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trunkbark

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Arbor

Upon my back, I raise my eyes,
Above my garden, the sky draws out its circuit
as if pinned by the spindle of my nose,
The grass damp beneath my clothes,
My garden stands above me like an arbor
holding the universe close.

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green water

Existence equals copula plus substance.

Existence requires an architecture, a structure of interrelations which informs itself and is what we term 'meaning.' Language is made up of vocabulary, a lexical base composed of different words each of which has a "proper" meaning attached to it. However, it does not function, that is it does not speak and produce phrases, unless the words are assembled in a series put together around some verb form. Verbs allow the discursive string (the unidimensionally linear) to turn over, or around, or back on itself and so occupy some kind of multidimensional space. It is the creation of this opening that allows for the possibility of meaningful utterance. In this way, language is a reality parallel to the physical and the conscious (Dasein). The significance of its structure comes into being through the verb; the connecting-relating element which brings it from one dimension into the realm of another. The copula allows existence to appear...to be self-evident. Copula and existence are one and the same. The verb that is always at the base of meaning is that of existence: “to be.” All verbs around which words are assembled to say something about each other are derived from the base verb “to be.” The verb is the indispensable condition of all discourse and the entire verbal species can be reduced to the single one that signifies: “to be.” In reality, there is only one verb, the verb “to be,” compounded, for all other verb forms, with attributes:

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I sing = I am + singing.[1]

The verb “to be,” like lone existence, is without determinable meaning . . . its role is the syntactical function which allows other words to relate to each other, it functions as the threshold of meaning and allows language to function. From another perspective, the function of “to be” is manifest as the re-presentational component of language. The operation which turns the discursive string back around on itself is the same as that through which language re-presents reality . . . it functions as the multidimensional linguistic space paralleling the multidimensional space in which reality decomposes itself and allows the appearance of difference. Both “spaces” allow for the most basic requirement of meaning: difference and interrelation within limitation. In conjunction with the lexical aspect (including verbal attributes) of language, the copula “to be” becomes substantive . . . the horizon of meaning.

[1] This sample comes from Michel Foucault.

“A method can, but need not, be one of the consequences of a system.”[1]
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Arnold Schoenberg

[1] Arnold Schoenberg, Style and Idea (London: 1951); 107.

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ditch walk, upper Lenno, Italy

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round window, Lenno, Italy

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. . . without Donald Judd, Robert Therrien
. . . enlarges the chair:


Robert Therrien, "Under the Table," 1994, wood and metal, 117 inches high.

October Essay - Proportion is Visible Reason.

If I wish to make a bed, to design one, can I do it the way I design a building?

Any object produced through work exists within a complex realm of ideas. This realm constitutes the boundaries which define its place within the categories of cultured objects. Donald Judd tried to make a coffee table out of a sculptural work and transgressed the boundaries which differentiate objects of furniture from those of sculpture. In his words, the work was debased and produced a bad table which he threw away. Revisiting this failure twenty years later, Judd concluded that the configuration and scale of art cannot be transposed into furniture and architecture. Their intentions differ too fundamentally. The practical arts rely upon functional performance as well as artifice, and if they are reduced to either category alone they become (in Judd's words) ridiculous. The requirement that furniture house the body with care in an intimate manner means that, even more than architecture, it must focus its art towards its use. This implies that objects of furniture exist at the fringes of representation. They do not easily allow themselves to be used to represent ideas which are born from outside of their own reality. They do not easily conform to the insertion of artistic interest into their program. When making furniture, unlike art, one must place one's aesthetic desire within the scope of the object's own reasoned intention. That intention is firstly and always primarily the thoughtful and sober accommodation of the body through use. Furniture is inherently wrapped up in proportion, fit and the material interaction with skin under the force of the body. In effect, it must work for its value like few other objects . . . it must measure itself to the restricted movements and positions of the body, it must follow the body's proportions as it moves, and it must accept the body's need for comfort. Furniture must first exist as itself. In this way it may be described as minimal in its distillation of our otherwise wide arena of material interest.

Does this mean that furniture exemplifies the principles of minimalism? Both Donald Judd's art and furniture are admirable in their attention to the idea of the minimal. However, I think that the answer is a complicated yes. The best furniture tends toward the minimalistic satisfaction of its own nature, and the further its conceptual centre is from that focus, the more its usability and beauty are compromised. This does not mean that furniture cannot contain other ideas within its form. Only that it must ultimately rest upon its satisfaction of its own nature first. A bed can never be an idea of a bed. It can never be valuable solely for its likeness or affinity to art. A bed must exist as a bed before all else. That is where its meaning lies.

Does this mean that furniture does not share similarities with other things we make? For example, can it not share something with art and architecture? When I design my bed will it not resemble my architecture and painting? Judd contends that the various interests in form will come together in a consistent manner. I agree. But . . . this does not mean that they will look alike. Judd claims that "If you like simple forms in your art you will not make complicated ones in architecture." [2] I disagree. Because the design of the practical arts is driven by their prosaic nature, a like for simple forms which is appropriate to one discipline does not necessarily translate to another. We relate to our world differently according to what scale is appropriate to the specific manner of relation we are living at any specific time.

Human beings relate to the world in many different ways. In thinking about it, our location of it operates across a wide range: from the fine detail of specific references to the general resolution of our abstractions. The situation is more complicated when we consider the case of perception. The sense of sight can engage the world over a wide range of focus. Through need, interest or concentration we can simplify or complicate what we see. When running with speed along a trail, the forest is radically reduced; and one sees only what is necessary to safely land each footfall and to avoid collision. When we stop and contemplate the same wood, we can hold both its general character and its detail at once. Likewise, but to a lesser extent, we are capable of picking out sounds from background noise by seeking them. If we stop concentrating they become lost in the general discord. On the other hand, the sense of touch displays a highly restricted range of scale. In spite of its uneven sensitivity over the body, we may say that all of our skin is highly sensitive to a very fine scale of difference. Where it is most concentrated, our finger tips for example, our touch can discern differences to a surface which are invisible to the eye. We must remember that, although we relate to objects with all of our senses at once, when we do so we use each of them to different degrees at different times.

This means that our needs and abilities to interact with different parts of our world vary widely. The complexity of volume and sound we may enjoy within a piece of music may prove (and often does) to be uncomfortable within the background noise of daily life. In the same manner, the formal character of our physical environment can comfortably range across a wide variety of complexity and quality depending upon the scale of our interaction with it. At the scale of the city, many people find it impossible to find too much complexity. Here elaboration is experienced as interesting and rich as we move about through it. Regardless of our feelings about the pace and restrictions of city life, a high degree of complexity seems to be both characteristic and appropriate to an 'object' the size of a city. This applies equally to the landscape in general. However, such an appropriateness becomes less so in individual buildings. We demand that they work to simplify the manifold nature of the outside world in order to make places in which people can act in a more focused manner. If movement captures something about our manner of relating to the outdoors, repose does so when we are inside. Our comfort and use of indoor places requires a relative reduced range and amount of movement. In furniture, that repose is intensified . . . better characterized as rest in the sense that the body 'rests up close against' the item which holds its place. Here the body's options for movement are restricted (to sitting, laying, etc.) and through contact, the simplicity required of the object is even higher. It is only once objects themselves operate through being movable by the body (our utensils for eating are a good example), that an even higher simplicity than for furniture is required.

Our conception of, and feelings about, objects are coloured by these experiential aspects. When designing a bed it is necessary to realize that its inherent character requires a relatively simple solution. If it becomes too complicated, if its complexity is not subsumed under an appropriate overriding simplicity, it will appear just as ridiculous as if it were trying to first be an object of sculpture. Even more so, a room full of overly complicated furniture will suffer in its operation and will impact negatively upon our perception of it. We must be careful here. What does overly complicated mean? The arbitration of this must be according to the fundamental nature of the item. The assertion of individual interests; including taste, style and the like; lies outside of this accordance. Hence there is room for both the minimal aesthetic exemplified by Shaker furniture, and the somewhat more plentiful one of the Victorian era. Where there is no room, is where an interest in some aspect outside of the fundamental is asserted in spite of it. Then the object ceases to be furniture and begins to exist as something else. Or, in the case that it retains some usefulness, it might be considered a debased example of the furniture it approximates. The philosopher would claim that a category mistake had occurred. Donald Judd simply claims that other things, art for example, are incapable of becoming furniture.

[1] These words represent my understanding. In as much as it agrees with itself, it represents (illustrates) the postion it expresses. In as much as it exists as a work, it merely presents itself. In as much as it presents the history of its own inception, it presents the results of a private dialogue with the essay Donald Judd wrote titled "It's Hard to Find a Good Lamp." The title is derived from Judd's statement: "The art of a chair . . . is partly its reasonableness, usefulness and scale as a chair. These are proportion, which is visible reasonableness." Donald Judd, "It's Hard to Find a Good Lamp." In Donald Judd Furniture Retrospective, 7-21 (Rotterdam: Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, 1992): 7.
[2] Ibid.

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post dive

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My Imagination Flies
. [04/01/00 - a poem following something Rene Crevel might have said.*]

My imagination outreaches me,
wrenches the bars of reason’s cage,
and like a bird, flies off upon the air(s) from which I came,
carried above the world and pushing the horizon further,
before turning around to find
. . . the island toward which I reach
. . . . . . . . and graze my
. .........finger.

* Something said in Kay Boyle’s fictional “Afterword: A Conversation with Rene Crevel,” in Rene Crevel, Babylon, trans. Kay Boyle (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1996): 161.

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from quarlo in NYC

before Descartes' radical reduction, Parmenides:

". . . the same thing is there for thinking and for being."

Parmenides' fragment 3 is mere opinion, but what beautifully simple optimism is expressed . . . that we are in and of this world. Interestingly, a logic-based expansion of the cogito (I think something, therefore I and something other than I exist) brings Cartesian doubt and Parmenidean certainty into a kind of alignment which reflects the similarities implicit in their equally reasoned discourses.
(more later . . . )

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fountain wake

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ocean wake

Can Subjectivity Dominate?

Once reality is divided into subjective and objective parts their interrelation becomes problematic . . . in what way are they connected, and do they define each other's existence necessarily? For its part, the West has developed a long tradition of understanding the conscious ego as something essentially disconnected from its outer/exterior objects.[1] Even before Descartes, the unified cosmos, which had held subjects and objects together in balance since antiquity, had begun to be replaced with an egalitarian construction in which the subject dominates. This construction can best be described as a neutral field within which the intending subject can exercise its fullest effects. For its part, philosophy has been busy generating a subject, newly self-conscious, which would be up to the task. The result has been a subject which primarily sees itself as an agent of control. Through its scepticism of orthodoxy, its refusal of authority, its commitment to progress, and most importantly, its confidence in its own powers of judgement; the relationship between the subjective and objective has increasingly become understood through this single particular category, its action and its exercise. At its most profound level, understanding reality based upon the requirements of keeping it under control, reduces the essence of things to mere depositories of potential content. They remain impenetrable save for their capacity to enter the subject-driven realm of experience and manipulation. This condition sets up the material foundation of reality as an object of experience, knowledge, desire. As such it stands in opposition, even frustration, to the nature of the subject; but it does so in a passive way, through its muteness and difference. I equivocate concerning whether this is a good or bad development. On one hand, it speaks of an existence out of balance. But perhaps this is temporary, and indicative of a limited understanding of what our dominant position fully entails . . . especially concerning responsibilities. On the other hand, this model incorporates its own latent forces of balance. In it, epistemology is not limited to the description of states of affairs relative to the attainment of knowledge, but includes our active (motivated) engagement of our objective context. The alienation of a world of cold facts is hereby potentially undone. In modernity’s alienation of subjects from objects there lies a seed of unity. The philosophical battle pitting the contemplative spirit (the true home of philosophy's original impulse to speculate and doubt) against overwhelming pragmatic spirit of calculative control was introduced to cultural practice precisely when positivism tried to throw it out. Our folly was always inherently exposed . . . as if we could ever replace the position once conceived of for the gods.

[1] It must be noted that there are very different approaches in other cultures. In India, the ego is scorned as a delusion. Instead of domination (by the subject), the experienced duality of existence is closed through contemplative union with, and submission to, the infinite.

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I could

I could touch things beyond the window, or beyond the window beyond that.
The house I saw without was the house I stood within, looking out, back upon me.

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wood dock by CF Moller Arkitektfirmaet, Mollestrommen, Haderslev

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Storm: ap an ation

See I, in lakes like eyes;
in tired lakes rolling cold,
in storms
a dull beauty hits; all things
spoiled without minding,
as time cleaves drab and fat
with pressure descending.
Sea mine –
my skin pressed by dead air,
holding tight what turns inside,
in blindness like death
in tired duration,
roiling in storms.

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gull kick (wwwcull - photographer unknown)

mind, matter, difference and the city

That mind was an alien element in the material cosmos has long been intuitively recognized, but scientists only toward the end of the last millennium [the 20th-century] formulated its primal place among the forces of creation. The particles smaller than a quark, it was reluctantly proclaimed, are purely mathematical, that is to say, mental. 1
John Updike

It remains imperative that the alien characters of the material and the mental be figured into a unity. There is connection, it is certain that there must be translation . . . a point or a form through which they become one and the same character while retaining their different groundings. It is also inherent in the oneness of everything that the material and the immaterial are essential and necessary to each other. This relationship includes their existential requirements as well as their peculiarities.

+

“And so?” Montale says, “Still, it’s a fact/that something happened, maybe a nothing/which is everything [italics mine].” 2

The omnipolis, 3 coming into being, relying not on geographic unity (connection) so much as communicative instantaneity, the developing home of us all, is not governed by a single polarity. The radical pessimism of Paul Virilio is supported by only half of the picture. The omnipolis is not simply reducing all real cities to suburbs. The forces which push all to the periphery are also redefining the position of the edge. The bipolar of traditional urbanity is being closed while, inside out, it is being pushed to its limit. Virilio under-presents the internal completeness of this process. When he thinks the new virtual city is merely “. . . a sort of omnipolitan periphery whose centre will be nowhere and circumference everywhere, he misses the the implication of the reverse. The sense of the original statement (the centre is everywhere, the circumference nowhere) already includes Virilio’s opposite version. 4 Either characterization holds at the logical endpoints of ‘everywhere’ and ‘nowhere.’ The new omnipolis grafts on to our geographical organization a structure which equally places everyone (tied in) at the edge and centre at the same time. The dream of the internet is that all terminals sit at the very side of all others, without hierachy, without distance. The centre is everywhere and nowhere, the periphery likewise. The distinction held forth by these terms collapses within the realm of instantaneous telepresence. The meaning they structure is maintained only because that telepresence is a kind of alternative life which confuses the polarity of the ever existing (?) geography of physical presence.

1 John Updike,Toward the End of Time (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997): 151.
2 Euginio Montale, “Xenia II,” in Satura {Poems}, trans. W. Arrowsmith (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1998): 31.
3 A term coined by Marco Bertozzi.
4 The original derives from the Corpus Hermeticum (3rd Century).

democracy

This is theory. There is no democracy alone. It is a force, even as statute, which plays amongst other powers.

Octavio Paz tells us that democracy is not teleological: “. . . [it] is not an absolute project about the future: it is a method [italics mine] of civilized co-existence.” 1 He is correct when he points to relativism as the crux of democratic society. It does assure the peaceful co-existence of people within a range of their differences. However, I cannot agree with Paz’s position that this basis is an empty one; a core that “. . . ceaselessly enlarges and empties souls.” 2 Democracy is an agreement, and as such, it is only partly a method. Equally important is the mutual value agreed upon by the very virtue of its practice: it is an agreement to share the basic equalities of citizenship. I maintain that the price we pay for sharing these rights is twofold. Firstly, because democracy is partial, we must accept many things which compromise our individuality in order to establish the mere possibility of getting along. All democracies have sacred content upon which they cannot operate without risking disintegration. 3 For example, they require a social contract based upon sufficient individual wealth that its majority can live (judge themselves to live) with enough independence, security and quality that the agreement (to participate) remains sufficiently satisfying. Such satisfaction may amount to no more than a continuation based upon a lack of alternatives for improvement. Democracy rests upon a minimal standard of majority pacification. 4 Secondly, the freedom gained from democratic relativism engenders individual responsiblities unknown to the subjects of authoritarian rule. Democracy’s reliance upon only the most basic (even abstract) rules of community does not provide sufficient meaning for human culture. This is the emptiness which Paz and so many others identify as the key problem of modernity. But this characterization is a holdover from our premodern heritage. The universe does not tolerate emptiness. Human culture began to fill the void long before it was ever identified. Pained by the loss of imposed meanings, like an adolescent troubled by no longer being able to stand behind the parent, democratic societies (like others) have moved on. The challenge they present is to the individual: gaining in freedom but also in responsibility. This responsibility is to create and evolve . . . to face the void and put content into it.

Democracy does not imply a static society. Rather, it relinquishes the dream of control and accepts blind faith. It accepts that change is yet another aspect of reality which transcends our limitations. We are agents within, not gods unto ourselves. We cannot bemoan our inability to return to the “innocence” of divinty. 5 Paz has stated that he was sure of one thing: that we are living an interregnum. 6 Perhaps progress ammounts to no more than the realization that we always have been and always will. The concept of stability is only a reflection of our myopia. Interruption is movement, is history, is us. We are the interval in which the universe reflects upon itself. It can be no surprise that this reflection is local. The difficulty Paz identifies is that once radically stretched or extended, the local reveals the vastness of its context. Eternity and endlessness are brought home. The important point is that such an interregnum is not unsurpassible. We are simply, painfully pushed to extend our selves . . . once managed, we regain our focus and the local is re-established within the unbounded. The basis of meaning once again remains.

1 Octavio Paz,, Itinerary: An Intellectual Journey, trans., Jason Wilson (New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1994): 88.
2 Ibid.
3 This content is resilient but not static.
4 Majority, as history amply illustrates, is a quantity of power. If democracy has any teleological effect, it may be that it works to free the distribution of power as a flow seeking its equilibrium within the world’s population. This would appear to be a very slow process.
5 Could anything be more loaded!
6 Paz: 89.

Repetition

Resemblance and repetition are different in kind. In resemblance, one term may be substituted for another. It is a case of generality. Generality presents two major orders; the qualitative order of resemblances and the quantitative order of equivalences. Repetition, on the other hand, concerns non-exchangeable singularities. It expresses an identity opposed to the general, a particularity opposed to the universal, a distinctive opposed to the ordinary, an instantaneity opposed to variation and a permanence opposed to eternity. Following the difference between resemblance and repetition, we find two equally different languages. There is the language of science . . . dominated by equality, in which each term is replaceable by others; and there is that of lyricism . . . in which each term is irreplaceable and can only be repeated.

There is a serious question here though. Is genuine repetition even possible? Revealing an origin which would make repetition possible is the challenge. Art seeks to enable actions which make singular changes to the differences that already exist . . . to convert one thing into another; i.e., wisdom into virtue, love into knowledge . . . to turn our daily toil into something beyond a mere natural law, into something we both choose and transcend. Daily toil, as habit, as mere second nature, is a generality. Only through its being surpassed can habit ever rise to an act of true repetition. Otherwise it remains mechanical and we remain unable to do anything new or unique. Such a limitation entails that human being is an existence without freedom (Kierkegaard) or liberation of will (Nietsche). It would be an existence within the routines of outward domination; by the forces of inner or outer nature, solely by the determinations of the already concluded. This is a fate not even worthy of animal being. It is a fate which we inherently disobey and violate. Repetition is a means by which our individuality defends its strange and matchless existence. It belongs to the realms of humour and irony; it is by nature transgression and exception, always revealing a singularity opposed to the particulars subsumed under laws; a creation opposed to the generalities which give rise to laws.

Rene Thom , Esquisse d'une Semiophysique.

Instead of establishing Geometry on Logic, it is a question of establishing Logic within Geometry. Thus, we produce an overall scheme of a world made of emergences and pregnances: emergences are respectively impenetrable objects; pregnances are hidden qualities, efficient virtues that, emanating from source forms, impregnate themselves with other emerging forms and produce visible (figurative) effects. 1
Rene Thom

Thom equates the figurative with the 'visible' (experienceable) effects produced through the inter-impregnation of the hidden qualities of source forms (emergences). The action responsible for this does not implicate the final essense of the things we perceive. Rather, it reveals their ability to enter into the intelligibility/operability of our world 'at hand.' The relationship between essential nature and consciousness is the sole implication. We might say that the relationship itself is that action. Essential nature remains the impenetrable ground which (paradoxically) opens (through our perceptual limitation of its infinite quality) a complex range of possible meanings. 2 Thom's position defines a metaphysic.

Figuration, in the abstract, defines the meaningful organization of material into discrete entities. Perceptually, this occurs prior to its appropriation by the conceptual categories of the intellect. Material organization disposes/composes meanings which are prior to any reconstitution of them through the re-presenting mechanisms of discursive thought.
Figuration provides the basis for the interrelation of simple figures into complexities that retain significance as wholes. This retention withstands the experiential difficulties of possible internal states of difference or contradiction which may exist between parts.

1 Rene Thom, Esquisse d'une Semiophysique. (Paris: Intereditions, 1988).
2 My interpretation of Thom is based on understanding that the impenetrability he speaks of implies that emergences are absolute simples which reveal themselves (emerge) as and what they are. The previous quotation makes sense to me only if this is in fact the case. Only if emergences are understood as abstract points without character, can they exist as objects-in-themselves and not exhibit figural ‘effects.’

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Will there be enough silence? 1

If lost the world be lost to us,
If spent, the spent word is left unheard,
If unheard, the word lays unsaid,
Unsaid and unheard, the world is silence unbroken.
Stillness fills the unspoken word,
Voided and unheard, no word without a word,
Without a world the word rests within,
The world turned both light and dark,
By the word let go amidst the whirl,
Pinned about the centre of the silence that be.
The spark to which we harken.

1 One of my many rough plagiarisms; this time of part V’s beginning in T. S. Eliot’s Ash-Wednesday, 1930.

dirt and texture

Disliking purity as much as they do, let me begin with the words of three others:

The praise of purity which protects from evil like a coat of mail; the praise of impurity which gives rise to changes, in other words to life. I discarded the first . . . and I lingered to consider the second, which I found more congenial. In order for the wheel to turn, for life to be lived, impurities are needed.
Primo Levi 1

. . .
Impure and all intermingled,
hardly divisible,
living holds me: I am creature.
I accept
my human condition,
make myself at home
thanks to superhuman favours.
The world is more than man.
. . .
Jorge Guillén 2

The web of the spider, beautiful and sterile, exhibiting a useless perfection,
becomes meaningful “. . . only when broken by the entangled fly.” 3

1 Primo Levi, The Periodic Table, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984): 37.
2 Jorge Guillén, “Living,” in Horses in the Air and Other Poems, trans. Cola Franzen (San Fransisco: City Lights Books, 1987): 25.
3 Bruno Monguzzi relating a statement by Antonio Boggeri in Franc Nunoo-Quercoo, “A Poet of Form and Function,” in Bruno Monguzzi: A Designers Perspective (Baltimore: the Fine Arts Gallery, University of Maryland, 1998): 41-42.


Disliking purity, liking mess, enjoying the ability to orchestrate it somewhat . . . to play with its texture:

The texture of a thing holds it together.
The sum of its parts, if they are truly parts of it, accepting it as the whole they contribute to, comprise the total texture by being interrelated all with each other . . . everything being within, without, beside, above and below.
They offer a multitude of potential ‘takes’ upon their self-determined order; a multitude of experiential perspectives, uses, understandings and ways within and about locations which can be inhabited across a range of practices.
No absoloute orientations can be taken to rule the totality.
It is out of control.
Instead, it is multi-figural; a landscape of complex incompleteness.

happy birthday

T: its 3:19 AM. Is this how it goes?

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coming home for my birthday