence of its crumpling and unfolding. This condition of Blaser’s writing, as he interprets and reiterates Spicer’s own crumpledness, leaves us always with uncertainty as we try to make out what’s written on the creased and unfolded page. * I remember once listening to the painter, Howard Hodgkin, on the radio - he mentioned the “evasiveness of reality”. * Hybrids, hyphens and margins These ideas can be linked to the work of the Chinese/Canadian poet, Fred Wah. In his poetry and poetics Wah explores the “hyphened position, a hybridised identity”. He writes: The half-breed shares with the nomadic and diasporic, and the immigrant, the terms of displacement and marginalisation. Yet the hybrid, even in those relegated spaces of race and ethnicity, is never whole. It is the betweenness itself, however, that becomes interesting. (Wah 2002)

This notion of the “hyphened position” can also be applied to any of us trying to survive existentially, poetically and ethically within a comforting but alienating managerial and technocratic culture. Many of us are marginalised, forced into a cultural nomadism in which we seek out voices and positions that articulate alternatives, enabling us, temporarily at least to feel kinship. Those voices and positions may belong to radical artists and poets, tribal songmakers, scattered mythmakers and mythcritics, or passing individuals who light up the street and transform everyday experience. Wah continues: The discourses of other marginalized positions have always interested me as fodder for a resistance to being a fixture of colonization. Writers have to

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Most of us have to use the “language of the colonizer” to survive – the impoverished formulaic discourses of bureaucracy, officialdom and consumerism - what Guy Debord calls “informationism”). (in Rothenberg & Joris 1998: 419) Art and poetry provide ways to revitalise our thinking and to re-awaken ourselves to the open-work of being and becoming. The arts present us with modes of living and speaking “against the grain”, enabling us to recognise our own hybridity and to establish kinship with others (however distant in time and space) who share a “hyphened position” at the margins of the dominant culture. This brings us back to Robin Blaser (1996: 277) who seems to be anticipating Wah’s thinking when he writes: in the contemporary experience, the formal, public language does not hold and our language in the midst of a recomposition has to account for what is stopped, lost, loose and silent.

Blaser argues that the “formal, public language”, which may also be Wah’s “language of the colonizer”, can be resisted or destabilised through the continual “recomposition” of a “renewed speech” (ibid: 279) This speech takes account of the “stopped, lost, loose and silent”, the indefiniteness of the outside, the formlessness and impossibility of the other. Blaser refers to this articulation of doubleness and polarity, the interpenetration of inside and outside, as a “contrarium” (ibid: 278) A term which brings to mind many of the themes I’ve been exploring in this book: self and unself; ideal and actual; suchness and emptiness; determinacy and indeterminacy; and the mutuality of existence. One characteristic of the contrarium is that its dynamic polarities are never resolvable through a formulaic rationalist discourse but only through the continual recomposition of lived experience and the open work. The polyvocal contrarium can’t be posited in simple terms as the expression of the singular self. As Blaser (ibid) puts it: “Such polarity is not reductive to a simple-minded authenticity or to a signature that is only one’s self”. To realise or actualise the contrarium in the arts and in life is to bring into play the dynamics of otherness and the real -

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the polarities of self and unself, visible and invisible - within a subjectivity that is no longer an expression of the illusory, unhyphenated, singular self. We are all manifestations of the contrarium - halfbreeds and hybrids, liminal presences on the edge of otherness. To seek for a fixed essence or purity is to falsify the way we are and the way all things are. For reality is a confluence of identities, impermanent and indeterminate as wind and cloud, and to be precise we are neither, this nor that, one thing nor an “other” – yet we are also this and that, self and other. Poets like Blaser, Spicer and Duncan try to actualise the irreducible indefiniteness of the contrarium in their work. As Duncan puts it: “I don’t seek a synthesis, but a melee”. (Hoover 1994: 29) * In some ways the arts can be seen as a way of gaining empathic access to the otherness of the social web in which we are situated. When Thomas Nagel poses the question, “what is it like” to be this or that? He is also affirming the importance of the arts to philosophical enquiry and to socio-cultural relations - in that the arts endlessly pose this kind of question and provide us with countless equally valid and varied responses or realisations to such questions. Artists present us with complex material and symbolic enactments of what it is to inhabit this particular space, to be embodied minds interacting with other embodied minds (beings, artefacts, buildings, habitats, histories, cultures), what it is to be both flesh and bone, and light and energyprocessing consciousness. Artists and poets can articulate what it is like to be in the liminal space between beings, between the self and the unself. Apart from its importance to developing cultural, psychological and philosophical understandings this facility of the arts also has implications for politics. Christopher Ricks makes this very clear in a brief discussion of William Empson’s position. It is worth quoting Ricks’ remarks in full: Empson said one of the reasons we have arts and literature is that it gives us sympathetic access to systems of belief [and we might add ways of being] that are not our own. Some terrible recent developments seem to value solely in a work of art those things that corroborate what you already think. It assumes that the end of politics is establishing that your position is the

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only one for which anything can be said. But the thing that Empson most valued in the arts was that it allowed him to realise that intelligent, sensitive, compassionate and very good people could disagree with him. (in Wroe 2005: 22)

* In his poem, Compass, translated by Richard Wilbur, Jorge Luis Borges suggests another paradox. On the one hand we can consider the things of this world as a manifestation of a Divine language: All things are words of some strange tongue, in thrall To Someone, Something, who both day and night Proceeds in endless gibberish to write The history of the world… (Borges 1985: 109)

An idea that echoes Jacob Boehme’s belief that God inscribes all things in the world with His signature. On the other hand, as Borges points out, there is something beyond language, a world that in its actuality, materiality, immateriality and mystery is forever unreachable except through associations, subtle allusions and the well-tried symbols and metaphors that illuminate the darkness of human history in stories, poems and pictures: “Beyond the name there lies what has no name”. And between the nameless and the word, the Divine other and the otherness of the real, we make our way, reiterating the remorseless codes of biology and poetry. Borges reminds us how we fumble to make a fire that burns for moments and is then extinguished by the breeze of history. How we stumble towards understanding and how self-knowledge eludes us: And this my being which escapes me quite, My anguished life that’s cryptic, recondite, And garbled as the tongues of Babel’s fall. (ibid)

* As I read again Martin Buber’s, I and Thou, I make notes to myself words or phrases used by Buber are woven into fragmentary thoughts about otherness, presence and art: Even if it was hell. Nothing at all. Only everything. Where is there room for it to unfold, to present itself? The relation is all. The relationship is every-

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thing, of which there is no thing, and nothing else. When the actual is all, there is no other. It is a difficult reading, the reading of what is. There is no translation, only a pointing & a recognition & a retelling & an opening to it all… only to glimpse, to be familiar yet to be witness to the strangeness of things as they are – the carpet now illumined by patches of light and moving shadows that trace the breeze outside Only the acceptance of the presence is required… and only when we are present is the word decomposed & revealed as another presence… we can only witness, there is nothing more, or less, to be done…

***

Part 8 Where we are: locus of mind-in-the-world “Geography is the wife of history, as space is the wife of time”. (Davenport 1984: 4) “I sit listening to the wind […] work in a field that is neither that of thought nor of faith. The great work-field”. (White 1990: 151) “Is there a scholarship that grows naturally as the lichen”. (Thomas 2001: 471) “It’s an intense geography that is never far removed from your body”. (Snyder, in Davidson 1991: 13)

I live in a red cedar house near the top of a steep hill overlooking the city of Exeter. It is an unusual house designed and built by an architect who was also a sailor. At the front of the building is a balcony, like a captain’s lookout, facing south, with a view to the silver estuary in the distance. We have almost an acre of land bounded on the western side by a hedge that may be over six hundred years old. On the eastern side a line of Monterey Pines shades the new executive housing and drains the red-clay soil of summer moisture. To the north, at the back of the house, is a small piece of woodland, a copse of turkey oak, holm oak, sweet chestnut, ash, sycamore and southern beech, interspersed with holly and hawthorn. Over the hill behind us is a deep valley where roe

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deer spend the days in sleep and silence, coming out at dawn and dusk to graze around the stream and up the valley sides. I know this place intimately. I feel at home here. I’m familiar with most of its resident population of larger animals. I look out for the snails that gather around the front door on wet evenings. I hear the craark of a pair of visiting ravens as they are pestered by anxious crows. I know where all the badger trails are and where their public toilet is. I remember the spot where I buried a roe deer, not yet stiff, after its chest had been torn open by a fox. And I can see where I laid a fox to rest a couple of years ago after it had curled up and died near a wooden den we had made years before for our children. Early each summer I’ve seen broods of slow worms and grass snakes raised in our compost bins and watched the newts coming up for air in the tiny pond. Each autumn I’ve carefully picked-off tiny ramshorn snails from the decaying lily leaves that I’ve cleared from the water, dropping the delicate spirals back into the pond with hardly a ripple. In the airways above the garden I know where the bats wheel and turn above the clearing in the copse and how they sweep the length of the plot only to turn again above the magnolia and sweep back up the hillside time after time. I can see where the hornet’s nest used to be in the infirm turkey-oak and where the biggest of the turkey oaks had to be cut down when it had become too diseased and fragile to leave. From our position here on the sheltered coast of an Atlantic promontory we can watch storms blowing in from the southwest, full of rain and silvergrey fury. Occasionally cold winds come down from the Arctic lifting the needles of the Monterey Pines like sprays of frost against dark sky. Very occasionally a thin golden film of Saharan sand, perhaps whipped-up by the feet of Berber tribesmen, dusts the leaves of grass and shrub. “Our” weather comes from all points of the compass, a rising and falling of atmospheric pressure drawing in these ghost winds, rains, mists and exotic dusts. Mostly it is a mild, benevolent climate that provides for all kinds of creatures and plants. The Devon clay is hard and deeply fissured in dry summers, lead-heavy in winter. The house opens its pores in the short days, gaps opening in the plaster of the walls as the clay beneath expands. In summer the clay shrinks and the gaps close. The house breathes with the seasons.

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This intimacy of perception and feeling for where we are comes from being in a place for many years, participating in its seasonal changes and being attentive to what goes on here. Working the land, drawing, photographing and walking the same walks over and over again salts the skin with local knowledge and sensory delights. Nuances of light, cloud formations and nocturnal sounds are revealed incrementally over days, months and years. This sensory history is stored on the skin, in the muscles, eyes, ears and tongue. And the sensory history is one current of my being in this place, interwoven with other currents of travels, encounters, geographies and cultures - all inscribed in memories, images and symbolic narratives that constitute me as a being-in-the-world. * Introduction In this section I want briefly to explore some ideas surrounding our being-in-the-world, our experience of place, what it is to be where we are. I also discuss some of the ways in which the arts address, investigate and celebrate our being-in-the-world. Drawing on diverse sources I enquire into the metaphysics of emplacement, how we are as participants in the natural world, mingling with other beings and forces in a changing environment that is both physical/geological/geographical and cultural/symbolic/mythological. We live in a multi-storied world, a place of complex interwoven stories that are inscribed in the topography of every locality we inhabit. We are minds overlapping and inter-mingling with other minds and information-processing systems in a world of stratified codes and layered histories, a world of evolutionary, cultural and cosmological change – all of which forms the locus of our being here, constituting the medium of our presence as much as the air constitutes the medium we breathe. * My touch is of the world. My skin is the skin of things, dealings with other beings, encounters with other skins. I am here in this space, amongst the textured weight & resistance of other substances, the material universe of densely-structured lumps of matter. And yet I am also a condensation of light in a field of light – a prism through which energy is transmitted and refracted.

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* Kenneth White, in The Blue Road (1990: 117), quotes Mishima, trying to describe a new kind of writing he was moving towards, he calls it “confidential criticism”: The “I” I’ll be concerned with won’t be that of my strictly personal history, but something else […] Reflecting on the nature of this other self, I came to the conclusion that it was very much a question of the space I happened to be physically occupying.

* According to Guy Davenport (1984: 4): The imagination [is] rooted in a ground, a geography. The Latin word for the sacredness of a space is cultus, the dwelling of a god, the place where a rite is valid. Cultus becomes our word culture, not in the portentous sense it now has, but in a much humbler sense. For ancient people the sacred was the vernacular ordinariness of things: the hearth, primarily; the bed, the wall around the yard.

* Mapping & genealogy Palaeolithic to contemporary hunter-gatherers and myth-makers: Pyrrho. Sextus Empiricus. Pelagius. Erigena. Duns Scotus. The desert fathers. Heraclitus. Diogenes. St Jerome. Countless hermits, scholar monks and cloud-drifting nuns. Spinoza. Han-shan. Tu Fu. Basho. Clare. Waterton. Ruskin. Thoreau. Muir. Rexroth. Snyder. White. Celtic & Norman. Atlantic edge. Gulf Stream Drift. Westerlies, sou’westerlies. Mindscape & Landscape – topography, cartography, ideography. Bodymind & Mindbody. Oceanic-mind & River-mind. Force-fields, energy-fields, scent-fields, sight-fields, sound-fields, touch-fields, fields-of-consciousness, analogical-fields, symbolicfields. Olson: composition-by-field.

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Stone, fibre, flesh, dust & light. Cultures of being. Archives of knowing. Intelligences of moss, lichen, microbes, trees, bugs, birds, four-leggeds, two-leggeds… Layered histories. Transmission of knowledge & information: gene to gene, mind-to-mind, hand-to-hand, eye-to-eye, ear-to-ear… * Fred Wah George Bowering (Wah 1980: 14) in writing about the Canadian poet, Fred Wah, notes his emplacement, his rootedness, the embeddness of his language in the local topography. Wah writes from a position in and amongst his British Columbian territory: “I try to be the place”. (ibid) This, despite his sense of himself as a hybrid, an occupant of a “hyphenated” position. Bowering discusses Wah’s poetry as a function of attention, an attending to the world: Wah’s poems tangle with [the?] phenomenal, the first act of noticing something, and they try to signify it without over-using ‘society’s’ name for it, which latter is next to be peeled away after we have discarded abstraction and description, and their simi-lies. In the poem “Here”, we catch the poet’s attention as it is caught, attention being for Wah more important than reflection. (ibid)

In his poetry, Wah often exercises and celebrates the power of naming things, while at the same time pushing against the tendency that naming and describing have of setting up a barrier to attention, a nominal lens that distorts and refracts the light of attentiveness. In his poem, Havoc Nation, he articulates the complexity of this situation: this is a hard language to work out the images keep interrupting the talking trees keep being pictures of themselves my words keep meaning pictures of words meaning tree and its not easy to find myself in the picture (Wah 1980: 66)

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Somehow the poet has to use the language as a scalpel to cut the symbolic cord that binds the word “tree” to the idea-picture or representation, and then to re-energise the word with “treeness” in such a way as to distil the act of perception into a poetic presence on the page. Bowering suggests that Wah’s approach to composition reflects his thinking about the self as implicated in the world, a participatory and ecological perspective: We remember that Coleridge and Duncan both insist on a co-operation (and varying leadership) among the physical-mental faculties, rather than the generalship of the mind in a composer’s individual chain of being […] keeping in mind [Wah’s] identification of self with ecosystem, we associate his poetic with the view that Pierre Dansereau argues for flora, that different plant species naturally co-operate on site, as opposed to the basic puritancapitalist (E.J.Pratt) idea that they compete for range. (in Wah 1980: 14)

* Heading East from Aberystwyth Travelling through Welsh hills towards Mercian heartlands brings to mind Kenneth White’s “intellectual nomadism” – journeying through layered histories, shifting geographies and overlapping territories and cultures. Grey slate stained with lichen and wiry gorse, jackdaws nesting in shadowed clefts, cultures of bacteria in tiny cups of rainwater, mist infusing everything with Atlantic tears and mild air. Celts, Mercians, Romans, Vikings, Saxons, Normans, Africans, Indians, Pakistanis, Pagans, Hindus, Muslims, Christians – migratory flows of song and story, myths inscribed into earth and air. These islands where Eurasia meets the wild western ocean, rocky cloud-makers, storm-shields, stepping-stones to horizons of wave and fabled lands inhabited by strangers and speculations. The diaspora of hybridised migrants who wandered the Eurasian landmass had to find ontological equivalents for these interweavings of intelligence and being. From Palaeolithic hunters and picture-makers to travelling monks and scholars of many faiths, the need to mark, inscribe, name and sing was as essential as the need to find food, drink and rest. These were thinkers on the edge of thought – clouds meeting mountains, sky meeting sea, islands on the edge of a continent. For these wanderers, and for us, place-names are markers, words stabbed into the earth to

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locate us, to tell where we stand in relation to tree, river, hill, low place, high place; what we are near to, above, below; what we can see from here; what happened here. Ways of signing this place and singing this land. * Robert Duncan (1968: jacket) quotes Dante in De Monarchia: “God’s art, which is nature”. * In his poem, World, World, George Oppen speaks of what it is to be in a place, to meet the resistance of stone and air and light and to sing of being here: The self is no mystery, the mystery is That there is something for us to stand on. We want to be here. The act of being, the act of being More than oneself. (1976: 143)

* Sightline. Scanning the visual field my eyes encounter a small painting: a skyscape with a gull …the mind blinks into attention. There is this pen & the page, a scattering of other pens & pages, a blur of tones & muted colours at the edge. Oranges come into view, focus on dry taut dimpled skins, puckered here & there with age & loss of fluid. Vision runs along surfaces that shine & dance the light, then to shadow, a stone, a chunk of flint like a sharp fractured bone. Beside it there’s a softness, a grey bundle of sheep’s wool & a memory of gathering handfuls on a hillside, clumps stuck to barbed wire, knots of it, rubbed off by passing sheep. Sight moves higher past ranks of books, some leaning left, others right, to a shelf beneath the low ceiling. Leaning against the pale greygreen wall is a dark blue field of colour topped by a pale blue band beneath which is a light grey silhouetted form of a bird, a seagull – still, but vibrant – a chromatic episode of quiet insistence in this cluttered field of sensations.

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* In rivermist lost in rain grief is a bridge over which we walk a pair of swallows divided by life & loss * Mountains & walking Gary Snyder, the mountain laureate, writes of walking as both measure and discipline, and as a primary mode of being. Through walking a place our sensory intelligence develops, we get to know the lie of the land, our body moves with the topography of hill, valley, shadowed forest and illuminated plain. We learn a place and how to visualize spatial relationships, as children, on foot and with imagination. Place and the scale of space must be measured against our bodies and their capabilities. A ‘mile’ was originally a Roman measure of one thousand paces… To know that it takes six months to walk across Turtle Island/North America walking steadily but comfortably all day is to get some grasp of the distance. (Snyder 2004: 8)

Walking is one of what the Chinese refer to as, “the ‘four dignities’ – Standing, Lying, Sitting and Walking. “They are ‘dignities’ in that they are ways of being fully ourselves, at home in our bodies, in their fundamental modes”. (ibid) Snyder also discusses the myths woven around mountains and how these relate to ancient Taoist cosmologies: Mountains also have mythic associations of verticality, spirit, height, transcendence, hardness, resistance and masculinity. For the Chinese they are exemplars of the “yang”: dry, hard, male and bright. Waters are feminine: wet, soft, dark, “yin” with associations of fluid-but-strong, seeking (and carving) the lowest, soulful, life-giving, shape-shifting. (ibid: 10)

Mountains and waters are bound together as two interpenetrating and interdependent vectors of geography and myth. Walking in the mountains, fording streams, being enveloped in moisture-laden clouds on rocky paths, is to activate and realise the mythic structures that are immanent in the landscape. Knowledge is transmitted from age to age through the symbolic codes embedded in the cultural ecology of each locality.

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Davidson (1991:13) argues that for Snyder, and for his contemporaries, the poets Lew Welch, Joanne Kyger and William Everson, place is both the source and the ground of numinous presence […] To walk in the landscape is to establish connections between animate and inanimate realms, the resulting poem being the necessary articulation of those interdependencies [the poems] are not intended to be descriptions of the events but re-enactments, testifying through the poetics of open form to the vitality of an open universe.

For Snyder landscape is an “ecological model” (see Davidson 1991: 12) rather than an allegorical or symbolic subject. Cataloguing landforms and the plants and animals that inhabit a particular “bioregion” is an important part of the poet’s role to give song to the natural world – to locate ourselves within the ecological web. Snyder is also an activist, very aware of his other responsibilities, particularly the need to “prepare the landscape for future habitation”. (ibid) His poetics combines a belief in giving voice to the land and its inhabitants, a feeling of reverence and kinship with the ways of the natural world and those who work with it, and a sense of responsibility to hand on to future generations a sustainable presence in the landscape. Mind and mountains, poetry and waters, myths and land are inseparable and mutually reinforcing. The landscape, with all its constituent energies and beings, is alive with inherited knowledge, passed along lines of culture from microbe to microbe, plant to plant, animal to animal, bird to bird, human to human. As we walk in the landscape, attentive to our footfall and to the landscape that flows through and around us, biological and cultural evolutionary realms are fused in narratives of stone, water, fibre, filament, flesh, bone, air and light. Each strand of the ecological web sings its songs, tell its tales, inscribes its drawings, and all are orchestrated in a great improvisatory gesamkunstwerk that is forever evolving in an ocean of indeterminacy. * “To write is to move. Dispersal of a presumed and constructed world”. (Wah 2000: 18)

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Walking & thinking, trails & associations Richard Long, the English sculptor, has made walking a central feature of his art practice. He has walked and photographed the traces of walks all over the world. In 1967 he photographed A Line Made by Walking, the record in flattened grass (and photographic emulsion on paper) of walking backwards and forwards along a line in a field. On another occasion he walked a line in a daisy-covered field, picking off the daisy heads as he walked. The resulting daisy-less trail was a trace of absence, of minimal erasure in a drawing made by walking. Sometimes he piles stones at places along his route, or picks up a stone in one place and puts it down in another, before picking up another stone and putting it down further along the route, and so on for the length of a walk. Over the years since the mid-1960s Long has walked some places many times, particularly on Dartmoor, not far from his Bristol home. What I have always liked about Dartmoor is that it is this big empty place which nevertheless has traces of all these layers of human history, like the tinners or farmers or whatever. And I suppose after so many years I can also say that it has traces of my own walks and history on it. So I can’t go to Dartmoor now without being aware of a lot of my own history, my walks that have criss-crossed it for thirty years, and that… becomes part of the cumulative richness of the work. (in Gooding & Furlong 2002: 139)

Long’s walking sculptures resonate with associations and histories, both personal and collective. They bring to mind our own experiences of walking from place to place, noticing features of the landscape, smelling the air, picking things up as we walk. We also think of those peoples who have come before us, tramping the earth as traders, explorers, nomads, soldiers and monks. With only a few remote exceptions, most places on land have been seen, crossed, touched, slept on and sung about. Human walking trails are woven over each other, in places gathering in tracks that are sometimes hundreds, maybe thousands, of years old. Everywhere these human peregrinations are overlaid with animal trails, where badgers, foxes, rats and smaller creatures have impressed their weight on the earth as they move about on their daily and seasonal journeys. In the sky above invisible flight-paths mark the migration routes and food-gathering movements of birds and bats. Within the soil similar patterns mark the countless journeys of beetles, worms and other subterranean creatures.

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And in the oceans and waterways amphibians and fish leave chemical and auditory traces of their migrations and movements. Richard Long adds his trails to this accumulation of inscriptions, an index of his own life interwoven with the lives of others over centuries and millennia. In 1990 Long made a piece of work entitled, Sound Circle: A Walk on Dartmoor.(reproduced in Gooding & Furlong 2002: 143) The record of the walk, presented as an artefact, is a map of the area with a circle delineating the route taken. At intervals along the circle single words are placed at right angles, describing sounds heard or sources of sounds: “wind, grasshoppers, wind, grasshoppers, larks, wind, aeroplane, larks, buzzing, bleating, buzz, squelching, larks, cropping, stream, wind”. This bringing together of word, sensation and place is echoed in similar practices of speaking the land amongst huntergatherers and indigenous peoples across the world. Associative thinking, often of a subtle and complex kind, is characteristic of oral traditions that bind together place and idea, story and stone, perception and symbolic memory. In the following set of Navajo Correspondences, we can see how these associations are set out in a poetic list that weaves together highly disparate phenomena: 1. red willow Sun yellow 2. arrow Wind Cicada arrow-crossing life 3. aspen white summer pink 4. Bat Darkness wing feather Big Fly

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The linkage between Long’s practice as a sculptor and the art of poetry is sometimes very obvious. In 2002 he made a work entitled, A Four Day Walk on Dartmoor, it consists of a verbal statement: NATURAL FORCES WALKING WITH THE FORCE OF GRAVITY IN THE FORCE OF THE WIND THROUGH THE FORCE OF RIVERS ALONG MAGNETIC FORCE BY COMPASS OVER GEOLOGICAL FORCE ON THE STICKLEPATH FAULT (reproduced in Gooding & Furlong 2002: 141)

There is a sense here of landscape as physical force, as lived experience and as idea. Different modes of explanatory description are placed in sequence in a way that echoes this song, one of Five Teton Sioux Songs: ‘where the wind is blowing’ where the wind is blowing the wind is roaring I stand westward the wind is blowing the wind is roaring I stand (in Rothenberg 1969: 205)

All of Richard Long’s art walks are in non-urban places, often through wilderness or rural areas with few human inhabitants. However, other artists and poets have made records of walks and journeys through the

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mutter and clutter of urban environments, where the layered density of trails, routes and journeys is much greater, forming a multidimensional carpet of associations, memories, myths, images and songs. Here’s Kerouac writing about being on a bus moving through rural and urban terrains: I took the Washington bus; wasted some time there wandering around; went out of my way to see the Blue Ridge, heard the bird of Shenandoah and visited Stonewall Jackson’s grave; at dusk stood expectorating in the Kanawha River and walked the hillbilly night of Charleston, West Virginia; at midnight Ashland, Kentucky, and a lonely girl under the marquee of a closedup shop. The dark and mysterious Ohio, and Cincinatti at dawn. Then Indiana fields again, and St Louis as ever in its great valley clouds of afternoon. The muddy cobbles and the Montana logs, the broken steamboats, the ancient signs, the grass and the ropes by the river. (Kerouac 2000: 232)

The litany of names interposed with snappy descriptive phrases marks the changing environment as vividly as a more lengthy and detailed account. The rhythms and disjunctive images of journeying are conveyed in a concise reportage which is not unlike the Navajo Correspondences. In both, mindscape and landscape are integrated vectors of the same experience, different dimensions of moving through a place. And here’s Snyder again, walking in downtown Naha, on the island of Okinawa: Ads and signs everywhere: my eyes couldn’t leave the writing alone. Some part of my mind effortlessly soaked up long-forgotten Chinese characters and syllabary-written loan-words and sallied out to reassemble its old fluency. A few more bends and the lane was heading due east […] There were path-wide breaks paved in between structures, some might be passages. A student in a blue dress came up one so I took it and was carried through (descending steps and being funnelled between old stone walls) to a wider street totally packed with cars and trucks, lined with storefronts and signs, a basin of rumbling and honking […] I walked on up the intensely active street. I began to feel the landscape with my skin, a somatic sensation of mirroring or echoing that comes with re-cognitions that are below the conscious threshold. (Snyder 2000: 384 & 385)

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Snyder vividly evokes the experience of being in an urban landscape, the density of sensations and the interpenetration of matter (walls, trucks) and symbols (ads and signs). Alain De Botton (2003: 57) gives a different perspective on the enmeshing of mindscape and landscape: “Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than a moving plane, ship or train”. Walking is the template for these later modes of transport and though the speed of travel may change the interaction between environment, senses and thought remains as a constant – heightening consciousness, stimulating imagination, engendering dynamic sequences of association and juxtaposition. Kenneth White is a nomadic poet, navigating in his writing a huge geographical terrain (his Collected Poems is entitled, Open World). Yet he is also an inhabitant of particular places, most recently as a settler beside Lannion Bay in northern Brittany. While some poems journey through diverse times, places and ideas, others chart the familiar territory around his home. In Finisterra or The Logic of Lannion Bay, he brings to mind the history of this Atlantic promontory, “which was Roman ground / before it yielded / to the syntax of Christianity” (2003: 575), a place of “heather, thorn and pine” (ibid: 576) and he speculates on earlier inhabitants: something like those old taoists who founded the Academy of Gulls (a bird and an eye, a bird and an eye: ideogram for monastery) an academy without walls (ibid: 576-577)

As a latter-day member of the “Academy of Gulls” he is given to walking, to tramping the damp lanes and headlands, studying the terrain and charting its physical and symbolic topography: as one who has studied the grammar of granite I have walked here as one who would equate landscape with mindscape I have walked here as one who loves

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the ways and the waves of silence I have walked here (ibid: 577)

In other poems he writes about trying “to learn / the language of that silence / more difficult than the Latin / I learned in Bergen / or the Irish in Dublin”.(ibid: 523) As a poet White walks through a geographical space that is also the space of consciousness, of mind, and to understand both spaces, “a man needs to fix his knowledge / but he also needs an emptiness / in which to move”.(ibid: 524) Hence he has to study in an “academy without walls”, where the gulls and stones have as much to teach as the human scholars and writers. * Alice Oswald’s Dart Another example of the relationship between walking and poetic utterance comes in Alice Oswald’s long poem, Dart. In constructing her text Oswald makes use of conversations and interviews she recorded with people connected with the whole length of the river, from its source in Cranmere pool high on north Dartmoor to Dartmouth and the sea. The voices of fishermen, poachers, foresters, farmers, stonewallers and walkers are interlaced with the voice of the river itself and some of its non-human creatures and imaginary presences. The language is resonant with the music of water, with local words and phrases and with the changing rhythms of each stage of the river as it speeds and slows to the estuary. Near the beginning there is the following sequence which speaks of walking and rivering: I don’t know, all I know is walking. […] What I love is one foot in front of another. South-south-west and down the contours. I go slipping between Black Ridge and White Horse Hill into a bowl of the moor where echoes can’t get out listen, a lark spinning around one note splitting

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and mending it and I find you in the reeds, a trickle coming out of a bank, a foal of a river one step-width water of linked stones trills in the stones glides in the trills eels in the glides in each eel a fingerwidth of sea in walking boots, with twenty pounds on my back: spare socks, compass, map, water purifier so I can drink from streams, seeing the cold floating spread out above the morning, tent, torch, chocolate, not much else (Oswald 2002: 2-3)

A little later she gives voice to the two tributaries of the Dart before they join at Dartmeet: in that brawl of mudwaves the East Dart speaks Whiteslade and Babeny the West Dart speaks a wonderful dark fall from Cut Hill through Wystman’s Wood … and the West Dart speaks roots in a pinch of clitters the East Dart speaks coppice and standards the East Dart speaks the Gawler Brook and the Wallabrook the West Dart speaks the Blackabrook that runs by the prison (ibid: 10-11)

This is a conversation, a disputation of tongues: “at loggerheads, lying next to one another on the / riverbed / wrangling away into this valley of oaks”. (ibid: 11) There is the same reverence for names and for naming, for finding the right word, for crafting a song that has the intonation and music of the landscape, that the Teton Sioux demonstrate, or the Navajo, or any indigenous people who give voice to a

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particular place, articulating the intelligences that inhabit the locality, picturing the mindscape that is immanent in landscape. * Wah, wander & wonder In Fred Wah’s writing, “the notion of journey has been a very conscious element”. (Wah 2002: 1) Wah shares with Snyder a mode of writing that is infused with the physicality of movement and labour, a fluency in the handling of space, tactile experience and being outdoors. Timber Cruising, for example, located a physical environment that juxtaposed geographical spatiality with body rhythm […] Movement implies all sorts of possibilities for writing. Besides the obvious parallels with mapping, necessary for the formal innovation I was interested in, the cluster of connections around journal and journey became important formal avenues for my writing (ibid)

In the prose beginning of his poem, Cruise, Wah provides a succinct manifesto of his poetic project at that time (early 70s?): so I told myself I would go out wandering not over the world but in the world until I found instant upon instant of that minute contact with a piece of it… I would be out there in it with everything else collecting measurements with my senses in a timeless meandering through the wonder. (Wah 1980: 70)

This play on “wander” and “wonder” is typical of Wah’s sensibility, drawing in equal measure on Olson’s projective verse, the objectivism of, say, Oppen and Niedecker, the Chinese Taoist tradition and the oral poetries of indigenous peoples. The wandering is also intellectual and scholarly, there is a sense of Wah, and many other writers including Carson, Pound, Duncan, Rothenberg, et al, wandering through the libraries of the world, from book to book, poem to poem, grazing on the fields of knowledge, metaphor, narrative and image that unfold with each opening of a page, each looking and reading. * “And the poet is a wanderer”. (Davenport 1984: 188):

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Coming home: emplacement, locus, locality At the same time all wanderings start somewhere and often return to the same place. In Wah’s case this place is the “interior” of British Columbia, near the Kootenay River, a place that Wah considers to be, “local to me”, making up “a picture of a world I am native of”. (Wah 1980: 126) Journeys, physical and intellectual, move out from this locality and move back to it, leaving leads to homing, a returning that marks the gravitational pull of a familiar hearth. Writing has a lot to do with ‘place,’ the spiritual and spatial localities of the writer. I see things from where I am, my view point, and I measure and imagine a world from there. (ibid)

Gary Snyder’s locus is the watershed of the South Yuba river in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, Northern California - geographically not far south of Wah’s territory. According to Dodge (in Snyder 2000: xix) Snyder’s work as poet, writer and activist, has been at “the ‘mythopoetic interface of society, ecology, and language’ that he chose as his fields of inquiry, his point of multiple attention”. The title of his first book of poems, Riprap (published in 1959), suggests something of the distinctive interweaving of physicality and metaphysicality in much of Snyder’s work to date. I’ve come to realise that the rhythms of my poems follow the rhythm of the physical work I’m doing and the life I’m leading at any given time – which makes the music in my head which creates the line. (Snyder 1966: sleevenotes)

Part of his work as a member of a trail-crew on the Sierra Nevada involved “picking up and placing granite rocks in tight cobble patterns on hard slab”. “What are you doing?” I asked old Roy Marchbanks. “Riprapping,” he said. His selection of natural rocks was perfect, the result looked like dressed stone fitting to hair line cracks. Walking, climbing, placing with the hands. I tried writing poems of tough simple short words with the complexity far beneath the surface texture. (ibid)

In the title poem from Riprap, Snyder’s intelligence draws on the geology and ecology of the place and is articulated in a text of short studded lines that are almost indexically linked to the work of the

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trail-crew. There is a fusion of mind and body, a sense of cosmological magnitude inlaid with a dexterous handling of the gritted earth: Lay down these words Before your mind like rocks. placed solid, by hands In choice of place, set Before the body of the mind in space and time: Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall riprap of things: Cobble of milky way, straying planets, … Crystal and sediment linked hot all change, in thoughts, as well as things. (Snyder 1966: 29)

* Basil Bunting: Briggflatts In his long poem, Briggflatts, Basil Bunting constructs both a mythic journey (geographical, cultural and historical) and a poetic topography of places significant to the poet, from Northern England to Italy to Alexander’s empire and back to Northern England. The scope and

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scape of the poem are articulated in language suffused with the rhythms, dialect words and sounds of Bunting’s Northumberland homeland and the north-west Yorkshire of Brigflatts itself - a Quaker community and meeting house that is now in the county of Cumbria (note the different spelling to the poem’s title). Bunting’s reworkings of passages from the Libro de Alexandre, a thirteenth century Spanish account of the life of Alexander the Great (see Pursglove 2002) provide one of many compass points in the poem. Although Briggflatts can be seen as addressing similar issues to Romantic poetry, (for instance, “the rift between humankind and nature, the ‘progressive severance’” (Greaves 2005: 65) exacerbated by industrial, technological and scientific revolutions), Bunting articulates these issues in a less subjectivist tone than that used by the Romantics and attempts a rebinding of what has been torn apart. The modernist formal devices of the poem, linking him more to Pound and Eliot than to Wordsworth, are used to give voice to seasonal change, to relationships between mind and matter and to the intricate interweavings of human culture and nature. The well-known second stanza of Briggflatts is worth quoting again, as it encapsulates many of the themes of the whole text and gives us the sound of the music, as crafted as a dry-stone wall: A mason times his mallet to a lark’s twitter, listening while the marble rests, lays his rule at a letter’s edge, till the stone spells a name naming none, a man abolished. (Bunting 1968: 51)

As with Ted Hughes, and more indirectly Kenneth White, Gary Snyder and Fred Wah, this is a Romanticism reformulated in the light of a profound change of consciousness, an ecological awareness of relationship, connectivity, process and interdependence. Nature is both less domesticated and aestheticised, and not seen as a lost paradise that may yet be regained. Humanity is seen as a participant in nature, sharing in its evolution, its pleasures and its pains. The remorseless indifference of natural forces is acknowledged alongside the brief joys

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of existing – the lines that precede the coda at the end of Briggflatts, have a Beckett-like quality of resignation: “Starlight quivers. I had day enough. / For love uninterrupted night”. (ibid: 70) While earlier Romanticism sings of ‘the lark ascending’, Bunting describes the “Painful lark, labouring to rise!” (ibid: 51) He attempts to give voice to specific locations as dwelling places and habitats of many organisms, human and non-human, and as sites of complex histories, evolutions and cosmologies. Greaves (2005: 69) points to the revised Romanticism that underlies Bunting’s poetic project: This is a delicate anthropomorphism in which culture and nature, the visual and the auditory, tenor and vehicle, weave in and out defining each other, closely intertwined to form an exquisite web through which past guilt (‘what’s done’) is at last healed, thereby integrating humankind into the complex set of relationships between it and the environment, the mind and the world.

Cycles of seasons, birth and death, comings and goings of organisms, clouds, feelings and thoughts, are treated by Bunting with equal measure, a poised gravity of respect, empathy and ecological understanding. All the vicissitudes of corporeal existence are suspended in a consciousness that is both the poet’s and the world’s. All histories of rock, flesh and fibre are condensed in the presence of everything as it is, metabolised as poem/artefact in the hands, eyes, ears and mind of the poet/artist: “silence by silence sits / and Then is diffused in Now”. (Bunting 1968: 69) And all art can do is mourn each day, raising stones into walls that provide temporary shelter while we go blindly into night and the days to come, the indeterminate future: Blind, we follow rain slant, spray flick to fields we do not know. […] Where we are who knows of kings who sup while day fails? Who, swinging his axe to fell kings, guesses where we go? (ibid: 71)

*

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Turning aside: displacement Of course alongside place as home and emplacement as settlement or being at home, there is also displacement, a state (temporary or permanent) of being homeless or seeking a home or wanting to return to a home. Wah’s idea of writing as movement is the process that bridges his sense of home and his sense of being part of a displaced diaspora of immigrants – in his case Chinese Canadians, but the diaspora includes all those marginalised peoples who are not part of the European descendency that forms the socio-politico-cultural hegemony in Canada. The diaspora also includes, paradoxically perhaps, the indigenous peoples of Canada who are marginalised and displaced (culturally and, in some cases, geographically) within their own land. Wah identifies with all of these peoples, for whom “home” is a complex notion, about which they have ambivalent feelings and thoughts. In the field of writing, especially poetry, Wah argues that this sense of displacement, and the “hybridised” identity that goes with it, generates a syntax of disruption and discontinuity evident in Wah’s own writing and that of other Canadian minorities. As an example, Wah gives the following extract from Jeannette Armstrong’s poem, Blood of My People - Armstrong is an Okanagan Salish woman writing in English rather than her native language: forward a red liquid stream that draws ground upward that shakes earth and dust to move a long line before settling quietly back into soil (in Wah 2000: 56)

to move

According to Wah, the gaps that punctuate her poem reflect the nomadic cut and refuse to settle into English’s placement of expected syntax and, more basically and politically, into both the imaginary [Canadian?] nation and its ideological assault on the land. (ibid)

If identity and the self are, at least partially, emplaced in language, as well as in the environment, then we ought not to be surprised if displacement from one leads to displacement from and within the

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other. Landscape, mindscape and wordscape are interdependent manifestations of localised being. Wah pushes his argument even further, making the idea of displacement and hybridity much more inclusive. He agrees with Margaret Attwood’s remark that “[we] are all immigrants to this place even if we were born here”. (ibid: 52) In other words, even the majority of Canada’s citizens, who are of European descent, are immigrants, displaced peoples from across the ocean. This inclusivity can also be extended to most of the modern, particularly urban, populations of the world, who feel themselves to be separated from the natural environment, estranged from the earth, its other inhabitants, processes and topography. The lie of the land in a geographical sense becomes the lie of the land in an ethical, social and political sense. The sense of belonging is ruptured, the land seems not to belong to the people and the people seem not to belong to the land. * Drawing with light: Roger Ackling For over thirty years the sculptor, Roger Ackling, has used the same simple procedure for making his small-scale artefacts. Passing the sun’s rays through a magnifying glass, Ackling burns dots and lines into pieces of driftwood found on beaches near his East Anglian home or into pieces of found card. The cosmos (sun) is inscribed into the driftwood drawings, light becomes dark, energy and time are materialised as line. The image of the sun is carried in light waves over one hundred and fifty million kilometres until it hits the magnifying glass and is focused as a tiny point of burning intensity that Ackling nudges left to right across the surface of the material. Availability of sunlight becomes a crucial factor in Ackling’s working method. Time of day, season of the year, passage of cloud and quality of atmosphere are condensed into each drawing, providing a locus of meaning and a locality of making. Each drawing is defined by place and time in a way that is unusually specific. In some ways there is a paradoxical movement from abstraction (sunlight) to concrete materiality (wood or card) and back to abstraction again (‘straight’ lines, repeated, in parallel). The formality and geometry of the drawings only add to the sense of paradox and ambiguity as enormous cosmic energies are

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converted by a small human gesture into a handmade artefact of rubbish and light. * Water & light: Susan Derges The artist, Susan Derges, makes use of natural and artificial light to make photograms, often very large, that condense the movements of water or the vibrations of sound through pigment, into intricately detailed images in photo-emulsion on paper. One of Derges’s projects involved the imaging of the complex water patterns of the River Taw in North Devon, UK. Working outside in the landscape at night, rather than in the highly controlled environment of the darkroom, Derges uses light to make a record of brief moments of change. Large sheets (some are 8 feet by 3.5 feet) of light-sensitive paper are held in aluminium frames and submerged under the flowing water of the river. Flash light, delicately inflected by the ambient moonlight, falls on the paper to reveal a trace of the swirling patterns of water and, sometimes, the silhouetted images of over-hanging leaves and branches that come between the flash and the water. What was most surprising was the extraordinary complexity of the water. Many people have said that these prints reminded them of molecular structures or cellular structures. What interested me was that they were forms arising out of chaos. (Derges, in Kumar 2004: 21)

Although working in a gentle, non-disruptive, manner, Derges affirms her presence in the landscape, she is an active participant rather than a neutral observer cut off from her surroundings by the camera, lens and eyepiece. Although highly-skilled and experienced as a photographer Derges is working in collaboration with the indeterminate processes of water flow, atmosphere and light - a dialogue that is both intimate and surprising. Derges: What’s interesting is that working without a camera in this way is a very primitive kind of photography using just the interaction of the light, the transparency or opacity of the water and the light-sensitive paper… By working at night, the whole landscape can become a darkroom…I wanted to immerse myself in the environment. (in Lowenstein 2000: 79)

Derges’ water studies are closely in tune with Goethe’s methods and Ruskin’s ideas about working in and with the landscape to understand

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and attend to what is actually present, what is going on in the place, trying to absorb the phenomenological, intuitive and imaginative data in as accurate and lucid a manner as possible. There is also a connection to Alice Oswald’s study of the Dart. Whereas Oswald gives voice to the whole length of the river, its dynamics, physiology and culture, Derges focuses on very specific episodes in the river and visualises these in the chemistry of light moving through water on to light sensitive paper. Although both demonstrate a participatory engagement with their subject, Oswald and Derges aim to reveal the qualities of each river in as unadorned and concise a manner as possible. Their position is not that of Romantic poets like Wordsworth, Shelley or Keats, filtering views of the landscape through lenses of highlycoloured subjectivity, telling us as much, or more, about their own moods, emotions, aspirations and values as they tell us about ‘nature’. Derges and Oswald see themselves as representatives of a place, agents of perception, consciousness and representation working in collaboration with ambient conditions to articulate the genius loci of both rivers. While their values, ideas and feelings are manifested in the decisions they make, the material they select, the particular sites they study and the materials they employ, these are all exercised with great self-restraint, allowing the rivers to speak and picture the distinctive presences of Dart and Taw - rather than drawing attention to the distinctive presences of Oswald and Derges. And in the act of speaking and picturing the rivers, expanding human consciousness to embrace the non-human world, poet and artist learn something about their own being-in-the-world. I was aware of the dissolving of boundaries between myself and the water. It felt as if through working with the water I was learning a lot about my own internal energy states. Certainly working with a direct method like that gave me a much more tangible understanding of what was happening all around me. It was also teaching me quite a lot about myself. (in Kumar 2004: 22)

In the act of stepping aside, not imposing herself and her views, assumptions or emotions on the river as subject, Derges found what many practitioners of disciplined attention have found, which is that the processes of being and becoming are revealed with great clarity and detail. The practice of zazen and other forms of mindfulness meditation, and the practices of many scientists, artists and others who

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attend to phenomena without comment or interference, enable practitioners to observe dispassionately the ways in which the undifferentiated flux of consciousness becomes the linguistic, conceptualising self, and how this process can lead to a sense of separation arising between the individual and the world. Through the practice of art and poetry, Derges and Oswald dissolve this sense of separation and present us with the flux of consciousness realised in photographic images and poetic texts. * A metaphysics of emplacement In recent years a spate of neologisms have been coined that speak of an emergent metaphysics of emplacement, a renewed sense of “belonging to the earth”, or an awareness that we need to reconstruct our ties with the place in which we live. The terms, “ethnopoetics” (Tedlock & Rothenberg), “bio-regionalism” (Snyder and others) and “geopoetics” (Kenneth White), and the ideas that surround them, revision our being in the world as embodied minds interpenetrating with other embodied minds and beings in a multi-dimensional geophysical space. This ever-changing space - call it Gaia (Lovelock & Marguelis), earth-house-hold (Snyder), geosphere-biospherenoosphere (Teilhard de Chardin) or global village - is composed of many interdependent layers and domains, each one in an active mutually-responsive relationship with all the others. These layers and domains are alive with an astonishing variety of organisms that inhabit more or less every nook and cranny of the planet, however inhospitable some places may seem (from underwater volcanic vents to Antarctic ice hundreds of metres thick). These organisms (microbes, bacteria, fungi, animals, plants, humans, et al) constitute a sentient, information-processing dimension of multiple consciousnesses and intelligences – an interweaving of cultures, of which human culture is only one example. Each culture encapsulates and articulates a particular way of looking at, knowing about and being in the world. As human beings we can perceive, conceive and handle the world from many perspectives, each one focusing on a different quality or characteristic, and each one providing a distinctive set of models, descriptions and value systems. For instance: we can focus on the material “stuff” of the world – the

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chemistry of “solids”, gases and liquids; we can examine the processes and energies at work throughout the environment – the physics, ecology and meteorology of the planet; we can attend to the temporal sequencing of events – the histories and evolutionary cycles of everything. We can also focus on the diverse cultural patterns that distinguish each form of life in relationship to other forms, processes, geologies and locations. In observing these cultural patterns we become aware of the endlessly varied ways in which organisms interact with each other, the ways in which they inhabit, handle, consume and transform their environment, and the ways in which they encode their experiences of being in a territory, however large or small the organism or the territory might be. Art and poetry, alongside the sciences and other disciplines, offer insights into, and enactments of, these different perspectives. * Kenneth White & “geopoetics” The Scottish poet, Kenneth White, has been instrumental in developing “geopoetics”, an example of a perspective on poetry and the environment that crosses disciplinary boundaries in order to achieve a more holistic synthesis of knowledge. White develops his geopoetics out of a study of two emblematic figures: the German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, and the French poet, Arthur Rimbaud. Both men were what White (2004: 234) calls “intellectual nomads” – they were travellers in both the territories of ideas and geography. They both attempted to make sense of their place in the world in relation to the topography of landscapes and mind. White quotes Nietzsche, looking back on his travels: “I decided to go away into foreign parts, meet what was strange to me. […] Following a long vagabondage, full of research and transformation, with no easy definition. […] You feel space growing all around you, the horizon opens”. (ibid: 235) While Nietzsche wanders in a relatively small European territory (Germany, Switzerland, France, Italy), Rimbaud strikes out further afield (France, Switzerland, Italy, England, Indonesia, Ethiopea). In one of his poems, he writes, “If I have a taste left for anything at all, it’s for the earth and stones”. (ibid) White expands the field of geopoetics to include both other poets and writers like Whitman, Novalis, Thoreau, Rilke, Ezra Pound and Hugh MacDairmid, and

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thinkers like Heidegger, Einstein and the French linguist Gustave Guillaume. The ideas and images of these figures (with the addition of non-Western poets like Han-shan and Basho) are interwoven by White into a matrix or map that offers a framework within which we can think about a “world-culture”. “The work of the geopoetician is to integrate aspects of many cultures into a new coherence”. (ibid: 247) He doesn’t mean by this a kind of universal uniformity, but rather a dappled, varied, many-stranded fabric that reflects the morphologies of many regions, climates, altitudes and social organisations. “The sense of unity prevalent and operative in geopoetics is that of an archipelago”, full of islands of many shapes and sizes. (ibid) For White, the “intellectual nomad” is one who steps outside his immediate cultural and geographical context in order to map a bigger space and to make sense of the many histories, voices and ways of being of humankind. * Cold Mountain and ‘rock & bark’ poetry The writing of poetry about and within the natural world has a long history in China and Japan. Andrew Schelling identifies a particular strand of the Chinese poetic tradition that is called shih-shu, ‘rock and bark poetry’: Rather than being brushed on silk or paper, shih-shu were written on scraps of bamboo, scratched into bark, on rocks, or pecked into cliff faces. (in Pine & O’Connor 1998: 3)

Han-shan, or Kanzan in Japanese, who lived in the T’ang dynasty (c.7th-8th centuries A.D.) was an early exponent of this form of sited poetry - poetry about nature, written with natural materials and placed in a natural location. In Han-shan’s case, his name translates as ‘Cold Mountain’ and also refers to the place in southern China with which he is associated. As Snyder (2000: 521) notes: [Han-shan] is a mountain madman in an old Chinese line of ragged hermits. When he talks about Cold Mountain he means himself, his home, his state of mind […] His poems, of which three hundred survive, are written in T’ang colloquial: rough and fresh. The ideas are Taoist, Buddhist, Zen.

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In the preface to the traditional collection of Han-shan’s poetry, assembled by Lu Ch’iu-yin, the Governor of T’ai prefecture, Ch’iuyin begins to construct, or add to, the myths surrounding the poet. Han-shan is described as a kind of wild and holy fool, who lived as a tramp in the mountains near the Buddhist centre of T’ien-t’ai. In later paintings and poems Han-shan is usually represented as being accompanied by Shih-te, (Jittoku, in Japanese) who, according to Ch’iu-yin, ran the dining hall at a nearby temple. The two characters, are a T’ang dynasty double-act: Han-shan, the comic; with Shih-te, as his foil or straight-man. The former is usually depicted with a scroll, the latter with a broom. Ch’iu-yin has to enlist the help of local monks in gathering information about Han-shan and Shih-te: to find out how they had lived, to hunt up the poems written on bamboo, wood, stones, and cliffs – and also to collect those written on the walls of people’s houses. There were more than three hundred. (ibid: 523)

Han-shan’s poems are full of obvious and subtle metaphors, telling associations and diverse references to Buddhist and Taoist ideas and beliefs. They are also saturated in vivid images and concise descriptions of natural forces, events and beings. The passage of time and the transitory quality of human experience are continual themes: “Slowly consumed, like fire down a candle; / Forever flowing, like a passing river”. (ibid: 525) Han-shan has lived in the world of human affairs, studied history and literature, but without solving any of the riddles of existence or finding equilibrium. Only by disciplined attention and seeing into the undifferentiated nature of things has he been able to find peace and joy – often referred to as “immortality” in the Taoist tradition. In one of the poems he tells how, as a young man, he travelled widely and, Entered cities of boiling red dust. Tried drugs, but couldn’t make Immortal; Read books and wrote poems on history. Today I’m back at Cold Mountain: I’ll sleep by the creek and purify my ears. (ibid)

Only by letting-go of his cravings and attachments (both to gaining worldly goods and success, and to finding wisdom) does he open up another state of mind, another dimension of consciousness. And this

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new state, to an observer, looks like foolishness, or seems too ordinary to be worthy of respect. A critic says to him: “Your poems lack the Basic Truth of Tao”. But Han-shan knows different. He realises that “the old-timers / Who were poor and didn’t care”, were much wiser than the Taoist scholar-critic, who “misses the point entirely, / Men like that / Ought to stick to making money”. (ibid: 526) While acknowledging the tendency towards a rather sentimental aestheticisation of poverty and old-age, which as previously mentioned is a common conceit of Chinese poetry, we have to recognise the important messages that the metaphors carry – about self-knowledge, the untying of bonds of desire and attachment, and about the interdependence of all things. The picture that Han-shan constructs of himself and his environment is intrinsically ecological. He is one strand of being amongst many, a facet of the collective existence or mind. In describing the landscape about him he is also describing the topography of his own consciousness, as we can see in this poem: Cold Mountain is a house Without beams or walls. The six doors left and right are open The hall is blue sky. The rooms all vacant and vague The east wall beats on the west wall At the centre nothing. (ibid: 525)

* Ian Hamilton Finlay’s stone poems The Scottish word-sculptor, Ian Hamilton Finlay, can be considered as a contemporary exponent of shih-shu, ‘rock and bark’ poetry. Coming to prominence with the “concrete poetry” movement in the 1960s Finlay has devoted his career to the placing of words and short texts in the landscape. His garden at Stoneypath in southern Scotland, has been transformed into a sculptural habitat for his epigrammatical poems, mostly carved in stone (though some are cast in bronze). Finlay is interested in the ways in which cultures assimilate nature and in the ideologies at play when places are mythologized and poeticised. His tone is usually ironic, critical and laconic. In one part of his garden, near the edge of a pool, is a small rough-sided stone cube into

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which is carved, on the smooth upper surface, Albrecht Durer’s distinctive monogram. The stone sits on a patch of grass and meadow flowers. Finlay gives it the title, Das Grosse Rasenstuck (The Great Piece of Turf ) after Durer’s famous watercolour. On one level Finlay pays homage to the iconic painting, on another level, we find ourselves smiling at the joke. Durer’s painted celebration of a mundane patch of vegetation is here both quoted and actualised as a real patch of vegetation, but within a cultivated and artistically composed environment. The references throughout the garden, especially to the neo-classical landscape paintings of Poussin and Lorraine and to the related traditions of European garden design, emphasise the domestication of landscape, the narrative structures that, at times, suffocate and obscure any sense of ‘natural’ process and presence. In his Unconnected Sentences on Gardening, (in Beardsley 1998: 205) Finlay refers to Poussin and Salvatore as “Cops and Robbers”, for they and other makers of culture could be accused of having stolen the landscape of agriculture and the agrarian working classes, and the landscape of commons and topographical diversity, and replaced them with a designed space that reflects the taste and power of the aristocracy, the “landed” gentry. In his work Finlay rarely presents an obvious position or straight-forward opinion. There is usually an ambivalence and ambiguity that provokes contrasting responses and interpretations. The landscape, any landscape, is a complex site of innumerable cultures and histories, human and non-human (though Finlay focuses almost entirely on the human). It is also a site of contested values and experiences. The hunter-gatherer, the farmer, the city-dweller, the industrialist and the miner, all have a different sense of what the landscape is and what it means. The landscape of recreation is a different place to the landscape of work or real estate development or military planning, even though it may be the same physical space. When we see the ominous shape of a conning tower of a nuclear submarine, carved in slate, silhouetted against the water’s edge by Lochan Eck, our experience of the open sheep-grazed moorland is unsettled. Finlay’s sculpture, Nuclear Sail, shifts our attention to a radically different set of thoughts, feelings and images. The sense of militarism and conflict trespasses on our walk through the tranquil

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country. Battles, power struggles and violence come to mind, maybe reminding us that the struggle for existence goes on at all levels within nature, a counter-balance to the cooperation and mutuality that binds organisms and beings together. The tenor of Finlay’s thought comes through in these other extracts from his Unconnected Sentences on Gardening (ibid): A garden is not an object but a process. Flowers in a garden are an acceptable eccentricity. […] Superior gardens are composed of Glooms and Solitudes and not of plants and trees. […] Embark on a garden with a vision but never with a plan.

Finlay, like Han-shan and other shih-shu poets, experiences, represents and celebrates the landscape as a place where ideas, thoughts and moods are indwelling. He shares with the Zen-minded designer of the rock and raked-gravel garden of Ryoanji a belief in the cultivated landscape as a site for instruction, learning and metaphysical enquiry. He displays a more overtly interrogative stance to the concept of landscape than his predecessors - questioning its status as social, political, cultural object, the garden as art rather than nature as wilderness - but his poetic handling of words and objects has the same economy as his Chinese and Japanese forbears and a similar ethics of respect links his questioning ambiguousness to their religious clarity. In both cases the processes of nature, refracted through the prism of art and culture, provide a limitless store of narratives, meanings and teachings, when subjected to intelligent and open-minded contemplation. * Nature as represented and conceptualised in Chinese and Japanese painting and poetry: Taoist & Buddhist perspectives The term ‘Tao’ (referred to in some more recent translations as ‘Dao’) is found in the earliest literature of China. It is very ancient and underpins both Confucian and Taoist philosophy and practices. Despite its importance and ubiquity it is very difficult to define, or at least it has many subtle definitions, or perhaps, even better, it has no

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definitions. Many writers note that the “Tao is invisible and nameless”. (Sze 1967: 15) It can be shown or pointed to, but it cannot be verbally defined or conceptually grasped. The Tao is also the source, the origin, ‘the mother of all things’ (Sze 1967: 16). All things emerge or arise from the Tao, and return to the Tao. The Tao is the formless, indefinable, undifferentiated, matrix or potentiality out of which forms arise (yin & yang - see below), temporarily exist and dissolve back into. This dynamic, restless process is similar to the way we perceive forms, colours, objects set against the ground or field of vision – as in the figure-ground relationship in Gestalt theory. Western commentators have sometimes tried to identify the Tao with God, perhaps taking up Spinoza’s identification of God with Nature. However, as Watts points out, “whereas God produces the world by making (wei), the Tao produces it by ‘not-making’ (wu-wei)”. (Watts 1989: 16) The process by which thoughts, ideas, things, forms and objects emerge from the Tao is more like a process of growth than a process of designing and making - a spontaneous arising into a state of becoming out of the ground of being. Taoism often seems perverse to the Western mind because it seems to value nothing as much as something, the unknown as much as the known, letting go as much as holding on! Because the Tao operates on its own terms and in its own way it is wise not to interfere and not to try to grasp what cannot be grasped. For trying to grasp or hang on to the flux of experience, or trying to perpetuate moments of pleasure, beauty, love or success - or moments of pain, ugliness, hate or failure - leads to frustration, dissatisfaction and suffering. From the Taoist perspective natural processes, the processes of life and living, are in constant flux and cannot be halted or prolonged beyond their autonomous, selforganising duration. These ideas and realisations align very closely with Buddhist insights and practices. Indeed the early history of Ch’an (Zen) Buddhism in China is a history of dialogue and rapprochement between Indian Buddhism and Taoism. Taoist ideas can be expressed in Buddhist terms as the Four Noble Truths (diagnosing human dis-ease and its cure). In Sanskrit, the ancient Indian language of Buddhism, these are:

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1. dukkha - often translated as ‘suffering’ but also meaning dissatisfaction, a sense of incompleteness, anxiety, ‘angst’ and a feeling that things are never quite right or harmonious; 2. trishna – ‘desiring, clinging or grasping’, the cause of dukkha which is the result of our ignorance (avidya) about the nature of life as a process of constant change, impermanence, flux (anitya) - this applies equally to our own identity and self-hood, which in Buddhist terms is not an enduring, fixed, entity but a process of moment-bymoment becoming (anatman – ‘absence of an enduring self’, as opposed to the Hindu notion of the atman the ‘enduring transcendent self’ and jivatman, the ‘individual soul, or essential self’); 3. Buddha said that dukkha and trishna can be overcome, that as a consequence or our own efforts we can come to enlightenment by seeing things as they really are, understanding that all things and ourselves are impermanent, realising that clinging leads to frustration, while letting-go leads to liberation (moksha, nirvana, or satori in Zen terms); 4. the fourth Noble Truth is ‘The Eightfold Path’ - the route to enlightenment and understanding advocated by the Buddha, a method or teaching (dharma) by which we can find a way out of, or through, the vicious circle of desiring, clinging, losing, being dissatisfied, desiring again, and so on. According to Brian Brown: early Buddhism identified existence as a thoroughly contextual process: no person or thing is an independent, self-subsisting reality… From its origin, then, the Buddhist tradition reflects a conceptual framework rooted in the central intuition of an ecological perspective where nothing exists in autonomous isolation. (in Tucker & Grim 1994: 126)

All phenomena, including animals, plants, geological processes, clouds, and humans, are mutually interdependent. (see Part 4) This emphasis on mutuality, reciprocity, on relationship and process is central to the idea of sunyata - a term that is usually translated as ‘emptiness’, meaning empty of separate existence, not empty or void

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of any existence whatsoever! To consider anything as separate from anything else is to hold a view that contradicts this reality of interpenetration and mutual interdependence, and is to be in a state of ignorance (avidya). Buddhism anticipates contemporary ecological thinking, especially the “deep ecology” of Arne Naess, and ideas put forward by Capra and others about the interconnectedness of all life – the web of life. For most Buddhists “liberation” is a day-to-day, moment-by-moment process of getting to know our “monkey mind” through careful observation in meditation (zazen) - letting-go of habits, obsessions and all manner of clinging behaviours as they arise, and moving on to the next tangle in the thread of our lives. As far as possible this process involves non-intervention, letting things be, not adding fuel to the fire - practicing wu-wei as Taoists advocate. When actions, thoughts, feelings happen, they should happen cleanly, leaving no residue or trail, no stain - for there is no enduring self to be stained, only an illusion of permanence built up from the sediment of earlier actions, thoughts and feelings which we foolishly try to preserve (“good” thoughts and feelings because we like them, they make us feel good, and “bad” ones because we want to change them into good ones!) Our endlessly chattering mind, in constant dialogue and argument with itself, is in many ways the main constituent of what we call our “self” - we come to think and feel that this is what we are - despite the fact that in those moments when the chattering stops or dies down, rather than ceasing to exist we often feel more alive, alert and in harmony with the world! Within the arts of Chinese Ch’an and Japanese Zen traditions, emphasis is placed on disciplined spontaneity, on recognising the impermanence of things and celebrating the processes of life, experience, change and becoming. Paintings, tea-ceremonies, gardens, calligraphy and poetry provide both a path to understanding or release (satori), a means of celebration, and a way of illuminating a path for others – showing or pointing the way by example. Up until the end of the 19th Century Chinese landscape painting, poetry and other arts were produced by monks and scholars, many of whom also had positions in local government or worked for the Emperor. Hence travel, moving from place to place, is a common theme as highly

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educated poets and artists were moved from region to region across the vast country. A sense of loss, transitoriness, evanescence comes through in a great number of works. Landscape paintings, often inscribed with calligraphic poems, represent carefully observed natural features transformed into highly conventionalised signs and compositions - which many ‘masters’ subvert or use to their own individual ends. Garden makers, who may also be painters and poets, create microcosmic analogues for the natural landscape, the most famous of which is probably the stone and raked-gravel garden at Ryoanji temple in Kyoto, Japan. In all the arts, practitioners maintain a dialogue through practice with the histories and traditions of their discipline. Poems may be re-workings of earlier poems, or be based on, or written on, earlier paintings. Painters will work in the style of earlier artists, or transpose earlier themes or scenes into contemporary idioms. Notions of individual artistic identity are very different to post-Renaissance Western models. For many centuries Japanese artists modelled themselves on Chinese masters. It was not until Sesshu came along that Japanese landscape painting asserted its own distinctive qualities. After a visit to China in 1467 he recounted how his trip “brought home to me the greatness of my own [Japanese] teachers Shubun and Josetsu”. He learnt most from “nature and the customs of the Chinese people… His acceptance of direct experience marked the true foundation of landscape painting in Japan”. (Matsushita 1974: 71-77) Absorption in the landscape, becoming one with all that exists, are aspirations and goals that typify these Chinese and Japanese traditions. Human beings, animals and birds are integrated into the natural environment, often as small forms within the large space of the painting. Often we may have to look closely to find the peasant in a field, the fisherman in a boat, or the scholar sitting in his bamboo hut. Events seem not to be directed by the human figures, who are only a small part of the larger story of the picture - humans are depicted as participants in nature, rather than dominant powers or central characters.

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* Metaphors, Allusions, Yin & Yang Metaphors, symbols, allusions and associations are nearly always threaded into artworks in ways that may be not be at all obvious to a Western viewer or reader. In ancient China the dark and light sides of a valley were referred to as yin and yang. These terms were taken up into the Taoist tradition and were used to signify the two main dynamic forces that arise from the formless Tao. Yin represents: dark, female, passive, night, supple. Yang represents: light, male, dynamic, day, strong. However yin and yang are not separate entities, they are interdependent - reciprocal forces that maintain the dynamic balance of the world. In the traditional symbol for yin and yang notice how they embrace each other, how they each include a hole or eye through which the other can be seen, and how together they form the circle of the Tao.

In Chinese landscape paintings, trees (swaying, dynamic) may represent yang, while a mountain (passive) represents yin. The interaction of dark and light tonality across the picture plane parallels the interaction of yin and yang. The “empty” space of the painting is the formless undifferentiated Tao out of which forms (both yin and yang) arise. At another level a fisherman sitting in a boat may also represent the activity of silent meditation – “fishing” for understanding and enlightenment in the depths of the mind/Tao. Mists often represent the Tao out of which mountains and rivers emerge. Underlying everything in the landscape are the natural forces of changing seasons, cycles of growth and decay, motions of wind, cloud and water. The space of the painting may also be a metaphor for the mind. Birds flying across a space may allude to thoughts arising in the mind, or even monks searching for truth! *

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Wabi, Sabi, Aware & Yugen Traditional Japanese aesthetics (especially within Zen poetry & painting) makes use of four concepts (wabi, sabi, aware, yugen) that many writers have struggled to translate into English - but which are important to an understanding of how landscape is represented and attended to in Japanese culture. Suzuki (1973: 22-23) describes wabi as meaning, ‘poverty’ or ‘not to be in the fashionable society of the time’: To be poor… not to be dependent on things worldly… to be satisfied with a little hut… a dish of vegetables picked in the neighbouring fields, and perhaps to be listening to the pattering of a gentle spring rainfall.

However we need to keep in mind that painters and poets of the Zen schools were usually reasonably well-off scholars, or they were monks who were supported by their institutions and the charity of local people. The “poverty” alluded to is a poverty of the mind rather than the at times grinding poverty of peasants or later working-classes! Wabi is a state of being “quietly content with the mystical contemplation of Nature and to feel at home with the world”. Suzuki adds, “we all seem to have an innate longing for primitive simplicity, close to the natural state of living”.(ibid) Watts refers to wabi as catching “a glimpse of something rather ordinary and unpretentious in its incredible ‘suchness’”(tathata). As examples of this mood or quality he gives Blyth’s translations of two haiku (unascribed): A brushwood gate, And for a lock This snail. Winter desolation; In the rain-water tub, Sparrows are walking. (in Watts 1989: 186)

In many examples of Japanese (and Chinese) traditional landscape painting economy of brushwork, a kind of poverty of means, is combined with asymmetry, a balanced imbalance, to produce a beauty

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of imperfection that seems to arise from apparent simplicity and effortlessness in execution. According to Suzuki (1973: 24-25) when “beauty of imperfection is accompanied by antiquity or primitive uncouthness, we have a glimpse of sabi” - a quality that is much “prized by Japanese connoisseurs”. He defines sabi as literally meaning ‘loneliness’ or ‘solitude’. As an example he quotes the teamaster, Fujiwara Sadaiye: As I come out To this fishing village, Late in the autumn day, No flowers in bloom I see, Nor any tinted maple leaves. (ibid)

Watts (1989: 186) describes sabi as being, “loneliness in the sense of Buddhist detachment, of seeing all things as happening ‘by themselves’ in miraculous spontaneity”. On a withered branch A crow is perched, In the autumn evening. With the evening breeze, The water laps against The heron’s legs. Sleet falling; Fathomless, infinite Loneliness. (ibid:185-186) [Blyth’s translation echoing an old Chinese poem about “snow falling on snow”]

According to Watts (ibid: 181): “When the moment evokes a more intense, nostalgic sadness, connected with autumn and the vanishing away of the world, it is called aware”. For example: The evening haze; Thinking of past things, How far-off they are! (ibid: 187)

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Watts adds: “and when the vision is the sudden perception of something mysterious and strange, hinting at an unknown never to be discovered, the mood is called yugen”. (ibid: 181-182) The sea darkens; The voices of the wild ducks Are faintly white. (ibid)

Note that in all these examples human experiences are represented in relation to nature, to a landscape within which human beings move and which forms the main object of contemplation or reflection. The idea of naturalness, as a state of acting in accordance with nature, is affirmed as a quality to be attained and demonstrated in poetry or painting. Note also the links with Romantic sensibility in the European tradition, especially ideas of the sublime put forward by Burke and Kant, and the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich. It is no coincidence that R.H. Blyth, the translator of the haiku quoted above, wrote a book entitled, Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics, in which he traces many connections between Zen sensibility and English poetry, particularly the Romantics. * The Goethean method of observing and reading the landscape Interesting similarities and differences can be traced between the ways in which Taoist hermits and classical Chinese and Japanese artistpoets engage with landscape and Goethe’s ideas about observing the natural world. Both emphasise the importance of attention to what is present, a patient and rigorous phenomenological method, while also advocating the use of imagination and intuition in opening up the meanings that arise when we attune ourselves to a particular location or aspect of nature. The Goethean method comprises four stages. First, using “perception to see the form, second, using imagination to perceive its mutability, and third, inviting inspiration to reveal the gesture. The fourth stage uses intuition both to combine and to go beyond the previous stages”. (Brook 1998: 56) Goethean science aims at a participatory identification with the “objects” of enquiry, which are not seen as remote and autonomous but rather as close and woven into the sensory field of the

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scientist. The approach is holistic and deeply ecological. The natural scientist could be said to be an agent of consciousness in, and of, the world – realising the forms of nature in forms of human thought. This empathic method is accompanied by an ethical dimension, a sense in which the Goethean scientist is empowered to act on behalf of the natural forms. Conservation, guardianship, care and advocacy are integral to the scientific project, not an optional ethics that may or may not be attached to a science considered as objective empiricism. Science in Goethe’s view is value-laden rather than neutral, giving voice to natural forms and beings. As Brook (ibid: 57) puts it: “Being one with the object allows an appreciation of the content or meaning of the form as well as the form itself”. The Goethean method is as much about the development of “sensual and emotional awareness to experience phenomena as fully as possible”, developing “a sense of wonder to the world”, as it is about the gathering of information and the construction of theory. (ibid: 52) This approach to science has obvious parallels with artistic disciplines like drawing (for instance as conceived by Ruskin and as practiced by artists from Palaeolithic times to contemporary exponents like Susan Rothenberg or Joseph Beuys) or poetry (for example, in the work of Clare, Wordsworth, Ted Hughes, Snyder, Heaney and the poetries of many indigenous tribal peoples). In each discipline heightened awareness and attunement to the topographical and ontological structures of nature are combined with an intention to picture or sing the world of natural phenomena. Drawing and poetry become methods of phenomenological enquiry and modes of consciousness, as well as modes of showing and singing. In his poem, What You Should Know To Be A Poet, Gary Snyder advises aspirant poets to learn: all you can about animals as persons. the names of trees and flowers and weeds. names of stars, and the movements of the planets and the moon. your own six senses, with a watchful and elegant mind. (Snyder 1970: 50)

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* John Wolseley The above poetic prospectus outlined by Snyder could be applied to the work of John Wolseley, an English artist resident in Australia since 1976. Wolseley’s paintings and drawings bring together themes of journeying, visual and spatial enquiry, botanical and topographical analysis, and a sensory recording of being-in-a-place. These themes connect to Snyder’s poetic practices, to Goethe’s scientific methods and to the ideas of John Ruskin described below. Wolseley grounds his practice, quite literally, in the Australian bush. As an artist educated within the British/European context he has had to find ways of engaging with a landscape that was not only strikingly different to that of northern Europe but also culturally framed in very different ways. The tensions and contradictions between the traditions of white European immigrants and the indigenous peoples of the vast Australian landmass were played out in the slow development of a “Western” mode of representation that could do justice to the distinctive non-European terrain. Through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries painters tried to apply the conventions and ideas being developed in Paris, London and New York. By the nineteen-fifties artists like Sidney Nolan and Arthur Boyd had developed styles that combined European modernist (expressionist) modes of representation with narratives and themes drawn from the history of exploration and settlement that were also the focus of novels like Voss by Patrick Wright (published in 1957). However it was only with the work of artists such as Fred Williams in the sixties and seventies, and Wolseley in the eighties and nineties, that a revisioning of the Australian landscape was fully established. While Williams developed a gestural, calligraphic mode of painterly abstraction related to American artists like Motherwell and De Kooning and also to late Monet and to Bonnard drawings, Wolseley adopted and revised a mode of topographical representation that extends back to eighteenth century English water-colourists and botanical artists, and to Ruskin’s practices in the nineteenth century. While the European tradition tends to be about standing back and viewing landscape from a distance, Wolseley and Williams picture the experience of being in or passing through a particular terrain. In

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Wolseley’s case this involves a mode of pictorial construction that combines many different viewpoints, including close-ups, birds-eye images and geological and botanical details, brought together into sensory maps of particular localities or inter-connected geographies. Like Williams he makes most of his work on site, often in terrain that is remote and inhospitable. Working with watercolour, graphite and other media on paper, many works are large (eg. 1.5 x 2.0 metres) made up of smaller units produced at campsites on extended journeys. The interweaving of multi-perspectival drawings, suggestive of changing spatial orientation, bodily movement and shifting ideas about scale, perception and representation, bring to mind Snyder’s poems of working in the landscape and Charles Waterton’s writings about his travels. No fixed position is taken, geographically, perceptually or culturally. Wolseley seems to be constantly trying to work out where he is, how he is positioned in relation to the natural environment around him and how to make sense of his own cultural hybridity – as an Englishman, in Australia, in a landscape suffused with the iconography, symbolism and myths of indigenous peoples who have struggled to survive the colonial encroachments of Western culture. In his charting of narratives of journeying, sensory enquiry and ecological interconnectedness, Wolseley’s work, though very different in method and style, has a curious relationship with the work of contemporary aboriginal artists like Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri. A similar process of mapping linked to storytelling and visual representation links both artists, despite the differences of personal background and culture. It is as if Wolseley has taken the ideas and methods advocated and practiced by Ruskin on his travels through Europe, and transposed them to this radically different context. Yet the transposition works very effectively, enabling Wolseley to engage with, analyse and picture his surroundings in a manner that is both visually arresting and meaningful. Underlying Wolseley’s practice is a profound recognition of the world as process, both physically extensive and indeterminate in form and unfolding structure. Wolseley (1999: 45) quotes F. David Peat, describing the ideas of the physicist David Bohm: The stable forms we see around us are not primary in themselves but only the temporary unfolding of the underlying implicate order. To take rocks,

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As an artist Wolseley (2000: 3) analyses the world as both an indeterminate process and a physical presence. Painting is a manipulation of, and a representation of, the materiality of the world: …concerned with the physical makeup of matter and a certain attachment to the structure and texture of the surrounding world. Our ideas are actually expressed within tactile stuff or matter – the medium of paint.

However, he notes how, at the same time, he is trying to describe in his work: …a kind of inter-weaving of very light, almost invisible, elusive and allusive strands and traces. I think a quality of lightness, of the idea that landscape is made up of fields of energy, is the kind of thing drawing can do rather well… I feel that once we have learnt to see, feel, smell, and hear these subtle geographies, then we can enter into the sumptuous weave of structures which is the sand dune, a spinifex plain, or a forest. (ibid: 7)

As with Ruskin and Goethe, art and science are modes of empathic engagement, involving an intensification of experience which is analytical, integrative and celebratory. This form of enquiry is characterised by participation and involvement rather than by separation and standing back in an attempt to be a neutral observer. Wolseley’s intention is both poetically ambitious and a prosaic recognition of how things are. He tries to convey in his paintings: The idea that our nervous system, our dreams and our visions are one with the patterns and movements which connect a flower to the drifting of continents and the whirling of galaxies. Matter does not exist independently of us. If we so allow, we can be the Earth thinking. (1999: 46)

Like Ruskin and Goethe before him, Wolseley is trying to enter into the presence of a particular place, to experience both the substance of stone and tree and the insubstantial flux of changing structures, events and processes that constitute our being-in-the-world. This also means engaging with histories of being, cultures of presence, inscribed in the stories, myths, images and landforms around us – what Wolesley

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calls, “the primal morphology” of a place, the fields of energy immanent in a particular patch of ground. And these histories of being are woven out of many strands: human, animal, plant, mineral – filaments of light and matter bound up in ever-changing pools of consciousness. * Drawing nature: Ruskin’s disciplined attention The visible world was to Ruskin a reflection of God, a sacred domain manifest in the most mundane stone or leaf or cast of light on a house front. In Ruskin’s thinking the relationship between ethics and aesthetics is very close. Honesty regarding what is seen and the way things are, is fundamental. Drawing should be an engagement with the visible, with the sensory field, as uninflected as possible by personality or ego. Drawing was for Ruskin a discipline for unknowing, letting go and accepting the grace of nature – a kind of liberation from assumptions and from habits of perception and thinking. Seeing is a sacred act: The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion, - all in one. (Ruskin, in Hewison 1976: jacket quote)

The task for Ruskin is to see the structural processes of nature as they manifest themselves in natural forms like rocks, rivers, leaves and mountains. This means the artist has to see through the labels and ideas that he or she may have about the landscape, in order to see what is actually there. At the end of Modern Painters I, Ruskin advises that all artists “should go to nature in all singleness of heart […] neglecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing”. (in Walton 1972: 53) In 1842, while drawing a tree at Fontainebleu, Ruskin noticed how when he attends more to the tree, to what his senses reveal of the strange organic form before him, and attends less to his idea of what the finished drawing should look like, the lines in the drawing somehow compose themselves into forms that have the presence of

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the tree. (see Hewison 1976: 41) In a letter written about the same time Ruskin advises a college friend who is learning to draw: Now, when you sit down to sketch from nature you are not to compose a scene… from materials before you. Still less are you to count stones or measure angles. You are to imbue your mind with the peculiar spirit of the place. (in Walton 1972: 37)

This is remarkably similar to Goethe’s empathic method. There is also an intriguing echo of the Taoist idea of wu-wei, doing by not-doing. By attending fully to the Fontainebleu tree Ruskin recounts how the drawing seemed to materialise of itself, unforced and unexpected. Ruskin had a sophisticated awareness of how the senses operate as a function of a mind. Walton notes (ibid: 98): “in Ruskin’s work we feel his concern to record not only the sensations of the eye, but their reactions on the mind, sympathies, and emotions”. And Ruskin himself argued that by drawing, students “actually obtained a power of the eye and a power of the mind wholly different from that known to any other discipline”. (in Hewison 1976: 172) The unfolding of sensations, of thinking through images, and of constructing representations through trial and error, are integral aspects of the process of drawing. Drawing is both perceiving, imaging, thinking and representing. Seeing through the discipline of drawing was for Ruskin “the ordering of intelligence”, a mode of metaphysical insight and philosophical enquiry. (see Hewison 1976: 197) A surprisingly large proportion of Ruskin’s drawings appear to be unfinished, or at least they don’t have the quality of “finish”, completeness or conclusion that most professional artists demonstrated in the early nineteenth century. The process of drawing as thinking with pencil on paper is always in evidence. We can see the way in which Ruskin’s mind is working, how he tries to find visual analogues for his perceptual handling of the world. Observation, in his case, is participation. Ruskin is in the environment, in the mist, sun and rain, sensing the light and touch of what is around him. He anticipates Cezanne in his struggle to be true to his sensations, to record something of the complexity of sensing and representing the world. Many of Ruskin’s drawings are of fragments of the visual field, fragments which nevertheless convey, suggest or evoke the quality of the whole.

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Somehow fugitive traces of what is passing through Ruskin’s sensing mind are inscribed on the pages of his notebooks and sketchpads, still alive with the improvisatory movements of eyes, body, hand and mind. The way in which lines tail off into white paper and then pick up another aspect of the visible landscape elsewhere on the page, suggests the endless unfinished business of perception, of being in a place, as well as suggesting the tracery of connections between things. Ruskin’s father despaired of his son’s methods but he recognised that there was something in the drawings: “all true – truth itself, but truth in mosaic […] a mass of hieroglyphics”. Ruskin described his practice as “a constant habit of making little patches and scratches of the sections and fractions of things in a notebook”. (in Walton 1972: 67) These discontinuities of form and the practice of drawing as notation are indicative of Ruskin’s awareness of the flux of nature, both in relation to the changing light, season and form of the landscape around him and to his changing perceptions of these conditions. In Ruskin’s view the artist had a special role in drawing attention to the dynamic processes and rhythms that infused all of nature from the obvious patterns of growth and decay in plants and animals, to the less obvious patterns of change in mountains. In 1854-55 he writes about the need to move away from depicting natural forms as static features, but rather to convey, “not so much what these forms of the earth actually are, as what they are constantly becoming”. (ibid: 76) A lifetime of notational practices in writing and drawing led Ruskin to the realisation that the world is process. While he may have begun his artistic life believing that an observer was somehow removed from the object of observation, he certainly came to the view that we are all active participants in the world. In this he anticipates more recent thinking about ecology and interconnectedness, perceptual systems and physics, an outlook exemplified by Bronowski’s remarks: The world is not a fixed, solid array of objects, out there, for it cannot be fully separated from our perception of it. It shifts under our gaze, it interacts with us… (Bronowski 1977: 364)

*

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* Perception as Participation The ideas of Goethe and Ruskin can form a bridge between the Taoist approach to landscape and the phenomenological approach outlined by David Abram in his exploration of the ways in which indigenous peoples engage with their world. Early on in his book, The Spell of the Sensuous, (1997) Abram outlines some key characteristics of the phenomenological ideas of first Heidegger and then Merleau-Ponty. He then makes use of Merleau-Ponty’s approach and vocabulary to make connections between our own perceptual experience and the experiences of indigenous peoples, particularly the shaman/magician who is a key figure in hunter-gatherer cultures. Acknowledging his debt to Levy-Bruhl (French anthropologist) Abram writes: “animals, particular places and persons and powers may all be felt to participate in one another’s existence, influencing each other and being influenced in turn”. (1997: 57) This notion of participation arises (in Merleau-Ponty’s view) from our basic perceptual experiences which are always participatory, involving, “an active interplay […] between the perceiving body and that which it perceives. Prior to all our verbal reflections, at the level of our spontaneous, sensorial engagement with the world around us, we are all animists”. (ibid) He uses the term perception to mean: “the concerted activity of all the body’s senses as they function and flourish together”. (ibid: 59) He also makes use of Merleau-Ponty’s term, “the flesh of the world”, by which he means the zone of contact between us, our bodies and the world - the fusion between skin and air, eye and light, tongue and food - our reciprocal relationship with the world: We can experience things - can touch, hear, and taste things - only because, as bodies, we are ourselves included in the sensible field, and have our own textures, sounds, and tastes…We might as well say that we are organs of this world, flesh of its flesh, and that the world is perceiving through us... our experience of the forest is nothing more than the forest experiencing itself. (ibid: 68)

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This view connects closely with the worldview of many indigenous, oral cultures. Abram quotes Richard Nelson (writing about the ecology of the Koyukon Indians of north central Alaska): Koyukon people live in a world that watches, in a forest of eyes… The surroundings are aware, sensate, personified… They must… be treated with the proper respect. (ibid: 69)

Abram suggests that this view could be the basis for an environmental/ecological ethics based upon respect, attentiveness and attunement - grounded in the reciprocity of awareness, the participatory nature of our experience within the “flesh of the world” - a “sensorial empathy with the living land that supports us”. (ibid: 69) Note the similarity of vocabulary and approach to that of Goethean science. Abram’s emphasis on the reciprocity of perception affirms what is evident to us in our most intense moments of awareness. In such moments it is as if the nucleic self is dissolved, the observing subject becomes one with the observed object. The sensory field is itself energised and alive. We are only one facet of this dynamic field. Just as we experience textures and tastes, we ourselves are textures and tastes. Just as we listen to the sounds of the world we are ourselves emitting sounds and being listened to. As we process information at the genetic, metabolic, sensory and symbolic/linguistic levels we are integral to other information processing systems within other organisms (human and non-human, animals and plants). We are knowing and unknowing participants in fields of information transaction that constitute the hum of communications between all points in the web of existence. Within oral cultures participation in the web of existence is mediated, celebrated and speculated upon in vivid and complex linguistic structures that are rooted in sensory experience: In indigenous, oral cultures… language seems to encourage and augment the participatory life of the senses, while in Western civilisation language seems to deny or deaden that life, promoting a massive distrust of sensorial experience while valorising an abstract realm of ideas hidden behind or beyond the sensory appearances. (Abram 1997: 71)

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In oral cultures, “words do not speak about the world; rather they speak to the world […] to the expressive presences that, with us, inhabit the world”. (ibid) Songs and tales are modes of address, greetings, supplications and celebrations of the phenomenal world. Conversations and dialogues with other beings, human and nonhuman, are central to the evolution of languages around the world: You surprise me, crow whenever you see wolf people you get way up on some branch (Tlingit song, in Rothenberg 1972: 156) * You, you, caribou yes you long legs yes you long ears … (Eskimo, Magic Words for Hunting Caribou, ibid: 47) * In the very earliest time, when both people and animals lived on earth, a person could become an animal if he wanted to and an animal could become a human being. Sometimes they were people and sometimes animals and there was no difference. All spoke the same language. That was the time when words were like magic. (Magic Words - after Nalungiaq, ibid: 45)

Abram (2004: 20) writes about the ways in which the landscape also provides a mnemonic device for the storage and retrieval of oral narratives: Thus, while the accumulated knowledge of our oral ancestors was carried in their stories, the stories themselves were carried by the surrounding earth. The local landscape was alive with stories! Travelling through the terrain, one felt teachings and tellings sprouting from every nook and knoll.

Mithen (1998: 190) agrees that in southwest France for instance, the evidence of “caves and rockshelters covered with paintings” (dating

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from 40,000 years ago) suggests that “the Upper Palaeolithic hunters were also living in a landscape full of symbolic meanings”. The natural world is also a social and symbolic world, a place in which minds, beings, places and forces interact and interpenetrate in a complex and ever-changing field of cultures.

Old-man-stone As a boy I can remember wandering beside granite tors and across bilberry-covered commons, through my uncle’s farmland to a nearby monastery. Wherever I looked, the walls, old barns, massive rocky outcrops and scrubby woods held memories of things that had happened to me and my friends. These personal links to the physical

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terrain were inter-mingled with other tales and significances that came from local lore and legend. This is the place in the old quarry where the body was found below “dead man’s drop”. This is where the witch lived. This ruin is where the old sisters lived who built the walls over there. This huge rock is the old man of the forest, who sat here for so long waiting for his woman to come home that he turned to stone and he still gazes longingly at each sunset hoping to hear her voice. The land was shaped as much by these fables and images as by the forces of geology and climate. I’ve photographed and drawn the old-man-stone from my childhood many times over the years. It is emblematic of so many things: patience, endurance, hope, tragedy, a stoic indifference to passing circumstances, an agedness that is indifferent to time. It teaches me as much about sitting meditation as any Zen master or Taoist elder. It is a powerful reference point in my body’s negotiation of space and geography, and in the layered history of my mind. I think of the old-man-stone when I read the following Omaha poem/song: Unmoved from time without end you rest there in the midst of the paths in the midst of the winds you rest covered with the droppings of birds grass growing from your feet your head decked with the down of birds you rest in the midst of the winds you wait Aged One (Abram 1997: 71)

There is a remarkable similarity in the ways in which the Omaha and my childhood friends think of the rock as a presence, a teacher and a marker. A deep-rooted sense of the landscape as intelligent presence links my Leicestershire, Charnwood Forest, post-second-world-war cultural milieu and the culture of a people of the North American

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plains. In each case human beings feel themselves to be implicated in the natural world, participants in the histories of flesh, leaf and stone that make up the cultural ecology of the land. Day-to-day existence is woven through with mythic tales and images that condense in particular natural features and places. The landscape is conceptualised and felt as a realm of interwoven presence and otherness, strangeness and familiarity, human and non-human, physical stuff and immaterial energy. * Nature is Big Mind, an indeterminate field of interpenetrating beings and intelligences. Everything causes everything else - mutual coarising. And every “thing” is a process, an event, a burst of information, sensation, experience illuminating Big Mind for a moment then melting away into a pool of history that becomes accessible and shared through a symbolic memory of stories, songs, poetries, images, artefacts and dance. Nature is complex, full of intricate patterns, woven through with unfathomable strands of causation that generate indeterminacy out of determinacy. Chance events arise at the interstices of countless lines of intention, desire, evolutionary instinct and cultural play, as beings and processes live their interdependent networks of existence. In Hindu cosmology the universe is characterised as lila, a state of cosmic play – a state of endlessly changing interactions that are ultimately non-intentional, indeterminate, serendipitous and joyful. To live wisely and to be fulfilled is to be at ease with complexity, change and indeterminacy. This leads me to think of John Cage, trying to fulfil two vocations in his art and music. On the one hand, learning from Coomaraswamy, Cage was moved “to imitate nature in her manner of operation” - not representing appearances, but constructing compositional processes that are analogous to the operational modes of nature; and, on the other hand, he believed art had a primary function to “sober and quiet the mind so that it is in accord with what happens”. (quoted in Brown 2000: 45) Art could be a way of developing openness and flexibility of mind, grounded in non-judgemental attentiveness and clarity of perception. Art that imitates the structural modes of nature presents us

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with opportunities to develop modes of being, thinking and perceiving that enable us to lead everyday lives in accordance with nature. Everything we do and experience can be a means of fulfilment and enjoyment. Doing as nature does is to be in harmony with the way things are, to be attuned to nature’s processes - to be, to feel and to think as one of the infinite manifestations of Big Mind. * The great Japanese poet and walker, Matsuo Basho, had similar beliefs to Cage about the vocation of the poet. As befits a master of haiku poetry he expressed the heart of his kado, or ‘Way of Poetry’, in the following concise statement: “Follow nature, return to nature, be nature”. (Sam Hamill’s translation, in Basho 2000: 177) On his deathbed Basho (ibid, p.168) wrote in a matter-of-fact way about the vicissitudes of life, sensing perhaps that his walking days were over: Sick on my journey, only my dreams will wander these desolate moors

* In his poem, Poet, Kenneth White (1966: 51) has this to say about the poetic voice: I have said nothing for so many days my skull lying at the edge of a tide now when I open my mouth to speak it is the sea that speaks

* “Songs are thoughts, sung out with the breath when people are moved by great forces & ordinary speech no longer suffices. Man is moved just like the ice floe sailing here & there in the current. His thoughts are driven by a flowing force when he feels joy, when he feels fear, when he feels sorrow”. - Statement by Orpingalik, Netsilik Eskimo (Rothenberg 1969: 360)

* Art can be seen as being part of a much bigger enterprise: the activity of coming to know the world and coming to know the self, a process

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that involves a reorientation of being-in-the-world, a regrounding, a revised way of being and doing. Ontology indivisible from epistemology and making things. * An Atlantic storm blows in at night, up and over Dartmoor, around the north-western shoulder of Haldon Hill, swooping down into the Exe valley. City lights cast a warm glow to the underbelly of low fastmoving clouds. The old yew thrashes about and the Monterey pines hiss in dark winds. At 3.00am my mind stirs with badger, owl and ghostly deer – alert to whip of branch and scent of moor-shadowed ocean. The rush of air and pulp of sound brings me history of gullflicked waves. A confusion of energies condensed into sharpness of sensation. A taste lingers of many yesterdays, clamorous and calm. * Phenomenology, shamanism & indigenous peoples Taking as a starting point extracts from David Abram’s book, The Spell of the Sensuous, (1997) I’d like to briefly explore some of the beliefs and practices that typify the relationships between indigenous, tribal peoples and the natural world. In doing this it is inevitable that I will be simplifying and generalising about a complex field of study. However it is important to get a sense of how our hunter-gatherer ancestors (and contemporaries – though these are few and far between) think about the natural world, particularly as the huntergatherer (and subsistence pastoralist) system is the most enduring kind of social organisation that we have known – sustained in one form or another by Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens for up to 100,000 years. Arguments about the length of human history continue, and dates are continually being pushed back. Homo Sapiens (our species) have been around for at least 40,000 years (probably much longer), and our close relatives the Neanderthals (also hunter-gatherers) inhabited Europe and the Near East for almost 100,000 years. This longevity attests to the effectiveness of hunter-gathering as a way of life. It’s quite a thought that according to Richard Fortey (1997: 359) a small species of mammoth - often hunted by early humans - survived on Wrangell Island until 5,000 years ago, when the first pyramids were being built!

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The first cultivation of crops - especially cereals - began in different parts of the world between five and ten thousand years ago. It is important to keep in mind that most tribal or indigenous peoples around the world are (or were in recent or ancient times) huntergatherers or subsistence pastoralists (growing food largely for themselves), with an oral, visual and material culture. They are, or were, often nomadic for all or part of the year. * The shaman In order to give something of the “flavour” of indigenous, tribal cultures it is useful to consider the role of the shaman and the worldview associated with shamanic practices. Within many, or most, hunter-gatherer cultures, the shaman is a key figure, occupying a central position of power, respect and influence. The shaman in Mircea Eliade's arresting phrase is a “technician of the sacred”, a mediator between the realms of nature and human beings, between the conscious and subconscious/dreamworld, the living and the dead. Shamanism is “an archaic technique of ecstasy”. (Eliade 1964) The shaman has a primary integrative function, holding together the tribal group (and in some cases holding together the shaman's own identity and self), making coherent the seeming incoherence of human experience in an environment that could appear hostile and uncertain, full of mysterious energies and forces. The shaman acts as a healer in a holistic sense - he/she heals him/herself, other tribal members, the social group as a whole - and also heals any rift that may occur between the human and non-human realms. The shaman repairs any tears in the fabric of our relationships with the four-leggeds, wingedones, crawling creatures, trees, stones and winds! Abram argues against the popular notion that shamanism is about humans attempting to contact the “supernatural” realm, instead he makes the point that the shaman/magician is mostly concerned with more fully entering the natural realm, becoming more fully conscious of the phenomenal field that includes non-human beings - animals, plants, trees, waters, clouds, even rocks and mountains. We are participants in this realm not spectators - although the dominance of the dualistic Cartesian tradition tends to make Westerners act, feel and

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think like spectators, separated from the world we co-habit with other creatures. [In] indigenous cultures, the sensuous world [the natural world] itself remains the dwelling place of the gods, of the numinous powers that can either sustain or extinguish human life. (Abram 97: 10)

The purpose of shamanistic magic, according to Abram, is to establish experiential contact with the non-human realm - developing an ecological awareness grounded in human perception. Magic, then, in its… most primordial sense, is the experience of existing in a world made up of multiple intelligences, the intuition that every form one perceives… is an experiencing form… only by altering the common organisation of his senses will [the shaman/magician] be able to enter into rapport with the multiple sensibilities that animate the local landscape. (ibid: 9)

Hence the importance within shamanic practices of dreaming, trance states and the use of hallucinogenic substances. One characteristic of the tribal view of the universe is of a sacred entity (uni-verse), an integrated whole. The universe is composed of parts which are interdependent, interwoven and alive - animate rather than inanimate. In Earth House Hold (1969: 123) Gary Snyder writes: Everything was alive – the trees, grasses, and winds were dancing with me, talking with me; I could understand the songs of the birds…. The phenomenal world experienced at certain pitches is totally living, exciting, mysterious, filling one with a trembling awe, leaving one grateful and humble…

Abram links this idea that “everything was alive” to a belief that intelligence is not an exclusively human faculty located somewhere inside our skulls, but is rather a power of the animate Earth itself, in which we humans, along with the hawks and the thrumming frogs, all participate. It is to know, further, that each land, each valley, each wild community of plants and animals and soils, has its particular style of intelligence, its unique mind or imagination evident in the particular patterns that play out there. (Abram 2004: 21

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Human culture as evident in what we produce, and how we act, sing, visualise and symbolise the world, is one amongst many cultures of plants, animals, bacteria and other organisms in all the diverse habitats of the earth. Each eco-system is a culture, a particular “style of intelligence”, finely tuned to its patch of earth, territory or migratory domain. While we conceptualise, quantify and categorise the world through language, measurement and rational analysis - leading us to think about animals, plants, other entities and each other as “things” and “objects” quite separate from ourselves - the role of the shaman is to affirm and maintain our contact with, and attention to, the world-as-awhole. The shaman reminds us of our place within the flux of natural presences and processes. Through the disciplined power of his or her personality and a remarkable range of techniques the shaman accesses all the various realms of nature (both living and dead - death being to the shamanic mind just one more strand in the web of life), and uses this integrating, connecting and transmuting power for the benefit of the whole community.

Hunting consciousness Weston La Barre (1972) has shown how our own physiology has changed very little since palaeolithic times. Both our brain and body evolved into their present form in order to cope with the needs, stresses and delights of a hunter-gatherer life-style. While our modern Western worldview may be very different to that of hunter-gatherer peoples we have common perceptual and imaginative aptitudes, and we still inhabit and participate in an environment of natural forces, processes and beings - even though we may act and think as if we didn’t!

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Snyder writes about hunting (from his youth onwards he has spent a lot of time with Native Americans of the Pacific North West): To hunt means to use your body and senses to the fullest: to strain your consciousness to feel what the deer are thinking today, this moment; to sit still and let your self go into the birds and wind while waiting by a game trail. Hunting magic is designed to bring the game to you - the creature who has heard your song, witnessed your sincerity. (Snyder 1969: 120)

Snyder argues that hunting is a primary context within which consciousness (the senses, thought, will and imagination) is developed and tuned. Awareness is heightened, the mind is disciplined and explored. The condensation and externalisation of these experiences

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and disciplines into narrative, song, poetry and drawn imagery is also the beginnings of religion, in the sense that religion (religio – ‘to connect’) is a disciplined engagement with the web of interpenetrating energies which is the world – a world of beings, trees, plants, rocks, valleys, streams, clouds, shadows and light. Brody makes a similar point: Hunter-gatherer knowledge is dependent on the most intimate possible connection with the world and with the creatures in it […] Rather than seeking to change the world, hunter-gatherers know it. They also care for it, showing respect and paying attention to its well-being. (2001: 254)

And the shaman is a primary knowledge-bearer, using sleep and unconsciousness [& alcohol, peyote, etc.] to move through the walls around reality in order to know it better […] The dreamer makes a journey into the land, although his body remains asleep in the safety of his home. The dreamer [hunter] crosses the boundary between humans and animals, making contact with his prey […] The events of the dream are relied upon as a guide to trails and the location of animals. In this way, dreaming is [hunting] or a phase of gathering […] Dreamers are aware of the facts; their brains are full of the right kinds of knowledge. But they leave it to a final intuition to ‘see’ the correct choice […] Intuition is a way of paying the closest and deepest possible attention to the world (Brody 2001: 258-260)

Lommel (1972: 117) suggests that “the special psychic techniques of […] the shaman, have evolved out of the religious concepts of the hunter”. The shaman believes that by entering into trance states he or she can enter the consciousness of other beings, particularly animals. This use of trance, brought on by hallucinogenic drugs and ascetic practices (for instance, sleep deprivation or fasting), is common amongst shamanic cultures around the world – hence Eliade’s reference to shamanism as “archaic techniques of ecstasy”. LewisWilliams (2002: 133) also claims that “shamanism is fundamentally posited on a range of institutionalized altered states of consciousness”. He provides an eloquent argument, supported by a wealth of examples as evidence, in favour of the idea that “the visual, aural and somatic experiences of [altered] states give rise to perceptions of an alternative reality that is frequently tiered” (ibid) – hence the idea of realms above and below the everyday reality. With the assistance of “spirit

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helpers”, who usually appear in a dream or trance state, shamans can communicate with other beings, move between different realms of being and gain knowledge of the other intelligences that inhabit the world. The image of the “sky-ladder” appears many times in shamanic myths. The shaman could use a sky-ladder to climb from one world to another in a universe composed of a multitude of layers inhabited by evil spirits, good spirits, kinds of animals, winds, rains, and all other kinds of beings. Lewis-Williams also argues that “the behaviour of the human nervous system in certain altered states creates the illusion of dissociation from one’s body” (ibid) a phenomenon that may explain the frequent references to out-of-body experiences, the ability to fly and possession by spirits within shamanic cultures. Another characteristic of the shamanic view of the universe is that nothing is fixed, one thing can become another, can be two or more things at once. Time can shift and be dislocated. Space can be compressed or expanded at will. There is an acute awareness of indeterminacy, process and change - a deep sense of the fluidity of the universe - a universe of ceaselessly modulated energies that are interpenetrating and interdependent. Lommel (1972) argues that the artefacts associated with shamanism, the images, clothes and devices connected with their work, are full of this changeful nature. They embody a deeprooted experience of unpredictability and instability, and are full of transformations, associations, layers of meaning and significance. The rhythms and energies of life are ever-present and it is this presence which the art of shamanism makes visible and tangible to the community. Examples of these qualities can be found in artefacts from many different cultures, for example: the masks of the Inuit peoples of the far north; palaeolithic cave drawings from many parts of the world; Yaqui masks from northern Mexico; Australian aboriginal drawings & petroglyphs. It is interesting to note that we rarely find, if at all, visual representations of landscape as such within these cultures. That is, landscape as a panoramic view, distanced from an “observer”. What we do find are iconic, indexical (and symbolic) signs, representing beings, forms and phenomena within the landscape. Natural forms are located in nature, bison, for instance, are drawn on rocky forms that suggest the contours of a bison. Landscape as a subject of art comes later as human

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beings conceptualise landscape as something “out there”, external, viewed from a distance. In the art of hunter-gatherers and the other practices of shamanic cultures, human beings are represented, or considered as, participants in the fields of energy, consciousness and intelligence, which make up the natural world. * Neanderthals & Homo-Sapiens: “congenital atheists” & “socialised dreamers” Archaeologists and anthropologists have long speculated on the origins of art as a mode of cognition, expression and construction, and the possibility that these origins lie within the shamanic practices of ancient hunter-gatherer cultures. David Lewis-Williams offers some interesting insights about the development and significance of art and I’d like to very briefly discuss a few of the ideas he puts forward. Lewis-Williams’ book, The Mind in the Cave, is a very detailed account of “how metaphor, mind, image, society and cosmos coalesce” and how at a fundamental level these phenomena are informed and energised by “the working of the universal human nervous system”. (2002: 144) His book presents a cognitive and neurological account of the origins of art and culture. Lewis-Williams is highly sympathetic to the belief of the French anthropologist and ethnographer, Andre Leroi-Gourhan, that art “was the expression of ideas concerning the natural and supernatural organization of the living world”. (in Lewis-Williams 2002: 63) These ideas, and the coded representations of these ideas, are subject to change over the Palaeolithic period. These changes reflect how “the brain and changing social relations were shaping the mind. (ibid: 68) In explaining the differences between Neanderthals, who seem not to present us with “art” as we would recognise it, and early Homo Sapiens, who do, Lewis-Williams makes use of Edelman’s concepts of “primary” and “higher-order” consciousness. (see Part 2) He argues that the evolution of higher-order consciousness goes hand-in-hand with the development of language and other encoded modes of signification (including what we would call “art”). As an example, he makes the point that “language makes possible auditory hallucinations: it is only with language that ‘inner voices’ can tell people what to do […] not only do shamans ‘see’ their animal spirit helpers; the

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spirits also talk to them”. (ibid: 189) This marks a crucial stage in the development of consciousness. The mind manifests images and altered states of consciousness, these are not only experienced by certain individuals (for instance, shamans), but are also retained in memories and shared with others through vocal utterances (the beginnings of poetry and song) and visual/spatial signs and symbols (cave paintings and the making of particular kinds of encoded artefacts). Also, Lewis-Williams argues, (ibid: 190-192) higher-order consciousness enables dreams to be remembered and talked about. This development of “socialised dreaming” means that communities can share, interpret and apply symbolic value to dreams in a way that was not possible before. This may be one distinction between Neanderthals and Homo-Sapiens. While Neanderthals may well have passed through periods of REM sleep, (the “rapid eye movement” stage of sleeping associated with dreaming) and probably did dream, (like dogs and some other animals), they could not remember what they had dreamt or experienced in “vision” states of altered consciousness, and couldn’t talk about such experiences. Therefore, Lewis-Williams claims, they were “congenital atheists”. (ibid: 192) This may be one important reason for the presence of art in the cultures of Homo-Sapiens and not in that of the Neanderthals: art objects are tokens of dreaming, symbolic testimonies to visionary experiences and altered states of consciousness. Homo-Sapiens could “fix” the images that they held in a remembered state in their minds. According to Lewis-Williams, the first two-dimensional images were thus not two-dimensional representations of three-dimensional things in the material world, as researchers have always assumed. Rather, they were “fixed” mental images. In all probability the makers did not suppose that they “stood for” real animals, any more than the Abelam [a people indigenous to New Guinea, studied by anthropologists in very recent times] think that their painted and carved images represent things in the material world”. (ibid: 193)

Lewis-Williams’ remarks on dreaming and visionary states suggest some of the reasons for the importance of visions and the “vision quest” in shamanic cultures. Jerome Rothenberg (1972: 197) includes the following two “vision events” in his anthology of poetries of the indigenous peoples of the Americas:

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Eskimo Go to a lonely place & rub a stone in a circle on a rock for hours & days on end. Sioux Go to a mountain-top & cry for a vision.

He also includes a peyote vision of the Winnebago people. Here is an extract (Rothenberg 1972: 358-359): sleeping would see great snakes would cry out & get up raise my cover & look around had someone called me? […] would see things happening in a distant country ghosts on horseback drunk […] was looking at the [peyote] button I saw an eagle with outstretched wings each feather had a mark it looked at me but I was looking all around me wondered if it would disappear then when I looked another way it did

* Body as gathering-place, mind of the many We are all manifestations of the mutuality of existence, participating in the interpenetration and interdependence of all things, including organisms with each other and with the environment. Our human skin can be seen as a porous interface with everything that surrounds us and as the skin of the world. There is a unity of inside and outside. At the chemical, micro-biological and quantum levels there are no easy and obvious distinctions between one organism and another, or between organism and environment, subject and object, observer and

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observed. We are all implicated in the whole of existence, participants in the web of being. A vivid description of this interdependence is given by Lewis Thomas. He describes how, in the most intimate way, each of us provides, in each of our bodies, a habitat for other organisms. Ecosystems are woven into each other. When I say “me” am I really referring to a whole community of organisms of which “me” is the collective title? Am “I” an assembly of immigrants, a place in which many organisms reside? How can I call this body “mine” when it is a gathering-place of creatures, all of whom are tenants, residents, citizens? Aren’t “my” thoughts and feelings as much “theirs”? Is the consciousness that arises in this body a collective consciousness? Whose is this mind I treat as if it were mine? Shouldn’t “I” be replaced by “we” and “mine” by “ours”? There they are, moving about in my cytoplasm… They are much less closely related to me than to each other and to the free-living bacteria out under the hill. They feel like strangers, but the thought comes that the same creatures, precisely the same, are out there in the cells of seagulls, and whales, and dune grass, and seaweed… and further inland in the leaves of the beech in my backyard, and in the family of skunks beneath the back fence, and even in that fly on the window. Through them, I am connected: I have close relatives, once removed, all over the place. (in Capra 1990: 294)

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* Charles Waterton The Victorian naturalist and traveller, Charles Waterton, (1782-1865) writes vividly about the natural history of his native West Riding of Yorkshire and the more exotic ambience of South America. As a Catholic, Waterton had a strong sense of his family’s history as part of an oppressed minority in a largely Protestant country. Many of his forebears had left England to live in more congenial surroundings in Belgium, Spain, North and South America, and New Zealand. Maybe Waterton’s sense of himself as an exile in his own country, a Catholic in a country of “Hanoverian rats”, led him to identify with what he came to see as the increasingly oppressed lives of the flora and fauna of his homeland, and to identify with the peoples and natural environment of places he visited on his travels to Spain, British Guiana and North America. Waterton was a fine writer, who could convey vividly and concisely both the flavour of the places he visited and detailed information about the habitats, behaviours and appearance of the plants and animals he encountered. His eccentricities have been the subject of many stories and biographical essays and don’t need repeating here. He was a solitary who seems to have had few close relationships – his marriage to Anne, the daughter of Charles Edmonstone, an old friend from British Guiana, only lasted a year before Anne died after giving birth to a son, Edmund. In between his travels Waterton returned to the family home at Walton Hall in Yorkshire. The house stood on a wooded island in the centre of a thirty-acre lake, and Waterton turned the whole estate of threehundred acres into a refuge for native wildlife. From 1813 onwards he introduced a regime of management on the estate that outlawed the use of traps and guns. He planted trees and ground cover, put up nestboxes, roofed hollow tree-trunks as nesting places, and built stone structures that supported ivy and other climbers to make yet more dwelling places for wildlife. At this time, Walton Hall, like most other estates in England, had been denuded of wildlife due to the game-laws which protected species like grouse, pheasant and partridges, but allowed non-game birds to be shot. Waterton writes of this period: Kites were frequent here in the days of my father; but I myself have never seen one near the place. In 1813, I had my last sight of the buzzard. It used to repair to the storm-blasted top of an ancient oak which grows near the

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Where we are water’s edge; and many and many a time have I gone that way, on purpose of getting a view of it. In the spring of that year it went away to return no more, and, about the same period, our last raven was shot on its nest by a neighbouring gentleman. (in Blackburn 1991: 53-54)

By the 1850’s Waterton’s protective and supportive regime had transformed the estate into a haven of animal, plant and birdlife. The numbers of birds observed on the lakes and its surrounds point to the success of his scheme: “between 3,000 and 5,000 waterfowl [of great variety…] 90 adult herons in the heronry, and 5,000 wood pigeons, 800 rooks, and 100 carrion crows”. (ibid: 171) There were also 100 kestrels, 100 sandmartins as well as kingfishers, nightjars, rabbits, weasels, hedgehogs, adders, toads, bats and other species - an impressive testimony to Waterton’s achievements as a conservationist. As Blackburn points out (ibid: 170) most visitors to Walton Hall in the middle of the nineteenth century seem to have considered Waterton himself, and the abundance of wildlife that surrounded him, as a rather romantic and fanciful creation. Walton Hall was a strange island of bio-diversity in an area that was otherwise suffering the same degradation of species to be found elsewhere in England, an area that was also becoming rapidly industrialised. Waterton resisted the encroachment of soap factories and other industrial plants in his locality, because of the effects they were having on the environment. His outlook and his activism anticipate, by almost a hundred years, the beginnings of the conservation movements in North America and Europe. Blackburn (ibid: 42) describes Waterton’s aim as a writer: “to draw his audience into the landscape, and then to show them how to look and what to look for, while he himself remained […] out of sight”. He encouraged his readers to “look close with a quiet mind”. (ibid) He was a dispassionately accurate describer, in the tradition of naturalists like Gilbert White, but he also became, as he reflected more deeply on what he has witnessed, an articulate advocate on behalf of the natural world. As an example of his ethical code as a naturalist out in the field, and of his qualities as a writer, here is an extract written in 1812: to give the world a finished picture [of Guiana] may appear a difficult task […] but look close at it, and it is nothing at all; provided thou hast but a quiet mind […] the genius which presides over these wilds will kindly help thee through the rest. She will allow thee to slay the faun and to cut down the mountain-cabbage for thy support, and to select from every part of her

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domain whatever may be necessary for the work thou art about; but having killed a pair of doves in order to enable thee to give mankind a true and proper description of them, thou must not destroy a third through wantonness or to show what a good marksman thou art: that would only blot the picture thou art finishing, not colour it. […] And if, in the cool of the evening, thou hast been tempted to stray too far from thy place of abode, and art deprived of light to write down the information thou hast collected, the fire-fly, which thou wilt see in almost every bush around thee, will be thy candle. Hold it over thy pocket-book, in any position which thou knowest will not hurt it, and it will afford thee ample light. And when thou hast done with it, put it kindly back again on the next branch to thee. It will want no other reward for its services. (Waterton 1925: page not known)

This extract was written before his conservation project at Walton Hall got underway. As time went on he turned away from his earlier practices of killing animals to obtain specimens for study, preferring to observe them – alive - in their natural habitat. He became an active conservationist, a participant in the landscape, as well as a quiet observer. He empathises with the natural world, with the other organisms and beings that inhabit the Walton Hall estate, without being overly sentimental or anthropocentric. He acts as an attentive listener and observer, as well as a voice for disenfranchised species and habitats, in much the same way that Gary Snyder, Alice Oswald and Kenneth White do today. Waterton died in 1865. According to a friend, Norman Moore, “He died just as the rooks were beginning to caw and the swallows to chirp. He died as he always said he would, sitting up, and conscious to the last”. (ibid: 212) * It is New Year’s Day. It is always new year’s day. Silvergrey light follows a fleshpink dawn. The night’s fireworks and distant revelling are gone. There is an exhausted silence about the city. Across the valley hills merge into clouds. A magpie screeches. A robin sings. There is no end to the unfolding light. ***

Part 9 The ! the One & the Many: mysticism, art & poetry “‘Make of yourself a light,’ said the Buddha, before he died.” (Oliver 1990: 4) “John Scotus Eriugena conceived of the universe as a revelation of God in His ineffable beauty”. (Eco 2002: 18)

Introduction In this section I explore a body of ideas about states of being and knowing that have come to be called “mystical”, and I relate these ideas and experiences to examples of art and poetry that could be considered as manifestations and enactments of mystical states of mind. While tracing ideas and practices that have certain characteristics in common, we also need to be mindful of the very different cultural contexts and belief systems informed by, and surrounding, mysticism. In order to contrast with, contradict or disrupt whatever continuity the unfolding discussion may have, I have added various fragments, quotes and notes. The intention is that these constitute a kind of critical or poetic counterpoint to the main themes. * Claims, questions, criticality In thinking about mysticism and the possible relationships between mysticism, art and poetry, we need to keep our feet on the ground and maintain a critical stance. We need to ask questions and not be carried along by the tendency, in some quarters, to accept vague arguments,

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definitions and evidence as soon as the terms mysticism, spirituality and the sacred are mentioned. In this section I first present an overview of mysticism by describing characteristics of mystical experiences drawn from the literature. I then use a number of examples to show how experiences or qualities, defined as “mystical”, can be considered as being manifested in particular artworks. Given that mysticism is a formalisation of accounts of particular kinds of experiences, characteristics of which have been described in remarkably similar terms by individuals from many different cultures, it seems reasonable that we should look for “evidence” of the validity of claims made about possible relationships between art and mysticism, in accounts of the making of, and engaging with, particular artworks. In discussing the work of Kapoor, Martin, Turrell, Borges and Rexroth in this way, I have no intention of suggesting that this is the only way in which their work can be interpreted, nor am I suggesting that these artists intend their work to be seen as “mystical”. Indeed I’m fairly sure that all of them would resist this kind of characterisation. However I hope that as one of the many ways of discussing what these artists do, the comments below will be considered as being illuminating and useful. * A note on the “silhouettes”: these are extracts from a series of brief textual “portraits”, of artists, poets, writers, thinkers, et al, composed over the past eight years or so. Like visual silhouettes they are extremely compressed, a reduction resulting from a process of erasure and editing, such that some indexical trace of the subject is revealed in what remains – a composition through removal and loss. Most of the Silhouettes are derived from verbal collages which are themselves the result of extracting words, fragments of sentences or distinctive modes of syntax, and re-composing these into a new structure that conveys something of the mind of the subject. Unaltered longer phrases are indicated by italics. * Defining “mysticism” Although there have been, and are, many different ideas about the meaning of the terms “mystical” and “mysticism” we need to establish at the outset a clear distinction between the tendency in many contexts

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to use these terms as synonyms for mysterious, unclear, vague or inexplicable, and the meanings ascribed to these terms in the religious and philosophical context. In the former case there are associations with wizards, magic, mists and even anything with a “mystique” attached to it – these are not associations that add to any understanding of mysticism in the sense that it is being used in the following pages. There is a point at which the popular and theological conceptions of mysticism converge, namely, that the etymology of the word “mystic” can be traced back to the Greek mysteries: “A mystic was one who had been initiated into these mysteries, through which he had gained an esoteric knowledge of divine things and been reborn into eternity”. (Happold 1970: 18). As Happold points out, this original conception of the mystic changed over time, particularly in the fusion of “Greek and Oriental philosophy which occurred in the centuries immediately preceding the birth of Christ”. (ibid.) In more recent times the terms “mysticism” and “mystical” are used to describe particular qualities of experience or modes of consciousness within the context of theology, religious studies or philosophy. Happold (1970), James (1982), Wolters (1961) and Merton (1968, 1973) all concur in describing mysticism as a set of beliefs, practices and traditions that arise from a core of distinctive experiences. Russell (1963) takes a more analytical approach that focuses on the ideas and beliefs of mystics and philosophers who share such beliefs. Rather than try to propose a generic definition I will provide some examples of the ways in which these writers use the term. In doing this it will be apparent that though there is a convergence, with the exception of Russell, upon describing mysticism in experiential terms, there are both many very clear similarities, and some differences in approach. * William James: four “marks” of mystical states William James’s famous study, The Varieties of Religious Experience, was first published in 1902. It is one of the first serious attempts to examine religious experiences, rather than religious ideas, theories and public doctrines or rituals. In his study James’s interest and focus is on individuals, “in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine”. (James

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1982: 32) He includes the non-deistic traditions of Buddhism and Emersonian “transcendental idealism” in his study, referring to them as “Emersonian optimism” and “Buddhistic pessimism”! (34) Nor is atheism a defence against inclusion in James’s definition of religion. He quotes a colleague who describes a student “manifesting a fine atheistic ardour” as follows: “He believes in No-God, and he worships him”. (35) This is a typical James observation, even though secondhand, it has his characteristic tone of wry humour, benign scepticism and good sense. James refers to “the striking and sudden unifications of a discordant self” (483) as characteristic of the process of “conversion” to a religion – something that also seems to typify the mystical experience. In a chapter devoted to mysticism James provides four “marks” of the mystical state: [1] Ineffability [….] it defies expression [….] no adequate report of its contents can be given in words [….] its quality must be directly experienced. [2] Noetic quality. – Although so similar to states of feeling, mystical states seem to those who experience them to be also states of knowledge. They are states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect. (380)

James suggests these are the two prime marks, but he adds two supplementary characteristics. [3] Transiency. – Mystical states cannot be sustained for long. [Thirty minutes to two hours maximum, he gauges] [4] Passivity [….] the mystic feels as if his own will were in abeyance. (381)

In relation to these states he argues that “Some memory of their content always remains, and a profound sense of their importance”. (381) James the psychologist characterises mystical experiences in terms of particular qualities of consciousness and their effects, rather than on the “content” of the experiences. He is interested in describing the objects of consciousness, objects “that may be present to our senses, or they may be present only to our thought”. (53) Indeed, in his usual inclusive manner, James describes all kinds of examples of

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states that have the above qualities, from the feeling that “I’ve been here before”, to states “produced by intoxicants and anaesthetics, especially by alcohol”, (387) and the ecstasies of St. Theresa and Meister Eckhart. He delights in the varieties of these experiences and in the idiosyncratic nature of each reported instance he provides as examples. * […] The bottle is empty. The fire has gone out in the stove. Everywhere men speak in whispers. I brood on the uselessness of letters. -Tu Fu (in Rexroth 1971: 6)

* F.C. Happold: seven characteristics of mysticism In F.C.Happold’s later study of mysticism, first published in 1963, the author takes a somewhat different approach to James. Happold (1970: 38) disregards “those false types of so-called mysticism such as spiritualism, occultism, and the like” – practices that enjoyed considerable popularity at the end of the nineteenth century in the artistic salons of Europe and North America, when James was gathering material for his milestone text. Happold sets these phenomena aside in order to focus on mysticism as a “particular and distinct sort of ‘spirituality’” (39) which he sets out to examine “from three points of view, as a type of experience, as a way of knowledge, and as a state of consciousness”. (39) When it comes to describing the characteristics of mystical states, Happold takes his cue from James. Ineffability, a noetic quality, transiency and passivity are listed as the first four of Happold’s seven characteristics, following closely James’s descriptions. The other three are, “the presence of a consciousness of the Oneness of everything,” (46) a “sense of timelessness” (47) and “the conviction that the familiar phenomenal ego is not the real I”. (48) In relation to the first of these, “All creaturely existence is experienced as a unity, as All in One and One in All. In theistic mysticism God is felt to be in everything and everything to exist in God”. (46) In relation to the second “the mystic feels himself to be in a dimension where time is not, where ‘all is always now’,” (48) - what is often referred to as the “eternal present”. T.S.Eliot may be alluding to this sense of timelessness when he writes in Burnt Norton, “to be conscious is not

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to be in time”. (Eliot 1936: 188) As far as the third is concerned, Happold suggests that mystics experience the presence of a “true Self” that is “constant and unchanging” and divine. (48) He considers the true self to be synonymous with Atman in the Hindu traditions and with the “spark, the centre, or apex of the soul, and the ground of the spirit” (48-49) in Christian mysticism. In some ways these three additional “marks” of mystical states provide a sense of the content of such states, something that James only includes through case studies. In regard to the noetic quality of mystical experience, Happold writes: The Indian philosopher Radhakrishnan […] calls mysticism ‘integrated thought’, in that it brings together in a new pattern, i.e. integrates them, instead of, as in analytical thought, breaking them into parts. It thus relates them into a meaningful whole. It is a sort of creative insight. (37)

This connects to Russell’s observations about mystical insight (see below). Happold also mentions another aspect of mysticism, the belief that mystical experience involves a union with Reality or God (which may be felt as transcendent or immanent). He quotes Ruth Underhill: Mysticism is the art of union with Reality. The mystic is a person who has attained that union in a greater or lesser degree; or who aims at and believes in such attainment. (38)

* Guy Davenport (1987: 41) urges us to read Plutarch and Montaigne “to reflect on this inner life rationally [making us] at peace with ourselves”. Both men were “sceptics with Stoic minds and welltempered good natures”. * Bertrand Russell: Mysticism and logic Bertrand Russell in his brief, highly sceptical and very informative essay, Mysticism and Logic, proposes four characteristics of philosophical mysticism or mysticism within philosophy. Underlying mysticism is, the belief in insight as against discursive analytic knowledge: the belief in a way of wisdom, sudden, penetrating, coercive, which is contrasted with the

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slow and fallible study of outward appearance by a science relying wholly upon the senses. (Russell 1963: 14)

For Russell the beliefs of mystics “are the result of reflection upon the inarticulate experience gained in the moment of insight”. (ibid) This accords with the views of James and Happold that ineffability is one of the primary characteristics of the mystical experience. Russell argues that the mystic values, and makes use of, insight, revelation and intuition, above reason and analysis, the modes of knowing preferred by philosophers in the western tradition. He connects these mystical modes of knowing to a belief in “the conception of a Reality behind the world of appearances and utterly different from it”. (14) It is this reality which the mystic has insight into – the mystic “lives in the full light of the vision”. (15) This belief in another reality is Russell’s first characteristic of mysticism. The second “is its belief in unity, and its refusal to admit opposition or division anywhere”. (ibid) Hence, in Russell’s view, the mystical nature of Heraclitus’s contradictory assertions – for instance, that good and evil are one. Russell’s third characteristic is the “mystical metaphysics of Time. This is an outcome of the denial of division; if all is one, the distinction of past and future must be illusory”. Russell notes that this belief is evident in Parmenides, Spinoza and Hegel. As a fourth characteristic, Russell proposes the “belief that all evil is mere appearance, an illusion produced by the divisions and oppositions of the analytical intellect”. (ibid) If all is one, it follows logically that not only can there be no division into past, present and future, but also, as Heraclitus states, there can be no division into good and evil. Russell reminds us that Spinoza also considered good and evil to be illusory, irreconcilable with a belief in the Reality of the All. Russell’s approach is analytical and philosophical. His focus is upon the beliefs and ideas that characterise mysticism as a metaphysical tradition, rather than upon the experiential evidence that James and Happold place at the centre of their studies. As one might expect of a logician and mathematician, Russell uses the tools of logic to analyse and criticise the shortcomings of mysticism as a strand within philosophy. However he does commend mysticism “as an attitude towards life” but “not as a creed about the world”. (16) Maybe what he really means is that mysticism may offer beneficial insights into the living of our lives, even if it doesn’t fulfil the requirements, or follow

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the rules, of logical philosophy. Also one could argue that philosophy involves the analysis and structuring of statements about the world, while mystics are attempting to point to the way the world is, or the way states of affairs are in the world. As such mystics and philosophers may be concerned with two very different levels or kinds of order and two different modes of discourse - one employing propositional logic and the other employing a poetry of immanence and insight. * The Spanish poet, Antonio Machado, in his poem, Rebirth, reminds us that: The deepest words of the wise men teach us the same as the whistle of the wind when it blows, or the sound of the water when it is flowing. (in Reid 1998: 207)

* Clifton Wolters and The Cloud of Unknowing In the introduction to his translation of The Cloud of Unknowing, Clifton Wolters describes “contemplation” as “the awareness of God, known and loved at the core of one’s being”. (Wolters 1961: 36) This awareness always involves a “sense of ‘otherness’ to which the soul turns as to its home.” (37) Both Wolters and Merton use the term “contemplation” to mean the disciplined cultivation of mystical experience. Wolters argues that contemplation involves the setting aside of thinking in human terms and opening ourselves to the divine grace, the presence of God. That we can see the Nought and the Nowhere to which our journey has brought us is the presence of God himself. For he is No-thing, and Nowhere. The very ‘unknowing’, ‘full blind and full dark’, is the knowing of him [….] And the life of contemplation is just this unknowing knowing, this blind seeing, this presence which is unfelt.” (38)

The Cloud of Unknowing was written around 1370 by a priest (he gives his blessing in the final paragraph) who may have been from the East Midlands of England - the evidence of his diction and vocabulary suggest this. The book seems to have been written as an advisory text

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for a twenty-four year old disciple, as such it combines kindness, practicality and good sense, with vivid descriptions of the author’s own mystical experience. The author advises his student to let go of “this ‘everywhere’ and this ‘everything’ in exchange for this ‘nowhere’ and this ‘nothing’”. Our “outer self” calls it nothing, but our “inner self calls it ‘All’”. (134-135) In these brief extracts we encounter not only the gist of the author’s advice but also the vocabulary of contradiction, paradox and inversion that typifies many mystical texts. * A poem by the Japanese poet, Ikkyu (1394-1481) – who trained in the Rinzai tradition of Zen: We eat, excrete, sleep, and get up; This is our world. All we have to do after that – Is to die. (in Watts 1989: 162)

* Thomas Merton’s “Louisville vision” Thomas Merton was a Trappist monk who entered the monastery of Our Lady of Gethsemani near Louisville, Kentucky, in 1941. He was based there until his accidental death in December 1968 at a gathering of monks in Bangkok, Thailand. Merton’s extensive writings, including poems, are grounded in his experiences as a contemplative. He writes about mystical experiences as one who feels he has had such experiences and also as one who feels the need to analyse and discuss his experiences within the context of Christian theology and, towards the end of his life, in relation to Buddhism, particularly Zen. In his journal and in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, he describes a “mystical experience” he had on 18th March, 1958, in his local town of Louisville – what he later refers to as his “Louisville vision”. This experience involved an intense feeling of community with the people he mingled with on the street, “a realisation that I loved all these people, they were mine and I theirs. It was like waking from a dream of separateness”. He adds, “This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy that I almost laughed out loud”. (in Shannon 1987: xii-xiii) Shannon notes that “Merton saw the contemplative experience as an experience of oneness and transcen-

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dent unity. The quaint translation of Julian of Norwich [late fourteenth, early fifteenth century English mystic] puts it this way: ‘Prayer oneth the soul to God’”. (8) Merton’s experience has many of the “marks” of the mystical experience identified by James and Happold: it was very brief; it arose, unbeckoned, in a casual everyday context; it had a noetic quality, giving Merton an insight into the structures of relationship that were normally hidden; it involved a profound sense of unity; and it marked a transformation in Merton’s sense of self. For Merton, this experience, and many others he had in the course of his life, convinced him that this sense of unity was the real state of things, a state that we needed to rediscover if we were to become more fully human: “We are already one. But we imagine that we are not. And what we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we are”. (in Shannon 1987: xvi)

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* Traditions of describing mystical experiences In his book about Thomas Merton, William H. Shannon provides a concise overview of two ways of describing mystical experiences, commonly used in theological literature. He distinguishes between the “kataphatic” and “apophatic” traditions. The kataphatic tradition is, “the tradition of light […] an understanding of God through affirmation (the Greek word kataphasis means affirmation)”. (Shannon 1987: 9) The apophatic tradition is: the tradition of darkness and negation (the Greek word apophasis means negation or denial). […] sooner or later, the contemplative must renounce the mind’s activity, put out the light of the intellect, and enter into the darkness, wherein there is an ‘experience’ of the ineffable reality of what is beyond experience. The presence of God is ‘known’, not in clear vision, but as ‘unknown.’ (10)

While it is regrettable that Shannon gives the impression, if not the intention, of being anti-intellectual, he does convey the differences between the two traditions – which are also known as the “via positiva” and the “via negativa”. He places Merton firmly in the latter tradition, a tradition that “thrives on paradoxical expressions”. (11) For instance, Merton himself writes about the “wordless darkness” that is also the “apophatic light”, God is experienced as a “dazzling darkness” or as “the brightness of a most lucid darkness”. (in Shannon 1987: 11) As we saw in relation to Eckhart’s writings this use of paradox and contradiction is very typical of the discourses of mysticism. The way in which mystics use words is often obscure, paradoxical and “difficult” because our everyday language is inevitably concerned with our “self-centred” relationship with the world. We place importance on doing, getting, having, holding and knowing, and these are seen as positive qualities (because they enhance and affirm the self). It is no surprise, therefore, that the language of mysticism should often appear negative - because it is describing and articulating a process of inner transformation, self-surrender or self-transcendence. Giving-up, surrendering, losing, not-doing, unknowing, forgetting - these become the terms given importance and value. From the perspective of social psychology Erich Fromm provides a stimulating analysis of the

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language of being (in contrast to having) and its related politics and ideology, in To Have or To Be (1979). * Heidegger, mysticism, nothingness Martin Heidegger had, in many ways, an ambivalent attitude towards Christianity and institutionalised religions. In his early writings he was influenced by the German Dominican monk and mystic Meister Eckhart (c.1260-1327/8), who advocated inner transformation as a goal of the religious life, believing that human beings could achieve unity with God in this life. Eckhart emphasised the ineffable nature of God, struggling to find a vocabulary that could convey God’s resistance to categorisation and conceptualisation. We find in Eckhart’s writings, and in Heidegger, the use of paradoxical expressions that characterise many statements made by mystics and by those who attempt to write about mystical experiences. Gerda von Brockhausen: Mystical language stands in strong contrast to rational thought. It tries to approach the ineffable by using hints, symbols, antithesis and paradox and by feeling in the dark. [….] Thus we see the importance of silence […] for the language of mysticism. (in Schierz 2003: 40)

Eckhart refers to the ineffability of God as, “Nothingness,” “Unfathomable Ocean,” a “way without a way,” and “dark light”. (Schierz 2003: 41) Michael E. Zimmerman (1993: 241) writes about Eckhart’s use of the term, “Divine Nothingness” from Heidegger’s perspective: The Divine cannot be regarded as a super entity existing somewhere else, but instead constitutes the unconditioned openness or emptiness in which all things appear. Meister Eckhart argued that humans are at one with this openness. So lacking is any distinction between one’s soul and the Divine, in fact, that one who is awakened to Divine Nothingness forgets all about ‘God’ and lives a life of releasement (Gelassenheit), moved by compassion to free things from suffering.

Zimmerman identifies connections between the thinking of Eckhart and Heidegger, and we can relate these to Buddhist conceptions of the Bodhisattva, a being who refuses to enter a state of nirvana, or complete enlightenment and freedom from suffering, in order to help other beings achieve this state. Zimmerman (1993: 241) argues that

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Heidegger’s “notion that human existence is the openness, clearing, or nothingness in which things can manifest themselves is deeply indebted to mysticism”. Heidegger extends Eckhart’s notion of God as Divine Nothingness in order to describe the nature of human being. To denote human being, Heidegger uses the term Dasein (“being here” or “being there”), by which he means “the place in which being occurs, the openness in which presencing transpires” – to use Zimmermen’s awkward, but arresting, phrase. (1993: 244) According to Zimmerman, Heidegger proposed that human being is not a thing but rather a peculiar kind of nothingness: the temporal-linguistic clearing, the opening, the absencing in which things can present themselves. (ibid: 242-243)

Human being in this sense is groundless, a kind of “peculiar receptivity” for the self-manifesting of entities that present themselves to us in our state of being-ness. Heidegger’s emphasis on receptivity and on the openness of human being, leads him to make use of Eckhart’s term Gelassenheit, suggesting that we need to reorient our thinking and action around being towards “letting-be” rather than striving and willing. As Caputo argues, “being is not something that human thinking can conceive or grasp […] but something that thinking can only be ‘granted’”. (Caputo 1993: 282) Our role, which is not to be sleepily passive, but to be awake and open to being: The work that man can do is not to will but to not-will, to prepare a clearing and opening in which being may come. This is not quietism but asceticism, the hard work of a kind of poverty of spirit. (Caputo 1993: 282)

This brings us back to the paradoxical language of mysticism and to the strategy of knowing by unknowing, opening up to nothingness, practiced by many mystics. As Merton affirms, (see above), the “grace” of mystical experience, contact with God, is not something that can be willed or engineered. Accounts of mystical experiences often reveal the unbidden nature of such events, in many cases they occur when all hope is lost, or when the individual has “given up”, or when circumstances seem to be against the onset of such experiences. It could be argued that at such times of “letting-be” an individual may be more open and receptive to the grace of being – whether it is in Heidegger’s non-theological sense or in Merton’s context of Christian

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belief. Certainly letting-go, or non-attachment, is a key element in Buddhist practices of awakening to the flux of existence. Happold writes of this state of letting-go in a slightly different way: In the state of Contemplation [the mystical state] there is found a selfforgetting attention, a humble receptiveness, a still and steady gazing, an intense concentration, so that emotion, will, and thought are all fused and then lost in something which is none of them, but which embraces them all. (1970: 70)

There may be a connection here between the state of Contemplation, as described by Happold and suggested by Heidegger, and states of mindfulness and non-attachment in Buddhist practices of meditation – particularly vipassana and zazen. Merton was particularly interested in exploring the potential connections between Zen Buddhism and his own contemplative tradition as a Trappist monk. His dialogues with D.T. Suzuki, whose thinking was deeply informed by the Rinzai school of Zen, trace some of the similarities and differences between the two bodies of experience. In Mystics and Zen Masters (1967) and Zen and the Birds of Appetite (1968) Merton contrasts the dualistic, Cartesian, consciousness, with its separation of subject and object, and body and mind, with another mode of consciousness which, he argues, “starts not from the thinking and self-aware subject but from Being, ontologically seen to be beyond and prior to the subject-object division”. (1968: 23) Merton goes on to suggest that: Underlying the subjective experience of the individual self there is an immediate experience of Being. This is totally different from an experience of self-consciousness. It is completely non-objective. It has none of the split and alienation that occurs when the subject becomes aware of itself as a quasi-object. The consciousness of Being (whether considered positively or negatively and apophatically as in Buddhism) [see below] is an immediate experience that goes beyond reflexive awareness. It is not ‘consciousness of’ but pure consciousness, in which the subject as such ‘disappears.’ (1968: 23-24)

Merton’s description here accords with the qualities of unity and oneness that have been proposed as characteristics of mystical experience - a state of non-duality that is consistent with Russell’s contention that mystical unity “refuses to admit opposition or division anywhere”. (Russell 1963: 15) Merton also describes the impact that

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this kind of experience has on our conception and understanding of the “self”. He argues that, from his Christian perspective, “The self is not its own centre and does not orbit around itself; it is centred on God, the one centre of all, which is ‘everywhere and nowhere’”. (1968: 24) According to Merton mystical consciousness is grounded, not in the intellect, self-awareness and acquisitiveness, but in a profound sense of the mystery, grace and sacredness of Being. He articulates a belief, shared by many mystics, that beneath our subjective experience of an individual self or ego lies a deeper unfathomable ocean of Being of which we are simply the ripples on the surface. This Ground of Being is also called God - what Eliot (1936: 187) called the “still point of the turning world” – and what Buddhists refer to not as a point or centre but as sunyata or the ‘void’. The Ground of Being can also be described as the undifferentiated, indivisible, fundamental reality - the utterly unified, integrated Whole – what in Hinduism is referred to as Brahman. Merton claims that Cartesian reductivism has no means of negotiating this reality because it cannot, by definition, be subjected to dualistic thought. Suzuki, in part of his dialogue with Merton (in Merton 1968: 108-111) analyses possible connections between Eckhart’s “Divine Nothingness” and “emptiness” or sunyata in Buddhism. He relates the “metaphysical concept of emptiness” to poverty, as in the Christian sense of “blessed are those who are poor in spirit”. (108-109) He quotes Eckhart: “He is a poor man who wants nothing, knows nothing, and has nothing”. (109) This sentence brings together the Buddhist emphasis on non-attachment, freedom from desire, and the mystical idea of encountering God by entering the Cloud of Unknowing. Although Suzuki and Merton acknowledge differences in terminology and modes of description between Zen and Christianity, they agree that emptiness (sunyata) and “Divine Nothingness” should not be seen as one side of a binary relationship, standing in opposition to “fullness” or “Everything”. Instead they have to be seen as shorthand codes for states that are beyond duality and differentiation, states of dynamic betweenness, openness and indeterminacy. While the use of a phrase like “pure consciousness” might suggest that Merton is moving towards an idea of transcendent being, a concept Heidegger and others might disagree with, he explains that any

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“intuition of Being is an intuition of a ground of openness, indeed a kind of ontological openness and an infinite generosity which communicates itself to everything that is”. (1968: 24-25) This idea of a “ground of openness” is a return to a discourse about mysticism that once more seems close to Heidegger, and Eckhart. * Samuel Beckett’s character, Lucky, in Waiting for Godot, gives us another kind of eloquence as he scathingly disputes the idea of a benign and transcendent God: Given the existence as uttered forth in the public works of Puncher and Wattman of a personal God quaquaquaqua with white beard quaquaquaqua outside time without extension who from the heights of divine apathia divine athambia divine aphasia loves us dearly with some exceptions for reasons unknown but time will tell and suffers like the divine Miranda with those who for reasons unknown but time will tell are plunged in torment plunged in fire[…] (Beckett 1965: 42-43)

* Wittgenstein and the ineffable From a perspective somewhere between Russell and the other writers I’ve mentioned, Wittgenstein shines his inimitable light on the matters under discussion. In the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, first published in an English translation in 1921 (with an introduction by Russell) Wittgenstein builds a stringently logical series of statements about language and knowledge, and about the relationship between these constructs and the world. In both the early thinking behind the Tractatus and the later thinking of the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein’s philosophical project is “the elucidation of language”, the dissolving of apparent problems, conflicts and misunderstandings by a logical analysis of the workings of language as a tool or game. “Philosophy is a struggle against the bewitchment of our understanding by means of language”. (Hacker 2000: 336) However he also recognises that language has limits, that there is a realm of the unsayable. According to Schierz, (2003: 41) not only did Wittgenstein formulate

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the logical prerequisites for the possibility of any meaningful linguistic proposition about the world of facts in language, but he also set the limits of everything sayable. ‘The ineffable really does exist. This reveals itself. That is what is mystical’.

Schierz (41) quotes Wittgenstein: “It is not how the world is that is mystical, but that it exists”, and this existence of the world is ineffable, unapproachable by language. In his notebooks Wittgenstein acknowledges that “the world is independent of my will”. (in Perloff 1996: 29) According to Dieter Mersch, Wittgenstein’s ethics are based on the ‘that’ experience, the experience of existence as existence. As language, this experience contains the sheerest emptiness because no sentence can lead to this experience, nor is any sentence derivable from it. Nevertheless as experience, it contains the most extreme form of disorientation possible, i.e. the confrontation with the Ultimate Enigma. (in Shierz 2003: 42)

Paradoxically this Ultimate Enigma is existence, “being here”, consciousness itself. In a curious reversal the most ordinary of experiences, that of existing, becomes extraordinary. It could be argued that awakening to the enigmatic ineffability of existence is itself a mystical experience. Certainly this could form a bridge between some accounts of nature mysticism for instance - mystical experiences that happen in relation to an individual’s presence in the natural world - and mystical strands within Taoist and Zen traditions. Awakening to this present existence, what we might call a mysticism of being, is a key aspiration of the Taoist and Zen practitioner. Encountering the manifesting of entities (consciousness of the world) in the openness or clearing which is our human existence (Heidegger’s Dasein) can only happen in the silence of contemplation (meditation, zazen, silent prayer) - a disciplined attention to what is without comment, meta-awareness or judgement. In the Tractatus, consisting, as it does, of numbered propositions, Wittgenstein writes: 6.4 6.41

All propositions are of equal value. The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it happens. In it there is no value – and if there were, it would be of no value. (in Perloff 1996a: 44)

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All propositions, linguistic statements, are of equal value in relation to the world as it is. All propositions are equally redundant in the face of the “Ultimate Enigma” which is the existence of the world. There is no value in the world because “the sense of the world”, human values, language and philosophical ideas, “must lie outside the world”. The world, where everything “happens as it happens” is beyond, or perhaps before, values, ideas, human constructs, intentions and desires. The radical shift in Wittgenstein’s thinking between the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations can be seen as the result of a realisation that language cannot represent or picture the world, cannot somehow re-present it in words, as is suggested in the famous statement at the end of the Tractatus: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”. To analyse the relationship between linguistic statements and the world as it is, is pointless because there is no relationship in any causal or indexical sense. Therefore Wittgenstein, after the Tractatus is completed, focuses on clarifying the workings of language, which he feels he can say something about. The world “as it is” is purposeless, indeterminate and ineffable – to be experienced as “empty and marvellous”, in the words of Te-shan. (in Watts 1989:131) Tathata (suchness) is the Buddhist equivalent of Wittgenstein’s “that experience”, the experience of everything as it is. We can point to this state of affairs, we can manifest it in actual objects and events in the world, and we can experience it in silence or with nonsensical, non-propositional exclamations or affirmations: Ah! Doh! Eureka! Yes! But we can’t express it or define it or explain it. It is no surprise that Russell, while he thought Wittgenstein’s Tractatus was “wonderful,” (Perloff 1996a: 30) had reservations about a strand of “mysticism” that he claimed was in Wittgenstein’s thinking. Russell writes (in a letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell, 1919): I was amazed to learn that he has become a complete mystic. He reads people like Kierkegaard and Angelus Silesius and is thinking seriously of becoming a monk. This all began with William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience…. He has penetrated deep into mystical modes of thought and feeling, but I think (although he would not agree), that what he likes best in mysticism is its power to stop him from thinking. (Perloff 1996a: 30)

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Although Russell is probably wrong to call Wittgenstein “a complete mystic”, whatever that may be, it is very likely that Wittgenstein’s thinking was informed by his readings, during the war years, of north European writers like Tolstoy, Schopenhauer and Silesius. Kierkegaard would probably have disapproved of the idea that he was himself a “mystic” in the sense that we have been using the term - he took a more sceptical stance towards such matters, in some ways more akin to Wittgenstein’s position. However reasonable or unreasonable we consider Russell’s comments to be, according to Perloff, Wittgenstein didn’t like Russell’s introduction to the Tractatus. Unsurprisingly, by this time relations between the two men, who had been close for a time, had become strained. (Perloff 1996a: 30) * According to the novelist, Dorothy Allison: There is a place where we are always alone with our own mortality, where we must simply have something greater than ourselves to hold onto – God or history or politics or literature or a belief in the healing power of love, or even righteous anger. Sometimes I think they are all the same. (in Rorty 1999: 161)

* Taoism: the way of the willow Note. The term “Taoism” has been changed to “Daoism” in many recent works, in line with a move to a more accurate translation and accuracy of pronunciation – likewise with the terms, Tao/Dao and Tao Te Ching/ Dao De Ching. However, given that most of the texts consulted in this study use the term Taoism and that the older term is still current in public discourse, I have chosen to use “Taoism” throughout this book to avoid confusion. I apologise to Chinese speakers and scholars if this causes offence. The vocabulary of Taoism echoes that of the Christian mystics. Contradictions and paradoxes are common as is the use of negatives where we might expect to find positives. While the term Tao is often translated as “the way”, Happold (1970: 149) suggests that another meaning of perhaps greater importance, is to consider the Tao as the “Univided Unity” out of which the “phenomenal world that we know” arises (“the myriad creatures”). It can be seen that Happold is fitting

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Taoism into his framework of mystical characteristics that I outlined earlier. However other scholars support the idea that the Tao is both the “Way” and the “One”. (see Lau 1963: 16) Watts (1989: 15) makes the important point that the Tao is “the indefinable, concrete ‘process’ of the world, the Way of life”. In other words the Tao is a dynamic undifferentiated field of energy or process that is indefinable and ineffable. It works, according to Taoists, spontaneously by not-working, it makes by not-making, it is a selforganising system and its process is one of growth in which it spontaneously divides itself into parts, as cells divide in a growing organism. (see Watts 1989: 16-17) This process of acting by not-acting is denoted by the Chinese term “wu-wei”. (ibid: 19) Metaphorically this process of action is likened to the action of wind and water, to flexibility, fluidity and bending rather than rigidity. The willow survives the force of the wind by being supple and bending with the wind rather than trying to resist it. The hard stone is eroded by the action of flowing water. Notice in these few comments the obvious paradoxes. The Taoist sage, hermit or mystic, follows the Way, he or she emulates the Tao, using wu-wei, doing by not-doing, knowing by not-knowing, as a way of being in the world. The universe is intentionless or purposeless, therefore to act in a purposeless way, without clinging to things and ideas, to act selflessly, is to act in accordance with the flow of the universe. Self-centred actions resist the flow of existence like a stone in a stream. The Taoist practitioner learns to bend with the flux of existence, to be at one with indeterminacy and to allow things to happen of their own accord, to let go of habits of thought and behaviour, to be released from conditioning. It is commonplace to consider Taoism as a complementary strand of beliefs and practices to the Confucian system of ethics and social values that have dominated Chinese society since ancient times. Certainly the Taoist emphasis on letting-go, release from conditioning, following the natural way, doing by not-doing, seems to be the mirror image of the Confucian emphasis on social and filial responsibility, and on political order and continuity. The Taoist practitioner seems to be releasing him or herself from these social pressures and conventions in order to achieve greater harmony with the Tao. How to do this without being a mindless sponge or a passive spectator of life is

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something that the Taoist learns through disciplined practice with a teacher and close observation of his or her own actions. Something of the flavour of Taoist thinking can be gleaned from the following excerpts from the Lao Tzu or Tao Te Ching (Lau: 1963) The way conceals itself in being nameless. (102) The way begets one; one begets two; two begets three; three begets the myriad creatures. (103) I do my utmost to attain emptiness; I hold firmly to stillness. The myriad creatures all rise together And I watch their return. (72) Have little thought of self and as few desires as possible. (75) In the pursuit of learning one knows more every day; in the pursuit of the way one does less every day. One does less and less until one does nothing at all, and when one does nothing at all there is nothing that is undone. (109)

These statements aren’t intended as a recipe for unthinking torpidity or literally “doing nothing at all”. Instead, the Tao Te Ching provides a philosophical framework and a carefully-honed manual of advice for working with the Tao not against it. When “one does nothing at all” against the flow of existence or against the natural order of things, when one lives attuned to the Tao, “there is nothing that is undone”. To live in accordance with the Tao is to live in harmony with patterns of growth (and decay) and interdependence, and to develop a more ecological (egoless) sense of self, informed by contemplative insight into the undifferentiated unity of existence. From The Song of Realising the Tao (Cheng-tao Ke): Like the empty sky it has no boundaries, Yet it is right in this place, ever profound and clear. When you seek to know it, you cannot see it. You cannot take hold of it, But you cannot lose it. In not being able to get it, you get it. When you are silent, it speaks; When you speak, it is silent. (in Watts 1989: 145)

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* Sufi mysticism Al-Ghazali (1059-1111) was a leading Islamic scholar who converted to Sufism later in his life. He writes eloquently of the Sufi aspiration of self-mergence in God and the world, and attempts to describe this state from the position of those who have attained it. [Those who] return from their Ascent into the heaven of Reality, confess with one voice that they saw nought existent there save the One Real. Some of these arrived at this scientifically, and others experimentally and subjectively. From these last the plurality of things fell away in its entirety. They were drowned in the absolute Unitude, and their intelligences were lost in Its abyss…Therein became they as dumbfoundered things. (in Happold 1970: 260)

Note the equating of Reality and the One, the reference to science as a path to God (mathematics and geometry, particularly were fields of study in which Islamic scholars excelled) and to the way in which distinctions and differentiations give way to the undifferentiated totality of the “absolute Unitude”. Note also how those who experience this ecstatic state of union with God are rendered speechless, unable to describe this state in terms that would be intelligible to another. Many of the “marks” of mysticism are evident here. Jalalud-din Rumi (1207-73) one of the best known Sufi poets, likens this process of mergence with the divine, to being consumed by a benign fire, in other poems he uses the metaphor of the ecstasy of love – a traditional trope of Sufi literature. He set the world aflame, And laid me on the same; A hundred tongues of fire Lapped around my pyre. And when the blazing tide Engulfed me, and I sighed, Upon my mouth in haste His hand he placed. (Happold 1970: 257)

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*

!

The the One & the Many If the whole of existence is One (Spinoza, Emerson and Eckhart provide three different examples of such a belief) or in a state of mutual co-arising (in the Buddhist sense), manifesting both “suchness” (tathata) and “emptiness” (sunyata), then we cannot determine the essence or nature of entities because there are no entities or things other than the One. It follows that all divisions, categorisations and

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distinctions, which we might impose upon aspects of the One (which, of course, can have no “aspects” because there is no way that we can stand outside or apart from the One in order to look at an aspect) are artificial conventions that have no reality in relation to the One. There are many ways in which we divide up the indivisible world. The divisions and categories are relatively arbitrary - agreed and maintained through conventions, habits and routines. The different ways in which cultures divide up the world are encoded and reinforced in languages, laws, theories, beliefs, rituals and behaviours that vary from place to place and time to time. Mysticism could be considered as a counter-balance to these differentiating tendencies, an experiencing of the indivisible One, a reminder of the arbitrariness of how we divide the One into the Many, and a critique of the belief that any division is absolute or pre-determined. If the One is an indivisible, unified, universal continuum, then there can be no “things” or “entities”, just as infinity can’t be broken down into finite parts. “Things” or “entities” are linguistic conceptualisations that do not accord with the state of Oneness – the “naming of parts” must be a questionable or impossible practice if there are no parts within an indivisible whole. There can be no differentiations in an undifferentiated totality. The totality is a multidimensional formless infinite field that we cannot comprehend, analyse or picture. No wonder then that Wittgenstein argued that linguistic statements cannot represent or picture the world. Only silence (“contemplation” in Merton’s sense) opens up the possibility of an encounter with the world as it is. However it may be possible to consider some kinds of art and poetry as modes of pointing, showing or demonstrating how the world is through metaphor, paradoxical language, poetic images or forms of visual/spatial representation. “Minimalists” like Richard Serra, Carl Andre and Donald Judd, and other sculptors and installation artists like Eva Hesse, Rachel Whiteread, Jannis Kounellis and Marina Abramovic, have produced works that can be considered as material enactments or presentations of the ineffability and actuality of the world.

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In relation to oneness and non-relationality, spatial artists such as James Turrell (in his works employing natural and artifical light), Wolfgang Laib (rectangles of pollen laid on the floor) and Anish Kapoor, have made works that evoke such states. The “white” paintings of Robert Ryman and Robert Rauschenberg, the subtle grids and linear constructions of Agnes Martin, the black canvases of Ad Reinhardt, the blue monochrome paintings of Yves Klein and the expansive colour-fields of Barnett Newman – all of these have been presented as manifestations of a metaphysical formlessness, picturings of an undifferentiated totality or Oneness. As many of these works refute our usual preconceptions of artworks as being about internal compositional relationships and resist our compulsion to look for forms and images within a pictorial field, they may come closest to evoking a non-relational state. But the very fact that they are objects, differentiated from other objects, means they can never fully actualise non-relationality or the undifferentiated nature of the One. All they can do, like some of the works of Sesshu or Nantenbo or Tantric images of the cosmos, is point towards, or evoke in us, a feeling or apprehension of the oneness that mystics describe. Of course, to write of the “One” and the “Many” is to perpetuate a false dichotomy, for the “One” and the “Many” are both linguistic terms within the realm of differentiation and relational conventions. Perhaps we should point to the undifferentiated totality by using an exclamation mark

! or a nonsense sound like “Blah” or “Kwatz”.

!

The is the inexpressible actuality of all that is. (Maybe we can sound this symbol by making a click noise with the tongue – as is used by the !kung people of the Kalahari within their musically distinctive language). *

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One mind Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay, History, begins with this proclamation of his Transcendentalist belief: There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he can understand. Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done. (Emerson 1911: 5)

* Nature mysticism Happold (1970: 43) writes about nature-mysticism as follows: Nature-mysticism is characterized by a sense of the immanence of the One or God or soul in Nature. In a very typical form it is expressed in Wordsworth’s lines: A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things.

Richard Jefferies, the nineteenth century English writer, describes in his spiritual autobiography, Story of my Heart, his experiences on a hill he used to walk to as a youth: I was utterly alone with the sun and the earth. Lying down on the grass, I spoke in my soul to the earth, the sun, the air, and the distant sea far beyond sight. I thought of the earth’s firmness - I felt it bear me up; through the grassy couch there came an influence as if I could feel the great earth speaking to me… Through every grass blade in the thousand, thousand grasses; through the million leaves, veined and edge-cut, on bush and tree; through the song-notes and the marked feathers of the birds; through the insects’ hum and the colour of the butterflies; through the soft warm air, the flecks of clouds dissolving - I used them all for prayer… (in Happold 1970: 386)

Later in the same text he writes: Now is eternity, now I am in the midst of immortality… Open my mind, give my soul to see, let me live it now on earth, while I hear the burring of the larger bees, the sweet air in the grass, and watch the yellow wheat wave beneath me. (ibid: 392)

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* Nature as our creation As an expression of her “chronic uneasiness with Nature-mysticism”, Joyce Carol Oates quotes, approvingly, Oscar Wilde, writing at the end of the 19th Century: Nature is no great mother who has borne us. She is our creation. It is in our brain that she quickens to life. Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depend on the Arts that have influenced us. To look at a thing is very different from seeing a thing… At present, people see fogs, not because there are fogs, but because poets and painters have taught them the mysterious loveliness of such effects. (in Halpern & Frank 2001: 231)

* Dakota Wise Man (just prior to 1890) The following extract was considered by Levi-Strauss, in his book, Totemism, to exemplify, “a metaphysical philosophy common to all the Sioux from the Osage in the south to the Dakota in the north, according to which things and beings are nothing but materialized forms of creative continuity”. (in McLuhan 1973: 177) Everything as it moves, now & then, here & there, makes stops. The bird as it flies stops in one place to make its nest, and in another to rest in its flight. A man when he goes forth stops when he wills. So the god has stopped. The sun, which is so bright & beautiful, is one place where he has stopped. The moon, the stars, the winds, he has been with. The trees, the animals, are all where he has stopped, and the Indian thinks of these places & sends his prayers there to reach the place where the god has stopped & win help & a blessing. (ibid: 37)

* An oak leaf is a thought. It is a manifest idea. All of nature is some intelligent being’s meditation on being. (Davenport 1984: 244)

*

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A geometry of infinity? Mysticism and the infinite In an article entitled, Nicholas of Cusa and the Infinite, for the Integralscience website, Thomas J. McFarlane, (2004) examines potential links between mathematical theories about the infinite and mysticism. In his witty, tongue-in-cheek, preface, A Meditation on the Infinite, McFarlane suggests that unity as applied to notions of God is a unity without an opposite: “This unity is the maximum name enfolding all things in its simplicity of unity, and this is the name which is ineffable and above all understanding” - echoes here of Spinoza’s logical analysis of God as the indeterminate All. The infinite (by definition!) cannot be defined: To define it as other than the finite is to set the infinite apart from the finite and thereby limit it. To define the infinite, therefore, is to make it definite, and no longer infinite. […] Like the Tao, the Infinite that can be named is not the true infinite. The Infinite, then, is ineffable. (ibid)

Except that, as McFarlane points out, to define it as ineffable as opposed to what is not ineffable is to make it finite once more. To say anything is to say too much! McFarlane goes on: The Infinite is paradoxical and contradictory. Yet, while it cannot be defined or represented in rational terms, it is nevertheless profoundly meaningful. The Infinite is a numinous reality that has flooded the human mind with awe and inspiration for thousands of years. Throughout history, the intuition of the Infinite has been known by equally profound and paradoxical terms: the Absolute, the One, the Unconditioned, the Unlimited, the Indivisible, and the Indefinite. Philosophers have identified it with Reality and Truth. Mystics have called it God, Brahman, Allah, and Tao. (ibid)

To which list could be added, the Void, Emptiness and the “Ocean of Indeterminacy” – a phrase used by St John of Damascus to speak about God. McFarlane proceeds to outline the history of the infinite as a mathematical concept, from Pythagoras to Zeno, to Aristotle and Duns Scotus. He then discusses the contribution made by Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464) to these historical developments. Apparently Nicholas had a “mystical illumination in 1437 during a journey home from

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Constantinople”. (ibid) This vision had a profound effect on his thinking enabling him to discuss the infinite in relation to what he calls “the coincidence of opposites”. His mystical insight involved an apprehension of God as beyond, or antecedent to, distinction and indistinction, antecedent to any limits, categories or propositions. McFarlane remarks, “According to Nicholas, this logic of infinitude unites opposites, transcends comparison, overcomes limits of discursive reasoning, and goes beyond both positive and negative theology”. (ibid) In order to understand the concept of the “coincidence of opposites” it may be useful to look at the example of another concept which Nicholas introduced into fifteenth century philosophy, “learned ignorance”. McFarlane writes: Learned ignorance itself is a coincidence of opposites, for it teaches that the more we know our ignorance, the more we attain to true knowledge. Thus, as learned ignorance is perfected, knowledge and ignorance coincide. (ibid)

Just as if we travel in a straight line any point on a sphere will be returned to regardless of which direction we take, or, more explicitly, travelling either west or east along a line of latitude or longitude will bring us back to our starting point – opposite trajectories coincide at the same point. Another intriguing example of the coincidence of opposites is the idea that “in the Infinite, the circle coincides with the line”. (ibid) What Nicholas means is that as a circle increases in size “a given length of the circumference is less curved and more similar to a straight line. The infinite circle, therefore, coincides with the line.” (ibid) These ideas of Nicholas provide a surprising mathematical dimension to some of the paradoxical statements made by mystics in trying to describe their experiences. “Knowing by unknowing”, “the way without a way”, “dark light” and “unfathomable ocean” could be seen as examples of the coincidence of opposites. Elsewhere in his writings Nicholas applies his ideas about infinity and the coincidence of opposites to cosmological speculations. He argues that if the cosmos is infinitely large it must be without a fixed centre, on the other hand any point in an infinite universe can be considered as being located at its centre. Nicholas concludes his argument with a vivid statement of this cosmological coincidence of opposites:

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Borges and the infinite sphere In writing about Nicholas of Cusa I was reminded of an essay by the Argentinian writer, Jorge Luis Borges, who, as I remembered it, was writing about Nicholas and his cosmological paradoxes of infinitude. In re-reading the essay, Pascal’s Sphere, (Borges 1965: 6-9) I realise my memory has not served me well. Although the essay is about the paradoxical statement we have just considered, Nicholas is not mentioned. With typical erudition and wit Borges explores ideas about infinity, time and recurrence in this essay, which he also explores over and over again in other essays, poems and short stories. He begins the short text (it is only three pages long) with a sentence which, in slightly different form, concludes it: “Perhaps universal history is the history of a few metaphors”. (ibid: 6) He traces the metaphor of God, or nature, as a sphere, through many reiterations beginning with Xenophanes of Colophon who proposed to the polytheistic Greeks,

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(who imagined their gods as anthropomorphic beings) the controversial idea that there was only one God, “an eternal sphere”. Borges describes how Plato, in the Timaeus, considers the sphere to be “the most perfect and uniform shape, because all points on its surface are equidistant from the centre”. (ibid) By the twelfth century a French theologian, Alain de Lille, articulates what Borges calls “this formula, which future generations would not forget: ‘God is an intelligible sphere, whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere’”. (ibid: 7) Through medieval writings, Dante’s Divine Comedy and into the Renaissance the metaphor is repeated. By 1584, Giordano Bruno, explaining Copernicus’s ideas about space, writes: “We can state with certainty that the universe is all centre, or that the centre of the universe is everywhere and the circumference nowhere”. (ibid: 8) Borges claims that while Bruno found the idea of infinite space to be liberating, Pascal in the seventeenth century, found it abhorrent (it was a “labyrinth and an abyss”). (ibid) Borges delights in paradoxes and he notes that Pascal “hated the universe, and yearned to adore God. But God was less real to him than the hated universe”. In his manuscript Pascal begins to write “A frightful sphere, the centre of which is…”. But “frightful” (effroyable) doesn’t appear in the final published version. What does appear, driven perhaps by the genetic force of metaphor, is: “It [nature] is an infinite sphere, the centre of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere”. (ibid: 9) I don’t know why Borges omits Nicholas of Cusa from his history of this particular metaphor. Maybe, as the blind director of the national library, Borges had an acute awareness of both infinity and the finite. The thousands of books that were his responsibility must have seemed an infinite archive of writing and reading. On the other hand, even for someone with a prodigious memory (which Borges had), forgetfulness trims the infinite to a finitude of repeated stories and remembered metaphors. In his poem, In Memory of Angelica, Borges reflects on another face of infinity. How many possible lives must have gone out in this so modest and diminutive death, how many possible lives, which fate would turn to memory, or else oblivion?

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292 […] like her, I am dead to infinite destinies which chance makes inaccessible to me. […] A slab of marble tends her memory. Over us looms atrocious history. (1979: 177)

Out of the infinite possibilities that each coming into existence heralds, only a few will be realised. Caught between “destiny” and “chance”, between the “infinite” and “oblivion”, each life is an essay in the resolution of contradictions in the “coincidence of opposites”. Borges records in his fables and tales his own elliptical analyses of what it is to be an entity named “Borges”. Borges maps what is sayable and imaginable with great precision and lucidity. Yet everything he writes seems to be pushing against the unsayable and unimaginable. In this sense his work seems to me to exemplify some of the characteristics of mysticism identified above. The circularities, labyrinths, repetitions and paradoxes that are both his subjects and his compositional devices, are emblematic of his attempts to make sense of many seeming polarities: the one and the many; the indifference of history and the joys and sorrows of each life; a belief in free will and the implacable force of destiny; the uniqueness and capriciousness of every being and the identical certainties of birth and death. Somehow Borges believes equally in the relative and the absolute, free will and fate, the arrow of time and the wheel of destiny. He can write with equal conviction from the perspective of the enigmatic process philosophy of Heraclitus and the logical pantheism of Spinoza, who believed that nothing that is finite has substance. In his poem, Spinoza, he describes how the philosopher’s […] hands, translucent in the dusk, Polish the lenses time and again. […] Free of metaphor and myth, he grinds A stubborn crystal: the infinite Map of the One who is all His stars. (1985: 213)

In, Le Regret D’Heraclite, he imagines Heraclitus, whose thinking we only know from fragments and from the writings of “so many men”,

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looking back on the flux of a life which was never his and never that of a man he particularly envied. This is the whole poem: I, who’ve been so many men, have never been He in whose embrace Matilda Urbach spent. (263)

He ascribes these two lines to “Gaspar Camerarius, in Deliciae Poetarum Borussiae, VII, 16”. Given that many of Borges’ ascriptions are hoaxes, attributions to fictional authors, I am left, as so often in reading this Quixotic Argentinian confabulist, unsure of my ground, uncertain what to believe, feeling all kinds of meanings and references slip through my fingers. It is no coincidence that Borges titled one of his collections of poems, The Book of Sand. * Mysticism, Dasein, indeterminacy & the “open work” I’d like to add a few brief points to the various accounts and working definitions of mysticism given by James, Happold, Merton, Russell, et al. Mystical experiences involve, at some level, a destabilisation or deconstruction of the subject and a reconstruction in a form that the individual feels to be qualitatively “different”. Nearly all accounts suggest that some kind of transformation occurs to, and in, the individual – for instance, expressed as a process of “unknowing”, entering a “darkness” or a state of “egolessness” or unity, experiencing a profound sense of “nonduality”, and a heightened awareness of “being here”. The experience of unity often involves a perception of the dissolution of boundaries, categories and divisions and a profound feeling of relatedness with all that is, an awareness of the mutuality of existence. These experiences, which are somehow both destabilising and harmonious, liberating and reassuring, give rise to a re-oriented sense of self and a revitalisation of the personality that is often very long-lasting. Accounts of mystical experiences also present a sense of “letting-go”, an experience of being that is more like an “opening” or “clearing” in which things arise without intention or will – an acceptance of indeterminacy and interdependence. We can relate Heidegger’s thinking about Dasein as an openness, a clearing or a nothingness to Umberto Eco’s concept of the artwork as an “open work” extended in relation to the self: the idea of the self as an open work, a site of unfolding possibilities, a field of relationships and potential

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mergence with all that is. And these ideas can be linked back to concepts of indeterminacy and infinity, and to “emptiness” and “suchness” as discussed in Part 4. * Anish Kapoor: vertiginous stone and infinite space Anish Kapoor is an example of an artist, who for a time at least, made work that manifests qualities of the mystical via negativa. In a conversation with Friedhelm Mennekes, Kapoor acknowledges his interest in the German mystic Meister Eckhart, references to whose writings he came across in the books of Ananda K. Coomaraswamy. According to Kapoor, Coomaraswamy “saw life as a totality and [he] was convinced that artistic endeavour was a unifying process so that each individual artist would become an integral part of this synthesis”. (Kapoor & Mennekes 2003: 243) Kapoor refers to his need to manifest a kind of “emptiness” in his work, a quality that, paradoxically, he achieves by a process of letting-go, stepping outside, or inside, his own volition: “The real work must be without intention”. (244) As an example of such a work he describes his sculpture, Descent into Limbo, made for the Documenta 9 exhibition in 1992: Upon entering the building, you could only see the hole in the floor: the dark descent. The darkness hovered between meaning and non-meaning and moved between nothingness and the absolute centre of everything, between abundance and emptiness – and yet it was not abstract. (246)

Using dense matt black or deep blue pigment to line holes or concaved recessions in stone, Kapoor manages to induce a sensory disorientation in those who encounter works like Descent into Limbo, Adam or Void Field – the latter works made in 1989. The light-absorbent qualities of the pigment remove the reflective cues that enable us to perceive spatial depth. The dark holes or recessions appear to be infinite - sensory voids that often induce a feeling of vertigo. Descent into Limbo maximises this sense of instability and disorientation by presenting the viewer/participant with a stark “hole” in the floor, a hole that could be bottomless, a deep well or abyss. What is particularly interesting in Kapoor’s work is the coming together (“a coincidence of opposites”?) of a rich sensory experience and a feeling of nothingness or infinite space, material physicality and metaphysical emptiness. In making the first of his Void series, a bowl-shaped form,

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coloured on the inside with “a very, very dark blue”, Kapoor describes how he realised that his previous work had been full of content. Now for the first time it was truly empty […] It was a very clear dark void form. Dark and empty. The opposite of the Platonic idea of looking into the light from the back of a dark cave. This was darkness. The only content that was necessary, was already there”. (244)

He refers to these dark voids as “spaces of the possible”. (245) For Kapoor, “a work of art is an inner reality, even though it manifests itself outwardly”. (244) The physical manifesting of an “inner reality” is at the heart of Kapoor’s making “without intention”. He finds it “astonishing that objects can open up spaces resembling human consciousness”, (245) yet this is what his works seems to do – presenting us with objects that are both powerful metaphors or symbols, and physical enactments, of unified contradictions: infinite space and material substance; emptiness and fullness; actuality and abstraction; sculptural tangibility and sensory disorientation. Kapoor’s work, and the way he describes it, have many similarities to the ideas and phrases used by Merton (“wordless darkness”), Eckhart (“a way without a way”) and other exponents of the apophatic tradition of mysticism. What is particularly striking is the way in which the ineffable qualities of particular states of consciousness are realised, or induced, in so many people who come into contact with Kapoor’s works. I have seen individuals so effected that they have had to cling on to someone else for support, and I’ve overheard conversations in which people try to articulate their experience of vertigo, disorientation and a transformed awareness of being-in-the-world. Perhaps, unintentionally, Kapoor’s works enable us to experience what Heidegger refers to (see above) as “the temporal-linguistic clearing, the opening, the absencing in which things can present themselves”. Kapoor himself says: “The void is not silent. I have always thought of it more and more as a transitional space, an inbetween space […] It’s a space of becoming”. (Ellias 2005)

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* Silhouette: John Bunyan I lighted I fell into a burning I was a little overcome I was walking into a wilderness All words to dust did chafe the air Miseries & wants were puddle into a drought, as if my own light did drown them A small rain of joy did rise I was dreamed into a stone & into a melting & lost all skinfolded form into this shimmering These rags of words are not enough How would it be to touch you into what it is How to put fingers to eternity or to swim with the void Neither here nor there nor doubting nor any certainty nor any ashes of this quick fire It is & I am shadowed by its light (composed from fragments of John Bunyan’s, To Be a Pilgrim)

* Kenneth Rexroth Seemingly a long way from Borges’ narratives of infinitude and Kapoor’s vertiginous sculpture, stands the work of the poet, Kenneth Rexroth, many of whose writings explore a mystical sense of being and the immanence of the “divine” in nature. While Rexroth wrote extensively about experiences which manifest in an ecstatic form many of the characteristics of mystical insight, he was also a writer deeply engaged in the social, political and cultural debates of his time. He was a radical intellectual, critic and activist who did much to develop the artistic culture of the Bay Area around San Francisco. Despite his notoriously turbulent life, his womanising and his many fractured relationships with other intellectuals, artists and poets, Rexroth produced a body of work that is distinguished by its accessibility, lucidity and eloquence. At times rhapsodic and ecstatic, sometimes angry and full of protestations at the injustices he perceived around him, much of his writing is measured and elegiac, the voice of someone who finds in the space of the poem a place in which to step aside from the flow of conflicts and suffering (received and inflicted) that often overwhelmed him. The process of writing poems seemed to afford Rexroth both a way of reflecting on and detaching himself from conflict and suffering, and maintaining contact, however briefly, with a more harmonious and joyfully ecstatic mode of being. The tension between these two strands of discourse is evident, not only in Rexroth’s life, but in many of his poems and translations. In Time Is the Mercy of Eternity (Rexroth 2003: 545) he writes:

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Far away the writhing city Burns in a fire of transcendence And commodities. The bowels Of men are wrung between the poles Of meaningless antithesis.

And yet this image of conflict is immediately followed by these lines: The holiness of the real Is always there, accessible In total immanence.

For Rexroth, “the holiness of the real” is a state that is immanent in the whole of life, to be found within the everyday affairs of the “writhing city”, not in some other reality or in the cloisters of academia or the institutionalised church. Undoubtedly Rexroth himself found it hard to realise this state, except in the making of his poetry and in his life-long practice of walking, climbing and camping in the Sierras. In his political thinking Rexroth’s sought to unite apparently mutually-exclusive strands of egalitarian socialism and anarchist individualism. He was suspicious of institutions and mainstream political organisations. In For Eli Jacobson, written in 1952 to commemorate the death of an old friend, he reflects on the hopes of an age of social emancipation and harmony that he and Jacobson thought, naively, they would live to see realised: “the new / world where man was no longer / wolf to man, but men and women / were all brothers and lovers / together. We will not see it”. (ibid: 541) However, though he recognises that this “golden age” will not happen, he believes that it was, and is, worth working for. He reckons that Jacobson “had a good life. Even all / its sorrows and defeats and / disillusionments were good”. (ibid) This acceptance of the “sorrows and defeats” provides a note of realism to offset the romantic left-wing dreaming that might otherwise make this an overly-sentimental poem. For Rexroth, the pursuit of social justice and the egalitarian state is an integral part of the poet’s agenda, even though he knows that these aspirations may never be fulfilled – indeed he knows that “all this has happened before, / many times”. (ibid)

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Underpinning Rexroth’s social and political activism is a belief that the poet is “one who creates / sacramental relationships / that last always”. (in Barnhill 1997) Hamalian (1992: 60) recounts how Rexroth read the German mystic, Jacob Boehme (1575-1624), in whose writings he identified “a way of endowing the natural world with spiritual significance and an explanation of the revelatory moments he [Rexroth] had experienced since childhood”. Rexroth took one of Boehme’s writings, The Signature of All Things, as the title of a poem published in 1949 (in a collection with the same title). In the poem he refers to Boehme as a saint who “saw the world as streaming / in the electrolysis of love”. (Rexroth 2003: 275) As in many of his other works, Rexroth describes states of reverie and contemplation amidst the woods, glades and mountains. The detail is as finely drawn as in the work of John Clare or Thoreau: “The wren broods in her moss domed nest. / A newt struggles with a white moth / Drowning in the pool”. (ibid) Out of these “long hours” of reflection and reminiscence he experiences some kind of redemptive epiphany: “My own sin and trouble fall away / Like Christian’s bundle, and I watch / My forty summers fall like falling / Leaves and falling water held / Eternally in summer air”. (ibid: 275-276) Later in the poem he describes how he pulled a “rotten log / From the bottom of the pool, / It seemed as heavy as stone”. He leaves the log for a month to dry out, chops it into kindling and lets it lie nearby to dry some more. Later that night he looks out from his cabin porch and sees the pieces of log “Spread on the floor of night, ingots / Of quivering phosphorescence, / And all about were scattered chips / Of pale cold light that was alive”. (ibid: 277) In the transmutation of the heavy rotten log into “pale cold light that was alive”, we can perhaps read a metaphor for the way in which Rexroth retrieves “sacramental relationships” from the flux of conflict and brokenness that characterised his everyday life. Just as Boehme recognised the signature of the divine in all things, so Rexroth “draws attention through reminiscence to the transience of life and […] the need to crystallize value amidst the flux of existence”. (Gutierrez 1999: 2) Tu Fu, like Jacob Boehme, was a talismanic figure in Rexroth’s mindscape. Inscribed into the poems of Tu Fu and Rexroth there is a melancholy air, a yearning for peace and tranquillity. In his translation of Tu Fu’s poem, Written on the Wall of Chang’s Hermitage,

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Rexroth/Tu Fu writes: “Life whirls past like drunken wildfire”. (Rexroth 1971: 4) Rexroth’s troubled personality, stormed by anger, cruelty and remorse, yet aspiring to compassion and care, found a companion in time, an ancient counsel in the sensitive mind of Tu Fu who, like Rexroth, addressed both the public powers of the day and the many intimate friendships he both sought and disturbed. Both Tu Fu and Rexroth seem to have been envious of, and in awe of, those who have found peace of mind and stillness in action: […] You have learned to be gentle As the mountain deer you have tamed. The way back forgotten, hidden Away, I become like you, An empty boat, floating, adrift. (Rexroth 1971: 4)

Rexroth’s range of reading was extensive, and many poets, students and scholars who participated in the countless discussions and dinner parties he laid on throughout his life, bear testimony to his erudition and autodidactic scholarship. As well as his readings of Boehme and other Christian mystics and scholars (Duns Scotus was a favourite, an author whose “incomprehensibility appealed to him”), later in his life he was drawn more and more to Buddhist ideas. (Hamalian 1992: 28) Despite, or maybe because of, his somewhat chaotic personal life, Rexroth valued contemplative experience and the insights and equilibrium it brought him. If we return to his poem, Time Is the Mercy of Eternity, which, as we have seen, opens with an image of “the writhing city” burning “in a fire of transcendence / And commodities”, we can see how a process of contemplation and the insights it brings, lead Rexroth to a state of being that appears to be very similar to the mystical states described by James, Happold, Merton and others. Here is the ending of the poem, which I quote at length because it reveals much about Rexroth’s poetics and his belief in art as a transformative mode of knowing: […] Suspended In absolutely transparent Air and water and time, I Take on a kind of crystalline Being. In this translucent Immense here and now, if ever, The form of the person should be

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300 Visible, its geometry, Its crystallography, and Its astronomy. The good And evil of my history Go by. I can see them and Weigh them. They go first, with all The other personal facts, And sensations, and desires. At last there is nothing left But knowledge, itself a vast Crystal encompassing the Limitless crystal of air And rock and water. And the Two crystals are perfectly Silent. There is nothing to Say about them. Nothing at all. (Rexroth 2003: 548-549)

Rexroth’s infidelities, occasional cruelties and lies, “the good and evil” of his history, are not to be excused, let alone somehow compensated for, by his poetry. But he does demonstrate in his writing a profoundly self-aware and self-critical analysis of his own shortcomings. In his work we see how a flawed and troubled life, scrutinised and stripped bare by contemplation, can be laid out for us so that we can see “its geometry, / Its crystallography, and / Its astronomy”. The poem becomes a kind of “clearing” in which the contraries that make up a person’s life are presented without much comment or judgemental analysis. In Rexroth’s case the exercise of a poetic discipline can be considered as equivalent to the disciplines of prayer and meditation in a monastic context, or to the merging of self in love or nature found in Sufism or transcendentalists like Thoreau, or to the “letting-be” that Heidegger advocates as a mode of understanding human being. * Liminality moth to light moon trees stone a web of inbetweens a collecting & a dispersing so it goes afternoon into evening into night and the infinite dawn

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* Fire in the House Consider the metaphor of a fire, which burns too fiercely, threatening to engulf the house. The fire is the self, or monkey mind, driven by wanting, craving, discriminating, dividing and categorising. Most of our time is spent throwing more and more fuel on the fire - feeding the flames. The Taoist and the mystic argue that we need to deny the fire its fuel in order to find peace, understanding and freedom. Or as a Zen master might say: leave the fire alone and it'll die down all by itself. As noted above the Taoist calls this wu-wei, “doing by not-doing”. But, we might ask, what's wrong with the fire burning fiercely? Isn't this what drives us to progress, change, invent new things, improve our “standard of living”? Isn't the mystical way a recipe for passivity, for social and political inaction and stasis? Isn't the fire what drives our moral action - our sense of right and wrong, justice and injustice? Isn't our True Self, rooted in the Ground of Being, likely to lead to an amoral indifference to social and political conditions? No doubt at various times and in some places these criticisms have been legitimately directed at mystics, times when a quietist passivity has dominated mystical practices in such a way as to lead to a worldweariness or a removal from worldly affairs or a tacit complicity in social injustice or political inequality. On the other hand there are many examples that can be put forward to support the contention that mystical states of consciousness can energise individuals to speak and take action against injustices and inequalities and towards peacefulness, tolerance and emancipation. There are many Quakers who might be included in a list of examples, though some of them might object to the term “mystical” being applied to their encounters with “that of God in everyone”. Hildegard von Bingen, Gandhi, Tolstoy, Thoreau, Charles de Foucauld (the founder of the order of contemplatives called the Little Brothers and Sisters of Christ), Thich Nat Hanh, Joseph Beuys and Thomas Merton are other names that come to mind.

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* Mary Oliver, (1990: 6) in her poem, Spring: ‘There is only one question: / how to love this world’. * The metaphysics of light In a poem from the second volume of his religious verse, Silex Scintillans (1655), Henry Vaughan begins with: They are all gone into the world of light! And I alone sit lingering here; Their very memory is fair and bright, And my sad thoughts doth clear.

And ends with: Either disperse these mists, which blot and fill My perspective (still) as they pass, Or else remove me hence unto that hill, Where I shall need no glass. (in Gardner 1966: 275-277)

Maybe Vaughan intends a double meaning here. On the one hand he is referring to the dead, to angels and souls; on the other he could be referring to moments of insight, flashes of mystical lucidity, glimpses of the divine. Gardner points out that, in Vaughan’s day, “perspective” was a term used to denote “spy-glass.” The analogy of the lens or window is a familiar device in mystical literature. The idea is that we look at the world through a glass lens. The glass itself is the individualistic self. Self-awareness consists of being aware of the glass. The more we are aware of the glass, the less we are aware of the world beyond. The reality of the glass overtakes and dominates our awareness of the reality of the “real” world. In Cartesian consciousness and rationalistic analytical thinking the glass is emphasised. We draw grids, lines and compartments on its surface in order to categorise, divide and quantify what is “out there”. Mystics suggest that in doing this what we see becomes distorted and modified by the glass. The disciplines of mysticism are used to clean the lens and to focus on the reality itself. In the words of Jacob Boehme: “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would

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appear to men as it is, infinite”. (in Wilson, 1957) Given that many mystics seek a re-union with the Ground of Being, the ego or individualistic self is often considered a hindrance - one of the barriers dividing us from Reality. Therefore the ego has to be made transparent, the glass has to be cleaned and purified in order to let in the light of divine illumination. Mysticism urges us not to mistake the glass, the lens or the image on the lens, for the “real world”. Of course, in using the metaphor of a lens and the world we are maintaining a dualistic mode of thought and expression that mystics question and refute. There is no lens separate from the world. Lens and world are interdependent facets of one integral reality - the ! as described above. The metaphor of cleaning the lens can be linked to what Blaser calls the “metaphysics of light” tradition within mysticism. This tradition is complemented by, or entwined with, another strand of mystical thought that Blaser traces from Dionysius the Aeropagite (PseudoDionysius): “we now call it the agnostic, but the agnosia was the business of working always with the darkness, the unknown, and the incomprehensibility”. (Blaser 1974: 52) Blaser claims that PseudoDionysius influenced Dante into believing that “the real is light itself, that it begins in light and that it ends in light, both, and so as a consequence whatever is substantial, the way the real moves, what makes it continuous and full and alive, is the nature of light”. (Blaser 1974: 36) And this is the light of illumination, of understanding – light as energy and the awakened mind, the meeting of physics and metaphysics. In the words of Thomas Vaughan (the brother of Henry Vaughan), “matter is the house of light”. (in Blaser 1974: 46) It could be argued that the mind has a similar relationship to the body, as Vaughan’s light has to matter. The mind is the dynamic resonating wave-pulse of the body, the neurological “light” or consciousness. * The vagaries of belief and logic: Belief in a reality quite different from what appears to the senses arises with irresistible force in certain moods, which are the source of most mysticism, and of most metaphysics. […] When the intensity of emotional conviction subsides, a man who is in the habit of reasoning will search for logical

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* James Turrell’s light projections The American artist, James Turrell, has used natural and artificial light in many of his works since the mid nineteen-sixties. One way of framing and interpreting Turrell’s work is in relation to the “metaphysics of light” tradition. In the single wall projections, like Decker, 1967, an intense rectangle of white light is projected on to a wall surface within a confined interior space that is otherwise dark. The appearance of the rectangle of light changes depending upon the angle at which it is viewed. Sometimes it seems to be part of the wall, at other times, or from other angles, it may appear to be a luminous sheet hovering a few inches away from the wall. In other instances it seems as if you were looking into an unfathomable space that receded into the wall – an effect not dissimilar to viewing the dark voids in Kapoor’s works, though produced with brightness rather than darkness. Turrell doesn’t set out to deceive those who observe and participate in his work. He remarks: All of these pieces existed at the limits or very slightly inside the limits of the physical space. They affected the viewer’s awareness of the space and tended to create a hypothetical or imaginary space within the gallery that could be dissolved on approaching the image. In all the Projection Pieces, it was important that the quality of illusion be both convincing and dissoluble. (in Birnbaum 2002: 64)

The perceptual conundrum posed by Decker and other works, is on one level the product of ambiguous visual and spatial cues, and on another level it is a conflict between appearances and “reality”. Indeed works like this, and, it could be argued many of the works of Kapoor and Agnes Martin, raise questions about what is “real”? What is it that we are experiencing? To what extent are our perceptions reliable or “true”? What is the relationship between our perceptions and the “world out there”? We switch from one “reading” of the work to another. In the case of another series of Turrell’s works, the cross corner projections (examples include: Afrum-Proto, 1966, and Catso Blue, or

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Catso Red, 1967), the perceptual and cognitive riddles are more dramatic. In these works the rectangle of light is projected into the corner of the gallery space “in such a way that from a distance there appeared to be a cube floating off the floor, yet in some manner attached to the corner of the space. From a distance this space had solidity, but appeared to be literally composed of light”. (ibid: 59) The illusion of luminous corporeality was extremely convincing, yet it dissolved when the observer moved to another position in relation to the work. The “object” (the cube of light) only existed as a fleeting phantom, a perceptual construct that the viewer could see was there and yet not there. The relativity of perception could be experienced in a very intense way. We could consider this as an eloquent demonstration of the Buddhist concept of sunyata, “emptiness”, in that the bright cube, like all objects, could be seen to have no essential self-existence, it only existed as a transitory manifestation of relationships and interdependence. Looked at in Taoist terms we could see the appearance of the cube as a manifestation of the way in which the “myriad creatures” arise out of the inchoate unity of the Tao, or in Eckhart’s terms the Many appearing out of the One. In a conversation with Richard Whittaker (2005) Turrell, who was brought up as a Quaker, mentions that “My grandmother used to tell me that as you sat in Quaker silence you were to go inside to greet the light. That expression stuck with me”. This suggests a direct connection with the “metaphysics of light” tradition – though many Friends would dispute this way of articulating it. Like many Quakers, Turrell prefers not to use the grandiose language of theology to talk about his beliefs and experiences. In talking about two astronomer colleagues who attend his local Quaker meeting, he may also perhaps be talking about himself and his artmaking: In some ways they have difficulty with organized religion, but in another way they are peering into this ‘face of God’ every night where the real awe of it is absolutely evident to them. But to have some way to express this in the secular world is difficult for them, very difficult. On the other hand, they are some of the more devout people I know. (ibid)

He tells of other events in his early life that have a bearing on his later work:

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I was out in a garden when I was a child, and things took on a life and a luminance that was like this near-death experience, with eyes open. Then once, in Ireland I was coming in a boat, in from Fastnet toward Whitehall. It was absolutely still. A silver light came about that bathed everything. This was an experience I had in a conscious, awake state. (ibid)

He goes on: I would like to have the physicality of my light at least remind you of this other way of seeing. […] It’s terrible hubris to say this is a religious art. But it is something that does remind us of that way we are when we are thinking of things beyond us. (ibid)

Turrell’s installations can be considered as “viewing chambers”, spaces in which the act of seeing and sensing a space are intensified, problematised and celebrated. Nothing is represented. What we encounter are instances of perception, light and dark, qualities of space and experiences of being in a space. Turrell provides us with an “opening” or “clearing” in which perceptions, thoughts, phenomena arise, and in which we experience an intensification of being. In engaging with works by Kapoor, Martin and Turrell, we may feel a sense of disorientation and destabilisation as we grapple with the riddles they pose. While the context may be secular rather than religious, an art gallery rather than a monastery or temple, it may not be too far-fetched to describe these experiences as momentary awakenings to a way of being that is close to mystical experience as described by mystics and philosophers over the centuries. * Silhouette: Thomas Traherne I was a stranger from dust I rose in my bones was knowledge all things were spotless & pure & nothing in the world and yet out of nothing all tears & quarrels were brought to pass in silence did I see how soft the stars did entertain my senses these eyes & hands did seek the lofty skies & touch chaos all that is born dies into the dust of light from which all things rise: trees & wheat, lively air & time, smiles & sorrows, rare & ordinary things (composed from fragments of texts used by Gerald Finzi in Dies Natalis, opus 8 – including quotes from Traherne’s Centuries of Meditation and Arioso)

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* Jacob Boehme: “The true heaven is everywhere, even in that very place where thou standest and goest…. If man’s eyes were but opened he should see God everywhere in his heaven, for heaven stands in the innermost moving everywhere”. (in Palmer, 1954) * Agnes Martin Since the nineteen-sixties the American painter, Agnes Martin, has made works that employ a few basic elements. Thin graphite lines and watercolour or acrylic paint (usually applied in thin washes) are structured in accordance with an underlying grid. Sometimes the graphite and/or colour take the form of vertical or horizontal lines or bands, sometimes there is an explicit grid drawn with graphite or coloured ink. For the past thirty years or so, the larger paintings have been made on square canvases either six-feet or, more recently fivefeet, in size. Smaller works, often only nine or ten inches square, have been made on paper. Formally, Untitled #8, 1977, is a typical work from the period, although it is made with India ink, graphite and gesso on a six-foot square canvas. Horizontal graphite lines are repeated close together across the whole width of the canvas. Five vertical lines are arranged at equal intervals to form a grid. When a work like this is encountered the response of “viewers” is often one of surprise. Words like “beautiful”, “delicate” and “subtle” are accompanied by phrases like “so rich”, “what a presence they have”, “the stillness is captivating” and “they have a kind of aura about them”. Simple means are used to generate both “simple” and much more complex responses. Untitled #8, has the stability one would expect from a square object. From a distance it is the pale tonality and the simple squareness that one sees. Moving closer we become aware of a shifting sensation as our eyes begin to perceive the lines that seem to hover or quiver within the square field. The stillness of the object as a whole seems to be disturbed by this shimmering of lines - lines that are themselves slightly modulated and uneven as the graphite picks out the undulating surface of the canvas. The work has a phenomenological immediacy and complexity that belies its apparent simplicity. There is a kind of subtle disorientation at work, an undermining of certainties and

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expectations. The perceptual processes of trying to focus on thin lines repeated in close proximity to each other against a ground that is spatially hard to “fix” in relation to the lines, generate feelings of indefinability, formlessness and intensity. In a very different form to that generated by Kapoor’s work, we experience a similar kind of intense inability to rationalise or make definite our place in the world (the space surrounding the work). We come face-to-face with the indefinable and the ineffable, the threshold of perception and cognition. Martin writes: “My interest is in experience that is wordless and silent, and in the fact that this experience can be expressed for me in art work that is also wordless and silent”. (in McEvilley 1993: 71) Paintings like Untitled #8, present us with a vivid experience of the way in which forms (lines) arise out of an undifferentiated ground – the way the Many arise out of the One. The painting presents us with a “plane of attention and awareness” (in Haskell 1992: 102) - a vehicle for contemplative states of consciousness. In this sense it plays a similar role to prayer in the discipline of monks like Merton or to the mandala in the practices of Tantric Buddhism – both of which function as a “plane of attention and awareness”, a device for distilling mystical insight out of the flow of everyday experience. Martin writes very eloquently and concisely, conveying the ideas and beliefs that underpin her art practice. Here are a few examples without commentary: The silence on the floor of my house Is all the questions and all the answers that have been known in the world (Haskell 1992: 25) I used to look in my mind for the unwritten page if my mind was empty enough I could see it (ibid: 16) These paintings are about freedom from the cares of this world from worldliness When your eyes are open you see beauty in anything. (ibid: 17)

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Anna C. Chave argues that “a kind of egolessness sets Martin apart from her male peers”. (in Haskell 1992: 132) There is something very non-assertive and humble about Martin’s work that Chave suggests may be “anachronistic” at a time when “self-assertion – has been the watchword of feminists”. However, as Chave points out, Martin’s humility and self-effacement have been remarkably effective in terms of the respect and the amount of serious critical attention given to her work by the male-dominated art establishment. While it is usual to frame Martin’s work within the context of minimalist art and classicism, Thomas McEvilley (1993: 69-70) argues that in her writings and her work there are echoes of Taoist texts, “a body of literature with which Martin has lived closely”. There is a suggestion in Lao Tzu, that to follow the Way of the Tao all preconceptions, judgements and worldly knowledge must be abandoned. As evidence that Agnes Martin sympathises with this idea McEvilley quotes from Martin’s unpublished lecture notes, On the Perfection Underlying Life: If it is the unconditioned life that you want [,] you do not know what you should do or what you should have done. We will just have to let everything go. Everything we know and everything everyone else knows is conditioned. (ibid: 72)

This takes us back to Merton’s description of his sense of “liberation from an illusory difference” arising in his “Louisville vision”, and to the “unknowing knowing” of the author of the Cloud of Unknowing, and to the aspiration towards, and experience of, “self-surrender” or “mergence” in the accounts of Sufi and other mystics. It also accords with the Taoist ideas of letting-go of socially conditioned values and behaviours in order to act in accordance with the Tao. * Marcel Duchamp & Pierre Cabanne: a dialogue about not-believing in “being” Duchamp: […] I don’t believe in positions. Cabanne: But what do you believe in? Duchamp: Nothing, of course! The word ‘belief’ is another error. It’s like the word “judgement.” They’re both horrible ideas, on which the world is based. Cabanne: Nevertheless, you believe in yourself?

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Duchamp: I don’t believe in the word “being.” The idea of being is a human invention… It’s an essential concept which doesn’t exist at all in reality. (in McEvilley 1999: 55)

* John Cage on this life and the Tao of art: Art is not an attempt to bring order out of chaos… but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s desire out of its way and lets it act of its own accord. (in Perloff 1996b: 202)

* in the spider’s web the spider is free *

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Silhouette: Lucrezia Tornabuoni de Medeci No more desire, no more that hides what is, no more is heard, her prayer as spark from wood from stone mere breath no more, already spent this sign no more is heard, not once no more this sign, this spark, divine speech unable to hide no more to speak, why do you say, to discern such spark a mere breath awakens not to see to discern such devout breath a mere spark will fly that hides before it comes to be To fabricate one day such desire, one day to make known such love & to conceal death, fears, suffered times of nothing concealed alone such desire made known For a long time the other said in that place whence such desire concealed had suffered a long time: “a long time I have wanted to tell you, so captured & bound to me always as the breath is bound free no more to speak…” (composed from fragments of de Medeci’s, Sacred Narratives, in Tylus 2001)

* Neither this, nor that Montaigne, in his Apology for Raimund Sebond, reminds us to suspend judgement and conviction , to doubt all theories and concepts, including God and mysticism: “Is it not better to remain in suspense than to entangle yourself in the many errors that the human fancy has produced?” (in McEvilley 1999: 13) * Neither here nor there In the dark world of the pond there is another version of this world the symmetry of reflections binds the two where they meet is neither here nor there a nowhere exists that is this invisible skin this transparency where the light changes direction the shaft of lily breaks (yet is unbroken) the skater meets its opposite number (yet there is no number to this once and only world * In the end there is only

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Part 10 The discontinuum of consciousness: ambiguity, indeterminacy & multiplicity “I don’t see a synthesis, but a melee”. Robert Duncan (in Hoover 1994: 29) “These fragments I have shored against my ruins”. T.S.Eliot, The Wasteland (in Eliot 1936: 77)

In this section I briefly describe some of the structural ideas and methods that are employed in the present volume and link them to the work of other artists and writers. I also trace some of the historical vectors that shape my thinking and place the compositional ethos manifested and discussed in these pages into a wider cultural framework – particularly in relation to ideas about knowledge. In writing this section I ought to point out that I’m interested in making and discussing a kind of art “that imitates nature in her manner of operation”. (Cage 1966: 194) I’ve adopted this notion about art from John Cage, who, in turn, got it from Coomaraswamy. Implicit in this approach is a belief that somehow structures in art, modes of composition, should approximate to structures and processes operating in the wider world. * Composing the Text The text in many parts of this book is organised in a series of sections which are both freestanding and in some way related to the others.

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Each section and sub-section illuminates a different aspect of the field of enquiry. The images, and the more unusual texts and formatting, provide a visual enactment or complementary picturing of some of the ideas under discussion. The fragmentation and discontinuity within the text are presented as forms of resistance to normalising discourses of knowing, making and being. The sequencing of text fragments and images is intended to surprise, to disrupt expectations and to encourage associative thinking on the part of the reader - an invitation to participate in the construction of meaning and interpretation. The reiteration of some ideas and themes in different sections generates rhythmic patterns of attention and insistence that parallel the ways in which we turn over ideas and phrases in our mind, coming at the same notion from different angles in order to open out different meanings and possibilities. Our consciousness is characterised by its multi-dimensional complexity. We process information, sensations and memories in convoluted chains of images, linguistic patterns, moods and emotions. There is a layered simultaneity to this processing that adds to its complexity and to the indeterminacy of meanings, actions and possibilities that arise from moment-to-moment. In our everyday thinking and “minding”, sequences of linear argument are interrupted by reiterations of phrase and word, detours of association and analogy, eruptions of unconnected images and changes of emotion or mood. This interweaving of many threads is what gives such resonance and richness to our sense of being and becoming. We are these complex, fluid, ever-changing currents of embodied mind - episodic rhythms of linear continuity, non-linear discontinuity and multi-linear complexity. Collage, montage, dialogues, networks and layered structures approximate more closely to the multi-dimensional topography of consciousness than do single monological narratives or isolated images. In this book the intermittent continuity and discontinuity, within a multi-linear field, is also meant to be an enactment of mind, a picturing of how I am in the world and a record of how images, thoughts, feelings and ideas arise in consciousness – consciousness that is grounded in the world – an embodied mind implicated, through sensory and symbolic fields, in the ebb and flow of light and matter. Somehow I’m trying, probably with limited success, to combine both

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a buzzard’s view of things, soaring above the terrain with a keen-eyed precision of focus and optical nuance, and a badger’s feel of things at ground level, snuffling into the earth, nudging and scraping at the tactile grubbiness of mattered space. Trying to combine material topography and energy field spectroscopy – bone and light – skin and eye - rootedness and nonlocality – specificity and indeterminacy. * Assemblage, Pound & play Andre Furlani (2002) has written perceptively about Guy Davenport’s fiction and essays. He refers to what Davenport calls “architectonic form”, a mode of construction that Davenport uses in much of his work. Furlani writes: “In architectonic form, meaning may be generated more in the interstices between images, citation, and passages of dialogue than in the content of these elements”. Davenport applies the term “assemblage” to his work, rather than “story”. He traces his compositional indebtedness to early modernists like Pound and the Vorticists, arguing that “a work of art is a form that articulates forces, making them intelligible”. (1987: xi) Furlani (2002) suggests that in his short stories Davenport has adapted “the ideogrammatic method of Ezra Pound’s Cantos, where a grammar of images, emblems, and symbols replaces that of logical sequence”. Furlani adds that Davenport “follows his modernist precursors in assuming that a new subject entails the renegotiation of formal convention”. Despite Furlani’s contention that there is a close parallel between Davenport’s prose method and the Cubists, the process of “renegotiation” that happens with each work marks a significant difference between Cubist (and possibly Vorticist) methods and Davenport’s own. Cubist structural modes are developed by Picasso, Braque and others from work to work over a number of years (say between 1908 and c.1918). Those who employ a Cubist style during this period, work with that style as a given. Even Picasso, normally a magpie collector and user of different styles, becomes single-minded in developing the compositional vocabulary of, firstly, analytical Cubism and then, synthetic Cubism. In this sense the formal concern dominates all others. Renegotiation, in the sense that Furlani applies it to

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Davenport’s work, is minimised or suspended in favour of a continuity of formal development. Furlani ends his article by suggesting that a “principle of play” is at work in Davenport’s assemblages: “In contrast to the linear, continuous, and temporal conventions of traditional fiction, Davenport models his texts on the multi-dimensional, discontinuous and spatial principles of the playing field”. * In his essay, Ernst Machs Max Ernst, Davenport writes: A page, which I think of as a picture, is essentially a texture of images… The text of a story is therefore a continuous graph, kin to the imagist poem, to a collage… a page of Pound, a Brakhage film. (1984: 374-375)

* The discontinuum of consciousness It seems likely that discontinuity is a structural feature of consciousness. Deepak Chopra (2005: 9) claims that “the world is a discontinuity, and every experience arises because of the discontinuity”. He goes on to explain: If I go to see a movie I see on the screen a continuous picture, but when I go to the projection room I find out that there is a series of still frames with little spaces in between. If I move the reel fast enough, I cannot see the “off”: I can only see the “on”; so I experience in consciousness a continuity. But the reality is that the movie is a discontinuity. (ibid)

Chopra’s views seem to be supported by the findings of Dale Purves at Duke University. According to Oliver Sacks, Purves and his colleagues have analysed in detail the way in which we perceive rotating blades of a fan or spokes of a moving wheel, and the related phenomena of the “wagon-wheel illusion” which occurs when the rotating wheels of a wagon in a cowboy film seem to stop or go backwards. The wagon wheel illusion reflects a lack of synchronisation between the number of frames per second at which the film moves and the speed of the rotating wheels. Sacks comments that having excluded any other cause of discontinuity (intermittent lighting, eye movements, etc), [Purves’s team] conclude that the visual system processes

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information “in sequential episodes”, at the rate of three to twenty such episodes per second. Normally these sequential images are experienced as an unbroken perceptual flow. (Sacks 2004: 5)

It may be that movies seem so life-like to us precisely because they are composed of discrete frames projected at a speed that approximates to our own process of visual perception. As far as Purves is concerned it is precisely this decomposition of what we see into a succession of moments that enables the brain to detect and compute motion; for all it has to do is to note the differing positions of objects between successive “frames”, and from these calculate the direction and speed of motion. (in Sacks 2004: 6)

Perhaps the discontinuities evident in the films of Stan Brakhage, in the collages and assemblages of Schwitters and Rauschenberg, and in the textual constructs of Davenport, Pound, Carson and many other poets, are reflecting, or approximating to, the structural discontinuities embedded in the apparent continuity of consciousness. * Waking-up: self-discipline rather than self-expression John Cage, in an interview with Daniel Charles, speaks of the relationship between art and the world-as-process: The real [is not] the world as it is […] it is not, it becomes! It moves, it changes! It doesn’t wait for us to change […] The world, the real is not an object. It is a process […] The function of art at the present time is to preserve us from all logical minimizations that we are at each instant tempted to apply to the flux of events. To draw us nearer to the process which is the world we live in. (in Perloff 1996b: 196-197)

This aspiration of Cage’s, to draw near “to the process which is the world we live in”, is stated in a slightly different way when he quotes Coomaraswamy’s injunction that art should “imitate nature in her manner of operation” – a phrase Cage comes back to many times in his writings and conversations. (see Cage 1966: 194) The artist’s job is not to express him or her self, but to generate structures that approximate to the processes that operate in nature. These structures are complex, usually made up of many linear determinate strands, interwoven and layered in such a way that the unfolding totality is an

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indeterminate, highly complex, conglomeration of forces and constituent parts. As Perloff (1996b: 202) puts it, Cage saw “‘selfdiscipline’ as a way of displacing ‘self-expression’ from the romantic tradition of the artist as self-centred seer”. Discipline is needed to fulfil Cage’s “repeated insistence that ‘art is not an attempt to bring order out of chaos […] but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s desire out of its way and lets it act of its own accord’”. Cage works to make the ego more porous and transparent, to let the light pass through a skin that is a mediating membrane rather than an inviolable barrier. The distinction between “inside” and “outside”, self and world, is blurred and reduced, such that in Cage’s music, writing and performance the individual is considered and treated as a participant in the world, not as an entity separate from the world. As participants in the world, in the music, writing and performance, we have to be awake to what is happening all around us, we have to be responsive, critical and questioning, alive to whatever arises in consciousness. Cage (1981: 239) likens this aliveness and attentiveness to a kind of liberation: “Among these wanderings – and in the middle of them – here, all of a sudden, is a release. Or an opening”. The language used here is reminiscent of Eckhart and Heidegger – Gelassenheit, a release or “letting-be”; Dasein, the openness of “being-here” or “being-there”. (See Part 9) * Indeterminacy Having made reference to indeterminacy many times in the previous pages I’d like say a little more about what I mean by this term. Turning to a dictionary yields the following typical definitions: Indeterminable 1. that cannot be determined or defined 2. (of a dispute) that cannot be terminated Indeterminate 1. not fixed or limited in scope, nature, etc. 2. indefinite, not precise 3. (math) having no fixed value (Cassell 2000: 641)

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I seem to remember reading somewhere that St. John of Damascus had a way of referring to God as “the ocean of indeterminacy”. If we connect this with Spinoza’s identification of God with Nature, the totality of existence, then we can think of nature and existence as an ocean of indeterminacy. Within this ocean are countless currents of determinacy, linear threads of will and intention, maybe even filaments of “destiny” or “fate”, but these are frail things, entwined and knotted like seaweed in such a way that they only add to the indeterminate whole. Indeterminacy is a characteristic of many aspects of life (and of art). We can’t determine how a person will live, what opportunities they will realise out of all those that are presented to them. Nor can we determine these things in relation to ourselves. Weather patterns, natural events, illnesses, accidents, epiphanies, moods, conflicts, ecstasies – these all exhibit high levels of indeterminacy and contribute to the indeterminacy of our own existence. We have to live with uncertainty, instability, ambiguity and contradiction. We can’t determine with any accuracy how someone will respond to an artwork; what thoughts or feelings they will have; what meanings and interpretations they will make of a painting, or a poem, let alone of another person or the “world”. Heisenberg and Bohr have argued that at the quantum level we can either observe the momentum of a particle, but not its position, or we can plot its position but not its momentum. The non-localised effect of the observer on the observed leads to a deep unpredictability, an inherent indeterminacy, in relation to our observations and to the “reality” that is observed. According to David Bohm (1989: 79-80) Heisenberg’s original formulation of his theory, as the “uncertainty principle” suggested that a particle did have a position and momentum, but these facts were unknown to the observer. Neils Bohr argued that the term “ambiguous” (or, we might claim, “indeterminate”) was more precise, indicating that the values and meaning of the terms “position”, “momentum” and “trajectory” are inherently ambiguous – they cannot be defined or determined however sophisticated the observer or the observational apparatus. Jacob Bronowski (1977: 365) suggests that this principle means “that no events, not even atomic events, can be described with certainty, that is, with zero tolerance”.

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Therefore, Bronowski argues, another way of thinking about Heisenberg’s theory is as a “Principle of Tolerance”: “All knowledge, all information between human beings can only be exchanged within a play of tolerance”. We have to live with indefiniteness and indeterminacy, and be open to the opinions and knowledge of others, who will be looking at things from a different perspective, a different point and moment of observation. Another aspect of indeterminacy connects with ideas discussed in section 4. If objects and entities are “mutually dependent”, existing only as manifestations of a web of relationships, then they have no essence or fixed identity. Objects have no autonomous self-existence, they only exist in relation to all that surrounds them. They are neither this nor that. In the realm of appearances, conventions and linguistic categorisations we give names to objects, but we need to keep in mind that we are giving names to evanescent manifestations of the flux and indeterminacy of existence. As McEvilley (2003: 12) puts it, this “type of indeterminacy goes beyond the problem of knowledge into ontology. In this mode, we cannot know what something is, not simply because our information is incomplete, but because it isn’t anything in particular at all”. John Cage (1966: 35-40) is particularly associated with indeterminacy in relation to music and the arts. In the section entitled, Indeterminacy, of his three lectures on Composition as Process, Cage is largely concerned to demonstrate how “music which is indeterminate with respect to its performance” is often composed using determinate means. It is only when these determinate strands (parts) come together that indeterminacy is generated in the performance – each performance is always different because the parts are always played differently. We can also point to the indeterminacy involved in all performances in music, dance and theatre. Scripts, scores and choreography are all interpreted and played in slightly, or radically, different ways by different actors, musicians and dancers. Similarly, all the visual and spatial arts (painting, sculpture, installation, photography, film, video, etc.) are indeterminate as to reception, however “fixed” or determinate the “artefact” may be. The response of an audience, individually or collectively, cannot be predicted and may be very varied. The meanings or interpretations given to a work of art are

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highly indeterminate – leading to endless critical disputes and changing critical values, even over a short period of time. Some artists, composers, choreographers and writers may set out to maximise the indeterminacy of the performance and structure of their works. For example, John Cage, Morton Feldman, Cornelius Cardew, Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg, Hans Arp, Marcel Duchamp, Dove Bradshaw and B.S. Johnson, have all employed chance, randomness or other processes to generate works, the precise outcome of which they could not predict. The usual authorial control, and the “expressive” purpose that usually accompanies such control, is set aside in favour of a more open, less predictable, relationship between artist and artefact. The artwork is no longer expressing the artist’s emotions, moods or ideas, in the Romantic or Modernist sense, but is doing something else. For instance, providing a space or opportunity for the audience or observer, who is often considered as a passive receiver of the “message” or “meaning” of the artwork, to become an active participant in the process of making and interpreting. While Merleau-Ponty can be seen as suggesting that the artwork should be considered as a zone of interpretation, Umberto Eco promotes the idea of the “open work” and Barthes distinguishes between the “readerly” text (a passively received text) and the “writerly” text (which involves a more participatory role on the part of a reader). These ideas connect to the aspirations of Cage, Feldman, et al, in attempting to liberate the audience from a role of passive reception to active participation – from a subordinate role to a more egalitarian set of relationships. Cage’s use of complex chance procedures in his work and his refusal to adopt an expressive authorial role gives rise to questions about how closely a performer needs to follow what is written in Cage’s musical score. If A flat is written in the score, but has been arrived at by throwing a coin, does it matter if B flat is played? William Brooks (2002: 224-225) argues that this kind of question highlights the way in which Cage shifts the emphasis in his music from music and aesthetics to life and ethics. Brooks reckons that any intentional deviation from what is written in the score is a “manifestation of ego, and therefore to be avoided”. Such a deviation would take the performance back into the expressive realm, the substituted B flat would be an

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expression of the taste and judgement of the performer, which is precisely what Cage is trying to overcome. Cage’s aspiration is similar to that expressed by T.S. Eliot, in his oft-quoted aphorism, “The role of art is not to express the personality, but to overcome it”. For Cage, abiding by the outcome of a chance procedure, a decision-making process outside the immediate aesthetic control of the composer, opens up the possibility of transformation and surprise: “If I am unhappy after a chance operation, if the result does not satisfy me, by accepting it I at least have the chance to modify myself, to change myself”. (ibid: 225) Accidental deviations from what is written, “mistakes”, are another matter in that they become part of the indeterminate field of the work – they are not intentional and therefore lie within the realm of purposelessness and play. In the preface to Lecture on the Weather, Cage (1980: 5) writes about his selection of passages from Thoreau’s writings, using chance procedures. He argues that: chance operations are not mysterious sources of “the right answers”. They are a means of locating a single one among a multiplicity of answers, and, at the same time, of freeing the ego from its taste and memory, its concern for profit and power, of silencing the ego so that the rest of the world has a chance to enter into the ego’s own experience whether that be outside or inside.

Cage is questioning, among other things, the need to select only one option out of many. His remarks suggest an affinity to the Pyrrhonist position, articulated by Sextus Empiricus, that we need to suspend judgement, to find a way of negotiating the multiplicity, complexity and ambiguity of life and art that doesn’t involve coming down on one side or another of a binary divide. As Cage writes in his collage/essay on Jaspers Johns, “The situation must be Yes-and-No not either-or. Avoid a polar situation”. (in Perloff 1996b: 213) Or as he writes in his Lecture on Commitment, “We are not committed to this or that. As the Indians put it: Neti Neti (Not this Not that). We are committed to the Nothing-in-between – whether we know it or not”. (Cage 1968: 119) *

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Paradox, contradiction, ambiguity We’re all enmeshed in multiple paradoxes and contradictions, a kind of confusion of multi-polar gravitational forces pulling us in many different, often opposing, directions. How do we resolve these contradictions? Can we? Do we need to? Isn’t any person’s life a bundle of contradictions, an entanglement of conflicting hopes, emotions, memories, ideas and attachments? Isn’t this how we are? Each of us is as much a nexus of unresolvable divergences and conflicts as we are a continuity and a harmony. These forces are often irreconcilable, yet we have to find ways of living with them and making sense of fluid complexity.

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William Empson, the author of Seven Kinds of Ambiguity, argued that “life involves maintaining oneself between contradictions that can’t be solved by analysis”. (in Phillips 2005) Adam Phillips suggests that Empson believed that, We should not be trying to resolve the contradictions, the conflicts in our lives, […]; rather, we should “straddle” them. We are carried along by the difficulties we have and the art of living was not, in Empson’s striking view, to try to solve them, which, in any case, is impossible, but to formulate them as incisively as possible. This is what he thought great literature did for us and why it was worth our attention. (ibid)

Haffendon, in his biography of Empson, describes him as a “connoisseur of conflict”. (ibid) Empson’s view seems to echo Wittgenstein’s idea that philosophy is an “elucidation of language”, a process of trying to say what can be said as lucidly as possible, and to be as clear about what can’t be said. It also brings to mind the Pyrrhonist notion that we shouldn’t be sucked into any conviction that this or that argument is correct, or to “take sides” in disputes, or to make judgements. Rather we should hold all possibilities in suspension (Sextus’s epoche), a state of mind in which all dualities and oppositions are seen with equal clarity and treated with equal respect – a kind of compassionate disinterest or dispassionate interest. * If we consider the world as a world-in-process and that indeterminacy is a significant characteristic of our lives, and if we also acknowledge that there is a need to balance or suspend judgement in the face of the multiple contradictions, ambiguities and paradoxes that we are presented with, then we might agree that it may be wise to doubt and to live with uncertainty as a positive quality. Being non-dogmatic, tolerant, accepting of impermanence and open to changes of mind and revisions of opinion, may be less foolish than being dogmatic, intolerant, resistant to impermanence and closed to revisions of opinion. Maintaining a state of dispassionate interest or compassionate disinterest in the multiplicity of views, beliefs and values that surround us, and exercising a robust non-attachment to one fixed belief or opinion, may be useful ways in which to cope with, and to enjoy, the complexity and diversity of life. It may be that we should aim to stand firmly at a point of balance, to be a pivot and an opening, to find the

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midpoint, to be in a state of betweenness in the contrarium. (See elsewhere in this section and Part 7 for more about the contrarium). * Kathleen Jamie, the Scottish poet, writes: […] my job is not to get angry and proselytise. […] It would be easy to jump in and be judgemental and start ranting [but what] I wanted to do […] was get the ego out of the way and just look and see what’s there. […] Poetry is a sort of connective tissue where myself meets the world, and it rises out of that, that liminal place. (in Scott 2005: 23)

* Perspectivism, revisibility & ideas about knowledge In relation to some of the topics already explored (the knowing body, the self as open work, picturing mind, the locus of mind-in-the-world and the mutuality of existence) we have seen how we are all implicated in the world as knowing bodies, mutually existent beings without essences or discrete boundaries. As such we each have a situated presence within the spatio-temporal field. We each constitute a particular localised nexus of changing relationships with other beings, energies, cultures and minds. We are in a sense interstices of consciousness in the continuum of existence. We each have a perspective on the world that changes in the light of experience. We revise what we think and we are revised by what we think and experience. I’d briefly like to explore some ideas about perspectivism, revisibility, and knowledge. The term “perspectivism” is often employed to describe the philosophical positions taken by Nietzsche and Ortega Y Gasset, and I’m using it in a similar but broader sense. (for a brief overview of Nietzsche’s thinking see Honderich 1995: 622) Perspectivism involves a belief that knowledge is always partial, incomplete, indeterminate and contingent. There can be no absolute, objective or complete view of any subject, topic, idea or issue. Our knowledge and opinions are always informed and guided by our learning, by those we learn from and the context in which we develop our understandings. They are also framed by our needs, intentions and expectations, and by our beliefs and values. Each perspective, our own

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and those of others, needs to be considered on its merits, as shedding light from a different angle, and in relation to other perspectives, as providing a more rounded picture. No perspective should be considered as definitive or as representing the final word on a particular topic. There can be no neutral, omniscient or “objective” view. Multiple perspectives are to be welcomed. Diversity, difference and pluralism are factors to be encouraged in all contexts as they are likely to provide a more balanced and comprehensive view. But it is important to keep in mind that, just as a our view of an object changes from moment-to-moment with the scanning motion of our eyes and the movements of our head and body, and as our knowledge of the same object is constantly modified by picking it up, touching it, tasting it and by discussing the object with others, so our perspective is subject to change and revision as our position, context and relationships with others and the world change. * Silhouette: John Cage The role of the composer is other is no longer is being, is free is a wild goose chase, full circle back again to piano & dry fungi, direction (no stars) woodpecker solos & a startled moose our poetry now is the realisation that we possess nothing Out of a hat comes revelation & a pianist on the way, she said she would play slowly on the way she would play slowly she said on the way she would play, play slowly everything, he said, is repetition slowly she would play she would say playing slowly she hoped to avoid making mistakes, but there are no mistakes only sounds intended & unintended a glass of brandy

* Revisibility Given the relative, ever-changing and perspectival condition of knowledge, it follows that all views, theories & opinions are open to revision. Indeed effective learning, if we are to avoid dogmatism, prejudice and eventually bigotry, involves a constant willingness to revise, re-think and re-formulate – to be open to new “facts” and ideas, and to seek out alternative perspectives that are challenging and revitalising. The inherent revisibility of knowledge has implications for our thinking about evaluating what we think and do and what

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others think and do. Judgements can only ever be tentative and conditional, subject to continuing revision over time. Critical opinions and judgements can only be made from a particular perspective, at a specific moment, in a continuum of changing views. Any misrepresentation or reification of this process (for example, by representing a particular judgement as final and summative, or as a fixed measurement or a quantitative “fact” rather than as a qualitative opinion) ought not to go unchallenged. Contradictions and tensions are likely to arise from the imposition of absolute and dogmatic regimes of criticism, judgement and interpretation which do not acknowledge the perspectival nature of knowledge, the ways in which all ideas, theories and descriptions are relative, limited and subject to change. In the light of these factors it could be argued that we should encourage and create situations in which many views are considered, many voices are heard and taken into account. Indeed we might go further and argue, like the Pyrrhonist sceptics, that it is better to suspend all judgements (epoche), to withhold agreement or disagreement with any proposition or view, as far as possible, in order to see clearly how things are and to keep in mind the multi-perspectival and revisible nature of knowledge. * Gobbling & singing As I write this book I wonder how I can string it all together? This interweaving of views – all of them conditional fumblings in semidarkness. Do I use another voice altogether? Insert a meta-narrative that comments on the book being written, the unfolding of ideas, the many changes of mind? Or do I leave them to speak for themselves? If I introduce another voice should it be a quizzical, disinterested Pyrrhonist, for whom all writings are scratchings in the dust? Pyrrho himself started out as a painter. He and I can’t forget the fact that all our representations, theories and ideas are so much spit and pigment, marks against oblivion, possibilities of the moment, rendered obsolete almost as soon as they are made. All our utterances are little more than the eloquence of crows or gulls. Very occasionally, against all the odds, we rise to the compass of song, the melodic fluency of a blackbird or a robin or the clichéd nightingale. No matter what we say or write we can do no more than release it into the air. Like a leaf or a feather it may catch the breeze and be lifted high or it may immedi-

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ately spin to the ground. Whatever happens, it will eventually join all the other feathers and leaves trampled underfoot, unnoticed by anyone, subject to decay and chemical transformation, becoming in time so much compost, detritus or soil – out of which other things grow in their turn. All opinions and ideas, however lofty, are subject to the laws of gravity, to the pull of contingency and uncertainty, to the necessity of “perhaps”, “maybe”, “it appears” or “it seems” – never the certainty of “it is true”. Likewise with decisions – all can be rationalised as correct and incorrect. Arguments can be made to confirm the validity of this course of action and the opposite course. One is no more or less subject to proof or surety than another. I always act in the full knowledge that I could have done something else equally as valid, and probably equally as worthwhile or as worthless. To do something in the belief that I do the right thing is to believe that this leaf will not fall to the ground. To be attached to this belief, rather than that belief, is to be deluded, to defy gravity, to gobble like a turkey while thinking I sing like a thrush.

* In her “fictional essay in 29 tangos”, entitled The Beauty of the Husband, Anne Carson (2001: 21) quotes a note that Keats wrote in his copy of Paradise Lost: “one of the most mysterious of semispeculations is, one would suppose, that of one Mind’s imagining into another”. Yet this is what we do, or attempt to do, every time we read a book, or gaze at a painting, or encounter an art installation, or converse with a friend or stranger.

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In the same work Carson makes many other suggestive references to consciousness. At one point she speaks of “the dip and slant /of mindfulness”. (ibid: 75) Later she entwines the vocabulary of neurology into her poetic diction: Hole in time shows this moment to me and to you, / ragged where edges of synaptic change / melt off into / blurred walls of other days – a “flashbulb memory” neurologists say. / It has both explicit and implicit circuitry. (ibid: 79)

Combining strands of thought articulated by Zeno and Bergson about the indivisibility of time, with the “pseudo-problem” of an essential self, she remarks, “by dividing pure movement into minutes, hours, years, we raise / the pseudo-problem of an underlying ‘self’ whose successive states / these are supposed to be”. (ibid: 123) * The threads of our thinking are often invisible or as slender as gossamer, and the threads are continuous with our sensations and with the fumblings of our hands and mind, and with what we read and see and make – what the world entwines us in and in us. * It is likely that indeterminacy, as I’ve described and discussed it, can be linked to ideas about complexity or “chaos”. James Gleick (1990: 43) writes: “The study of chaos has provided a seemingly paradoxical insight: that rich kinds of order, as well as chaos, can arise – arise spontaneously – from the unplanned interaction of many simple things”. Scientists tend nowadays to refer to “complexity” theory rather than chaos theory, given that one of the main tenets of such theories is to demonstrate and analyse the way in which very simple determinate structures or sequences of events can very rapidly give rise to exceedingly complex and eventually indeterminate structures and sequences. A few simple phrases of musical notes, when repeated, layered or phased, as in a work by Steve Reich or Philip Glass, can generate very complex melodic and rhythmic structures. Hence the richness and structural density of some works of so-called Minimalist music. Note how the language and the ideas of “spontaneously arising” forms and orders seem to echo the Taoist idea of the “myriad creatures” arising from the undifferentiated matrix of the “Tao”.

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Gleick (ibid: 30) quotes Cyril Stanley Smith, a metallurgist and an expert on structure: “All structures (whether of atoms, cells, philosophies, or societies) began from something that was without form and void”. Smith uses a vocabulary that would not be out of place in the teachings of a Taoist master! * Sometimes incomprehensibility can be seen as a positive quality in a work of art - in the sense that the mind may be unable to find any explanation for a kind of satisfaction, excitement or pleasure that arises in relation to a poet or artwork that seems to defy rational analysis or linguistic definition. Linda Hamalian (1992: 28) remarks that Kenneth Rexroth read “the Middle English poets and philosophers, especially Duns Scotus, whose incomprehensibility appealed to him”. Coming at the incomprehensible from a different direction, Iain Sinclair writes in favour of the “difficult” radical poetry he encounters in small magazines and chapbooks: The work I value is that which seems most remote, alienated, fractured. I don’t claim to “understand” it but I like having it around. The darker it grows outside the window, the worse the noises from the island, the more closely do I attend to the mass of instant-printed pamphlets that pile up around my desk. (Sinclair 1996: xvii)

Sinclair argues that we should not expect poetry to be “easy”. If poetry is to do something other than to endorse or reflect the dominant discourses of a society, which in our case may be the anodyne, jargonfilled discourses of bureaucracy, management and consumer culture, what Debord (Rothenberg and Joris 1998: 419) calls “informationism”, then it may well be perceived as difficult and resistant to easy interpretations. It is likely to make us uncomfortable and to work against our habits of reading and thinking. As W.S. Graham writes, in his poem, A Note to the Difficult One, we “stand in [our] vocabulary”, a vocabulary of the familiar, trying to translate and make sense of “terrible words always just beyond” us, the words of a poetry that the poet enunciates “very clearly” in a “new language”. (Sinclair 1996: 212) It is this new language, resisting the familiar transparency of habitual responses and easy meanings, which gives works by many artists and poets a kind of difficulty. But this “difficulty” is only another way of saying that it makes us think, question, consciously

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engage and interpret. Art of this kind is not easy to digest, it resists consumption. As Sinclair (1996: xvii) puts it, “poetry will always be that splinter of bone that is left when the rest of the skeleton has been devoured”. * George Bowering, in his essay, Robin Blaser at Lake Paradox, writes, “If paradise is around us in fragments, as Ezra Pound wrote in his Pisan prison, one can assemble those fragments in a poem as they are disbursed in a life”. (in Nichols 2002: 94) * Associative thinking In a discussion about Beckett’s textual construction in his later short works (for example, How It Is and Ill Seen Ill Said) Perloff (1996a: 139) notes Beckett’s use of the phrase “the voice of us all” as a description of his mode of speaking in these works. This mode of address is a kind of disinterested describing, seeming to come from just outside a protagonist’s consciousness - a voice from the margins. Beckett’s characteristic rhythm in this period of his writing is described by Northrop Frye as, “associative rhythm”, a rhythm which often moves along independent of syntactical coherence. According to Perloff (1996b: 189) associative rhythm, …whose unit is the abrupt, discontinuous, repetitive, heavily accented phrase of ordinary speech – currently exercises an important metapoetic function: it calls attention to itself as discourse, refusing to fulfil what John Cage would call our “either-or” expectations.

My own thinking, as enacted in this book, tends to be associative. Ideas and images in a linear sequence suddenly break off and move at a tangent, connecting with ideas and images that may, at first, seem to have no direct link with the main line of development (if there is a main line of development). The movement of ideas and images is energised by associations, lateral leaps impelled by resemblance, contrast, resonance, suggestion, implication, and the indefinable weaving of connective tissues and synaptic transference. Thoughts move to and fro, out and in, from a trajectory that is no longer a line but a dance of associations. An image of rock climbing comes to mind. Moving left, right, up, temporarily down and then up again.

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From handhold to handhold. Seeing another foothold. Short steps, long stretches. Each climb orchestrated by eyes, body and mind in relation to the changing terrain and a sense of direction, an improvised sequence of moves, pulls, footfalls and scrambles. At times there is a clear objective or goal, at other times the climbing may be its own objective. * Michael Davidson (1991: 78) writes, “The poem should not be a demonstration or description of states of consciousness, but should itself manifest the energies of those states”. At different points in this book I am attempting to do what Davidson suggests the poem should, or could, do. * Indeterminacy, dualism & non-dualism: Cartesianism & pragmatism One important aspect of the philosophy of Descartes is what is called “mind-body dualism”, that is, the belief that “the mind is a nonphysical substance”. (Anon 2000: 217) This separation of mind and body, aligned with Christian dualisms such as, God/humanity, spirit/matter, heaven/earth, became one of the foundations of scientific and philosophical thinking in the West. These ideas, combined with Descartes’ famous statement, “cogito ergo sum” (“I am thinking, therefore I exist”), tend to privilege thought, rationality and reason, over feeling, irrationality and intuition. Philosophical and scientific enquiry is a process of constructing rational answers to rational questions. Reliable knowledge can only be established through the exercise of reason and rationality. We can see from this how science, objectivity (as opposed to subjectivity), abstract thinking and human consciousness can be valued more highly than the arts, subjectivity, sensory perceptions and the non-human. The focus of science becomes rational understanding (by systematically dividing, categorising and finding reasons) and the use/exploitation of the physical world (a material world, separate from the human mind and from the divine realm of God). It is important to keep in mind that the term dualism, in the philosophical sense, implies not just the dividing-up of the world and ideas into binary pairs or opposites, either this or that, but the belief that we have to choose between these opposites in favour of one

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or other side, and that we place a higher value upon the chosen side. Thus “mind” is not only separated from “body” but also comes to be considered as having greater value. Rational thought is not only separated from emotion or intuitive thought, but is also considered as more important. Thus a hierarchical set of relations and values accompanies the basic division into dualities. * Towards non-dualism: Richard Rorty & pragmatism Descartes presents us with one very influential form of dualistic thinking within the European tradition. Richard Rorty is an example of a contemporary philosopher who argues against the dualistic thinking integral to mainstream Western philosophy. He continues the tradition of pragmatism founded by the American thinkers, C.S.Peirce, William James and John Dewey (to whom Rorty acknowledges a particular debt). Rorty (1999: xviii) argues that, “We anti-Platonists cannot permit ourselves to be called ‘relativists’” - since that would imply accepting Platonic dualities like absolute & relative, or ideal & actual. Rorty resists employing Platonic terminology and questions the “Kantian and Hegelian distinction between subject and object […] the Cartesian distinctions which Kant and Hegel used […] and the Greek distinctions which provided the framework for Descartes’ own thought”. (ibid: xviii-xix) In other words he is against the use of, or rather reliance upon, oppositional dualities like: mind or body, absolute or relative, real or apparent, true or false. Rorty doesn’t believe that the philosophical “problems” that such dualities raise, are any more selfevident or essential than any other problem or question that philosophers might wish to ask. The Platonic-Cartesian-Hegelian tradition has insisted that these problems are found, in the sense that they are inevitably encountered by any reflective mind. The pragmatist tradition [and the strand of thinking exemplified by Foucault, Derrida, Merleau-Ponty and Gadamer] has insisted that they are made - are artificial rather than natural and can be unmade by using a different vocabulary [discourse] than that which the philosophical tradition has used”. (ibid: xxi-xxii)

Rorty is arguing against an essentialist view, that problems are selfexisting entities waiting to be found, in favour of a constructivist

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view, that problems are problems only in relation to particular questions we ask or aspirations we have – in other words in relation to what we want to do in the world. Rorty goes on, pragmatists… have no use for the reality-appearance distinction, any more than for the distinction between the found and the made. We hope to replace the reality-appearance distinction with the distinction between the more useful and the less useful”. (ibid: xxii)

Note that any use of language involves the setting up of binary oppositions or dualities. Each concept, word or term implies an opposite concept without which it would make no sense – for instance, “more useful” as opposed to, “less useful”. Hence, even a philosopher like Rorty, arguing against dualism, has to employ dichotomies or dualities in his argument. The question is, what is a particular philosopher trying to do in the world? How is the language being used, and what is it being used for? Rorty, and his pragmatist precursors, consider human beings as organisms/animals actively participating in the world, not sitting outside the world “objectively” observing what goes on. Organism/environment, human/animal and man/world aren’t considered as binary oppositions. Humans are animals “doing their best to develop tools which will enable them to enjoy more pleasure and less pain. Words are among the tools which these clever animals have developed”. (ibid: xxiii) According to pragmatist thinking “truth” is not something “out there”, an absolute or universal object or goal. “We cannot regard truth as a goal of enquiry. The purpose of inquiry is to achieve agreement among human beings about what to do, to bring about consensus on the ends to be achieved and the means to be used to achieve those ends”. (ibid: xxv) Truth is one of the words we use to describe these agreed ways of doing things. False statements are ways of doing things that don’t work - that aren’t useful to us, that don’t provide useful descriptions upon which we can act. Rorty believes that there is no need to search for, or construct, a unitary explanation, grand design, narrative or philosophy, and certainly no justification for supposing such a unitary view (eg.

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Christian, Western, Islamic, Marxist, Capitalist, and pragmatist!) will be shared by others. In the same way we shouldn’t assume priority for the universal or abstract or ideal over the unique, concrete or idiosyncratic. For Deweyian pragmatists like me, history and anthropology are enough to show that there are no unwobbling pivots, [eg. universal truths] and that seeking objectivity is just a matter of getting as much intersubjective agreement as you can manage. (ibid: 15)

In Rorty’s view philosophers “are not here to provide principles or foundations or deep theoretical diagnoses, or a synoptic vision”. (ibid: 19) Instead he seems to argue that philosophy is about trying to clarify what we are saying and thinking, trying to find “intersubjective agreement” and developing ways of thinking and speaking that usefully enable us to live together with greater pleasure and less pain. Sharing our infinitely different descriptions of the world is one of the ways in which we can do this. Rorty quotes (approvingly) Andrew Goodman: “There is no one Way the World Is”. Instead, as Rorty says, there is “no one way it is to be accurately represented. But there are lots of ways to act so as to realize human hopes of happiness.’ (ibid: 33) This is an argument in favour of pluralism, encouraging us to celebrate diversity and difference. These ideas go against those articulated by Plato and Descartes that present us with a set of either/or, yes/no, true/false distinctions and that also prioritise abstraction, rationality, universal “truths” and ideals. Rationalism, a tradition that includes the ideas of Plato, Descartes, Kant, Hegel and others, assumes that human “problems” can be solved by reason, that there are “answers” to all our questions that can be “found” through the use of logical thinking. Rationalists tend to view logic, mathematics and geometry as the highest achievements of human beings - because they are most certain, stable, rational, abstract and universal. According to the rationalist prospectus determinacy is a positive attribute, indeterminacy is problematic. Other qualities and attributes, that seem to lie outside the orbit of rational thought are viewed with suspicion or considered to be undependable. Thus feelings, moods, unconscious drives, moods, intuition and chance are things to be overcome or transcended by rationality. Of course, this way of thinking marginalises or devalues a

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large proportion of human experiences and attributes. It also projects on to the non-human sphere a level of determinacy and human reason which may not correspond with the indeterminacy and flux of the world and its creatures. This fact alone tends to reinforce in rationalists a sense of separation between the human and non-human, between “us” and “the world”. * Colorado incident I hear voices outside the movement of bodies at work the rhythms & intonations of American English apart from the word “silence” I can make out nothing of what is said. But the crunch of boots on gritty earth the scraping of plant pots the drawing-in of breath & the quietness of things being lifted says it all

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* Doubt, uncertainty & non-attachment In his book, Sculpture in the Age of Doubt, (1999) Thomas McEvilley affirms the importance of sceptical doubt as a positive attitude to take in the face of competing opinions, “facts”, theories and assertions of value or morality. McEvilley draws on sources in the Greek tradition (Zeno, Pyrrho, or Pyrrhon, of Elias and Sextus Empiricus), the resurgence of interest in Pyrrhonist thinking in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Montaigne, Pierre Bayle) and in Mahayana Buddhism (ancient Indian sutras and the Zen master, Hakuin). I’ve already discussed some of the relationships between the early Greek and Buddhist traditions (see Part 4) and how a sceptical strand of thinking is evident in both. I’d like to add a few remarks at this point to emphasise the importance of doubt and uncertainty and to suggest that the suspension of judgement is not a sign of weakness or indecisiveness in a negative sense, but a sign of positive openness, compassion and balance in the midst of competing dogmas, beliefs and prejudices. McEvilley provides many examples of statements from his sources that highlight different aspects of the sceptical tradition. In the Mahaprajnaparamita Sastra, a group of Buddhist texts probably originating from around 100 B.C., the Buddha’s aspirations for his disciples are that they should be “free from passion for doctrine, free from attachment to doctrine, free from partisanship… They do not quarrel about the nature of things”. (McEvilley 1999: 6) If, as the Buddha argued and demonstrated, entities (physical and mental “objects”) have no self-existence (see Part 4) then it is foolish to believe that doctrines and dogmatic statements that this, or that, is the case, can be “true” in any absolute or essential sense. To cling to such doctrines or dogmas as if we were clinging to something that was unarguably correct, an accurate reflection of how things are, is to be misguided. To analyse any dogma or doctrine in depth, is to expose its flaws, the relativity of its arguments and the one-sidedness of its statements. Philosophy, theology, metaphysics and critical theories from many cultures and times, provide us with countless examples of such analyses about all dogmas, doctrines and apparent truths. Therefore to

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be sceptical of any doctrine or truth is to acknowledge its limitations, to recognise that all knowledge and beliefs are perspectival, open to revision and only exist insofar as they relate to other doctrines and truths. So to be sceptically doubtful of all positions and perspectives is to be mindful of their interdependence and to recognise that they are “empty” of any existence in themselves. Hakuin, a Japanese Zen master in the Rinzai school, advised his students to enter into what he called “the great doubt”. He says, “When a person faces the great doubt it is just as though he were standing in complete emptiness […] At the bottom of great doubt, lies great awakening. If you doubt fully, you will awaken fully”. (ibid: 5) Stephen Batchelor, in his book, The Faith To Doubt, (1990) provides an interesting analysis of attitudes to doubt in Buddhism, and its use as a positive activity in the Zen tradition. Batchelor’s writings, like McEvilley’s, can be seen as anticipating the current resurgence of interest in scepticism as an important counterbalance to dogmatic belief, especially in the sphere of institutionalised religion. To return to McEvilley, he suggests that, Renaissance humanists of the sixteenth century, like Montaigne, living in a period of heightened doubt, experienced the liberation, joy, and quietude of the realization that the huge body of dogma they had been labouring under had been unnecessary all along, and happily laid it down (at least in spirit). (ibid: 14)

He goes on to suggest that our present postmodern culture can be considered as another “age of doubt” succeeding and repudiating the apparent certainties of modernism (for instance beliefs in: progress, science and technology; the pursuit of truth, universals and “grand narratives”; etc.). However, contemporary “postmodern” thinkers seem to be generally unaware of their sceptical predecessors, and often present their opinions and beliefs as if they were new and somehow “better” than other views - particularly modernist views. This lack of awareness leads to hubris, a lack of subtlety in arguments and a very limited set of reference points. More seriously perhaps, the assumption that postmodernism is somehow an improvement on modernism suggests that postmodern doubt may not be directed at itself, something, a Pyrrhonist would argue, that always needs to be done, if scepticism itself is not to become another form of dogmatism.

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Sceptical doubt is a process, a continuing practice of non-judgemental analysis and dialectic, an opening and a clearing in the forest of knowledge, opinions and beliefs, rather than the planting of more trees. To doubt and to embrace uncertainty is to let go of false certainty and the illusion of absolute knowledge. Doubt is the natural accompaniment of learning not to grasp at passing truths, beliefs and values as if they were constant and universal. It is the not-grasping and the nonattachment that leads to inner balance, equilibrium and the wisdom of “unknowing” – as distinct from the view that “to know” is to be certain of what we know. And to be attached to “the certainty of what we know” is dogmatism. * In the tenth section of his poem, The City of the Moon, Kenneth Rexroth writes: Buddha took some Autumn leaves In his hand and asked Ananda if these were all The red leaves there were. Ananda answered that it Was Autumn and leaves Were falling all about them, More than could ever Be numbered. So Buddha said, “I have given you A handful of truths. Besides These there are many Thousands of other truths, more Than can ever be numbered”. (Rexroth 2003:709-710)

* In Part 8 I wrote about the connections between thinking and walking. Here is another connection, through associations between the rhythms and actions of walking in a landscape and thinking in a mindscape: Thinking is constant motion, heel & toe, rise & fall, adding always to what is already footed, pressed in the trail, no line

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between thoughts and things seen touched imagined feared desired & looking sucks in words & silences, the gravitational pull of commentary mapping explaining questioning. Images hover in a pool of light until some other thought arises, door opens, light spills again into sense of something that has no word, unspoken stone heeled or turned as we walk, tuned to another step, another minding, this to that to this again and so on. Thinking is forgetting, footprints erased by wind and rain, yet some history of erasure remains, an archive of loss, of no more no less no more no less, each footfall the first and last, til light consumes and songs are sung that we will never hear

* We can conceive of the artist/poet as a gatherer or hunter-gatherer, gathering together in one place-object-text the fruits of the forest. The forest being both the locus and life of the poet – experiences, perceptions, feelings, imaginings and dreams – and the layered histories, narratives and cultures of other forest-dwellers – the common-wealth of beings for whom the poet acts as consciousness, voice, scribe, mythmaker and imagemaker. * In the heat even the house quivers Dervish ecstasy turns weight to water tremored like bee’s wings there is nothing on which to focus no anchorage for the eye.

* Improvisation & association Stephen Greenblatt, the founder of “New Historicism”, describes how he writes in a state of heightened receptiveness to random connections. He’s attuned, like a hunter, to the detail and complexity of the environment around him – though it’s more likely to be a library or

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study than a stretch of woodland or savannah. Greenblatt becomes highly attentive to the potential ideas and associations that leap out at him from whatever he reads and reflects on. He seems to be describing a state that is akin to a musician or actor working on a group improvisation – a state of fluid responsiveness and mutuality of thought: If it’s working for me I feel I could run up and down these shelves […] and open books at random and things would jump out at me… I’ve always worked that way, feeling controlled serendipity. If something is working, almost anything I touch can swim into sharp focus and I can use it. (in Miller 2005)

* Multiplicity In seeing, reading and thinking we are enlivened by variety. The eyes move from form to form, event to event. The mind is buoyed-up by scanning, by the free flow of associations, crossings-over and inbetweens. Perceiving, sensing, thinking and imagining are functions of relationship, jumping from similarities to differences, resemblances to strangenesses. The world is a polymorphic place and the mind is a polyphonic and polyvisual register of the world’s variety. * Another Colorado incident Overheard: “twenty-five years of reading while operating signals on the railroad I had it down to a fine art” “I hope so”, said his companion digging the freshly thawed earth.

* The story invents a writer In 1978, Italo Calvino refers to the “collection of fragments that is my oeuvre”. (in Wood 2003: 8) He suggests that writing, inventing, imagining are integral aspects of the process of what Merleau-Ponty calls “self-construction”. Like Borges, Calvino writes stories that offer a commentary on, and an enactment of, his own changing identity. Both writers share an interest in history as a succession of stories, stories that are told and retold in ways that reflect the times and the teller. The stories are diverse and the tellings are often divergent, opening up a new perspective or a new constellation of meanings. As

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Michael Wood (2003: 8) suggests, Calvino’s understanding of history leads him to learn to “live with invention and diversity rather [than] a dream of integration”. As the author writes so he has to reconfigure himself in relation to the world and reformulate himself as an entity in the world. Calvino: “Every time I have to invent, alongside the book I have to write, the author who has to write it, a kind of writer who is different from me”. (ibid) Inventing his text, the author invents a self. The story remakes the storyteller. Each new story produces a new author. The writer is many, and one. * Happenstance: words on a bus-ride “there were two of them” blackthorn in snowy flower “he’s lost” “she looks lost” intense green of field & hedge “last Christmas he died “it hits ya”

now she’s going to sell up”

buzzard swoops a lamb skips over a shadow “we’ve lost quite a few” river thick with tide

***

Part 11 A leaving, an unending. A folding, an unfolding. Exiled on the shivering sea, my brothers were the cackling gannets and whimpering petrels. All humanity were strangers who lived in the silver city where trees grew and laughter still had a place. As a homeless outlaw I left behind the dust of the world in order to tramp this bleached and fickle whale-road where God metes out hatred and compassion with equal indifference. (my own variation on extracts from The Wanderer, in The Exeter Book – a collection of Anglo-Saxon poems and riddles)

* In following the various convoluted trails and themes of this book we are left with the conundrum of how to draw these together into a meaningful resolution? How are we to make sense of the many contradictions and apparently insurmountable dichotomies: self and other; ideal and actual; energy and matter; suchness and emptiness, and so on? Of course the short answer is that there is no resolution or conclusion. The open work by definition is never closed, the crumpled page of being is inscribed with the creases and stains of its own history and is open to new states of crumpledness. Instead of a resolution or conclusion we find only the contrarium, a zone of balanced oscillation in which multiple perspectives are suspended in the open-work which is our lived experience.

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* Infolding and unfolding In a typically complex many-stranded essay, that begins with a discussion of Ruskin’s own multi-fibred essay in episodic letter form (Fors Clavigera), Guy Davenport makes an interesting point about writing and reading: “The daedelian artist infolds, he makes a complicatio. We beholders are involved in an explicatio; we unfold to read”. (1984: 51) I like the idea of the artist/maker “infolding”, while the audience/reader “unfolds”. We could extend this notion to include the possibility that the making of the self is like an infolding, the self being a complicatio. In observing the self, and in meeting another self, we become engaged in an unfolding, an explicatio. In relation to both the self and the artwork/text the process of infolding, unfolding, refolding and unfolding goes on and on. Each encounter involves another infolding and unfolding. And each folding leaves a trace, a crumpling, an adding to the texture and history of the complicatio. The self, the artwork, life – can be considered as crumpled pages of text or drawings, endlessly open to infolding, unfolding and refolding. * Indeterminacy, again: A and not-A: A(not)A As Thomas McEvilley (2003, p.11-12) points out, the ideas and practices of Madhyamika Buddhism and Pyrrhonist scepticism, show how we become caught between two laws of logic. On the one hand the Law of the Excluded Middle which insists that there is “no middle position between this and that, or yes and no”. Every entity must be either A or not-A as a logician might put it. And on the other hand the Law of Identity, which insists that “each thing is itself and nothing else”. An entity can’t be both A and not-A. To go against these basic premises would bring the house of logic down about our ears and leave us staring into the void. However this is precisely where many Buddhist and sceptical thinkers place themselves, and where we are all, in some ways, placed, whether we like it or not. From the perspective of these thinkers the laws of identity and the excluded middle are faulty premises upon which to build a metaphysics, let alone a way of living. We are misguided, and in danger of misguiding others, if we construct a belief system based upon determinacy and apparent certainty. Instead we have to recognise that entities do not have a fixed and enduring identity. Things are only what they are in relation-

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ship with other things. They are ‘mutually co-arising’ as Buddhists might say. Things have no clear or constant essence, we can only differentiate between things as they exist in relation to other things. Identities are relative, maintained by a web of conditional differences within a field of existence that is unconditional and undifferentiated. There is no this or that, in any ultimate sense, there is only an inclusive middle. All things exist in a zone of indeterminacy, mutual relationship and endless flux. While certainty may be a goal of idealism or a characteristic of delusion, uncertainty is a quality of the actual. * In the words of John Cage: The situation must be Yes-and-No not either-or. Avoid a polar situation. (in Perloff 1996: 213) * Or, as William Empson, the author of Seven Kinds of Ambiguity, points out: “life involves maintaining oneself between contradictions that can’t be solved by analysis”. (in Phillips 2005) * The contrarium This book has involved the unfolding of a crumpled page, a page of notes towards a metaphysics of indeterminacy, notes that trace some of the features of the mutuality of existence. It would not be consistent to bind the various strands of thought together into one string or rope, better to hold the various threads in an inconsistency of possibilities, an emerging order that is never stabilised or unified. For it is in the perpetual flux of possibilities and ever-changing perspectives that we live our lives, a contrarium in which all things are possible, where all perspectives have a place in the scheme of things and in which artists and poets working in many disciplines and media, offer their images and narratives alongside those of philosophers, scientists, mythmakers and mythcritics. And the contrarium is itself a field of indeterminacy,

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a zone of mutually interdependent, and often mutually antithetical, ideas, conjectures, insights, speculations, understandings and misunderstandings. I briefly discussed Robin Blaser’s term, the “contrarium” in Part 7. Because the image and idea of the contrarium seems important here is the relevant passage again: Blaser refers to this articulation of doubleness and polarity, the interpenetration of inside and outside, as a “contrarium” (1993: 278) A term which brings to mind many of the themes I’ve been exploring in this book: self and unself; ideal and actual; suchness and emptiness; determinacy and indeterminacy; and the mutuality of existence. One characteristic of the contrarium is that its dynamic polarities are never resolvable through a formulaic rationalist discourse but only through the continual recomposition of lived experience and the open work. The polyvocal contrarium can’t be posited in simple terms as the expression of the singular self. As Blaser (ibid) puts it: “Such polarity is not reductive to a simple-minded authenticity or to a signature that is only one’s self”. To realise or actualise the contrarium in the arts and in life is to bring into play the dynamics of otherness and the real - the polarities of self and unself, visible and invisible - within a subjectivity that is no longer an expression of the illusory, unhyphenated, singular self. We are all manifestations of the contrarium - half-breeds and hybrids, liminal presences on the edge of otherness. To seek for a fixed essence or purity is to falsify the way we are and the way all things are. For reality is a confluence of identities, impermanent and indeterminate as wind and cloud, and to be precise we are neither, this nor that, one thing nor an “other” – yet we are also this and that, self and other.

Another way of looking at the contrarium is as a state or clearing in which contraries are held in suspension, a state of inbetweeness, an attentive unknowing in which contraries arise and are observed without comment or judgement. In a sense, the contrarium can be seen as a bowl or vessel in which possibilities that may be diametrically opposed are held in a “coincidence of opposites”, to use Nicholas of Cusa’s term, (see Part 9) an alchemical chamber out of which a dynamically hybrid energy will be released. The “coincidence of opposites” includes many of the different vectors intersecting within, and, to some extent, forming, the “embodied subject” that is each individual. I have discussed some of these in this book: self and other; ideal and actual; matter and energy; suchness and emptiness. To some extent we all have to find a point of dynamic

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equilibrium at the “coincidence of opposites”. We have to live in the continuum that is also a discontinuum, manifesting a certainty that is also a profound uncertainty. We move in a world of hard and soft things, handling objects that have weight, texture and substance. Yet, at the same time, we perceive these things as shifting patterns of light, colour and tone, forms that change and reform themselves as we interact with them, eventually becoming other entities as they are disintegrated or in process of growth or decay. We also know, through the extended sensuality of our sciences, that these apparent substances are also fields of energy in constant motion, devoid of any solid essence. We are all reiterations of becoming, different ways of writing being or picturing mind. We are all open works, incomplete essays in what it is to be human. * In Spencer’s translation, Joachim de Bellay writes of Rome (in Colegate 2002: 233): That which is firm doth flit & fall away, And that is flitting, doth abide & stay.

Maybe… ***

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Afterword In writing this book I’ve realised that the book I wanted to write has already been written. It lies in the fragments of Heraclitus and Sappho, the sayings of Pyrrho of Elias, in the pages of works written by Montaigne, Spinoza, G.K. Chesterton, Jorge Luis Borges, John Cage, Kenneth Rexroth, Thomas McEvilley, Georges Dreyfus, and many others, and in artworks made by our anonymous Palaeolithic and tribal ancestors, and in works by Fabritius, Sesshu, Sengai, Chu Ta, Ruskin, Cezanne, Giacometti, Beuys, Martin, Kapoor, Whiteread, Twombly, Turrell, and many other artists. I am indebted to all of these authors and artists for saying and showing what I wanted to say and show much more eloquently than I have been able to do. I also thank them for leading me to realise what I wanted to convey to you, which is only to reiterate what they have already revealed many times through the centuries. Very similar ideas, images, concerns and debates have migrated from generation to generation since our earliest ancestors

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made marks on the walls of caves – whiling away what time was available to them. These migrations from mind to mind and age to age are traced in countless languages, codes, symbols and objects, orchestrated into a polyphonic celebration of what it is to be here, what it is to awaken to the empty and marvellous existence that comes and goes without purpose or end.

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Index Abram, David, 8, 239, 240, 241, 243, 246, 247, 248, 353 Abramovic, Marina, 284 Ackling, Roger, 213 Adorno, Theodor, 163, 165, 166 Alpers, Svetlana, 29, 353 Andre, Carl, 31, 45, 175, 284 Annas, Julia, 88, 89, 90, 91, 96, 353 Arikha, Avigdor, 46, 47, 49, 55, 353 Aristotle, 21, 105, 118, 179, 288 Armstrong, Jeannette, 212 Arp, Hans, 321 artwork as open work, 132–34 artwork as zone of interpretation, 150, 162, 321 associative thinking, 331–32 Attwood, Margaret, 213 Auerbach, Frank, 31, 39, 44, 50, 55, 57, 72, 357 aware, 228, 229 Bacon, Francis, 31 Bankei, 95 Barth, John, 135 Barthes, Roland, 8, 131, 134, 135, 136, 156, 172, 321, 353, 357 Basho, Matsuo, 76, 110, 194, 218, 245, 353, 360 Batchelor, Stephen, 338 Bate, Jonathan, 163, 164, 165, 166, 353 Beckett, Samuel, 46, 49, 104, 142, 151, 152, 211, 276, 331, 353 Berger, John, 60, 353 Bergson, Henri-Louis, 119, 120, 329 Berio, Luciano, 133 Bernstein, Charles, 107, 108, 353 Beuys, Joseph, 104, 108, 134, 177, 231, 301, 351 Bingen, Hildegard von, 301 bio-regionalism, 216 Bishop, Elizabeth, 76

Blake, William, 31 Blaser, Robin, 8, 57, 104, 105, 108, 109, 121, 159, 163, 170, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 185, 186, 187, 303, 331, 349, 353, 358 Blyth, R.H., 86, 228, 229, 230, 354 Bochner, Mel, 175 Bodhidharma, 96 Boehme, Jacob, 83, 84, 85, 188, 298, 299, 302, 307, 358 Bohm, David, 14, 27, 233, 319, 354 Bohr, Neils, 319 Bois, Yves-Alain, 183, 184, 354 Bonnard, Pierre, 232 Borges, Jorge Luis, 9, 188, 262, 290, 291, 292, 293, 296, 341, 351, 354 Botton, Alain De, 204 Bowering, George, 195, 331 Boyd, Arthur, 232 Bradshaw, Dove, 321, 357 Brakhage, Stan, 317 Braque, Georges, 110 Brathwaite, Edward Kamau, 164 Breton, Andre, 55 Brody, Hugh, 251, 354 Bronowski, Jacob, 23, 45, 237, 319, 320, 354 Brooks, William, 321 Brunelleschi, Filippo, 30 Bruno, Giordano, 291 Buber, Martin, 188 Buddhism, 7, 21, 26, 32, 38, 52, 53, 54, 65, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 86, 87, 90, 91, 96, 107, 126, 128, 141, 171, 178, 184, 218, 219, 222, 223, 224, 225, 229, 264, 269, 272, 274, 275, 278, 283, 299, 305, 308, 337, 338, 347, 353, 354, 355, 358, 360, 361 Bunting, Basil, 209, 210, 211, 354, 356

364 Bunyan, John, 296 Burgin, Victor, 55 Cage, John, 8, 9, 101, 102, 104, 108, 109, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 134, 144, 166, 177, 244, 245, 310, 313, 317, 318, 320, 321, 322, 326, 331, 348, 351, 354, 358 Caliban, 164 Calvino, Italo, 341, 342, 361 Candrakirti, 91 Capra, Fritjof, 17, 23, 26, 27, 28, 225, 256, 354 Cardew, Cornelius, 321 Caro, Anthony, 31 Carson, Anne, 9, 14, 108, 109, 207, 317, 328, 329, 354 Cesaire, Aime, 164 Cezanne, Paul, 30, 39, 42, 49, 72, 236, 351 Ch’an, Chu, 124 Chadwick, Helen, 8, 31, 153, 154, 354 Chave, Anna C., 309 Chesterton, G.K., 351 Chopra, Deepak, 316, 354 Clement of Alexandria, 12 Close, Chuck, 55 Coldstream, William, 39, 45, 47, 50, 55 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 107, 114, 121, 196, 358 Collingwood, R.G., 18, 113 Constable, John, 29, 30, 354 constructionism, 160, 171, 172, 174 contrarium, 9, 162, 186, 325, 345, 348, 349 Coomaraswamy, Ananda K., 244, 294, 313, 317 Croll, Maurice, 107, 108 Crook, John, 71, 355 Crowther, Paul, 20, 23, 62, 148, 149, 355 Cubism, 315 Cummings, E.E., 121 Cunningham, Merce, 321 Cupitt, Don, 51, 52, 355 Dahlberg, Edward, 115 Dali, Salvador, 31

Index Dante Alighieri, 104, 111, 112, 178, 197, 291, 303 Danvers, John, 7 Dasein, 138, 156, 162, 273, 277, 293, 318 Davenport, Guy, 8, 191, 194, 207, 266, 287, 315, 316, 317, 347, 355, 356 Davidson, Michael, 114, 191, 199, 332, 355 de Kooning, Willem, 31, 175 Debord, Guy, 186, 330 Degas, Edgar, 30 Democritus, 91 Dennett, Daniel, 172 Derges, Susan, 8, 214, 215, 216, 357 Derrida, Jacques, 74, 75, 136, 172, 333 Descartes, 80, 87, 120, 332, 333, 335 Dewey, John, 119, 333 Dillard, Annie, 166 discontinuum of consciousness, 5, 9, 313, 316 doubt, uncertainty and nonattachment, 337–39 Dreyfus, Georges, B.J., 69, 70, 71, 74, 75, 351, 355 dualism and non-dualism, 332–36 Duchamp, Marcel, 136, 309, 310, 321 Duncan, Robert, 8, 12, 114, 138, 176, 178, 187, 196, 197, 207, 313, 355 Durer, Albrecht, 221 Eckhart, Meister, 124, 127, 128, 265, 271, 272, 273, 275, 276, 283, 294, 295, 305, 318 Eco, Umberto, 8, 131, 133, 134, 136, 154, 156, 162, 172, 261, 293, 321, 355 Edelman and Tononi. See Edelman, Gerald Edelman, Gerald, 24, 25, 26, 43, 143, 144, 253, 355 Eliade, Mircea, 247 Eliot, T.S., 275 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 84, 283, 286, 356 Empson, William, 159, 187, 188, 324, 348, 356, 358

Index ethnopoetics, 216, 359 Euclid, 30 Euripides, 45 Everson, William, 199 Fabritius, Carel, 37, 351 Feldman, Morton, 321 Finlay, Ian Hamilton, 8, 220 Flam, Jack D., 53 florilegium, 12 Fortey, Richard, 246 Foucauld, Charles de, 301 Foucault, Michel, 136, 172, 333 Francesca, Piero della, 30 Fried, Michael, 153 Fromentin, Eugene, 29 Fromm, Erich, 126, 271 Furlani, Andre, 315 Gallagher, Tess, 58, 59 Gandhi, Mahatma, 301 geopoetics, 216, 217 Giacometti, Alberto, 31, 39, 46, 47, 49, 50, 51, 55, 57, 177, 351, 359 Gibson, James, 22, 26 Glass, Philip, 134, 329 Gleick, James, 329, 330, 356 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 8, 214, 230, 231, 232, 234, 236, 239 Gogh, Vincent van, 31 Goodman, Nelson, 53 Gormley, Anthony, 134 Graham, W.S., 330 Greenberg, Clement, 153 Greenblatt, Stephen, 340, 358 Gunaratana, Henepola, 77, 78, 356 Guston, Philip, 56, 359 Hakuin, 94, 125, 337, 338 Hanh, Thich Nat, 301 Han-shan, 218, 219, 220, 222 Happold, F.C., 263, 265, 266, 267, 270, 274, 279, 282, 286, 293, 299, 356 Hardy, Thomas, 166 Hecht, Anthony, 60, 357 Hegel, G.W.F., 333 Heidegger, Martin, 8, 9, 55, 138, 152, 156, 161, 162, 164, 165, 170, 173, 178, 218, 239, 272, 273, 274, 275,

365 276, 277, 293, 295, 300, 318, 354, 361 Heisenberg, Werner, 319, 320 Heraclitus, 119, 194, 267, 292, 351 Hesse, Eva, 284 Hiller, Susan, 134 Hodgkin, Howard, 185 Holzer, Jenny, 134 Hopkins, Gerald Manley, 104 Huang-Po, 65, 124, 354 Hughes, Robert, 44 Hughes, Ted, 210, 231 Hui-Neng, 94 Husserl, Edmund, 51, 119, 175 hybridity, the hyphened position, 185–86 Ikkyu, 269 indeterminacy, 5, 9, 33, 47, 83, 86, 87, 88, 89, 92, 93, 108, 109, 112, 127, 128, 160, 162, 163, 166, 179, 186, 199, 244, 252, 275, 280, 293, 313, 314, 315, 318, 319, 320, 321, 324, 329, 335, 348, 349 infinity and mysticism, 287–93 James, William, 9, 145, 263, 278, 333 Jamie, Kathleen, 325, 359 Jefferies, Richard, 286 Johns, Jaspar, 322 Johnson, B.S., 134, 135, 151, 321 Johnson, Samuel, 121 Joyce, James, 135 Judd, Don, 31, 175, 284 Kandinsky, Wassily, 18, 113 Kant, Immanuel, 176, 230, 333, 335 Kapoor, Anish, 9, 262, 285, 294, 295, 296, 304, 306, 308, 351, 356, 357 Keats, John, 113, 215, 328 Kerouac, Jack, 109, 203, 357 Kierkegaard, Soren, 152, 161, 278, 279 Klee, Paul, 18 Klein, Yves, 285 Kline, Franz, 175 koan, 94, 95, 96 Kounellis, Yannis, 108, 177, 284 Kristeva, Julia, 172 Kruger, Barbara, 134 Kuhn, Thomas S., 26

366 Kyger, Joanne, 199 La Barre, Weston, 249 Laib, Wolfgang, 285 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 287 Lewis-Williams, David, 251, 252, 253, 254, 357 LeWitt, Sol, 175 Liebniz, Gottfried Wilhem, 28 Lodge, David, 145 Lommel, Andreas, 251, 252, 357 Long, Richard, 8, 200, 201 Lopez-Garcia, Antonio, 39, 47 Lorraine, Claude, 221 Lowell, Robert, 58 MacDairmid, Hugh, 217 Machado, Antonio, 268 Madhyamika - school of Buddhism, 54, 69, 70, 74, 75, 80, 81, 83, 87, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 171, 184, 347 Magee, Bryan, 42 Magritte, Rene, 55 Marcel, Gabriel, 87 Maritain, Jacques, 87 Martin, Agnes, 9, 285, 304, 307, 356 Maturana and Varela, 23 McEvilley, Thomas, 9, 65, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 308, 309, 310, 311, 320, 337, 338, 347, 351, 357 McFarlane, Thomas J., 288 Medeci, Lucrezia Tornabuoni de, 311 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 8, 17, 20, 23, 26, 50, 51, 52, 53, 62, 87, 119, 131, 148, 149, 150, 156, 162, 239, 321, 333, 341, 357, 358 Merton, Thomas, 9, 86, 87, 263, 268, 269, 270, 271, 273, 274, 275, 284, 293, 295, 299, 301, 308, 309, 358, 360 Merz, Mario, 132 metaphysics of light, 302–3 Michelangelo, 30, 31 Minimalism, 8, 175 Mithen, Steven, 241, 358 Mondrian, Piet, 30 Monet, Claude, 232 Monk, Thelonius, 109, 110

Index Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de, 107, 131, 132, 266, 311, 337, 338, 351 Morris, Robert, 175 Mossin, Andrew, 181 Motherwell, Robert, 232 Munch, Edvard, 18 Murti, T.V.R., 54, 69, 358 mutuality of existence, 5, 65, 68, 77, 79, 82, 151, 160, 162, 186, 255, 293, 325, 348, 349 mysticism, 5, 9, 21, 86, 146, 160, 184, 261, 262, 263, 264, 265, 266, 267, 271, 272, 273, 276, 277, 278, 282, 286, 287, 288, 292, 293, 295, 302, 303, 311 Mysticism, 9, 266, 284, 288, 293, 303, 356, 359 Nagarjuna, 8, 54, 69, 75, 87, 90, 92, 95 Nagel, Thomas, 187 Nantenbo, 32 nature as other, 163–66 Nicholas of Cusa, 288, 290, 291, 349, 358 Niedecker, Lorine, 108, 115 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 161, 217, 325 Nishida, Kitaro, 87 Nolan, Sidney, 232 Oates, Joyce Carol, 287 object as other, 175–76 observational painting and drawing, 65–68 Oliver, Mary, 166, 302 Olson, Charles, 8, 101, 104, 105, 108, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 179, 194, 207, 358 Oppen, George, 46, 47, 115, 197, 207, 358 Oswald, Alice, 205, 206, 215, 216, 259, 358 P’o, Su Tung, 97 Palaeolithic, 8, 194, 196, 231, 242, 253, 351 Parmenides, 91, 267 Pascal, Blaise, 160, 161, 162, 290, 291 Peirce, C.S., 40

Index Perloff, Marjorie, 128, 142, 176, 277, 278, 279, 310, 317, 318, 322, 331, 348, 358 Perspectivism, 325 Picasso, Pablo, 110 picturing mind, 8, 107, 124, 129, 176, 325, 350 Plato, 81, 91, 105, 150, 179, 286, 291, 335 Pollock, Jackson, 18, 175 Pope, Alexander, 104, 178 postmodernism, 19, 27, 33, 338 Pound, Ezra, 217, 315, 331 Poussin, Nicolas, 221 Prospero, 164 Purves, Dale, 316, 317 Pyrrho, or Pyrrhon, of Elis, 8, 87, 90, 91, 92, 95, 194, 327, 337, 351, 354 Pythagorus, 30 Ramachandran, Vilayanur, 24, 25, 26, 359 Ransome, John Crowe, 102 Rauschenberg, Robert, 8, 101, 104, 108, 110, 111, 112, 177, 285, 317, 321 Reago, Paula, 31 Reich, Steve, 329 Reinhardt, Ad, 8, 182, 183, 184, 354 Rembrandt, 31 revisibility, 8, 9, 14, 51, 55, 131, 172, 325, 326 Rexroth, Kenneth, 9, 97, 98, 104, 159, 166, 194, 262, 265, 296, 297, 298, 299, 300, 330, 339, 351, 353, 356, 359 Reznikoff, Charles, 46, 60, 115, 177, 359 Ricks, Christopher, 187 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 105, 179, 217 Rimbaud, Arthur, 217 Rodin, Auguste, 31 Rorty, Richard, 9, 52, 170, 172, 173, 279, 333, 334, 335, 359 Rosenberg, Harold, 56 Rothenberg, Jerome, 121, 186, 202, 207, 216, 231, 241, 245, 254, 255, 330, 359

367 Rothko, Mark, 175 Rousseau, J.J., 164 Rubens, Peter Paul, 31 Ruisdael, Jacob, 29 Rumi, Jalalud-din, 282 Ruskin, John, 8, 30, 104, 194, 214, 231, 232, 233, 234, 235, 236, 237, 239, 347, 351, 357, 360 Russell, Bertrand, 9, 80, 81, 82, 90, 263, 266, 267, 274, 276, 278, 279, 293, 304, 359 Ryman, Robert, 285 Ryoanji, 32, 222, 226 sabi, 228, 229 Sartre, J.P., 50, 160 Scepticism, 87, 90, 91 Schierz, Kai Uwe, 276 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 279 Schweizer, Harold, 58, 59, 355, 359 Schwitters, Kurt, 110, 317 Scotus, Duns, 194, 288, 299, 330 Seferis, George, 103 self as open work, 138–39 Serra, Richard, 31, 175, 284 Sesshu, 104, 125, 226, 285, 351 Sextus Empiricus, 88, 90, 194, 322, 337 Shakespeare, William, 164 shamanism, 8, 239, 246, 247, 248, 249, 251, 252 Sherman, Cindy, 31 Silesius, Angelus, 278, 279 Sinclair, Iain, 330 Smith, Cyril Stanley, 330 Smith, Tony, 175 Smithson, Robert, 129, 356 Snyder, Gary, 8, 104, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 176, 191, 194, 198, 199, 203, 204, 207, 208, 209, 210, 216, 218, 231, 232, 233, 248, 250, 259, 360 Socrates, 81, 90, 105, 118, 179, 356 Spicer, Jack, 121, 163, 176, 177, 179, 185, 187, 353 Spinoza, Baruch, 65, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 107, 151, 194, 223, 267, 283, 288, 292, 319, 351 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 133

368 Stubbs, George, 30 Sufi - mysticism, 9, 282, 309 sunyata, 7, 21, 65, 68, 69, 70, 72, 74, 75, 77, 78, 81, 82, 93, 96, 97, 163, 224, 275, 283, 305 Suzuki, D.T., 274 Tao, 220, 222, 223, 227, 279, 280, 281, 288, 305, 309, 310, 329, 357, 360 Taoism, 9, 97, 198, 207, 218, 219, 220, 222, 223, 227, 230, 236, 239, 243, 277, 280, 281, 301, 305, 309, 329, 330 tathata, 7, 32, 65, 68, 70, 75, 79, 81, 83, 92, 97, 142, 228, 283 The Cloud of Unknowing, 268, 361 Thomas, Lewis, 256 Thomas, R.S., 8, 166, 168 Thoreau, Henry David, 194, 217, 298, 300, 301, 322 Titian, 31 Tjapaltjarri, Clifford Possum, 31, 233 Tolstoy, Leo, 279, 301 Traherne, Thomas, 306 Tu Fu, 298 Turrell, James, 9, 262, 285, 304, 305, 306, 351, 353, 361 Twichell, Chase, 76 Twombly, Cy, 8, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 108, 177, 351, 355, 360 Valery, Paul, 56, 163, 165, 166 Vaughan, Henry, 302, 303 Vermeer, Jan, 58, 72 Vinci, Leonardo da, 30 Viola, Bill, 31 vipassana, 70, 78, 274 wabi, 228 Wah, Fred, 8, 121, 164, 185, 186, 195, 196, 199, 207, 208, 210, 212, 213, 360 walking art and poetry, 198–207 Waterton, Charles, 8, 194, 233, 257, 258, 259, 353, 360 Watts, Alan, 52, 53, 69, 79, 86, 95, 97, 223, 228, 229, 230, 269, 278, 280, 281, 360

Index Welch, Lew, 129, 180, 199 Weschler, Lawrence, 58, 76, 360 Whalen, Philip, 8, 101, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 360 White, Gilbert, 258 White, Kenneth, 8, 104, 131, 141, 194, 196, 204, 210, 216, 217, 245, 259, 358 Whitehead, A.N., 119, 120 Whiteread, Rachel, 31, 284 Whitman, Walt, 217 Wilde, Oscar, 287 Williams, Fred, 232 Wilson, Robert, 134 Winters, Yvor, 46 Witkin, Joel Peter, 31 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 56, 73, 128, 129, 136, 176, 276, 277, 278, 279, 284, 324, 356, 358 Wolseley, John, 8, 232, 233, 234, 361 Wolters, Clifton, 268 Wood, Michael, 342 Wordsworth, William, 166, 210, 215, 231, 286 Worringer, Wilhelm, 18 writerly and readerly texts, 134–36 wu-wei, 97, 223, 225, 236, 280, 301 Xenophanes of Colophon, 290 yang, 198, 223, 227 yin, 198, 223, 227 yugen, 228, 230 zazen, 70, 78, 143, 171, 215, 225, 274, 277 Zen Buddhism, 70, 72, 73, 86, 87, 94, 95, 96, 97, 124, 125, 126, 218, 222, 223, 224, 225, 228, 230, 243, 269, 274, 275, 277, 301, 337, 338, 354, 356, 358, 359, 360 Zeno of Elea, 329 Zenrin-Kushu, 97 Zimmerman, Michael E., 272 Zizek, Slavoj, 180, 181, 182 Zukofsky, Louis, 115