Rendezvous with the Sensuous : Readings on Aesthetics [1 ed.] 9781443857871, 9781443856225

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Rendezvous with the Sensuous

Rendezvous with the Sensuous: Readings on Aesthetics

Edited by

Linda Ardito and John Murungi

Rendezvous with the Sensuous: Readings on Aesthetics Edited by Linda Ardito and John Murungi This book first published 2014 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2014 by Linda Ardito, John Murungi and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-5622-3, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5622-5

CONTENTS Preface ...................................................................................................... vii Introduction ............................................................................................. viii Part I: On Conceptualizing the Sensuous Chapter One ................................................................................................ 2 Angels with Guns Alphonso Lingis Chapter Two ............................................................................................. 19 Sensuality of Embodied Space in Language, Psychopathology and Art: Body-Full Experience of Body-Less Emptiness Bongrae Seok Chapter Three ........................................................................................... 40 Wandering Richard L. Wilson Part II: On Animating the Sensuous Chapter Four ............................................................................................. 62 Sensuously Virtuous: The Power of Sophrosyne in Platonic Erotics Anne Ashbaugh Chapter Five ............................................................................................. 75 The Soundscape of Plato’s Symposium Linda Ardito Chapter Six ............................................................................................. 112 Frida Kahlo’s Painting Brush John Murungi

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Part III: Emerging Dichotomies of the Sensuous Chapter Seven......................................................................................... 136 Irrationality, Entropy and Nature: The Aesthetic Collision of Hegel and Smithson Shannon Mussett Chapter Eight .......................................................................................... 160 The Aesthetic Transformation of the Past: History, Tragedy and Myth-Making Gerald L. Phillips Part IV: Biographical and Autobiographical Explorations of the Sensuous Chapter Nine........................................................................................... 184 From Philosophy to Poetry: The Personal Odyssey of N. Kazantzakis Christos C. Evangeliou Chapter Ten ............................................................................................ 206 The Sensuous Immortal Gayil Nalls Chapter Eleven ....................................................................................... 231 Measuring the Sensuous Joan Maloof Contributors ............................................................................................ 248

PREFACE Rendezvous with the Sensuous offers readers a variety of perspectives on the complex and interesting subject of aesthetics. Centered upon the notion of the sensuous, it includes a number of challenging ideas that allow for readers to actively engage in their discernment. The book is organized in four parts: Conceptualizing the Sensuous; Animating the Sensuous; Emerging Dichotomies of the Sensuous; Contemplating Biographical and Autobiographical Contexts of the Sensuous. Collectively, they represent a collection of distinct facets of and approaches to the subject. Individually, each part can be understood as a link to the others, just as each chapter within each part can be relevant in the context of the others. The subject of aesthetics is limitless. This is likewise the case with the sensuous, which informs it. Thus, a consideration of either the sensuous or of aesthetics can accommodate varied perspectives within such fields as the visual arts, music, and philosophy, disciplines represented in the present book. Readers contemplating the chapters herein shall be afforded the opportunity to gain insights into rich and vital facets of human experience and appreciation with respect to aesthetics.

INTRODUCTION An introduction is a gateway guided, shaped and given life by what it introduces. This introduction both introduces and is introduced by the sensuous. It introduces us, as readers, to the sensuous, inviting us to rendezvous with its mystery as it guides and inspires us. Readers who respond to its call, who desire to explore the world of the sensuous, are responding to a call arising from the self, a call that also leads to the self as a sensuous being. As a rendezvous with the sensuous unfolds, it is all the while returning one to one’s self, but now to a self transformed by this new pathway that is undertaken. One may not be cognizant of this relationship of the self to the self via the sensuous and thus, it may not be apparent that a rendezvous with the self is also a rendezvous with all that is sensuous. Rendezvous with the Sensuous is about the interplay between humans and their aesthetic experience. Consistent with the etymology of the term “rendezvous,” from the French “rendez vous” (rendre, to present; vous, you), it is about the presenting of one’s self to the experience of the sensuous. In the present book, the term sensuous shall connote that which is perceived by the senses. It is applied with the aim of amplifying shades of aesthetical meaning that to varying degrees will place the intellect somewhere within its midst. Even so, the intellect is not implicated overtly or predominantly against this different language of the immediacy of sensuous perceptions. The distinction between that which is intellectual and the sensuous dissolves in a rendezvous with the latter, in the context of an aesthetic experience. Life is contextualized by such an experience and thus it is itself an invitation to the places of the sensuous. Such places must be sensuous for a rendezvous to occur. Given this, the rendezvous is itself a dynamic force transcendent of the more mundane connotations typically associated with the term. In the context of this book, a given rendezvous becomes the medium and the site for an aesthetic experience, and, to be true to itself, it occurs rather than simply residing within aesthetic spaces and places. It is a dynamic presence that does not allow for preconceived notions as to where or how it manifests. Places and spaces are its vessels and sites, and it is in these dimensions that a participant of the rendezvous finds meaning. What is brought to that meeting place is what informs the kind of place it is.

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One’s presence there is the place and the place is one’s presence, with the place-presence becoming a poetical space within which the imagination is free to roam. With no a priori roadmap to a particular destination, one’s presence is participating in an experiential now; it is in this presence of the present that one can also experience the infinite universe of aesthetical potentiality. The sensuousness of being human is not exclusive to humans. Rather, as we shall see within the chapters of the present book, the sensuousness of being human introduces us to any and all things sensuous, from such phenomena as flowing water and a lofty breeze, and from textures, scents, flavors and sounds, as well as from the visual stimuli of such animate and inanimate objects as trees, clouds, rocks and animals. It is this openness that makes a work of art possible, that fosters creativity. Hence a rendezvous with the sensuous reminds us, as readers, that we are intrinsic components of all that is sensuous. The site of a rendezvous is where the epiphany of the sensuous takes place. Thus we may undertake a rendezvous with the sensuous by accessing the gateway to everything sensuous. The present book brings together varying viewpoints and approaches to the interrelationship between all things sensuous and our sensorial being. The sensuous, being the common basis of the work of aestheticians, is what inspires all aesthetical works and it is there where these works dwell. Given that all aestheticians are guided by and are inspired by the sensuous, readers shall find commonalities among the articles contained herein, with each becoming an opportunity for greater appreciation of the others and for a deeper and broader appreciation of aesthetics. In Rendezvous with the Sensuous, we, as readers, shall find ourselves in the presence of the sensuous, with reciprocal inspiration and information generated from this relationship. What arises in the dynamic of the rendezvous itself is a phenomenological experience, an experience that is unambiguously aesthetic. It is an experience that also becomes a phenomenological site in which perception may be kindled vividly and profoundly. The book’s contributors have informed the aesthetic experience of a rendezvous with the sensuous, and, by extension, readers, too, are implicated in this experience, becoming important not only for what they bring to the place of their respective sensibilities but also for how these sensibilities can become transformative. Ultimately, one is drawn to the rendezvous not by an external force but by an inner, experiential sensibility, an aesthetic sense. The sensuousness of the rendezvous place is suffused with one’s own sensuousness. One

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arrives there in response to the call of the rendezvous place itself. It is an alluring and uncanny place that is as a vessel in which one can experience its sensuousness. The authors of this book each treat the subject of the sensuous in terms of their own background, experience, and sensibilities regarding aesthetics. As the collective chapters show, the undertaking of this query into the sensuous is interdisciplinary and multi-dimensional, revealing a richness of perspectives and meanings in the context of our subject. The place of the rendezvous invites all that is sensuous. In leading to itself the sensuous can receive individuals on its path, along its trajectory. The space of this dynamic presence becomes as a dwelling place for those who take up the rendezvous. It is a place whose boundaries are permeable, and it is experienced as such by those who arrive there. It is not an objective place. Rather, it is a place of dissolution of the subject–object dichotomy. If one actively seeks it “out there,” one soon finds that it already exists in the place where one is.

PART I ON CONCEPTUALIZING THE SENSUOUS

CHAPTER ONE ANGELS WITH GUNS ALPHONSO LINGIS Fetishes Material things. Brute things. Size, position and motion are their real or objective properties, according to the scientific philosophy elaborated in the 17th century by Galileo, Newton, John Locke and Descartes. Purpose and causality are relations our minds project into them. Indeed colours, sounds, doors, tastes, heat and hardness are sensations produced in our minds by physical, chemical, or electromagnetic stimuli on our nervous system, but our minds project these sensations onto things as their own properties. ‘Nature is a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colourless, merely the hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly’, Whitehead interprets (1953: 52-4). This conception of things, he notes, continues to guide scientific research. Plastic chairs in the food court of a shopping mall. Christmas trees. Laundry driers. Plastic cups for soft drinks.1 All we see in them is shapes in positions, sizes, to which we assign identities and uses. 1 ‘The glassy plastic drinking cup. Scarcely an object, it is so superbly universal Hegel might have halloed at it. Made of a substance found nowhere in nature, manufactured by processes equally unnatural and strange, it is the complete and expert artifact. Then packaged in sterilized stacks as though it weren’t a thing at all by itself, this light, translucent emptiness is so utterly identical to the other items in its package, the other members of its class, it might almost be space. Sloganless— it has no message—often not even the indented hallmark of its maker. It is an abstraction acting as a glass, and resists individuation perfectly, because you can’t crimp its rim or write on it or poke it full of pencil holes—it will shatter first, rather than submit—so there is no way, after a committee meeting, a church sup or reception (its ideal locales), to know one from the other, as it won’t discolor, stain, craze, chip, but simply safeguards the world from its contents until both the flat Coke or cold coffee and their cup are disposed of. It is a decendental object. It cannot have a history. It has disappeared entirely into its function. It is completely

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But when we try on a new dress, we see that this blue could only exist in this silk and not in cotton, we see how the material absorbs or reflects light, how it intensifies or clashes with our complexion and hair. We listen to the expert on the radio compare the complex savours of two bottles of wine and then resolve to buy the one for the guests at our dinner. The colour, tone and texture of the walls and the lighting invite us to wander down the halls of one hotel, but other halls we just want to get out of. We follow the seasons on the path beside the river and the trees. Things are attractions. They beckon to us, guide us, order our movements as we come to know them. Artworks are things, things at their richest and most enigmatic. They are things addressed to our sensibility, though they may also depict a diagram of the social hierarchy or of the cosmos, convey a political or ideological message, depict a heroic deed or a virtuous stance, or make attractive a policy or commercial product. The directives they address to us are composed with their colours, light, tones, lines, forms, proportions and rhythms. When we walk through museums, perhaps educating ourselves about periods, styles, evolutions, our perception and memory records images, but we do not really encounter the works as the distinctive things they are, as we do not encounter the crowds there as persons. In reality we encounter a few artworks in all their density as things. There is the statue in the park, the church that has one painting or a few, to which we return and with which we live, which unceasingly shape our sense of the essential and the trivial. A picture by Käthe Kollwitz materializes for us all we experienced and all we hoped for in becoming a mother; we long lived with a reproduction of the lithograph, then one day set out to see and spend time with the original and thereafter keep a reproduction in our bedroom. A photograph of our immigrant grandfather dressed for his wedding picture kept us sensitive to candour and trustworthiness. With their lines, design, colour, tone, light and composition artworks turn us from the petty and commonplace, the utilitarian and egocentric, they exhibit the marvellous in the minute happenings of the world, they open horizons toward the noble, the terrible and the unnameable. They are

what it does, except that what it does, it does as a species. Of itself it provides no experience, and scarcely of its kind. Even a bullet gets uniquely scarred. Still, this shotte, this nebech, is just as much a cultural object, and just as crystalline in its way, as our golden bowl, and is without flaws, and costs nothing, and demands nothing, and is one of the ultimate wonders of the world of dreck—the world of neutered things.’ Gass 1997: 204-5.

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talismans and omens of good and bad fortune. They attract us, stay with us, order us. They are fetishes (Leiris, 1929: 209; McInnes, 2000). Early historians of religion Edward Burnett Tylor, John Lubbock and Charles de Brosses argued that the primitive and fundamental form of religion was animism and fetishism.2 These terms have undergone many modifications as they have spread across many disciplines in our culture, notably political economy and psychoanalysis. The term ‘fetish’ in particular is now debased in our culture; in fact it first entered European languages to denigrate things Africans valued (Pietz, 1985, 1987, 1988). Anthropologist Peter Pels has recently proposed that fetishism recognizes a spirit—a voice, a directing power—of things, while animism recognizes a spirit—a voice, a directing power—in things (Pels, 1998). Animism recognizes a spirit—a voice, a directing power—that is in things but is separate from them, can migrate from one thing to another.3 The modern, positivist and evolutionist, historians of religion explained the animist and fetishist sensibility as the practice of ‘primitive’ humans, who have a conception of a spirit in themselves distinct from their bodies and project spirits into other species, plants and inanimate things. But the explanation presupposes modern conceptions of the distinction between animate and inanimate things and of the distinction between body and spirit in humans. Recently anthropologists have deconstructed this explanation and sought to formulate more accurately the experience of people in cultures called animist or fetishist.4 These researchers argue that for people in those cultures the sense of self does not consist in consciousness of an abiding spirit with innate structure and capacities distinct from one’s body. Instead, the sense of self arises and becomes concrete in active engagement in relationships: I am a father, a son of the chief, or a mother of two infants, am hunting wild boar or on a raid to an enemy camp, am herding cattle in the summer valley or digging the ground to plant yams.

2 ‘The concept of animism, which E. B. Tylor developed in his 1871 masterwork Primitive Culture, is one of anthropology’s earliest concepts, if not the first.’ Nurit Bird-David 1999: S67. 3 The 17th century philosophy we invoked at the beginning, which explained that the relations and sensuous properties we perceive in things are in fact projected into them by our minds, is animist. 4 Anthropologists did not only find animism and fetishism in archaic tribal cultures; they noted that in large stretches of our life today we treat other species, plants, machines, cars as ‘animated,’ issuing orders, directives, prohibitions to us as we interact with them.

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In the active engagement with kin, with hunted or domestic animals and with resources and implements, one responds to their movements with one’s body forces and is directed by them (Bird-David, 1999; Ingold 2000; Hornborg 2006; Willerslev 2007). Sensibility makes contact with their steadfastness and drive and catches on to their directives. One is sometimes disengaged from things while at other times one experiences a concentration of directing and prohibiting force in other humans, other species, caves and flooding rivers. This force may appear intense when the apparition of certain things marked a path to good fortune or to calamity, or when such things insistently recurred in the environment or in dreams. Certain places and formations in our environment become cardinal axes that order our days and nights: the meeting of rivers, paths that lead to clearings and vantage points over broad landscapes, the sun and the North Star. Directive and ordering force are concentrated in places where decisive events have occurred: cyclones, avalanches, fires, places where people have suffered major injuries or diseases or have been cured. Places where people gather, where feasting takes place. Burial grounds. The trees and stones marking such places. Shrines and temples built to mark such places. Artworks set up in them.

Saint Michael the Archangel This painting of Saint Michael the Archangel must have once been mounted in a monastery or chapel of a pious home. I found it in a small shop in Qosqo in Peru. In the book of Revelation Michael and his angels fought in heaven against the dragon.5 Saint Thomas Aquinas explained that angels are immaterial, are pure forms without matter. In European art angels are sometimes depicted as having only head and wings or head, wings and hands. However, Saint Michael, depicted defeating the dragon, was most often represented fully armed with the helmet, sword and shield of a Byzantine warrior or the armour of a Western European knight.

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‘Then war broke out in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back. But he was not strong enough, and they lost their place in heaven. The great dragon was hurled down—that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray. He was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him.’ Revelation, 12:7-9, New International Version.

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Here he is clad in shirt with billowing white sleeves and lace cuffs, tight breeches, a brocaded velvet cape with lace ruff, a long cloak and a cavalier hat—the garb of a Spanish grandee, although the plumes of his

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hat, set upright, are carried over from the headdress of Inca administrators. He, carrying a harquebus and a bag of gunpowder,6 is an armed watchman. The space about him, smoky red, contains no building or landscape of our world; he is striding in ethereal space. The colours of his garb—moss green, aquamarine, ochre, earth red and rose—welcome one another. These earth colours materialize him in our world and in nature. His face and hair are those of a young androgynous aristocrat. Though armed, there is no ferocity in his face but instead serene watchfulness. His small lips are subtle and sensitive. His huge eyes, with dilated pupils, dominate his face, making us recall the all-seeing eyes of the Pantocrator that from the fourth century onward was set in the central dome of Eastern Orthodox Churches. Our gaze encounters and is engulfed in his eyes seeing us more intensely. His watch protects us but also summons us to be watchful. The image moves with graceful dynamism. The figure is in twisted perspective, the upper body in frontal position, the lower body and the wings in profile. The Archangel’s wings are aligned with his legs, ploughing the air with his lithe steps. His cloak does not trail behind him but unfolds ahead with his stride. His hands are outspread as in the pose of a dancer. But the Archangel’s delicate hands hold the harquebus and the bag of gunpowder in ways no one who knew guns would carry them. Indeed both of his hands are left hands. The painter would be a native in Spanish Peru who had never handled these weapons. This painting was made in or around Qosqo in the 17th or 18th century. I guess 17th century, because paintings of the faces of the angels became more realist and their garb much more ornamented in the 18th century. It may have come from a monastery or more likely from a pious private home, perhaps of an aristocratic Inca family. The image captivates with the magnetism of the eyes and face, the dynamism of the posture and the beauty of its colours and composition. We are also intrigued by the subject: where did representing an Archangel armed with a harquebus come from?

The Cuzco School In 1537 the great Inca rebellion was crushed and Qosqo was in the hands of Pizarro and his conquistadors. The conversion of the local 6

The harquebus, a matchlock fired gun, was invented in Spain in the 15th century; it was positioned on the shoulder to be fired.

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population to Christianity was set forth as the essential mission of Spanish imperialism and its legitimation.7 The priests worked to extirpate the native beliefs, destroying the Inca temples and shrines and prohibiting their ritual practices.8 Vicente de Valverde, companion of Pizarro, was consecrated bishop in 1538 and impounded native people to build a cathedral, the Iglesia del Triunfo, on the site of the Inca temple Kiswarkancha. Very soon the religious orders, Franciscans, Jesuits, Dominicans, Augustinians and Mercederians, arrived and presided over the construction of great churches. But by ordering churches to be built over sacred places that the Inca had marked with temples, the priests in fact maintained the sacredness of those places in the native consciousness. On the supposition that God must have given access to His Truth to all peoples, the Augustinians actively sought out antecedents of Catholic teachings in the native religion, presenting Catholic beliefs and personages as the true form of imperfect or distorted native beliefs. St James, who with his brother John were called in the Gospel ‘sons of thunder,’ was identified with lllapa, the Quechua deity of lightning. The native people saw the forces and figures of their cosmology under the Catholic images. The sacred powers revered by the Inca—the Apus, grottos, waterfalls, storms, celestial bodies—were anthropomorphized in the Catholic representation, personified in angels and saints. Artist monks arrived to cover the walls of churches with paintings, the Bible for the illiterate. Convents and monasteries established workshops where Indians were trained in Spanish crafts, including making religious sculptures and paintings. Spanish and Italian and, later, Flemish paintings were brought from Europe to serve as models; drawings and copies of European paintings were also provided. Spanish, mestizos and also native people learned painting in these workshops. Members of the Inca aristocracy entered the artist guilds and there found upward social mobility in the new colonial order (Spalding, 1970). A major earthquake devastated Qosqo in 1650. The following two decades saw the rapid reconstruction of the cathedral, churches and monasteries and the training of many painters to replace the destroyed 7

In 1494 Pope Alexander VI ‘by the authority of the Almighty God’ had divided the lands outside of Europe and declared them to belong Spain and Portugal, investing them with the mission to evangelize the heathen of those lands. 8 They prohibited the cultivation of quinoa, the protein-rich gluten-free seed food of the Andes which had been cultivated for 4000 years, because of religious rituals performed for its cultivation. Amaranth was likewise prohibited, and crops were burned.

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works. Mayors of cities, lawyers and merchants commissioned paintings for resale. Qosqo became the centre of an industry producing paintings that were distributed throughout Spanish America and even exported to Europe.

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The Inca painter Diego Quispe Tito, born in 1611-1681, worked in a small village outside Qosqo; he developed an individual style, incorporating local landscapes and decorative birds. He, with Chihuantito and Chilli Tupac, are taken to have originated the Cusqueña style. In 1688 there was open conflict between Spanish and Creole and the indigenous painters; the latter left Qosqo’s guild of painters and set up independent workshops. They produced works of technical virtuosity and great diversity of subjects and styles. Religious themes continued to dominate, but portraits of Inca kings were also popular and Inca personages figured in religious paintings. Often equal numbers of Spanish and natives figured in the paintings. European monarchs and Inca rulers, Spanish and native persons were depicted in equally elaborate clothing. Thus importance was given to the actual image of the personage rather than to his or her identity and story. A painting of the Last Supper in the Qosqo cathedral by Marcos Zapata Inca shows Jesus instituting the Eucharist with roast guinea pig and chicha. These painters depicted flat hieratic figures, reminiscent of Medieval European art. The scene was not laid out in perspective and space was filled out with images of native flowers and birds. Red, yellow and earth colours dominated. The textiles, laces, ribbons, embroideries were painted in intricate detail. The painters delineated much gold tracery on the garments, especially on images of the Virgin Mary, scraping the paint to reveal the gilding first put on the canvas. Cuzco school paintings exhibit three themes that are not found in the European religious art that first served as the models. The Virgin Mary was painted full face on top of a stiff conical robe that is heavily embroidered and bejewelled. The rigid conical dress of the image in these paintings suggests a mountain; the Virgin appears as the consecrated life that animates the Apus, mountain peaks sacred to the Inca. The figure of the Virgin Mary, impregnated by the supreme God, substituted for the major Andean figure of Pachamama, the earth-mother goddess who is impregnated by the sun god. The Holy Trinity was represented as three identical men. This form of representation of the three persons in God occurred, though rarely, in Eastern Orthodox art, referring to the three men in the book of Genesis who visit Abraham and whom the text identifies as ‘the Lord’.9 Papal edicts in 1623 and 1745 condemned representation of Trinity as three 9

‘The Lord appeared to Abraham near the great trees of Mamre while he was sitting at the entrance to his tent in the heat of the day. Abraham looked up and saw three men standing nearby.’ Genesis 18, 1-2. New International Version.

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equal men, but this representation continued in the paintings in the Andes. In 1628 Pope Urban VIII had condemned images depicting the Trinity as a man with three mouths, three noses and four eyes, but such images continued to be made in Cuzco.

Then there are the ángeles arcabuceros, angels with harquebuses. Beginning around 1680, Cuzco school artists painted series of portraits of angels. In European painting, angels are often depicted in Biblical or miraculous scenes but rarely featured alone in paintings; the image of Saint Michael vanquishing the dragon is an exception. A complete series painted in Cuzco would contain an angel standard-bearer, a trumpeter, a drummer and some angels bearing swords, lances and shields or guns. The series would typically include the archangels Michael, Raphael and Gabriel and continue with the sometimes named Uriel, Adriel, Osiel, El Alami, Habriel, Leriel, Laciet and Zabriel. Their sumptuous garb sets the archangels apart from the profane realm of work and reason.10 10

In battle European warriors wore their own rough clothing and armor, determined by their utilitarian function, with colors or patterns painted on their shields or embroidered on their surcoats to identify their allegiance to one lord or another. Charlemagne awarded his mounted warriors with land, and Charles the Bald made these land grants hereditary. The knights in peacetime began to clothe themselves with impractical glamorous clothing, displayed in parades, jousts, and

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The archangels are depicted as androgynous youths. Francisco Pacheco, painter and official censor of Seville’s Inquisition, had decreed tournaments. The transition from utilitarian to sumptuous garb marks the transition to gratuitous splendor which philosopher Georges Bataille sees as distinctive of the realm of the sacred.

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that angels must be depicted as neither male nor female and that the models for them should be young men between 15 and 20 years of age (Pacheco, 1649). The Archangelical androgyny was not an alien phenomenon in Peru. Anthropologist Carolyn Dean argues that in the pre-colonial Andes masculinity was not simply identified with biological maleness but was defined by practices. In infancy there is not yet and in old age there is no longer gender differentiation; ‘humans appeared to move from androgyny to single sex, and back to androgyny’ (Dean 2001:164). Wiraqocha, the preInca and Inca creative centre, is an unsexed or androgynous figure.11 In the Andes, people gazed not only at the visible objects in the night sky, but the spaces between them, finding not only star-to-star constellations, but ‘dark cloud’ constellations also. The dark cloud constellations formed animals and earthly creatures; these figures were androgynous or asexual (Urton: 95-105, 108, 110). In Catholic tradition the angels moved the stars; adoration of the angels was to replace the pagan adoration of the stars.

Religious Sensibility By ‘religious art’ we can, with art historians and museum curators, designate paintings and statues that depict personages and events from religious discourse—not so much from the rationalized theology as from the myth from which it was derived. We can designate ritual objects also—altars, tombs, temples, vestments, censers, trumpets, drums, prayer beads—pronounced to be art for the excellence of their design, materials and workmanship. We can designate the ritual objects and also images inasmuch as they effectively direct us from the utilitarian and the petty to the realm of incalculable power and gratuitous splendour—ritual objects and images as fetishes. A strong tradition in the dominant religions of the West rejects the concept of religious art. Drawing from the Jewish and Christian Bible and the Quran, it decrees that the sole access to the sacred is the word—the audible-conceptual and not the visible and tangible. The kingdom of God is not of this world; the Sacred is utterly transcendent, outside of this world. This conception gave rise to the Byzantine iconoclasts of the 8th and 9th centuries and the destruction of statues and paintings in the Protestant Reformation. Those who saw sacred presence and power in

11 ‘A Quechua text accompanying the creator underscores its ambivalence; it can be translated as ‘whether it be male, whether it be female.’ Dean 2001: 149.

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paintings and statues were abominated as idolaters, worshipping material things instead of the immaterial, spiritual God. Against the iconoclasts the Second Council of Nicaea (787 CE) decreed that in the veneration of religious paintings and statues the devout are moved to recall the spiritual beings that are alone worshipped. St. Gregory the Great, Pope from 590-604, had characterized paintings and statues as conveying the religious message to those who cannot read.12 But are images like words that, according to linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, are arbitrary sounds or marks on paper, connected to their referents simply by convention? Or is the nature and power of what they represent somehow in them? The religious message was not constructed with abstract concepts, about beings themselves utterly spiritual. The religious message is elaborated in myth, both a cosmological diagram of the dimensions and orders of reality and a narrative. The images are proper to convey the myth, for a myth is not composed with abstract terms and concepts but with concrete universals—particulars that function as categories. The paintings of the Cuzco school are narrative; they show the key events of the Gospel and of the Biblical sacred history; they also depict miraculous events of contemporary Peru, the dedication of churches and religious processions, such the great procession of Corpus Christi replacing the Inti Raymi of the Incas (Dean 1999: 31-38). Often symbols were attached to persons depicted to make their identity in the narrative more clear. For art the sacred realm is the perceived world or a depth of the perceived world. But there is a religious sensibility that is not simply a predilection for certain kinds of concepts and explanations. Buddha images are not portraits of 6LGGKƗUWKD*DXWDPD; they are images of the body and mind in equilibrium, images of mindfulness and compassion. They are created in a state of meditation and created to induce and sustain meditation. Seated in yoga position, meditation before a Buddha image induces equilibrium, serenity and attentiveness in the devotee. Neither male nor female, the image does not depict self-conscious individuality and disconnects egoism. There are temples and caves where hundreds or thousands of

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‘It is one thing to adore an image, it is quite another thing to learn from the appearance of a picture what we must adore. What books are to those who can read, that is a picture to the ignorant who look at it; in a picture even the unlearned may see what example they should follow; in a picture they who know no letters may yet read. Hence, for barbarians especially a picture takes the place of a book.’ Patrologia Latina. Paris: Imprimerie Catholique, 1844-55. LXXVII, 1027.

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Buddha images all alike have been created, as visual mantras.13 Mandalas are contemplated until the image becomes fully internalized. In traversing the concentric circles and squares of the orders of reality the meditating one experiences an inner cantering and integration. The Cuzco school images of the Virgin Mary and of the three identical men of the Holy Trinity, serene, composed, blissful, do not only function to convey a conceptual message or designate the role they figure in the mythic narrative. They do not simply induce a conceptual reorganization. They are not portraits but images that induce effects on the sensibility and work a transformation of viewer. The images were experienced to possess power and pilgrimages to certain images drew great numbers of people. Sometimes this exceptional power first became known by the circumstances in which the image was found. The image of Our Lady of Belen, now enshrined in Qosqo, was found floating on the sea by the Peruvian coast. The crucifix later known as El Señor de los Temblores was found intact in the debris of a shipwreck. During the earthquake of 1650, the images were being taken out of the threatened cathedral; when this crucifix was brought out into the street, the tremors ceased. Pilgrims came to the sacred images to make contact with the sacred power, to give homage and to find healing for physical and spiritual sickness. They experienced an inner rending, an emptying out of what was venal and petty in them. They were separated from the profane world. Things, and especially those richest of things that are artworks or fetishes, reveal themselves across time. By chance, by luck, I came upon the painting of the Archangel Saint Michel in the shop in Qosqo seventeen years ago. In my home the discrete beauty of its colours, the composed dynamism of the figure, the space devoid of irrelevancies emanate a quiet power and directive force. It opens back into time, when an Inca painter worked in a society that understood itself with overlaying myths. He is someone whose sensibility I share; though I do not know his name he is my brother. He has found this lithe and watchful presence in the depth of the perceived nature and institutions about him. The aesthetic perception is entangled in the depiction of a civic order, seen in the dress and weapon, which prolongs into the unseen but accessible 17th century political, historical and ideological field. Even if we no longer give intellectual credence to the myth in which Saint Michael is a figure, our perception is more than aesthetic. For if the few artworks that, more than give us 13

For example, the Ajanta Caves in India, the Longmen Grottos in China, the 6DQMnjVDQJHQ-GǀLQ-DSDQ:DW3RLQ7KDLODQG

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pleasure, guide our lives, are fetishes, then the painting as an aesthetic object and as a religious object communicate.

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References David, Nurit. 1999. “Animism” revisited: personhood, environment, and relational epistemology. Current Anthropology, Vol. 40, (February) No. S1, Special Issue Culture—A Second Chance? S67-S91. Dean, Carolyn.2001. Andean androgeny and the making of men, in Cecilia F. Klein, Gender in Pre-Hispanic America. Washington D. C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. —. 1999. Inka Bodies and the Body of Christ: Corpus Christi in Colonial Cuzco, Peru. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press Books. Fane, Diana, ed. 1996. Converging Cultures: Art and Identity in Spanish America. New York: Harry N. Abrams. Gass, William H. 1997. The Habitations of the Word: Essays. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Gell, Alfred. 1998. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hornborg, Alf. 2006. Animism, fetishism, and objectivism as strategies for knowing (or not knowing) the world. Ethnos 71:1, 21-32. Ingold, Tim. 2000. Totemism, animism and the depiction of animals. In The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London: Routledge, 111–131. Katzew, Ilona, ed. 2011. Contested Visions in the Spanish Colonial World. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Leiris, Michel. 1929. Alberto Giacometti. Documents, I: 4. McInnes, Mary Drach. 2000. Alberto Giacometti, le féticheur. In Keith Aspley, Elizabeth Cowling, and Peter Sharratt, eds., From Rodin to Giacometti: Sculpture and Literature in France, 1880-1950. Amsterdam: Rodopi B. V. Mitchell, Jon P. 2009. Performing statues: the presence and power of Catholic saints, in D. Morgan, ed. Religion and Material Culture: The Matter of Belief. New York: Routledge, 262-276. Pacheco, Francisco. 1649. Arte de la pintura, 1649. Reprinted Charleston SC: Nabu Press, 2011. Pels, Peter. 1998. The Spirit of matter: on fetish, rarity, fact, and fancy. In Patricia Spyer, ed, Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable Spaces. New York: Routledge, 91-121. —. 1985. The Problem of the fetish. RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, No. 9 (Spring), 5-17. —. 1987. II: The Origin of the fetish. RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, No. 13 (Spring), 23-45.

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—. 1988. IIIa: Bosman’s Guinea and the Enlightenment theory of fetishism. RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, No.16 (Autumn), 105124. Spalding Karen. 1970. Social climbers: changing patterns of mobility among the Indians of colonial Peru. Hispanic American Historical Review, 1:4, 645-664. Tord, Luis Enrique, et al. 1986. Gloria in Excelsis: the Virgin and Angels in Viceregal Paintings of Peru and Bolivia. New York: American Society/Council of the Americas. Urton, Gary. 1981. At the Crossroads and the Earth and the Sky. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2004. Exchanging perspectives: the transformation of objects into subjects in Amerindian cosmologies. Common Knowledge, Fall 10:3, 463-484. Whitehead, Albert North. 1953. Science and the Modern World. New York: The Free Press, 1953, 52-54. Whitehead, Amy. 2011. Gift giving and power perspectives: testing the role of statue devotion in England and Spain. Diskus 12, 24-37. Willerslev, Rane. 2007. Sould Hunters: Hunting, Animism and Personhood among the Siberian Yukaghirs. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007, 89-119 and 181-9.

CHAPTER TWO SENSUALITY OF EMBODIED SPACE IN LANGUAGE, PSYCHOPATHOLOGY AND ART: BODY-FULL EXPERIENCE OF BODY-LESS EMPTINESS BONGRAE SEOK Introduction We often appreciate the beauty of emptiness such as the wide open space of the Saharan desert, the spacious serenity of minimalist Japanese gardens in Kyoto, the highly compact and divided spaces of the skyscrapers in New York or the empty gaps created by huge metallic structures in Henry Moore’s Double Oval. All of these scenes of emptiness are full of perceptual and aesthetic excitement. How can we perceive things that do not have positive existence and appreciate their beauty of absence? In this paper, I will discuss the perceptual and aesthetic experience of seemingly non-sensuous or non-sensible emptiness (found in fully extended space, enclosed emptiness, or compartmentalized spatial gaps and islands) and their unlikely dependence on the body (i.e., the sensorimotor activities of an agent). I will argue, quite paradoxically, that to experience such non-sensible and non-sensuous things, embodied sensual imagination (tactile, visceral, motor and holistic somatic sense) is necessary. That is, if we can recognize the existence and appreciate the beauty of empty space, we have an uncanny perceptual and aesthetics sense of body-less (or substance-less) emptiness with body-full experience. According to many psychologists (such as Gibson 1977, 1979) and philosophers (such as Merleau-Ponty [1945] 1962), we perceive and understand the presence of physical entities and their relations through our bodily interaction with them. A chair, for example, is not just an independently existing, physical structure but also an object we physically sense and interact with (i.e., we touch, grab, and sit on it) with our bodies.

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To borrow Gibson’s term, a chair affords certain types of bodily activities (touching, moving, grabbing, sitting etc.) and that this is how we perceive its existence and understand its functions. According to this approach of perception, our basic perceptual encounter with physical objects in the world is guided by the sensorimotor activities of the body. What about things that do not have positive presence, such as empty space or an open environment? How can we experience fully extended space or an empty background if there is nothing for our body to contact and to interact with? Is the same type of embodied perception or interaction necessary in our meaningful experience of emptiness? That is, is the body necessary for us to experience, understand and appreciate the body-less emptiness or openness? To answer these questions and to analyze our experience of spatial emptiness, I will take the following steps. First, as a general introduction to embodied perception, I will sketch the main orientation of cognitive embodiment in psychology and philosophy and explain important cognitive roles the body plays in our perception and experience of the world. Second, I will discuss embodied experience of space (locations and directions) reflected in our linguistic expressions and metaphors to illustrate the point that seemingly non-sensible (open, empty and homogeneous) space is not just seen but experienced (i.e., sensed and felt) by the body. Third, I will discuss and analyze psychopathologies of space, such as agoraphobia (fear of open unfamiliar spaces) and acrophobia (fear of heights), in order to support my hypothesis that our perception of space is heavily dependent on the sensorimotor of activities of the body and that psychopathologies of space are closely related to or perhaps caused by insufficient or inappropriate bodily reactions to emptiness. Fourth, I will discuss how certain forms of creative artworks are inspired or motivated by embodied spatial experience of emptiness. Particularly, I will focus on how paintings and architectural structures are used to reconstruct and transform homogeneously extended plain emptiness into meaningful and beautiful space that can deliver the embodied images of sensorimotor activities. Unlike the apparent images of space (i.e., empty, open and homogeneously extended emptiness), our experience of spatial emptiness is nothing but empty, quiet or static. It is full of images and activities that come out of our bodily senses and motoric explorations. I will argue that the body and its sensuality are necessary to identify, perceive, and feel seemingly body-less and perceptually sterile structures like empty space.

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Embodied Approach to Cognition In many computational models of cognitive science, the main process of cognition (i.e., the central process of thinking) is understood as purely inferential, modality neutral, and situation/environment independent changes in the mind of an epistemic agent that is typically captured and analyzed by the formal derivation processes of logic.1 In this theoretical approach, the mind functions like a digital computer (a disembodied machine) and its cognitive processes are characterized as formal information processing procedures.2 The body, in this approach, is simply regarded as a physical structure (hardware) that supports but does not essentially contribute to the main processes of cognition. Particularly, a cognitive agent’s modality-specific processes of perception and sensorimotor interactions with her environment are regarded as merely peripheral processes to the central functions of cognition. One of the limitations of this purely intellectual and disembodied approach to cognition is its insufficient or incomplete explanation of intentionality (the aboutness or the directedness of the mind, i.e., the ability of the mind to understand meanings of information bearing symbols).3 Can intentionality be explained purely computationally as an inferentially guided formal process of symbol manipulation? One of the messages of John Searle’s (1980) Chinese room argument is this frustration of the indeterminacy or the insufficiency of computational approach to intentionality. Searle argues, in his Chinese room thought experiment, that even though a computational system (i.e., a translation system) processes Chinese sentences and outputs its responses as fluently as native Chinese speakers, we do not take it as a sufficiently intentional system with the full ability of semantic and conceptual understanding of Chinese language. Searle, like most of us, believes that following a formal procedure (a computer program) is not sufficient for the full understanding of Chinese even though this type of computational procedure sometimes generates seemingly sensible responses. Perhaps, the ability of genuine 1

See Fodor’s (1975) LOT (language of thought) hypothesis. Mental states and processes are explained by a system that manipulates a medium that has language like structure with discrete lexical items with their compositional combination. 2 A good example is Haugeland’s (1985) characterization of artificial intelligence. He coined the term GOFAI (Good Old Fashioned Artificial Intelligence) to refer to disembodied cognitive science where amodal, digital and centrally processed information processing dominates the computational process of cognition. 3 German psychologist Franz Brentano characterized intentionality as the definitive feature of the mind but the true nature of intentionality was not clearly explained.

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understanding should include our sensorimotor activities of the body.4 As Dreyfus (1992) argues, without the body and its activities, even basic and natural cognitive abilities like intentionality can be a puzzling phenomenon. The limitation of a disembodied (i.e. formal computational) approach to cognition is not limited to the explanation of purely intellectual abilities of the mind. By taking the body out from the main processes of cognition, the disembodied approach is equally limited in explaining other cognitive functions such as our abilities to see and understand human social and moral behaviors.5 When we see an object in a detached manner, it seems that only visual features (such as color, shape, size etc.) are registered and perceived by us. According to recent research in psychology, however, visual perception, particularly in the context of social cognition, employs actions and reactions of the body as often purely visual processes. When we recognize a human face, for instance, we not only see the shape and location of facial features (eyes, nose, mouth etc.) but also react to them with our bodies by physically mimicking and by physiologically reacting to them. Additionally, many psychologists report that embodied mimicry or simulation is not a peripheral process of perception but the main constitutive element of social cognition.6 Considering the important roles the body plays in our cognition, it is easily understandable that the lack of bodily reactions (emotional arousal 4

This is just one interpretation of the conclusion of the Chinese room argument. Searle believes that if we duplicate the causal power of the brain we can recreate genuine intentionality but philosophers such as Hubert Dreyfus (1992) focuses on the embodied interaction with the world as the essential foundation of intentionality. 5 It has been widely observed that some species of primates and humans perceive and understand behaviors of their conspecifics. They engage in motor and affective reenactment to perceive social relations and understand others’ behaviors. For example, quick and automatic mimicry (imitating others’ facial expressions or bodily gestures) observed in many conditions of social cognition is a simple but effective way to understand others’ emotional states but it does not come out of the conscious effort to reason run empathetic projections. That is, the body is not reacting to the already recognized scenes of social interaction, but initiating and even running the perception by reenacting and mimicking the scenes and the conditions of others’ behaviors. In this case, the body plays constitutive and causal (not epiphenomenal) roles. See Seok (2012) for further discussion of the intrinsically embodied nature of social and even moral cognition. 6 See Bavelas, Black, Chovil, Lemery & Mullett (1988), Cappella & Panalp (1981), Chartrand, Maddux & Lakin (2005), Giles & Powesland (1975) and Wilson & Knoblich (2005).

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and the underlying physiological changes) can result in serious cognitive impairments. For example, the separation of embodied affection from visual perception of familiar or intimate objects (such as human faces) is believed to be the main cause of Capgras delusion, i.e., identity delusion associated with atypical patterns of facial recognition. The bodies of Capgras patients, when they see faces of their family members and friends, do not generate sufficient emotional arousal and underlying physiological changes that we typically but unconsciously experience in our perception of human faces. As a result, they experience the deficiency of intimacy and familiarity from the faces of people with whom they have close relationships and this deprived experience leads them to doubts, confusions, and even delusions regarding the identities of people and objects that are close to them. Capgras patients often complain that their loved ones and family members are abducted by aliens and replaced with body doubles. According to a well-known hypothesis, the lack of emotional arousal with insufficient physiological changes in the body is the underlying cause of the delusional experience of Capgras patients (Ellis & Young, 1990; Ellis et al., 1997). It seems that we see others and their faces not just with our eyes but also with our bodies. Recently, the disembodied approach in cognitive science has been challenged and criticized. Alternative models are proposed and developed for better understanding of cognition in its intrinsic relations to the body, the environment, and the history of cognitive development. This general orientation of cognitive science is called embodied cognition, situated cognition or more generally, grounded cognition.7 From the perspective of embodied cognition, physical mimicry, physiological change and sensorimotor exploration are all regarded as important or, sometimes, essential processes of cognition. Many psychologists report that these bodily reactions are not just peripheral or accidental byproducts of ongoing sensory processes but important and essential or at least necessary elements of cognition.8 This emphasis on the embodiment of cognition does not imply that cognition is completely embodied and entirely grounded in particular environmental conditions. Some cognitive processes, such as the processes of abstract mathematical reasoning, are purely intellectual and disembodied. However, many cognitive processes such as sensory and perceptual processes and social cognitive processes 7

Here I will use the term “embodied cognition” broadly to cover diverse research programs in this approach. For general reviews, see Barsalow (2010), Niedenthal (2007) and Schubert & Semin (2009). 8 For a substantial (not peripheral) role of embodied processes, see Barsalou 2008, p. 632.

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are heavily embodied and essentially grounded in the body and in their concrete environments.9 Following this line of embodied approach, I will argue that perception and the aesthetic appreciation of body-less entities (diverse forms of space or fully extended emptiness) essentially require embodied (body-full) experience. It sounds paradoxical but the body is necessary to perceive, understand, experience, and appreciate body-less (i.e., physically deprived, or perceptually sterile) entities and their beauties. In the following sections, I will discuss the embodied sense of emptiness in language, psychopathology, and art.

Embodied Metaphors of Space Empty space is devoid of existence or presence of objects, and, for that reason, the perception of space or emptiness does not seem to be related to the body (i.e., a structure with physical dimensions with its activity in a concrete environment). For some, it seems very strange to observe or feel bodily activities in our experience of body-less (i.e., empty and open) space. Contrary to this commonsensical view, the experience of space (or the phenomenology of space) is full of corporeal metaphors and images of bodily activities. Consider Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) analysis of directional expressions such as “up” and “down.” The English words “uptown” and “downtown,” for instance, refer to different areas of a city but they do not literally mean geographically specific locations. In a city, downtown is not necessarily a place with a low altitude. Lakoff and Johnson (1980) believe that these expressions are embodied metaphors that can be interpreted by the following scheme of spatial dichotomy. 9

When I say the body in my emphasis of embodied cognition, I do not mean the physical substance or the structure of the human body. Nor do I mean physical or biological processes, ones that passively and blindly following their physical causes to implement inferentially (or computationally) described cognitive processes. Instead, the body in many embodied approaches to cognition means the open (inclusive), interactive, situational and relational activities of a cognitive agent in her sensorimotor activities that combine the environment, situation, history of interaction/development, and inner mental states together in their contributions to cognition. That is, cognition is not a matter of creating and processing inner symbols that represent the event in the outside world but a holistic and open ensemble of interactions that take place in and with the human body. For this reason, Barsalou (2010, p. 721, n. 2) proposes to use the more general term “grounded cognition” instead of “embodied cognition” but in this paper I will use the term “embodied cognition” or “the body” in this general sense.

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Up Happiness Consciousness Health/Life Control/Force More High Status Good Virtue Rational

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Down Sadness Unconsciousness Sickness/Death Controlled/Forced Less Low Status Bad Depravity Emotional

Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 1999) hypothesize that the meanings of these spatial and directional expressions are understood metaphorically on the basis of our bodily activities in the physical environment. In our casual bodily activities, we see things in different locations (up and down, forward and backward, right and left) and reach out, grab and manipulate them. According to Lakoff and Johnson, these types of basic bodily activities provide the foundation for spatial metaphors. Specifically, the human body is in a gravitational field and, because of the body’s inherent gravitational sensitivity, the vertical directions (up and down) feel different to us: it is difficult (or it requires energy) for the body to move upward but it is easy (or it requires less energy) for the body to move downwards. Because “up” in a gravitational field requires lot of work and energy, “up” is always associated with hot, exciting, energetic and active actions, but “down” is associated with less active, sluggish, tired, dormant and even lethargic retreats or withdrawals.10 We don’t say “slow up” and “speed down.” Instead, we say “slow down” and “speed up.” These types of embodied metaphors are so deeply engrained in the human understanding of spatial directions that even ancient philosophers had a difficult time cleaning up our embodied and intuitive but biased understanding of space. According to ancient schools of atomism, atoms do not change but they move around empty space (the void) and collide with each other to form larger perceptible objects. One of the difficult challenges ancient atomists had to deal with was explaining the initial movement of atoms: if atoms are ultimate and eternal (indestructible and uncreated) elements of the universe, why and how do they start moving (i.e., flying) in the void? One suggestion (by an ancient philosopher 10

To understand how the meanings of abstract concepts are explained and specified by bodily experience, see Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980, 1999) conceptual metaphor theory. Many metaphors have their embodied grounds from which the embedded meanings are projected.

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Epicurus) was to attribute weight to atoms and let them move downwards (with straight or curved paths) to initiates motion and change in the physical world. But this seemingly intuitive suggestion quickly invites more questions. If space is defined as purely extended homogeneity where multiple objects or events can exist or occur simultaneously, there should be no “up” or “down.” Additionally, there is no reason why atoms have to move downward (or in a particular direction), if space, as Democritus assumed, is pure emptiness without any directional forces such as gravity. The initial atomic motion, therefore, is difficult to explain from the perspective of purely philosophical (i.e. disembodied) theory of atoms and the void. We can easily understand this predicament, if we realize that “up” and “down” are not the words for locations but the words for embodied interactions. In any gravitational field, the body feels spatial directions by sensing different degrees of difficulty in its directional movements. Because of this embodied sense of space, one can easily fall into the habit of attributing directions to empty space that does not necessarily have built-in directions or locations. If this embodied understanding of spatial directions is extended or projected to location-less and direction-less emptiness, philosophical difficulties can arise. Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980, 1999) analysis of spatial metaphors such as “up” and “down” and the persistence of the philosophical challenge regarding the initial atomic movement in ancient schools of atomism inspire us to understand how space is perceived by us and how their literal or metaphorical meanings are developed through our embodied experience of sensorimotor activities. But spatial directions such as up and down refer only to part of space. What about the whole space? How do we experience the whole space, i.e., empty and boundless space? Do we still need the body to experience and parse the body-less open emptiness?11 To investigate the human experience of non-compartmentalized space (i.e., open emptiness), I suggest a methodology similar to the one used in cognitive neuroscience or cognitive neuropathology. By studying impaired cognitive functions with associated neuronal abnormalities, neuroscientists develop their hypotheses on the cognitive structures of the mind. Similarly, by studying psychopathologies of space, one can develop a good hypothesis about the nature of the human experience of space. The pathology I discuss in this paper is agoraphobia. Agoraphobia is a state of anxiety generated by an uncomfortable encounter with open, fully extended space or by particular conditions (crowded or unfamiliar locations) of space where a person is fully exposed to the threatening 11

Space itself is not necessarily open emptiness or nothingness. But its phenomenology is open and empty: it is felt by us as if it is empty nothingness.

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presence of emptiness. Generally, agoraphobia is defined as the fear of empty or unfamiliar spaces that can induce a panic attack. The symptoms include palpitations, rapid heartbeat, dizziness, shortness of breath, a sense of choking in the throat, nausea and vomiting.12 Usually, it comes with a history of panic disorder and a specific type of escape or comfort behaviors, but, in this paper, I will use the term in a broad sense to refer to the uneasiness or fear of open space in order to focus on how we experience open space and how much our spatial experience is dependent on our bodily (i.e., sensorimotor) activities. I will summarize different historical approaches of agoraphobia and critically compare them with my hypothesis of space anxieties.

Agoraphobia When an Austrian psychiatrist, Carl Friedrich Otto Westphal, first coined the term agoraphobia, he defined it more generally as the fear of space (Westphal 1871, 1988, p. 59). He identified and characterized the symptoms of agoraphobia as dizziness, palpitations and fear of madness and described the fear of Mr. P in the following way. During an attempt to cross an open space the fear begins as soon as the houses of a street leading to an open area increase their distance from him … A feeling of insecurity appears … and he perceives the cobble stones melting together …The condition improves by merely approaching houses again. (Westphal 1871, 1988, p. 70)

This is a very dramatic characterization of fear of open space often described as la peur des espaces (fear of spaces, used by Legrand du Saulle, 1878), or Raumangst (fear of space). A historical footnote is helpful to understand this type of fear: people in Western Europe in the nineteenth century experienced the development and the expansion of modern cities and their large open spaces, particularly public squares.

12

According to a well-known diagnostic measurement of agoraphobia (the body sensation questionnaire), agoraphobia is associated with the following somatosensory features: heart palpitations, pressure or a heavy feeling in chest, numbness in arms or legs, tingling in the fingertips, numbness in another part of the body, feeling short of breath, dizziness, blurred or distorted vision, nausea, having “butterflies” in the stomach, feeling a knot in your stomach, having a lump in your throat, wobbly or rubber legs, sweating, a dry throat, feeling disoriented and confused, and feeling disconnected from your body. See Chambless, Caputo, Bright and Gallagher (1984).

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Westphal described the fear of Mr. C in this environment of a large open space. In Berlin the Dohnhofsplatz is the most unpleasant for him; when he attempts to cross the corresponding square he feels as if the distance were great, that he would never make it across … the more he diverges the boundaries of the houses, the less the feeling of safety. (Westphal [1871] 1988, p. 60)

Mr. C’s agoraphobic experience is comparable to the strange feeling of alienation people can get from the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico such as Piaza d’Italia and Mystic and Melancholy of a Street where the barren and open space brutally presents itself to city dwellers against the background of a modern industrialized city. Perhaps another term, Platzschwindel (square dizziness, used by Benedikt 1870), is more appropriate to this particular type of uneasiness to open spaces, such as public squares and plazas. Agoraphobia, however, is the right term because Westphal characterized the fear mainly from the perspective of human experience and psychology of space, not from the perspective of particular geographical features of locations. The symptoms could occur in any place where space is experienced as an overly dominating power that eliminates the ordinary sense of familiarity. Westphal saw the instability, insecurity, and the following dizziness and confusion of his patients from the perspective of their intimidating experience of unbounded and unfamiliar openness, like the absurdly open and foreign space (a wide corn field where a crop-duster plane is attacking a nicely dressed man) depicted in one of the scenes in Hitchcock’s movie North by Northwest. Therefore, agoraphobia, defined and characterized by Westphal, is the problem of the particular human experience of open space, not necessarily the architectural, environmental, or urban planning problems of public spaces such as public squares and plazas. However, the reason why open spaces generate this type of dizziness was not fully explained by Westphal. Later, Sigmund Freud gave a different interpretation of the same set of symptoms. He argued that the space of the street represents temptation for the sexually repressed female. Open and unfamiliar spaces provide an opportunity for a woman to “take the first man one meets in the street” (Freud [1887] 1985, p. 17). Agoraphobia, in this context, is the dizziness of freedom, i.e., the uncontrolled emergence of their sexuality in the form of prostitution; and prostitution is a symbol of breaking the boundary between the public and the private in the modern city. This psychoanalytic approach interprets open space as the burden of freedom from sexual

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repression or from traditional norms of human relations. It also interprets the clash between the public and the private as the causes of agoraphobic fear and anxiety. This interpretation of agoraphobia, like other hypotheses of Freudian psychoanalysis, focuses too much on the issue of sexual repression of women. Men are equally vulnerable to agoraphobia, even though women suffer from it more often. Additionally, one can experience agoraphobia in any society regardless of its gender specific roles and statuses. Even in a non-repressive, egalitarian society, open space can be threatening to some people. Therefore, the fear of open space and its anxiety inducing unfamiliarity need to be explained more deeply from the perspective of universal human psychology. The nineteenth-century Viennese architect and urbanist Camillo Sitte gave a more general interpretation of this spatial uneasiness. He argued that agoraphobia results from “our natural craving for protection from the flank” (Sitte [1889] 1986, p. 183) and, for this reason, open squares and large buildings are agoraphobia-inducing spaces. Based on his hypothesis of agoraphobia, he proposed to build small and segmented spaces to better suit the general orientation of human psychology. He said, “people … are attacked by this malady [agoraphobia] and thus always prefer … to choose a little old plaza rather than a large empty one for their permanent location” (Sitte [1889] 1986, p. 183). Sitte’s interpretation of agoraphobia is both architectural and psychological but, other than the discussion of the natural human tendency, it does not give further explanation of why and how we develop agoraphobia in the particular conditions of space in modern cities. Human beings throughout history have seen the threatening presence of large-scale emptiness created by temples, palaces, and monuments but only a few of them experienced agoraphobia, particularly in modern industrialized cities. If Sitte is right, why do modern cities pose a special threat to us and why do we keep creating agoraphobia-inducing spaces? A German sociologist and philosopher, Georg Simmel, gave an interesting analysis of the life of modern city dwellers and their agoraphobia-prone psychology. He said that life in a modern city is predominantly visual. We see others without talking to them and are seen by others we do not know personally. That is, we watch and are being watched by anonymous others without interacting with them. According to Simmel, open, empty and public spaces in a modern city are agoraphobiainducing because they are unfamiliar, emotionless places where we are vulnerably displayed and seen by others without interacting with them. Social life in the large city as compared with the towns shows a great preponderance of occasions to see rather than to hear people. Before the

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Chapter Two appearance of omnibus, railroads, and streetcars in the 19th century men were not in a situation where for periods of minutes or hours they could or must look at each other without talking to one another … the sense of utter lonesomeness and the feeling that the individual is surrounded on all sides by closed doors. (Simmel 1971, p. 325)

Simmel characterized the unfamiliar experience of seeing and being seen by others as one of the psychological challenges of living in a big city, but the threat to privacy or individual life can occur in a variety of environmental and social conditions of life. A huge space created by information technology (i.e., cyberspace) provides a similarly intimidating, privacy-endangering environment where we are constantly watched by anonymous others in large-scale surveillance systems. Miraculously, we don’t have any major report of agoraphobia or its associated fear in cyberspace. Perhaps, there needs to be some explanation of why urban space (but not cyberspace) generates the agoraphobic experience of city dwellers. Additionally, we need a deeper explanation of why wide-open space (not just that of a modern city where fully visual but passive, i.e., privacy-threatening, patterns of human interaction occur) generates emotional and physical uneasiness. Recently, agoraphobia has been analyzed from the perspective of feminism. Feminist scholars characterize the fear of open space as the intimidation and oppression of women by men who built the modern city space. Particularly, several feminist scholars have raised the issue of industrialized and urbanized spaces that are oppressive and threatening to women. In the modernized space of a large city, business and private residential areas are clearly separated in spatially distinct zones where urban centers and peripheries are clearly and categorically distinguished. This spatial separation or specialization creates an overly rigid and hierarchical confrontation between street (the public and the unfamiliar) and home (the private and the personal), and this confrontation is particularly burdensome to women.13 For this reason, the space of a modern city is characterized as spatialized patriarchy (Callard 2003) that intimidates and oppresses women (Seidenberg & DeCrow 1983) who prefer continuously integrated and accommodating forms of space. From the feminist perspective, agoraphobia is a women’s syndrome (Foa, Steketee & Young, 1984, p. 445; Bankey 2002). Simply speaking, more women are agoraphobic than men (by a two-to-one ratio). But this 13

This characterization of spatial confrontation is similar to that of Freudian analysis of agoraphobia where the dizziness and fear comes out of the clash between the public and the private.

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approach over-feminizes the issue. Men are as vulnerable to agoraphobia as women, even though there are more women with agoraphobia. Additionally the agoraphobic fear is not necessarily limited to the fear of the urban space created by modern cities. It can be developed in other geographically, culturally and socially diverse environments where women are not necessarily oppressed or intimidated.

Embodied Space Despite the seemingly inspiring and convincing explanatory messages, the hypotheses and analyses of agoraphobia discussed earlier do not provide the full explanation of agoraphobia and other space anxieties. I do not believe that these theories and explanations of agoraphobia are wrong or misguided; they bring up different aspects of agoraphobia and describe diverse challenges of space created by industrialized cities and their modern lifestyle. To develop a more general and deeper explanation of agoraphobia, however, I believe that the nature of the pathology and the phenomenology of space need to be clearly specified and analyzed: How do we experience (perceive, sense and feel) open space and how does it affect us (our cognition and emotion)? Why does open and unbounded space generate palpitations, dizziness and panic attacks for some people, specifically city dwellers or perhaps women? Agoraphobia is not about just dizziness or palpitations. Nor is it just a problem of the geometrical or geographical idiosyncrasies of a modern city. Nor does it directly reflect our intuitive preference for small spaces. Nor is it simply caused by the oppressive submission of women or the liberation of sexually repressed women. Nor does it blindly reflect distorted human relations or the clash between privacy and publicity in a modern city. Then, what is it and how does it affect us? Perhaps agoraphobia is the body’s confused reaction to a homogeneously extended medium that does not provide sufficient motorsensory anchors and perceptual cues for us to create the consistent and meaningful image of emptiness. As I discussed earlier, our quick and unconscious bodily reactions (such as mimicking others’ facial expressions and their bodily gestures and positions) are necessary for us to recognize and understand the faces and behaviors of others. Many psychologists report that if one’s body movements are controlled or inhibited, one’s social cognition is greatly affected because one’s embodied processes of mimicry or reenactment are necessary for our basic

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understanding of the social behaviors of others.14 Is the same observation applicable to our perception and experience of open space? Is our experience of space dependent upon and affected by the sensorimotor activity of the body? If our ordinary perception and experience of ourselves and of others in the world are mediated by bodily reactions (i.e., automatic arousals and mimicry through which one feels and perceives the scenes and objects it faces), the perception and experience of space is also mediated and affected by the sensorimotor activities of the body. From the perspective of the body, open and unbounded space is a very special challenge to us. As one can imagine, unbounded space looks plain, anonymous, and emotionless because it looks empty and evenly extended with no particular characteristics. There is little or no visual cue to guide and orient our bodies to different directions or locations. When visual cues are limited or absent, we usually turn to somatic cues (touch, pressure, rigidity, texture etc.) but, in unbounded space, these are not readily available. Particularly to those of us who are new to diverse spatial conditions of open emptiness and who are overly sensitive to their bodily changes, the limited sensorymotor conditions of the body in open emptiness can easily escalate into a major uneasiness or a panic attack.15 Considering the critical role the body plays in our experience of open space, I hypothesize that the lack of sufficient bodily feedback and subsequent psychological and physical uneasiness are the main causes of agoraphobia and, perhaps, of other space related anxieties. To understand the embodied nature of our perception and experience of space, consider acrophobia (the fear of heights). One of the major causes of acrophobia (fear of height) is the poor coordination of balance and orientation typically caused by the distracted and confused body (i.e., the proprioceptive and vestibular systems). As we go up to higher places, ordinary visual cues (such as the ground and the objects attached to the ground) are gradually unavailable and open space becomes perceptually 14 In general, it has been reported that manipulating bodily states affect higher cognitive processes such as evaluation, decision making, and attribution (Barsalou, Niedenthal, Barbey, & Ruppert 2003; Niedenthal, Barsalou, Winkielman, KrauthGruber & Ric 2005). 15 Agoraphobia is typically diagnosed and associated with a list of somatosensory features that include but are not limited to dizziness, nausea, heart palpitations, pressure or a heavy feeling in chest, and numbness in arms or legs. It is important to see the close relationship between agoraphobia and the bodily reactions and symptoms. See Chambless, Caputo, Bright & Gallagher (1984) and note 12 above for further information.

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dominating. Under these conditions, we need to rely on the proprioceptive system (the system mostly supported by the cerebellum that keeps track of relative positions and movement of the various parts of the body) and the vestibular system (the system located in the inner ear that monitors the balance and spatial orientation of the body), not the visual system, for balance and orientation. According to many psychologists, the failure to shift the reliance smoothly from visual cues to somatic sense (that substantiates the feeling of bodily orientations and balance) is the main cause of acrophobia.16 That is, people with acrophobia, when they approach a height, rely more on limited visual cues or on proprioceptive or vestibular systems less effectively and this imbalance or ineffectiveness results in confusion and uneasiness that develop into anxiety. In a fully open space with few visual cues (such as the space provided by height or openness), it is the sense of the body, not the visual cues, that determines our spatial experience of orientation, balance and relative movement. If the body does not receive or generate sufficient somatic/physiological inputs and reactions, uncomfortable feelings (i.e., space anxieties such as acrophobia) will develop. Again, space is not just what we see but what we sense and feel with our body. The same logic is applicable to agoraphobia. Without sufficient visual cues, open and unbounded space becomes a confusion or anxiety-inducing experience to people with agoraphobia. Like people with acrophobia, they do not feel appropriate somatic sense and motor-sensory reactions from their open spaces. Since the body does not have anything to interact with in open space, the physical encounter with unfamiliar emptiness generates sheer arbitrariness and confusion even to the level of absurdity and queasiness. Agoraphobic experience of space is the experience of bodily alienation from the living environment where perception is closely linked to emotional tones typically provided by our appropriate bodily actions and reactions. Simply put, the body in agoraphobic space is frozen in front of the emotionless and colorless homogeneity, and fear comes naturally to fill in this blank of spatial anonymity. From the perspective of the embodied interpretation of agoraphobia, open and unbounded space (fully extended, homogeneous, and body-less structure) is like a ghost, an intangible and featureless emptiness that haunts us like Rilke’s black cat (Die Schwarze Katze). Rilke describes the strange experience of seeing an invisible ghost (an empty place). His ghost is empty space: you can see it only by being sucked into bottomless homogeneity or anonymity because space does not have a physical form that can bounce back your gaze. 16

See Whitney et al. 2005 for their study of acrophobia.

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Chapter Two A ghost, though invisible, still exists like a place in which your sight clashes with a big noise. In this coat of black pelt your strongest gaze comes to disappear.17

Ein Gespenst ist noch wie eine Stelle, dran dein Blick mit einem Klange stößt; aber da, an diesem schwarzen Felle wird dein stärkstes Schauen aufgelöst:

Like Rilke’s black cat, open space is a ghost and it exists like a place: it sucks up our sight and disappears. It confuses, absorbs and blows us out. We stare at it trying hard to find what it is but it does not give us any visual cues. Because our sight is absorbed and taken away, we have to use our body instead, but we cannot properly locate our body in the wide-open emptiness. In the absence of visual cues, the lack of sufficient bodily feedback and subsequent emotional emptiness can result in this spatial anxiety.

Creative Construction of Space If the body does not receive enough feedback due to the lack of physical cues in unbounded space, the emptiness becomes emotionless, unfamiliar, faceless and pure visual homogeneity and it quickly develops into a confusion, distraction, fear or panic attack. These are pathological reactions to open and unbounded space. But space can become a meaningful experience of emptiness if space dwellers create visual cues and project their bodily activities to transform the ghostly structure into a meaningful environment. Creative and artistic construction is one of the key elements of the healthy experience of space and that is what ancient Egyptians did to their spaces with gigantic monuments and Picasso did to his space with abstract paintings. In contrast to agoraphobia, these constructive activities provide healthy and meaningful experience of open space. The German art historian Wilhelm Worringer characterizes the fear of open space in two different ways. First, he explains it as “a residue from a normal phase of man’s development, at which he was not yet able to trust entirely to visual impression as a means of becoming familiar with a space extended before him, but was still dependent upon the assurances of his sense of touch” (Worringer [1908] 1980, pp. 15–16). Worringer talks about the transitional shift in our experience of space (i.e., the shift from the familiar sense of touch to more abstract sense of visual impression). 17

This is part of Rilke’s poem and the translation is mine.

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But the pure visual impression without the full engagement of the body generates uneasiness, anxiety and panic, as we have seen in the cases of agoraphobia, acrophobia and Capgras delusion. Second, as a result, we still experience “a kind of spiritual disorder and caprice of the phenomenal world” (Worringer [1908] 1980, p. 129) in front of open unbounded space. As with my embodied interpretation of agoraphobia, Worringer anticipates space anxiety in this imperfect transitional dependence on visual impression but there is nothing spiritual about the uneasiness and stress of space anxiety. Worringer’s spiritual disorder does not derive from the deficiency of spirit but that of the body, the lack of bodily engagement and the resulting sense of sheer arbitrariness, something that pure visual impression does not easily overcome. Perhaps the spiritual side of the space anxiety lies in its creative motivation not in its cause. Worringer believes that this spiritual fear of visually dominant, body-poor emptiness is the motivation for creative construction (i.e., abstract art). Instead of focusing on the somatic deficiency and the pathological experience of space, he interpreted the challenge of body-deficient space as the spiritual driving force for an artistic solution to overcome the threatening presence of homogeneous emptiness. According to Worringer, the fear of space or spiritual dread (geistiger Raumscheu) is already manifested in Egyptian architecture but it did not develop into a major panic attack for ancient Egyptians because they overcame or learned to live with it by developing a style of artistic expression, and geometric and abstract art forms. They placed massive, clean and fully regulated physical bodies in the bodydeficient open space. That is, they simplified and somatized their open space and made it less threatening to them. Perhaps a similar artistic motivation can be found in the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century when some Expressionists (such as Cézanne)18 and the Cubists (such as Picasso and Brach) experimented with abstract art styles. In their paintings, Cézanne and Picasso did not just draw and represent visually presented or perceived objects. They also 18

In their paintings, French impressionists focused on the fleeting images of human visual experience, not the permanent substance and physical dimensions of the objects presented in human eyes. For them, most of our visual experience of the world is affected by the variance of light from the sky and its reflection from the environment of light. They did not draw the objects of vision but the experience or images of light and the reflection of light. In this effort to record human visual experience of the world, Cézanne took one step further to analyze the experience of space. When we see different objects in the environment, we don’t just see their visual features (different reflections of light). We experience their spaces too. Cézanne’s experiment of abstract art is the artistic articulation of this hidden human experience of space.

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studied, analyzed, reconstructed and recreated space. They often depicted fragmented, multi-perspectival spaces in their paintings such as La Montagne Sainte-Victoire (Cézanne) and Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (Picasso). They deconstructed (fragmented) and reconstructed (unified) seemingly empty, deprived or undeveloped space and made it a meaningful experience of the human mind. Compared with other interpretations of space anxiety, Worringer’s is a positive and creative explanation of how open space can be reconstructed and felt from the viewpoint of creative works of art. As he argued, the fear of open space is the insight and the motivation of abstract art but I believe that the ultimate cause of the fear may not be spiritual dread but the lack of bodily engagement and feedback. Fortunately, the absence of bodily sensation and interaction can be overcome, not by spiritual transcendence but by grounding or reconstructing the open space near or around our body so that the emptiness becomes a meaningful experience to us. And this is what great artists and architects can do with their embodied imagination.

Conclusion In this paper, I have argued that embodied perception is necessary in the experience of space (body-less emptiness) by analyzing psychopathologies where embodied interaction is absent or minimal in the perception of open space. Despite appearances, the experience of space has never been empty or body-less homogeneity. Space looks empty but its experience requires concrete activities of the body (i.e., embodied senses and images of the body). Sometimes, inappropriate and insufficient bodily activities and reactions result in uneasiness and psychological stress. To overcome these challenges of open space, emptiness needs to be interpreted and reconstructed as some painters and architects do in their paintings and buildings. Otherwise, space becomes a body-less mystery and Rilke’s ghost keeps on haunting we who are not body-less Cartesian res cogitans. Because our experience of space has never been body-less, sterile and estranged experience, empty space, for its full recognition and appreciation, should be grounded and embodied. Either pathological or artistic, the experience of space includes and is mediated by the body.

References Bankey, R. 2002. Embodying agoraphobia: Rethinking geographies of women’s fear. In L. Bondi et al (eds). Subjectivities, knowledges, and feminist geographies. New York: Rowman & Littlefield.

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Barsalou, L. W. 2008. Grounded cognition. Annual Review of Psychology 59, pp. 617–645. —. 2010. Grounded cognition: Past, present, and future. Topics in Cognitive Science 2, pp. 716–724. Barsalou, L. W., Niedenthal, P. M., Barbey, A. & Ruppert, J. 2003. Social embodiment. In B. Ross (ed.), The psychology of learning and motivation 43, pp. 43–92. San Diego: Academic Press. Bavelas, J. B., Black, A., Chovil, N., Lemery, C. R., & Mullett, J. (1988). Form and function in motor mimicry: Topographic evidence that the primary function is communicative. Human Communication Research 14, pp. 275–299. Benedikt, M. 1870. Über Platzschwindel. Allgemeine Wiener Medizinische Zeitung, 15, pp. 488–490. Callard, F. 2003. Conceptualisations of agoraphobia: implications for mental health promotion. Journal of Mental Health Promotion 2(4), pp. 37–45. Cappella, J. & Panalp, A. 1981. Talk and silence sequences in informal conversations: interspeaker influence. Human Communication Research 7, pp. 117–132. Chambless, D. L., Caputo, G. C., Bright, P. & Gallagher, R. 1984. Assessment of fear of fear in agoraphobics: The Body Sensations Questionnaire and the Agoraphobic Cognitions Questionnaire. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 52, pp. 1090–1097. Chartrand, T. L., Maddux, W. W. & Lakin, J. L. 2005. Beyond the perception-behavior link: The ubiquitous utility and motivational moderators of nonconscious mimicry. In R. R. Hassin, J. S. Uleman, & J. A. Bargh (eds), The new unconscious (pp. 334–361). New York: Oxford University Press. Dreyfus, H. 1992. What computers still can’t do: A critique of artificial reason. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Ellis, H. D. & Young, A. W. 1990. Accounting for delusional misidentifications. British Journal of Psychiatry 157 (August), pp. 239–248. Ellis, H. D., Young, A. W., Quayle, A. H. & De Pauw, K. W. 1997. Reduced autonomic responses to faces in Capgras delusion. Proceedings of Royal Society London B Biological Science 264, pp.1085–1092. Foa, E., Steketee, G. & Young, M. 1984. Agoraphobia: Phenomenological aspects, associated characteristics and theoretical considerations. Clinical Psychology Review 4, pp. 431–457.

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Fodor, J. 1975. The language of thought. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Freud, S. (1887) 1985. The complete letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fleiss. Masson, G. (ed. & trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gibson, J. J. 1977. The theory of affordances. In R. Shaw & J. Bransford (eds), Perceiving, acting, and knowing: Toward an ecological psychology (pp. 67–82). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. —. 1979. The ecological approach to visual perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Giles, H., & Powesland, P. 1975. Speech style and social evaluation. London and New York: Academic Press. Haugeland, J. 1985. Artificial intelligence: The very idea. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. 1980. Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. 1999. Philosophy in the flesh: The embodied mind and its challenge to Western thought. New York: Basic Books. Legrand du Saulle, H. 1878. Étude clinique sur la peur des espaces (agoraphobie, des allemands). Paris: V.-A. Delahaye. Simmel, G. 1971. On individuality and social forms: selected writings ed. D. Levine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1945) 1962. The Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge. Niedenthal, P. M. 2007. Embodying Emotion. Science 316 (May), pp. 1002–1005. Niedenthal, P. M., Barsalou, L. W., Winkielman, P., Krauth-Gruber, S. & Ric, F. 2005. Embodiment in attitude, social perception, and emotion. Personality and Social Psychology Review 9, pp. 184–211. Schubert, T. W. & Semin, G. R. 2009. Embodiment as a unifying perspective for psychology. European Journal of Social Psychology 39, pp. 1135–1141. Searle, J. 1980. Minds, brains, and programs. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3, pp. 417–424. Seidenberg, R. & DeCrow, K. 1983. Women who marry houses: Panic and protest in agoraphobia. Columbus, OH: McGraw-Hill. Seok. B. 2012. Embodied moral psychology and Confucian philosophy. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Sitte, C. (1889) 1986. The birth of modern city planning. Collins, G. & Collins, C. (ed. & trans). New York: Rizzoli.

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Westphal, C. 1871. Die Agoraphobie: eine neuropathische Erscheinung. Archiv für Psychatrie und Nervenkrankheiten 3, pp. 138–161. —. 1988. Westphal’s ‘Die Agoraphobie’. Knapp, T. & Schumacher, M (ed. & trans). Lanham: University Press of America. Whitney, S. L., Jacob, R. G., Sparto, P. J., Olshansky, E. F., DetweilerShostak, G., Brown, E. L. & Furman, J. M. 2005. Acrophobia and pathological height vertigo: Indications for vestibular physical therapy? Physical Therapy 85 (5), pp. 443–458. Wilson, M. & Knoblich, G. 2005. The case for motor involvement in perceiving conspecifics. Psychological Bulletin 131, pp. 460–473. Worringer, W. (1908) 1980. Abstraction and empathy (4th edition, trans. M. Bullock). New York: International University Press.

CHAPTER THREE WANDERING RICHARD L. WILSON Having, then, formed the project of describing the habitual state of my soul in the strangest position in which a mortal could ever find himself, I saw no simpler and surer way to carry out this enterprise than to keep a faithful record of my solitary walks and of the reveries which fill them when I leave my head entirely free and let my ideas follow their bent without resistance or constraint. These hours of solitude and meditation are the only ones in the day during which I am fully myself and for myself, without diversion, without obstacle, and during which I can truly claim to be what nature willed. The Reveries Of The Solitary Walker (2nd Walk) Jean-Jacques Rousseau; trans. Charles E. Butterworth We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return, prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again—if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all affairs, and are a free man—then you a ready for a walk. Walking, Henry David Thoreau All men by nature desire to know. An indication of this is the delight we take in our senses; for even apart from their usefulness they are loved for themselves; and above all others the sense of sight. For not only with a view to action, but even when we are not going to do anything, we prefer seeing (one might say) to everything else. The reason is that this, most of all the senses, makes us know and brings to light many differences between things. Metaphysics, Aristotle; trans. W. D. Ross

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Aimless Wandering Inspired by Aristotle, one might say that, by nature, all people desire to wander. In this desire, we experience delight in what comes towards and enters within us, for apart from the usefulness of wandering for guiding our thoughts about wandering, it can be loved in its own right; and what is loved above all else is what reveals itself to us as we are wandering, but not only in our active wandering but also in our intention to wander, in the preference for letting nature reveal itself to us. This is because nature’s revelation makes us more receptive: as we learn to listen to the environment, it helps us discover fundamental aspects of our being. Whenever we begin an enquiry, we have, in a sense, a tacit understanding of what it is about. Yet we also know that what we are after is so close to us, so near, so obvious, that we do not really see it. This is why we begin the enquiry, and this is how we are with wandering. Both thinking about wandering and the activity of wandering itself seem to mark progressions in time. Thinking about wandering points towards a time when we will actually be wandering. At the same time, actual wandering points towards a time in the future where we will be in a place where we want to be, and where we will be wandering in the direction of the future place of our wandering. And yet genuine wandering occurs in timelessness. It is similar to when good friends come to visit whom we have not seen for a while. We anticipate their arrival and then when they arrive we interact with them and soon it seems as though they have come and gone in the blink of an eye. Such is the experience of wandering, too. What does it mean to be engaged in wandering? Is it meandering, sauntering, strolling, rambling, roaming, drifting, or sojourning, or is there a peculiarity about wandering because it is, in a sense, a process that is as a non-activity, lacking a center and a monitoring focal point? To wander means to let go of all expectation. In this sense wandering can be said to have intrinsic value. We pursue it for its own sake with no other end in mind. If indeed it has intrinsic value, is it possible to engage in such a decentered activity without intentionality, without the intention to do anything, and without a goal? Is wandering a process that is without a time frame, and a spatial reference point? Is it even really possible for us to just wander? Do we always have to have goals? What does it mean to wander without an aim? Is it possible for us to just wander without any goals? Do we always have to have goals, or is it possible that the goal of wandering is simply to wander without any goal? But just what is wandering and how do we learn to wander? To wander one might just head off in a direction without a plan, without an aim, without even an

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intention of ever turning around. People might say that the last time the person was seen, s/he just sort of took off in that direction. S/he did not say where s/he was going and s/he did not say when s/he would be back. S/he just took off without indicating where she was going, what s/he planned to do, or when s/he would be back. When we set off as wanderers, what is it we are looking for? What if we are not looking for anything, but just want to become receptive to what finds us, inspiring our even greater receptivity? Perhaps, then, what is out there will somehow be revealed to us as it is, apart from our preconceptions of it, without our imposing anything upon it. The difficulty we confront is that, on the one hand, in terms of wandering, no matter what we think or do it seems that this activity always seems to have an aim. It seems to be impossible to just passively wander. On the other hand, to understand wandering we have to let go of our aim, addressing instead the question of how we can learn to let the essence and the process of open-ended wandering reveal itself to us. Generally speaking, most of us seem to have a different outlook here than the one associated with journeys, voyages, or vacations. We seem to always set out to go to a destination in order to wander. At first we want to engage in the activity of open-ended wandering, but our anxiety—even desperation—about wandering comes about in our inability to leave behind the very thing(s) we want to leave behind when we set out to wander. In approaching open-ended wandering, we enter into a state of cognitive dissonance due to our conceptual boundedness. We cannot think of ourselves outside of our own thoughts and preconceptions. What we say we want to leave behind always seems to accompany us along the way, and to such a degree that as soon as we think we are beginning the process of wandering, we also begin thinking about what we just wanted to leave behind rather than engaging in the openness associated with the activity of true wandering. As soon as we begin to try to wander, in effect, our presuppositions about wandering prevent us from engaging in wandering and, thus, we are in danger of never becoming wanderers. There is always a hidden reluctance that we do not even recognize, imposing itself upon our efforts to wander. We know somehow before we even begin to wander that we will have to come back from our wanderings. When we are wanderers, wandering, we seem to “know” in a non-cognitive way, what we are doing, but we also know there really is no way to articulate the attainment of what we call wandering. We also even know that eventually we will have to come back not only from wandering, but also from even thinking about wandering.

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When we think about wandering as we wander off in thought, we just dream about disappearing into the distance, into a vast openness, through the threshold, over the horizon, past the boundaries, beyond the limit, over the edge, when in reality, for many of us, to disappear means to go someplace briefly and then return to where we were just a short time ago. In a sense we have returned to the place from which we wanted to disappear when we thought about wandering, before we even left. In this returning, wandering is reduced to a temporary vacation that we must rush through in order to return to the place from which we rushed away. In our efforts to hurry and rush the process of being wanderers engaged in the activity of wandering, we project ourselves ahead of ourselves and create the condition where we are wandering so far ahead of ourselves in time, that we are already, without knowing it, thinking about when we will no longer be wandering. To begin understanding the difficulties associated with wandering, we need to focus on the degree to which wandering requires letting go of concentration and the continual effort to reach a destination. The ability to allow ourselves to surrender to openness and to wander off points to a letting go of what we normally see and expect to see, to allow what is in front of us to show itself to us from a variety of perspectives that, when we set off, we did not necessarily expect to see. We are usually so concerned with concentrating on where we want to wander and what we want to see that we lose sight of the open-ended aspect involved with identifying what wandering actually is. To wander is to project oneself into pure possibility. With open-ended wandering, one is projected onto not-yet-realized, open, and unrecognizable possibilities. We somehow fail to actively wander and to understand what it actually means to be directly involved in wandering. When we begin to think about where we want to wander, we usually have goals and wander towards some thing or some place; but can we become true wanderers by letting the open-ended aspect of wandering reveal itself to us? Perhaps we can only wander by letting go of our focus upon a goal and by releasing ourselves for openness. To be fully engaged in wandering means to let go and to release one’s self towards letting the activity of wandering come towards one’s self as it reveals itself. To wander is to explore a horizon of possibilities that cannot be entirely absorbed at any given moment or at a series of adumbrated moments. We seem to anticipate that through wandering we will be made complete and somehow magically fulfilled. Wandering involves opening ourselves towards and for these possibilities to reveal themselves to us. To wander is to release oneself from the anticipation related to what we expect to do and see while wandering. To wander we must let the invisible

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aspects of the possibilities of what it means to be involved in wandering, become visible. To wander, we must give up both the aim of planning to reach a destination and the goal of actually reaching that destination. We must let go of the time constraints imposed upon us by such objectives. We must disengage from thinking about wandering in order to let the true nature of the activity of wandering reveal itself to us. What we are struggling with and striving to experience becomes the conditions that make possible the wandering of a wanderer. In one sense such wandering can be defined by the possibility of encountering the open-ended wildness of nature and the unexpected things that one encounters there while wandering. To be at the crossroads of the wildness of nature, the wildness within us as wanderers, and the wildness of the activity of wandering, is to be free. To be open to wandering means that when we are truly free we are free to the open possibilities of wandering in wild nature. Perhaps open-ended wandering is as near as we will ever get to complete freedom. Wandering is open and receptive to the wildness of the natural world we encounter while wandering. The true wandering of a wanderer is the freedom of the unrestrained wanderer wandering within the wildness of a natural wilderness that has revealed itself in the wandering. The wildness of the environment will only reveal itself to the wildness of the free wandering of a wanderer. It is a struggle to release oneself from the expectations imposed upon what it means to wander by one’s self, particularly in light of those who do not really seem to understand wandering. After all, why would someone want to wander unless they sought a destination in order to bring something back from their wandering? It is difficult to grasp what it means to be captivated by the immediacy of the wandering, of the wanderings of a wanderer. All of wild nature swirls and whorls around the wanderer, and the wanderer tries to give the swirling an orientation and a meaning, but in true wandering wildness supersedes and surpasses all of the wanderer’s efforts to do so. Our thoughts about wandering can never adequately grasp the wildness of nature that confronts us. Perhaps this is why we need to surrender to the open possibilities of true wandering. By engaging in wandering, the wild freedom inside us impels and drives us to wander towards and into the open possibilities to be encountered in wild nature, and we know that we will never be able to exhaust the open possibilities of wild nature. It is thought that the wanderer will carefully preserve and take back from wandering a storehouse of memories to be examined and reexamined sometime in the future, when every possibility about what we experienced while we wandered will be discovered after our wandering. But then our

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wandering is no longer wandering but only memories and recollections of wandering. We have become reflective examiners of the records and artifacts of over-and-done-with past wanderings. In such reflection we lose touch with actual wandering and we are no longer wanderers. We look at the records of our wanderings as we look at dead butterflies mounted in a case in someone’s butterfly collection. To reflect upon the recollections of wandering is similar to looking at a collection of dead butterflies, thinking that they somehow still resemble living butterflies. To engage in living wandering is to be released and to fly like wild butterflies in the clear air and open blue sky. If we wander down a beach, another part of the world shows itself, and no two steps are the same. As we wander, in our walking, we follow an unexplained course, pausing here, looking there, resting for a moment before continuing, listening to the sounds that are around us, haphazardly dancing along and within a place or location, we do not reach the level of conscious awareness; we engage in non-guided aimless walking because we have opened ourselves up to the wandering. Wandering has become a non-directional or aimless non-activity. Continuing our wandering down the beach, the sand gives way under our feet and water washes across the tops of them; our feet sink into the wet sand, while a cool breeze moves across the surface of our skin. Our heads tilt and our faces point downward, and so, too, our eyes look downward, and then up, and side-to-side. Clouds like Spanish galleons drift across the sky, reflecting onto the surf and tidal pools, which spread out before us. We might ask, what reveals itself in the motion of our heads as they go up and down, back and forth, and to and fro? We have become lost within our wandering. We have given ourselves over to the activity and the process of wandering.

The Nearest Edge of Wandering When we begin to reflect upon what we were engaged in while we were last wandering, we discover that there are three basic temporal orientations from which we can look at and reflect upon wandering. We can think about how we think that we have wandered in the past. We can think about how we think we engage in wandering in the present, and we can think about how we will think about our engagement with wandering in the future. It is important to realize that once we begin to reflect upon wandering, we have already distanced ourselves from actual wandering. In a sense, how we perceive ourselves as wanderers or how we perceive what it means to engage in wandering, is dominated by the past. When we plan

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to go somewhere to wander, it is true that we are focused on the future wandering, but what we do is see ourselves as wandering in a future that has imaginatively been made present based upon the idea of how we think we were wanderers in the past. The future made imaginatively present by wandering is actually envisioned as on the verge of being over-and-donewith as we place it before the fact, among our collection of memories of past wanderings. We look forward to a future wandering and envision it as similar to a past wandering. We interpret the wandering as already accomplished, as now over-and-done-with. We look forward to this future of wandering in the same way we might look forward to finding a stamp that is missing from our stamp collection so that we can return it to the place reserved for it. In projections of future wanderings, we survey the horizon looking for indistinct things to reveal themselves to us, while past wanderings are recalled as places where wildness and unexpected treasures were found. We want the treasures that we think we will find in our future wanderings to be placed in our collection of the memories of our other past wanderings, alongside mementos of our past wanderings, adding to and alongside the treasures we already have stored there. For it to be genuine, both of these points of view must be abandoned. For wandering to be genuine, we must exist on the nearest edge of what it means to wander, and to be wanderers wandering there, passively and receptively embracing the notion of wandering. The nearest edge of wandering is found when we, as wanderers, haphazardly and arbitrarily take off in a direction, our feet in a repetitive motion as our body immerses itself in wandering in a present that becomes, in wandering, neither present nor now. Space and time, and worries and concerns, dissolve into the activity of pure presupposition-less wandering. To enter into wandering, we must let go of anticipation and expectations as we also learn to jettison our regrets about where in the past we have not been able to wander. One foot is moved towards a spot on the ground in front of us and our momentum moves our body along with our other foot in a particular direction. Our weight shifts to our front foot and centers us there, until as we again begin to move forward our weight momentarily rests in the middle between our feet. And then we again take a step forward. To wander is to be in the middle with our weight balanced between steps. We amble forward aimlessly but not directionless, moving towards things, towards a world, a blue sky, moving across the sand. We hear the sound of waves and look up at the clouds in the sky. As we wander, we feel the wildness within ourselves pulled towards nature’s wildness. Beyond this immediate impulse we feel a “pulled toward-ness” in general. Natural

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wildness is like a gravitational force urging and cajoling us in the direction of openness, moving us in its direction. We feel ourselves irresistibly drawn towards nature, we feel compelled by it to wander. We feel compelled to move outside of and beyond ourselves. There are bands of sand both wet and under water, exposed wet sand, semi-wet sand and dry sand, yellow sand, light gray sand, and dark gray sand. Our feet and bodies move differently as we wander through the different types of sand. The motion of our feet and bodies evokes varied thoughts within us. Aimless, non-directed wandering does not mean the same thing as meaningless wandering that fills our minds with directionless thoughts. Genuine wandering is merely undirected and uncontrolled. It is presupposition-less, open-ended wandering. Controlled wandering is of an entirely different order. With controlled wandering, we are dominated by goals. Controlled wandering always has an aim and an outcome at which it is aimed. To wander means to give up our aims and our need to reach goals. On hard wet sand we move quickly, but does this mean our thoughts move quickly as well? In the water our feet move at a more leisurely pace, while moving in the semi-wet sand is more of a task as our feet sink into it. In dry, hot sand, the movement of our wandering is even more hard-fought. The wind-driven sand strikes against our bodies, mildly burning and stinging the surface of our skin. What is common to all of these experiences is that when we wander we surrender our existence to the environment. With our wanderings do our bodies adjust to the difficulty of the terrain and do our thoughts correspond and adjust in some way to it, as we go over, around and through it as we wander? Does the movement of our feet and bodies correlate with that of our thoughts; are the two movements intimately connected? Perhaps we are somewhere in the middle, in between the movement of our thoughts and our bodies. Does our wandering release what might be called our “bodily mindedness”? Through wandering do our bodies come back to themselves in a bodily awareness, and do our minds come back to themselves as our bodies come back to our minds and our minds come back to our bodies, as we recognize their fundamental oneness? And is it here that we find what we do not need, as we find peace, when the things of the environment begin to show themselves to us, as we move closer to them by becoming true wanderers? True wandering allows the wanderers within us to encounter the environment in such a way as to allow it to show itself from itself to us. Through wandering we also learn to show ourselves to ourselves.

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It is wandering that has allowed the wildness of nature to be breathed into our bodies and our minds, and it is here that we find a reflection of the wildness that already exists within ourselves. It is as if the environment already knows and has anticipated our inner needs for wandering. Wild nature pulls us towards itself as if it knows how to guide our wandering. The wildness of nature pulls the wildness within us towards itself and in this being pulled towards nature, we are pulled towards ourselves. It is through wandering that we begin to recover the sense of who we really are. Ahead of us lies the open horizon. If we get to what is in front of us, what will we find there, another horizon, or one beyond it? In open-ended wandering there is always a further horizon, a next horizon, an open horizon, a horizon beyond the horizon, a horizon-less horizon beyond the visible horizon. It is important to realize that we can never exhaust the horizons that exist within us and around us. Wandering is a movement towards empty horizons. So what do our feet find along the way? What thoughts do our minds discover as our feet facilitate the movement of our wandering? When our bodies move as we wander, do our minds move in unison as well? In wandering, what shows itself is, what exists in its own right, apart and aside from what we project into and onto it. What we discover in wandering even begins to reveal itself to our legs and feet. Our toes dig into the sand, we find seaweed wedged between our toes. We stumble over shells. What we are looking for we often cannot find, but what is really there when we wander, manages to find us. In true wandering, the things of the natural world find us apart from our preconceptions, intentions, desires, and presuppositions. Apart from our goals, expectations, and projections of our awaited, future wanderings, apart from the remembrances of wanderings from the past, wild nature begins to reveal itself to us in its true wildness. The wildness within us instinctively knows this and embraces the wildness found in the openness of nature and the wildness found in open-ended wandering. The environment has caught us within an embrace-less embrace. As we wander along the beach, the ocean pushes things up and onto it and then pulls things back from it and toward itself. As we wander, we attend to the rhythms of the ocean and nature’s wildness, and all the heaviness and gravity of our day-to-day lives and whatever trivialities lie within them, are lifted from our hearts, minds and souls. All that we had formerly thought to be the most important things in life begin to drift away into the weightless air, or on the movement of the flowing water. Without fully realizing it, we have slipped into a state of wandering.

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The Threshold of Wandering As we struggle to engage in wandering with each new partial step there is a sense of anticipation as we feel that something momentous is about to occur. In addition to our anticipation, there is a surge that envelops our bodies and fills our minds. We can’t become true wanderers until we learn to let go of anticipation and expectation. As we walk over the sand dunes we feel as if our wandering has taken us to a place where we feel like we are moving through a landscape of wide-awake dreams. While wandering, as we lift one foot after another, and through movement continually finding the balancing point of our bodily weight and the balancing point between our bodies and minds, we approach the threshold of grasping the moods of wildness in both the environment and within us. By the sound of the ocean’s waves, our ears are dazzled and overwhelmed. Each wave produces and is followed by hiss after hiss after hissssss. The ocean constructs a natural symphony by which our inner being is continually refreshed. Whhooooosh, Kaaaawhhuummmpppf, Hsssssssssss, as we become attuned to it, we begin to hear nature’s call. Nature’s wildness beckons us and when we respond to its call it responds by rejuvenating us. Through wandering do we understand nature’s impulses better than before? Do we seek isolation or do we run from it? As wanderers do we realize that previously we were overwhelmed by the loneliness we felt within crowds, until through wandering we were able to escape from the retrograde gravitational pull of the crowd? We ask ourselves, can the crowd ever adequately become receptive to the gravitational pull of wild nature? Through wandering we undergo a transformation and transfiguration. Day by day as we dwell upon and live within the environment, as we wander within it and through it, wildness entices us, until our loneliness fades away. It is wild nature that has made the wanderers within us slip over into wandering and it is wild nature that causes us to lose our sense of loneliness. Wildness unifies our bodies and minds. The wildness of nature is a balance of its various elemental forces and as we wander, the balance point of our bodily shifts of weight achieves a harmony with the balance point of elemental nature. The peculiar thing is that when we wander we feel alone, though we are never really alone. We are surrounded by sounds, aromas, panorama’s and visual vistas to which we are not normally exposed, as the wildness of the woods or of the ocean or the desert begin to reveal themselves to us. Whenever we are wandering at any moment we can decide that we can sit down and simply gaze at what’s right in front of us, the richness of the

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blueness of the summer sky, the aroma and smell of the salt air, the sound of the crashing of the waves, the feel of coolness and touch of the sand on our feet, we can savor the taste and flavor of the environment. The richness of our inner life has become attuned simultaneously to what is at the center of our inner life, and to what is outside us, the wildness of nature and to the center of our inner wildness. When we wander we have to learn to let go of the predetermined categories of life that influence, consume and that appear to swallow everything other than our particularly reductive ways of looking at things, the presuppositions and predeterminations that influence everything, until we realize that this is the only way of life that many people seem to know. To take the view that we are to control and dominate nature, to think that we are supposed to seize control of it, would make it impossible for us to be receptive to the revelations of nature. To take such a view is to not be at one with one’s self; one is thus at one with a style of life, a set of habituations and preconceptions that have been completely conditioned by a vision of domination of which one cannot let go. It is as if a life, governed by a set of predetermined categories, moves through them and lives in them. Such individuals would live according to a set of rules and categories completely out of sync with nature and the wildness within it. As a result, they are also out of touch with themselves. So they lead a life of constant meaningless tension, governed by imaginary sets of rules that describe how life is supposed to be lived, without being able to actually live it. They have not set their own goals. Their goals have been set for them by others. The tension within us is created by a life that is focused on living a life that others say we should live. There is no openness only a closed attitude governed by preconceptions of how life should be lived, but never really is. Abstract unlivable rules that state how you should live but that are never attainable lead to the destruction of the true self. These preconceptions fail to allow the world reveal itself in its own right as it really is. It is the wildness of the natural world that should determine how we live and not the presumptions of the crowd and the reductive view of those who wish to subdue and dominate it. To become genuine wanderers we have to give up what “they” say. And yet the perceptions created by the inertia of the crowd continue to influence us. As wanderers, when we try to learn to let go of the artificial rhythms of our preconceptions and live with our own free sense of wandering, we begin to learn to live our lives according to the rhythms of wild nature and the environment, and a transformation within us begins to occur. All that we see, as our feet crunch into and through the soft crust at the surface of the sand, is the slow coming of light as the sun moves

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upwards and towards its zenith in the sky. To follow the track of the rising and setting sun is to follow the track of elementally wild nature and to attempt to release the wanderer within. We move through layers of aroma that hang in the air and through the waves of sound that surround us. We feel and move through the layers of cool air enveloping us. We become aware of how the water meets the sky. Wanderers share a common perception of the horizon. Wandering towards the horizon binds them to wander through the environment between themselves and the horizon while knowing that another horizon lurks behind the observed horizon. Wanderers are enthralled by the idea of looking for, as of yet, a next unforeseen horizon. It is through this recognition that we begin to learn to develop the ability to release ourselves for and into wandering. To engage in open-ended wandering, is to dream of infinite horizons beyond infinite horizons, knowing deep inside ourselves, that we will really never be able to reach them. We wander, in order to try to find the meaning of what it means for a wanderer, to be in the midst of wandering towards, a horizon-less horizon. To be wanderers, is to be free to choose to wander towards unrecognizable and unattainable goals and towards unreachable horizons.

Pulled Towards Wandering When we eschew, ignore and disregard or are indifferent to the wildness of nature, an alarm begins to go off somewhere deep inside us, even if we do not realize it. Those who are afraid of wandering, and can’t allow themselves to be wanderers, or who are afraid of others wandering, try to call us back from our wandering. They want us to come back from our wanderings. Distracted as they are from their true selves by their distractions, they do not recognize the powerful forces that dominate and distract them, and so they cannot escape the powerful forces that dominate and distract them. They have turned their backs on their true selves. They think that they should not wander and since they cannot allow themselves to be wanderers, they cannot allow you or anyone else, to be a wanderer either. Wanderers and wandering somehow, for them, represent a threat. A wanderer threatens their sense of stability and control. A great deal of energy is spent by those who fear wandering, trying to prevent anyone who is interested in wandering from thinking about wandering and then also from actually wandering. If they can, they will prevent you from thinking about wandering in the first place, which perhaps means they will be able eventually to prevent you from engaging in wandering. As they see it, there is work to be done, and if there is work to be done, there are also

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more important things to do. And if these things are true, then wandering to them is a complete waste of time. Just as they have given up wandering, they expect you do the same. You have to return from thinking about wandering and from actual wandering to what they misconstrue as the real world, and to the important things that have to be done within the “real” world. And yet there is something within our inner being that testifies to the wrongness of this type of thinking and intuitively we already seem to know differently. To be a wanderer in the midst of wandering is to be in the real world. The world of wandering is the true world, the genuine world, the authentic world. To fail to see the importance of wandering is to fail to see the real world. At times we are driven to wander up a mountainside, or to wander along a beach or riverbank. In the natural environment, we are continually pulled towards wandering; the different parts of the world and the environment, implore us to explore them as wanderers. We feel the urgency and need to wander. As wanderers, we learn to let go of our preconceptions about the real world outside of the natural wild world. The real world is the natural wild world. It is this world to which we need to become receptive in order to become wanderers there. When we are wandering, when we wander on the beach, people who observe us may think that we are alone and lonely, but this is simply not true. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. We are never alone when we are enveloped by nature in its cocoon, because we have become receptive. To engage in open-ended wandering means we have passed through a series of stages of metamorphosis and we have learned to release the butterfly within ourselves. All too often when we are adversely influenced, this butterfly exists only in an underdeveloped larvae state within nature’s cocoon. It is not allowed to undergo metamorphosis, spurred on by the thoughts and activities related to open-ended wandering. With each step we take as wanderers into the wildness of nature, there is an increasing calmness, that slowly but surely and steadily arises within us. The receptivity that develops as a result of this increasing calmness within us, increases our receptivity of the environment, which in turn allows the environment to reveal more and more of itself to us. We slowly learn more and about how the wildness of the environment is related to the internal wildness found within ourselves, that reveals itself to us, when we become wanderers. As a result we begin to discover more and more fully, that the wild and natural environment is the wanderers natural home. In our wanderings the question we have to answer is, can we learn to let go of our ideas related to the common view of journeys where we are always aimed at getting “there” or getting “somewhere” or getting to

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“someplace”? Can we relinquish our desire to control anything and everything and allow what is inside us to achieve harmony with what is outside us? What we discover is that much of what we believe about the nature of journeys, is based upon our view of time. For the many, to wander, is thought to be a waste our time and yet we also know that to allow ourselves to wander, is to allow ourselves to enter into a timeless time. When we wander, we enter a state of being, that seems to be timeless or outside of time. Past and future conceptions of time have disappeared. We might ask, is it even possible to wander without a goal, a destination, or without a sense of time constraints? Is it even possible to sense our existence while being aware of being unaware? Wandering carries within itself, its own sense of unaware awareness.

Unselfconscious Wandering By chance we encounter another person as we wander, who says, while looking at us, “You look completely relaxed and completely at peace with yourself.” Such is what a passer-by tells us as we rest for a moment on the beach during our wandering. Yet we might know differently. Although we have begun to move outside the boundaries of the constraints of the ordinary world, we are still entangled within a net of illusions that we have imposed upon ourselves, and that are of our own devising. For deep within ourselves, we know we are not there yet, we have not arrived, we are not yet wandering. We have not yet achieved a state of calm and non-selfcenteredness or un-self-conscious control. Is there an intermediate state of self-control that is not control, not restrained control, but of an invisible self without a self, a non-self-ordering, non-self-control? Until we can approach this state, we realize that we are not really wandering. We do not even know what it means to get ready, to get ready to being there, to being true wanderers. As beginners, we know what we want; we want to slip over into wandering without cognitively seizing hold of wandering; we want to be wanderers; we want to be wanderers in the midst of wandering; and we know that this cannot occur if we try to assume a sense of domination and dominating control of the situation. The very thought of being wanderers in the midst of wandering inflames our souls as it simultaneously paralyzes us, turning our thoughts about wandering to ice. The thoughts we have about wandering cause us to simultaneously burn with a peculiar sense of longing and at the same time to ache from growing completely cold. But can we ever really exist in this state of tensionless tension, as wanderers in the process of learning how to engage in wandering, without

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controlling the situation through domination, so that we can just sort of slip over into the activity of wandering? We seem to know instinctively that we do not really know what it means to be wanderers in the midst of wandering. This is the case although at times we also know that we have at times in the past just found ourselves in the middle of wandering. So we do not know what we think we know, and we do not know that we do not know, what it means to be wandering. When we as wanderers engage in wandering, we seem to know that we are wandering, but do not have control over our wandering, as we might have control over the light in a room, by flipping a light switch. We cannot just flip a switch and suddenly find ourselves wandering. The harmony and balance between inner wildness and outer wildness is what allows us to engage in genuine wandering, but this is perhaps best described as a type of uncontrolled control. The functions of the different parts of our inner being enter into a harmony, without an overbearing sense of control of any one part of our inner being over the other parts. Although we seem to have some tacit knowledge of wandering, most of the time we approach wandering from the wrong circumstances, and from the wrong perspectives, and with a series of misguided ideas. We seem to be in the wrong context and never fully in command of what we realize that we do not know. We are already familiar with genuine wandering, the concept is somehow present to us, but simultaneously we seem to have forgotten it and we just do not seem to understand it. Genuine wandering may never be capable of being understood, so we need to struggle to recollect the ideas we have of the activity that we have inside ourselves, about what it means to genuinely wander. At times, we realize that we are trying too hard, and we have to recollect what it means to let go of control. We must learn to control without controlling. We have to let go of thinking and conceptualizing about wandering and simply engage in the activity of wandering. Through our limited self-understanding, we come to recognize that wandering is beyond the grasp of restrained and restraining willful control. But can we willfully learn to release our drive for control and closure, and live within a state of openness, receptivity, and insatiable curiosity? We struggle with struggling within ourselves, struggling to know what it means to wander. We seek to avert craving mastery when we genuinely wander. Mastery is not achieved by effort and struggle and control, we cannot master wandering, until we learn to let go, of trying to control wandering. Without restraint, all sense of a self that monitors and controls wandering, is relinquished, in the face of invisible self-control, where we show a mastery that is not a struggle, but a graceful internally harmonized

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uncontrolled self-control. A similar sequence must occur for wandering to occur.

Forgotten Wandering “Let go, if you can only learn to let go, you will be free. You can just walk off in any direction you please, and release yourself for what will come towards you without expectations, when you wander.” So a voice says to us, which seems to speak to us from within our inner being; but we are still perplexed, what does it mean to release ourselves and what does it mean to be free? Does it mean to be free to wander off in a directionless direction? Does it mean to inaugurate a series of thoughts within one’s self that are unique or original? What does it mean to inaugurate thoughts within one’s self that are unique and original? Is there such a thing as an original thought? Is there a wandering that occurs within our thoughts, mimicking the wandering that occurs as we wander through a natural wild environment? The wildness of our thoughts is reawakened through our processes of association, and through the production of imaginative variations, that move beyond mere reproduction of what has gone on before in our thoughts. You hear the voice and at first you cannot recognize it. It seems odd to hear yourself talking to yourself in a way that is similar to how at times you seem to have become the narrator of your own dreams. This voice that speaks to you from the center of your inner being, stirs up and triggers within you, thoughts and recollections about all of your wanderings, but especially about your childhood wanderings. Memories of childhood wanderings are often fragmentary, in non-sequiturs garbled and raw. You remember always going towards unknown, explored places that were off limits, out of bounds, or on the edge of where you were not supposed to go. You were always in the process of heading towards some unknown somewhere, perhaps, it was just around the next corner, but you could never quite see yourself as getting there. You always got wrapped up with something along the way. Perhaps, you can or could never get there, but you are driven to try to get there nevertheless. Everyone who sees you engaging in the activity of preparing to go off wandering, does not want you to go or wants you to come back from your wandering, before you have even left. Others are embarrassed and ashamed when you tell them of your recollections of wandering, especially when they rediscover within themselves the memory of the wild freedom of childhood in their memories of childlike wandering. They have forgotten that they have forgotten, the bliss of childlike wandering. They

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have forgotten that they have forgotten how to wander, until they too begin to recollect. What many of us do not seem to understand is that we are all wanderers, we are all on the way, without being able to quite get to our destination, with regard to where we are going, especially with regard to the sense of wandering. And yet, we also seem to think that we already understand what we just do not understand. We think we have the answers to important questions, we think we know what we should do next, we think somehow we know, and we think that we know that we know. In such a state we can never truly wander. In such a state even our thoughts can never really wander. We have unwittingly and unbeknownst to us, cut ourselves off from wandering. How we understand wandering also influences how we wander, including how we wander in our thoughts, in the natural environment, as well as what we believe. What we perceive causes us to believe what we believe and is the basis of how we assign meaning. What has meaning is related to how we have been taught and conditioned to perceive. We have been taught and conditioned to approach wandering in a limited way. But to become true wanderers we need to begin to learn to alter the nature of our perception. As wanderers attempting to engage in wandering, we need to be receptive to how as well as what we perceive. Our perceptions themselves must be allowed to wander. To perceptually wander is to become both receptive and passive to how we perceive, while being in the midst of wandering. The receptivity in perception must be extended to include receptivity and passivity in wandering. We can then become receptive to what it means to be engaged in the activity of wandering. To be receptive to the activity of wandering, we need to develop and then employ a perceptual receptivity to the environment. To be receptive to the environment we must be receptive to the wildness of nature. We must learn to let our perception be open to the wildness of nature revealing itself to us. We can then become receptive to the wildness within ourselves. Perhaps wandering occurs when the wildness of nature and the wildness within us, coincide. Wandering requires that we give up on the idea of bending and instrumentally molding the environment to fit our projects, purposes and presuppositions. We must give up our will and desire to dominate. We must open our sensory organs to what the environment has to say to us, we must become receptive to nature’s ambiance and moods, its movements and alterations, its calmness and turbulence, which then will only begin to reveal themselves to us, when we have become genuine wanderers. We have to become genuinely attuned to the wildness of nature. But how do

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we enter such receptivity in order to engage in insightful wandering? We can wander in simplicity moving in a direction down a beach, but also recognize that this not just a mindless wandering, or a mindless escape. When we are perceptually receptive and when we take off in a direction, we find that we are perceptually filled with the wildness of nature. When we are receptive we feel the pull of nature. The immediacy of the wildness of nature and the wildness within an environment nurtures and reanimates our internal wildness. The pull we feel from nature also pulls us more deeply into ourselves. As the wildness within the environment moves towards us, the wildness within us moves towards the wildness within nature and the environment. These mutual forces of attraction create the conditions for the possibility of wandering. Like a combination of gravity and love we are drawn towards openness and wildness.

Letting Wandering Reveal Itself How do we become absorbed in the activity of wandering amidst the pressures that plague us day in and day out, in everyday existence? We have to learn to see things in a different way. We need to alter our sense of perception. What we normally see has to be reconfigured and reconceptualized and the world must be perceived in a different way. The beginning of this alteration is to let things show and reveal themselves to us, and we must become receptive to their revealing themselves to us. We must become receptive in our attitude towards the environment and nature. Why do we feel the need to see things in a different way? And when and if we do see things in a different way what will happen? What will happen to us? Will we lose ourselves as many seem to think, or will we find ourselves? We now know that to be able to attempt to wander is to be able to try to find ourselves. And when we find ourselves, will it be because we became wanderers? As we wander something inside of us begins to vibrate, as thoughts and ideas begin to flow outward from our inner being. By allowing what is outside of us to reveal itself to us through wandering, we begin to perceive differently. The elemental forces of nature and the environment begin to reveal themselves to us. To realize that wandering is not about getting to a destination or collecting the mementoes from a series destinations is to begin to change. It is then that we begin to let the activity of wandering reveal itself to us. Open-ended wandering is not easy. It involves both an active and a passive perception. It involves having an aim that is aimless. We and everyone around us always seem to assume that wandering seeks a destination, but to find a final destination and to find the center of our

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inner being may be a place at which we can never arrive. We are always on the way toward a destination-less destination, with a fear of not finding it. In true wandering, we learn to let go of this fear. We have to learn to peel back the layers of presuppositions and preconceptions that we cause within ourselves and one by one, we must learn to let our pretensions drift away. It is difficult to uncover all the disguises by which we disguise ourselves from ourselves. How many different times and in how many different ways, have we disguised from ourselves, so that we think we are wandering, when we really aren’t? We have disguised from ourselves the fact that we really aren’t wandering when we think that we are. We live in a world of illusions about our illusions. One of the motivations for our attempting to wander is not only to renew our energies but also our sense of purpose and self-worth. To wander is to be filled with the purposeful purposelessness of a pregnant emptiness, that gives birth to openness within us, towards nature and the environment.

Recollecting Childhood Wandering It may happen that one day we begin to realize that without even recognizing it we have been wandering, and we have wandered a great way, and are amazed at how far our wanderings have gone on, and how far they have proceeded, and how far we have come. By wandering, we return to and roam through all the periods of our lives, but most of all we return to our childhood and our childhood wanderings. In childhood we were all wanderers; we just did not realize it, recognize it, or know it. We simply wandered. We were wanderers wandering. When we wander now, we reanimate our childhood wanderings as our future thoughts about wandering. The openness of childhood is different from other parts of our lives. It is drawn to the openness of wild spaces and wild places within the environment. Now we are surrounded by and filled with artificial and arbitrary boundaries. In childhood we are filled with energy, optimism, openness and a willingness to immediately embrace what is around us and in front of us. We are willing to wander instantaneously towards that which is revealed to us. In our contemporary world, it is important to remember that we need to engage in wandering and that we need to return to the openness of childhood. But now we also need to realize that we have just begun. To recollect the timeless time of childhood and the immediacy of the wandering that took place within it is to prepare the ground for wandering today.

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Who would have thought when we joined in the exploration of what it means to wander, that we would join in the great adventure of rediscovering what it means to be engaged in open-ended wandering, and that it would lead us to where it has lead? During all of our efforts to wander, as we learned to move slowly, through, around, and within the environment, we begin to realize that living in this world is like falling asleep in a world of artificially constructed false priorities. We are so busy pretending to be busy doing important things, that we have forgotten what is most important. But then we suddenly awaken to a new perception of the world as we discover something peculiar has taken place. The very thought of wandering at first created within us no sense of significance, no unusual air of urgency, but this has now given way to a new attitude, we can barely contain ourselves, we fidget with anticipation, we cannot wait until we get another chance at wandering. We feel a deep inner urge. We feel the pull of the idea of wandering. When will we again be able to wander? When will it next occur? When and where can we again find the time and place to wander? When can we fill ourselves again with the pregnant empty emptiness of true wandering? When will we again give birth to true wandering? In thinking about wandering, the arbitrary boundaries of existence that are the product of ordinary existence and social convention have begun to melt away, evaporate and disappear. We know that when we again actually wander, when we are wandering, trivial concerns will have drifted away and we will say to ourselves, here we are again, we will say to ourselves; now, at long last, once again, here we are as wanderers; once again, we are finally engaged as wanderers in the activity of wandering. Until that moment arrives we must remind ourselves to ask once again: what does it mean to inquire into and to think about wandering? And most of all we need to ask what does it mean to wander? Can we rediscover what we already think that we understand but do not? Is it possible for us to release ourselves into wandering and for us to allow it to allow us, to make it our own? Is it possible for us to become wanderers engaged in open-ended wandering? If in wandering we reincarnate our childhoods, we know we must struggle to wander and to explore nature and the environment in order to help enable those who exist now but who have forgotten how to wander, to rediscover it. We must also prepare the ground for those will exist in the future, through wandering to rediscover their childhoods. If we are irresistibly drawn to wander, like children, we must be unafraid to set out once again to wander. Most of all by wandering, we must learn the importance of protecting the wild parts of nature and the environment for

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those who will exist in the future, so that they will be able to learn to how to wander. How do we begin to do this? How can we ensure that those who will exist in the future can find a placeless place in order to be able to wander? How can we ensure that wildness will exist in the future so that the inner wildness of our successors can come into contact with it so that they can find themselves through wandering? We ourselves must try to begin to wander. And how do we do this? One foot is moved towards a spot on the ground in front of us, and momentum moves our body along with our other foot in a direction. We amble forward aimlessly but not directionless, moving towards things, towards a world, a blue sky. Moving across the sand, we hear the sound of waves, we look up and see the clouds in the sky, we feel the wind in our hair, as we wander we feel the wildness within ourselves pulled towards nature’s wildness. Beyond this immediate impulse, we feel a “pulled toward-ness” in general. Natural wildness is like a gravitational force urging and cajoling us in the direction of openness, in the direction of wildness, in the direction of the environment. Like children, we feel ourselves irresistibly drawn towards nature, we feel compelled to wander, towards environmental wildness.

PART II ON ANIMATING THE SENSUOUS

CHAPTER FOUR SENSUOUSLY VIRTUOUS: THE POWER OF SOPHROSYNE IN PLATONIC EROTICS ANNE ASHBAUGH So now dear Love, … be kind and gracious toward my expertise at love, which is your own gift to me: do not out of anger take it away or disable it; and grant that I may be held in higher esteem than ever by those who are beautiful. (Phaedrus, 257a)

The role of aesthetic delight in the formation of character presents a puzzle for western morality. Clearly and insightfully Nietzsche already exposed the matter in the third essay of his Genealogy of Morals where he shows how the Christian moral ideal sought to overcome sensuality by eradicating it. In the figure of the ascetic priest Nietzsche showed the potent lure of canceling out sensuousness for the sake of attaining power or truth or salvation. In the figure of the artist, however, Nietzsche discovered a way to overcome the ascetic ideal by achieving a full immersion in sensuousness and affirming the embodiment of human excellence. An elaboration of Nietzsche’s essay would take us too far afield. Suffice it to say, that what I call sensuous virtue refers to sophrosyne, the virtue with which Plato commits to assigning a role to sensuousness in the attainment of human flourishing. Like Nietzsche after him, Plato did not espouse asceticism and saw right through its perils.

All references to Plato’s dialogues originate from: J. M. Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson, editors, Plato: Complete Works (Minneapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997); the page numbers and letters written after the name of a dialogue conform to those assigned in the Stephanus edition of Plato’s work (Geneva, 1578) which has become the standard way of referring to Plato’s dialogues. In English editions, those page numbers appear in the margin of the text and do not coincide with the regular pagination.

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Thus, when in Plato’s Republic Socrates assigns the ruling of the soul to the logistikon or rational faculty, Plato has Socrates reason to that claim by asking which psychic power can govern itself, without tyrannizing or harming other capabilities the soul has for desiring. The proper ruler of the soul must be able to pursue its own desire and enhance in the other powers the ability to attain their desired objects (Republic 427e–441c). Proper to reason is the desire to know. Proper to spiritedness is the desire for honor, victory and self-esteem. Proper to appetites is the desire for physical pleasure. Presumably, reason is the proper ruler of the whole soul because reason has the power to satisfy its desire for knowledge by pursuing selfknowledge, thus gaining expertise on what would best enhance other desiring powers of the soul. Among those powers that reason, or the proper ruler, must not harm or tyrannize is the epithumetikon or that power souls have to desire and enjoy physical pleasures. Plato’s discernment concerning the ability of reason to govern, therefore, is not founded on a misguided rationalism of the sort that leaves the body behind or suppresses physical pleasures or aesthetic delight. Sophrosyne or right-minded moderation, identified as the excellence of appetitive desiring, maximizes the enjoyment of physical pleasure. Moderation supports not an ascetic practice but an aesthetic experience. In Republic’s discussion of the threefold modes of desiring proper to human souls Socrates assigns a place of importance to the appetites recognizing that unaided or ungoverned the appetites will overtake the desiderative organization of any human being. The example of Gyges’ Lydian ancestor (Republic 359b–360b) and that of the struggle between delight in the image and self-disgust experienced by the man driven by necrophilia (Republic 439e–440a) point to that extreme case suggesting that appetites have enormous force and can indeed derail an ungoverned soul. At no time, however, do the Platonic dialogues intimate that appetites be crushed or even ignored. Rather, appetites require the governance of reason and under that tutelage are expected to thrive both in their desire and their enjoyment of physical pleasures. Sophrosyne, the appetitive excellence, is in that sense a sensuous virtue and a virtue that secures and maximizes sensuousness. In fact, most dialogues include in their various discussions some lure that will help the soul rein the appetitive power and satisfy it even in the midst of dialectical inquiries. Examples of these concessions abound in the Symposium but appear more subtly in other dialogues like Meno, where the dialectic pursuit for the nature of virtue entertains the degree to which it is the case that virtue involves “desiring beautiful things and being able

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to acquire them” (justly but not otherwise, of course—Meno, 77b; 78d– 79b). This essay examines the commitment in Plato’s dialogues to the pursuit of aesthetic delight and physical pleasure viewed as an integral part of the attainment of virtue as a whole. In particular, the essay aims to show that beauty is the highest end of sophrosyne and that the right-minded enjoyment of beauty, in turn, perfects the soul’s desire for physical pleasures thus contributing significantly to the excellence of the whole soul. In the presence of beauty the appetitive desires attain their optimal state. In this respect, it is safe to say that ethics and aesthetics intertwine in the characterization of sophrosyne given by the Platonic dialogues.

Sophrosyne … all that is good is beautiful, and the beautiful is not disproportionate; so one must say that an animal too, if it is to be beautiful, must have due proportion. … with respect to health and deceases and virtues and vices, there is not a single proportion or lack of proportion greater than that of soul herself in relation to body itself. (Timaeus 87c)

The first proportion that moderation secures is health—using “first” in the sense of the most basic. In the Timaeus, for example, the link to health pertains to the power sophrosyne has to measure and bring about harmony between body and soul, beauty and goodness. Thus Timaeus recommends “neither to exercise the soul without the body nor the body without the soul so that they may be evenly matched and sound of health” (Timaeus 88b-c). This balance, in turn, sustains the bond between goodness and beauty: kalos kagathos. Furthermore, Timaeus adds that the student of geometry must balance the motions of his soul and body through gymnastics. Likewise, someone who works hard with his body should move the soul by cultivating music or philosophy (Timaeus 88c). Since the best motion of the body is that motion “caused by itself in itself” (Timaeus 89a), it is not difficult for dianoetic motion to accord with bodily processes ranging from sensations to digestion and the like. Sophrosyne is that excellence of soul that allows appetites to calibrate their responses to pathemata or stirrings within the soul in such a way that the affection in the appetite leads to physical pleasure without producing physical or psychic disorder. As such, Sophrosyne may be called “sound mindedness” since its presence in the appetites guards against deranged, unthinking pursuit of something mistakenly grasped to be beautiful. The

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latter would lead the soul to “adopt madness as its bodyguard” and be “stung to frenzy” (Republic, 573a-b). As such, Sophrosyne hones the soul towards beauty and maximizes the soul’s enjoyment of the sensuousness with which bodies endow motions. Appropriately, the etymology of “sophrosyne” in Cratylus proposes that this virtue receives its name from being a conservation (VǀWHULD) of SKURQƝVLV or intellection. Given that SKURQƝVLV consists in “the intellection of motility of what flows” (Cratylus 411d) and that “it arises in relation to our being stirred” (Cratylus 411d), we could safely say that SKURQƝVLV, that which sophrosyne conserves, is the noetic grasp of the soul’s desiring. After all, even logistikos or reason desires to know and is stirred or desires when it is provoked either by external sensations or by thinking, imagination, and nous separately or working together. Albeit through a comic account of dizzy philosophers, the Cratylus (411e) gives us a glimpse into a soul in constant motion or ever desiring. Presumably, these governed, unending motions support the soul’s immortality as conceived in Phaedrus (245c-246a). Following the description of immortality as constant motion—something quite familiar to the appetites—the dialogue offers a sublime lure to the appetites: souls well-governed, divine souls, enjoy unnamed delights in a great spectacle. By contrast, ungoverned souls, since they lack in moderation, lose their wings and crash to the ground. From the ground they cannot enjoy the panoramic spectacle seen by the gods in their procession through the heavens (Phaedrus 248b– 249e). Excess, therefore, disfigures human enjoyment. In fact, the wingless souls must wait a long time to regain their wings (Phaedrus, 250d–253c) so the harm done by excess has enduring consequences. Furthermore, since waiting is something the appetites do not relish, the image serves as a disincentive to engage in immoderate behavior or reject the rule of reason. Returning to the discussion of the sensuous virtue offered in the Cratylus, we find that this dialogue situates the term sophrosyne between phronesis and episteme suggesting that “the soul worthy of reputation accompanies things in their motion neither falling behind them nor running away from them” (Cratylus 412a). Interestingly, that power to stay the course identified with courage in Laches (191e–192b) brings to mind another desiring power of the soul: its desire for honor and victory. After episteme follows sophia or the power to grasp what is being “swept away” (Cratylus 412b with 404d). Taken together, these terms nicely present the three virtues of the soul outlined in the Republic’s discussion of the soul’s powers to desire, often called “tripartite soul”: moderation

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perfects appetitive desiring, courage perfects desiring of victory, honor and self-esteem, and wisdom perfects our desiring to know. If we carefully follow the organization of the etymologies in the Cratylus, and the comic strikes at Heracliteanism that pepper the dialogue, we discover an account of the soul similar to the one given in Republic 427e–441c. What the Cratylus adds, however, is a suggestion of how the virtues of the three desiring powers of the soul interact given the stirring within a soul that is ever-moving (Phaedrus 245c). Notably, in both accounts, the soul’s appetites need not be eliminated. In fact, sophrosyne, the virtue or excellence of appetitive desire, is indispensable for the proper functioning of reason and spiritedness. Whether we translate sophrosyne as “sound-mindedness” or “moderation,” the role of that perfection of appetitive desiring remains: promoting the greatest possible delight in beauty while conserving intact the soul’s reasoning power. Moderation, nonetheless, primarily perfects desire for physical pleasure and importantly guards the health of the body. In the Charmides, the dialogue devoted to the search for the nature of right-mindedness, all the beauty of Charmides and the beauty of his friends do not suffice to satisfy him while he suffers from a headache. Thus, he turns to Socrates, the philosopher, someone reputed to be ugly (Theaetetus 143e) and selfavowed to be as unlikely to stand out as a white line on white marble (Charmides 154b). Socrates’ only lure is his knowledge of a cure or an incantation that could heal Charmides’ headache. Thus, the dialogue that pursues moderation, immediately admits the importance of health and focuses the soul in its desire to know, even if what soul wants to know is a remedy for pain. Importantly, the image of a headache conjures up the relationship between thinking and physical health/pleasure since (1) the head is the organ associated with the locus of reasoning and (2) while suffering from a headache it is virtually impossible to reason or pursue dialectical inquiry. The dialogue, furthermore, redirects attention from the beautiful boy to the philosopher but not without first giving appetitive desire some satisfaction and acknowledgement. Before Socrates engages Charmides in conversation, and after a scramble to secure a place to sit next to Charmides, Socrates catches a glimpse inside Charmides’ cloak. Socrates admits that he “caught on fire and was quite beside myself” like a fawn caught by a lion yet, he was able to respond to Charmides when the young man asked Socrates if he knew a remedy for a headache (Charmides 155d). The detailed description of Charmides’ incomparable beauty (Charmides 154b–155d), coupled with the philosopher’s erotic reaction to that beautiful body, are aspects of the dialogue that lure the appetites into

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the task of understanding what the perfection of desiring physical pleasures entails, and keep the appetites satisfied while reason pursues knowledge of the very excellence that will ensure measured, sensuous delight or moderation. That is, the philosopher engages his appetites in the very process of leading those appetites to function at their best throughout the inquiry. The enquiry, furthermore, commits itself to find a cure for a headache (overcome pain) and discover the excellence of desiring physical pleasure (maximize pleasure). Socrates’ sexual response to Charmides’ beautiful body brings to mind that section of the Symposium (210a–211d) where Diotima instructs Socrates in the art of erotic desire, thus cultivating the soul’s ability to enjoy beauty itself. Presumably, the soul does best when it proceeds from desiring and/or loving one beautiful body, then, the beauty of all bodies, the beauty of souls, the beauty of laws, activities, and customs, moving towards love of knowledge and theories until the soul’s desire reaches beauty itself by itself. Importantly, that scale of sensuousness begins with the body. In the Charmides, we seem to move along similar lines until we reach theories but not beauty itself or all that there is to be beautiful. I suggest that had Socrates not experienced the initial erotic moment, his soul might have been tempted to leave the body behind and thus land not in an epistemic “aha!” concerning moderation, but a headache of his own. The Charmides does not provide a dogmatic characterization of moderation. Yet, like most inconclusive Platonic dialogues, the Charmides reveals important aspects concerning its object of inquiry by mentioning properties, in this case of moderation, in the process of eliminating false beliefs about the matter. We learn what moderation perfects and how. Moderation or sound mindedness seems to be a state that must take root for humans to thrive. The term sophrosyne or “moderation” at various points signals self-governance, discretion and even prudence. The dialogue entertains three propositions about moderation that reveal, at least in part, aspects that distinguish moderation from other virtues. More than definitions, these statements seem to provide three stages through which soul must pass to attain moderation. First, moderation appears to be a matter of being still—a quality that clearly would lead to soundmindedness from childhood onward since the still person would consider her choices and not allow cravings to overtake the soul. Secondly, as they get older, an element of shame becomes part of educating the young into what a culture deems appropriate conduct conducive to health and social success. Adult sound-mindedness, in turn, adds an element of right judgment in the face of self-knowledge as the person recognizes what is suitable in individual terms. This “doing of one’s own thing” brings to

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mind one of the definitions of justice in the Republic. Worthy of further note is that while that dialogue pursues the nature of justice and leaves the matter in suspense, Republic does explain moderation to consist in “an exercise of self-governance” especially the ruling of bodily hungers for drink, sex or food (Republic 389e). The Charmides, on the other hand, postpones defining moderation but presents the possibility that moderation may entail “doing one’s own things” (Charmides 161b). Importantly, self-governing is one’s own thing. What could be more suited to being a self than caring for one’s own well-being and securing autonomy to prevent being tyrannized by elements foreign to the self? Socrates debunks Critias’ claim concerning moderation as being defined by “doing one’s own” yet in the process shows an important way in which doing one’s own thing may and can entail benefitting others (as do the crafts). The suggestion that there is something about justice that requires that each person should practice what she is best suited to do (Republic 433a), now in the mouth of Critias becomes a basic element of temperance. In a sense, each virtue directly pertaining to the threefold way the soul has of desiring requires this appropriateness that Critias articulates. The business of the whole soul is to govern itself, its virtue, then, is justice. The business of reason is to do the governing but in such a way (wisely) that reason secures its own object (knowledge) wisely while it supports what is fitting to spiritedness (taking courageous pleasure in victory, honor, and self-esteem) while it simultaneously secures and supports what is fitting to the appetites (moderately enjoying physical pleasures). Thus, justice, wisdom, courage, and moderation, all four virtues entail in some measure “minding one’s own.” For Critias, such doings entail “doing what is beneficial and beautiful (a kind of kaloskagathia, 162c). Taken together with the passages in Timaeus discussed earlier, this statement of Critias makes perfect sense since we could take “doing one’s own things” to mean guarding the harmony between the motions of soul and body. Since Critias was present in Timaeus’ discussion of the matter in the dialogue entitled Timaeus, we may be allowed a little liberty to make this association. Finally, in the process of discussing “sound-mindedness” Socrates and Critias arrive at what may be a fourth stage in moderation, that of arriving at a recognition of knowledge and ignorance in oneself. The matter is not spelled out clearly and since the interlocutors include two men who became tyrants, one can surmise that neither Charmides nor Critias discovered their own ignorance or their own limits. In their lives, Eros collapses into power and health gives way to wealth.

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In the Protagoras, as in the Charmides, we find Socrates sexually aroused while inquiring into the nature of virtue. This time, not Charmides’ but Protagoras’ beauty lures appetitive desire into supporting an investigation of ways and means of becoming virtuous. When the dialogue Protagoras opens, so stirred did Socrates look that an unnamed friend he meets thinks Socrates just came from being with Alcibiades. Yet, Socrates notes that though Alcibiades was present at the meeting, and even defended Socrates when others attacked Socrates’ claims, Socrates had no eyes for Alcibiades. What blinded him to Alcibiades’ beautiful face and form was a greater beauty. “How can superlative wisdom not seem surpassingly beautiful?” Socrates asked his friend (Protagoras 309c). Immediately, a puzzle appears for reason: how can Socrates have fallen for Protagoras when during the whole conversation he mostly warred with the sophist and attacked his views? Wherefrom the erotic pleasure that shows in Socrates’ face when he encounters the unnamed friend? These questions are at the heart of the relationship between sophrosyne and sophia, the appetites and reason. Interestingly, that is exactly what the dialogue will reveal without taking a stand: the relationship among the virtues. The erotic charge that Socrates experiences matching wits with Protagoras, furthermore, is strong inducement for the appetites to align themselves with spiritedness in the quest proposed. In fact, Socrates’ eroticized state at the onset of the dialogue gives us a strong dramatic clue of how we should feel at the end: if we have practiced the elenchus fully, we too, will feel erotic pleasure in contemplating the beauty of the philosophical inquiry just experienced. The Protagoras is outstandingly erotic. Even reason pursues knowledge of virtue in tantalizing stages. No sooner is a view presented than its failure to persuade reason is exposed. Every view is provisional and no dogmatic assertion remains untested. Every question and every response awakens a desire to engage in further inquiry—and this in the presence of foreign and local luminaries known for their power in politics, the arts, medicine and other crafts (Protagoras 314e–315b). Before Socrates arrived in the house of Callias, most of these men followed Protagoras enthralled. Socrates describes their procession as a dance that “simply delighted” him when he “saw how beautifully they took care never to get in Protagoras’ way … It was quite lovely” (Protagoras 315b). Alcibiades, too, was in the house of Callias that day, having arrived shortly after Socrates (Protagoras 316a). It is before that audience that Socrates discredits every claim that Protagoras makes and ends deflating even his own claim, so that in the end, the two contestants/enquirers exchange views but the conversation remains inconclusive and inquiry is

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postponed. Importantly, right before they become aware of the shift, Socrates impersonates the conversation: “It seems to me that our discussion has turned on us, and if it had a voice of its own, it would say, mockingly, ‘Socrates and Protagoras, how ridiculous you are, both of you’” (Protagoras 361a) This sensuousness that originated the narration of the conversation to an unnamed friend, continues and it is the embodied discussion now personified that shows the most crucial failure in the respective arguments of Socrates and Protagoras (Protagoras 361a-c). What does the Protagoras reveal about moderation? The lesson in moderation that the dialogue offers takes place before the discussion of virtue, outside the house of Socrates. There, Socrates receives Hippocrates, son of Apollodoros, who arrives at daybreak impatient to meet Protagoras and begin learning from that sophist immediately or sooner. What drives Hippocrates is his spiritedness or his desire for fame and victory, goods that he believes he can get if he becomes Protagoras’ follower. What Socrates calibrates through his discussion, however, is the appetitive force with which Hippocrates pursues spirited ends. Socrates restores Hippocrates to Hippocrates by asking the young man precisely what it is that he seeks through his desire to study with Protagoras. It is that returning of Hippocrates to minding his own business that moderates the young man’s conduct and best prepares him to meet the sophist. The restoration reaches its culminating point through a beautiful image in which Socrates weaves together hunger and honor—the two objects the young man’s soul first craved in his appetitive frenzy. Socrates reminds Hippocrates that when he buys food in the market place, he is able to carry the items in a container and inspect them before ingesting them. Words or teachings, however, directly enter the soul and affect it for good or ill before one can evaluate them (Protagoras 314a-c). Through the analogy, furthermore, Socrates allows Hippocrates to discover what is the element of hunger that fits spiritedness: its desire for something good or admirable. That is, hunger is not just satisfied by food, but by food fitting to support health and give nourishment. Food not meeting that condition is discarded. That is the lesson that spiritedness and reason can gain from hunger: not its modality but its scrupulousness. Thus, by awakening through questions Hippocrates’ power to reason and by luring his appetites through the food analogy, Socrates prepares the young man to moderate his responses to the sophist. Proof that the arguments will satisfy appetitive desire is in Socrates’ erotic state at the initial moments of the dialogue. In Lysis, too, when the truth about friendship eludes the philosophical search, the sensuousness of the inquiry once more prevails, this time with an added inducement for spiritedness to win, by capturing the elusive item

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during the search. Socrates comments that “friendship puts one in mind of something soft and smooth and sleek, which is presumably why it finds it easy to give us the slip; if that is what it’s like, it’s hardly surprising that it eludes us” (Lysis 216c). Thus characterized, friendship becomes tactile, ready for the appetites to grasp. That dialogue, furthermore, had introduced Lysis as an exceedingly beautiful youth for whom Hippothales pines. Hippothales believed that Socrates could help him conquer Lysis. In so far as Socrates may be said to represent mostly the rule of reason, Hippothales’ confidence in Socrates shows that reason is a friend to erotic pleasure. Thus, to the sexual lure is added a usefulness of reason for winning and conquest of a beloved. This in turn reveals a way in which all the desiring loci of soul can work together to satisfy desire (Lysis 205a– 207b). This practice of including in each dialogue something that satisfies each of the desiring powers of the soul, including sensuousness, prevails in Plato’s writings. Most notably in Phaedrus and Symposium—dialogues that begin with physical pleasure and culminate with self-knowledge based on the realization of one’s own ignorance—do we find remarkably sensuous passages. It would require more space than this essay has at its disposal to do justice to every depiction in those two dialogues. I’ll concentrate primarily on the use of ekphrasis in Symposium, specifically, in Alcibiades’ exposure of Socrates’ inner self. My aim is to show how such moments satisfy our desire for physical pleasures by producing encounters with beauty and promising increased delight if the appetites overcome the urge to tyrannize reason.

Alcibiades’ Ekphrasis Socrates: “Because you are beautiful, Theaetetus, and not ugly as Theodorus was saying, for one who speaks beautifully is beautiful and good.” (Theaetetus 185e)

A process of weaving words and images through detailed description or imitation of the item described, ekphrasis allows one to communicate beauty. It reveals something hidden or absent as if present and vividly accessible. Every speaker in the Symposium sought to thus incarnate Eros in an image of its being. Socrates, instead, revealed Eros to the soul, as it inhabits the soul, that is, as the soul’s own. In his impersonation of Diotima Socrates appealed to the whole soul by offering a mode of immortality to each desiring power. Thus, the appetites live through procreation (Symposium 207b), spiritedness lives through fame, like the heroes endure (Symposium 207c), and reason lives through the knowledge

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and virtue it pursues (Symposium 207d-e). Thus, Socrates moved Eros through every desiring power of the soul and directed eroticism towards preserving the soul’s immortality. He did not characterize Eros; he appropriated it. To Alcibiades, however, belongs the most difficult feat: to bring Socrates, already present and having just shared an intimate moment about himself (his education by Diotima), to the attention of the group with the same focus and intensity that they dedicated to Eros. That is, Alcibiades, inebriated though he claims to be (Symposium 212e), must share with others an account on how Socrates educated Alcibiades in erotic desire and right-mindedness. Together with Socrates’ speech, Alcibiades’ oration teaches how to educate appetites into desiring moderately—a task that requires that one sees both external and internal beauty in their interrelationship. Repeatedly, Alcibiades insists that the Socrates present before Agathon’s guests at the banquet is not the whole Socrates. He is like those statues of Silenus, “split down the middle, and inside it is full of tiny statues of the gods” (Symposium 215b, 216d, 216e, 221d). Socrates also resembles the satyr Marsyas (Symposium 215b) yet he seduced Alcibiades not with music but with words. Alcibiades adds, “the moment he starts to speak, I am beside myself: my heart starts leaping in my chest, the tears come streaming down my face, even the frenzied Corybantes seem sane compared to me” (Symposium, 215d). No orator, not even Pericles, has that effect on Alcibiades (Symposium 215e). Socrates, then, has provoked a strong desire in Alcibiades, not in virtue of Socrates having a beautiful body, not only through the words (as Alcibiades believes), but by wielding the power of dialectic to lure the appetites and instruct them (and Alcibiades) in sophrosyne. First, Socrates provoked shame in Alcibiades by bringing him to the realization that he should do something about his way of life. Presumably, this is what Socrates taught Alcibiades. Although Socrates “is crazy about beautiful boys” (Symposium 216d), when Alcibiades gave Socrates the opportunity to enjoy sex with him, Socrates simply allowed Alcibiades to lie next to him (Symposium 217c–219d). No more. Thus, Socrates’ lesson in sophrosyne proceeds in two modes: in deed and in word. The lesson in deed pertains to Socrates’ abstention from immediate sexual gratification. Not indulging in intercourse while allowing them the pleasure of touch, Socrates taught Alcibiades the subtlety of delight necessary to enjoy beauty. That is, Alcibiades wanted satisfaction to a sexual hunger in limited terms. By containing the flow of that direct satisfaction, Socrates allowed him to learn the pleasure of

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measured joy during physical contact. This in no way intimates that there should never be sexual intercourse between them, only that the whole soul should be able to enjoy the inner beauty of Socrates that Alcibiades had merely glimpsed. The second lesson, in words, proceeds equally subtly. Socrates suggested to Alcibiades that if he was right in his opinion of Socrates, Alcibiades was already ahead of the game: If I really have in me the power to make you a better man, then, you can see in me a beauty that is really beyond description and makes your own remarkable good looks pale in comparison. (Symposium 218d-e)

This is the same beauty that, as we discussed earlier, Socrates perceived in Protagoras (Protagoras 309c). Presumably, the beauty that Alcibiades has perceived in Socrates is also the same beauty of which Diotima spoke and to which one arrives gradually from desiring a single beautiful body to finally desiring the beautiful itself. That is, an education in erotic desire simultaneously instructs in sophrosyne, showing how to appropriate beauty not as the object of a hunger but as the source of a surfeit of pleasure. In the same way that Socrates drinks without losing soundness of mind (sophrosyne), he showed Alcibiades to enjoy the physical presence of Socrates without becoming drunk in the pleasure. The success of Alcibiades’ education becomes evident when Alcibiades shares all the levels involved in the instruction of a soul whose desires split in three basic modes. First Alcibiades practiced sophrosyne, as we discussed above, and prepared appetitive desire to function virtuously. Furthermore, Alcibiades learned courage fighting in battle side by side with Socrates (Symposium 219d–221c), thus the virtue of his desire for honor and self-esteem followed that of the appetitive cravings. Finally, Alcibiades learned wisdom in the use of arguments (Symposium 221e–222b). That is, Socrates educated Alcibiades’ whole soul into virtue or at least gave Alcibiades a chance to observe in Socrates’ deeds and words the kind of self-governing that Diotima taught Socrates and Socrates sought to teach Protagoras. Though Alcibiades thinks that he is speaking only about Socrates, Alcibiades reveals himself at every turn, including Alcibiades’ own realization of failure while having the means to succeed. Alcibiades gives us to understand that his greatest failure was in not seducing Socrates but Alcibiades’ greatest failure consists in not seducing his own appetites to follow spiritedness into being governed by reason. That failure renders Alcibiades incapable of enjoying Socrates—that rarified physical pleasure

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embodied in a dialectical tension of opposites which is the province of reason’s most sensuous manifestation, its logos. Thus the sensuousness of virtue lies as much in the practice of soundminded delight in physical beauty, as in the courageous delight in victory and honor, and wise delight in understanding. Enjoying fully this kind of sensuousness is not only the soul’s own business, it is also the business of reason as it governs the soul through eroticized inquiry. That inquiry directs Eros towards kinship or philia with Sophia guaranteeing that physical pleasure will stir the whole soul. Sophrosyne, then, secures one of the many gifts of practicing philosophy: virtuous enjoyment of bodily pleasures.

CHAPTER FIVE THE SOUNDSCAPE OF PLATO’S SYMPOSIUM LINDA ARDITO Introduction Plato’s Symposium (c. 385–380 BCE) is among the prominent works of intellectual history and the Western literary tradition. Considered one of his “most impressive”1 achievements, it is called “perhaps the most beautiful”2 of the dialogues. The atypical treatment of its narrative form, varied perspectives of its individual speeches3 and philosophical inquiry into the nature of eros (desire)—or love, as it is often put—are among the primary factors contributing to its importance and enduring influence. The last of these informs the first two, dictating the narrative setting and thematic basis of the speeches delivered by guests at a symposium. Collectively, the speeches represent wide-ranging interpretations of eros, from connoting sexual desire to, ultimately, in Socrates’ speech, desire for the beautiful. These divergences underscore the elusiveness and complexity of eros, as do Diotima’s words as quoted by Socrates that “we detach from eros a certain kind of eros and give it the name eros, imposing upon it the name of the whole; while in the other cases we employ several different names.”4 1

Plato. The Symposium and The Phaedrus: Plato’s Erotic Dialogues, trans. with introduction and commentaries by William S. Cobb (State University of New York Press, Albany, 1993), p. 11. 2 Bloom, A. 2001. The ladder of love. In Plato’s “Symposium,” trans. Seth Benardete. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 55. 3 See M. C. Howatson and Frisbee C. C. Sheffield, eds., trans. M. C. Howatson, “Introduction,” Plato, The Symposium (Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. vii, x. See also Christopher Gill, “Introduction,” Plato, ‘The Symposium’, trans., with introduction and notes by Christopher Gill (London: Penguin Group, 1999), pp. xviii-xix. 4 Plato. 2001. Symposium, trans. Seth Benardete, with commentaries by Allan Bloom and Seth Benardete. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 35.

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The challenge of love’s mystery has inspired its pursuit throughout history. The following line from the second stanza of Can vei la lauzeta mover (c. 1150), by troubadour and poet-musician Bernart de Ventadorn, reads: “Alas! how much I thought I knew about love, and how little I know!”5 A prefatory passage from Renaissance physician Jacques Ferrand’s second treatise on love (1623) says of love that it has “preoccupied all of antiquity,” and has caused “considerable trouble to all those who embarked upon this ocean of marvels.”6 Plato’s dialogue takes up this challenge in its philosophical approach to eros and has become an important source for contemplating the subject. Ferrand’s classifications of love have their basis in the health–disease axis proposed by physician Eryximachus in the Symposium, for example, and Ficino’s De amore or Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love (1469), as its title indicates, treats the dialogue directly. A closely correspondent and integral notion to eros is that of the sensuous. Likewise conceptually challenging, the “sensuous” is here consistent with its earliest applied meaning as that which is perceived by the senses over the intellect.7 Despite the dialogue’s many implicit and explicit allusions to the sensuous, its influence and affinity with eros might easily escape notice. Moreover, as the sensuous involves the direct participation of the senses, it is strongly implicated in the dramatic dynamic of the dialogue, a work justifiably considered a “dramatic masterpiece”8 and a “theatre piece” with “many of the qualities of an Hereafter, all quoted passages from Plato’s Symposium are taken from this publication and translation, and thus subsequent entries include “Symp.” and the standard indication of line number and section only. 5 “Can vei la lauzeta mover.” 1990. In Lyrics of the Middle Ages: An anthology ed. James J. Wilhelm. London: Routledge-Taylor & Francis Group, p. 69, no. 55. Wilhelm indicates in his anthology that the original text of “Can vei la lauzeta mover” appears in Section IX, from the classic edition of Carl Appel (Niemeyer, 1915), no. 43. 6 Ferrand, Jacques. 1990. A treatise on lovesickness, trans. and ed. Donald A. Beecher and Massimo Ciavolella with a critical introduction and notes. Syracuse University Press, p. 217. 7 The word “sensuous” is chosen here over “sensual” as it generally connotes an emphasis upon the senses over the intellect, without a strictly sexual connotation, as is often the case with the latter term. It is believed that John Milton first applied the term “sensuous” in 1641 to avoid the sexual connotation often associated with “sensual.” 8 Hadas, Moses. 1953. “Introduction,” Plato: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and Symposium. The Jowett translation revised and with an introduction by Moses Hadas. Chicago: Regnery Gateway, p. x.

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Aristophanic comedy.”9 Indeed, in addition to philosophy, drama is among the dialogue’s broad classifications; others include poetry, history and literature.10 These multiple classifications are indicative of the dialogue’s richness and complexity. So too is its thematic focus upon eros, which, as noted in scholarship,11 reinforces the link between philosophy and poetry, a connection fittingly aligning with Socrates’ characterization as “the most erotic of philosophers.”12 The dialogue’s subtle yet dramatic interplay between philosophy and poetry emphasizes the dual influence of the intellect and the sensuous, respectively. From the standpoint of philosophy, the intellect presides over the discernment and appreciation of the varied perspectives and levels of meaning in the speeches on eros. With respect to poetry, the sensuous finds expression in Plato’s “unusual”13 treatment of the speeches, being largely devoid of the dialectical approach typical in Socratic dialogue. It also finds a voice in its pertinency to eros. The sensuous is especially noteworthy in its expressive form as sound phenomena, and, more particularly, as conveyed via music or speech. Artists and intellectuals contemplating the senses often place great importance—if not the greatest importance—upon the sense of hearing, and thus upon the phenomenon of sound. In the painting Allegory of the Five Senses (1632)14 by Flemish Baroque painter Theodor Rombouts (1597–1637), for example, hearing dominates the scene, being allegorically depicted by a lutenist who is actively engaged in musicmaking as the other four individuals, each of whom signify one of the other senses, are gathered around him. In Rombouts’ earlier painting, The Concert (A Musical Party) (c. 1620),15 the five senses are also celebrated, but by its title and depicted concert scene hearing again presides over the other senses. Of the ancient Greeks, noted musicologist Paul Henry Lang 9

Segal, E. 1986. “Introduction,” The Dialogues of Plato. New York: Bantam Dell (Bantam Classic reissue 2006, p. xx). 10 See, for example, Stanley Rosen’s treatment of this consideration in the introduction to his Plato’s ‘Symposium’, 2nd edn. Yale: Yale University Press, 1987), pp. xxix-lxvi. 11 Bloom 2001, p. 55. 12 Ibid. 13 Christopher Gill makes note of the unusual treatment of the dialogue’s speeches. See Christopher Gill. 1999. “Introduction,” Plato, ‘The Symposium’, trans., with intro. and notes by Christopher Gill. London: Penguin, p. xix. 14 Oil on canvas 207 x 288cm, Museum voor Schone Kunsten (Ghent, Belgium). 15 Oil on canvas 44 7/8” x 68 7/8”, permanent collection, The Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens, Jacksonville, Florida, USA.

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writes that they “answered to the sensuous qualities of music.”16 In these and other similar contexts the intellect is not unimportant, of course. Rather, it corresponds to the sensuous in that it is informed by it. Historically, the sensuous is recognized as an especially important factor in the acquisition of knowledge. Recall, for example, the assertion of medieval scholastic philosopher and theologian William of Ockham (c. 1287–1347) that to pursue knowledge of either nature or humanity one should rely not solely upon reason but also upon the experience of the senses. Our inquiry into the soundscape of Plato’s Symposium is centered upon the phenomenon of sound as a facet of the sensuous. As we proceed, we shall find it beneficial to carefully consider references to its expression within the various contexts and levels of meaning throughout the dialogue. In so doing, we shall have the opportunity to more fully appreciate Plato’s soundscape from the perspective of its complex role in defining a layer of abstraction beyond that of ideas, a sensuous layer that significantly and uniquely informs the dimensionality, dramatic import, and meaning of the Symposium.

Understanding Plato’s Soundscape To appreciate a given soundscape, one should be mindful of the temporal and abstract nature of sound itself, particularly as other dimensions can easily vie for one’s attention. This is likewise important for our inquiry, especially if we are to realize the thematic relevance of sound as one of the richest expressions of the sensuous intended to enliven and more fully contextualize the dialogue. Supporting the soundscape’s complex dimensionality, Plato treats sound phenomena by both direct and indirect allusion amidst the unfolding “drama” of the story of Agathon’s symposium, the telling of which by Apollodorus is essentially what constitutes the story of the Symposium. Described as “profoundly theatrical,”17 its dramatic dimension is consistent with the Athenian view of life, a view consistent with an uneventful comingling of what today might more typically constitute such disparate fields of inquiry and practise as philosophy, music, poetry, medicine, and athletics. The following passage from Agathon’s speech underscores this earlier approach: 16

Lang, Paul Henry. (1941) 1997. Music in Western Civilization, new foreword by Leonard Botstein. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, p. 2. 17 Colaiaco, James A. 2001. Socrates against Athens: Philosophy on trial. New York: Routledge, p. 7.

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Archery, for example, medicine, and divination were invented by Apollo when desire and love were his guides; and thus he too must be a pupil of Eros, as are the Muses in music, Hephaestus in blacksmithing, Athena in weaving, and Zeus “the captain of gods and human beings.”18

Socrates would later tell Agathon’s guests that, according to Diotima, the idea of “making” has broad application, referring to anything that is transforming from “what it is not” to “what it is.” Moreover, in Diotima’s view, craftsmen are “makers” and whatever they produce that relies upon the arts constitutes “makings.” Thus the constituent dimensions of life’s activities would have been more holistically perceived and experienced. This is not to say that Plato intended the dialogue’s speeches to simply constitute a seamless narrative, without regard for their individual relevance. Plato the philosopher would have it that each speech stands both on its own terms and against the others, which, of course, would include Socrates’ speech, the most important of them. At the same time, Plato the dramatist would have it that each speech lends to the continuation of a life drama, here seen through the lens of Apollodorus’ telling of the story of Agathon’s symposium.

Plato’s Soundscape and the Reader The appreciation of any creative work is reliant upon what is brought to it by the observer/listener/reader. Thus when considering the passages of the dialogue, we should be mindful of the ease with which both its explicit and implicit allusions to sound phenomena can escape our notice or recede in our thinking, compromising our ability to appreciate them more deeply and comprehensively. Interestingly, as has been noted in scholarship, Plato does not explicitly implicate himself within the dialogue. Even so, by reference to the layers of query regarding the story of Agathon’s symposium, by its retrospective perspectives in the telling of it, and by Apollodorus’ account of it to his unnamed companion, we may take it that he is indirectly inviting us, his readers, to step into the scene of that gathering, as Apollodorus would do with each subsequent account of it. There we would find ourselves in the midst of Agathon’s party, hearing the speeches according to Apollodorus’ telling of the story. What we as readers bring to the story in the telling of it to others would ever shape and transform it. We learn from Apollodorus that the party had occurred many years prior to his recent telling of it, when he was yet a boy. Typically of 18

Symp. 197a-b.

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symposia generally, its guests comprised a rather exclusive segment of the Athenian male aristocracy. We, as readers, are nevertheless indirectly invited to the “there” of Agathon’s party, but not unaccompanied, as one might imagine. Instead, we are, in a sense, accompanied by Apollodorus, walking in the footsteps of his acquaintance with whom he had recently shared the story as they headed to town; or perhaps we are as his unnamed companion whom we never actually meet but who, at the opening of the dialogue, has implicitly asked about the story of the party. Also, as we are necessarily without a formal invitation to the party, we might find ourselves identifying with Aristodemus, walking in his footsteps as he accompanies Socrates to the party despite not having been invited. During their walk, he considers what he might say to explain his arrival there. In any case, Agathon wholeheartedly welcomes him, adding that he had not meant to exclude him. Perhaps Plato is indeed telling us, his readers, that we walk metaphorically in the footsteps of Aristodemus, and thus we, too, are welcomed at Agathon’s despite not having been formally invited. This metaphor becomes our invitation, placing us in the role of accompanying Socrates, in being in his presence. Ultimately, Plato’s dialogue affords us the opportunity to step into this role or the roles of either Apollodorus’ companion or his acquaintance. In the latter two contexts, we are invited to experience Agathon’s symposium by hearing the telling of it as we read about it. Plato has it that the “there” of the party is also accommodated by an ever-present “here.” Indeed, Plato carefully articulates a rather complex telescoping of time in the multiple retellings of the story of the party. In so doing he eradicates its purely local relevance and substitutes in its place an implicit potentiality for infinite widening to accommodate, as we shall see, the theme of human striving for immortality. Plato focuses extensively upon this human desire and preoccupation, which signifies a culminating notion within which the applicability of eros shines most brightly. Thus we take our cue from Apollodorus’ unnamed companion, who, by his query about Agathon’s party and its speeches, paves the way for us to step into his role, the role of listener. This is particularly significant in that though we read about Apollodorus’ account we ourselves are soon drawn into the listening of it, having been indirectly invited to listen to the telling of it, the recounting of it. In this context, and at this rather abstract level, sound itself becomes particularly important in that the telling of the story is where the emphasis shifts from a literary one to one based upon the oral tradition, upon the sounding of the telling of the story, with its featured speeches, which themselves would resonate not only within the scene of the party but, metaphorically, across time. This is a subtle yet profound

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moment in Plato’s treatment of sound phenomena and of the soundscape generally, conveying the complexity of its dimensionality as well as its enduring relevance, here in the form of speech. Thus Plato places the highest value not in our reading of the account but in our imagined listening to the telling of it. His artful and purposeful inclusion of both explicit and implicit allusions to sound take us from largely intellectualizing and, in part, conceivably historicizing the contents of the dialogue, to experiencing an imagined “now” reconstructed from places and spaces enlivened by such implicit sounds as the collective footsteps of Apollodorus and his acquaintance as they head to town, or, later, those of Socrates and Aristodemus as they head to Agathon’s party, or even those of Socrates as he is said by Alcibiades to have marched through the ice at Potidaea. The more explicit sounds include such expressions as singing, the music of the flute girl, laughter and the speeches and intermittent conversations. From Apollodorus’ account of the party, our imaginations are folded into the dramatic mix of a facet of Athenian life hidden to most and, in any case, otherwise lost to time. Plato takes this story of exclusivity, privilege, and even a certain remoteness, and, ironically, has made it available to any and all who might hear it, even if by the reading of the telling of it. This is particularly noteworthy given that the Athens of Plato’s day, though already a democratic society, had not seen a change to the exclusionary nature of Athenian symposia. Guests at such affairs were typically limited to between nine and thirty aristocratic men. Such admittance criteria doubtless lent to the association of symposia with a certain kind of attractiveness amongst the circle of participants and perhaps a certain curiosity if not intrigue amongst those on the outside. Thus it is noteworthy that in writing about the telling of the symposium, Plato has lifted the temporal and social barriers ordinarily associated with such occasions, making possible for readers the experience of its unfolding sensuousness, philosophy, poetry and drama. With respect to the last of these, the sensuousness of sound is of particular importance as the dialogue’s soundscape opens up the dramatic dimension. Indeed we may say that its sonic strands constitute an intricately woven dynamism, a rarified living patchwork in the cultural fabric of the collective identity of a people.

The Sounds of Plato’s Soundscape The dialogue’s early references to song and speech set the groundwork for a meaningfully sensuous soundscape. We can generally imagine the explicit sounds of conversation and of music, but first Plato introduces us

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to what might seem to be an implicitly incidental detail: the sound of footsteps. These are introduced when Apollodorus mentions to his unnamed companion, who inquires about the story of the speeches at Agathon’s, that he has just recently shared an account of it with an acquaintance while heading to town. We know Plato has purposely counted these footsteps amongst his palette of sounds as he has found it important enough to have Apollodorus mention to his unnamed companion—and, therefore, to us—that he was joined by an acquaintance and shared the story with him as they continued their walk to town. Thus Plato has it that the story is being recounted while accompanied by their walking, rendering it all the more dynamic in this seeming detail, which also contributes to the dynamic dimension of the dialogue’s dramatic unfolding. Indeed the two men are not merely sitting across from each other as an account of the story unfolds, as though it signifies a static story fixed in time and thus for all time; it is not a dead account with perhaps some historical curiosity. Plato’s insertion of this seeming detail of the walk to town as the story of Agathon’s party is told implicitly paints an important and lively scene both for the telling of the story and for the story itself. Moreover, consider that Apollodorus’ footsteps are reinforced by a second set upon the appearance of his acquaintance, and, together, they provide the implicit sonic and rhythmic backdrop to the telling of the story. Later, within Apollodorus’ recounting of the party we learn of another set of parallel footsteps when Socrates and Aristodemus are heading to the party. Initially, we, as readers, are implicitly invited to walk with Apollodorus and hear the story of the party. Soon thereafter, however, the dramatic dimension of the dialogue has us walking with Apollodorus through the story and into the actual scene, as we imagine it, of Agathon’s party. Indeed, the imagined hearing of the telling of the story becomes as a portal transporting us back to the time of Apollodorus’ telling of the story and then to the time of the party itself.

Re-imagining the Sounds of Plato’s Soundscape Such implicit sounds as the aforementioned footsteps are woven throughout the poetic layers of the dialogue. Yet the work’s more immediate, non-sound-based subjects can easily distract us from their relevance. Even without distraction, there would remain the uncertainty as to whether our reconstruction of Plato’s soundscape would at all resemble that which he had intended. This is because we hear differently from the ancients. That is to say, we focus our attention differently; we approach listening differently, and it seems that we interpret sounds differently. In a

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similar vein, it is widely held among scientists and scholars that the ancients appear to have perceived color differently. We learn this already in the Iliad and the Odyssey, with mention of such unexpected colors19 as the “wine-dark”20 sea and the “bronze” sky, though it is uncertain how such factors as evolution, consciousness and language might be implicated.21 As for the basis of the comparative differences with respect to hearing, it seems that culture and environment are factors. Devoid of a multitude of diverse, modern-day sounds, the world of the ancients would have been considerably quieter than that of the present day and thus their understanding and experience of the relationship of sound to silence would have been different. We may imagine that the ancients, generally, experienced sound more acutely and comprehensively in the context of a holistic silence-sound continuum. This would have been partly owing to their comparatively greater connectedness to the natural world, as more of their time was typically spent out-of-doors, and, in the Greek world in particular, often with the outlook of being on a kind of public stage. In this kind of setting, then, sound would have been more likely experienced not as filling a gap or rising up out of a void but as an expression of the life force within the continuum of the sound-silence axis. In this context, sound and silence are comingled in endless variation along this continuum, with each carrying the potential of the other’s expression. In this way, silence is ever present during the expression of sound and vice versa, and thus expressing the one suggests the other. Moreover, to the ancients, the sounds between silences and the silences between sounds constituted what might be described as an enmeshed continuum in the dynamic experience of the drama of life itself. To imagine Plato’s intended soundscape we must first confront the obvious fact that no direct access to the actual sounds of his day exist today. We are solely reliant upon informational sources to piece together our imaginary palette of the music, speeches, and ambient sounds referenced in the dialogue. Moreover, we have few extant examples of notated music of the ancient Greek world owing in part to a largely improvisational approach to music within the parameters of a stillflourishing oral tradition. The dialogue’s opening lines reflect its 19 See, for example, Arthur Zajonc, 1995. Catching the light: the entwined history of light and mind. New York: Oxford University Press. 20 Homer, Odyssey, Book V. 21 For an interesting and informative inquiry into philosophical issues pertaining to the question of color vision, see Byrne, Alex & Hilbert, David R. 2000. “Colour vision, Philosophical issues about.” In Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science. Macmillan Reference.

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continued currency, with Apollodorus, at the apparent request of a companion, preparing, as noted previously, to tell the story of Agathon’s party, which, he had only recently recounted for an acquaintance. The suggestion of multiple iterations of the story underscores the common practise of this tradition as well as the importance of the story itself despite whatever inconsistencies might arise over time in the telling of it. This points to Plato’s artful approach to the dialogue and perhaps intimates the validity of the approach we might take in our imagined participation within the story. We may wonder why this should be so, why Plato would have conceived of the dialogue as he did. He clearly aims to uncover levels of truth, as well as draw closer to the highest, philosophical truth, a truth which dissolves levels and details as it emerges, a truth that points to that highest and best form of eros in the seeking of wisdom, the good, and the beautiful. In this seeking, one aims ever closer to the truth of the ultimate desire for immortality. While the mitigating factors mentioned above leave ample room to doubt the reliability of any soundscape we might imaginatively reconstruct with respect to Plato’s dialogue, Plato’s inclusion of references to lessthan-accurate accounts of Agathon’s party nevertheless encourage us to do so. Interestingly, Plato could only be assured of imparting his particular version of the story to generations far into the future by breaking with the oral tradition and writing about it, though what he writes is about the telling of it. With this approach Plato continues to celebrate the oral tradition and maintains the fundamental importance of the soundscape within the narrative. The telling of the story—the sounding of it in the telling of it—is itself a dramatic event central to the story. It is what animates the story, what makes it real, and what resonates on multiple and implicitly infinite levels of its soundscape. Moreover, in revisiting the telling of the story, we, too, become a part of this tradition, celebrating at the symposium, and, by extension, in its story. Despite the majority of the retrospectives in the narratives, this correspondence across time, this writing about the telling of the telling of the story links past, present and future, with Plato implicitly crediting most the oral tradition for inspiring this unifying and infinitely enduring outcome. Indeed, notwithstanding the invariable “decay” associated with authentic, acoustic sounds, Plato’s dialogue of the story—albeit with its somewhat faded or inaccurate recollections—lingers for yet another recounting of it. In this context, Plato’s emphasis upon sound and, by extension, its implicit sensuousness, informs the dialogue’s dramatic dimension, which, in turn, enlivens and implicitly perpetuates the work.

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In recent times, sound’s temporality has inspired the invention of a variety of technological devices designed for its “capture”/recording. Of course, a basic and obvious difference between recorded and acoustical sound is that the latter, being “authentically” sounded, unfolds in “real” time and in what we might call an “original” space; that is, the authentic space of the original acoustical event. Yet as the former renders more than a vague approximation of that event, its listeners would have a far greater advantage in appreciating the original, acoustical expression upon which it is based. Sound’s temporality has also inspired more recent efforts to “collect”/record sounds from various societies and regions of the world. Interestingly, such collections now include a category of sounds considered “endangered.” Beyond the recording of acoustic sounds, technology itself can be a means of producing new, “original” sounds, and this has been an influence found in a variety of musical genres, particularly since the mid-twentieth century. In probing a deeper past whose sounds have long since dissipated, whose music can only be imagined—and, at that, without any measure of accuracy—we are necessarily confronted with an obvious question: How are we to appreciate an ancient soundscape without any form of access to the actual sounds of which it was comprised, without at least the benefit that later would be afforded by modern recording technologies? Compounding this challenge, music was almost entirely improvisatory, based upon an oral tradition in which poetry would dictate the meter, rhythm, and accents of song. Thus, with little in the way of notated music, we are left to rely upon the descriptions of ancient poetical, theoretical, and philosophical writings, to such pictorial evidence as vase paintings, statues, and representations on reliefs and other artwork, and to the physical evidence of certain relatively early musical instruments and later examples of notated music, most of which appear in fragmentary form. We are also left to educated guesses, our own imaginations, and, indeed, to coming perilously close to questioning the benefit of having taken up this inquiry in the first place. Yet we should not ignore Plato’s implicit sounds of the metered and unmetered speeches at Agathon’s symposium, with what would be their varying intonations, inflections, and timbres. Nor should we ignore the mention of music, whether it is that of the flute girl or of song. Indeed speech and song are said to convey the very “cultural significance”22 of symposia. These and other sounds are purposefully and 22

Hook, Brian S. 2009. The tragic comedy of sex in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata and Plato’s Symposium. In Bloom’s Literary Themes: Human Sexuality, edited and with an introduction by Harold Bloom; volume editor, Blake Hobby (p. 82). New York, NY: Bloom’s Literary Criticism.

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artfully woven into the thematic fabric of the dialogue. We should therefore concede that we have before us a soundscape worthy of our consideration to whatever extent reasonably possible. From such an endeavor we are afforded the opportunity to consider the importance of sound from both intellectual and imagined, experiential/sensuous vantage points for a broader appreciation of Plato’s intended soundscape. From such considerations we also can appreciate the meaning and value of sound in the context of the work as a whole. Hence, to the question of the worthiness of our inquiry, I am reminded of a passage from Henri Marrou’s fictional dialogue between a “Classical Scholar” and a “Modern Man,” from his essay, “The Heritage of the Ancient World”: [Modern-day man] would be much farther away from the ancients … and their classicism would be much more foreign to us, if Western men had not made repeated but distinctive efforts to recapture the heritage of antiquity, to rediscover whatever time had obliterated or they had forgotten.”23

Plato’s outlook is similar, for example, in Diotima’s view that it is human nature to instill a “fresh memory” in replacement of one that is “departing.”

Athenian Symposia The word “symposium” refers to “drinking together.” The typical drink would have been some diluted mixture of wine and water. At certain points during such occasions there would have been music, whether vocal, accompanied by the lyre, or of the “flutes,” more properly called the auloi. Interestingly, wine and song share a deeper connection in that the early cultivation of the vine and the earliest expressions of song were fundamental to the “greater ‘cultivation’ and flowering of some of our

23 Marrou, Henri. 1961. The heritage of the ancient world. In Chapters in Western Civilization, 3rd edn. Columbia University Press. Vol. I, p. 5. This quote appears previously in Ardito, Linda. Perspectives on academic research.” In Paideia: Education in the Global Era, eds. Konstantine Boudouris and Mikonja Knezevic. (Athens: Ionia Publications, International Center for Greek Philosophy and Culture & K.B.), vol I, pp. 28–29. I should like to add that though Marrou’s commentary refers solely to the efforts of “Western men” in recapturing the heritage of antiquity, we can of course expand upon his point, broadening it to include all individuals from all parts of the globe who have taken an interest in the subject and have contributed to its advancement in scholarly discourse.

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earliest civilizations.”24 Their shared intoxicative potential brings to the fore the interplay of their respective scientific and artistic roots and influences. Later, we find that words, too, carry this potential, as, for example, when Alcibiades is “thunderstruck” at hearing Socrates’ speech. As previously mentioned, symposia were privately held affairs with anywhere from around nine to thirty male guests from aristocratic society. Women musicians, slaves and/or prostitutes might also be present at certain times. The assigned group leader, later called the “symposiarch” (c. 1600, English), adhered to agreed-upon rules such as the order of the speeches, a feature of such occasions. Notwithstanding the commonplace imposition of rules, the purpose and meaning of symposia varied and thus we cannot conclude that all such gatherings adhered to any one particular set of rules and/or restrictions. The andron, a room specifically designated for men, is where symposia took place. This was typically a relatively more private space described as having “low accessibility and high openness values.”25 Unlike most other dwelling places, it was not ordinarily accessible directly from the courtyard, being separated from it by a smaller room. In the case of the andron at Agathon’s, where the symposium Apollodorus speaks of takes place, whether or not it was situated directly next to the courtyard, it would have been conducive to a soundscape devoid of a good many of the sounds that might otherwise have emanated from beyond its walls. This, of course, would further emphasize the sensuousness of the sounds within the interior space. Moreover, tapestries may well have lined its walls, a feature typically found in the more “elegant”26 private dwellings. These, too, would have been a factor in favorably supporting the acoustics of the room while further insulating it from outside noise/sounds. With a greater ability to concentrate upon the sounds within the andron we might gather that, as with the symposium itself, the nature and variety of sounds comprising its acoustic environment would also be regulated rather than arbitrary, with not all sounds being equally acceptable. For example, Robert Garland, in 24

See Ardito, Linda. 2002. The magico-medicinal ethos of eine and song in the Homeric Hymn to Dionysos. In Thinking Outside the Box, Proceedings of the Sixth Oneonta Undergraduate Philosophy Conference, Oneonta Philosophy Studies, Historical and Cultural Perspectives, ed. Douglas W. Shrader, p. 183. State University of New York, College at Oneonta: Oneonta Philosophy Studies. 25 Nevett, Lisa C. 2001. House and society in the ancient Greek world. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 66. 26 Robert Garland notes that androns in the more “elegant” private homes could feature floor mosaics and wall tapestries. See Garland, Robert. 2008. Ancient Greece: everyday life in the birthplace of Western civilization. New York: Sterling, p. 157.

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his interesting and informative book, Ancient Greece, refers to the philosopher Theophrastos (c. 372–288 BCE) as having cited a number of instances of “bad form” at symposia: It was, [Theophrastus] tells us, the mark of an uneducated lout to drop his cup while the rest of the company was at prayer and burst out laughing, to tap or whistle in accompaniment to the flute girl, or to spit across the table at the wine pourer.27

The symposium proper typically took place after the meal and could include a mix of social and intellectual activities. Common musical instruments at such events included the lyre and/or kithara (the latter being a larger instrument for the more professional musician) and the aulos/auloi (the latter, a double aulos). In ancient Greece, these were the most important of the string and wind groups of instruments, respectively. The aulos/auloi was associated with the cult of the wine-god Dionysos, while the lyre and kithara, the enlightened aims of the cult of Apollo. Both wind and string instruments were in use at symposia, though for the recitation of poetry they would have relied upon the support of instruments from the string group—typically the lyre or kithara. The aulos/auloi, instrument(s) of Dionysos, would have been perfectly suited to the setting of a drinking party, and this brings to the fore an important point about symposia that again draws the sensuous into focus. Clearly a symposium had rules, restrictions and formalities, but, as R. E. Allen says, “it is more than that.”28 He makes the important point that at such affairs drinking is “ritualistic,” a “private religious ceremony,” indeed, a “religious act, an acknowledgment both of divinity through wine and of mutual fellowship.”29 Robert Garland puts it that “every stage of the symposium was marked by a traditional religious observance.”30 Hence in the context of this religious dimension of symposia, the experiential, sensuous dimension emerges rather strongly with dedications, offerings, speeches and the music of hymns31 and paeans sung by the guests to honor the gods. Agathon’s symposium is held to celebrate his 27

Ibid., p. 158. R. E. Allen, trans. with comment/analysis, “Prologue: Apollodorus to a Companion (172a-174a),” Plato, ‘The Symposium’ (Yale University Press, 1991), 2.3. 29 Ibid.. 30 Garland, op. cit., 158. 31 The generic term “hymnos” connotes a devotional song to a deity, with religious ritual, myth and poetry at its core. See Ardito, “The magico-medicinal ethos of wine and song,” p. 185. 28

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victory for his first tragedy. This occurred in 416 BCE at the Lenaea, a festival honoring the god Dionysos. It is the story of this symposium that becomes the basis of Plato’s Symposium, and thus the story we come to know.

Plato’s Symposium The Symposium (c. 385 BCE) is one of Plato’s middle period works. It includes mention of such historical persons as Socrates (469–399BCE), the politician Alcibiades (450–404 BCE), the comic poet Aristophanes (c. 450–c. 388 BCE), the tragic playwright Agathon (c. 448–400 BCE), and the physician Eryxmiachus (b. mid-fifth century BCE), who was also the son of a physician. Little is known about the intellectual Pausanias (fl. c. 420 BCE) or Phaedrus, who, along with Eryximachus, had been accused of destroying Athenian Herms (stone structures/statues of Hermes) just prior to Alcibiades departure to lead the Sicilian Expedition. Moreover, we find no definitive historical basis for the others of the dialogue including Pausanias, Diotima, Aristodemus and Apollodorus. Apollodorus’ recounting of Agathon’s symposium features seven speeches given by Phaedrus (178a–180c), Pausanias (180c–185c), Eryximachus (185e–188e), Aristophanes (189a–193d), Agathon (194e– 197e), Socrates (201d–212c) and Alcibiades (215a–222b)32 respectively. Diotima, through Socrates, might be said to also have given a speech there—at least this is how Socrates would have it appear. Moreover, Apollodorus’ commentary during the recounting of the story likewise might be taken into account. That Socrates tells of his earlier meeting with Diotima again shows a layering of time, here associated with memorable speech, adding to the dialogue’s complex dimensionality. Recall, too, that Apollodorus had not attended the dinner-party as he was yet a child, but he learned of it through Aristodemus, who had attended and knew Socrates. This along with Apollodorus’ mention of Socrates’ recent confirmation of the accuracy of the story lends credibility to it. Even so, it is clear from the outset that the narrative is complex, particularly in its layered retellings of Agathon’s party. Plato sets the events recounted by Apollodorus at about the year 416 BCE. The story Apollodorus recounts is about a dinner party celebrating Agathon’s victory at the Lenaea for his tragedy. It is this party that 32

As there are several speeches and much to consider within each, I have taken William S. Cobb’s helpful approach by noting the applicable sections for each speaker. Henceforth, material cited from their individual speeches corresponds to the section as indicated.

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becomes the basis of the symposium story, with its guests who will each give a speech on the nature of eros/Eros. That it is the success of Agathon’s tragedy that becomes the basis of celebration is particularly apropos as such a work was to be appreciated not solely intellectually but also emotionally/sensuously. Plato’s pupil Aristotle would put it that the aim of tragedy is catharsis, which is typically brought about via a dramatic form of communication primarily appreciated subjectively by the emotions as opposed to objectively by the intellect.33 Agathon’s dinner party is the stage set for what we might call the theater piece of Plato’s Symposium, the story about the story. In it we learn that Agathon’s victory and celebration would be followed the next day by his celebratory yet comparably more reserved symposium; and it is in this latter venue that the speeches on the nature of eros/love occur. In taking an artful, more dramatic and quasi-historical approach to the dialogue, Plato is emphasizing not so much accuracy of detail but philosophical thinking,34 with its aim of arriving at deeper truth(s). He presents us with what appears to be a simple, agreed-upon subject for the speeches: the nature of eros/love. All of the speeches eventually lead us to the speech of speeches—that is, Socrates’ speech. Socrates himself would say that it is based upon what he has heard from the prophetess Diotima. It would seem that it is a speech that offers as closely as possible an answer to the query on the nature of love, though it requires philosophy for its discernment. Ironically, it is the philosopher, who, seeking after wisdom, calls upon desire, and it is this dynamic principle that mediates between things human and divine, and which constitutes the essential embodiment of eros. The story of Agathon’s symposium begins with Apollodorus telling his unnamed companion that, just the other day, an acquaintance had seen him “a long way off from behind”35 and had playfully called out to him so he could “catch up,” which he does. As they head to town, Apollodorus recounts the story of the dinner party. What might appear to be a rather incidental scene between acquaintances nevertheless suggests some important features of the Athenian soundscape. Apollodorus’ home is in Phaleron, approximately five miles from Athens. He is on foot and heading towards the city, but stops to allow his acquaintance to “catch up.” Though the two men are obviously in sight of one another, we do not know the actual distance between them. As the acquaintance is said to have been a “long way off,” he could well have been at quite a significant distance. That Apollodorus had not heard his implicit footsteps from 33

Aristotle, Poetics 6, 1449b24–9. See also Christopher Gill, op. cit., xviii. 35 Symp. 173A. 34

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behind seems to support this possibility. Moreover, Apollodorus makes the point that he stopped so that his acquaintance could “catch up”. That the acquaintance was initially situated behind him indicates that it was an auditory cue—his calling out, not the sound of his footsteps—that caught Apollodorus’ attention, enabling them to meet. Also, though Apollodorus would have had his back towards the acquaintance and was at enough of a distance that he had not heard his footsteps, he nevertheless appears to have heard his call with relative ease. This tells us something about the Athenian soundscape in that the ambient sounds of the environment had not impeded the voice of the acquaintance from reaching Apollodorus despite some acknowledged distance between them. This also supports the notion that in the relatively quieter world of the ancients, sounds were less compromised or impeded in their travel and thus could be heard more acutely, and, in a certain sense, perhaps even experienced more deeply. This would argue that Plato had intended to convey to readers that there was indeed a fair amount of distance between the two men as Apollodorus had not heard the footsteps of his acquaintance but had heard him calling out to him. Thus this seemingly incidental account reveals much about Plato’s intended soundscape, particularly as he clearly deemed it worthy of mention within the work. In continuing to construct our imagined soundscape of the dialogue, we should consider another factor. The port cities of Phaleron and Piraeus were each connected to the inland city of Athens by a wall. Referred to as the “Long Walls” owing to their relatively long span, their history as fortification to accommodate the Athenian navy with an important connection to the sea, and as protection for the city from attack, is well known. The walls were initially constructed in the mid-fifth century BCE, destroyed by the Spartans in 404 BCE after the Athenian defeat in the Peloponnesian War, and rebuilt during the Corinthian War (395–387 BCE), when Athens, with its allied states (Thebes, Corinth and Argos) and a Persian fleet, defeated Sparta. Construction of the “Wall of Phaleron” occurred between 437 and 432 BCE under the “Periclean Building Program.” It would be reconstructed over the years to serve as protection during wartime. As noted in scholarship,36 however, Pericles had earlier (c. 443) succeeded in having another long wall built parallel to the northern wall of the port of Peiraeus and leading to Athens. This other wall formed a far narrower and “defensible, fortified” passage, leaving the “Wall of Phaleron” in increasing disrepair, with, as it is imagined, the “open beach of Phaleron bay becoming deserted for the quays and marts of 36 Cotterill, H. B. (1915) 1996. Ancient Greece. Royston, Hertfordshire: Oracle Publishing, p. 297.

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the new harbours.”37 Thus we cannot know with certainty the condition of the Phaleron Wall either at the time of Agathon’s party in 416 BCE or at the time Plato wrote the Symposium. Moreover, we cannot know with certainty to what extent the relatively impressive walls might have had some effect on the sound being projected in its vicinity. The following passage pertaining to the Phaleron Wall appears in a nineteenth-century dictionary of Greek and Roman antiquity: The height of the Long Walls is nowhere stated; but we may presume that they were not lower than the walls of Peiraeus, which were 40 cubits or 60 feet high (Apian, Mithr. 30.)38

If this was indeed the height of the Phalerian Walls then there might well have been some mediation of the sounds generated in their vicinity. In any case, the ancients would have been highly attuned to the sounds within their environment. We need only consider the following description of the launching of an arrow in the more remote time of Homer’s Iliad to gain an appreciation for the comparative difference: “he flexed the great weapon back in a half-circle—the bow sprang! The string sang out.”39 Here the bow’s reverberating string becomes an event, a melodious focal point despite the brief, temporal trajectory of its sonic life. A recent scholar says of the bow that it is “not silent in action” and of the arrow, too, that it, “like the flight of sound … is audible in travel.”40 Futurist painter and composer Luigi Russolo writes:

37

Ibid. Smith, William (ed.). 1872. A dictionary of Greek and Roman geography. London: John Murray, vol. 1, p. 261. 39 Homer, Iliad, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Viking, 1990), 5.502-17. This excerpt is previously cited in Linda Ardito, “Reverberating strings: Echoes of Apollo,” Musical Sounds from Past Millennia, Proceedings of the International Symposium on Musical Acoustics, Perugia Italia, September 10–14, 2001; eds. D. Bonsi, D. Gonzalez, D. Stanzial (Musical and Architectural Acoustics Laboratory FSSG-CNR, c/o Fondaz. Cini, Venezia, Italia, 2001), vol. 2, p. 604. 40 Lippman, Edward A. 1964. Musical thought in ancient Greece. New York: Columbia University Press, p. 11. Previously cited in Ardito, Reverberating strings, p. 604. 38

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Noises being so scarce, the first musical sounds which man succeeded in drawing from a hollow reed or from a stretched string were a new, astonishing, miraculous discovery.41

Russolo’s point is worth noting as we contemplate moments in the soundscape of Plato’s Symposium. It serves to remind us that, in reading the Symposium, when encountering references to seemingly incidental sound phenomena we should consider how such sounds might well have been experienced differently by the ancients. Apollodorus says that upon winning the prize Agathon and his choral dancers “celebrated the victory sacrifice.”42 This paints a preliminary soundscape of celebratory sounds, followed the next day by the more reserved soundscape of the symposium at Agathon’s house. We may also gather that the soundscape in which the story is being told by Apollodorus is relatively quiet. For example, he says to his acquaintance, “the way to town … is as suitable for speaking, while we walk, as for listening.”43 Another translation of this same line reads: “walking on the road to the city gives us a good chance to talk and listen as we go along.”44 Either translation affords us essentially the same probable conclusion: the ancient environs were quiet enough for conversation and, in general, presumably much more so than ours. Plato has it that the men are on foot and though he does not mention any of the ambient sounds that might accompany their walk to the city, they are implicit and require our participation to bring them to life. Though this would be an entirely subjective conjuring of imaginary sounds, Plato the dramatist paints enough of a dramatic scene for us to insert such features as the sound of footsteps on a dusty ground as Apollodorus and his companion head to town, perhaps amidst the intermittent singing of birds. As Apollodorus’ story of the party proceeds we learn that Aristodemus had not been formally invited. He appears to feel a bit awkward upon arriving at the party, particularly as he does so alone despite having been earlier accompanied by Socrates who has found a nearby porch on which to become contemplative. Guests are midway through their dinner before Socrates finally arrives. Seeming to mark his long-awaited arrival, libations are made and a song is sung to the god. It is noteworthy that 41

Russolo, Luigi. 1938. The art of noises. In Slonimsky, Nicolas. Music since 1900. New York: W. W. Norton, p. 536. Previously cited in Ardito, Reverberating strings, p. 604. 42 Symp. 173A. 43 Symp. 173B. 44 Gill, op. cit., 4.

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music underscores the importance of this moment, a moment contrasted and punctuated by the preceding suggested scene of Socrates in a transfixed and silent state on a nearby porch. Socrates is left alone there in his trance-like state despite Agathon’s urging to retrieve him from there. Here Plato artistically leaves an acoustic space to suggest the stillness conducive of deep, meditative thought. The soundscape is thus set against a gap of silence subjectively superimposed by Socrates. In his stillness, action is juxtaposed with inaction as sound is juxtaposed with silence. Yet his meditative state suggests a different variety of activity in what outwardly appears as inactivity, and the great, contemplative noise, too, outwardly appears as silence. The contrast of sound with silence, their respective guises as the “other,” the mention of song juxtaposed with the profoundly amplified silence of Socrates’ meditative stillness are intended by Plato not merely for added interest but to further delineate the soundscape, to mark the importance of Socrates’ arrival at the party and to enhance the dialogue’s sense of drama. Drinking commences after singing and the performance of some customary rites, but Pausanias suggests that each guest be allowed discretion as to the amount of wine to be consumed, particularly as there had been quite a lot of drinking in the previous night’s celebration. Eryximachus, the physician who is also the son of the physician Acumenus, agrees with Pausanias’ suggestion of drinking moderately. Song marks the inception of the party “proper”—that is, the party once Socrates joins the others, and the venerated Eros becomes a symbolic first and last guest there. In this context, melody becomes an important mediator between the divine and the mundane, between the realm of the gods and the world of humans. As we shall discover later from Socrates’ account of Diotima’s view about Eros, this middle ground, this in-between realm, is the realm of Eros. Melody may be viewed similarly, signifying an inspiration of the divine that serves as a celebratory prelude to the symposium. Music has, for the moment, served its lofty purpose, and the soundscape takes a deliberate turn towards speech. Indeed, Plato draws attention to speech and song by making an obvious distinction between them in Eryximachus’ proposal that the flute girl be dismissed so that the speeches can begin. In his proposal he adds that on this particular day they shall share their time through speeches. As the music making has just ended, it is perhaps with a bit of irony that the musical genres of hymns and paeans are then mentioned by Eryximachus just prior to the first speech given by Phaedrus:

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On several occasions Phaedrus has said to me in annoyance, “Isn’t it awful, Eryximachus, that hymns and paeans have been made by poets for other gods, but for Eros, who is so great and important a god, not one of the many poets there have been has ever made even a eulogy?”45

Thus song signals the commencement of the symposium and its subsequent mention precedes the first speech. Allusions to song and to speech are characteristic in Plato’s approach to the soundscape, and they draw particular attention to the importance of both. Speech is the initial focal point in Apollodorus’ layered recounting of his conversations. Telling his companion of his previous conversation with an acquaintance about Agathon’s dinner party from years earlier, which had been told to him by Aristodemus, etc., collapses a sense of time as the different layers of speech are introduced. Plato thus treats speech and song as the two primary sonic manifestations of the Symposium, and we shall see how they support and contribute to the dialogue’s highly dimensional architectonic structure. We shall also see how both speech and song underscore an active adherence to oral tradition, to years of imparting “the story.” Speech and song form a sensuous backdrop for contemplating eros, the primary subject of the symposium and of the dialogue. Plato has the firm backing of tradition in including both speech and song as focal points at the very beginning of the work. Traditionally, the Muses would be representative of both. Hesiod, in his Theogony, for example, would have the Muses instruct him to “always put [them] at the beginning and end of [his] singing.”46 Also recall that both the Iliad and the Odyssey, monumental epic poems at the very foundation of Greek literature and themselves based upon a long oral tradition, begin with an invocation to the Muse(s).47 Indeed oral tradition itself dictates this approach to the “telling” of the story. This would support Plato’s more narrative approach to the speeches than is otherwise typical in Socratic dialogue. Echoes of certain formalities within the oral tradition are underscored in Eryximachus’ suggestion that Phaedrus be the first to praise Eros as he is lying on the head coach and is the “father of the argument.”48 No one objects but Socrates says it seems a bit unfair for those lying on the end coaches. He nevertheless agrees providing that “those who come first 45

Symp. 177A-C. Hesiod. 1959. Theogony, trans. Richmond Lattimore. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, pp. 50–1. 47 For more on this subject, see Ardito, Linda. 2002. Mousike and the principles of inspiration and communication, eds. Konstantine Boudouris and Takis Poulakos. Athens, Greece: Ionia Verlag, pp. 25–33. 48 Symp. 177D. 46

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speak in a fine and adequate way.”49 Though we cannot know precisely what is meant by “fine and adequate,” Socrates’ stated condition again brings speech to the fore, here in terms of its content and manner of delivery. Moreover, we can perhaps detect something else in Socrates’ comment as he may be objecting to that with which he appears to be in agreement. The inconsistencies typically arising from stories based upon the oral tradition are emphasized in the following passage, where Apollodorus says to his companion: Aristodemus scarcely remembered all that each and every one of them said, and I in turn do not remember all that he said; but I shall tell you the noteworthy points of those speeches that, in my opinion, most particularly deserved remembering.50

With the above passage, we confront another of the dialogue’s many implicit ironies: if neither Aristodemus nor Apollodorus are able to recall all that was said during their respective sessions pertaining to the story, then how would it be possible for either of them to recall and determine the “noteworthy points” of the speeches? On what basis would either determine which is most deserving of our attention? Clearly, an accurate account is impossible for either Apollodorus or Aristodemus given the many, lengthy speeches, the unreliability of human memory, and the passage of time. Ultimately, Plato would have each remember that which they had subjectively determined worthy of recollection, and, despite inconsistencies that might inherently arise as a characteristic of the oral tradition, their recollections are justified in the context of pursuing philosophical truths. The Symposium’s layering of the story of Agathon’s party forms a complex, multi-dimensional soundscape. Apollodorus recounts to his companion the story he had recently given to an acquaintance, which is based upon Aristodemus’ first-hand recollection of it, which was later affirmed by Socrates. We also learn of a less reliable version of the story that had been told to Apollodorus’ companion by one who had heard it from Phoenix, who himself heard it from Aristodeus. Thus we are to surmise that Phaedrus’ initial speech in praise of Eros had been recounted by Aristodemus to Apollodorus, and endorsed by Socrates. Each quasireiteration of the account of Agathon’s party implicitly adds to a kind of temporal telescoping of it, underscoring its perpetuating momentum and 49 50

Symp. 177E. Symp. 178A.

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complexity, and highlighting the still common practice and inevitable inconsistencies of the oral tradition. H. C. Baldry says that fifth-century literature remained predominantly oral. Behind the genres that now flourished lay the part played by the spoken word in a community which enjoyed leisure as a result of slavery, used the easiest of all meeting-places, the open air, and took an uninhibited delight in the gift of speech. A walk round the remains of the ancient city [of Athens] and brief study of her monuments makes it easy to understand how such a community could give birth to so many masterpieces of the spoken word, only a fraction of which, be it remembered, we now possess.51

Notwithstanding the importance of the oral tradition, an emphasis upon the absence of speech can also be meaningful. Consider the following passage from Phaedrus’ purported speech: For the god to be ranked among the oldest is a mark of honor … and here is the proof: the parents of Eros neither exist nor are they spoken of by anyone, whether prose author or poet.52

Here it is the absence of speech that signifies the foundational importance of Eros. At other times allusions to sound phenomena can have a less-than-virtuous connotation, as, for example, when Phaedrus says that Orpheus was regarded as the “soft” lyre player who, unlike Alcestis, lacked the courage to die for his wife. Here the source of the sound phenomenon associated with Orpheus’ lack of virtue is a musical instrument, his lyre. The content of speech can also be less than virtuous, as pointed out by Phaedrus who says that Achilles, in claiming he was in love with Patroclus rather than the other way around, “talks nonsense.”53 Additionally, in the context of the oral tradition, speech is subject to modification and thus its contents could be less than reliable. We see this in the desire of Apollodorus’ companion to hear the story of Agathon’s party, as he believes he has heard a less reliable version of it. We also find it in Apollodorus’ admission that neither he nor Aristodemus could recall all the contents of the speeches. Speech can also produce an argument that is less noble than initially proposed. This is what Pausanias claims regarding Phaedrus’ speech in 51

Baldry, H. C. 1968. Ancient Greek literature in its living context. New York: McGraw-Hill; London: Thames and Hudson, p. 61. 52 Symp. 178B. 53 Symp. 180A.

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which Eros is perceived as a singularity rather than as having a more complex nature. Pausanias seeks clarification regarding which Eros is to be venerated, explaining that drinking, singing or conversing are not in themselves noble; how each is expressed in its unfolding is what determines “the sort of thing that it is.”54 In Pausanias’ mention of either the presence or absence of song and/or speech, with their respective, varying positive and negative connotations, we are again reminded of the bipolarity within the two major sonic factors defining the dialogue’s soundscape. A perhaps subtler expression of the importance of speech is found in the layering of retrospectives. Indeed, as we have learned, the symposium Apollodorus speaks of has occurred long ago. With the passage of time it is implicit that both Apollodorus and his companion could reflect upon this earlier time as it pertained to those who had attended the party. Reading the dialogue, we might wonder about the absence of direct speech from Plato himself, and about the noted55 dialectic this creates with the speeches of the guests. In Stanley Rosen’s study of the Symposium, he makes the broader observation that it is the silent dimension of the Platonic dialogues that becomes, methodologically speaking, “most important.”56 In the Symposium, suggestions of both the presence and absence of speech can itself “speak” contextually to its importance. Consider, for example, the following passage from Pausanias’ speech: In Elis and among the Boeotians, and where they are not wise in speaking, the gratification of lovers has been unqualifiedly legalized as noble, and no one, whether young or old, would say that it is shameful. This is so, I suspect, in order that they might have no trouble in trying to persuade the young by speech, because they are incapable of speaking.57

Here Pausanias is underscoring the power of speech and the imbalance of power that arises amongst those individuals who do not possess it, who are not “wise” in speaking. We should take into account what the ancients surely knew about speech; its nature is both temporal/fluid as well as fixed for all time once uttered. The latter consequence implies that speech is not retractable once verbally expressed, and thus it can take on a life of its own. Thus, in fixity it carries an unknowable potential. In this context, its relevance could be diminished, elevated/enhanced, or distorted. With the passage of time it 54

Symp. 180E-181A. See Rosen, op. cit., p. xlvii. 56 Rosen, op. cit., p. xlvii. 57 Symp. 182B. 55

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could also remain, in a sense, as present as it had been when first uttered, and thus, whether initially intended or not, it can become a basis for later judgment. For example, Pausanias, alluding to the pandemian lover, who is said to love the body as opposed to the soul, says: As soon as the bloom of the body fades—which is what he was in love with—“he is off and takes wing,” having made a foul shame of many speeches and promises.58

Here, speech becomes a living reality once outwardly expressed. Thus the words of the pandemian lover become as objects of defilement in the context of his later, shameful actions of deceit and broken promises. Thus Plato makes plain that speech once uttered can transcend its initial, directed purpose to instruct or persuade, and here it has instead become an instrument of judgment. In addition to focusing upon the contents of speech, Plato emphasizes the importance of its delivery. For example, at the conclusion of Pausanias’ speech, Apollodorus interrupts his own sentence to make the point about the manner in which he is delivering the story of the speeches: “With Pausanias’ pausation—the wise teach me to talk in such balanced phrases—Aristodemus said that it was Aristophanes’ turn to speak.”59 As Aristophanes has developed a case of hiccups and thus no “balanced phrases” can come from him as a result, Eryximachus offers to speak in his place, but first gives him advice as to how his hiccups might be remedied. This is a rather light, humorous interlude in which the soundscape gives way to sonic references of a more mundane, human nature. Indeed, Aristophanes is told to hold his breath for a long time. If this is ineffective, he should gargle with water. If still unsuccessful, he should take something that will “irritate” his nose to provoke a sneeze. Aristophanes agrees that Eryximachus should indeed speak in his place and he will look after take the rest, leaving us to imagine the sorts of sounds accompanying Eryximachus’ speech. Speaking rather straightforwardly, Eryximachus centers upon eros’ dual nature and the broader theme of how it presides over medicine, farming, and music, all of which he places on the same level of importance. He speaks at some length about music, making plain that its power is needed to transform humans towards greater decency:

58 59

Symp. 183E. Symp. 185C.

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[when] rhythm and harmony have to be employed in regard to human beings, either by making rhythm and harmony (what they call lyric poetry) or by using correctly the songs and meters that have been made (what has been called education), it is difficult and a good craftsman is needed. For … decent human beings must be gratified, as well as those who are not as yet decent, so that they might become more decent; and the love of the decent must be preserved.60

It is then Aristophanes’ turn to speak, but first he satisfies our curiosity as to the nature of his sonic accompaniment to Eryximachus’ speech: [The hiccups] have stopped, to be sure; not, however, before sneezing had been applied to it. So I wonder at the orderly decency of the body desiring such noises and garglings as a sneeze is; for my hiccupping stopped right away as soon as I applied the sneeze to it.61

Eryximachus tells Aristophanes that he has made everyone laugh. The light-heartedness of laughter marks not only the end of Eryximachus’ speech but also a thematic turn in the discourse on eros, which now takes up the subject of sexual desire. This is framed within the context of Aristophanes’ mythic story of the original, double form of humans, or proto-humans, who were cut in half by Zeus to eliminate their increasing threat. Aristophanes begins his speech by emphasizing Eros’ power and the importance of recognizing it, particularly given that it goes entirely unnoticed by humans. He then speaks about the original three races of humans: male, female and androgynous, all of which had a rounded shape with four arms, four legs and two opposing faces with one head on a cylindrical neck. As the story goes, they could move swiftly by tumbling. Human males were the offspring of the sun; females, the earth; and, sharing in both, the androgynous beings, the moon. As they were strong and attempted to reach the sky and attack the gods, Zeus cut each in half. Thus, according to Aristophanes, the human feelings of eros are an expression of desire for one’s other half. Androgynous males were the lovers of women and vice versa. Aristophanes concludes that love is the name for the desire and pursuit of the whole: …were we to hymn the god who is the cause of this we should justly hymn Eros, who at the present time benefits us most by leading us to what is our own.62

60

Symp. 187C-D. Symp. 189A. 62 Symp. 193D. 61

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Plato’s inclusion of the mention of song here, of offering a hymn of praise to Eros, frames and punctuates Aristophanes’ speech. In so doing, he is adhering to a cultural and traditional norm in which song begins and ends something of importance such as epic poetry, with, for example, its invocation to the Muse(s). Here Plato has chosen Aristophanes’ speech to echo this tradition that, here, informs the soundscape. Agathon speaks next, saying: There is one proper manner in every praise of anything: to tell in speech— whomever the speech is about—what sort he is and what sort of things he causes.63

Here Plato emphasizes the singular importance of speech, and we again see how, in so doing, the soundscape is informed and elevated. As Agathon proceeds, he asserts that Eros is the happiest of the gods because he is “the most beautiful” and “the best.” He says this is so because Eros despises old age, and thus he remains youngest of the gods. The god is also “tender” according to Agathon, but he adds that to reveal this would require a poet as good as Homer, indicating that conveying the complexity of this dimension of his nature would require a skilled poet. Perhaps Plato intends for his readers to infer from this that he, too, is skilled in his conveyance of the complex subject of eros. Agathon also says that Eros dwells in those whose character is “soft” rather than “hard.” He adds that Eros’ figure is harmoniously proportioned and that there is continual strife between “lack of harmony” and Eros. The harmony of speech, of song, of the human form, these are all one and the same at this level, the level of proportion. As Plato would have us understand, this is the level at which Eros resonates. Proportion, the beautiful, the good, and the true—Eros embodies all of these. Agathon summarizes by praising the justice, moderation, courage, and wisdom of Eros. The last of these characteristics is effectively conveyed via poetry and music: [Eros] is a poet of such wisdom that he can make poets of others too; at any rate, everyone whom Eros touches proves to be a poet, “though he be without the Muses before.” We can, accordingly, properly make use of this fact to infer that in every kind of musical making [i.e. poetry] Eros is a

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good poet [maker]; for what one does not have and does not know, one could neither give to another nor teach another.64

The interrelatedness of wisdom as representative of Eros with both poetry and the making of music emphasizes the importance of the latter two in the context of the very thematic core and meaning of the dialogue. Moreover, Eros’ multi-faceted inspirations are to be understood as of paramount importance, whether they are applied to Apollo’s music, Athena’s weaving, Hephaestus’ blacksmithing, or even to Zeus himself, “the captain of gods and human beings.”65 Agathon adds that, with Eros, love of beauty inspires the arrangement of godly affairs. He then proposes to also praise Eros in metered poetry, and closes by saying: every real man must follow hymning beautifully, and sharing the song Eros sings in charming the thought of all gods and human beings.66

Note that Plato has Agathon’s speech end with the mention of song to mark its conclusion and to convey the importance of song not only for its role in honoring Eros but also for its original nature as emanating from Eros to all gods and humans. Thus at the lofty level of Eros’ song is ascribed the power to influence gods as well as humans. Socrates praises Agathon’s speech for its beauty of delivery and profound effects, and then asks Phaedrus whether he wishes to hear his speech, though, as he says, “the phrasing and arrangement of the sentences just fall as they come.”67 Phaedrus and the others indeed affirm their interest and also agree that he should give his speech in whatever manner he wishes. Here Plato has juxtaposes the reference to Agathon’s previously metered, poetic speech with Socrates’ extemporaneous one, underscoring not only the different manners in which speech may be delivered but also the different approaches to its impact. This also elevates both forms of speech, and, indeed, is likely to give preference to Socrates’ improvisatory approach, not only because it is his speech but because improvisation dispenses with contrivances and thus allows the truth of one’s thoughts to prevail in dictating the patterns of speech. Socrates poses questions to Agathon about the speech he has just delivered, and some dialectic in the question-answer sequence between the two men ensues. This is followed by Socrates’ speech on eros/Eros, which, as he says, is based upon a speech he once heard from the 64

Symp. 196E. Symp. 197B. 66 Symp. 197E. 67 Symp. 199B. 65

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prophetess Diotima of Mantineia. Plato has constructed many ironies throughout the work, not the least of which is Socrates’ speech itself, which, according to Socrates, have their basis in the words of a wise woman, thus resonating uniquely and powerfully against the speeches of an all-male symposium. As Socrates explains, he might have given a speech similar to that of Agathon’s had he not heard Diotima’s words and realized that Eros is neither beautiful nor good. Socrates quotes Diotima as saying, “Do not compel what is not beautiful to be ugly, or what is not good, to be bad … but something between the two of them.”68 Thus she calls Eros a “great daemon,” being between gods and humans. This middle position is the source of the bringing into being of the art of priests, which includes sacrifices, rituals and incantations, as well as all manner of magic, sooth-saying, and divination. Most importantly for our inquiry about the dialogue’s soundscape, Diotima says the following to Socrates: A god does not mingle with a human being; but through this occurs the whole intercourse and conversation of gods with human beings while they are awake and asleep.69

Thus Plato has it that Eros is responsible for this meta-level of speech or conversation among gods and humans. This level is more abstract and esoteric, though it is to be counted among the many layers of speech that contribute to the complex soundscape of the dialogue. As to the parentage of Eros, Diotima tells Socrates that Eros is born on Aphrodite’s birthday, which is rather fitting since Eros is by nature a “lover in regard to the beautiful.”70 She then says that Eros is the son of the god Poros (resource), who is the son of Metis (intelligence), and of Penia71 (poverty). Thus, as she says, he is always poor and hardly “tender” or “beautiful.” Rather he is “tough” and “squalid,” “always dwelling with neediness.” These characteristics are counter-balanced by his father’s 68

Symp. 202B. Symp. 203A. 70 Symp. 203C. 71 We learn from Alcaeus in Fragment 364 that Penia is said to be a “grievous thing,” a spirit of wild evils, and together with her companion Amakhania (Helplessness) they cause all manner of trouble for humans. In Fragment I.267 of Theognis we learn that she is “well known” but does not visit the marketplace or the courts as she is scorned and hated. In Symp. 203B we learn that the god Poros (Expediency), who is the son of Metis (Wisdom), was a guest at a feast on the day of Aphrodite’s birthday. At the end of the feast, Penia went from door to door begging. Poros, who had too much nectar, fell asleep in Zeus’ garden, lying beside him and conceiving Eros. 69

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nature and are evident in his desire for the beautiful and the good. Importantly, Diotima is quoted as saying: No one of the gods philosophizes and desires to become wise—for he is so … Nor, in turn, do those who lack understanding philosophize and desire to become wise; for it is precisely this that makes the lack of understanding so difficult—that if a man is not beautiful and good, nor intelligent, he has the opinion that that is sufficient for him. Consequently, he who does not believe that he is in need does not desire that which he does not believe he needs.72

It is in this “in between” realm, therefore, that eros or desire resides as an actively seeking, life-affirming principle. Indeed, in response to Socrates’ query about the nature/identity of philosophers, Diotima says: they are those between them both, of whom Eros would be one. For wisdom is one of the most beautiful things, and Eros is love in regard to the beautiful; and so Eros is—necessarily—a philosopher; and as a philosopher he is between being wise and being without understanding.73

Eros is characterized as the lover rather than the beloved. Thus he is not the static object of one’s desire—indeed he is hardly a static god at all, being without overt attributes of the beautiful, delicate, perfect, etc. Rather, he is the active life principle of desire itself, desire of “good things” and of “being happy.” In more modern times, Sigmund Freud, in his Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), would propose the notion of a death drive/wish, defining it as that which opposes the dynamic, lifeaffirming nature of eros/love. In Plato’s dialogue, Diotima tells Socrates that love, truth and the virtue of all striving come about from desire for the good and the beautiful; but this is only possible through earnest, intense pursuit. Those who are successful in doing so are, according to Diotima, “bringing to birth in beauty both in terms of the body and in terms of the soul.”74 Thus, with respect to the latter, we learn that eros is of “immortality,” and as the nature of mortals is to seek this very condition, we now see how Plato, himself, by authoring the Symposium, participates in this striving, in this pursuit for timelessness. Moreover, in leaving behind “another young thing”75 to replace the old, as Diotima puts it, we can see how Plato underscores the basis upon which the oral tradition 72

Symp. 204A. Symp. 204B. 74 Symp. 206B. 75 Symp. 208B. 73

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rests. This is because it is humans possessed of eros who will ensure the perpetuation of the story. Indeed eros is the basis of the oral tradition, of storytelling, of Plato’s Symposium. Underscoring the correspondence between poetry and eros in the context of the oral tradition, Diotima says: and if one looks at Homer, Hesiod, and the other good poets, one envies them: what offspring of themselves they have left behind! For as these offspring are in their own right immortal, they supply the poets with immortal fame and memory.76

Socrates concludes his speech with Diotima’s notion that beholding the beautiful is what makes life worth living. In this striving to behold, one is attempting to draw closer to the virtue of truth and to immortality. Socrates says that he believes in Diotima’s words and asserts that all men should honor Eros. At the close of his speech, while Aristophanes attempts to respond to his having been mentioned in the speech, there is a sudden, very noisy “hammering” on the courtyard door, and this is accompanied by the musical sound of a flute girl. Interestingly, Plato has complemented the dismissal of the flute girl before the symposium proper had begun by one who now accompanies Alcibiades, indicating a formal move towards closure of the story. The sudden noisiness, too, marks the beginning of the dramatic closure not only of the story of Agathon’s symposium but of Plato’s Symposium as well. These new, more strident tones of the soundscape have introduced the arrival of the flamboyant Alcibiades, who emerges in the courtyard, adding still further to these different sorts of sounds by his drunken shouting as he asks his attendants to lead him to Agathon. He then explains he has come to place the wreath from his head to that of Agathon’s. He wonders along the way if he will be laughed at owing to his drunken state, but joins the others after being encouraged by their loud applause. The soundscape opens to include these varied dissonant sounds, which would accommodate Alcibiades himself. Gradually he becomes cognizant of Socrates’ presence. A long exchange ensues between them, over the course of which we learn that he holds resentment towards Socrates for not reciprocating his erotic sentiment towards him. Yet he clearly holds him in the highest regard as well, declaring that he makes the best speeches of anyone at all times. A bit later Eryximachus tells Alcibiades that he should either make a speech about Eros or sing, as this is what the others have done, and this is what would be “just.” As we see throughout the dialogue, Plato is here emphasizing both speech and song as primary sound sources of the 76

Symp. 209D.

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soundscape. Indeed, song is interspersed throughout and speech is hardly optional or ancillary to the night’s events. Thus we learn that regardless of the drunken state of Alcibiades, he is expected to make a speech. Alcibiades then declares that Socrates bears a likeness to the satyr Marsyas. The mythic story of the hapless, aulos-playing Marsyas centers upon his doomed musical contest with Apollo, the lyre-player. As he has challenged the god Apollo to this contest, we know from the outset that he will lose. He of course cannot meet the additional condition Apollo has proposed and the Muses agreed upon, that both should sing while playing their respective instruments in an upside-down position, an obvious impossibility for an aulos-player. As if losing the contest were not bad enough for Marsyas, his fate grows far worse as he is flayed alive for daring to challenge Apollo to a contest in the first place. Bearing this myth and the characterization of Marsyas in mind, Alcibiades’ speech likening Socrates to Marsyas again juxtaposes speech and song to articulate the important thematic ideas informing the soundscape. Moreover, Alcibiades refers to the equal power of Socrates and Marsyas to “charm,” but declares that Socrates’ power comes from “bare words,” not instruments. He says that any who hear his speeches are “thunderstruck” and “possessed.” Indeed Alcibiades appears to be saying that Socrates is able to achieve what Marsyas could not, as his words are themselves as music, not even requiring a musical instrument to accompany them. He goes on to say that the power of Socrates’ speeches bring about tears, both his own and so many others. He asks in advance to be forgiven for what will next be heard, even instructing the house servants and anyone else who is “profane” and “rustic” to put “large gates” over their ears. This emphasizes what is experienced as a result of what is heard. He proceeds to speak about the time when Socrates joined him on an expedition to Potidaea, claiming that, though shoeless, Socrates was able to march through the ice better than the others. Here the implicit soundscape of Socrates’ rustic marching through ice offers a counterpoint to the lighter and easier footsteps imagined at the dialogue’s opening, when Apollodorus and his acquaintance head to town on foot and the former recounts the story of Agathon’s party, the very story that includes the speech of Alcibiades, with his recollection of Socrates’ marching. Thus it is implicit that as Apollodorus is walking with his acquaintance there comes a point at which he is speaking of Alcibiades’ recounting of Socrates’ marching. Alcibiades, in his speech, also alludes to how Socrates’ speeches can initially seem “laughable,” though he ends by saying:

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if one sees [Socrates’ speeches] opened up and gets oneself inside them, one will find, first, that they alone of speeches have sense inside; and, second, that they are most divine and have the largest number of images of virtue in them; and that they apply to the largest area, indeed to the whole area that it is proper to examine for one who is going to be beautiful and good.77

Alcibiades concludes by saying of Socrates that though he appears to be as the lover, he is actually the beloved, suggesting the desire kindled in one who has heard a speech by Socrates. After a time, Socrates declares that he very much wants to “sing the praises” of Agathon. This provides a kind of disappointment/tension for Alcibiades who is portrayed as yet being “erotically inclined” towards Socrates. As Agathon goes to lie down beside Socrates, a large crowd of revelers appears at the door and enters. The volume of the soundscape has increased yet again in this moment. Indeed, we learn that there was a lot of “commotion” and all were compelled to drink lots of wine but not in any ordered manner as before. Plato has inserted this scenario in which order is disrupted yet again to signal that the story of Agathon’s symposium is drawing to a close. As part of this movement towards closure, Aristodemus is “overtaken by sleep” and Eryximachus, Phaedrus and some of the others have departed from the party. Daybreak introduces a soundscape background of roosters “singing” as Aristodemus awakens. Agathon, Aristophanes and Socrates have stayed awake all night and are drinking in the same proper order from left to right while Socrates continued in conversation. Thus Socrates is left with the tragic playwright Agathon and the comic playwright Aristophanes. Aristodemus had not remembered the other points of the speeches as he had not been present from the beginning of the symposium and was falling asleep at the end. However, he is somehow able to identify the “chief point” put forth by Socrates—that a tragic poet is also a comic poet. The others agree but had not followed very well due to their episodic dozing. Aristophanes was first to go to sleep. Then, after daybreak, Agathon falls asleep. The soundscape of the symposium has thus fallen exceedingly quiet and becomes even quieter still as Socrates is said to have put them to bed and then to have left for the Lyceum as Aristodemus followed him, another echo of the earlier references to accompanied walking, to the soundscape of paired footsteps. It is also another gesture of closure, as it is Aristodemus who had originally walked with Socrates to the party and now departs from it with him. There, at the Lyceum, Socrates is said to have spent his day as 77

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usual and then, in the evening, he rested at home. Plato punctuates the ending of the dialogue’s soundscape with a silence associated with the kind of rest that precedes another day, another story.

Conclusion In Plato’s Symposium, each successive speech given at Agathon’s symposium informs a kind of meta-dynamic that becomes as a crescendo culminating in the lofty, enlightened vantage point of Socrates’ speech, which, as he says, is based upon what he has heard from the priestess Diotima. Ultimately, he conveys to the others that the truest manifestation of eros is in desire itself, and this can be expressed as desire for the good and the beautiful, and for wisdom. The greatest lover is a lover of wisdom. The greatest lover is a philosopher. Plato has called our attention to all manner of sound, from the lofty to the mundane, from the background sounds of the natural environment and Aristophanes’ sonic backdrop of sneezing, hiccups and gargling to speeches and songs intended to challenge our minds and capture our imaginations. The noise and disorderliness that accompany the arrival of Alcibiades and the revelers break the spell of the speeches and of song and set the stage for not only the end of the night’s events and of Apollodorus’ recounting of the story but also the end of the dialogue. A flute girl is among them, becoming an implicit symbol of the dialogue’s end through the sonic marker of her flute. This seeming detail of her arrival compliments the dismissal of the flute girl at the beginning of the dialogue, as the symposium is about to begin. After Alcibiades’ speech, as Agathon goes to lie down next to Socrates, there is a second set of revelers that make quite a commotion, becoming the second sonic marker in formally concluding the story of the night’s events and the dialogue as a whole. Yet, in a sense, the story has no end. Plato is all the while suggesting this as he emphasizes the retrospective layers of the story of Agathon’s party. In pursuit of truth, time becomes inconsequential, or, put another way, time transforms to timelessness. In the dialogue, pursuing the truth about eros reveals the truth of desire’s ultimate goal of immortality, which closely corresponds with infinity, with eternity. Ultimately, Plato presents us with philosophical perspectives on a subject that remains relevant, compelling, elusive and, indeed, timeless. As suggested in scholarship, readers might consider the dialogue’s historical dimension and wonder about the lives of the individual guests beyond the night of Agathon’s party—over the subsequent years leading up to Apollodorus’ recounting of it. A fairly substantial period of time

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passes between the party, held in 416 BCE, and Apollodorus’ account(s) of it, which is typically set between 401 BCE and 399BCE, the year of Socrates’ trial and execution. Thus Apollodorus, his unnamed companion and his acquaintance would implicitly find themselves in a similar position to our own in contemplating the fate of the guests. The possibility that Apollodorus would consider their future in the context of his retrospective about the party would suggest a complex collapsing of time, with an equally complex and dimensional soundscape. In the case of Agathon, though none of his tragedies survive, we know that for a time Athenians held him in high regard. In 407 BCE, not very long after the party, he leaves Athens to join the court of the Macedonian king Archelaus, where he dies in about 402 BCE. Just one year after Agathon’s party, in 415 BCE, the charismatic Athenian general Alcibiades (c. 450 BCE–c. 404 BCE) fails at leading the Sicilian Expedition at Syracuse, which results in the defeat of Athens by Sparta in the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE). This, of course, is an outcome popularly said to have ended the “golden age” of Athens. Subsequently, Alcibiades aligns himself with two major Athenian rivals of the day: Sparta and Persia. He has also been accused of destroying Herms (stone markers/edifices or statues of Hermes) throughout Athens, so he goes to Sparta for a time to avoid execution. Ultimately, his hero’s welcome back to Athens some years later would not prevent his assassination there. As for Phaedrus and Eryximachus, they, too, were implicated in the destruction of the Athenian herms. As has been raised in scholarship,78 we may wonder whether the guests who gave speeches at the party had only passively heard Socrates’ speech, perhaps missing his considerably potent words about the highest form of eros/love. As with the telling of the story, where many details are lost and memory is admittedly faded, Plato’s soundscape is necessarily perceived subjectively in this implicit dichotomy between active and passive listening with respect to Socrates’ speech. Both the comic playwright Aristophanes and the tragedian Agathon gradually come into greater focus in the dialogue, being ultimately contextualized by Socrates in his observation that both comedy and tragedy can originate from one and the same person. That Aristophanes 78 See Bacon, Helen. 1959. Socrates crowned, Virginia Quarterly Review 5, pp. 415–430; see also Brentlinger, John A. 1970. The cycle of becoming in the Symposium. In The Symposium of Plato, trans. Suzy Groden, drawings Leonard Baskin. University of Massachusetts Press. Also Naugle, David. The Platonic concept of love: The Symposium. www3.dbu/naugle/pdf/platonic_love.pdf . Both Bacon and Brentlinger are cited in David Naugle’s informative study, which also addresses this retrospective outlook.

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and Agathon both remain awake with Socrates long after others had either left the party or had fallen asleep would seem to symbolize this. Thus Plato has it that though Aristophanes and Agathon each represent different sides of the same coin of life’s drama, they each represent both as well. Such is drama; such is life. Song and speech are paramount in symposia, generally. Both are characteristic features defining the soundscape of such occasions, and, of course, in the Symposium speech is a key component of the whole affair. Our growing awareness and appreciation of Plato’s soundscape is owing to his pointed and purposeful treatment of both. With our own imaginations enlivened in their contemplation, we, too, gain entry to Agathon’s dinner party. There we dine in the powerful and lofty potential of the intellect and the imagination, in the realms of philosophy and poetry. Plato has Socrates convey through Diotima that such potential is only fully realized when individuals aspire to such loftiness. We might ask why an ancient Athenian soundscape should be of interest to us. Yet in the striving for wisdom and for the good and the beautiful, and within the sensuousness of such human expressions as speech and song, we can discover, hidden just beneath the surface of their sounding, the echo of immortality, drawing ever closer within our perceptions as Plato doubtless intended in the Symposium. There in the dialogue the voices in song and in speech tell a story about desire and about the desire to know about desire. They tell how love is not the object of desire. Rather, desire is an active principle to be applied in the striving for wisdom, for the good, for the beautiful, and for immortality. Here eros or love is a lofty striving, a desire for what is beyond the human limits of romantic love in its narrower sense. It shows desire in its most positive, life-affirming aspect and thus differs widely from some of the more popular historical perspectives on love. For example, the second stanza of Bernart de Ventadorn’s poem, Can vei la lauzeta mover, referenced at the beginning of our inquiry, shows desire in one of the more popular contexts, ending with: “And after she robbed me, left me nothing except desire79 and a longing heart.”80 Here desire is not a celebrated, lifeaffirming principle as it is in Socrates’ speech. It is instead limited to one, lower aspect of eros, perhaps closer to that discussed in the dialogue by Aristophanes. Far from being an active principle, it has transformed into the fixed object of the troubadour’s doomed affection, an inescapable, ultimate condition. 79 80

My italics. Wilhelm, op. cit., 69, no. 55.

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We, as readers, find ourselves enveloped in the sonic and temporal complexity of a dynamic soundscape as Plato has suggested it and we have imagined it, with its meta-levels and middle- and foreground levels of sound and the more surface, ambient sounds that serve as a backdrop to the stage-set of a dinner party. Plato indirectly welcomes us there to experience and then, as would be the tradition, to impart to others an eternal moment in the sensuousness of life.

CHAPTER SIX FRIDA KAHLO’S PAINTING BRUSH JOHN MURUNGI At the hands of Frida Kahlo, a painting brush becomes an artistic brush. As it becomes artistic, Frida Kahlo herself becomes an artist. These two becomings are simultaneously and necessarily attended by a third becoming: the becoming of the work of art. This tripartite becoming is an extraordinary or an unusual event. It is this extraordinariness that Martin Heidegger calls to our attention in The Origin of the Work of Art. He says The essence of art, on which both the artwork and the artist depend is the setting itself-into-work of truth. It is due to art’s poetic essence that, in the midst of beings art breaks open an open place, in whose openness everything is other than usual.1

To inhabit this place is to be rendered unusual. It is to be opened up and to dwell in openness. It brings about the openness of the inhabitants. Openness animates not only the place that is opened up; it also animates its inhabitants. The shared openness rules out the perception of the place as an objective container in which the inhabitants are positioned as if they were objects. Here, the distinction between subject and object vanishes. To enter into it or to be claimed by it is to succumb to vanishment. In its openness it is also a place of rebirth. In its presence, one cannot be present as a by-stander. One is taken in or taken up by it and rendered extraordinary. The extraordinary in us, around us and in the world we inhabit is awakened and rendered lively by Frida Kahlo’s painting brush, provided that we are receptive to its work. We are in the presence of this extraordinary painting brush, a presence that is itself extraordinary. What follows is an invitation to the world of a painter’s brush. I do not want to be pretentious and project myself as one who is extending the 1

Heidegger, Martin, Basic Writings, edited by David Farrell Krell, (New York: Harper Collins Publishers,1993), p.197.

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invitation because I too am one of the invitees. Invitation is the work of the painting brush. It is what invites us. Usually, when we think of an invitation in the world of painting, we think of invitation as coming from a painter. It may even be said that it is a painting that invites us because we find it aesthetically pleasing. We do not expect an invitation from the painting brush. Yet, without a painting brush there would be no painter and there would be no painting. The invitation by a painting brush disrupts this normalcy, this expectation. We enter into what is not normal into what is unexpected. To respond positively to the painting brush’s invitation, it is essential that we offer and release ourselves to the painting brush so that we can be led by it to its world. This offering and the releasing of ourselves happens to be a part of the work of the painting brush. We stand in the way of its work when we bar it from doing its work. Because it is sensuous, that is, because it is sensible, its work cannot but be sensuous. It is as sensible that we too are drawn into it, and respond to it. The invitation is sensuous and it is as such that we welcome the mutual initiation. Consequently, it is not to be responded to intellectually or unsensuously. Failure to respond to it in its own terms is to violate it and stand in the way of its work. When we do so, we also stand in the way of our work, the work of being what we are. It is not to be forgotten that we too are sensuous. Painting is this double working, when doubling ceases to be what it is and becomes one even in its doubleness. Here transpires artistic creation, the creation into which we are taken and accommodated by the painting brush. Frida’s painting brush constitutes this creation, creating a site where we too are constituted as its creature, and disclosed as such. This brush opens us as creatures of the site and as where we dwell. What comes into relief here is the artist’s role as an artist. Frida introduces us to the world of the artist through the magic of her painting brush. A part of the conventional understanding of an artist is that to be an artist one has to be creative. In other words, no one can be an artist without being creative. It is also a part of conventional wisdom that not everyone who creates is an artist. What, then, is it that distinguishes an artist from other individuals who create? An easy answer that is true yet not very illuminating is that an artist is one who creates a work of art. What is not so illuminating is that this answer makes little sense if one does not have an understanding of what constitutes a work of art. When it is asked what a work of art is, an easy answer that is equally unilluminating is that work or art is what is produced by an artistic creation. The problem here is that we are taken back to the question regarding what is distinctive about the creation such that creation is what the artist embarks upon. Here, circular thinking finds itself at home. Can this kind of thinking be avoided and

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should it be avoided? Perhaps, this is only perhaps, we can find a way around it if we focus on a particular work of art. Let us focus attention on the painting of Frida Kahlo, a well-known painter, widely recognized as an artist. Let us pay special attention to her painting brush. We do this not only because this painting brush is the site for the disclosure of the truth of what makes creation artistic, but also because this disclosure discloses the truth of what makes one an artist. For the most part, we pay attention to a painting and ignore a painting brush as it paints, thereby, forgetting that the creation of a painting rests on a painting brush. Before focusing more attention on Frida’s painting brush, preliminary words on a work of art are in order. Though not often recognized, according to conventional wisdom, in creating a work of art, one creates oneself as an artist. Assuming that a work of art is truly what it is—that is, a creation by a human being—in the process of its creating oneself, one creates more than oneself, more than the creation of an isolated human being. In creating oneself the artist inescapably creates what is essential about being human. Our being is implicated in the artist’s creation of herself or himself in the creation of the work of art. Though this is not self-evident, the audience of the artist’s work is itself the audience, and thus participates as a creator in the artist’s creation. Where the audience is passive in the presence of the work of art, the work of art ceases to be a work of art. Accordingly, to understand a great work of art is to understand ourselves. To be consistent with what is understood in or about the work of art, understanding in this context, must be a creative understanding. She or he who seeks to understand such work must do so in a way that is self-creating. An artist does not present us with a finished work. His or her audience participates in the creative process. The audience participates in the artist’s self-creation and selfunderstanding. What is said above is intended to initiate us into the artistic dimension of a painter’s painting brush. It initiates us into the world of Frida Kahlo’s painting brush. Let us bear in mind that an artist’s painting brush is created as the artist paints. It is in painting that it is what it is. I will participate in the creation of Frida’s painting brush and participate in its creating of the work of art—that from which the painting brush arises as a painting brush. You too are a participant in what I am doing. If this comes across as preposterous and as unwarranted, I will gladly admit to be being preposterous. What is said may be equally unwarranted. Frida herself was both. Nothing that a genuine artist does is warranted and what is artistically done is preposterous. What is preposterous and unwarranted is a part of the excessiveness that is immanent in the work of art and its

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creation. One creates excessively, and one can do so only to the extent that one is a part of this excessiveness. Let us call this excessiveness eros. There is what is erotic in the work of art. The artist awakens eros in us, and we too awaken eros in him or in her. The painting brush is inspired by eros, and the painting it brings into relief vibrates erotically. It awakens the erotic in us. Paint eroticizes the painting brush so that the painting brush can carry out its work. What is said above should disabuse us of any expectation that what is said about Frida’s painting brush falls under the domain of empirical study. It is not an objective study that would lead one to ask whether what is said corresponds to an object called Frida’s painting brush. It is an artistic study—a creative study—and should be taken as such, that is, taken artistically. In this approach, I find myself guided by the words of Gaston Bachelard, words that are animated by what is essential in Frida’s work of art, the work from which Frida’s painting brush comes into relief. Frida’s painting brush is a child of her painting work. It is itself a work of art. There is resonance in this work. What brings it about resonates with Bachelard’s sensibility. He observes, it is impossible to receive the psychic benefit of poetry unless these two functions of the human psyche—the function of the real and the function of the unreal—are made to co-operate.2

One could readily say that Bachelard presents half of the truth. The other half is that it is impossible to receive full psychic benefits of poetry unless the two functions of the human body—the function of the real and the unreal—are made to cooperate. After all, the psychic and the corporeal unite to make up the being that each of us is. Such a body—the body that phenomenologists refer to as the lived-body—is the body that is preeminently poetic. Ultimately, it is this body, the sensuous body that receives the benefit of poetry. Psychic benefits without corporeal benefits are only abstract benefits. Benefits accrue to the lived-body –the body that makes a human being a living being. To receive this benefit, the body has to be poetic, or differently stated, by receiving the benefit of poetry, it becomes poetic. Bachelard’s view reminds me of Heidegger’s observation in his essay The Origin of the Work of Art:

2

Bachelard, Gaston, Poetics of Space, translated by Maria Jolas, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), p. xxxv.

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The essence of art, on which both the artwork and the artist depend is the setting itself-into-work of truth. It is due to art’s poetic essence that, in the midst of beings art breaks open an open place, in whose openness everything is other than usual.3 Heidegger also says: “If all art is in essence poetry, then the arts of architecture, painting, sculpture, and music must be traced back to poesy.”4 Let us then, along with Heidegger, embrace the experience in which Frida’s painting brush is poetic, in so far as it is an artistic painting brush. In this view, we are not alone. Writing about Frida during her stay in the United States, Diego Rivera, her husband, said, “Never has a woman so poetically transformed her deeply felt agony and place it on canvas as Frida did.”5 Robin Richmond, in her study of Frida, says that “Frida’s art is pure poetry.”6 She could have correctly added that Frida is pure poetry. One is present in one’s work. More to the point, one is one’s work. It is by poetizing with Frida that we can gain access to what is essential about her painting brush. To do so, we ourselves must be pure poetry. It takes what is alike to know what is alike. The association of art with poetry may strike many of us as unjustifiable. It is likely to obscure what we normally believe to be essential to both art and poetry. But as long as we remain in the bondage of the usual, the poetic essence of Frida’s painting brush will remain elusive. Getting to what is essential about it calls for a releasement from this bondage. To do so, the assistance of this brush is required. We need to prepare ourselves poetically for this assistance. In what follows, it is my objective to make a contribution to this preparation. In a conventional academic setting, it is not expected that one who is not, has not been and is not intending to be a painter has much to offer in our understanding and appreciation of the world of painting. This is especially the case when it is a philosopher that one has in view. A philosopher, it is assumed, is someone whose specialty is abstract thinking. The painter, after all, according to conventional wisdom, works with the sensuous material and uses his or her hands, whereas a philosopher concerns himself or herself with the work of mind. In modern 3

Martin Heidegger Basic Writings edited by David Farrell Krell, (New York: Harper Publishers, 1993), p.197. 4 Ibid., p. 198. 5 Billeter, Erika, The World of Frida Kahlo: The Blue House, (Houston: Museum of Fine Art, 1994), p. 10. 6 Richmond, Robin, Frida Kahlo in Mexico, (San Francisco: Pomegranate Art Books, 1994), p. 15.

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European philosophy, Descartes is one of the philosophers viewed as the founding fathers of this view. In his thinking, philosophy is associated with the activity of the mind—an entity he takes to be separate from the body. He is one of the founders of the spirit of anesthesia in philosophy—a spirit of desensitization in philosophy. What we have from this conception of philosophy is that a philosopher is someone who has lost his or her senses. Descartes was one of the architects of the war on aesthetics. It is important to note that he was a Christian theological architect. He was in the service of the Christian army, an army whose objective was to win the war for the Christian God against aesthetic Temptation. Frida would have willingly joined the opposing army, and would have prayed and fought for the Fall into the Temptation. The prayer would be directed not to the Christian God but to the Mexican God Quetzalcoatl and, perhaps, this god would reinforce Frida’s army and send Dionysius as one his generals. Gods keep companies with each other. It is we mortals who set them apart. To determine whether what a philosopher does has a bearing on what a painter does, or whether what a painter does has a bearing on what a philosopher does, it is essential that we pay attention to both. This implies overcoming or subverting the Cartesian regime—a regime that holds most of modern Western European thinking hostage. The philosopher, as is the case with the painter, is a sensuous being. Nothing is done by either without recourse to the body. Both do body work. It may readily be accepted that a painter’s work is body work, whereas the philosopher’s work may not readily be accepted as such. What has been forgotten in the Cartesian world is the power and the radius of sensing. Sensing constitutes and discloses the realm of being/existence, and the realm of life. It finds limit only in non-being because in non-being there is nothing to sense. And because non-being is non-being, strictly speaking, it does not limit sensing. Sensing is enabled by the body because it is of the body. The hand, as a senser and the sensed, is at work here. Moreover, since the hand is the hand of the body, and the body itself is the wherein of the painter and the philosopher, on this level of being, what the painter does and what the philosopher does are indistinguishable. The philosopher is also handed. Heidegger is correct when he says Every motion of the hand in every one of its works carries itself through the element of thinking, every bearing of the hand is rooted in thinking. Therefore, thinking itself is man’s simplest, and for that reason hardest, handwork, if from time to time it would be accomplished properly.7

7

Heidegger, Martin, Basic Works, p. 381.

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What he says makes greater sense if handwork is freed to be itself, that is, to be the work of the body, not the Cartesian body, but the lived body, the body that paints, the body that philosophizes, the body that is preeminently sensible, your body and my body. It is not my intention to reduce Frida the painter to Frida the thinker, or vice versa. It is not my intention to reduce Frida’s painting brush to a thing that thinks to render it intelligible to thinkers. To think it is not to reduce it to thinking. This would be a miracle that is beyond human powers. To do so is not only to do violence to what is thought; it is also to do violence to thinking itself. A painter’s brush is irreducible to anything other than what it is. It is exhaustively sensuous. Its work is exhaustively sensuous. It is what it is, and for it to be thought, it has to be thought sensuously. To think of it from this standpoint is to think of it paintingly. It is to avail ourselves to a painting thinking, to a thinking painting. One can be taught such thinking by a painting brush provided that one is patient with how and what it teaches. There is a book titled Devouring Frida Kahlo.8 I will not get into the content of this book. What I want to call your attention to is its title. I too am numbered among her devourers, but all devourers are not created equal. In response to the growing popularity of Frida, a friend of hers has said the following: Frida has now been banished by her well-meaning admirers to the land of inaccessibility, to an Olympus of art where she sits queenlike on a gilded throne … It seems wrong that Frida Kahlo, an earthly woman who identified so strongly with her race and nature, has been both deified and sequestered.9

As an admirer of Frida, I want to separate myself from these admirers, from these devourers, and direct my admiration to the Frida who is “an earthly woman who identified herself so strongly with her race and nature.” I want to avoid the negative devourers of Frida. When she is devoured negatively, she is no longer there to be admired, and one ends up admiring oneself and devouring oneself for having devoured her. As an earthly woman, she cannot be devoured without devouring the earth. This is an impossible feat for any one of us. The earth is too much for any one of us, even for Frida. I want to hold onto the earthly Frida and, in this way, attempt to do justice to her, to the extent that one can do justice not only to 8

Lindauer, Margaret A., Devouring Frida Kahlo, ( Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1999). 9 Richmond, p.9.

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her but also to oneself. I would like to associate her similarly to how she viewed her husband and lover, Diego Rivera. As she put it: Nobody will ever know how much I love Diego, I don’t want anything to hurt him, nothing to bother him and rob him of the energy he needs for living, for living as he likes.10

Furthermore, she says: I will not refer to Diego as my “husband” because that would be ridiculous. Diego has not been, nor will he ever be, anyone’s “husband.” Or as a lover, because he contains much beyond the sexual limitations; and if I were to speak of him as a son, I would only be describing or picturing my own emotions, almost my self-portrait, not Diego’s. With this warning and with all clarity, I will try, within my ability, to tell the only truth—my own— that sketches his image.11

For Frida, Diego ceased to be a possession and became a way of seeing the world. It is this seeing that cannot be possessed. It is likely that it is this way of seeing him that led her to paint his face with the Eye of Shiva on his forehead. Conceivably, when we, too, enter into an intimate relation with others, they cease being possessions and become ways of seeing the world. Even the ones we do not have intimate relations with, equally, become ways of seeing the world. This also applies to Frida’s painting brush. It is not her possession. She did not own a painting brush. She could not own what could not be owned. Her brush was a way of seeing the world. It is an invitation to see the world. Frida herself is herself by being a way of seeing the world. She is not a subject that would claim possession of a painting brush, if only because once a brush ceases to be a possession there is no possessor to possess what is not. She was possessed by the painting brush, a possession that negated itself by surrendering to being a way of seeing the world. To possess is to cease being a possessor. The seer of the world loses herself or himself in seeing the world. A world without a seer is what is delivered to us by a painting brush. The brush does this by losing itself in this delivery, in enabling us to see the world without mediation. I will not exempt myself from devouring Frida if only because to write or to speak about her, as is the case with speaking about anyone or about any thing, is to partake in devouring. But there is a negative and a positive 10

Tibol, Raquel, Frida Kahlo: An Open Life, translated by Elinor Randall, (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 1993), 27. 11 Tibol, pp.137-138.

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devouring. The former devours and annihilates what is devoured. It conceals and or erases what is devoured. Positive devouring devours without annihilating, without erasing the devoured. Its devouring is undevouring. It sheds light on and preserves the devoured. It reveals. To devour in this positive sense is to bring into the open and preserve in the open what is brought into the open. Frida’s painting brush devours too, and does so in a positive sense. It is what every genuine painter’s brush does. It devours without devouring. Frida is devoured by her brush. She invites us to be devoured in this devouring. She invites us to participate in the fiesta of devouring, the fiesta of being devoured, to be devoured without being devoured. It is inevitable that the truth about Frida’s painting brush is “my own” truth, and whoever presents this truth, inevitably, it is going to be his or her own truth. What I say is to be taken merely as a sketch of its image. As for what is meant by “my own”, expect nothing but my image of it. I ask of you to attend to what I say from the standpoint of the image. What you are going to hear is largely the work of imagination—Frida’s painting brush as I imagine it. Since it is “her” brush, expect it to be so in a way that takes into account my image of what she imagines herself to be. It is your image too, unavoidably so. To hear is to hear oneself, just as to see is to see oneself. Sensing is sensing oneself, and in so far as self is sensible and is a part of the sensible, one cannot truly sense oneself without sensing the whole of the sensible. One is sensible only in so far as one is a part of the sensible whole—an elemental teaching of Frida’s painting brush. Frida Kahlo was born in the town of Coyoacan, Mexico, on July 7, 1907, or should one say, on July 7, 1910. She died in Coyoacan on July 13, 1954. Apparently, the date of her death does not allow for either or. It appears to be definite, or at least, it appears to be so to her biographers. What about this “either or” of her birth date? Why doesn’t the “either or” of her birth date apply to her date of death even more so than the date of her birth? She did not witness her date of death. She did not know when she died. But is it not also the case that she did not witness her own birth? If she did not witness her date of birth, how could she know when she was born? What one is told by others about one’s birth is inescapably abstract. Nothing concretely registers in oneself. How could it be otherwise since one does not experience one’s birth? One’s birth appears to be a birth for another just as in death one dies for another. In the case of a painter’s birth, however, one encounters a paradox in so far as one gives birth to oneself. The glimpse of this paradox is in the painter’s painting—the painting that is what it is because it is brought about by the paradox of the painter’s brush. The painting brush gives birth to the painter, and the

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painter gives birth to the painting brush, and the painter and the painting give birth to the painting brush. In the case of Frida, it appears incontrovertible that her mother and those who were with her at the time of her birth knew when she was born. But there is a difference between a painter’s knowledge and the kind of knowledge a mother has of her baby. If we bear in mind that the birth, in the case of Frida, is the birth of a painter, the incontrovertible knowledge that her mother had of her birth date is not as incontrovertible as it appears. Perhaps, here, one can benefit by paying attention to what the painting brush says about this matter. The painter’s knowledge is to be found in the painter’s brush as it paints. In commenting on Frida’s painting paradoxically titled My Birth, Hayden Herrera quotes a friend of hers who remarked, “Frida is the only person I know who, by their own will, created their own life. She is the only person who gave birth to herself.” But how could one create one’s own life, or give birth to oneself? Won’t one paradoxically have to be before one is? What has painting to say about this paradox? Since what painting says is said by and through a painting brush, it is appropriate to ask, what does the painting brush say about this paradox? Can what it says be said without the painting brush itself becoming paradoxical, perhaps, creating or giving birth to itself? And could those of us who listen to what the painting brush says not equally be paradoxical and hear what is said paradoxically? Is not the case that to hear what is paradoxical one has to hear paradoxically? And could we too, as we hear the paradoxical, perhaps, create and give birth to ourselves, and thus, get caught up in this paradoxical mode of generation? Let us open ourselves and be at home in the spirit of the paradox for, it is precisely this spirit that prepares us for experiencing and understanding Frida’s painting brush. We are not simply after a prosaic understanding that would only lead us to physical composition of her painting brush. We want to position ourselves and be positioned where her painting brush unveils itself. In the prosaic sense, just as others witnessed Frida’s birth, others, also, witnessed her death. It seems to follow that since she was not a witness to either, from her standpoint, her life is bracketed by the unknown, by nothing. But how can nothing bracket any life or anything? A life that is witnessed by others does not touch on what is essential about the perception of one’s life by oneself. Perhaps, each of us is in Frida’s shoes, for without exception, our lives are haunted by nothing at the core of their being. In relation to their lives, others stand in the same relation as Frida stands in relation to her own life. We lie to ourselves when we claim as if it were in apodictic certainty that we know the course of our lives from

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beginning to the end. We were not witnesses to our births, and we will not be witnesses to our deaths. Our death is inevitably indefinite. Death, the possibility of the impossibility of our being, haunts our lives. It is a part of the meaning of our lives. It is not incidental that Frida, on occasion, surrounded herself with skulls and skeletons. Skulls and skeletons are integral to life. In celebrating or affirming life, one must celebrate and affirm them. This life that is ours without being ours is the life that is concretely and intensely expressed in Frida’s painting. It is the life into which her painting brush draws us. Painting is this drawing into the unfathomable. To name the date of one’s birth or to name the possible date of one’s death is to name the unnamable. Frida says “I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone because I am a person I know best.” Like a shaman’s words which make sense only in the world of shamanism, these words come from a painter and are not to be taken lightly. They are poetizing words. They are artizing words. Our understanding of what they mean depends on our being rooted in the world of painting as revealed in painting, in what the painting brush reveals. Frida’s being alone is the being alone of a painter, and when she says that she knows herself best, the clue to this knowledge lies in the painting, in what the painting brush says in painting. Aloneness pervades her paintings. Being alone is not an accidental mode of one’s being. It is a part of what it is to be human. What Frida is, is not separate from her selfportraits. Her self wholly inhabits her portraits. This is not to be understood in the narrow sense in which one can readily recognize her in her self-portraits, portraits that appear to be copies of herself. A painter’s self-portraits are not copies of the painter’s self. What they are is a matter of the painting brush. It is the painting brush that directs us to what they are. Without exception, all paintings by all painters are self-portraits. Frida’s self-portraits are not an exception. Moreover, what Frida’s selfportrait teaches us is that self-portrait is, at the same time, the portrait of the not-self. That is, in painting oneself, one does not turn inwards, as if turning in this case is to turn away from what is other than oneself. It is a turning to oneself that is a turning away from oneself. A painter paints his or her world. Nothing is external to this world. It is precisely why in painting herself or himself, she or he paints all of us. It cannot be otherwise since she or he is one of us; a human being. Moreover, in so far as she or he is sensible, she or he paints; the self-portrait is the portrait of the entire sensible world. Unequivocally, Frida’s painting brush is intimately Frida’s painting brush, and her paintings are likewise intimately hers. But it is equally true that this intimacy, the painter’s intimacy is the

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intimacy of all of us; it is the intimacy of being, the intimacy of life. Erika Billiter is correct when she says that “Despite its extreme vividness, her work is completely closed in a mysterious way that belongs only to her.”12 What she omits is the truth of her work, the work which is the work of her being, is completely and mysteriously open, not only to the rest of us but also it is open as such. It is open to nature because it is of it. Her work is nature’s work. It is nature that works in her work. Like any other painting brush, Frida’s painting brush is a painting brush. But what is there to learn from this principle of identity? Nothing, one could say. But this nothing is not mere nothing. It may be worthwhile to recall words of Sartre in Being and Nothingness, where he tells us that the being that each one of us is, is a being whose to be is to be conscious of the nothingness of its own being.13 At the hands of a human being, a painting brush, as it paints, takes on this mode of being human, and announces it as a mode of being human, and in doing so, announces itself as what it is. A painting brush is a painting brush by not being a painting brush, by not being a thing that paints. It vanishes in the painter so that it can carry out its work, so that a painter can paint. Nothingness lies at the core of what a painting brush is. It is nothing more or less than itself. It is indeed true that from nothing we learn nothing. But this nothing is not just an empty nothing. At least, it triggers the question regarding the nature of a painting brush, a nature that is normally taken for granted. Let us recall that, normally, nothing strikes us as questionable about a painting brush. A painting brush is taken to be a thing that paints; it is what a painter uses to paint. At the hands of a painter, however, a painting brush takes us beyond the normal world, but this taking away is not really taking away; it situates us in the normal, but in a more radical way. It discloses the abnormality of the normal. One must position oneself at the home of what is being defined if one is to make sense of what is being defined. Stated more accurately, what is defined must do the positioning of he or she who seeks a definition. We, the seekers of the sense of Frida’s painting brush, must be positioned by her painting brush into and onto itself. By surrendering to this positioning, we are placed in a position where its sense can be disclosed. Rather than being an instrument for painting, the painting brush becomes a site where we are positioned. At this site, we are constituted and illuminated. And 12

Billeter, Erika, The Blue House: The World of Frida Kahlo, p. 11. See Jean Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, translation by Hazel Barnes, (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), p, 575. Sartre claims that man is a being who is what he is not and is not what he is. Being conscious of this mode of being is to be conscious of the nothingness of one’s being. 13

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perhaps, in this way, in addition to experiencing what a painting brush is, we too stand a better chance of experiencing ourselves. In seeking to understand anything, one seeks to understand oneself. To be sure, how this is the case is not self-evident. What should be anticipated here is that Frida’s painting brush is a brush of our being. It is our painting brush too. In it, our being is painted. A painting brush is like a surgeon’s knife. A surgeon’s knife cuts. It opens up. It reveals and makes manifest what is hidden. It opens what is to be seen, opens the knife as what opens, and opens the opener. It opens seeing, and opens opening itself. The knife exhausts itself in what it does. What it is, is nothing more than what it does. Opening, then, becomes what is essential to the knife. The knife knifes. What is being said here is none other than the work of phenomenology. This highly technical word in philosophy conveys nothing more than what is being said here. It is precisely this intuition that is stated forcefully by Heidegger in Being and Time. He says, “Phenomenology means to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself.”14 Here, we are brought into the neighborhood of Frida’s painting brush. This brush is a phenomenological brush. It opens. It opens itself opening and reveals itself as nothing more than what it does. Like a surgeon’s knife, it loses its thingliness so that it can be what it is, and do what it does. Frida was not a stranger to a surgeon’s knife. She had an intimate knowledge of this knife. At the tender age of 19, when one is full of life with an anticipation of a vibrant future, Frida had a horrific accident. A trolley car collided with a bus in which she was riding. The handrail broke and pierced her at the pelvis exiting through her vagina. She was thrown out of the bus, and landed on the street where she lay naked, profusely bleeding. The handrail not only pierced and opened her to herself and to the world; but also opened up the nature’s world. At the hospital, the surgeon’s knife opened her body to herself and to the world at large. It was rendered public, where it essentially belonged. In the course of her illness, she had more than twenty-two surgical operations. Close to the end of her life, her right leg was amputated. Through her painting, Frida too opened her body to the world at large. As Richmond correctly points out, “The body of her work used her own body as its subject.”15 This opening up became the work of her painting brush. She rendered open in her painting what her surgeon rendered open, and much more than the surgeon could ever have rendered open. The brush took on an ontological and existential 14

Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time, translated by John , Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, Inc., 1962), p. 58. 15 Richmond, p. 145.

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significance. The disclosing nature of the surgeon’s knife became the disclosing nature of Frida’s painting brush. The therapeutic aspect of the surgeon’s knife was taken up by the therapeutic aspect of her painting brush. Frida’s painting brush was diagnostic as well as therapeutic. Frida painted to heal herself. The healing was more than physiological or psychological. It was to healing of the human, a healing that could not be a healing if a human being were to remain a human being. The pain she underwent was more than a physical pain. It was a pain of existence, the pain that her painting sought to bring into relief. Pain becomes a site for self-revelation. The surgeon’s knife and the painters brush consummate their identity in the essential work of constituting disclosing, and do not, thereby, disclose themselves as things. Just as a surgeon’s knife becomes the extension of the surgeon’s hand, a painter’s brush is an extension of the painter’s hand. This does not mean that the brush is an addition to the hand, an addition that can be set aside at the painter’s will. It is not prosthesis. It is not experienced as such when a painter is painting. It derives its meaning in the process of painting. It is given birth in the process of painting, the same process that gives birth to the painter’s hand. In painting, this double birth loses its doubleness, and is united in the process of painting. Since this is the case, one is to see in the painter’s brush the painter’s hand. The painting brush does what the painter’s hand does. Let us also note that what the painting brush opens up is the extensionality of the hand. The fingers or the hand have their limits at the end of painting brush’s tips. The painting brush reveals itself as this extensionality. For one reason or another, if a painter is not able to use his or her hands, he or she may be able to substitute the lips or the feet for hands in which case, the painting brush becomes an extension of the lips and the extension of the feet. Indeed, any part of the body can be substituted for any other part of the body in painting. This is primarily because it is the whole body that paints. Hands are, after all are hands of the body. When the hand paints it is the whole body that paints, not the body that is a thing since things cannot paint, but rather what phenomenologists refer to as the lived-body. It is tempting to view and think of Kahlo’s painting brush or any other painter’s painting brush as a thing. What Frida’s painting brush teaches us is that a painter’s brush is not a thing. In painting, it loses its thingly character, and exhausts what it is in and by painting. Accordingly, it is not a thing that is held by the painter’s hand. It becomes handy. The hand itself, as it does so, loses its thingly character. What it handles is no longer there as a thing, and without it being there, there is no thing for the hand to

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handle. With this loss of the thingly aspect of the thing, the hand itself ceases to be a biophysical thing that handles. As the hand loses its thingly character so does the body, the body that the hand is the hand of. The hand is the hand because it is the hand of the body, not in the sense that the hand is part of the body, but that the hand of a body that has ceased to be an aggregate of parts. Let us then say that, ultimately, it is the body that paints. The body that paints is the living body. The painter’s brush is indistinguishable from the body that paints. In telling the story about itself as it paints, it also tells the story about the body. We are now in a position to make greater sense out of Frida Kahlo’s painting brush. This brush is not a thing at the hands of Frida’s hand, and Frida’s hand is not an anatomical part of Frida’s body. It loses its thingly identity in Frida’s body, and this body itself exhaustively loses itself in Frida’s painting. We are also to note that Frida’s painting body exhausts itself in painting. We cannot look for it apart from or besides the painting. It loses and finds itself in painting. Here, it is important to note that a painting does not lie out there as an object of the painter or as an object for a spectator. Contrary to what appears to be the case, a painting is not a visual object or any type of object. It loses its objectness if it is to be a painting. A painting is a way of seeing the world. As sensuous, it is a way of seeing the sensuous world. A painting brush constitutes and directs this seeing. It is able to do so because it is itself sensuous. Things are normally taken as mere things. Little attention is paid to them unless one seeks to use them. Scientists reinforce this normalcy when they adopt a physio-chemical investigation of the nature of things. But there is another side to things, a side that is not accounted for by common sense or by science. One of these aspects is that aspect that is opened up by a work of art, for example, by the art of painting. Bachelard tells us that A philosopher who has evolved his entire thinking from the fundamental themes of philosophy of science, and followed the main line of the active growing rationalism of contemporary science as closely as he could, must forget his learning and break with all his habits of philosophical research, if he wants to study the problem posed by the poetic imagination.16

Poetic imagination does not uproot us from the sensuous. It has its being in the sensuous, and calls attention to the sensuousness of the poet. A poet is embodied, and poesy resides in and is an expression of the sensuous. The poetizing painting, the painting that Frida took up as her 16 Bachelard, Gaston, The Poetics of Space, translated by Maria Jolas, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), p. XV.

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calling, was the work of imagination. She poetizes in her painting. Her painting brush and her hand were poetic. Heidegger has called our attention to what is essential about the hand. The hand is something altogether peculiar. In the common view, the hand is a part of our bodily organism. But the hand’s essence can never be determined, or explained by its being an organ that can gasp. Apes too have organs that can grasp, but they do not have hands. The hand is infinitely different from the entire grasping organ—paws, claws, or fangs—different by an abyss of essence. Only a being who can speak that is think can have hands and can handily achieve works of handcraft.17

Frida, it seems, outdoes Heidegger. Heidegger is deeply steeped in humanism. It is indeed true that Heidegger is very critical of humanism as indicated in the Letter on Humanism,18 and in his overall project of fundamental ontology where man is presented as the shepherd of Being. But Frida’s sense of the hand takes us beyond humanism; it takes us to the undomesticated wild world—the primal world of the sensible. Her paintings are intensely sensuous, and their world is intensely sensible, so much so that painting is sensuously palpable. Heidegger’s understanding of the hand, his understanding of body, appears to be taken up by thinking. Heidegger may be said to be a pure thinker who’s thinking about thinking verges on the sacred. Frida, however, does not worship at the altar of thinking, not even at the altar of the piety of thinking. She worships at the altar of the sensuous. She is intoxicated by the sensuous. Her painting brush opens the world of the sensible because it is itself sensible, and because she herself is sensible. Her self-portraits are unequivocally sensuous. Her painting brush loses itself in the sensuous so that it can give rise to sensuousness to be what it is. In presenting painting this way, she shares Merleau-Ponty’s faith in the world of the sensible. Merleau-Ponty has correctly pointed out that It is by rending his body to the world that the artist changes the world into paintings. To understand these transabstantions we must go back to the working, actual body—not the body as a chunk of space or a bundle of functions but that body which is an intertwining of vision and movement.19 17

Heidegger, Martin, Basic Writings, edited by David Farrell Krell, (New York: Harper Collins, 1993), p.380. 18 Heidegger, Martin, Basic Writings, edited by David Farrell Krell, (HarperCollins Publishers, 1993), pp. 213-255. 19 The Essential Writings of Merleau-Ponty, Fisher, Alden L. editor, (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1969), p. 255.

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Rending the body to the world is natural. The body does not have to abandon itself to do so. It renders itself to itself. It is a part of the world to which it rends itself. Frida’s painting brush is our brush, for we too belong to her world, to the world of her brush. In opening herself sensuously as sensuous she sensuously opens us as sensuous, and thereby, we ourselves appear to ourselves sensuously. Since it is sensible and because we ourselves are sensible, it opens a common sensible world in which we are its extension and in which it is our extension. As Frida has noted in her diary, “Nobody is apart from anybody else. Nobody struggles by him or herself. All is all and also one.”20 The word “nobody” should be taken literally. It means no “body”; equally, the word “anybody” should be taken literally to mean any “body.” Our bodies open to each other to be what they are, an elemental teaching by the painting brush, by painting. As her paintings amply illustrate, being Mexican was a part of her identity. The paintings demonstrate that being a Mexican is to be an integral member of the Mexican community. In this regard, her painting brush is a Mexican painting brush. The Mexican community is constituted and illuminated by her painting brush. The race to which she belongs is a matter of her painting brush. It painted Mexicanity. This identity is sensuously expressed in her paintings. It is not something mysterious or invisible located in her body, or in the body of a Mexican. Inside lived human bodies there is nothing. The lived body has no inside. It knows no dichotomy between inside and outside. There is no intra-corporeal space where self could be located. Bodies are not containers. All that is human is exhaustively sensuous. This is not the sensuousness of biology. It is the sensuousness of painting. That is being Mexican is not a matter of the degree of the presence of melanin. It is not a matter of not being white. It is not a matter of genetics. It is a matter of painting. A painter is a public person. Public space is where he or she practices his or her handcraft. One is what one is publicly. Frida would not hide herself in herself. She had no inside where she could hide herself, and none of us has an inside. She wanted to be seen because being seen is what makes her be what she is. It is to misunderstand her to think of her as an exhibitionist or to see her as such. Ultimately, her paintings are a testament of what she is as a Mexican, as a human being. One cannot be a Mexican privately or be a human being privately. There is a Mexican public body to which or in which Frida belongs. Diego Rivera, her husband, lover and friend painted murals, murals that are, by definition, public works. For Frida, the mural— the public painting—was her body. She exhibited herself publicly, 20

Tibol, p. 21.

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exhaustively so. She rendered her body a public work of art. This is possible because the human body is a public world of art. When a child is born she or he has no sense of a private body. By rendering her body public in her painting, Frida was not only reaffirming this natural condition of the human body; she was also challenging the privatization of the body. As previously stated, Frida said that “I paint myself because I know myself best.” The self that she had in mind, the sensuous self she painted, was not a bourgeois or a modern Western individualistic self. Herrera is only partly correct when she says that “Frida’s was a self-enclosed world.”21 Although one sees the world from one’s point of view, as is clearly the case with Frida, one is in the world with others, inescapably so as a matter of being human. Painting is essentially public. A painter’s self is a public self. The world of painting is a public world. Frida’s self was a public self. It was a Mexican self, a communal self. It is well known that she was Mexphile. She loved things Mexican—Mexican art, Mexican culture, Mexican people, Mexican flora and fauna, Mexican ambience, Mexican aura. Her paintings attest to this. It is where her painting brush leads us and, in so leading, it leads us to itself, and exhausts itself thereby. Her painting brush takes us to the Mexican world, the sensuous Mexican world. She was an authentic Mexican patriot, not a patriot in the interior, but an ecstatic patriot. Body in ecstasy is how she expressed her patriotism. It was a fiesta-like patriotism. The Tehuana dress she wore, the indigenous jewelry that jeweled her body, the Mexican gods, animals, plants and artwork that constituted the environment of her life point to her ecstatic mode of being. To know herself best as she claimed was to know herself this way. Compared to the murals painted by Diego, Orozco and Siqueiros, she was a living mobile mural, more intimately yet publicly expressed than the murals of these great muralists. For Frida, Mexicanness was not a prison. It was not an enclosure that cut Mexicans off from the rest of the Latin Americans, or from the rest of humankind. She cherished the liberty to be human, to be human in the community with other human beings. Her attraction to communism was not simply a matter of ideological or theoretical attraction. Painting is only secondarily ideological or theoretical. Communist painting primarily seizes the sensuous. It is primarily a visceral communism, a communism in which no human body is alien to any other body. This was the body that for centuries the European racist North denied, the body that European communists were blind to, or that they repressed, or disparaged. It is this 21 Herrera, Hayden, Frida Kahlo: The Paintings, (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, , 1991), p. 10.

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body of the South that Frida affirmed and celebrated. Her voice is not only the voice of the women of the South. It is also the voice of the people of the South regardless of their gender or ethnicity. Ultimately, it is the voice of all human beings as well as the voice of the non-human. Her voice, the voice of her paining, was the voice of the Mexican Revolution. Although she was born before 1910, the year of Mexican Revolution, she often indicated 1910 as the year of her birth. The painter’s birth, as the birth of an artist, does not coincide with the year of his or her “actual” birth. A painter can give birth to himself or herself, perhaps, not one time, but through a series of rebirths. It was the voice of the Mexican people and, at the same time, the voice of humanity. Frida was far ahead of her time, not in a linear sense, but in a circular sense. Her voice is yet to be fully heard. There is a communism of the sensuous, a communism that does not need a Marx, a Lenin, or a Mao, or a communism that is more than a product of a classless society. Without the liberation of the lived body, liberation is abstract. In liberation, the Mexican indigenous body that conquistadores invented and that was groomed by other Europeans, had to die, expire, so that there could be a renaissance of an authentic Mexican body. This is one of the lessons to learn from the indigenization of Frida, a process that played out in Frida’s painting brush. Clearly this is not the message one heard from European or Asian communism. Even fellow Mexican communists sang a different communist song. Frida was driven by a palpable communism, a communism that was an exhaustively corporeal. She was committed to a world that communism wanted to institute in human history. She did this and wanted to do this in painting. She longed for the world of Marx, the world of Lenin and the world of Mao, and ultimately for a human world, a world in which no human being would be a stranger to any other human being, a world in which the particularity of the Mexican would be the site where all human beings are constituted and revealed as such. In her painting, Frida sought to bridge the gap that Europeans opened at the end of the fifteenth century, the pre-Columbian and post-Columbian gap. The gap was essentially corporeal—the gap between the European body and the body of the indigenous pre-Columbian world. In her case, the gap was between the body of the European and the indigenous Mexican body. One sees this clearly in the painting of her family tree. She also wanted to bring other bodies, for no human body could be truly what it is without linking up with other human bodies. Her painting brush was the voice of this longing. For her, the classical Marxist dialectic was ultimately a corporeal dialectic. “All bodies of the world Unite!” appears to have been the motto of her painting. This side of Marxism was yet to .

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come into relief. European Marxism was under the spell of class struggle. Even its materialist side appears to have been oblivious of the corporeal revolution. Her interest in revolution was unconventional. A dialectical materialism that is not corporeally rooted is nothing more than another form of alienation. It seems that Frida understood this, and thereby, set herself apart from European Marxists and from European communists. Her Mexican bio-physical ancestry in combination with her fathers’ European ancestry concretized her self-consciousness. It is from the standpoint that she struggled for a new humanity. It is not that one has to be a mestizo or a mestiza to embody the new humanity. Rather, it is an affirmation of the inalienable aspect in each and every human body from the common human body whether it is or it is not a product of mixed races. There is a painting of her distributing arms to freedom fighters in the course of realization of world brotherhood and sisterhood. At the twilight of her life Frida said I feel uneasy about my painting. Above all I want to transform it into something useful to the communist revolutionary movement, since up to now I have only painted the earnest portrayal of myself, but I am very far from work that could serve the Party. I have to fight with all my strength to contribute the few positive things my health allows me to the revolution. The only true reason to live for.22

One may be led to communism by an ideology. One may also find a way to communism aesthetically. As sensuous, Frida’s body is not foreign to other human bodies, since they too are sensuous. She understood and sought to convey the view that one’s race is not surrounded by a moat full of lethal reptiles or by impregnable and impermeable wall. In so far as others are sensuous, they too are open to her. Here, we have what one may call aesthetic communism or corporeal communism. Instead of existing in the world as isolated individual bodies, or as isolated races, isolation comes to an end when communist body becomes a reality, when the body of bodies becomes a reality. As a human body, one’s body is what it is by constituting and expressing all other human bodies. Frida’s painting brush draws us to this kind of communist body. It invites us to create a history that is guided by the Communist Body Manifesto. It creates this Manifesto, a manifesto that calls all bodies in the world to unite. It affirms the temporality and the historicity of the body, in a communal sense. The body has a future that leads to the realization of what it is. At present, it is 22 Kahlo, Frida, Diary of Frida Kahlo, (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1995) p.25.

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not what it is. The now of the body points to the tomorrow of the body, and to the future of the body. Much has been written about the class struggle, and how the proletariat will wage a successful war and defeat the bourgeoisie, and eventually lead to a classless society, to a communist society. The Marxist dialect omits the body dialect, a dialect whose telos is the communism of the body. There is a body war to be waged, a war that is the framework of the war on racism and the war on sexism. Ultimately, the success of these territorial wars depends on the success of the global body war. A revolutionary war that is not body-centered is a distraction. In so far as it is a human war, it has to be body-centered. In the world where male bodies are worth more than female bodies, where lighter ones are worth more than the darker ones, where adults’ bodies are worth more than the children’s, where, increasingly, the bodies of young people are worth more than the bodies of the elderly, and where the bodies of Westerners are worth more than the bodies of non-Westerners, and where the bodies of the rich are worth more than the bodies of the poor, Frida’s painting brush sensitizes us to the prevailing corporeal injustice and calls us to a revolutionary action. Her suffering is inextricably bound to our suffering. The anguish of her painting brush is our anguish, anguish that has deep corporeal roots. Frida’s love of humanity blended with the love of the earth. For her, human beings did not and could not monopolize of the sensuous. Sensuousness linked them to the sensuous world in general. This is expressed in her paintings. Her painting brush takes us to this destination. Insects, birds, animals, plants and inanimate things were all a part of the sensuous world to which human beings belong. As Carlos Fuentes has pointed out Frida Kahlo was a natural pantheist, a woman and artist involved in the glory of universal celebration, an explorer of interconnectedness of all things, a priestess declaring everything created as sacred. Fertility symbols—flowers, fruits, monkeys, and parrots abounded in her art, but never in isolation, always intertwined with ribbons, necklaces, vines, veins, and even thorns. The latter may hurt, but they also bind.23

Since her painting brush was a child of the sensuous, it could paint the sensuous world without abandoning itself. As sensuous beings, we also belong to where it belongs. It can and does paint us whenever and whatever it paints. In this regard, one cannot be struck by the gap that separates Frida from Hegel. It is Hegel who said that 23

Ibid., p. 21.

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artistic beauty stands higher than nature. For the beauty of art is the beauty that is born—born again, that is, of mind; and by as much as the mind and its products are higher than nature and its appearances, by so much is the beauty of art higher than the beauty of nature.24

Clearly, for Frida, it is absurd to think that artistic beauty is higher than the beauty of nature, if only because, contrary to what Hegel says, ultimately artistic beauty is a creature of nature. What Hegel refers to as Mind is a creature of nature. Unfortunately, in Hegel, the creature turns against the parent—an offence to nature, a truly Oedipean offense. And just as Oedipus committed an offence against Thebes his homeland, Hegel commits an offense against our earthly home. Frida’s painting brush is an expiatory brush. It is a brush of justice. It reconciles us with ourselves by reconciling us with the earth. Seeing and experiencing oneself as belonging to nature transcend mere humanism. We must go beyond humanism in intention, the humanism that locks us up in our bodies and excludes us form one another, to that corporeal humanism in which each of our bodies is not only an expression of all other human bodies, but also an expression of nature’s body. These interlocking expressions constitute the sensible world to which Frida’s painting brush takes us, and in which it has its citizenship. This brush disrupts the everyday understanding of what is human—a disruption that may raise a terror alarm to most of us, especially those of us who worship in the cathedral of humanity, those who belong to the cult of humanity. As Kafka has noted Works of art always spring from those who have faced the danger, gone beyond which no human being can go. The further one dares to go, the more decent, the more personal, the more unique life becomes.

This is the way of Frida’s painting brush. That beyond which no human being can go is that which gives birth to a human being and it that into which one returns after death. In between resides in this beyond and derives its meaning from it. It is the wherein of Frida’s painting brush. This brush is the brush of humanity. It is the brush of nature. As Spinoza would say, it is nature naturing. To come into contact with Frida’s painting brush is come into contact with oneself, with one’s embodied self, with the embodied world. It is to pick up “her” brush, and participate in painting oneself, in painting her, in painting all human beings, and in painting nature. Here is a call that cannot 24 Hegel, G.W.F., On Art, Religion, and Philosophy, edited by J. Glenn Gray, (New York: Harper & Row Publishers,1970), p. 23.

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be resisted without resisting oneself –a futile resistance. Writing about Diego, she said I imagine that the world he would like to live in would be a great fiesta, in which each everyone of is being would take part from men to stones , from suns to darkness—all cooperating with their own beauty and creative power. A fiesta of form, color, movement, sound, intelligence, knowledge, and emotion; a spherical intelligent and loving fiesta to cover the entire surface of the earth.25

Frida’s painting brush is a key to this fiesta, to the fiesta of being, to the fiesta that life is. Her painting is an invitation to this fiesta. Saying no to this invitation is saying no to oneself. It is a refusal to be embraced by the earth—the mother of us all. It is a matricide. It is important to see that Frida was and remains a fruit of the earth. The earth gave birth to her, sustained her, and sustains her. Even when she died, she returned to mother earth. Her painting brush, which is itself a fruit of the earth, invites us to a celebration of our kinship with her, to celebrate ourselves, since, like her, we are fruits of the earth, and are sustained by it. To embrace the earth is to embrace ourselves, and to embrace ourselves is to embrace the earth. This is what Frida’s painting brush teaches us. This is what it teaches us about itself.

25

Tibol, p. 142.

PART III EMERGING DICHOTOMIES OF THE SENSUOUS

CHAPTER SEVEN IRRATIONALITY, ENTROPY AND NATURE: THE AESTHETIC COLLISION OF HEGEL AND SMITHSON SHANNON MUSSETT Every philosophy will turn against itself and it will always be refuted. The object or the system will always crush its originator. Eventually he will be overthrown and be replaced by another series of lies. Robert Smithson, Interview with P. A. Norvell, 1969 In the end too the art always turns on the artist, you know. Robert Smithson, Interview with Kenneth Baker, 1970

Introduction Alternately sinking into and emerging from the Great Salt Lake, Robert Smithson’s most famous work of art, the Spiral Jetty, proclaims an aesthetic that is rooted in neither divine nor humanistic privilege.1 This giant spiral made of rock and mud blurs artistic forms and decenters enlightenment conceptions of subjectivity. As a direct counterpoint, G. W. F. Hegel’s aesthetics deemphasizes the material and sensuous in spirit’s ascent toward the abstract, subjective and free. Underscoring the concept of impotence (Ohnmacht) at the heart of Hegel’s philosophy of nature and the entropic forces of matter manifest in Smithson’s works, in what follows, I explore the collision of these two perspectives on the role of 1

The significance of Robert Smithson to art and aesthetics continues to increase steadily with time. Not only is the Spiral Jetty the most famous of Smithson’s artworks, it may very well be the most famous artwork produced by an American in the past 150 years. See Galenson, David W. 2005. The reappearing masterpiece: Ranking American artists and art works of the late twentieth century, Historical Methods 38 (4), pp. 178–188. See also attached image of the Spiral Jetty (fig. 1).

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nature in art. I argue that the two seemingly divergent figures share a common bond on how nature operates in and through art insofar as both find nature to be a retarding and non-rational ground. Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics argue that for a human creation to be a work of fine art it must paradoxically make manifest the sensuous appearance of human and spiritual freedom. Ostensibly then, any comparison between the philosopher and the artist would yield little more than an irresolvable set of theses—quickly devolving into a series of contradictory claims whereby Hegel would reject Smithson’s art as a regression and confusion of forms, and Smithson would rebuff Hegel’s nostalgia for the past and desire for an anthropocentric future. Despite the obvious foil that Hegel’s historical theory of art plays for Smithson’s explicit rejection of humanity, freedom and history, there is a profound and not entirely antagonistic relationship between them when the focus shifts away from human freedom toward the natural. Specifically, both adhere to a conception of nature as irrational, chaotic and destructive. Whereas Hegel configures art as a form of salvation from these natural forces, Smithson positions art as that enterprise which brings them to our attention in a way that celebrates, rather than eclipses, their impact on experience. To explore the dimensions of nature’s presence in the work of art, I begin with an analysis of nature in Hegel’s second volume of the Encyclopedia and the Aesthetics. There we find a pervading theme of nature’s irrationality gnawing at the artwork, even as the work struggles to find release from materiality. I then explore how Smithson immerses himself in disruptive, unpredictable, and wild materiality as a kind of response to the denigration of nature in art, thus highlighting the utter futility in our attempts to master time, history and progress. Smithson’s art still confirms Hegel’s insight into the inescapable materiality of the work of art, but without falling into a deep melancholy over the effects of natural forces. Rather, Smithson confronts concrete matter as the site not only of artistic disruption, but also of profound beauty, thus pointing to a new kind of art that connects humanity to the earth in all of its magnificence and devastation.

Nature and Beauty in Hegel’s Work of Art In wonder, natural objects strike us for the first time. Evoking Aristotle, Hegel tells us that wonder sparks an inkling of something higher than our brute material existence. Faced with natural entities and phenomena, we find ourselves magnetically drawn to and repelled by their

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foreignness. Our ability to posit nature as an objectified other that yet mirrors back something spiritually higher to us inspires the nascent artistic impulse.2 Nature not only serves as the primary site for the emergence of art but also continues to haunt the object of fine art (das Kunstwerk) well after its creation. Fine art, which Hegel characterizes as the sensuous appearance of the ideal,3 is throughout disturbed by a longing for an unattainable perfection, a pervading strangeness, and an unworkable otherness. In Hegel’s system, the lingering presence of nature configures art in a depreciated role in comparison to religion and philosophy. Hegel’s Lectures on Fine Art (delivered between 1823 and 1829) chart the progression of art from architecture to poetry. These lectures tell a story in which spirit frees itself from the weight of sensuousness through art, which is defined precisely as the appearance of the idea in sensuousness. The sensible appearance of spirit poses a dilemma for Hegel insofar as he rejects nature as the proper object of aesthetic investigation in favor of the aesthetics of human creations. As a result of his suspicions, Hegel argues that the material ground requires transformation by human labor to actualize the hidden concept of the beautiful, effectively bringing rational form to irrational matter. Hegel’s philosophical treatment of nature, even aside from its appearance in aesthetics, poses its own unique set of problems. His philosophy of nature has often been dismissed as based in a wrong-headed interpretation of the empirical sciences of his time.4 Much recent work attempts not only to overlook these misunderstandings5 but to praise his 2

Hegel, G. W. F. 1975. Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on fine art, trans. T. M. Knox. Oxford: Clarendon Press, vol. 1, p. 315; hereafter referenced as LA in the text. 3 The discussion of the ideal lies at the forefront of the Aesthetics in a way unparalleled by any of Hegel’s other works. The work of art presents the ideal, as the idea of beauty (or the idea in perfect sensuous form) in a way that no natural being can approximate because the ideal purifies all natural contaminants in accordance with the concept in the artwork (LA 155). 4 Terry Pinkard, for example, although attempting to find scientific worth in Hegel’s Naturphilosophie, ends up providing more of a laundry list of Hegel’s mistakes in the empirical sciences. See Pinkard, T. 2005. Speculative Naturphilosophie and the development of the empirical sciences: Hegel’s perspective. In Continental Philosophy of Science, ed. Gary Gutting Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, pp. 19–34. 5 As I believe Pinkard tries to do but not very successfully and Thomas Posch does quite well: Posch, T. 2005. Hegel’s anti-reductionism: Remarks on what is living of his philosophy of nature,” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 10 (1), pp. 61–76.

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philosophy of nature as in many ways superior to the methodology of empirical sciences,6 and even to cast Hegel as a kind of protoenvironmentalist.7 Although I do not specifically take up any of these positions in detail in this paper, I want to suggest that the ambiguous place that nature holds in Hegel’s overall philosophical project not only guarantees these different interpretive strains, but also echoes in Smithson’s ties to materiality and his own struggles with technology and environmentalism. In the Lectures, Hegel rejects nature as the proper domain of aesthetics. Why he takes this extreme position makes sense only by contextualizing it within his overall philosophy of nature as put forth in his Naturphilosophie. Despite the fact that in the Encyclopedia Hegel posits nature as the externalized idea, or “the corpse” of the intellect,8 he nevertheless maintains that the idea remains implicitly within nature. This implicit rationality results directly from of the fact that the absolute idea of the Logic goes forth freely into externality in order to know itself in its alterity.9 In spite of its strangeness, its otherness and its lack of selfdetermination, nature allows spirit the ability to confront its absolute other in order to rise to self-consciousness. Accordingly, even though nature appears as the muted other, “the very stones cry out and raise themselves to Spirit” (PN 15). The natural striving toward the spiritual also helps to 6

See, for example, Reid, Jeffrey. 2004. The fiery crucible, Yorick’s skull, and leprosy in the sky: Hegel and the otherness of nature, Idealistic Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 34 (1), pp. 99–115. 7 Alison Stone argues for Hegel’s nascent environmental thinking: Stone, A. 2002. Ethical implications of Hegel’s philosophy of nature, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 10 (2), pp. 243–260. She returns to these thoughts in Stone, A. 2006. Petrified intelligence: Nature in Hegel’s philosophy. Albany: SUNY Press. Edward C. Halper disagrees with the bifurcated metaphysics he finds in Stone’s defense of Hegel’s environmentalism and offers his own version of Hegelian environmentalism in Halper, E. D. 2005. A tale of two metaphysics: Alison Stone’s environmental Hegel,” Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain 51–52, pp. 1–11. Expanding the possibilities of environmental philosophy in Hegel, Jason Brennan modifies the master-slave dialectic to trace the emergence of modern environmental thought in Brennan, J. 2007. Dominating nature, Environmental Values 16, pp. 514–528. 8 Hegel, G. W. F. 1970. Philosophy of Nature: Being Part Two of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford: Clarendon Press, p. 14; hereafter referenced as PN in the text. 9 For a study on the frei entlassen of the idea (and Hegel’s lack of a clear explication of this move) see Dieter Wandschneider’s Das Problem der Entäusserung der Idee zur Natur bei Hegel, in Hegel-Jarhbuch (1990), pp. 25–33 and Reid, pp. 103–104.

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explain why human beings are drawn to engage nature. And yet, despite our efforts to harmonize with it, nature “remains a problem. When we see Nature’s processes and transformations we want to grasp its simple essence, to compel this Proteus to cease its transformations and show itself to us and declare itself to us” (PN 3). The protean flux of nature resists conceptualization as a rule. However, despite its irrationality and lack of universality, nature still poses a question for us—can you find yourself in me? The logical idea generates nature for the sole purpose of setting up an other through which spirit mediates so as to achieve true self-unity. Why, then, does Hegel see this otherness as a “self-degradation” of spirit? The answer lies, in part, in the fact that the externality of nature is further characterized by impotence (Ohnmacht)10—an inability to self-determine because it is externally determined. Lacking explicit freedom, nature is cast as a powerless realm of confusion, contingency, caprice and disorder that limits philosophical thought (PN 22–23). Nature’s purpose, then, is oriented toward two separate but interrelated goals: first, to become life, and second, to sublate this determination and to pass over into spirit through death. “The goal of Nature is to destroy itself and to break through its husk of immediate, sensuous existence, to consume itself like the phoenix in order to come forth from this externality rejuvenated as spirit” (PN 444).11 In order for nature to be accessible to spirit, conscious thought must idealize it—make it thinkable—thereby destroying its inherent otherness.12 The stillness of thinking turns things into universals and 10

The many meanings of Ohnmacht (powerless, helpless, unconscious) resonate in Hegel’s descriptions of the impotence of nature. 11 The negation of nature finds its precursor in the first mention of nature in The phenomenology of spirit where Hegel describes the power of the negative: “all Nature, like the animals, celebrates these open Mysteries which teach the truth about sensuous things,” namely, that sensible things are nothing in themselves. See Hegel, The phenomenology of spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 65. The placement of the phenomenon of “life” at the pinnacle of nature’s creations in Hegel’s Philosophy of nature (life that must die for spirit to be born) complicates the relationship between art and nature in a way that I cannot cover in any detail. Markos Tsetsos does a fine job illustrating the logic behind Hegel’s discussion of art and life in his article, “Zum Lebensbegriff in der Ästhetik Hegels,” in Hegel-Jahrbuch, ed. Andreas Arndt, Paul Cruysberghs and Andrzej Przylebski (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2007), pp. 18–22. Regardless, this critical insight into the radical impermanence of all things figures prominently in Smithson’s art in a way that I take up later in the paper. 12 In the The philosophy of mind Hegel puts this move in the following terms: “Spirit negates the externality of Nature, assimilates Nature to itself and thereby

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silences the rustle of life (PN 7). In part, this goes a long way in explaining why Hegel cannot philosophically treat the beautiful in nature; nature is essentially flux and the beautiful is eternal. Consequently, even as the stones cry out to spirit and nature asks us to find ourselves in it, this can only be accomplished through the activity of mind, which petrifies the very life that it studies. The work of art, however, is different. As an expression of eternity, it accomplishes what the protean flux of nature cannot without demanding the complete self-sacrifice of nature in conceptualization. Philosophy teaches that self-consciousness contains the concept at home, in the center, radiating out and returning to itself seamlessly. Nature exhibits pure externality, the concept submerged in the material, dispersed among outwardly related objects and wholly unaware of the direction of reason. This distinction between mind and nature is relatively consistent throughout Hegel’s thought. It should not be surprising, therefore, that in his Lectures on Aesthetics Hegel finds it necessary to immediately excise the entirety of natural beauty from his philosophical investigation. Far from being an arbitrary choice, Hegel clarifies that: The beauty of art is higher than nature. The beauty of art is beauty born of the spirit and born again, and the higher the spirit and its productions stand above nature and its phenomena, the higher too is the beauty of art above that of nature. Indeed, considered formally, even a useless notion that enters a man’s head is higher than any product of nature, because in such a notion spirituality and freedom are always present. (LA, 2)

While this is certainly a curious claim on the heels of Kant’s Critique of Judgment and its celebration of natural beauty, Hegel insists that the natural world is composed of entities and systems that are indifferent in themselves and therefore irrational and unfree. High art gives meaning to all concepts of beauty that we might loosely attribute to nature by joining disparate, externally related elements into a meaningful unity. Hegel maintains that “spirit is alone the true, comprehending everything in itself, so that everything beautiful is truly beautiful only as sharing in this higher sphere and generated by it. In this sense, the beauty of nature appears only as a reflection of the beauty that belongs to spirit” (ibid.). Thus, as he does elsewhere in his corpus, Hegel positions the natural world in a subordinate and incomplete mode of existence in relationship to the spirit that it repels and sustains. This ambiguity prevents the work of art from ever fully idealizes it.” See Hegel, The Philosophy of Mind: Being Part Three of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, trans. William Wallace and A.V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 13.

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extricating itself from its natural ground while also giving meaning to otherwise indifferent material entities. All great art is indebted to sensuousness and is thereby tethered to nature proper in all of its problematic aspects: contingency, confusion, birth and death, change, and the multiplication of difference.13 Despite his desire to push aside the question of a philosophical investigation of beauty in nature, the natural continues to erupt throughout his Aesthetics, thus forcing the question of the status of nature in the work of art to the foreground. Nature’s troubling aspect raises important questions: does nature as the nourishment, substratum and ground of spirit’s historical movement toward self-awareness gain a voice in the work of art denied to it in other treatments? Given that the work of art is comprised of natural materials, many of which were once living, what does it mean that lifeless nature forms the material of fine art?14 Spirit demands the death of nature for its own eternal life, yet the work of art holds fast to sensuousness while expressing spiritual truth. Could this play between the forces of living and dead nature indicate a necessary condition for a work of art to exist at all? If so, then the presence of decay and death casts a long shadow on the artistic endeavor. Clearly, these questions necessitate a more thorough understanding of the meaning of art for Hegel. Defined in the Lectures “as the first reconciling middle term,” Hegel emphasizes that art mediates between the abstractness of thought and the materiality of the natural world in a unique way (LA 8). More than a technological transformation of nature into a form wherein the worker gains self-recognition, the work of art speaks of the divine. “The aim of art is precisely to strip off the matter of everyday life and its mode of appearance, and by spiritual activity from within bring out only what is absolutely rational and give to it its true external configuration” (LA 289). That Hegel would demarcate human artistic activity as a proper sphere of spiritual investigation is not surprising. Art 13

William Maker captures this problem well when he writes, “art both is and celebrates an independence from nature and natural necessity even while recognizing and affirming our sensible and sensuous nature” in his “Introduction” to Hegel and aesthetics, ed. William Maker (Albany: SUNY Press, 2000), p. xiii. 14 J. M. Bernstein frames the dilemma in the form of a related question. Simply put, “Might it not be the case that dead nature belongs to art’s animation?,” “Freedom from nature? Post-Hegelian reflections on the end(s) of art” in Hegel and the arts, ed. Stephen Houlgate (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007), p. 218. Bernstein’s analysis focuses on the lost authority of nature in art, rather than its continuing and thriving presence. For more on art standing in for the lost authority of nature, see Gregg M. Horowitz’s chapter on Hegel in his book Sustaining loss: Art and mournful life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001).

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holds not only the whole wealth of natural formations but more importantly the infinite possibilities of the creative imagination molding these formations into original works (LA 5). In addition, art’s uniqueness centers on its ability to bring the highest truth to our attention through an appeal to the senses (LA 284). Fine art—by bringing the supersensible beyond into sensible appearance—actually bridges the scission between abstract thought and finite nature. Truth cannot be truth without appearing, and art provides the vehicle through which it appears. In a curious way, art is more real than the immediate world of external objects insofar as it saves them from the flux of change and decay. In the ordinary external and internal world essentiality does indeed appear too, but in the form of a chaos of accidents, afflicted by the immediacy of the sensuous and by the capriciousness of situations, events, characters, etc. Art liberates the true content of phenomena from the pure appearance and deception of this bad, transitory world, and gives them a higher actuality, born of the spirit. (LA 8–9)

And so, as an act of spirit itself, art mediates between the abstract concept and the sensuous particulars by baptizing the chaos of nature into the eternity and stability of truth. Yet, whereas practical and theoretical relationships to nature manage at times to eclipse the otherness of the sensible, art preserves it in a singular way. Since spirit demands that art appear to the senses, whilst being “liberated from the scaffolding of its purely material nature” (LA 38), Hegel cannot shake the presence of nature and the problem it poses to the work of art. Even though nature originally appears as something totally foreign to the mind which seeks to know or experience it, the truth of nature lies in the fact that it was posited by spirit as its first and only external, alien creation. Art addresses our alienation from nature by manifesting freedom in the matter itself. Humanity desires to escape the snare of the finite and rise into the fullness of absolute, infinite truth. Art offers us this salvation within sensuous life. Still, in themselves, beautiful beings in nature are only accidentally beautiful; their beauty exists solely for us and for themselves (LA 123). For example, if an animal—nature’s highest creation—has striking feathers or radiant eyes, or even a beautiful shape, the subjective unity (soul) of the organism only foreshadows the concept because the animal organism fails to express the ideal. “Only the self-conscious ego is the simple ideal which, as ideal in its own eyes, knows itself as this simple unity and therefore gives itself a reality which is no mere external, sensuous, and bodily reality, but itself one of an ideal kind” (LA 132).

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Whereas animal life has the concept implicitly, self-consciousness has the concept (of itself) as the object (for itself) explicitly. Unsatisfied with the lack of freedom in nature, spirit thus moves to the higher ground of art. In fact, from the deficiencies of organic nature emerges the beauty of art: “Only so is the truth lifted out of its temporal setting, out of its straying away into a series of finites” (LA 152). Nature, stuck in the finitudes of externality—unconsciously determined by its concept, unable to allow freedom to appear, governed by natural laws— cries out for something to give it reason and purpose. The animal (including the human) cannot therefore fully escape the vicissitudes of desire, chance, infirmity, and eventually death. For its part, fine art purifies the contaminants of natural objects that otherwise afflict them: “it casts aside everything in appearance which does not correspond with the Concept and only by this purification does it produce the Ideal” (LA 155). In other words, art takes away all signs of mortality and “confronts us like a blessed god” (LA 157). Artistic labor purifies hunger, pain, vice, illness and death, as well as love, longing, joy, and triumph of their natural settings and motivations, thereby making them timeless. However, since this achievement is ideal, it retains an aspect of longing—longing for the perfection demanded by the idea that serves as its internal engine. By making art the ideal, Hegel necessarily indicates a kind of striving toward perfection inherent in all works of art as well as a necessary failure of them to achieve what their ideality demands. How could it be otherwise? On the one hand he wants to say that they have achieved their perfection, but on the other hand, how is this possible given their inherent physicality, i.e., naturalness? Nature, as Ohnmacht, cannot be anything more than an obfuscation of the work of art. The ideal, as a presentation of the divine, is essentially defined by its unity, tranquility, and inner-perfection; however, such a presentation in art takes place in and through nature, which necessarily transgresses all of these features (LA 205).15 Leaving aside the all-too-natural body of the artist, the work itself 15

I emphasize the natural rather than the spiritual excess of the idea. Conversely, William Desmond asserts (quite correctly) “Something is manifested that is always in excess of expression in terms of a sensuous form, such as is necessary for the aesthetic. The aesthetic deals with the sensuous show of the Idea; but there is something here transcending sensuous show, in that the latter is finite, the former infinite.” Desmond, W. “Art and the absolute revisited: The neglect of Hegel’s aesthetics” in Hegel and aesthetics, p. 7. The transcendence of the natural toward the spiritual (a move repeatedly made by Hegel himself) almost always indicates a reflexive move whereby the natural cannot ever be entirely transcended, thus denoting its own kind of excess. The irresolvable natural remainder that haunts Hegel’s work of art becomes the centerpiece of Smithson’s writings and works.

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rests on the point of a needle—it is singular (and thus irreplaceable), it is the product of an artist (and thus subject to the chance gift of talent and cultivation) and it is made through the transformation of the natural world by human activity (and thus at the mercy of the very uncertainty and unpredictability of the natural world from which it promises to deliver us). Whatever perfection the work of art displays, all these signs of mortal life haunt it throughout.

A New Kind of Dialectic In turning to a twentieth-century artist we must confront the controversial and well-known Hegelian proclamation of the end of art.16 Although Hegel never denied that art would still be made, he maintained that its spiritual relevance to Western culture would never again hold a privileged place—giving way instead to Christianity and, most importantly, systematic philosophy. Even granting these bold claims, it is still too facile to approach art that came after Hegel as a series of refutations of his belief in art’s end. Therefore, I do not want merely to interpret Smithson’s art as a repudiation of Hegel’s closure on art’s significance (even if it can be understood in this way). Rather, I propose turning to Smithson in order to challenge fundamental Hegelian convictions in aesthetics concerning the relationship between the natural and the spiritual, the finite and the eternal, the human and the non-human. Smithson’s work disputes many tenets of Hegel’s aesthetics, yet the two can be placed in meaningful dialogue. This move not only provides a counterpoint to Hegelian aesthetics but also curiously expresses and expands it. For example, Gary Shapiro notes that Hegel’s monumental aesthetics displays affinities with Smithson primarily insofar as the artist describes his work as dialectical.17 Shapiro clarifies that what Smithson “finds useful in dialectics is not the idea of a higher synthesis or attained totality, as in Hegel or some versions of Marxism, but rather the idea of a play or movement that breaks down fixed oppositions” (Shapiro, p. 83). 16

The Aesthetics’ infamous heralding of the end of art (LA 11) is itself open to ongoing debate. Carl Rapp provides a provocative defense of the notion that art continues even on Hegel’s own terms. For Rapp, “we are still moving through the process Hegel refers to as the dissolution of romantic art.” Rapp, C., “Hegel’s concept of the dissolution of art” in Hegel and aesthetics, p. 16. 17 Gary Shapiro, Earthwards: Robert Smithson and art after Babel (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1995), p. 22. Despite drawing connections between Hegel and Smithson, Shapiro finds greater affinity between Heidegger’s aesthetics and Smithson’s project.

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Such emphasis on dialectical thinking and practice allows Smithson to work within Hegelian dynamics, while thoroughly disrupting its hegemonizing teleology. Like many of his contemporaries, Smithson rejected the European model for art. Where Hegel champions the purity of clearly demarcated art forms—sculpture, architecture, music—Smithson constantly blends forms. In fact, he not only challenges the strict distinctions between different kinds of art, he denies the sanctity of art as separate from other disciplines. Smithson consciously and aggressively incorporates technology, geology, mathematics, paleontology, crystallography and other sciences into his art. As a direct result of these influences, Smithson formed sculptures, nonsites and earthworks into the kinds of figures Hegel would have relegated to the earliest stages of unconscious symbolic art and even pre or non-art: spirals, circles, steps, grids, mirrors reflecting light or covered in dirt, boxes, crates, scatterings, pours and piles. Whereas Hegel would find such focus on the manipulation of matter into basic forms to be a regression, Smithson sees it as the expression of something that eludes oppressive anthropomorphic views on truth and beauty. While Smithson dismisses systematic philosophy for its pretentions to completeness and truth, he deliberately employs his own dialectic—one directly influenced by Marx and Hegel.18 Smithson’s nonsites—works where he brings materials (rocks, sand, dirt) from industrial sites into the space of the museum (bounding them with mirrors, boxes or crates) simultaneously draws the amorphous landscape into a relationship with the restricted space around a work of art. These nonsites form the basis of his conception of dialectical process in art. In discussing his choice of a site (such as a quarry or a mine) Smithson notes the way in which otherwise unproblematized industrial materials become a focal point in the gallery— disrupting both the bounded walls of the museum and the unbounded location of the site. Such disruption causes a movement between site and nonsite that is akin to the Hegelian movement between the essence and

18

In the collected writings, Smithson discusses Marx a number of times but rarely does he mention Hegel. For one critical mention of both regarding dialectical thinking see “Four conversations between Dennis Wheeler and Robert Smithson” (1969–1970) in Robert Smithson: The collected writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 207; Smithson’s works from this collection hereafter referenced as CW in the text. Despite the paucity of references to Hegel, Smithson’s accurate utilization of the terms and mechanics of dialectics shows a deep understanding of the movement between oppositions employed by both Marx and Hegel.

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appearance—except that for Smithson there is no origin, no telos, and no higher resolution. Smithson explains: I’m interested in making a point in a designated area. That’s the focal point. You then have a dialectic between the point and the edge: within a single focus, a kind of Pascalian calculus between the edge and the middle or the fringe and the center operating within a designated area.19

When Smithson takes dirt and rocks from what would otherwise be an aesthetic wasteland and arranges them within tidy boxes or bins inside the clean walls of a museum, a back-and-forth play unfolds wherein the spectator is drawn out of an indoor space into an unknown and indeterminate beyond. This dialectic, Margaret Iverson explains, “blurs the distinction between center and periphery, because the fragments in the gallery are inhabited by the absence of the site, and the site is virtually unlocatable. Smithson wanted to make the boundary between these two camps permeable.”20 Smithson’s description of the movement between point and edge, fringe and center, mirrors the Hegelian dialectic between inner essence and outer appearance. However, this fluid movement between fringe and center is never resolved—superseded—into a higher unity; it remains in a constant state of oceanic disruption. The lack of dialectical resolution underscores the very irrationality from which Hegel’s aesthetics seeks escape. The persistent Ohnmacht emphasizes nature’s essential powerlessness—its utter lack to do anything in its function as the mere ground for spirit’s quest toward self-knowledge. Here, the dialectic appears grossly one-sided as spirit—in this case through art—brings reason and purpose to the irrational through reconciliation. Smithson’s dialectic, on the other hand, refuses to posit such a relationship between nature and art. He emphasizes the irrational, but not because of the powerlessness of nature; rather, he does so in order to highlight the powerlessness of rationality in the face of nature. Rejecting the prioritization of one aspect over another, Smithson explains that the dialectic can be thought of “as a bipolar rhythm between mind and matter. You can’t say it’s all earth and you can’t say it’s all concept. It’s both. Everything is two things that converge.”21 In many respects, Hegel’s own understanding of the dialectical movement between concept and matter in art acknowledges this bipolarity. Yet Hegel’s 19

Smithson, “Fragments of a conversation” (1969), CW 188. Margaret Iverson, Beyond pleasure: Freud, Lacan, Barthes (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007), p. 79. 21 “Earth” Symposium at White Museum, Cornell University (1969), CW 187. 20

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historical narrative of spirit’s progressive freeing from matter—and eventually from art itself—refuses to allow this disruptive unity between material and ideal to continue. This bias in the Hegelian dialectic helps explain why Smithson gravitated more toward the Marxist dialectic and its basis in materiality.22 In the most grandiose expression of his adherence to matter over abstraction, Smithson’s giant rock spiral in Utah’s Great Salt Lake enacts a performative dialectic between eternity and time, matter and concept. Expressed in the motionless perfection of a rock spiral constantly undergoing assault from the natural elements of which it is composed and in which it is placed, matter is both wholly bound and yet strangely unbounded by its own configuration. Smithson speaks of the physical Spiral Jetty as a perfection of what he attempted in his nonsites. He explains that “Although the nonsite designates the site, the site itself is open and really unconfined and constantly being changed. And then the thing was to bring these two things together. And I guess to a great extent that culminated in the Spiral Jetty” (American Art Archives Interview/CW 295). The dialectic between site and nonsite turns on the dialectical interchange between inside/outside, center/periphery, and limit/unlimited. The organized spiral placed in an amorphous space of the geologic remains of ancient lake Bonneville perfects such an interchange. The Jetty—a literal interruption of the space of the lake and the surrounding landscape, is also an orderly presentation of a basic geometrical and geological structure. Its simplicity expresses a fractal elegance that raises the viewer up, yet its blunt perpendicular protrusion from the shore irritates any claim to seamlessness between earth and art. As such, it both breaks with the surrounding environment and holds it together in a profound way: “Ambiguities are admitted rather than rejected, contradictions are increased rather than decreased—the alogos undermines the logos. Purity is put in jeopardy.”23 The simultaneous style and disturbance of the Spiral Jetty disrupts the very purity of form and meaning that Hegel’s spirit strives to give voice through art. Smithson desired “to stabilize something that is unstable,”24 thereby illuminating the irrationality at the heart of his own dialectic. This impossible resolution 22 Even as Smithson downplays Marx’s influence on his thinking— at one time calling it nothing more than a “flicker” (CW 284)—he readily admits that he has “a kind of physicalist or materialist view of the world, which of course leads one into a kind of Marxian view.” “Interview with Robert Smithson for the Archives of American Art/Smithsonian Institution” (1972), CW 294. 23 Smithson, “The Spiral Jetty” (1972), CW 147. 24 Smithson, “Interview with Robert Smithson” (1970), CW 239.

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points to a temporality that deemphasizes the human in an unsettling turn to the abyssal.

Smithson on Entropy, System and Time As discussed above, Hegel’s approach to nature in general is haunted by the shadows of impotence, irrationality, and externality. Art’s inescapable materiality shows the profound limiting force that nature exerts in the expression of truth—the timeless and eternal eventually succumbs to the temporal and finite simply because the work of art is a physical object. In the end, nature has the final word over the work because it functions as its ground and its destroyer. If we approach this fact of art’s sensuousness not by lamenting how change and decay plague the material world even in its most beautiful manifestations, then we catch a glimpse into what Smithson’s art reveals: the beautiful not through the presentation of everlasting rationality, but through the endless transformations of the sensuous. The very things that attract us to Smithson’s art invoke Hegel’s unease. Hegel tells us that the stones “cry out to Spirit” to raise them up out of the muteness of externality into rationality. Yet Smithson’s nonsites and earthworks present stones rejecting the spiritual through their stubborn silence and ties to a geological time. Smithson’s focus on entropy—the tendency of any closed system toward disorder and dissolution—expands not only into natural systems, but into rational systems as well: One’s mind and the earth are in a constant state of erosion, mental rivers wear away abstract banks, brain waves undermine cliffs of thought, ideas decompose into stones of unknowing, and conceptual crystallizations break apart into deposits of gritty reason … This slow flowage makes one conscious of the turbidity of thinking. Slump, debris slides, avalanches all take place within the cracking limits of the brain. (“A Sedimentation of the Mind”/CW 100)

Here we find one of the clearest expressions of Smithson’s understanding of entropy. There exists no forward-thinking rationality that brings the irrational under its domination; there is no return home of the prodigal son to the welcoming father, bringing alienation and difference under the fold of unity. Rather, both nature and reason are in a constant state of erosion. What appears to be timeless and true, is only the temporary byproduct of the mind’s decomposition—what Freud would credit to the death drive and Anton Ehrenzweig attributed to

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“dedifferentiation.”25 However, this decomposition dismantles sedimented conceptions of art, nature, and truth and thereby reveals entirely new ways of experiencing them all. No longer tethered to the historical narrative of world spirit coming to fruition through human achievement, art becomes something other than the appearance of the rational in the irrational. Hegel’s sense of history, far more complicated than the idea of a linear progress from point A to point B, still totally commits to a sense of advancement. In the teleological drive toward self-realization, spirit (or simply humanity) attains—albeit through struggle, toil, violence and temporary periods of regression—the eventual self-conscious recognition of freedom and truth. Smithson, however, eliminates the idea that there exists a coherent movement from a starting point to such an optimistic goal, and certainly rejects the notion of human beings as the darlings of world history. Through his explicit emphasis on geological time, his art challenges the forward thrust of human history. Smithson is able to reject teleology largely because of his emphasis on the material basis of reality. Everything—even language and ideas— maintains a materiality that cannot be excised through abstraction. Once we understand temporality in terms of stones and crystals, we find ourselves on a scale where the human is greatly diminished, thus allowing Smithson to ground his art quite literally in the Earth itself.26 He observes that natural materials and the earth itself provide us with a different sense of time than we find in the human. The strata of the Earth is a jumbled museum. Embedded in the sediment is a text that contains limits and boundaries which evade the rational order, and social structures which confine art. In order to read the rocks we must

25

Freud’s later thinking and Ehrenzweig’s notion of “dedifferentiation” both impacted Smithson’s theory on the emergence of temporary truth from disruption and destruction. Smithson praises the “suspension of boundaries” between the self and the non-self discussed at length by Ehrenzweig as the place of artistic creativity. For an analysis of how Ehrenzweig’s concept of dedifferentiation figures into Smithson’s understanding of entropy, see Iverson, pp. 76–77 and Shapiro, pp. 88–94. 26 Whether he is collecting rocks and sand from an industrial site, placing mirrors strategically in the Yucatan (Yucatan Mirror Displacements 1–9, 1969), pouring asphalt down a hill in Rome (Asphalt Rundown, Rome, Italy, 1969) or building a disrupted circle in a quarry in Holland (Broken Circle, Emmen, Holland, 1971), Smithson’s art is rooted in the Earth and the material.

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become conscious of geologic time, and of the layers of prehistoric material that is entombed in the Earth’s crust.27

In prioritizing the geological, Smithson forces us out of human temporal privilege. From the perspective of history, we are the main characters in the world’s story, but from the perspective of geology, we are a momentary change in the scenery. The Hegelian notion that art is a progressive movement toward abstraction and immateriality, a movement of the hidden essence away from the material of which it is composed, has no place in Smithson’s worldview. He warns, “Each abstraction is but another block in the psychic prison … To have faith in abstraction is an empty hope; after that there is mud, torpor, and darkness.”28 Rather than attempting to overcome the material, Smithson embraces it: “My work is impure; it is clogged with matter … There is no escape from matter. There is no escape from the physical nor is there any escape from the mind. The two are in a constant collision course. You might say that my work is like an artistic disaster. It is a quiet catastrophe of mind and matter.”29 Invoking dialectical thinking, Smithson shows the connection between mind and matter as one based on an irresolvable contradiction—a spiraling catastrophe, a collision, an unsurpassable opposition between thought and body, rather than a reconciliation between two antitheses into a higher and more perfect unity. For Hegel, externalized nature, indifferent in itself, impotent insofar as it is externally determined, is always and most importantly, inherently rational. Thus the artist must bring that implicit rationality into sensuous appearance. Presenting an alternate vision, Smithson suggests “a way of seeing things in a manifold of relations, not as isolated objects. Nature for the dialectician is indifferent to any formal ideal. This does not mean one is helpless before nature, but rather that nature’s conditions are unexpected.”30 In other words, nature does not need reason (or humans) in order to bring its sensuous externality into line with its formal concept. Nature remains indifferent to reason and in the end dominates even the greatest technological achievements of rational animals. The apparatuses used in creation and the creations themselves are doomed to inevitable 27

Smithson, “A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects” (1968), CW 110. Kenneth Baker, “Talking with Robert Smithson” (1970) in Robert Smithson: Spiral Jetty, ed. Lynne Cooke and Karen Kelly (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), p. 148. 29 Smithson, “Fragments of an interview with P. A. Norvell” (1969), CW 194. 30 Smithson, “Frederick Law Olmsted and the dialectical landscape” (1973), CW 160. 28

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decay: “The tools of technology become a part of the Earth’s geology as they sink back into their original state. Machines like dinosaurs must return to dust or rust” (“A Sedimentation of the Mind”/CW 104). As with Hegel, the chaotic and irrational precedes the artist’s creation, but unlike Hegel, Smithson emphasizes the return of the work of art to this same state. Therefore, the Hegelian melancholy that clings to the work of art— its irredeemable finitude and inescapable naturalness—forms the centerpiece of Smithson’s focus. Despite Hegel’s insistence on the contradictory, negative and disruptive, the systematic sense of optimism and progress that pervades his work trumps these more destabilizing elements. From a Smithsonian viewpoint, systematicity is inherently distasteful. Smithson consistently and repeatedly attacks the notion that truth can be systematized, somehow mapped entirely (or even partially). One of the most powerful expressions of this anti-systematicity comes from his film Spiral Jetty—which, along with numerous photographs and an essay by the same name, documents the creation of the earthwork in the Great Salt Lake. Near the beginning of the movie, the image of what initially appears to be rocks tumbling down a hillside to the tick-tocking sound of a clock turns out to be torn pieces of maps and pages of atlases. In his signature monotone, Smithson’s voiceover quotes: “the earth’s history seems at times like a story recorded in a book each page of which is torn into small pieces. Many of the pages and some of the pieces of each page are missing.”31 Hegel certainly does not give an account of every event in human history in any of his scientific treatments (an impossible, Borgesian task) but he still gives the sense that he has covered the essential events necessary for the development of spiritual self-consciousness. Smithson mocks this kind of audacity by tearing the total map of truth into pieces with many, if not most of those pieces invariably lost to the limited human mind. The history of the world reads like a story in a book, thereby recognizing the human tendency to interpret the world and our place in it narratively. However, Smithson points to an interrupted, dismembered fiction, constituted as much—if not more—by its absences than by its disclosures. Thus our “truth” is really an incomplete fiction.

31

The Spiral Jetty, Produced with Bob Fiore, Nancy Holt, and Barbara Jarvis. 16 mm film, color with sound, 32 min. (1970). The quote is taken from Thomas H. Clark and Colin W. Stern, Geological Evolution of North America (New York: Ronald Press, n.d.), p. 5. See also The Spiral Jetty (CW 151). In filming this shot, Smithson wanted to treat the quote as a “fact,” (ibid.) thereby challenging the nature of both truth and facts.

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As soon as Smithson breaks from a belief in progress and optimism, a different sense of time through art emerges. He de-centers the human perspective in favor of the geologic and crystalline, thus resulting in a radically distinct experience of temporality. Jennifer Reynolds remarks that “Smithson’s crystalline model of time disregards linear, progressive, or triumphalist models by imagining time as an opaque encrustation around a fault or fracture. Here time has no connection to an animate origin or center; it begins with a ‘dislocation’ and merely accumulates from without.”32 Thus, Smithson jettisons ties to origins and goals entirely, resting instead on a spiraling stream of time with no beginning or end, which can be any or no time at all. As seen in the image of the torn maps falling down a hill, Smithson’s time goes to the heart of Hegelian historical confidence by presenting an incoherent and disjointed view of history—coming from nowhere and going nowhere. Once we are dislodged from the conception of progressive time, we are opened up to the possibility of abyssal time in its fullness. In one of the most captivating scenes in the Spiral Jetty film, the viewer is taken on a private tour of the Hall of Late Dinosaurs in the American Museum of Natural History viewed through a blood-red filter. The music is simple and ominous as it echoes through the empty room. The camera moves from dinosaur to dinosaur, evoking both an uneasiness with the monstrous and a horror at the skeletal reminders that these once dominant creatures are long since extinct. After this perusal of the museum space, Smithson’s voice, citing from Samuel Beckett’s, The Unnamable, emerges: Nothing has ever changed since I have been here. But I dare not infer from this that nothing ever will change. Let us try and see where these considerations lead. I have been here, ever since I began to be, my appearances elsewhere having been put in by other parties. All has proceeded, all this time, in the utmost calm, in the most perfect order apart from one or two manifestations the meaning of which escapes me. No, it is not just that their meaning escapes me, my own escapes me just as much. Here all things, no, I shall not say it, being unable to. I owe my existence to

32

Jennifer L. Reynolds, “The taste of time: Salt and Spiral Jetty” in Robert Smithson, ed. Jane Hyun (Los Angeles: The Museum of Contemporary Art, 2004), p. 98. Reynolds masterfully ties Smithson’s rejection of linear time to the location of the Spiral Jetty earthwork in relationship to the nearby Golden Spike National Historic Site, which is itself the epitome of monumental, progressive, and humanistic time (Reynolds 98–100).

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At first glance, Smithson’s choice of Beckett’s words seems to reverse the notion of time as constant, seemingly random and often destructive change. When he opens this monologue on the heels of the red-stained dinosaur skeletons, he reveals that nothing has changed, that there is a perfect stability, an utmost calm in the cosmos. This aspect of time emphasizes the universal order—a Spinozistic insight wherein change appears constant, but only from a localized perspective; viewed from the universal, there is calm and perfect order. However, we should not be fooled into thinking that Smithson embraces a Hegelian position in these lines. This order is still unnamable, inaccessible and wholly unconcerned with the human. The ultimate meaning of the world escapes us. In the end, we do not have the words to speak of this relationship to the all because this eternal order, of which we are but a miniscule and fleeting part, cannot be accessed or touched by us. Like Beckett’s unnamable protagonist above, we cannot even know ourselves.34 The sense of subjective loss in this expression of temporality provides the most fruitful prospect for aesthetic production and experience. When the meaning of one’s existence in relation to the universe is irrelevant, a kind of euphoric release occurs that opens up the possibility for a new conception of art and beauty. Through disruption and decomposition, the counterpoint to self-consciousness and eternal life becomes worthy of artistic celebration. Smithson remarks how “disruption of the earth’s crust is at times very compelling, and seems to confirm Heraclitus’s Fragment 124, ‘The most beautiful world is like a heap of rubble tossed down in confusion’” (“A Sedimentation of the Mind”/CW 102).35 Through this

33

Underscoring Smithson’s rejection of linearity, this passage is excised, almost randomly, from a much longer meditation by the unnamed protagonist of the story. Daniel Katz explores the influence that Beckett had on Smithson, notably through Beckett’s notion of the “surd” which appears often in Smithson (as “surd” but also as “alogon” and “ungraspable”). Katz, D., “Where now? A few reflections on Beckett, Robert Smithson, and the local” in Samuel Beckett: Debts and Legacies (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010), pp. 329–340. 34 In “a position of elsewhere,” Lynne Cooke emphasizes the myriad ways that Smithson’s film, like the rock spiral itself, rejects linear temporality by placing us in a present without origin or destination. Cooke, L., Robert Smithson: Spiral Jetty, pp. 64–65. 35 The beauty in a random “heap” recalls Smithson’s own belief that language is random and material throughout. See his sketch, A Heap of Language (1966)

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Heraclitean insight, Smithson points us to the possibility for beauty in (or as) rubble and randomness. The eternal truths of freedom, unity, and subjectivity no longer hold complete claim over the domain of the beautiful; that which perishes, transforms and metamorphoses can also be the site of fine art. Through this total reorientation, Smithson views a possible future for art.

Art is Not a Thing of the Past: Smithson’s Vision for the Future of Art Directly refuting the purity of art in isolation from other cultural phenomena, Smithson advocates the partnering of industry and art. Their separation hinders both—making art irrelevant and industry monstrous in advanced capitalist society.36 Instead of belonging to the past, Smithson envisions a role for art almost entirely nonexistent before him: as mediator between the devastating consequences of industry and the impossible utopia of environmentalism: A dialectic between land reclamation and mining usage must be established. The artist and the miner must become conscious of themselves as natural agents. In effect, this extends to all kinds of mining and building … Economics, when abstracted from the world, is blind to natural processes. Art can become a resource, that mediates between the ecologist and the industrialist. Ecology and industry are not one-way streets, rather they should be cross-roads. Art can help to provide the needed dialectic between them.37

Smithson here reverses the Hegelian accent on the self-conscious awareness of freedom with a call for the self-conscious awareness of ourselves as natural (and thus entropic) agents. By turning away from the revelations of spirit fulfilling its destiny, humanity finds the world filled with both endless devastation and endless possibilities. Riding the tenuous border between nature and technological transformation allows the artist to take on the enormous labor of mediation between industry and environment. Only one who has bypassed the Hegelian drive toward the where he plays with the monumental form of the pyramid, creating it entirely out of words (many of which name aspects of language itself). 36 From 1971 until his death in 1973, Smithson would visit many mines to propose earthworks that would artistically transform (rather than cover over) the effects of industry. Exhibiting tremendous shortsightedness, the mining industry rejected all of his proposals (CW xxviii). 37 Smithson, “Untitled” (1971), CW 376.

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progressively spiritual could envision bringing together what most see as diametrically opposed factions; and only one who has embraced the Hegelian notion of dialectic could see the falseness of a strict dichotomization between technology and art. Simply idealizing the essentially entropic forces of nature—such as we find in landscape painting and lyric poetry—serves only to allow them to continue their work silently in the unknown recesses of the individual and social psyche. Something like a working or abandoned industrial site, however, actually brings our destructive tendencies to light in all of their power and ugliness. How does one approach these sites artistically? Smithson answers, “In many ways the more humble or even degraded sites left in the wake of mining operations offer more of a challenge to art” (“Frederick Law Olmsted”/CW 166). This experiment provides more than a self-indulgent diversion for the artist trying to make beauty even in the most repugnant places; the artist is challenged to reconceive a middle path between environmentalism and industry on a scale never before achieved or even attempted. In one of his most ambitious proposals for such a reclamation project, Smithson envisioned placing an enormous revolving disk at the bottom of the mile-deep Bingham Copper Mine (now Kennecott Copper). Such a project, suggested, rejected, and minimally preserved in his writings and sketches, would force the viewer to confront the devastating void caused by the world’s largest open-pit mine, while drawing attention to how human technology functions in the larger workings of entropy. Rejecting the idea of simply filling in the hole once the mining was complete (as if this were possible) Smithson decries the naïveté of both environmentalism and industry. This “Humpty Dumpty” approach attempts “to recover a frontier or a wilderness that no longer exists. Here we have to accept the entropic situation and more or less learn how to reincorporate these things that seem ugly.”38 Ultimately, the earthwork would have revealed the utter futility of human technology to master nature as the spinning disk at the bottom of the void would have shown us how even the greatest of human works fall, like Ozymandias, into the entropic forces of the earth. Whether viewed from the perspective of profit or environmental devastation, there is little doubt that the confrontation with our own monstrous power makes us uneasy. In many senses, such productions bring the surface the workings of Freud’s death drive—the human tendency not only to be agents of destruction, but also to be slated for the same kind of destruction in psychic and organic dissolution. Reigning in our destructiveness, without simply repressing or idealizing it, encourages 38

Smithson, “Entropy Made Visible” (1973), CW 307.

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a turn which is neither anti-technological nor anti-environmental, but artistic. Here lies the future of art for Smithson.

Conclusion But it is no better for being eternal, as the long lasting is no whiter than the ephemeral. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

For Hegel, humanity lies at a crossroads: imprisoned by temporality, need, material and natural entanglement, yet constantly striving for the realm of eternal ideas, freedom, law, and will (LA, 54). Art allows us to straddle that impossible contradiction in a singular way. As the work of art cannot be sublated into something higher and remain what it is, perhaps Hegel was a bit too hasty to proclaim the end of art. Art actually reconciles this difficult contradiction plaguing the human condition by unveiling it before our senses. In this way, it is no longer a contradiction to be suffered unknowingly, but an affirmation of the very tension that allows us to persist. Smithson provides a kind of art that brings the contradictions inherent in matter to the foreground. Deemphasizing human freedom, he brings capricious and irrational elements of existence into his artworks. Yet, Smithson’s art achieves beauty in a way that, although not in line with the Hegelian norm of the sensible manifestation of spiritual freedom, still evokes a kind of elevation of the human spirit characteristic of so many great works of art. What then are we to do with a conception of beauty that is no longer the encounter with the ideal made sensuous? What are we to make of a sense of beauty grounding itself in the most brute and ponderous material instead of seeking escape into the abstract and weightless? Hegel tells us human beings desire a way out of the muck and the mire. We seek a “region of a higher, more substantial, truth, in which all oppositions and contradictions in the finite can find their final resolution, and freedom its full satisfaction. This is the region of absolute, not finite, truth” (LA 99). Yet, and in spite of Hegel’s intentions to speak of art under the rubric of the ideal, art fails to capture this infinite truth. But this failure discloses to us something about the ambiguity of existence lost in many of his other writings. Art, as the ideal—infected, or perhaps gifted, by the materiality of nature—ties us to the natural world in an intimate and critical way. Here, where we find the silence and failure of art to capture the spiritual ideal, Smithson and Hegel unite in a surprising collaboration. Although we can make incisive critiques of Hegel’s dismissal of nature in the Aesthetics, his rejection opens up a dynamic and meaningful way to

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continue to interpret art as practiced by Smithson. Nature as the impotent and irrational other to spirit in Hegel’s system necessarily disturbs the work of art even as it serves as its necessary ground. Smithson’s art allows for the very appearance and celebration of this ground. Without attempting to ameliorate the inherent irrationality of the natural world and the human confrontation with our own absurdity, Smithson shows us the beauty in this and relieves us somewhat from the terrifying realities of death and decay through a direct artistic confrontation with these forces. Although the crystalline and geological senses of time strip away our anthropocentric privilege, they also relieve us from the agony of holding all of existence on our human shoulders. Rather than rescuing us from finitude, we face it head-on with Smithson, thus minimizing the dangers to the world that our flights into abstraction often engender. In the end, there is no reason why Hegel and Smithson cannot collaborate. As human beings, we do desire a region of higher truth, an escape from our finitude, even if no such ultimate truth or resting ground can be found. Yet we also desire chaos and fragmentation, even if we cannot remain in this state without falling into the abysses of madness. If the portrayal of a Greek god in marble raises us to the highest insights into human subjectivity, so does the Spiral Jetty ground us in the everchanging geological processes of which we are but ephemeral manifestations. What else would motivate Smithson to pursue artistic land reclamation if not the insight that humanity has more to offer itself and the world than simply enacting entropic decay? We are also agents of beauty, which is no less true when facing rubble and waste than when in the presence of a marble deity. This insight may perhaps be the only way out of the looming destruction we face as a species.

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Figure 1, Spiral Jetty Photo by author

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CHAPTER EIGHT THE AESTHETIC TRANSFORMATION OF THE PAST: HISTORY, TRAGEDY AND MYTH-MAKING GERALD L. PHILLIPS If you are to venture to interpret the past, you can only do so out of the fullest exertion of the vigor of the present: only when you put forth your noblest qualities in all their strength will you divine what is worth knowing and preserving in the past. Like to like! Otherwise, you will draw the past down on you. Friedrich Nietzsche

Introduction Nietzsche’s point in the above quote comprises the very core of his essay, “The Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” (Nietzsche 1983, p. 94; Nietzsche’s emphasis). If we are to know how to interpret and what to preserve of the past, we must do so out of the fullest exercise of the living, vigorous present. But most classical musicians and audiences of the twenty-first century continue to knit together well-worn elements of the past into a warm blanket they pull up around them as though it might stave off the cold realities of the present. The fetal position is taken and all is lost. The following discussion raises important problems and possible advantages related to the “use” and/or the transformation of the past regarding the Western classical music tradition. I will examine this problem of the uses and possible transformations of the past for the present by discussing two works: Nietzsche’s “The Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” (the second of the Untimely Meditations), and his first book, The Birth of Tragedy (Nietzsche 1967). I will argue that the reinterpretation of the past is, or should be, a transformative aesthetic

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undertaking—it must be, in fact—a form of re-creation, a recreation absolutely vital to a dynamic, living present. However, a fully engaged “re-creation” is today fraught with difficulties. We are so self-conscious personally and culturally that, like the individuals under the spell of Nietzsche’s “hypertrophied” historical consciousness, we can no longer slip into a freely and fully committed aesthetic re-articulation of who we are. It seems that we cannot unselfconsciously create a vision that provides both a clear connection to a significant and mythic past and a way of creatively integrating it into our culture. I believe this situation to be very serious for all of us, for, increasingly, we either withdraw entirely or engage the world with an unsmiling cynicism that kills the will to establish and maintain an aesthetic perspective, a perspective I consider essential to living a life that is both the product of, and worthy of, our very best efforts. Nietzsche, in the second of his Untimely Meditations, points out the struggles humans face in trying to balance their relationship to the present and the past, the necessity of this struggle, and the ethical and aesthetic stakes involved in it. His attempt, though problematic,1 has received much attention, for it directly raises the possibility of a creative revitalization of the past and points out the danger of getting weighed down with the past to the point that one “freezes,” overwhelmed to the point of rigid inaction. Nietzsche also assesses the aesthetic and ethical stakes involved in this struggle. With The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche has himself, I believe, produced a “myth” that actually creates a past—not by making one up, but by radically rethinking what we know of a world buried deep in the past. We will look at this example of myth-making as a revitalization of the past, of finding in the artifacts of the past a new interpretation of them that enables a vision of a present (and a future) that awakens and engages to the limit the aesthetic sensibilities of those who might count themselves as artists,2 “highest exemplars,” or “strong poets.”3 This is especially important in classical music. Virtually all of the other arts have struggled through postmodernism, coped with the fact of the collapse of the overarching tradition of representationalism, and have, in 1 Though important, the problems with “The uses and disadvantages of history for life” cannot be dealt with here, except in areas directly related to the central themes of this discussion. 2 I would like to note that the term “artists” as used in this discussion denotes also composers and creative musicians of all kinds. 3 Rorty’s concept of the “strong poet” (Rorty 1989) owes much to Nietzsche’s idea of the “highest exemplar” and has some of the same sociocultural functions.

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the process, developed vital and substantive responses to these perspectival revolutions and maintained an equally vital and substantive connection with past ideas, works and exemplars. Classical music, on the other hand, has virtually ignored the postmodern and “post-postmodern” impulses, choosing instead to bury itself in the past of which I will later speak more. Nietzsche, like his own conception of the “highest exemplar,” internalized his present through a very exacting and demanding exercise of developing the tools and knowledge that represent the highest point of development in the field of philology of his time. He used those tools to examine the past. His research and analyses encouraged him to rethink certain influential conclusions his contemporaries had accepted regarding that past. The result of Nietzsche’s work was the creation of a radically transformative re-articulation of the aesthetics, ethics and views on life held by the ancient Greeks—the very culture out of which the West has, largely, emerged and by which it has measured itself. I will discuss this idea in general way, using ideas from this enigmatic work that so powerfully contributed to this dramatic change of perspective. This discussion then, is not an exegesis of the elements of the work—there will be no mention of Dionysus and Apollo, or Socrates, or Euripides, etc., just ideas from that work that impinge on present concerns. There is another important caveat regarding the re-articulation, or “remaking,” of the past. Certainly the horrors of the first half of the twentieth century give us pause when we think of “re-articulating” or “reinterpreting” the past. Clearly, the fallout from nefarious reconceptualizations, falsifications or misrepresentations the Nazis promulgated vis-à-vis their recent past had devastating results. Commentators on the second untimely meditation have often remarked on this issue and the dangers surrounding it in the context of Nietzsche’s representation of the past as a “living thing,” available, that is, to reconceptualization. But yet, we cannot escape the reality that the past is a living thing, it is malleable, for there is no past without interpreting, without rethinking, without in some sense creating it.4

Drawing the Past Down: The Western Classical Music Tradition One of my colleagues, a composer, teaches the final course of our history of Western music series: “Western Music from 1914 to the 4

J. P. Stern in Nietzsche 1983, p. xv.

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Present.” Early in the last month of the spring semester of 2012, he sent a young lady to talk with me. She, like many others in that course, became outraged when he had the audacity to present John Cage along with various other composers’ electronic and atonal music as “real” music. She indicated that not only had this upset the students, but then he actually required them to write a paper on this very “music”! So, this young lady came to me seeking help in developing her thesis, which would argue that the types of “music” just mentioned were not “really” music. I asked her if she had ever heard that kind of “music” earlier in her career at our University. She replied that she had. She had heard it in the required course for freshmen, “Music in the U.S.,” and in her Theory I course. But, as she recalled, those discussions had been relatively brief, rarely revisited (and again only briefly, in comparison to the amount of time spent on traditional music elsewhere in her curriculum), until the present course, the topic of our conversation and the final history of Western music course of her career here. Yes, she had performed some “crazy” pieces in one or two of her ensemble experiences, but most of the music she had performed was tonal.5 Her question to me was: “Why didn’t they tell me this in the first place? Why don’t I know the ‘classical’ music of my own time … even if I hate it?” Today many music educators are beginning to feel more than a twinge of inauthenticity as we form our responses to such questions (all the while holding on to unspoken premises justifying our position: our negative assessment of the “pop-music-non-culture” out of which most of our students emerge—along with the inevitable conclusion that this “appalling” lack of “culture” requires—no, demands—thorough immersion in the world of historical classical music). Yes, we may feel a twinge, but we still say it and we still do it. And in so doing, we have produced a framework that barely mentions the situation and nature of music of the living present until one of the very last courses our students take. Our “music history” is an environment in which virtually all the music taught, heard and performed is by dead composers of the tonal tradition. Many of music faculty members are strong adherents of the aforementioned “conservative” view. They have argued the following: “But tonality is the very heart of the musical world we live in! This is a tonal musical world! Look at symphony orchestras, operas, concert music, 5

A recent survey of our offerings at Towson University in concerts over three years showed the works of dead composers as ninety-five percent of the music performed. Most of the rest was works of extended tonality, typical of most contemporary composers today.

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even, and especially, popular music, most jazz, music on TV, on the radio, Sirius, iPods, YouTube, iTunes, name it! It’s virtually all tonal!” This retort reveals the “very heart” of the problem with which we seek to come to grips. Here, in all of its profound naïveté and ethical ambiguity, is the ideological, the illusory, the fatal, perspective that is such a serious and dangerous threat to our culture. Yes, tonality is omnipresent, but that does not mean it is a product of the living present. Rather, tonality is the aural remnant of a long dead culture. The endless re-presentation of the past is a perversion existing at the “very heart” of our present. The previous retort, in its vehement gesture, points to the many sources that tell us that tonality lives as a “real” part of our world, but that vehemence reveals, not a productive and pervasive effluence of vital creative activity, but only a staggering proliferation of tired musical implications that in fact deny essential sociocultural realities of our present, living world. This tonal “heart” lies in a rotting corpse that is still, somehow, being kept on life support as though it were going to take its place again as the dominant and rightful paradigm that “should” control the compositional aspirations of the present. The present-day culture this delusion sustains has also been rotting for a long time. It is dead and many of us do not know it. So we are really dealing with two problems here: the wholesale importation of classical works from the past, and an uncritical maintenance of the compositional paradigm of the past as though it were wholly adequate to the present. At this point the question must be asked: Does this mean the music of the Western tonal tradition should not be heard? The answer is an emphatic no: of course it should be heard; the music of the Western classical tradition, taken as a whole, is one of the crowning achievements of humanity: period. Without question the works of that tradition deserve to be heard and appreciated. We deserve to hear this music. The same goes for the best of the jazz, folk and popular traditions. But our living, present day culture is buried in this music: well over ninety percent of all music heard is the music of the Western classical tradition (music of dead composers), or the music of living composers (both pop and classical) writing in a dead musical language. Our fetishization of this music is strangling living composers and creators who are struggling to understand the swirling cacophony that is our present, living situation, struggling to create something that is born of, that belongs to, our world. That struggle, that fearful confrontation with the thrashing monster we call by many names: contingency, chance, chaos, entropy, we argue here, is an important and ethically viable source of energy for music composers and creators to create their own path.

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So in the end our student suffers from a form of teaching the history of Western music that is exactly backwards—that is, historically forward: starting from the distant past and moving (almost) to the present. Conservative music faculties are committed to going backwards because of their virtually exclusive commitment to the music of the classical tonal tradition. I argue that what we should be doing is acquainting our students in detail with the entire spread of our musical present—then teaching the theory and the history of Western music from the perspective of our present. This idea takes its inspiration, of course, from Nietzsche’s quote heading this discussion. Regarding that quote, it serves us well to note again that, to avoid “drawing the past down on us,” we and our students must interpret that past out of the “fullest exertion of the vigor of the present.” This exertion cannot be brought to bear unless we make present our students, to the fullest extent possible in the context of an undergraduate music education, by attempting to articulate that present as best we can: what the present is, and what it means for us, remembering always that there is a certain myopia attached to any attempt to understand, critique and interpret in medias res. Further, by learning the history of western classical music in the context of a fuller knowledge and appreciation of the present, we learn of important clues as to how we got to our present—which further enriches our knowledge of and critical assessment of both the past and the present. The goal of this reversal is to imbue students with the critical tools to assess what is valuable in the past to preserve it but not “draw it down on us,” that is, not revere the past at the expense of the living present. We have been willing to pay this outrageous price because we have blinded ourselves to the implications of our actions. This we have done so efficiently that our living, present-day music (the very source of the “the vigor of the present”) is set aside in favor of the music and practices of the past—the music of dead composers. But beyond the wholesale importation of the past into the present by our contemporary culture, is our culture’s concomitant failure to mediate the past: to rethink and rearticulate the music of the past in terms of the aesthetic values and practises of the present. Many proponents of the classical music tradition will argue that recasting, transforming or rearticulating the works of past masters in some manner using present-day techniques would be an aesthetic blunder bordering on sacrilege, even blasphemy: it is the failure to recognize, they say, that the masters are called masters because that is what in fact, they are! In their view, our job is to master the art of reproducing this music in a manner that is as close to the “original intent” of the composer as possible! We have, however,

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watched theatre, painting, dance, literature, sculpture—most of the arts— move into a different aesthetic world in relation to both their past and their present. This disagreement as to the uses and possible transformation of the artifacts of the past in the present has deep philosophical implications. Exactly how do we pay homage to the past without “bringing it down on us,” without making the past the present—as we clearly have already done in music? Why don’t we hear music of living composers whose work, though radically different than that of the western classical music tradition, holds aesthetic aspirations as lofty and valuable as the masters of the past? If there is a dearth of such music, what are the reasons for that paucity?

The Second Untimely Meditation: “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” The primary focus of the second meditation is history itself. It therefore presents arguments that can precisely apply to the history of music. The music of the classical tradition as it is performed, recorded and “consumed” today tends to reflect the perspective on history Nietzsche calls the “hypertrophied” sense of history. The other arts tend more toward the “unhistorical” attitude or condition. As Nietzsche addresses these two opposing perspectives on history, we see that a central consideration in his development of these perspectives is the problem of knowledge, that is, the damage too much knowledge of history can cause and what means there might be of limiting the influence that knowledge may have. Here, as in his earlier work, The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche sees too much knowledge (of history, of the work and creations of others in a negative comparison with one’s own production) as an impediment to action. He devotes much of the second meditation to a delineation of the effects of various aspects of historical knowledge. Specifically, he speaks of the problem of a disjunction between the “inner and outer” person, a loss of “instincts” (a phenomenon that might be described as collapse of the sense of free action, or aesthetic spontaneity, resulting from feeling utterly determined by history) which produces a cynical attitude inimical to bold hopes for the future. For example, we are all aware of the radical increase in human attempts to rationally control nature by means of the sciences over the past several centuries. In so doing, humans today are fortunate to have avoided many of the threats that beleaguered long-dead ancestors. Many of us do not face life-and-death situations on a daily or even yearly basis—we are lulled into relative detachment regarding such things. But when nature lets loose with a tsunami, earthquake, volcanic eruption or

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tornado, the most common response is a kind of stunned disbelief that chaos could, in seconds, envelop and threaten us so utterly. Many perish simply because their comprehension of the gravity—even the reality—of their situation, “freezes up” in a clash between disbelief and the attempt to reduce the event to an actionable concept. With the attempt at comprehension thus frozen, there is no time to react “instinctively” in the moment. Our own successes with control in the social and scientific realms tend to engender a false sense of invincibility in the face of the inherent contingencies of nature. These, coupled with the fact that such events are usually confined to certain areas of the world or are relatively rare in their most dangerous forms, makes it easier to lapse into a state of sanguinity. Nietzsche’s use of the phrase “loss of instincts” or the loss of the ability to conceive of and carry out creative projects (such as musical compositions) is important. As Nietzsche describes them here, instincts, rather than reflecting the pre-programmed quality found in animals, have a certain relation to freedom. That is, freedom is an individual’s ability to “let go the reins [of rational control]”6 so to speak, when her intellect threatens to overwhelm her with negative evaluations of her situation to such an extent as to “freeze” her into inaction. In contradistinction to the negativities of the “hypertrophied” sense of history, Nietzsche introduces the limiting concept of the “unhistorical,” i.e., the strategy of the avoidance of the negative consequences of too much historical knowledge through the construction of “horizons.” Later, we will see how this manifests itself in a comparison of Nietzsche’s own words, with those of perhaps the greatest composer of the twentieth century, Igor Stravinsky. The activity of creation, the composing of works is not often directed toward changing the world and, of course, works are not often judged on that basis. But it is not the work, but rather the activity, the process, that is the externalization of a form of aesthetic “knowing.” Nietzsche describes another antithesis that develops when knowledge is taken in without “hunger,” knowledge that no longer functions as an agent for transforming the outer world, but remains on the interior of the person, an interior which is, in his terms, “chaotic,” possessing “content” but lacking “form.”7 Most educators and writers realize early in their careers that when learning as a teacher or as a writer (as one who must later impart the knowledge s/he is taking in to others), one grasps that knowledge more “viscerally” than when taking the same knowledge in as a student. 6 7

Nietzsche 1983, p. 84. Nietzsche 1983, p. 78.

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Nietzsche sees another perspective on history as progressive in nature—as a tendency to look on the past as a preparation for the present (which is necessarily superior to all that went before). But to view the judgment of the present as overwhelmingly superior to former judgments is to lack judgment, to fail to see its own blindness. Concomitantly, there is a poverty of perspective by such individuals (and cultures) with regard to their own present, along with an inability to differentiate truly creative solutions of their contemporary culture from cliché.8 Nietzsche characterizes those who see themselves as standing at the apex of history as thinking they possess “justice.” But to be worthy to “judge the past,” one must have performed some “high and great deed.” This necessarily disallows the “virtue” of merely having been born in some particular present. That “high and great deed” in my view, is using “the fullest exertion” of one’s own vigor in the immediate present to interrogate and interpret the past. The opposite of history as progressive is, again, the sense that one is hopelessly determined by history. In this case, the individual sees herself as unable to act freely as the result of the fact that she believes herself to be a mere pawn of the past, a past that cannot be transcended, but can only be imitated. Nietzsche sees the “hypertrophied sense of history” as a form of “ironic self-awareness.” This is an overwhelming self-consciousness vis-à-vis history that destroys both the energy and the desire to act. This view interprets as hopeless and futile the striving for the truly rare and innovative creative act. It is an “inborn grey-hairedness”9 that does not act, but only remembers. There is, according to Nietzsche, another option: the idea of the “unhistorical,” the drawing about oneself a “magic tarnhelm,” a “horizon” within which one is safe from the numerous negative results of historical overload mentioned above. As in The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche sees some limiting or transformation of the world as necessary in order to live: “forgetting is essential to action of any kind” and “this is a universal law: a living thing can be healthy, strong and fruitful only when bounded by a horizon.”10 The issue is, of course, whether this horizon is the result of the “fullest exertion of the vigor of the present,” or simply the security blanket described earlier. We will return to this point. Now we need only describe briefly the ideas of monumental, antiquarian and critical history to complete our articulation of the elements of Nietzsche’s discussion of history that are germane to the arguments that 8

Nietzsche 1983, p. 90. Nietzsche 1983, p. 101. 10 Nietzsche 1983, p. 63. 9

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follow. Monumental history may be described as an “heroic” view in which great deeds and outstanding men rise up out of the past like “mountain peaks” to spur creative men and women of the present to take up the often daunting challenges with which their gifts and their personal situations confront them. The “antiquarian” stance is that of one who “preserves and reveres,” who looks back into the past with “love and loyalty”—and with a healthy dose of identification. The “critical viewpoint,” on the other hand, may be employed to “break up and dissolve part of the past,” by judging and finally condemning it, perhaps even replacing it.11 These various views have obvious, many-faceted effects on the forms of historical awareness we have been discussing. It is here that Nietzsche makes some of his most fascinating points. He says that it is the “dark, driving” power of life “thirsting for itself”12 that compels the artist to move on ever more deeply into her activity—activity that may result in the destruction of some of the past, or the traditional perceptions about what the past was and what it meant. Although this behavior may be seen by the artist (and especially those who unconditionally revere the past) as revisionist and ultimately destructive, Nietzsche points out that “It requires a great deal of strength to be able to live and to forget the extent to which to live [to create] and to be unjust is one and the same thing.” But even if we look at these words as a form of hyperbole he indulged in while still under the influence of Schopenhauer, it is important to follow this line of reasoning in Nietzsche’s thought, for it gives us a valuable hint as to the creation of, or “giving of,” a past to ourselves. Sometimes, he says, there may be a temporary suspension of forgetfulness, the result of which is that one may remember how unjust the existence of anything is and how it may be deserving of annihilation. Nietzsche recognizes the danger inherent in this judging and destroying of the past, but this danger is overshadowed, and perhaps even mitigated by a most important point: when we condemn the past—we condemn our origins, our “first nature,” and not just the good, but also the bad, the “aberrations, passions and even the crimes of the past.” He suggests that we recreate the past—to, a posteriori, give ourselves a past. He introduces 11

Nietzsche 1983, p. 75. This is, of course, Nietzsche’s famous “will-to-power,” one of the most misunderstood but most important concepts of his philosophy. There are many who have commented on this, but perhaps the best book presently available is Richardson 1996. Despite giving the book a title that would horrify many Nietzsche scholars, Richardson gathers all of Nietzsche’s widely scattered comments on will-to-power in order to present a finely nuanced exegesis of it. 12

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the possible reservation that “second natures” are usually weaker than first natures. However, when critical history is employed for the “sake of life,” occasionally a victory is achieved and an origin, or an original nature, is replaced by a “second nature,” a second nature which is not a weaker version of the first, but a “victorious” second nature which becomes itself a first nature.13 (Later in this discussion, as I mentioned above, I will argue that Nietzsche himself does precisely this in his Birth of Tragedy, a feat that produces a radically transformative re-articulation of the very foundations of Western consciousness.) This idea of a “first” nature that becomes a “second” nature is the crucial point for musicians, audiences and students of music and culture living today. We have been dealing with the music of the past as an inviolable “first” nature, to be kept pristine and unsullied by the passage of time, while the other arts have seen the past as a source for material to be used in any way they see fit. Of course, the Western classical music tradition is based in “true to the master” reproduction of the past—a strong damper on the idea that one might use it as a wholly plastic source material. We have now introduced and elucidated the points of the second untimely meditation that are central to the thesis of this discussion. They are (1) the primary antithesis of the hypertrophied sense of history versus the “unhistorical,” and (2) the various subdivisions of the historical sense as they impinge on the musical world of both the past and the present. The task now is to see if the opposition of the historical and the unhistorical can be fruitfully articulated from the perspective of the aesthetic.

The Aesthetic Symbiosis of the Hypertrophied and the Unhistorical Senses of History Throughout the second untimely meditation, Nietzsche either explicitly states or implies that the artist is among those who are the highest and best: those who do great deeds. Although obviously enamored of the idea of the artist, Nietzsche, at this point in his development at least (the early 1870s), focuses on science as a mode of approaching the world that retains some hope of realizing something of its “true” nature. But even in The Birth of Tragedy, he expresses deep concerns about the power of science: But science, spurred by its powerful illusion, speeds irresistibly toward its limits where its optimism, concealed in the essence of logic, suffers shipwreck. For the periphery of the circle of science has an infinite number 13

Nietzsche 1983, §§ 2 and 3.

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of points; and while there is no telling how this circle could ever be surveyed completely, noble and gifted men nevertheless reach, ere half their time and inevitably, such boundary points on the periphery from which one gazes into what defies illumination. When they see to their horror how logic coils up at these boundaries and finally bites its own tail—suddenly the new form of insight breaks through, tragic insight which, merely to be endured, needs art as a protection and remedy.14

Of first importance it is necessary here to point out that the categories essential to Nietzsche’s thinking about artists and musicians are today no longer automatically granted the authority they held during his time. Artists are not people with special insights exclusive to the “artistic personality.” Rather, today we see artists as internalizing the milieu of their existence, just as all other humans have done throughout history as they carried out their daily activities. What is different about artists is that the enculturation they have undergone enters (unconsciously and/or consciously) into works of art—works that are essentially non-discursive and a-rational objects, consequently remarkably resistant to the reductive processes of rationalization/reification.15 As such, artworks hold up mirrors to the human condition—mirrors that by virtue of their aesthetic, rather than discursive qualities, offer critically important reflections on that condition, reflections that can also resist the rationalizing reductionism of discourse. The artist does not however, simply create out of nothing. In Nietzsche’s time, and usually today, there is an arduous period in which the artist learns the techniques and styles particular to her field. It is this process in which we may begin to see the problem of the historical and unhistorical working itself out. Notice, for example, the startling similarity of the following quotes from Nietzsche and Stravinsky—Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil (1886), and Stravinsky’s description of his approach to the act of composing in his Poetics of 1942: Nietzsche Every artist knows how far from any feeling of letting himself go his “most natural state” is—the free ordering, placing, disposing, giving form in the moment of “inspiration”—and how strictly and subtly he obeys thousand14

Nietzsche 1967, pp. 97–98. Over time, though, even the most aggressive work by, say, Picasso or Dali, loses its relevance as social criticism. When it finally comes to rest in the sitting room of a lawyer’s office, it has lost its critical force to its new identity as a status symbol, as a commodity.

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Chapter Eight fold laws precisely then, laws that precisely on account of their hardness and determination defy all formulation though concept (even the firmest concept is, compared with them, not free of fluctuation, multiplicity, and ambiguity) … there should be obedience over a long period of time and in a single direction: given that, something always develops, has developed, for whose sake it is worthwhile to live on earth; for example, virtue, art, music, dance, reason, spirituality—something transfiguring, subtle, mad, and divine.16 Stravinsky The creator’s function is to sift the elements he receives from [his imagination], for human activity must impose limits on itself. The more art is controlled, limited, worked over, the more it is free. As for myself, I experience a sort of terror when, at the moment of setting to work and finding myself before the infinitude of possibilities that present themselves, I have the feeling that everything is permissible to me. If everything is permissible to me, the best and the worst: if nothing offers me any resistance then any effort is inconceivable, and I cannot use anything as a basis, and consequently every undertaking becomes futile … Let me have something finite, definite—matter that can lend itself to my operation only insofar as it is commensurate with my possibilities … [m]y freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. Whatever diminishes constraint diminishes strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self of the chains that shackle the spirit.17

The first thing we notice is that both of these men created “something for whose sake it is worthwhile to live on earth; for example, virtue, art, music, dance, reason, spirituality—something transfiguring, subtle, mad, and divine.” They both had profound and passionate links with the past, which they both famously mined in the quest to produce something worthy of their creative vision. Their detractors were many and vociferous; some were leading thinkers and artists in the same fields as Nietzsche and Stravinsky; many held great animosity toward both men and their work.18 Second, neither of these men had anything like contemporary peers. Nietzsche—in the aftermath of the Kantian and Hegelian systematizing philosophies in the first half of the nineteenth century—wrote sprawling, stylistically varied, seemingly endlessly contradictory works while at the 16

Nietzsche 1966, pp. 100–102 (my emphases). Stravinsky 1947, pp. 66–67. Emphasis mine. 18 Adorno, Wilamowiz-Moellendorf, Schoenberg, for example. 17

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same time tearing down pretensions to certainty and Truth-with-a-capitalT that philosophy had previously held. Other philologists considered The Birth of Tragedy utterly outside the limits of true philology. It is also clear that Stravinsky’s work, right up to the time of his death, had profound connections with the past, but as I am arguing here, primarily as a malleable resource, not a retrogression. Yet both men claim “obedience” to “thousand-fold laws,” and “narrow[ness], constraints, obstacles.” But no one would say that either of them was a mere slave to these constraints. As we said before, Nietzsche did his homework in philology (though toward the end of his studies his letters to friends showed increasing exasperation with the academic, antiseptic character of the whole enterprise).19 Stravinsky was the student of Rimsky-Korsakov. He was dutiful, devoted and wholly committed to Rimsky-Korsakov’s tutelage (and later Diaghilev, of course, but in a very different way). Nietzsche was powerfully influenced by Schopenhauer and Wagner, although he eventually became disenchanted with both. (Rimsky-Korsakov did not live long enough to suffer—as he probably would have—the same fate as Stravinsky.) Importantly, in both instances we have brilliant young men growing and advancing their critical sensibilities while under the influence of men known, at the time, for radical stances in their fields. Third, and most important, we need to realize that the “obedience” of both men was to constraints that, largely, they themselves had constructed. The power of The Birth of Tragedy is obvious: it is a virtually unclassifiable literary work that has received enormous and concentrated attention since its publication. (At first, the attention was quite negative.) Today, it is considered by many to be the greatest book (obviously, for very different reasons) on ancient Greek tragedy since Aristotle, 2200-odd years ago. The vast complexity of Stravinsky’s musical architectonic— largely built on the octatonic scale (which was foreign to the west at that time) and on his devilishly intricate rhythmic formulations—functioned as an endlessly fertile resource for his musical thought and as a powerful means of interrogating and internalizing (I would say, under the metaphor of eating and swallowing), the past. Thus the past became part of him, not just as an idea, but rather as a form of nourishment that, in the process of digestion, became him, became part of his unique musical aesthetic. Nietzsche’s statement captures precisely the difficult task the artist of his time undertook. For both Nietzsche and Stravinsky, the two primary charges set before the artist—the development of technique and the cultivation of a sense of style—require huge investment of time—of life for most—to achieve mastery. But this is not an exclusively intellectual 19

Silk and Stern 1981, p. 17.

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process. Of course, technique and style are internalized, either under the tutelage of a “master,” or in a “conservatory,” or by the independent study and examination of predecessors’ work and styles. Concomitantly, there begins a process of their integration: a process of incorporation, of embodiment. But we must remain clear concerning the source of these techniques and styles: it is the past. It is the past, the history of the artist’s chosen work in all its various aspects, which the aspiring artist is incorporating. This process integrates technique and style so deeply into the artist that they are “forgotten.” That is, when a painter sets brush to canvas, the tip of that brush is guided by every experience that individual artist has had, a very large portion of which has been an appropriation of the past, either in a systematic way or in a highly personal, individualist manner. Further, the very act of accepting or rejecting specific models from the past is itself an evaluation and an interpretation of the past. We see from Stravinsky’s words that this is a pervasive and profoundly influential phenomenon. It has the important function of enabling the artist to achieve the primary means of constructing a horizon, i.e., the choosing of, and the undertaking of, an artistic project: the creation of a work of art. It is the project, the process itself—as limited by the artist—that is the horizon (not the piece). The artist, in this case, is very similar to Nietzsche’s evocation of the example of the unwavering focus of one who is in love either with a woman or a great idea (a Hugo Wolf writing twenty-some lieder in a month) after living with the poems that are his inspiration for months and even years, reading, re-reading, quoting them from memory to friends, thoroughly internalizing them, making them a “second nature”; a Van Gogh creating painting after painting, day after day, consumed by his work, riveted into the moment, unconcerned, in the exact hour of creation, with anything else. Surely, here is one, like Stravinsky, who, while in the throes of the creative act, stands beyond the negative force of too much history. But is the influence of history actually avoided? No. The artist has brought that horizon within herself: she is the very embodiment of history. This is the point at which the historical and unhistorical coalesce: the artist brings to the artwork the past with which she is informed, and she transfers this “in-formation” into the work itself: the past—the monumental works of great predecessors, the reverence for a particular style, technique or paradigm, the critical excision (or inclusion) of the trivial, the cliché, bombastic, banal, the moribund—are all “remembered” and therefore contained in the work at hand. Again, it is not the work of art itself, but the “work,” the act of creation, by means of the creative energies of the artist directed though the channel of the appropriated past, that is the horizon.

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But all of this is paradoxically forgotten: the past is not intellectualized, but embodied, and the horizon is a passionately undertaken project, not a means but an end, both the historical and the unhistorical have become “second natures,” the artwork itself commemorates the project. But to talk of the unity of the historical and the unhistorical within the person of the type of artist Nietzsche would describe as one of the “highest exemplars” is not to talk of a resolution of conflict. My understanding of this individual includes the appreciation that conflict still resides at the very core of this unity. It is here we must make an important point that Nietzsche does not address. To talk simply of the unity of the historical and unhistorical in one person is to neglect an extremely important issue: the nature of that “unity.” I referred earlier and without explanation to the relationship between these two elements as a form of symbiosis. The problem, in my view, is the tendency of most artists to seek resolution of both forces, of both the historical and the unhistorical, in some kind of synthesis of the two. Synthesis is most often viewed as the combination of two or more material or abstract entities (like ideas) in such a manner as to form a coherent whole—a whole that is its own unique thing, not a collection of other things. This process is usually described in the arts as a form of reconciliation, unity or, in music, resolution. Synthesis usually consists of the stripping of at least some of the essential characteristics of the synthesized elements in favor of the integrity of the resultant “unified” entity, which in some sense resolves the differences between the original elements. Resolution is also the foundation of the Western tonal tradition—not to mention tonality’s rigorous reflection at the very heart of its structural premises of the linear, convergent, cumulative, teleological and, finally, utopian version of history that has, with great tenacity, dominated Western thought. Symbiosis, on the other hand, is a useful metaphor for the relationship between the reactions to history that Nietzsche addresses: among other things, two apparently opposing perspectives on history—the “hypertrophied” sense of history and the “unhistorical” attitude or condition. One form of biological symbiosis is the mutually supportive relationship in which two or more organisms develop a shared, dependent relationship that is mutually beneficial, and even essential, for the existence of each. A very important element of this relationship is that the integrity of neither organism is sacrificed to the union. They remain, in all significant respects, separate but radically dependent entities. In my view the most dangerous (and common) “union” of the “hypertrophied” sense of history and the “unhistorical” attitude or

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condition in any artist save the “highest exemplars” is the attempt to transform a symbiotic relationship into a synthetic one, one in which the conflict, the core opposition, would be resolved. For it is, Nietzsche says, the tendency of a lesser artist, a “chattering dwarf,” to allow these pressures to subside in their persons and their art in order to move toward what is least painful. At the end of the Twilight of the Idols (How to Philosophize with a Hammer), one of Nietzsche’s last books, he discusses his first book, The Birth of Tragedy. He makes perhaps his strongest and most memorable statement regarding the “concept of the tragic” in Twilight of the Idols: Saying Yes to life even in its strangest and hardest problems … this is what I understood as the bridge to the psychology of the tragic poet. Not in order to purge oneself of a dangerously strong feeling by its vehement discharge—Aristotle understood it this way—but in order to be oneself the eternal joy of becoming.20

The Birth of Tragedy: An Aesthetic Transformation of History21 To understand the context in which this book emerged and why it is important to present-day musicians and artists, we need to set the stage very briefly. Nietzsche, if he were to stake any claim to an original commentary on the ancient Athenians, had to speak to the work of two earlier, very influential commentators: J. J. Winckelmann and G. W. F. Hegel.22 Winckelmann (1716–1768), was a philologist of enormous influence. His work had a profound effect, especially on Germany but also 20

Nietzsche 1968, §5 (my emphasis). Phillips 2008, Introduction and Part I. I have written on this subject, from various perspectives, several times. The present section borrows its arguments from more detailed considerations I undertook in that book. 22 One would think Aristotle’s name would come up here, but his focus (as usual) was primarily on distinguishing the various forms of “poetry,” the differentiation of the elements of the tragedy, most importantly, hamartia (miscalculation), peripeteia (reversal), and Anagnorisis (recognition) and the idea of catharsis (purgation, purification etc.). His almost total reliance on the model of Oedipus Rex for his ideal form of tragedy and the generality of his comments have generated so many interpretative disagreements as to make it a very complicated source for any but the most sophisticated commentators of the last two centuries— not least because of the discursive minefield one must traverse in any attempt to present an informed exposition of a possible definition and meaning of tragedy in its larger sense. 21

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upon much of the rest of Europe. He advanced an already fairly robust interest in ancient Greek culture to unprecedented levels. Winckelmann argued in the Imitation of the Ancients in Painting and Statuary23 that the Greeks were a people of noble simplicity and serene greatness.24 This idea of simplicity and greatness gradually evolved to almost comical lengths by Matthew Arnold who, through reference to a passing remark by Jonathan Swift, proclaimed the classical Greek culture as all “sweetness and light,” defining “sweetness” as moral righteousness, and “light” as intellectual power and truth!25 What?! Oedipus, Electra, Creon, Medea—all sweetness and light?! Even today the phrase is used, but in the manner of Swift as a sarcastic stinger. Nonetheless, Winckelmann’s influence was of such force that the focus in ancient Greek studies turned almost exclusively to the visual arts, particularly sculpture. One of his most famous writings is on the Laocoön.26 The Laocoön is a magnificent Greek sculpture of Laocoön and his two sons in an epic and ultimately fatal struggle with two huge “sea snakes” or serpents.27 Winckelmann’s description notes the stress in their bodies, but also the relative calm on their faces, saying: “the pain of the body and the greatness of the soul are equally balanced throughout the composition of the figures and seem to cancel each other out.”28 He then proclaimed serenity, noble simplicity, balance and the quiet grandeur of “great, tranquil souls” as the central qualities of the Greek people, their art and their culture. Hegel (speaking now very generally) deals with tragedy as dialectic between the socio-political mores of the time and the aggressive pursuit of perceived personal/familial rights and obligations. That is, the heroic person is trapped between her existence as a pure individual and as a representative, in the deepest manner, of an idea. Overall, Winckelmann’s 23 Silk and Stern (1981, pp. 4–11) discuss the influence Winckelmann had on Goethe, Lessing, Herder and Friedrich Schlegel. Lessing disagreed with Winckelmann’s assessment, writing that one could consider a “scream of bodily anguish quite compatible with ‘greatness of soul’.” 24 Silk and Stern 1981, pp. 4–11. 25 Arnold 1869, pp. 22–24. 26 Silk and Stern 1981, pp. 5–9. 27 It is said that Laocoön was punished by Poseidon (or Athena, depending on the version) for trying to warn the Trojans concerning the dangers attending the wooden model of a horse about to be pulled inside the city walls. The irony, of course, was that Laocoön was himself a Trojan priest of Poseidon, unaware that Poseidon had made a deal with the Greeks in order to punish Laocoön. 28 Miss E. M. Butler’s translation, from Butler 1935, p. 46; German text in Winckelmann 1943, pp. 21f.

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views were the more popular, but Hegel’s were by far the more profound, and were thus likely to be always at the back of Nietzsche’s mind as he toiled on this strange and brilliant book, The Birth of Tragedy.29 This book is a radical and courageous work of scholarship, philosophy and above all literature. Prior to Homer (or, as is very possible, the anonymous writer or writers who flourished sometime around the late eighth century to whom the name Homer may refer), we realize that the only idea Greeks had of their history consisted of an inherently unstable, but vital, oral tradition. Homer’s written record of this great tradition had a powerful effect on Greek culture and identity. Homer not only stabilized what had very likely been a rather fluid collection of mythic stories, but formulated what can be described as a significantly “invented past,” a reality both created and commemorated, but a story without which the identity of the Greeks as a people would have been far less substantial and surely less heroic.30 In this discussion we must remain aware of Nietzsche’s use of scholarship in the service of myth-making, his deviousness in commission and omission, and, as Nietzsche scholar Alexander Nehamas points out, his magnificent hyperbole: “Nietzsche’s writing, and his thinking, [are] essentially hyperbolic.”31 Nietzsche’s audacity slaps us in the face in order to wake us from our “dogmatic slumbers,” and then, when we are fully awake, he pushes us toward the abyss, just to focus our attention. Nietzsche’s creative undermining of the ancient Greek self-identity as constructed by Winckelmann and other philologists, is a change of perspective having enormous consequences—for both good and bad. His creative transformation of the West’s perspectives on ancient Greek culture had a profound effect on our vision of ourselves as a culture, since, as we have already pointed out, any change in our vision of the ancient Greeks would necessarily affect the way we see ourselves. With these changes comes also a change in the concept of what philosophy is and what it does and how it does it. Nietzsche is considered by many to be the greatest German littérateur next to Goethe. His works span virtually the entire range of literary production: from poetry, to aphorism, to essay, to epic poetry, to philosophical treatise. His work 29 For an excellent summary of Hegel’s views on tragedy, see Silk and Stern 1981, pp. 313–326. A more detailed collection of Hegel’s ideas on art in general can be found in Hegel: on the Arts, trans. and ed. Henry Paolucci. This book consists of selections from Hegel’s philosophy of fine arts drawn primarily from his late “Berlin Lectures.” 30 McInerney 1998. 31 Nehamas 1985, p. 31.

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metamorphoses based upon the subject matter. In so doing, Nietzsche breaks the tradition of systematic philosophy of which Kant and Hegel represent the highest point of development. He also brings into question the entire project of seeking The Truth, recognizing that our perceptions and conceptions of the world are radically perspectival. Ultimately, he provides a vision of the world that respects the world as its own justification, denying that it requires any external, any transcendent, validation. Finally, Nietzsche’s creative aesthetic in the context of a fearless and intellectually rigorous vision makes it possible to imagine what it is to be or to become a creative person. Whether or not we agree with Nietzsche’s world view, we cannot deny that in the eyes of many major thinkers (many of whom themselves have serious disagreements with Nietzsche’s views), Nietzsche’s work is of central importance in the thought and activity of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. At the core of this book lies the specter of the tragic experience. That specter constitutes Nietzsche’s idea of the meaning of the ancient Greeks. Tragedy is the “fundamental” upon which the musiké of the Greeks, especially the Athenians, is based. Nietzsche’s rethinking of the source of the Greeks’ self-image as founded in tragedy again slaps us across the face. Again, he dramatically awakens, then directs us toward the abyss. All that is left for us is to dance, to sing the praises of life itself, while facing our rapidly approaching oblivion with laughter and courage. The music of Richard Wagner inspired The Birth of Tragedy. The dramatic force of the orchestra in Wagner is profound. What appears on the stage and what is said (sung) are epiphenomena, sheer after-effect. In the worlds of both the gods and the humans, anonymous, overwhelming forces blindly drive events. These forces emerge out of the orchestral music. They are not under the power of any of the beings upon the stage: whether human, god or half and half, though these forces occasionally respond to Wotan and a few others. Even as early as Der Fliegende Holländer, the orchestra in Wagner’s hands had become a living thing, driving, for example, the Dutchman’s opening monologue. It rides on a torrent of living sound raging beneath, over, through the words—through the Dutchman himself—a torrent, telling us of things neither he nor we can understand. That torrent permits us to grasp the emotional and spiritual message of his monologue far more profoundly than any words could ever say. In the vision of Greek tragedy Nietzsche brings to us, everyone on the stage is a shadowy, ephemeral representation of hopelessly limited human beings and whacked out gods that ride the waves of forces utterly

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unknown and uncontrolled by any of them. The only virtue any of the humans can muster is to stand against the blind raging of these forces, broken, torn and finally obliterated beneath the weight of their agonies. But something in them, something vital, something very valuable remains unbroken until the moment of annihilation. This vital resistance is the basis for Nietzsche’s concept of “strong pessimism.” In the end, there are no eulogies spoken, no monuments erected. Many thousands, hundreds of thousands even, by now, billions have faced the maelstrom with an equal measure of resistance and fortitude. But only the stories of a pathetic few have been preserved. For the legions of others, for her who has implacably resisted the voracious maelstrom, there is nothing but to be ground into dust and forgotten.32 Nietzsche changed the world in which he lived. He produced a radically transformative re-articulation of the past in a manner that made possible a new vision of the present and the future. He sought the meaning of his own, present world through an examination of the art of his own time, linking it with the past, visualizing its importance for the future. Nietzsche questioned himself at least as critically as did his contemporary detractors and sought a revaluation of all values with rigorous energy no matter where his thought and work led him. His fearless re-articulation of the past in terms of his own present and his endless enthusiasm for the world of his living present, provide a model for composers and indeed all human beings wishing to recreate themselves, not out of an imitation of the past but out of a healthy, rigorous transformation of their own present. This means that artists, composers and musicians must re-think and reinvigorate the artifacts of the past as part of the transformation of the living moment. The confrontation between the rationalizing power of human thought and the irrationality of existence raises the deepest questions of all: Are we creatures living in a universe in which we can find no home? Why do we feel homeless, yet live on a planet that in many places is still a stunningly beautiful, edenic world? Is our feeling of homelessness a mere consequent of the universe’s brute thingness, of its utter incapability of such a thing as “recognizing” our existence? Does it matter? Do we matter? Or can we go forward in the manner of the ancient Greeks as presented to us in The Birth of Tragedy? Ancient Greek tragedy has been seen by many as perhaps the most powerful evocation of the meaning of human existence.33 It has been 32

Phillips 2008, p. 147. See Nehamas, Steiner, Kaufmann, Heidegger, Easterling, Hegel, Silk, Stern, Goethe, etc.

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pointed out in this discussion that tragedy depicts our existence as playing itself out in a “contest” between the rational and the a-rational. The ferocity, deadliness and horror of this contest are depicted as being utterly beyond the power of humans to control or understand. But, deep in the bowels of Greek tragedy is an even more profound, more terrible revelation: Even the depiction of the strife between the rational and the irrational as a “contest” displays the insidious delusion of human selfimportance: There is no contest. The very idea that there is one reflects, in fatal measure, the greatest arrogance of all: the illusion that humans have an ordained place in the world. We humans of the present believe we can somehow, through clever and dedicated effort, outwit and triumph over the blind and irrational forces of the universe in which we exist. But there is no contest. In the tragic view, we humans are nothing to anything other than to ourselves.34 If we were to follow Nietzsche’s advice, we composers and musicians would look to our past in search of what seems healthy and useful for an aesthetic living of life, re-articulating that material in terms of the fullest vigor of the present. We would then turn our gaze to the future, bridging the move from the present to that future with refurbished planks taken from the vast, silent remains of the past. Then, at last, we would put on our dancing shoes.

References Arnold, Matthew. 1869. Culture and anarchy. London: Smith, Elder. Butler, E. M. 1935. The tyranny of Greece over Germany: A study of the influence exercised by Greek art and poetry over the great German writers of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hegel, G. W. F. 1979. Hegel: On the arts: Selections from G. W. F. Hegel’s aesthetics or the philosophy of fine art, trans. Henry Paolucci. New York: Unger. (Milestones of thought series.) (Selections from Hegel’s philosophy of fine arts drawn primarily from his late Berlin Lectures.) McInerney, Jeremy. 1998. The age of heroes. In Ancient Greek Civilization [sound recording], lecture 5. Springfield, VA: Teaching Company. Nehamas, Alexander. 1985. Life as literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 34

Phillips 2008, p. 148.

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Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1966. Beyond good and evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books. —. 1967. The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books. —. 1968. What I owe the ancients. In Twilight of the idols, trans. R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Penguin Classics. —. 1983, On the uses and disadvantages of history for life. In Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Cambridge University Press. Phillips, Gerald L. 2008. Dead composers, living audiences: The situation of classical music in the twenty first century. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press. Richardson, John. 1996. Nietzsche’s system. New York: Oxford University Press. Rorty, Richard. 1989. Contingency, irony, and solidarity. New York: Cambridge University Press. Silk. M. S. and Stern, J. P. 1981. Nietzsche on Tragedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stravinsky, Igor. 1947. Poetics of music in the form of six lessons. New York: Vintage Books. Winckelmann, J. J. 1943. Ewiges Griechentum, Auswahl aus seinen Schriften, ed. F. Forschepiepe. Stuttgart.

PART IV BIOGRAPHICAL AND AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL EXPLORATIONS OF THE SENSUOUS

CHAPTER NINE FROM PHILOSOPHY TO POETRY: THE PERSONAL ODYSSEY OF N. KAZANTZAKIS CHRISTOS C. EVANGELIOU I Eminent literary critics consider Nikos Kazantzakis “the most important Greek writer of modern times and one of the major figures in what is perhaps the outstanding literary generation of all times,” as Morton Levitt puts it.1 Along with James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Kafka, Camus, Proust, Lawrence, Faulkner and others, Kazantzakis represents the “spirit of modernism” in Western literature. He is also an outstanding figure in the literary renaissance, which occurred in Greece in the twentieth century. This rebirth of Greek letters has produced many well-known names in poetry, such as Cavafy, Seferis, Palamas, Sicelianos, Elytis, to mention only a few. It is not without significance that two of these poets received the Nobel Prize in literature in recent years. Their names are George Seferis and Odysseus Elytis. Lacking the official support of his country, Nikos Kazantzakis lost the Nobel Prize to R. Himeneth in 1956, but he received another great prize, the International Peace Prize, just a year before his death. By that time Kazantzakis had been acclaimed as one of the most powerful writers of our times. Evidently, the literary glory which he had craved and struggled for all his life, came to Kazantzakis very late, but it came at last. Ironically, he was recognized as a prose writer first, and not as a great poet, as he had desired. It was not the magnificent Odyssey that brought fame to Kazantzakis, as he hoped. The success and recognition came overnight, when he, late in life, decided to publish his first novels. The public in Greece and, especially, abroad, responded immediately and favorably. Kazantzakis’s marvelous stories, so artfully 1

. M. Levitt, The Cretan Glance (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1980), p. 3.

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told about the people of his native island, Crete, and their wild passions for life, love and liberty, were welcomed, loved and unanimously praised as masterpieces of their kind. Kazantzakis’s novels have been translated into some thirty languages and have the power to move the reader, even when they are read in translation. The best known of these novels in the U.S. are: Zorba the Greek, The Greek Passion, Freedom or Death, St. Francis, and The Last Temptation of Christ. Based on these novels, three very successful movies have been made, He Who Must Die, Zorba the Greek, and The Last Temptation of Christ. The philology that has developed around Kazantzakis’s art and philosophy of life in recent years is very large and steadily growing. After the publication of Kimon Friar’s superb translation of the Odyssey in 1958, Kazantzakis’s poetry, too, has found many admirers in the English-speaking world. As his work is studied in depth and appreciated as a whole, Kazantzakis emerges as an outstanding figure in contemporary literature and thought. Thus Will Durant is able to state in his survey of contemporary literature, where he examines the lives and opinions of some thirty major authors of our times: “Kazantzakis has been to me a major and exciting revelation … I feel closer to him than to any other hero of these pages.”2 To grasp the significance of this remark, one must consider the list of the heroes of Durant’s book, which includes such giants of the spirit as the philosophers Kierkegaard, Husserl, Heidegger and Sartre; the writers Faulkner, Pasternak, Camus and Thomas Mann; the poets T. S. Eliot, Eugene O’Neill, James Joyce and many others. Also, Colin Wilson, another eminent literary critic of the English-speaking world, has this to say regarding the greatness of Nikos Kazantzakis as a writer and thinker: A few great men recognize this problem clearly and strive to solve it [he is referring to the problem of man’s surpassing himself and becoming godlike]. In our own century, the number of such men has been pitifully small. A few major writers have recognized it, indeed—Sartre, Camus, Thomas Mann—but have decided it is insoluble … Kazantzakis is the only contemporary writer who saw the problem, faced it, and spent his life fighting like a demon to solve it. The greatness of his work lies in this demonic quality. It is also heroic; Kazantzakis is the only modern writer of whom one could use the word “Promethean.”3

2

. W. and A. Durant, “Nikos Kazantzakis,” in Interpretations of Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970), pp. 29-99. 3 . C. Wilson, “Nikos Kazantzakis,” London Magazine I (Dec. 1961): 80-89.

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II But who was Nikos Kazantzakis? What did he accomplish in his life? How did life treat this extraordinary man? To these questions we may now turn seeking an answer. Nikos Kazantzakis was born on February 18, 1883, in Megalo Kastro, Crete. He died at the age of seventy-four in Freiburg, Germany in 1957. He had a very adventurous life. Although he loved the island of his birth and his fatherland, Greece, he spent almost his entire mature life either in self-exile in decadent Europe, or traveling around the world. His travel journals constitute an essential part of Kazantzakis’s literary output and have been published in many volumes. He visited and wrote about such faraway countries as England, Spain, Italy, Cyprus, Palestine, Egypt, Russia, China and Japan. He was also planning to come to America, so that the circle around the globe might be completed, but he did not live long enough to realize this last wish. However, he wrote Christopher Columbus, which is his last great play, and may be considered as a tribute not only to the discoverer of America but also to America itself. Nikos Kazantzakis was the first and only son in a family of three children. It is interesting to see how he portrays his parents in his autobiography. My father spoke only rarely, never laughed, never engaged in brawls. He simply grated his teeth or clench his fist at certain times, and if he happened to be holding a hard-shelled almond, rubbed it between his fingers and reduced it to dust … He worshipped St. Minas above all Christs and Virgin Marys, because St. Minas was the captain of Magalo Kastro. (Report, pp. 31–32) God only knows what he must have said to him and what reproaches he heaped upon the Saint for delaying so long to liberate Crete. (Report, p. 81) My mother was a saintly woman. How was she able to feel the lion’s heavy inhalations and suspirations at her side for forty years without suffering a broken heart? She had the patience, endurance, and sweetness of the earth itself … I had never seen my mother laugh; she simply smiled and regarded everyone with deep-set eyes filled with kindness. (Report, p. 34) Both my parents circulate in my blood, the one fierce, hard and morose, the other tender, kind and saintly. I have carried them all my days; neither has died. As long as I live, they too will live inside me and battle in their

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antithetical ways to govern my thoughts and actions. My lifelong effort is to reconcile them so that the one may give me strength, the other her tenderness to make the discord between them turn to harmony inside their son’s heart. (Report, p. 49)

There is no doubt that Nikos was a bright and precocious boy. But the pedagogical method followed by the Cretan teachers in the last century might have contributed to the opening up of his appetite and thirst for knowledge. Kazantzakis was unable to quench this thirst, although he devoured literatures and philosophies in seven languages. He was fluent in French, German, Spanish, Italian, English and Russian, not to mention Ancient Greek, Latin and Chinese. Here is how little Nikos recalls his first day in school: “This is my son,” my father said to the teacher. “His bones are mine, his flesh is yours. Don’t feel sorry for him. Thrash him and make a man of him.” “Don’t worry, Captain Michalis,” said the teacher, pointing to his switch. “Right here is the tool which makes men.” When I grew older and philosophic theories began to mislead my mind, I termed this method barbarous. But when I came to know human nature still better, I blessed, and still bless, my teacher’s holy switch. It was this that taught us that suffering is the greatest guide along the ascent which leads from animal to man. (Report, pp. 52–53)

Perhaps what influenced Nikos Kazantzakis most in these formative years of his life was not schools nor teachers but the continuous struggle between Crete and her oppressor. Let us listen to his confession once again: Without this struggle my life would have taken a different course … From the day of my birth I inhaled this terrible visible and invisible battle in the very air I breathed. The opponents were Crete and Turkey; Crete was battling to gain freedom, the other trampling on its breast and preventing it … Thus, through the accident of being born a Cretan at a critical moment when Crete was fighting for its freedom, I realized as far back as my childhood that this world possesses a good which is dearer than life, sweeter than happiness—liberty. (Report, pp. 67–68)

If there is an idea; if there is a concept, which gives unity and coherence to Kazantzakis’s entire work, that concept and that idea is freedom. What freedom? Freedom from what? From all kinds of freedom

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(e.g., freedom from small desires and petty habits; freedom from tyranny and oppression; freedom from fear and hope; freedom from superstition and false idols). Above all, freedom from materialistic concerns which man must conquer and turn matter into spirit, darkness into light, the beastly man inside us into a god-like human being. Of course, this is a heroic task. But we should not forget that Kazantzakis the boy had dreamed of becoming a hero and/or a saint. Great saints and great heroes are the constant theme of his later writings: Christ, Buddha, St. Francis, Lenin, Captain Michalis, Odysseus, Hercules, Prometheus and so forth. At the end of his life he admitted that the initial attempts at sainthood and heroism miscarried in his case. Not only did he fail to become a saint, he did not even become a bishop as the midwife had predicted at the time of his birth, All Souls Day, a holy day in the Orthodox calendar of the church of Crete. He comments on this event: When in the course of time I heard of the midwife’s prophecy, I believed it, so well did it match my own most secret yearnings. A great responsibility fell upon me then, and I no longer wished to do anything that a bishop would not have done. Much later, when I saw what bishops actually do, I changed my mind. (Report, p. 74)

Little wonder then that some Orthodox bishops never forgave Nikos Kazantzakis for remarks like this and for his habit of contrasting in his novels the well-fed high priests of rich parishes with the lean, humble ministers of God who struggle on the side of suffering people. A striking example of this antithesis is the role assigned to the priests Gregoris and Fotis in Christ Recrucified. During the 1897 uprising Nikos was in high school. For security, he was sent to another island, Naxos, and entered the Catholic French School. With regard to the experience, he writes: Before this moment I had divined but had never known with such positiveness that the world is extremely large and that suffering and toil are the companions and fellow warriors not only of the Cretan, but of every man. Above all, only now did I begin to have a presentiment of the great secret: that by means of poetry all this suffering and effort could be transformed into dream; no matter how much of the ephemeral existed, poetry could immortalize it by turning it into song. Only two or three primitive passions had governed me until this time: fear, the struggle to conquer fear and the yearning for freedom. But now two new passions were kindled inside me: beauty and the thirst for learning … The world was larger than Greece, the world’s suffering was larger than our suffering,

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and the yearning for freedom was not the exclusive prerogative of the Cretan, it was the eternal struggle of all mankind. (Report, p. 96)

The teacher of physics in high school had revealed to Kazantzakis two terrible secrets: (1) that the Earth is not the center of the universe, but a small and insignificant planet; (2) that Man was not the favorite creature of God, but the product of a long evolutionary process. This revelation shocked the youngster Kazantzakis and occupied his mind for a long time.

III When he graduated from Gymnasium, Nikos went to the University of Athens to study law. The courses at the law school failed to answer the questions which were torturing Nikos’ soul. Although he managed to finish the law school with honors in four years, Nikos spent most of his time in Athens learning foreign languages and reading the literature written in those languages. It was during his student years that Nikos Kazantzakis tried his hand at creative literature. He entered a competition sponsored by the University of Athens with his work Day is Breaking, which was a romantic drama, full of passion, eroticism and melancholy. The young heroine preached the liberation of women and a new morality based on equal rights for both sexes. The judges praised the play for its powerful dramatic effects, but they denied the author the laurel on moral grounds. With dignity Nikos Kazantzakis stood up and walked out of the auditorium in protest. This episode created a scandal in the literary circles of Athens. Articles appeared in newspapers and journals about Kazantzakis’s drama and its treatment by the adjudicators. Kazantzakis was offered the position of editor of a daily newspaper, but he preferred to go to Paris to pursue graduate studies in philosophy under the renowned philosopher Henri Bergson at the Collège de France. By the time he left Athens in October 1907, he had completed another novel, Snake and Lily. For the first time now, he had come to realize that in art man does not simply imitate the works of God. With Satanic arrogance the artist who is worthy of his name strives to surpass even God the Creator. In this connection he writes: This struggle between reality and imagination, between God-the-Creator and man-the-creator, had momentarily intoxicated my heart … “God took mud to create a world; I took words. He made men as we see them, crawling on the ground; I, with air and imagination, the stuff that dreams are made of, would fashion other men with more soul, men able to resist

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In Paris Kazantzakis spent two busy years. He was taking courses in philosophy at two universities (the Collège de France and the Sorbonne) and he was writing his thesis on Nietzsche which was published later as Nietzsche and the Philosophy of Right. He was so absorbed by his studies that the landlady became suspicious about the normality of the student’s behavior. One day she could restrain herself no longer: “Once and for all,” she shouted, “how long is this state of affairs going to continue?” “What state of affairs?” “What state of affairs! Why, you come home early every evening, you never receive visitors, either men or women, you keep your light to past midnight. I suppose you think that’s normal?” “But I attend classes all day long at the university; at night I study and write. Isn’t that permitted?” “No, it is not. I’ve had complaints from the other tenants. You are hiding something. Such decorum, such isolation and silence—without a woman, good gracious, without a friend! You must be sick. Yes you must be sick, or else, with all due respects, you are cooking up something. I’m sorry but this simply cannot continue.” “At first I was on the verge of anger, but quickly I realized that my landlady was right. When a person is orderly and quiet in a society which is unruly, immoral and boisterous; when he welcomes neither men nor women into his room, he infringes the rules. He is not, and cannot be, tolerated … I have observed this all through my life. Since my life was always extremely simple, people considered it dangerously complicated. No matter what I said or did, they attached a different meaning to it, always trying to divine what was hidden and undivulged. (Report, p. 335)

Leaving Paris, Kazantzakis took with him the manuscripts of many plays. Two of these plays deserve mention here: the comedy titled Tragedy in One Act and the tragedy The Masterbuilder. The comedy has been translated into English by K. Friar (in Two Plays, St. Paul, MN: Nostos, 1982). This play is important because its theme anticipated Sartre’s play No Exit by half a century. The tragedy O Protomastoras is based on the popular ballad The Bridge of Arta. It is the first play of Kazantzakis’s that is entirely demotic in its language and theme. The young author thought highly of this tragedy. Although the poet was offered the laurel this time, the play failed to reach the stage immediately and to stir any reactions when published. The literary glory the author had expected did not come,

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and Kazantzakis was very disappointed. This was the year 1910, a critical year in Kazantzakis’s life. At this time he decided to give up poetry, philosophy and useless contemplation in order to begin a new and more practical, useful life. Thus, he married Galatea, his first wife; he volunteered to serve his country in the Balkan wars of 1912–13; he assisted the government of E. Venizelos to implement its program of repatriation of 150,000 refugee Greeks; he started a mining business with G. Zorbas; he worked for reforms in the public schools as member of the Educational Association and the Solomos Society; he translated into modern Greek works by such authors as Bergson, Nietzsche, James, Darwin, Plato and others; he traveled with Sicelianos, another great poet of Kazantzakis’s age, all over Greece in search of their spiritual roots. The two poets visited also the Holy Mountain of Athos because they felt that they should “reorganize Christian Asceticism and blow the breath of creativity into it once more” (Report, p. 203). After forty days of spiritual exercises, the two friends left Athos with the conviction that “a new decalogue is absolutely necessary.” It was this new decalogue which Kazantzakis tried to outline in his Symposium.4 All these activities came to an end with the defeat of Venizelos’ party in the November election of 1920, at which time Kazantzakis resigned his position as General Director of the ministry of social welfare and left Greece for Europe. Once again Nikos Kazantzakis tasted the bitterness of disappointment coming this time not from theory and poetic aspirations but from praxis and practical ambitions. Thus ended a period in his life which Kazantzakis has called “heroic nationalism.” The man who expressed this ideal more accurately than anybody else was his friend Ion Dragoumis, a great patriot and inspired writer. The assassination of Dragoumis—the national catastrophe which followed Venizelos’ defeat and the burial of the Megali Idea in 1922—brought about Kazantzakis’s disillusionment with national politics. In the twenties Kazantzakis became curious about the great experiment of social transformation which was going on in Russia and, for a while, he flirted with Marxist internationalism. He visited Russia three times, in 1925, 1927 and 1928. Like the philosopher Plato, who visited Sicily three times and hoped to educate the tyrant Dionysius, the poet Kazantzakis hoped to inspire the crude materialism of Marxist ideology with some spirituality. As expected, the modern poet, like the ancient philosopher, failed tragically. However, he never lost his independent critical attitude towards the Russian Revolution, as the following clearly shows: 4 . P. Prevelakis, Kazantzakis (Athens: Kollarou, 1958), p. 290. He dates the Symposium no later than 1925.

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These trips to Russia, like his trips to other trouble spots in the world, i.e. Spain and China, provided Kazantzakis with the opportunity to see many places, to hear about many peoples, and to collect material for his Odyssey, the first draft of which he wrote in 1925. There were to follow seven writings before the poem was finally published in 1938. By now philosophy had given way to philosophical poetry. In the early 1920s, while Lenin was busy with the building of socialism in the Soviet Union, putting into practise the Communist theories of Karl Marx, Nikos Kazantzakis wrote and published a little book under the title Salvatores Dei: Spiritual Exercises. The author, who had immersed himself for decades in reading Buddhist texts and studying the writings of Nietzsche and Bergson, tried to summarize his philosophical creed in a few pages, in an aphoristic style and in poetic diction. In light of his philosophic studies and his personal experiences during World War I, which saw the end of three empires in Europe alone and the coming in power of the Bolsheviks in Russia by way of the Russian Revolution in 1917, Nikos Kazantzakis was able to produce a powerful book embodying a new vision of the world, of men in action, of Nature and of God. It seemed to him that, at that particular time in European history, God was seriously imperiled and in need of help to overcome the odds and survive the oncoming storm of aggressive atheism. It becomes evident in his Spiritual Exercises that Kazantzakis felt that the proletarian revolution was in need of its own “mask of God,” a struggling God along with the poor and downtrodden men of that critical time. If God was in danger, so was the godless revolution. Hence the need of a new “Meta-Communist Manifesto” was to be filled by his Saviors of God.5 5

. “I tried with simple words, as in confession, to trace the spiritual struggles of my life, from where I set out, how I passed over obstacles, how the struggle of God began, how I found the central meaning which regulates at last my thought, my speech and my actions…. I find myself in a new borderland. The ultimate, the most holy form of theory is action. God is everywhere, in man, in politics, in daily life, and he is imperiled. He is not almighty, that he might cross his hands and thus await his certain victory. His salvation depends upon us. And only if he is saved

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In retrospect, it looks like a prophetic book about the fate of the Russian version of communism. The book is divided into the following parts: The Prologue, the Preparation, the March, the Vision, the Action, and the Silence. In the Prologue, Kazantzakis strikes an existentialist note: We come from a dark abyss, we end in a dark abyss, and we call the luminous interval life. As soon as we are born the return begins, at once the getting forth and the coming back. We die in every moment. Because of this many have cried out: The goal of life is death! But as soon as we are born we begin the struggle to create, to compose, to turn matter into life; we are born in every moment. Because of this many have cried out: The goal of ephemeral life is immortality! Life startles us at first; it seems somewhat beyond the law, somewhat contrary to nature, somewhat like a transitory counteraction to the dark eternal fountains; but deeper down we feel that life is itself without beginning, an indestructible force of the Universe. Otherwise, from where did that superhuman strength come which hurls us from the unborn to the born and gives us—plants, animals, men—courage for the struggle? But both opposing forces are holy. It is our duty, therefore, to grasp that vision which can embrace and harmonize these two enormous, timeless, and indestructible forces, and with this vision to modulate our thinking and our actions. (Spiritual Exercises, pp. 43–44)

In the Preparation, the author identifies the three basic duties of the aware and struggling man, his duty to the mind, his duty to the heart and his duty of going beyond mind and heart in the quest of Freedom. The Mind, of course, represents reason, logic, science and man’s effort to deal with phenomena and their sensible relations by drawing a curtain over the gapping abyss. To see and accept the boundaries of the human mind without vain rebellion, and in these severe limitations to work ceaselessly without protest—this is where man’s first duty lies…I recognize these limitations, I accept them with resignation, bravery, and love, and I struggle at ease in their enclosure, as though I were free. I subdue matter and force it to become my mind’s good medium. I rejoice in plants, in animals, in men and in gods, as though they were my children. I feel all the universe nestling about me and following me as though it were my own body. (Spiritual Exercises, pp. 49–50)

may we be saved. Theory has worth as preparation only; the critical struggle lies in the Act.” K. Friar, Spiritual Exercises (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960), p. 19. He quotes this passage from Letters to Galateia.

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But the human heart, representing the passionate part of the human nature as expressed in art, cannot be satisfied with these sensible arrangements of the mind. It rebels and demands to go beyond the limits of the visible in order to grasp the invisible and get a taste of the unlimited: I will not accept boundaries; appearances cannot contain me; I choke! To bleed in this agony, and to live it profoundly, is the second duty. The mind is patient and adjust itself, it likes to play, but the heart grows savage and would not condescend to play; it stifles and rushes to tear apart the nets of necessity … I ask and ask again, beating on chaos: “Who plants us on this earth without asking our permission? Who uproots us from this earth without asking our permission?…” I once set out from a dark point, the Womb, and now I proceed to another dark point, the Tomb. A power hurls me out of the dark pit and another power drags me irrevocably towards the dark pit … Let us unite, let us hold each other tightly, let us merge our hearts, let us create … For Earth a brain and a heart, let us give a human meaning to the superhuman struggle. This is our second duty. (Spiritual Exercises, pp. 50–55)

At this point the struggler is ready to take the third step, to embrace his third duty of going beyond the mind and the heart, beyond fear and hope, to find the ultimate freedom. The two voices now represent the two opposing forces of the seed and the womb: The moment is ripe: leave the heart and the mind behind you, go forward, take the third step. Free yourself from the simple complacency of the mind that thinks to put all things in order and hopes to subdue phenomena. Free yourself from the terror of the heart that seeks and hopes to find the essence of things. Conquer the last, the greatest temptation of all: Hope! This is the third duty … “To go beyond law, so smash bodies, to conquer death. I am the Seed!…” “I hold back the Spirit to enslave it, I won’t let it escape, for I hate the flame which rises eve upward. I am the Womb!…” I know now: I do not hope for anything. I do not fear anything. I have freed myself from both the mind and the heart, I have mounted much higher, I am free. This is what I want. I want nothing more. I have been seeking freedom. (Spiritual Exercises, pp. 55–59)

Having thus completed the Preparation the struggler is ready to start his March, in four giant steps which will take him out of his Ego and beyond his Race and Humanity, to embrace all life on Earth, in a mission to find out the source and the essence of an enigmatic Cry heard clearly within. It will turn out to be the new mask of God, an immanent and struggling God or Spirit, seeking his freedom from the prison of matter:

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The Cry within me is a call to arms. It shouts: “I, the Cry, am the Lord your God! I am not an asylum. I am not a hope and a home. I am not the Father nor the Son nor the Holy Ghost. I am your General! You are not my slave, nor a plaything in my hands. You are not my friend, you are not my child. You are my comrade-in-arms!…” I am an improvised bridge, and when someone passes over me, I crumble away behind Him. A Combatant passes through me, eats my flesh and brain to open roads, to free himself from me at last. It is not I but He who shouts. (Spiritual Exercises, pp. 67–69)

The Cry is not his, the individual man who hears it, although it is inside him. It belongs to greater forces, like the dead ancestors and the unborn children of his race, of humanity, and all life on the Earth. Ultimately it is the Cry of a struggling God, seeking liberation. They all demand action from him: Finish our work! Finish our work! All day and all night we come and go through your body, and we cry out. No, we have not gone, we have not detached ourselves from you, we have not descended into the earth. Deep in your entrails we continue the struggle. Deliver us! (p. 71) It is not you talking. Nor is it your race only which shouts within you, for all the innumerable races of mankind shout and rush within you: white, yellow, black. Free yourself from race also; fight to live through the whole struggle of man. (pp. 75–76) It is not you who call. It is not your voice calling from within your ephemeral breast. It is not only the white, yellow, and black generations of men calling in your heart. The entire Earth, with her trees and her waters, with her animals, with her men and her gods, calls from within your beast … It is as though the whole of life were the visible, eternal pursuit of an invisible Bridegroom who from body to body hunts down the untamed bride, Eternity. And we, all the guests of the wedding procession—plants, animals, men—rush trembling towards the mystical nuptial chamber. We each carry with awe the sacred symbols of marriage—one the Phallos, another the Womb. (p. 81)

The outcome of the great march is the great Vision of the struggling God, through all living beings, in His upward and endless spiral-like ascend, with its ups and downs, with its sweat and blood-stained trace. Kazantzakis’ God is like Bergson’s “élan vital,” the vital force itself that animates and goads on all living things, or it is like his erotic and “Ecstatic

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Son,” “This Ecstatic, who gives birth to all things, who rejoices in them all and yet destroys them, this Ecstatic is my Son” (p. 95). This kind of vision entails certain responsibilities for each man who is awakened and aware and wants to participate in the cosmic Action actively. Thus, the section which follows and is titled appropriately Action specifies man’s three basic relations with God, with Man, and with Nature. In the case of God, who is a struggling God, limited and suffering, man must help save Him, if he wishes to be saved himself. Unlike the traditional God, Kazantzakis’ God is not all-powerful, all-knowing, or allgood: Our profound human duty is not to interpret or to cast light on the rhythm of God’s march, but to adjust, as much as we can, the rhythm of our small and fleeting life to his. Only thus may we mortals achieve something immortal, because then we collaborate with one who is deathless … We struggle to make this Spirit visible, to give it a face, to encase it in words, in allegories and thoughts and incantations, that it may not escape us. (pp. 99–100) And again: It is not God who will save us—it is we who will save God, by battling, by creating, and by transmuting matter into spirit … Life is a crusade in the service of God. Whether we wished to or not, we set out as crusaders to free—not the Holy Sepulcher—but that God buried in matter and in our souls. (p. 106)

In this great crusade to free God, all man who have become aware of what is at stake must take part in this creative and erotic enterprise: Eros? What other name may we give that impetus which becomes enchanted as soon as it casts its glance on matter and then longs to impress its feature upon it? It confronts the body and longs to pass beyond it, to merge with the other erotic cry hidden in that body, to become one till both may vanish and become deathless by begetting sons … God is never created out of happiness or comfort or glory, but out of shame and hunger and tears … War against the unbelievers! The unbelievers are the satisfied, satiated, the sterile … This identification of our-selves with the Universe begets the two superior virtue of our ethics: responsibility and sacrifice. It is our duty to help liberate that God who is stifling in us, in mankind, in masses of people living in darkness. We must be ready at any moment to give up our lives for his sake. For life is not a goal; it is also an instrument, like death, like beauty, like virtue, like knowledge. Whose instrument? Of that God who fights for freedom. (pp. 110–115)

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It follows from the nature of the embattled new God that the world of nature become a battleground where the forces of light fight with the forces of darkness in a Manichean way: All this world, all this rich, endless flow of appearances is not a deception, a multicolored phantasmagoria of our mirroring mind. Nor is it absolute reality which lives and evolves freely, independent of our mind’s power … [It is] a condensation of the two enormous powers of the Universe permeated with all of God. One power descends and wants to scatter, to come to a standstill, to die. The other power ascends and strives for freedom, for immortality. These two armies, the dark and the light, the armies of life and death, collide eternally. The visible signs of this collision are, for us, plants, animals, men … Profound and incommensurable is the worth of this flowing world: God clings to it and ascends, god feeds upon it and increases. My heart breaks open, my mind is flooded with light, and all at once this world’s dread battlefield is revealed to me as an erotic arena … The wife of my God is matter; they wrestle with each other, they laugh and weep, they cry out in the nuptial bed of flesh … For the first time on this earth, from within our hearts and our minds, God gazes at his own struggle. (pp. 119–124)

The last section of the poem is titled Silence. It is the ultimate stage of this spiritual exercise, and the author tries to explain its meaning. It is the point where the soul of man has become a “flame, a bird of fire,” and beholds “the final fruit of fire, the Light,” and wants to set the “black bulk of the world on fire,” so that the “entire Universe will become a single conflagration,” and “fire is the first and final mask of my God” (pp. 127– 128). He explains the meaning of silence thus: There he merges with the Abyss and nestles within it like the seed of man in the womb of woman. The Abyss is now his wife, he plows her … How can you reach the womb of the Abysh to make it fruitful;? This cannot be expressed, cannot be narrowed into words, cannot be subjected to laws; every man is completely free and has his own special liberation. No form of instruction exist, no Savior exists to open up the road. No road exists to be opened. (p. 129)

At this point each freed soul will be able to sing its own song or creed. Kazantzakis’ creed is as follows: 1. I BELIEVE IN ONE GOD, DEFENDER OF THE BORDERS, OF DOUBLE DESCENT, MILITANT, SUFFERING, OF MIGHTY BUT NOT OF OMNIPOTENT POWERS, A WARRIOR AT THE FARTHEST

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Chapter Nine FRONTIERS, COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF OF ALL THE LUMINOUS POWERS, THE VISIBLE AND THE INVISIBLE. 2. I BELIEVE IN THE INNUMERABLE, THE EPHEMERAL MASKS WHICH GOD HAS ASSUMED THROUGHOUT THE CENTURIES, AND BEHIND HIS CEASELESS FLUX I DISCERN AN INDESTRUCTIBLE UNITY. 3. I BELIEVE IN HIS SLEEPLESS AND VIOLENT STRUGGLE WHICH TAMES AND FRUCTIFIES THE EARTH AS THE LIFEGIVING FOUNTAIN OF PLANTS, ANIMALS, AND MEN. 4. I BELIEVE IN MAN’S HEART, THAT EARTHEN THRESHINGFLOOR WHERE NIGHT AND DAY THE DEFENDER OF THE BORDERS FIGHTS WITH DEATH. 5. O LORD, YOU SHOUT: “HELP ME! HELP ME!” YOU SHOUT, O LORD AND I HEAR. 6. WITHIN ME ALL FOREFATHERS AND ALL DESCENDANTS, ALL RACES AND ALL EARTH HEAR YOUR CRY WITH JOY AND TERROR. 7. BLESSED BE ALL THOSE WHO HEAR AND RUSH TO FREE YOU, LORD, AND WHO SAY: “ONLY YOU AND I EXIST.” 8. BLESSED BE ALL THOSE WHO FREE YOU AND BECOME UNITED WITH YOU, LORD, AND WHO SAY: “YOU AND I ARE ONE.” 9. AND THRICE BLESSED BE THOSE WHO BEAR ON THEIR SHOULDERS AND DO NOT BUCKLE UNDER THIS GREAT, SUBLIME, AND TERRIFYING SECRET: THAT EVEN THIS ONE DOES NOT EXIST!

Kazantzakis tried to preach this new gospel to a group of young intellectual Jewish ladies who had left Russia and lived in exile in Germany. It was this group which introduced Kazantzakis to Marxism, though without great hope of converting this visionary poet into a politically minded Marxist. At that time, 1922–23, Kazantzakis was preoccupied with Buddha who, like Nietzsche, Christ, Dante and Homer, had captured his imagination. For a moment Kazantzakis thought that he could start a new religion, a mixture of ascetic Buddhism and revolutionary Marxism. The trips to Russia, the hardening of Stalinism,

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Trotsky’s fate, all helped to open the eyes of the young visionary poet. The man, who had dreamed an active life when he was isolated in his cell in Aegina, changed his mind as soon as he found himself in Moscow. Now he longed for seclusion, contemplation and peace of mind so that he could give his life to poetry. Like the prodigal son, he decided to return home. With nostalgia he confesses: When a man returns to his country after many years of wandering and struggle abroad, leans against the ancestral stones, and sweeps his glance over the familiar regions so densely populated with indigenous spirits, childhood memories, and youthful longings, he breaks into a cold sweat. The return to the ancestral soil perturbs our hearts … We gaze behind us to the land we left, and sigh. (Report, p. 435)

After a cruise to the Aegean islands, Kazantzakis was rejuvenated. Finally, he had found Greece in the beauty of the Aegean Sea and the demotic tongue. He writes: One of the greatest pleasures man is capable of being granted in this world is to sail the Aegean in the springtime when a gentle breeze is blowing. I have never been able to conceive how heaven could be in any way different. What other celestial or mundane joy could be more perfectly in harmony with man’s body and soul? … What are Abraham’s bosom and the immaterial fetches of the Christian heaven compared to this Greek eternity composed of water, rocks, and the refreshing north winds? I rejoiced that I was a man, a man and a Greek; thus I could feel the Aegean my own, my own ancestral heritage, and could sail among the islands from one happiness to the next without overstepping the boundaries of my soul. These divine islands gleamed like a partridge’s downy breast. (Report, p. 467)

IV In this state of mind and surrounded by this heavenly beauty, Kazantzakis completed The Odyssey, his magnum opus. There is no doubt that The Odyssey is Kazantzakis’s most monumental work. Compared to it, all his other works seemed to Kazantzakis as parerga. With its 33,333 verses, the poem is not only a reservoir of Kazantzakis’s philosophical ideas, but also a treasure box for thousands of beautiful demotic words. In this connection Kimon Friar writes: Kazantzakis wandered over the length and breadth of Greece, throughout her numerous islands, and with great love and care collected notebook after

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Chapter Nine notebook of words from any occupation and region until he had prepared a large dictionary of the demotic tongue … Athenian intellectuals were to be confronted with a special lexicon of almost 2,000 words appended to the poem and meant to elucidate a diction and an idiom with which they found themselves disconcertingly unfamiliar, although these words and phrases were in daily and familiar use by shepherds and fishermen throughout the islands and villages of Greece, or embedded in their folk songs and legends. Even then, however, there were many who hailed the book for what it was—the greatest of modern Greek poems and a masterpiece of the modern world.6

The Prologue of the poems ends with two lines that announce the theme: Ahoy, cast wretched sorrow out, prick up your ears— I sing the sufferings and torments of renowned Odysseus.

The Epilogue matches the Prologue well: O Sun, great Eastern Prince, your eyes have brimmed with tears, for all the world has darkened, all life swirls and spins, and now you’ve plunged down to your mother’s watery cellars. She’s yearned for you for a long time, stood by the door with wine for you to drink, a lamp to light your way: “Dear Son, the table’s spread, eat and rejoice your heart; here’s forty loaves of bread and forty jugs of wine and forty girls who drowned to light your way like lanterns; your pillows are made of violets and your bed of roses, night after night I have longed for you, my darling son!” But her black son upset the tables in wrath, poured all the wine into the sea, cast bread on waves, and all the green-haired girls sank in the weeds, and drowned. Then the earth vanished, the sea dimmed, all flesh dissolved, the body turned to fragile spirit and spirit to air, till the air moved and signed as in the hollow hush was heard the ultimate and despairing cry of Earth, the sun’s lament, but with no throat or mouth or voice: “Mother, enjoy the food you’ve cooked, the wine you hold, Mother, if you’ve a rose bed, rest your wary bones, Mother, I don’t want wine to drink or bread to eat— today I’ve seen my loved one vanish like a dwindling thought!”

These lines may remind us of Homer, but Kazantzakis’s Odysseus is more Nietzschean and Faustian than Homeric. Kazantzakis’s hero is a 6

. K. Friar, The Odyssey (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1958), p. X. and XXIX.

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restless wanderer, like his creator. As soon as Odysseus reached Ithaca, his island suffocates him. He puts down a revolt of the people, arranges his son’s wedding, buries his old father, gathers a group of companions, builds a ship and, without saying goodbye to Penelope, he takes once again to the sea. A long journey begins with stations at Peloponnesus, Crete and Egypt. Menelaus in Sparta, Idomeneus in Knossos and the Pharaoh in Egypt all face difficulties and social upheavals. Odysseus sides alternatively with the king or the rebels according to his mood at a given moment. From Egypt, as a leader of defeated rebels and refugees, he begins a great Exodus and a dangerous search for the source of the Nile. When they reach the destined land, Odysseus climbs to the top of a mountain to commune with God, like Minos or Moses. It is here in books XIV-XVI that Kazantzakis expresses his philosophy. Odysseus descends after seven days bringing to his people the new Decalogue. Midwither, in those ten days holy to all birds, the gulls begged God to let the sun appear, to calm the furious winds and soothe the seas that they might find time on some sunny stretch of shore to hatch their eggs. The Old Man heard, smiled on the earth and sent the sun, the seashores shone with warmth of birds hatching their eggs. When the archer saw the sun, he seized his chiseling tools and walked around his city walls to carve new laws; loud voices and commands tormented his dark head until he let them loose on rock to free his mind. Sparks flew until his tools and slabs of stone caught fire, his beard and hair filled with smoke and flying chips, but he bent low and hewed his God to bind him tight in thick and mystic snares that he might never flee. He curved flames, blood-drenched roads that rose in zigzag curves, he curved trees, beasts, and hearts, a swift and slender ship, and that small bird, frail freedom, with a wounded breast. He chiseled ten dark slabs of rock with ten commands; “God groans, he writhes within my heart and cries for help.” “God chokes within the ground and leaps from every grave.” “God stifles on all living things, kicks them, and soars.” “All living things to right or left are his co-fighters.” “Love wretched man at length, for he is you, my son.” “Love plants and beasts at length, for you were they, and now they follow you in war like faithful friends and slaves.” “Love the entire earth, its waters, soil, and stones; on these I cling to lie, for I have no other steed.” “Each day deny your joys, your wealth, your victories, all.” “The greatest virtue on earth is not to become free but to seek freedom in a ruthless, sleepless strife.”

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Chapter Nine He seized his last rock then curved an upright arrow Speeding high towards the sun with pointed thirsty beak: The last command leapt mutely on the empty stone To the archer’s joy, as though he’d shot his soul into the sun. (XIV, 1143–1176)

They build the ideal city, but at the inauguration of the new city a volcano erupts and everything is destroyed. Two of Odysseus’s companions are killed, and the new Moses falls into despair. After the disaster, Odysseus becomes an ascetic. His fame spreads, and he travels towards South Africa. There he builds a skiff in the shape of a coffin and sails all alone to the South Pole. Actually he is not alone. Death travels with him. But the poet says: “The Archer has fooled you, Death, he’s squandered all of your goods, melted down all the rusts and rots of his foul flesh till they escaped you in pure spirit, and when you come, you’ll find but trampled fires, embers, ash, and fleshly dross.”7 Truly Odysseus was made to view the abyss with a Cretan glance i.e., “without hope and fear but also without insolence” (Report, p. 487). The poem ends as it began with an invocation to the sun, the symbol in Kazantzakis’s imagery of transubstantiation of matter into flame, light, and spirit.

V World War II found Kazantzakis isolated on the island of Aegina. In the early forties something very significant happened for Kazantzakis’s career as a writer. Till then he had tried to make a name as a poet. Following an honorable Greek tradition he considered the art of poetry superior to that of prose. Even in the forties Kazantzakis continued to write poetry, not only tragedies but also epics. It was during this time that he planned the epics Acritas and Faust Part III. He also translated the Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, in cooperation with a great classicist, Professor John Kakridis. Prevelakis, the greatest authority on Kazantzakis and a life-long friend of the poet, has characterized these translations as “gifts to the [Greek] nation.”8 However, the unexpected Greek victories over Fascism and the heroic resistance of the Greek people against the Nazi occupation of Greece contributed greatly to the awakening in Nikos Kazantzakis of the spirit of “heroic nationalism” which the catastrophe of Asia Minor in 1922 had buried inside him twenty years earlier. Basil Laurdas, a literary critic and friend of Kazantzakis’s, 7

. Wilson, “Kazantzakis,” pp. 80-89. . P. Prevelakis, “Kazantzakis: Bios Kai Erga,” I Tetradia Euthenis 3 (1977): 9-45.

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called upon him “to love our land. That and that alone is our salvation. To transform Western decadence into imaginative literature is neither needed by us nor appropriate for you, who are worthy of much more substantial and permanent creation. Before you, around you, inside you lies another need: to make literature out of Neo-hellenism.”9 This was a turning point in Kazantzakis’s intellectual life. Master of the demotic tongue by now, he decided in his sixties to use the demotic as a medium to create in poetic prose. To quote P. Bien: “Kazantzakis finally succeeded in wedding language to material in an aesthetically justifiable way and thus in producing the most genuine works of his career.”10 The first novel, Zorba the Greek, was published in 1946 and followed by Christ Recrucified and Freedom or Death. When these works were translated a few years later into French, German and English, Kazantzakis was recognized as a great master of the pen. More novels followed in rapid succession: St. Francis, The Last Temptation of Christ, Fratricides. Many more were planned, especially when the author settled in Antibes, Southern France, with his second wife Helen in 1946. The year before he made an abortive attempt to enter Greek politics as acting president of the Socialist Workers’ League; he became minister of Education without portfolio in Sophoules’ government and served for a short time as a literary consultant to Unesco. In Antibes, famous at last, Kazantzakis expected to live about ten more years in peace so that he could complete his many literary projects. But since his early fifties he had been suffering from lymphoid leukemia and his health was steadily deteriorating. Nor was he granted the peace of mind he had wished for. As is well known, fame does not come alone. It is always followed by envy. The conspiracy of silence was to be followed by the “conspiracy of noise,” as Prevelakis puts it. While foreign people and governments supported Kazantzakis’s nomination for the Nobel Prize, his fellow Greeks and the Greek conservative government of that time did their best to block his candidacy. Kazantzakis was not willing to change his nationality in order to obtain the Nobel Prize. As if this were not enough, some Orthodox bishops in Greece tried to have him indicted for impiety at the same time when other peoples around the world saw in Kazantzakis a God-thirsty spirit. Here is how he reacted to all this noise: “I go calmly working, bothering no one, struggling to give my fellow human beings whatever is best in me, to help them endure life and have confidence in excellence. Surely, evil will be conquered, has already been 9

. P. Bien, Kazantzakis (Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 225. He quotes Laurdas Scholio, p. 1, 341. 10 . Ibid., p. 261.

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conquered. All Greece, except for a few priests and Melases, is with me.”11 Again: “My work is the purification of unspeakable struggles and joys … I have tried for many years to save what I could of my soul, so that, when I die, men may know how much I too have loved and felt life, and how I have gazed upon and touched the sea, the soil, the women; and so that they may learn that I was not a beast or a stone, but a man with warm flesh and an insatiable soul.”12 Literary critics, who have studied Kazantzakis’s entire work carefully, have found it gigantic in quantity and deemed it superb in quality at least in part. The labor of fifty years, which went into the creation of such a work, is awe-inspiring. No doubt Nikos Kazantzakis, when compared to ordinary men of letters, “stands like a colossus,” to use Wilson’s apt characterization. But we should not forget that “This uncouth giant is a living symbol of man’s greatness, of his capacity to rise above self-pity. He is even more important because he is so obviously human … Kazantzakis was not born a giant; he made himself into a giant. Again and again he loses confidence, comes to despair, then gradually straightens his shoulders and stretches his arms until his fears roll off his back … Kazantzakis is manifestly bigger, more rich and varied than any of the major figures of existentialism.”13 The achievement of Nikos Kazantzakis as a man of will and a writer is certainly great. The significance of his life and work for us can be summarized in the following way. Although we have been born human, we must try to surpass humanity; no matter how many times we may fall, we must find the strength to rise again. Although born mortal, we must try to overcome mortality; no matter how difficult the task is, we must find a way to create something lasting, something spiritual with a share in the beauty, the goodness and the truth of things eternal. This something may be a holy statue or an icon, a lyric poem or a symphony, a scientific discovery or a philosophic theory, a noble deed or a good composition. Only by creating in the sphere of spirit, a man may try, like the hero Acritas, to battle Charon successfully. Only by creating in the sphere of spirit, a man may try, like an Argonaut, to steal from God the golden fleece of immortality.

11

. H. Kazantzakis, Nikos Kazantzakis, trans. Amy Minus (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968), p. 533. 12 . P. Prevelakis, Tetrakosia Grammata (Athens: Kollarou, 1965), p. 180. 13 . Wilson, “Kazantzakis,” pp. 80-89.

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VI As a mortal man Nikos Kazantzakis died and was buried in the town of his birth on Saturday, October 26, 1957. But as a writer, Nikos Kazantzakis is alive and still with us today. He is more widely read and admired now than he was thirty years ago. He is better understood and appreciated now than he was thirty years ago. As long as there are some luminous human minds which read and understand his work; as long as there are some warm human hearts which feel something of his existential agony and despair; as long as there are some heroic human souls which are prepared to face death without fear and without hope, Nikos Kazantzakis will continue to be with us on this Earth which he loved so much. Kazantzakis’s spirit will always whisper, to those who have ears sensitive enough to hear, this honest, humble and all-too-human prayer, the prayer of Odysseus: “Dear God, how many foaming seas, how much green earth, how many multicolored birds and sweet desires I’ll never have time enough to taste before I die, like a poor beggar with outstretched and greedy palms!”14

14

. The Odyssey, Book XIII, 1240-44.

CHAPTER TEN THE SENSUOUS IMMORTAL GAYIL NALLS In wilderness is the preservation of the world. Henry David Thoreau

Saturday, June 29, 2009. I’ve just arrived at a clonal forest of Quaking Aspens called Pando, located in the alpine region of south-central Utah. As one of the oldest, largest and heaviest single living organisms on the planet, “he” (all the trees are male), encapsulates the very meaning of a natural phenomenon. Gracefully spreading out over 120 acres next to an exquisitely clear body of water called Fish Lake, Pando holds to the undulating terrain and banks of small creeks feeding into the lake. Depending on the biologist, he is judged to be somewhere between 80,000 to 1 million years old. During massive fires, Pando survived underground, reestablishing himself through his assertive asexuality in a process called suckering. Clonal Quaking Aspens reproduce using sexual and asexual methods, but Pando stopped flowering long ago. Re-propagating in secret through his single root structure, he sprouted multiple stems—which one might think are individual trees, but are in fact ramets. All part of one single genetic individual, he now comprises well over 40,000 trees, averaging 60–150 years old. In all, he is estimated to weigh 14 million tons. With certainty, Pando is a complicated and seductive living thing. The scientific name for the Quaking Aspen is Populus tremuloides. From the Willow Family (Salicaceae), they are also called trembling aspen, trembling poplar, golden aspen, mountain aspen, white poplar and popple. Deciduous, the trees grow throughout much of North America, although they generally thrive in cooler locations where they can surpass 80 feet in height. They are loved for their fall coloring, and the sight of Pando’s brilliantly pulsating ripe-mango-yellow canopy is legendary— even though hundreds of seasons passed before humans laid eyes on this forest.

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There are small remnants of once greater old growth forests throughout the United States, but Pando is unique to the classification because it is clonal. Ancient wild places are unmatched landscapes of the sensuous, preserves of worlds mostly lost to the human psyche, but once found, they offer deeply gratifying explorations of sight, hearing, smell and touch. Each sense acutely awakens to reach as far as possible into the whole of these evocative geographies to map light, shapes, sizes, proportions, surfaces, edges, texture, colors, sound vibrations and smells, which meet again in the environment of the body and mind and conscious experience. Since childhood I have liked to roam in the wilderness, which set my mind free and ultimately led me to pursue an interdisciplinary process of inquiry throughout my life. As an artist and scientist, personal experience frames my point of view. The human senses are artifacts of our coevolution with the physical world, and journeys through the wilderness serve as a reminder of how intricately bound we are to it. I have always been a naturalist, a keen observer of the natural world, yet I remain aware of how evolutionary filters frame my sense perception and shape my mind. I have built an understanding of the aesthetic experience in art by probing my own responses to natural connections, reflecting on how predictive systems, proportional frameworks, mathematical equations and gene regulation instruct intrinsic meaning of sensuous beauty and so world symbols of art. My approach is not new, as the study of sensory experience has always dwelled within the domains of art, philosophy and science, and recently evolutionary science too. I have traveled to many of the old growth forests across North America and the Caribbean, including Muir Woods in California, the Mount BakerSnoqualmie National Forest and Olympic National Park in Washington and to Big Cypress National Preserve in Florida. Conservationists manage these particular preserves, but other ancient locations are not well looked after. Places of old growth are all that is left of flawless beauty—every visit, no matter the length of the stay, is epically unforgettable. In such wilds, I’ve found access to parts of myself never before known, and become keenly aware of my bond with the mechanisms and forces that make me human. During long periods of observing, I began to comprehend the world, reflected on the origins of life and its organizing principles. Old growth forests have been my greatest teachers. I go too because it makes me happy—and because they are disappearing. To be still in an old growth (one of significant age with little disturbance) is to lavish in an instinctive connection: a state of grace. Here, you are reintroduced to life in its great abundance and diversity. Here, one can know the raw sensational experiences vital to creative force. Each

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individual old growth forest offers a profound education in lived experience—this isn’t the knowledge that requires linguistic phrase, but rather the intimate knowing isolated in wilderness. The engagement with this repository of long-lived history is relational, and is usually quite spontaneous in the way it brings about feelings and departures to new emotional and physical states. When I was in these authentic places, I have felt like we were two touching spirits.

Into Pando As I lower the car window, the air that rushes in is overwhelmingly refreshing—as is the fragrance and the sight before me. Pando doesn’t look his age. Hiking in, I feel his hearty welcome. Within minutes of having direct contact with the forest I find my brain has changed and is unfolding to the logic and grace of place. Soon, I’m rambling through him, enjoying the sparkling, pristine sunlight, the fresh, crisp, sweet smell of the air; I wonder why Pando isn’t a “wonder of the world” or on a list of “top 50 places of scenic splendor.” As I immerse myself in the pleasures of his tranquil way, I know he is aware of my presence. Pando is not indifferent—he is sensing me as I am sensing him. Pando is remarkably unlike all of the other old growth forests I have visited, which are endlessly intricate in their diversity and complexity of structure. Pando is not like the profoundly crevassed, old growth temperate rainforest of the Pacific Northwest. From within, one instantly sees Pando is dynamic and open, like a young regrowth forest. One particular view of the trees and their nearly precise branching structure reveals a striking visual pattern that illustrates their genetic oneness. Yet, from another position one can see how each tree evolves its own shape and size. However, the homogeneous composition has a cumulative effect that solidly reads as a visual expression of a unit, which is part of his spectacular beauty. It doesn’t matter if one rapidly glances around or sits for a long time, the patterns of repetitive structures and gestures that emerge are more pronounced in members of a clone. While the overall visual structure of an old growth forest looks random, the framework and sets of rules underlying natural cellular phenomena are there—and so easily visible in Pando. Known as The Trembling Giant above ground, Pando’s leaves shiver around the straight, white graceful trunks, and are moved by the gentlest of breezes. Presently, the leaves are green, shiny on one side and dull on the other with long slender stems—and more than equal in beauty to the

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autumnal golden foliage they ultimately become. I stand for long periods listening to and watching the small, delicately saw-edged, almost heartshaped leaves shimmer in erratic windblown patterns; some vibrate back and forth, while others dance on circles of air. I begin to feel the internal effects of being in Pando. I am breathing with the world, and suddenly feel emotionally relieved. I look around me, and focus once again on the leaves whirling on their branches. They seem to draw waves and clouds in the air, and their sound rhythms are amplified in my ear. Shade moves in tones, through the subtle variations of light coming through the leaves and branches. Everything moves in episodic sequence with the breeze, and provokes fleeting thoughts of sunlight and how much the Quaking Aspens love it. In sudden brightness I pause and feel the warmth. Walking from bouncing light to shape defining shade, my mood becomes infused with a bit of the psychedelic. Having easily succumbed to the euphoric, I feel I am taking in the rare sensorial nutrients of life. Every direction offers a lesson in form and aesthetic options; one element after another attracts the eye with texture, color and tension that provokes a spectrum of emotion. The hues of green recede as I focus on the trunks and how the diamond shaped symbols assemble, like alien eyes. The fleshy, chalky-white bark is etched with horizontal soot-colored lines (which deepen to a creamy grey-black as the trees age), the product of dark lichen that gathers and traces these lines, the scars marking where early branches dropped away. The young tree trunks are green-white—the green forecasts the chlorophyll molecules that form pigment and signal photosynthesis—a process invented by bacteria. But what does the startling overall color of the Trembling Aspen mean? What is the evolutionary advantage? Could it be to attract humans—to make a profound impression on them—to involve them in becoming their keeper? If so, it seems to have worked, their coloring and aesthetic beauty uniquely distinguishes them, and has made them one of the most popular trees chosen for human-designed gardens and landscapes—a common behavior that evolved as part of our species’ culture, and serves as evidence of the ways genetic ingenuity has played out the deep connections between plants and humans. I find myself intently watching the forest floor of Pando, waiting for what he conceals. I am touched by this living theatre, and am reminded of the intricate yet fragmented timing of stage director Robert Wilson’s performances, a metaphor for that which is perceived as nature’s complexity. Psychologist Wilhelm Wundt has told us that humans are aroused by complex stimuli and interpret them as a measure of worth.

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Pando commands sustained deep attention. Rocky soil, intact for millions of years, is arrayed with a strikingly random arrangement of dead and dying trees, decomposing slowly in the cold climate—the work of millions of invisible microbes. Beneath the canopy is an understory of grasses, sagebrush and mountain brushes, vascular and herbaceous plants, moss beds and patterns of soft light-green lichen, with cyanobacteria (a photosynthesizer) inhabiting fissures, cracks and surfaces of weathered rocks. New ramets sprout between dead leaves and small rugged looking plants, and there are unseen terrestrial inhabitants of a microworld that help the soil breathe. The alpine biome is a tough, windy environment, and I take notice of the reduced amount of species diversity. Despite the presence of decaying trees splayed on the ground, Pando does not look time-battered. His unwithered physical allure seems to exist beyond time and the physical processes that operate his biology. Humans, of course, decay as well, but we are not “immortal,” like Pando. Visual patterns rendered in the forest’s surface bring to mind the ancient artifacts that first defined the language of art—abstract patterns applied to caves, clay slabs and objects created from the oldest periods of human history. Some of the earliest artistic expressions appeared as realistic patterns, stylized in repetitive abstract design expressive of natural forces. Through such objects, one can sense early humanity’s deep mental involvement with nature, and how the rules of geometry and mathematics were acquired and skillfully applied. Art from all human cultures is linked to these expressions. Throughout history, theories of beauty and truth have germinated in the relationship between things. As the essences of mathematics and nature continue to be discovered, we have realized that they are inseparable. The existence of pleasing geometric proportions and ratios, such as the golden ratio or pi, has been found to be ubiquitous throughout the physical world. Aesthetic principles of dimension, symmetry, harmony, simplicity, unity and beauty apply elegantly as formulated equations and as explanations of natural phenomena. Human beauty, too, has been based on geometric proportions and progressive ratios—and therefore the fundamental basis of architecture lies within this world as well. On Architecture (now called The Ten Books of Architecture), by the Roman architect Vitruvius Pollio, has been highly influential since it was published during the early Renaissance. Illustrated by Leonardo da Vinci (the most famous image is the well-known Vitruvian Man), Michelangelo incorporated its principles into the composition of his marble masterwork David. As Italian mathematician Luca Pacioli wrote in his book De Divina Proportione, “Without

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mathematics there is no art.” Or perhaps, if our perceptual experience is that of beauty, the work may be conforming to a phi—as is said of the David. There are thousands upon thousands of examples of phi-based creations, from Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes to music. It is well known that there are mathematical laws of harmony in music, but also many composers (such as Tenny, Satie and Bartok) have used golden ratios or scales based on Fibonacci numbers in their compositions. Such digital music visualizations can produce phi-based images as well. The mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot pioneered surprising connections between nature, art and science, revealing natural structures and patterns throughout the scales of life. His digital computer images of fractal geometry and chaos theory expanded the way we interpret our environment, helping us understand complexity, randomness, order and disorder, and how these patterns, when presented to the mind, elicit aesthetic judgment. Experiences of this abstracted technical iconography allow us to see nature and relationships within the world as perceptual concepts. Fractal is the word Mandelbrot invented to describe a rough geometric pattern in nature whereby shapes split into parts, each a reduced copy of the whole. This includes the branching patterns of plants and trees, blood vessels, river networks and so on, and each progressively smaller part is like the whole. In Jackson Pollock’s abstract drip paintings, one can feel the dynamic flow of the overall pattern; however, looked at in magnification, the works reveal the fractal “fingerprint of Nature” (Taylor et al. 1999). When we perceive the drip paintings as beautiful, we are responding to a manifestation of nature, to what is real in the work. In Kant’s words, the “nature” of the paintings “brings with it a purposiveness in its form by which the object seems to be, as it were, preadapted to our judgment and thus constitutes in itself an object of satisfaction” (Kant 1951, s23). We are in agreement with these abstract images because we feel they are real; the language of their beauty is apprehended through principles evolutionarily embedded deep in our minds. These compositions and forms, and their descriptive mathematics, tell us about reality and existence. Mandelbrot thought it was possible that the number of patterns in nature was infinite, with different levels of complexity and irregularities. “Nature is beautiful because it looks like art, and art can only be called beautiful if we are conscious of it as art while yet it looks like nature” (Kant 1951: s45). In old growth forests, the pleasure of beauty arises naturally as do feelings of appreciation and gratitude. Today, common wisdom dictates that all biological life has mathematics at its core, and that

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all our senses are attuned to the mathematics of universal truths through evolutionary adaption. Beauty and harmony are characteristics of the universe, and we have evolved to perceive it as such. This biospherical veneration aligns with Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess’s deep ecology (Naess 1989), the view that the world’s ecosystems function as a whole and is part of the ecological experience and reflective Self (or self-realization). The philosophy’s principles believe all life on Earth has intrinsic value independent of humans, and the deep ecology movement sees anthropocentric values as the cause of our ecological problems. Perception can be thought of as the meaning we give to experiences and sensations taken in through the senses (including the chemosensory senses of smell and taste), which continue to, as they have throughout evolution, play a large and profound role in shaping humanity, transferring and inscripting information that underlies the formation of society’s learned practices. The sensuous is not only a perceptive construct of the vision and touch; it is also determined by the unconscious chemical communication that serves greater life systems. Our sense of smell helps us comprehend the natural world in all its complexity. Volatile odor molecules carry information, influencing our emotions, behavior and judgments, as well as our conception of beauty. The olfactory bulb, often described as part of the brain, touches the physical world and binds the internal and external environments into one eco-system. Like the insects and animals, we are instruments of instinctive behavior and physiological reaction manipulated by small volatile molecules. In forests, as we breathe, our olfactory pathways are worked by chemosensory signals that make their way to our central nervous system. Wilderness is a source of authentic smells, molecules faithful to their precise purpose. Pando’s smell is difficult to define. It’s woody but clean and fresh, with a little citrus and a faint hint of balsam, possibly from the Douglas fir that dot the forest. The earthy smell of the soil (geosmin) arrives periodically, its pleasing odor created by thousands of years of decayed trees and actinobacteria. Linked to smell is taste: Trembling Aspens are often food for deer and elk, but humans have also used the inner bark for energy and healing. This layer of the tree is tender but said to be bitter. Many plants deter predators from eating them by producing bitter tasting compounds that can produce unpleasant sensations. The tree has been known for its medical qualities since before Christ; the leaves and the cambium layer of the inner bark (which lies between the bark and the wood, and is the living tissue that transports photosynthesized food) contain populin and salican, one of the

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oldest forms of analgesics. It has long been used by Native Americans to make a painkilling tea. Additionally, the bark’s white powder is naturally occurring yeast, fermentable unicellular fungi (microorganisms which also colonize asexually) that can be scraped off and used for baking to make uniquely flavorful sourdough bread. Pando’s sound is unique—even iconic. The rustling of the leaves is distinctive, made possible by the long flat leaf stems that allow a great amount of mobility. The aural “quaking” filters through the mind and nurtures an inner peace—except when the wind is strong and sweeping, and the melodious unpremeditated song erupts in an extraordinary emotional frenzy. From whisper, to crisp-velvet ripple, to dissonant roar, I think of the composer John Cage, who honored both silence and sound—he knew there was something to hear in everything everywhere, even if it’s nothing. He did not believe in imposing order on nature, and described music as “simply a way of waking up to the very life we are living” (Cage 1961). When you’re in that place of aural and spiritual contemplation that Cage often described, it’s not that thoughts don’t follow—they do—but they are often inspired by the harmony and melody made by nature itself. Pando makes music, even when the weather is extreme or intensely raging. Metacognition—thinking about one’s own thinking—has become a repeated part of the process of being in a forest. While wandering through Pando, one can sense his unique, vibrant life force, complete with a metabolism and circuitry. The air is charged, filled with molecules of the tree’s healing salican, which Pando releases through the leaves’ respiration. Old growth forests are special information environments, within which the experiencer can find a perfectly attuned relationship, and a pathway to experiences of overtly sensual beauty. I have sensed and observed these almost human-like things of mind and emotion throughout nature. In recent years, substantial research into sensory perception in flora and its response to human presence has appeared in scientific journals. Chamovitz (2012) summarizes some of this research and describes the parallels between plant and human senses, arguing that plants perceive and remember touch, and experience it with more sensitivity than humans. They sense light and dark, and share the same genes for this as humans— the ones that regulate our circadian clock. They communicate through smell and release odor into the air as a way of talking. Trees feel and encode, store and retrieve memory. What are the implications for the fact that plants and trees have senses—inner lives—and monitor their environment? Reflecting on our

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common biology with plants, Chamovitz (2012, p. 141) asks: “So if humans and plants are similar in that both are aware of complex light environments, intricate aromas, different physical stimulations, if humans and plants both have preferences, and if both remember, then do we see ourselves when looking at the plant?” If plants have measurable levels of sensory discrimination, they must know the pleasurable from the unpleasurable. Is the sensual experience of warm soft rain pleasurable to them? Is the stress of drought painful? Baumgarden coined the term “aesthetics,” based on the Greek word for “perception through the senses.” By applying this original definition of aesthetics to what we now understand flora knows, one could argue that nature, too, experiences beauty.

Microbes Pando safeguards the watershed and stabilizes the soil with its massive root system, while increasing the strength and health of surrounding plants with nutrients such as potash, calcium and phosphorus. Stepping over a small spring, I look down, mesmerized by the lush ground cover, and the fact that below my feet lies something primeval. Chemical communication is not only playing an all-important role as an attractant and repellant below ground; above ground it manages my experience of the sensuousness of place, both directly and indirectly. Craig Montell, who researches decision-making based on sensory input at University of California, Santa Barbara, writes: “According to some interpretations of Aristotle’s writings, the sense organs are able to perceive the environment by being transformed so that they are more like the object they are detecting” (Montell 2007). Today, we know much more about perception and the pathways stimuli takes en route to the brain, allowing us to formulate meaning. However, there is little functional understanding of how a dense multi-sensorial environment, such as Pando’s old growth, is interpreted by the modern human brain—it’s something that can’t be simulated. Beyond just genetics, the roles that chemical communication plays in the dynamics of self-organizing living systems are paramount. Large-scale interconnectedness and adaptive patterns of behavior are processes we now know to be mediated by chemical communication. The exchange of hormones and pheromones contribute to the complex dynamics human beings have within their social systems. A microworld exists within Pando’s root system and soil—and even in the air. The organism’s massive root system not only takes up water and nutrients, but also constantly communicates with its distant parts: a task

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mediated by the diverse and specialized chemicals it secretes or synthesizes. Biochemical mechanisms change the chemical properties of the soil to regulate its environment, inhibiting the growth of competing plants or encouraging more symbiotic opportunities, like the hardy north side mosses that grow at the bases of the trees. As part of an optimal strategy to meet stresses, action in one part of the plant may result in systemically induced responses in other parts; this remarkable chemical signaling oozes forth to enable the organism’s expansion. As we strive to better understand the biosphere as unified living systems, we are also finding diverse microorganisms everywhere we look—even distributed through the atmosphere. Bacteria live and reproduce in clouds, and seem to have preferred conduits for geodistribution. It is possible that recent droughts have not only deprived Pando of water, but also the beneficial micro-flora (bacteria and fungal spores) that travel in clouds and are deposited through precipitation. It is well known that bacteria colonize tree leaves and are exchanged daily as part of the leaf’s ephemeral ecosystem cycle. On dry sunny days, bacterial aerosols rise from tree canopies into the atmosphere. Could reduction of this bring about disease process? Without this micro-flora is Pando less able to adapt? In Pando, the lichen and the bacteria are all clonal colonies—living worlds within living worlds. But then again, this is our makeup too. In humans, each individual is a composition of bacterial species and subspecies unique to that person. Princeton biologist Bonnie Bassler tells us that we have 10 trillion bacterial cells in us—10 times more than human ones. In 2010, microbiologists at the University of Colorado at Bolder found that the mixed bacterial communities that live on human skin form a type of fingerprint, which appears to be constant over one’s lifetime; in addition to our human DNA, we are inhabited by a bacterial genome too. Another University of Colorado study has shown that women have higher numbers and greater diversity of bacterial species than men. Among the 102 hands that were skin-cultured, more than 4,700 different bacteria were found, and only five species were shared among 51 participants. No matter how much you wash your hands—or even if you empty a bottle of hand sanitizer—you’ll still have the same microbiota (the two hundred or so occupant microbial species unique to you), and the bacterial print of your hands will remain primarily the same. Our rich and complex microbial community within us communicates: the bacteria have a sense of smell and utilize chemosensory signaling, which Dr. Bassler calls “bacteria Esperanto.” Her research found that bacteria populations, through a collective process called “quorum

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sensing,” carry out actions and tasks they couldn’t do as individuals. According to Dr. Bassler and her lab’s researchers at Princeton, we may think of ourselves as human beings having 30,000 genes; however, she says, “At the best, you’re 10 percent human, but more likely about one percent human. I know you think of yourself as human beings, but I think of you as 90 or 99 percent bacterial” (Bassler 2009). If we are only 10 percent human, is there some percentage within us that is like old growth? Our own internal ecosystem may even share many of the same bacterial species as Pando and like ours dispatches chemical signals in our defense, the same is happening for Pando. This “social behavior” is thought to be a hidden determinant in human behavior, whereby bacteria co-create our reality. The bacteria and yeasts that populate nature and function on its behalf also populate us, and are metabolically active producing chemical compounds that work for us as well (except for the small percentage that are pathogens). In humans, different microbial communities inhabit different parts of body, the same way different microbial communities inhabit different environments such as jungles, deserts, mountains, oceans or the Arctic. As humans host more than 10,000 bacteria species, we need to consider that Earth is maybe not the Human Planet, as the British television documentary series showing how humans have adapted to extreme environments proclaimed; it is more correctly a Bacteria Planet. It is said that our body is our most intimate guide, and that we should listen to it. However, in this reality of individual identity, self-conception and self-understanding, we are no longer the principal agent of our own identity. Many scientists are now referring to each of us as a superorganism, which shifts the nature of our own reality. Science has come to understand and interpret the principles of this coexistence more deeply, which leads us yet again to the interconnectedness of life. Through this, we’ve also gained additional insight into the depression and psychological wounding that can occur when individuals and communities lose their connections to true wilderness, forests and fields. Our macrocosm functions in the same manner as our microcosm. Bacteria scale (reproduce) in response to fluctuations in energy, determined by quorum sensing, as do their hosts. As such, I now look at human crowd behavior and social action within a very different framework. We are not just members of a crowd—we are a crowd. Much of our quorum sensing is now enabled by technology and mass communication. Like bacteria’s use of quorum sensing for survival, the human condition is hardwired and evolutionarily molded to establish psychophysical cohesion.

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The aesthetics of nature are important to this process as well; there is often beauty in collective action for survival. Biologist Aldo Leopold said, “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise” (quoted in Kellert 2012, p. 3). How do we use our group decision-making process to control our population density, or change destructive behaviors? Technology allows us to peer more closely into the microworld where we have learned that the survival behavior of microscopic species mirrors our own, enhancing our perception and understanding of what proportion and beauty is. In this case, beauty (in terms of aesthetic judgment) is tied to morality, which is tied to survival—a point that E. O. Wilson has made: “Beauty is our word for the perfection of those qualities of the environment that have contributed the most to human survival” (quoted in Kellert 2012, p. 3). Though autonomous in many ways, we are transcending the notion that a human is an independent organism, that the proportional beauty of one person, like the Vitruvian man, can symbolize the beauty of all humankind. Today, with broader ecological and aesthetic perspective we know that the beauty (and thus, survival) of the individual is actually the product of the cooperative masses, who, cluster together in our abundance, to make cities and nations. In macro-micro understandings, olfaction, chemical communication and quorum sensing is the template of the world’s larger living system.

Pando in the Anthropocene Era October 2012. Pando is dying. Was he deceptively ill when I last saw him? There are articles that predate the news, but scientists and rangers of Fishlake National Forest made the official announcement on October 30, 2012. There are several theories why: One is that the earth and atmosphere are changing, altering the clones’ ecosystem—climate change is warming higher elevations in the West and raising the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. There has also been prolonged drought and heat stress, which is perhaps why the once robust adult trees (that visually defied the ravages of age) have become vulnerable to fungus, beetles, borers and rodents. The new sprouts are suffering, too: deer, elk and cattle eat them, and—even worse—there are wider swaths in which no sprouts replace the dying trees. And even though botanists have calculated that Pando has vanished from above ground on hundreds of occasions (due to fire,

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landslides and other natural catastrophes), the root system has always survived. Now that, too, is dying. There are also broader ecological patterns afflicting the entire aspen species that could positively correlate to Pando. There are dire reports across the West of Sudden Aspen Decline (SAD), during which aspen forests quickly die. A federal study conducted by Rocky Mountain Research Station in Moscow, Idaho, has predicted a near total disappearance of Western aspen by 2090. But some ecologists are cautious about predicting the end, as they believe the aspens will migrate to higher ground where they can again thrive. Unfortunately, Pando has little room to move up and save itself. It wasn’t long ago that Charles David Keeling first discovered how to accurately measure carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and alerted the world to its progressive buildup. Since the 1950s we have known that carbon dioxide has a commanding influence over the earth’s atmosphere because it traps the sun’s heat, and we have watched its measure—parts per million—climb. Its rise is now accelerating rapidly and has already resulted in melting polar ice, rising seas, droughts, heat waves, flash floods, increasingly violent storms, extinction of plants and animals and other calamities. When organisms like Pando can no longer naturally adapt, is there a DNA switch for sudden death? Do specific biochemicals swim the root pathways? Or does it progressively shut down the flow of energy throughout its ecosystem? Could we really be saying goodbye to the stunning panoramas of Pando, after these millennia? Pando, first and foremost, has repeatedly shown us that he interacts with his environment in ways that influence his regeneration. It does not seem possible that Pando has hit his maximum life span. Prior to the prognosis of his death, Nassim Nicholas Taleb (author of Antifragile) would have categorized Pando as an “antifragile” organism. In spite of its current state, Pando has shown itself to be an organism that can ultimately thrive in the face of chaos and turmoil, surviving and flourishing once again. And, because of the adaptations he made, Pando became even stronger as a result of that adversity. With certainty, this is what has allowed Pando to live as long as he has, and once again, we are witnessing one of his transformations—yet we don’t know what the ultimate outcome will be. Has human activity interfered too much this time? Pando is a large intricate timepiece that has undergone a journey of a million years. Despite its rooted nature, it has never stayed in one place, growing horizontally in several directions, with much of the root system

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lying deep in the earth, allowing us to feel the cadence of the planet through it. Humans believe everything alive will eventually die—but are we sure? Pando has long been referred to as immortal, but what does that mean? Pando has shown that clonal forests are like animals—the larger they are, the longer they live. For centuries it has been recognized that measurements of proportion imply meaning for life and death. By utilizing understandings of geometry, physics and circulatory systems, fundamental predictive biological laws continue to be developed. In 1883, German physiologist Max Rubner developed a hypothesis that the metabolic rate of mammals is proportional to their body surface area. This evolved into a “rate of living theory,” which observed that animals with faster natural metabolisms have shorter lifespans, while larger animals have longer ones—a function of oxygen metabolism. Following suit, in 1932 Swiss born biologist Max Kleiber found that, for the majority of animals, there was an allometric relationship that predicted a life form’s metabolic rate is equal to its mass taken to the three-fourths power (metabolic rate is how much energy we need to stay alive). In calculating metabolic rate, Kleiber determined the faster the natural metabolism, the shorter the life, and that, as animals get larger, metabolisms get slower— and more efficient. By 1996, building on this groundwork, engineer-scientist Adrian Bejan put forward his Constructal theory, which accounts for how nature designs and evolves structures as flow systems to best transmit energy, be it blood, sap or lymph. Flow is life, and vascular (a word first used in 1672 to mean vessel) applies to trees, rivers, bodies, brains—and even the Internet. These are all vascular networks with a characteristic tree-like structure: patterns of the configuration follow a universal pathway hierarchy, large to small. Ecologist and biologist Brian Enquist expanded upon Kleiber’s law as well, applying it to nature. He determined that, through natural selection, the DNA code of all trees (and ecosystems) is governed by underlying predictive anatomical and physiological frameworks for their growth. In 1998 he collaborated with theoretical physicist Geoffrey West and biologist James Brown to further evolve the theory. Together, they published research defining Metabolic Scaling Theory (MST), which established universal laws of biological metabolism and scaling. Chemical activity governs reactions and processes that sustain life; allowing living organisms to interact with their environment, digest their food and reproduce. The metabolic rate, the energy turnover of an organism, is predictive of lifespan. The researchers recognized forests have a theoretical framework that illustrates an extraordinary regularity and

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structure—a scalability of the biological systems that developed over evolutionary history. Enquist, West and Brown created MST models showing the characteristics of scaling also applied to cells, organisms, and all of their networks. They also found that scaling’s three-quarter power law (which until that point had only been applied to mammals) also works for the evolutionarily refined, simple repeating pattern of plant branching geometry. These same observations allow for a general understanding of overall forest structure. Leonardo da Vinci was the first to decipher the pattern in the branching structure of trees. His notebooks contain beautifully rendered details of them, drawn 500 years ago, that articulate a scaled mathematical mechanics of tree growth, describing branching rules whereby the crosssectional sum of the ascending branches and twigs are equal to the size of the tree’s trunk. The artist did not give an explanation for this rule of branching proportions, although he does expose the vascular system of the tree in his drawings. Da Vinci had formulated the beginnings of the premise that nature is process, and ecology is about metabolism—how organisms use energy. An expansion of the reason for tree scaling and structure comes from physicist Christophe Eloy (Aix-Marseille University, Marseille, France). His 2011 study shows external stress loads that threaten the tree’s survival (such as harsh wind) influences the self-similar scaling structure. A known phenomenon called “thigmomorphogenesis” explains how trees have developed mechanisms that allow them to perceive and respond to stimuli (like wind sensation), enabling them to adapt the growth size of their trunk and branches. These fundamental mathematical constructs are integral to the existence and function of all life everywhere, and are indicative of the links between aesthetics and science in the pursuit to understand truth and beauty. In Truth or Beauty: Science and the Quest for Order, David Orrell writes: “It is certainly the case that, if you peruse scientific journals, you will see little mention of appearances or aesthetics or elegance … But if you listen to scientists talking, or read what they write outside of peerreviewed articles, then a very different picture emerges: there is a general acceptance that beauty and truth are mysteriously and inextricably linked. Indeed, the central drive of science often seems to be as much a quest for beauty as for truth, on the understanding that the two are to be found in the same place.” Forest networks, beauty and truth come together in biologist James Grier Miller’s 1978 Living Systems Theory, which focuses on the integrated wholeness of life as an endless process of moving material-

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energy and information through open, interacting, self-organizing subsystems. In this ceaseless global flow, trees and forests move moisture from the ground to the air. In a relatively new interpretation of the wholeness of life and evolution, life unfolds with the increasing complexity of information structures. As Ray Kurzweil has simply said it, “physics gave rise to chemistry … chemistry gave rise to biology. Thus we went from atoms to molecules to DNA to brains.” Programmed by hereditary DNA (including that of bacteria), the human brain has an unquestionably strong natural ability for discovering, deciphering and creating sophisticated symbols and mathematical patterns. Now even biology has become an information science, a subject of messages, instructions, and code. Genes encapsulate information and enable procedures for reading it in and writing it out. Life spreads by networking. The body itself is an information processor. Memory resides not just in brains but also in every cell. No wonder genetics bloomed along with information theory. DNA is the quintessential information molecule, the most advanced message processor at the cellular level—an alphabet and a code, 6 billion bits to form a human being. (Gleick 2011, p. 8)

Continuing in this new paradigm of life, the field of biosemiotics sees genetic code as an actual code, an informational system with symbols and meaning. The idea that the human body is, by evolution (and co-evolution with the physical world), an information processor (coding and copying), which explains our innate ability to sense and interpret other codes of life—patterns and symbols. Biosemiotics is the process of communication between and within living matter (a feature of the natural world), and encompasses humankind, animals, plants, fungus and bacteria. Our brains come pre-loaded with ancient operations that affect the way we see and the way our other senses connect. When one enters a forest, if one is open to experiencing it through all of your senses, these sensations have the ability to fully restore awareness to one’s more primitive brain— the limbic system. Explorations of consciousness have shown that the primitive foundational brain (the limbic system) must be fully functional in order for conscious activity in the younger neo-cortex to occur. Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson tells us that the deep satisfaction that humans get from living nature is genetically embedded and cannot be destroyed. This intimate adaptation over thousands of years can be seen in all aspects of our mental and physical preferences. In Pando and other old growth forests one can somehow sense that there is always more to what is being observed on the surface.

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Art can be a process of reacting to this. Aesthetically, this idea may be explained by the writings of Francis Hutcheson, who called the direct experience of nature and the feelings of unity with it “absolute beauty,” and the beauty that characterized art “relative beauty.” The intrinsic iconography of truth telling in artistic expression is universal, not unique to any one culture. It is evidence of our common ancestry. Eric Fromm (1964) introduced the concept of biophilia, the love of life, in contrast to an opposite syndrome of necrophilia, expressed as an indifference to life. Biophilia encompasses expressions of desire and sexual union, the drive to transit genes, or make copies of itself, like Pando. This orientation and openness to life is expressed by artist Georgia O’Keeffe in her paintings tapping into the sensuous qualities of flowers and the nature of her being, conveyed in a May 16, 1922, letter to Alfred Stieglitz: “Dearest I love you—I am on my way back—wanting to be spread wide apart—waiting for you—to die with the sense of you—the pleasure of you—the sensuousness of you touching the sensuousness of me—All of my body—all of me is waiting for you to touch the center of me with the center of you.” Wilson and Kellert (1993) wrote that our aesthetic reverence for nature was expressive of our evolution in the web of life—we are genetically encoded to love nature for our survival. Kellert (2012) sums up biophilia thus: “Humanity is the product of its evolved relationship to nature, countless yesterdays of ongoing interaction and experience of the natural world. Our senses, our emotions, our intellect, and even our culture developed in close association with, and in adaptive response to, the nonhuman world.” Nature’s aesthetic appeal engenders an emotional attachment. Our most enduring creative expressions embrace the characteristics of biophilic design. They are creations that unite the realities of sensory perception with systemic thinking. For example, love of the natural world lead to the distinctive architectural styles of Frank Lloyd Wright, whose residential work Fallingwater meticulously united with its environment as one; Antoni Gaudi, whose Church of Sagrada Familia grew in organic complexity around the ideal of tree structure as columns; and Eero Saarinen, whose curving Dulles International Airport framed the experience of flight. Now, being able to look at the physical realties of nature and model them based on the underlying math is a tool increasingly used by artists and architects to create forms and structures. Such processes allow the creator to transform scientific data visually, allowing us to both express and understand shifting dynamics in nature. Math and

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science based biomorphic art realized through 3D printing technology is expanding the reaches of this idea even further. Artists and scientists, or one as both, have long perused nature’s mysteries. Buckminster Fuller proclaimed the artist-architect of biomorphic forms, Isamu Noguchi, a scientist-artist. Speaking of his chrome sculptures, whose almost invisible presence could only be detected by the viewer through the unpleasant stimulus of the distorted reflections of its surroundings, Fuller said, “Noguchi pioneered and communicated negative behaviorism of energetical phenomena a decade ahead of the negative-entity discoveries of nuclear physicists” (Noguchi 1967, p. 39). Known for his use of ancient natural material and organic form, Noguchi said, “Sculpture may be made of anything and will be valued for its intrinsic sculptural qualities. However, it seems to me that the natural mediums of wood and stone, alive before man was, have the greater capacity to comfort us with the reality of our being” (Noguchi 1967, p. 8). Through a love of nature—a love of ourselves—we make our most universally meaningful and enduring cultural statements. From the buildings of Palladio to the Yosemite photographs by Ansel Adams, the natural world is the inspiration for many creators. For an artist like me, whose medium is often only the perception and what goes on in my mind and body, it is the rich, powerful experiences of nature that define these process works. Be it land art, environmental art, site-specific art, earth art or other—it is the essence of the natural world and its ceaseless process that inspires. Michael Heizer, a sculptor and constructor of massive land art has said, “I think earth is the material with the most potential because it is the original source material.” He and Walter de Maria pioneered the genres of “land art” and “earth art,” which examined ecology-geology as natural phenomenon. Walter de Maria’s The Lightening Field, a grid of 400 steel poles in the New Mexico desert, was intended to awe visitors with electrostatic discharge from the atmosphere to earth, and to focus them on cosmological aesthetics such as the mathematical and geometrical orbital patterns of the sun and planets. In modern and contemporary art, a vast catalogue of art brings one into dialogue with themes, principles and aesthetic values of environmentalism. In this array there are masterworks that provide positive and inspiring connections to the phenomena of nature: matter and energy, geology and weather. Robert Smithson’s earthworks, including his famous Spiral Jetty, in the Great Salt Lake, focus on entropy, making uncertainty and its implications of irreversible decay visible. James Turrell explored the physicality of light and the nature of human perception, creating

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installations where there was no one thing to focus on, nothing to touch. His most famous work, Roden Crater, is a volcanic crater in Arizona (which he has referred to as a naked-eye observatory) in which one experiences sky-light and celestial space over time. The work of Robert Irwin also invites us to see the reality of light and space—his acute sensibility of light and texture ultimately lead him to become a great landscape architect. Descending into his plant-light-texture-color palette of the Getty Garden in Los Angeles is an extraordinary immersion into the dynamics of living art. The site-specific installations of Andy Goldsworthy, the son of a former professor of applied mathematics, expose the transience of nature and strive to remind us of the need for ecological balance. Talking about his desire to really understand nature, he has said, “I want to get under the surface. When I work with a leaf, rock, stick, it is not just that material in itself, it is an opening into the processes of life within and around it. When I leave it, these processes continue” (Morning Earth). These artists touch on beauty that is both fleeting and enduring, and are themselves in tune with the intricacies of the earth and heavens. While the quest for beauty in the physical laws of our world has helped unravel underlying structure, and acts of aesthetic judgment have played a huge role in scientific discovery. David Orrell (2012, p. 12) argues pursuing scientific knowledge by associating it with aesthetic principles could be harmful to the future of science—it may not be the best way to comprehend the structure of our world. Although he says that art and science are “two versions of the same matter” (citing matters of complexity), he questions whether this aesthetic based model blinds science to even knowing what truth is. As we study complex systems that exhibit emergent behavior, scientists might be “ossified” in their concept of aesthetics. He advocates new aesthetics for interpreting physical reality: “a shift in aesthetics, from order and symmetry to something more complex, organic, and messy. The structures to be erected will be fluid and curved instead of square and static. Symmetry and perfection will be seen as special cases, rather than the authors of the universe. We will learn to celebrate qualities such as duality, mutability and asymmetry—not just in physics or in science, but in our entire world view.” This gets us back to nature and what is happening to it. To Pando. As we formulate theory for a new conceptual framework to address the challenges of further defining the laws of nature, shouldn’t we also be defining the legal framework to universally save it? Does the natural world have rights? Does Pando? Pando is not choosing death—he’s fighting for his life. In light of what we know about the interconnectedness of the life

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system, Pando’s right to survive is inseparable from our own. In order to reimagine the aesthetics of nature to reflect complex life systems, we need to align ourselves with the laws of nature. We need to think in terms of these systems to give them meaning. The structure of aesthetic principles, the values that human minds can recognize by mathematics (formal symbolic logic), has played an important role in contemporary physics—as well as in art. Principles of aesthetics, such as the natural proportions of the earth’s life forms, are considered to be the most pleasing. Humans may think they are the ones who are projecting aesthetic qualities on beings and things; however, we are part of biology’s creativity, and the complex universal whole that shapes all life. Aesthetics are not just a construct of the human mind, but are an evolutionary embedded hierarchy in the brain. Aesthetics did not begin with humans; it appears in concert with the experiences of all life forms. Aesthetics in human art can be seen as signs of the system. Art, at its best, and in various unique ways, explains key concepts of reality. In his 2009 book, Dennis Dutton argues the art instinct is innate to human nature. Automatic and unconscious patterns of behavior evolved through time, transforming into the human aesthetic imagination. The Jackson Pollock drip paintings, discussed earlier, are but one example of this. In a diary note (composed to himself in second person) Leonardo da Vinci wrote, “You have to show in your treatise that the earth is a star, like the moon or something like that, and thus prove the nobility of our world” (Herzfeld 1906, p. 141). Old growth vividly reminds us that the dynamics of these networks sustains us, and it is the evolutionary history of our molecular system within that connects us. Are we residing on a planet that has been largely changed by humans beyond our ability to restore it? When E.O. Wilson returned from the island of New Caledonia, where he had visited an ancient forest of massive Araucaria trees, he said, “It was a Jurassic forest, the real thing, and I thought to myself, that’s what we’ve got to save for the future of humanity—for our spirit—to have a sense of awe about what is left around us that transcends anything we can invent for ourselves.” We have to save the original. Research has shown that when animals regenerate missing body parts, the replacement is never as good as the original. Humans need contact with authentic nature: the sensuous experience is part of the web of life. It is the information. It is what we are. We should not just allow all that is left of the wild to be tagged, tracked and monitored, only to watch it disappear. Wild places need to stay, and need to be wild enough to produce different feelings and experiences.

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We are one ecosystem; a world without ancient wilderness is a state of disorientation and dementia. As we further discover the complexity of nature and the interrelationship between life forms (from bacteria and lichen to humans and organisms like Pando), and the role that these life forms play in the overall world of aesthetic principles and new math, we realize that we are one with it all. If the best of the natural world disappears, will we still be human? We already know microbes, plants, animals and humans have qualities of experience directed by genetic code that can be identified as sensoriaesthetic. Looking at evolutionary dynamics of biology, living systems and their mathematical equations, I have emerged with a theatrical view that aesthetics (the presence and pleasure of the perception of beauty) is not only driven by mechanisms of Darwin’s evolutionary natural selection and survival of the fittest, as Denis Dutton has told us. The microbial ecosystems that created and maintain us, that invented the earth’s metabolic diversity (Pace 1997), drive it through evolutionary preferences. There are profound implications of the universal interplay of these creators and destructors:

Microbes invented aesthetics Bacteria were on Earth 3.5 billion years before humans (Ingraham 2010, p. 306). Beauty and truth is an ancient language of communication that is part of all living matter—a symbiosis that is most purely dependent on chemistry. Their hidden existence is a driving force underlying Art’s progression. With magnification we not only find the irregular self-similar patterns that are the expressions of ongoing fractal processes, we find too, in all living biological systems and beings, the microbial evolutionary process and its value system. We inherit our biota along with our unique talents and instincts for image and object making. The result in part, of this interdependent and harmonic host-microbe biochemical interaction—are the feelings of recognition and positive emotions of aesthetics. Art is a simulated symbol, as an expression of a co-evolution. Like a virus that escapes an immune response, an interpretation of great art, could plausibly be, as a mutation; art that gives rise to new genres. Aesthetic beauty is not just part of human nature (Dutton).

All life is media by which beauty is experienced The sensations I have experienced walking through Pando and other old growth forests called into question where the physical borders of my

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body and mind begins and ends. I inhabited Pando and Pando inhabited me, and strong bacteria ecosystems (some aromatic) inhabit us both, sustaining us with their ceaseless labor. In this way we glance at and ponder at the otherness of self and engage in the pleasure of each other’s aesthetic qualities. We know the importance of bacteria in running the global ecosystem, but soon we may have scientific understanding of how bacteria act as biocatalysts for creativity. In my own sense-based artwork I have tried to recreate such a symbiotic experience using smell as a pathway. I have called it re-wilding the mind; however, the body too becomes an object of the work. Pando, one of the world’s oldest and largest living organisms, is dying. What do you call a once immortal forest—a terrestrial beauty—that has lost its ability to adapt and dies? I call it loneliness like no other.

References Bassler, Bonnie. 2009. How bacteria ‘talk.’” TED talk, http://www.ted. com/talks/bonnie_bassler_on_how_bacteria_communicate.html. Bauer H. et al. 2002. The contribution of bacteria and fungal spores to the organic carbon content of cloud water, precipitation and aerosols, Atmospheric Research 64 (1–4), pp. 109–119. http://www.science direct.com/science/article/pii/S0169809502000844. Cage, J. 1961. Silence. Wesleyan University Press. Carr, Nicholas G. 2010. The shallows: what the Internet is doing to our brains. New York: W.W. Norton. Chamovitz, Daniel. 2012. What a plant knows: A field guide to the senses. New York: Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Changeux, Jean-Pierre. 2012. The good, the true, and the beautiful: A neuronal approach, trans. Laurence Garey. New Haven: Yale University Press. Emboden, William A. 1987. Leonardo da Vinci on plants and gardens. Portland, OR: Dioscorides Press, in cooperation with the Armand Hammer Center for Leonardo Studies at UCLA. Enquist, Brian J., et al. 1998. Allometric scaling of plant energetics and population density. Nature 6698, pp. 122–125. Fisher, Rebecca E., et al. 2012. A histological comparison of the original and regenerated tail in the green anole, Anolis carolinensis. The Anatomical Record 295 (10), pp. 1609–1619. http://onlinelibrary. wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ar.22537/abstract. Fromm, Erich.1965. The heart of man: its genius for good and evil. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

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Gleick, James. 2011. The information: a history, a theory, a flood. New York: Pantheon Books. Grant, Michael C. 1993. The trembling giant. Discover. http:// discovermagazine.com/1993/oct/thetremblinggian285. Herzfeld, Marie. 1906. Leonardo da Vinci der Denker, Forscher und Poet, nach den veroeffentlichten Handschriften. Jena. Hollenhorst, John. 2010. Central Utah’s Pando, world’s largest living thing, is threatened, scientists say. Deseret News, October 7, 2010. http://www.deseretnews.com/m/article/700071982. Ingraham, John. 2010. March of the Microbes: Sighting the Unseen. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. James, Mia. 2005. The aspen tree: The story behind the fall forests’ golden flare. Sun Valley Guide. http://www.svguide.com/f05/f05_aspen trees.htm. Kant, I. 1951. Critique of judgement trans. J. H. Bernard. New York: Hefner. Kellert, Stephen R. 2012. Birthright: people and nature in the modern world. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012. Kellert, Stephen R. 2012. Birthright: People and nature in the modern world. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, p. 3. Kemperman, Jerry A. and Burton V. Barnes. 1976. Clone size in American aspens. Canadian Journal of Botany 54 (22), pp. 2603–2607. http:// www.nrcresearchpress.com/doi/abs/10.1139/b76-280#.US_HK44mWEk. Kross, Laura. 2013. Beautiful science: The art of mathematical modeling. https://www.nasw.org/beautiful-science-art-mathematical-modeling? goback=%2Egde_1636727_member_216739288. Kurzweil, R. 2012. How to create a mind. New York: Viking, 2012. Lindemann, Julianne and Upper, C. D. 1985. Aerial dispersal of epiphytic bacteria over bean plants. Applied and Environmental Microbology 50 (5), pp. 1229–1232. http://aem.asm.org/content/50/5/1229.short. Mandelbrot, Benoit B. 1983. The fractal geometry of nature. Updated and augmented edn. New York: W. H. Freeman. Montell, Craig. 2007. From taste to touch: sensory signaling in model organisms European Journal of Physiology 454, pp. 689–690. Morning Earth: Artist/Naturalist pages, Andy Goldsworthy. http://www. morning-earth.org/ARTISTNATURALISTS/AN_Goldsworthy.html. Næss, A. 1989. Ecology, community and lifestyle: Outline of an ecosophy trans. D. Rothenberg. New York: Cambridge University Press. Newcastle University. 2010. Bacteria can have a “sense of smell.” ScienceDaily (August 16). http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/ 08/100816095719.htm.

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Nijland, Reindert and Burgess, J. Grant. 2010. Bacterial olfaction. Biotechnology Journal 5 (2), pp. 974–977. Noguchi, Isamu. 1967. Isamu Noguchi: A sculptor’s world. New York: Thames and Hudson, p. 39. Normal bacterial makeup of the body has huge implications for health, says CU-Boulder professor. http://www.colorado.edu/news/releases/ 2012/06/13/normal-bacterial-makeup-body-has-huge-implicationshealth-says-cu-boulder#sthash.mnEjMYyF.dpuf. Orrell, David. 2012. Truth or beauty: science and the quest for order. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Pace, Norman R. 1997. A molecular view of microbial diversity and the biosphere. Science 276 (5313), pp. 734–740. [DOI:10.1126/science. 276.5313.734] Pando, one of the world’s largest living organisms, is dying. 2012. Fox 13 News (October 30). http://fox13now.com/2012/10/30/pando-one-ofthe-worlds-largest-living-organisms-is-dying/. Samuel, Nina, ed. 2012. The islands of Benoît Mandelbrot: Fractals, chaos, and the materiality of thinking. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Sattler, Birgit, et al. 2001. Bacterial growth in supercooled cloud droplets. Geophysical Research Letters 28 (2), pp. 239–242. http://online library.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2000GL011684/abstract;jsessionid=4D CB5DCA50D8405F818C9A2952286ECA.d03t03?deniedAccessCusto misedMessage=&userIsAuthenticated=false. Taleb, Nassim. 2012. Antifragile: Things that gain from disorder. New York: Random House. Tarasen, Nick. Double negative: a website about Michael Heizer. http://doublenegative.tarasen.net/heizer (accessed March 8, 2013). University of Colorado at Boulder. 2008. Women have more diverse hand bacteria than men. ScienceDaily (November 3). http://www. sciencedaily.com- /releases/2008/11/081103192310.htm. Van Horn, Paul J. The quaking aspen. sites.google.com/site/wilderness survivalarts/the-quaking-aspen. Wilson, Edward O. 1984. Biophilia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wilson, Edward O. 2012. Desktop diaries. Science Fridays (April 13). http://www.sciencefriday.com/video/04/13/2012/desktop-diaries-e-owilson.html. Wilson, Edward O., and Kellert, Stephen. 1993. The biophilia hypothesis. Washington, DC: Island Press.

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Zukerman, Laura. 2009. Fall colors fade in U.S. west as aspens die. Reuters (September 4). http://www.reuters.com/article/2009/09/04/ususa-forests-aspen-idUSTRE5826QY20090904.

CHAPTER ELEVEN MEASURING THE SENSUOUS JOAN MALOOF These stories are about the mystery. More specifically they are about blood sugar, and forests, and pelicans, and wind, and dragonflies. They are about whether these things can tell us something about the mystery— something that can be measured. I will tell you now that they are inconclusive; you will have to decide for yourself; and perhaps that is as it should be—because the mystery will always be … well … you know.

I. Measuring Blood Sugar The semester had finally ended and I prepared for my escape from computers, books and grading. It was the woods I wanted and not just the scrappy forest across the street. I wanted towering trees and clear streams tumbling over cracked rocks. I wanted ferns and moss and trillium—and maybe even bears. Under the pale blue cap of my darling pick-up truck I loaded a mattress, pillow, sleeping bag and flashlight. An old plastic milk crate held my camp kitchen: a one-burner propane stove, one pan for boiling and one for frying, utensils, dish soap, sponge. I decided to spoil myself with the French press coffee pot instead of the little plastic filter holder. Into the food bag I put my organic shade-grown coffee, a can of evaporated milk, crackers, peanut butter, honey, pasta, cheese, freeze-dried soup and trail mix. Into my day pack went my rain gear and my trail maps. In the cab with me went the road maps, the CDs, water, my cell phone, boots and wallet.1 I was ready for the open road leading to the magical forest. Most of what I know about road life I learned from a dear friend. She has a pick-up with a cap too, and we share a friendly rivalry about whose rig is better. We both have men in our lives, and on occasion we have 1

This was written in 2004 before I had both music and navigation in my phone.

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shared sleeping space in our trucks with them; but there is no doubt that the trucks belong to the women. If big motor homes are the McMansions of the road then our compact trucks are the one-room cabins—without electricity or indoor plumbing. They are the contemporary equivalent of covered wagons—something to keep you warm and dry in a storm, but rustic enough to require a sense of adventure. I kissed my husband goodbye, pet the cat and started the engine. The forest I was planning to visit was advertised as the largest old growth stand left in the Eastern U.S. I longed to wander through the forest breathing, touching, listening. I wanted to sit, perhaps sleep, under the rare towering giants. The forest, although a twelve hour drive from my house, was less than two hours from my father’s house. I didn’t get to his place very often, and I knew this would be a lonely time for him. He had lost his wife, my stepmother, to cancer five months previously. I planned to visit with him for a few days before I spent time with the trees. Dad looked truly happy to see me. During a phone call before my visit he told me that he had hurt his hand, but I didn’t realize how injured he was until I drove him to his doctor’s appointment the next day. The doctor unwrapped the bandages and all three of us stared down at a palm that had been split completely across from one side to another. About a dozen rough black stitches held the cut closed. Then he pointed toward the X-ray images and I removed them from the envelope and held them up to the light. The images showed that his middle finger bone was broken completely through at the base, and his third finger bone was cracked as well. All of this on his right hand, his dominant hand, on an aging man who now lived alone. While this was sinking in, I recalled that he had waited two days after the injury before having his hand treated, and once he was released from the hospital he had driven for two days with only his left hand, and a worrisome decline in his eyesight. He had not been treating his diabetes— perhaps that was the reason for his vision loss. He admitted to the doctor that he couldn’t find the little device for testing his blood sugar. We left the doctor’s office with a handful of prescriptions and headed to the pharmacy. We left the pharmacy with bags of pills, gauze pads, ace bandages, week-at-a-time pill holders, and a new blood sugar monitor. I set up a bandaging station on the bathroom counter and turned my attention toward making dinner. But where would we eat? The table was piled high with magazines, donation requests, bills, catalogs and condolence cards. Sweet notes from grandchildren were buried under

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offers from credit card companies. I cleared enough eating space for two. Dealing with the rest of clutter would go on tomorrow’s chore list. To understand the significance of the rest of this story it is helpful to know a little about my family history. My parents divorced after having four children together. They each remarried—to partners who had children of their own. As a result I have lots of siblings of the “yours, mine and ours” variety. My stepmother was a nurse and encouraged all of the girls to become nurses too. My three older sisters followed her advice. I was the fourth in line but I never gave any consideration to her urgings. I had no idea of what I wanted to be “when I grew up,” but I knew that I did not want to spend my days around sick people. I shied away from all things medical. When dinner was over we moved to the living room and I got out the new blood monitor. I thought I would help Dad by reading the directions and training him in its use. I figured out the little gadget, pricked him for a drop of blood and got a read-out on the screen. “It’s 178,” I said. “What does that mean?” “That means it’s time for my insulin.” “OK, Dad, I’ll get it for you. Where is it?”

He directed me to the insulin in the refrigerator, the disposable syringes in the cabinet and the alcohol swabs in the drawer. I got everything together and he instructed me to take the insulin out of the box. OK. Next I was to take the syringe out of the plastic wrapper. Done. This was all much easier for me than for him considering that he was temporarily one-handed. The next step, he said, was to pull the plunger on the syringe back to 30, push the syringe into the thin rubber membrane on top of the insulin bottle, push the 30 units of air into the bottle, and then turn the whole thing—bottle and syringe—upside down and draw in 30 units of fluid. I had seen this bottle and syringe trick done on TV shows and it was kind of fun doing it myself. Besides, I was helping him—I was taking care of my father. Now I held out the loaded syringe for him, but what happened next I didn’t expect. He pulled up his shirt to expose his belly and said, “OK, go ahead.” “What?! Dad, I’m sorry, I can’t give you a needle.” “Well, why not?” he said.

“I’ve never given anyone a needle in my life,” I stammered, “I have no training in that sort of thing” (I kept talking, hoping to explain myself,

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thinking perhaps he had confused me with my sisters). When he took the needle and struggled to inject himself with his left hand I felt that I had let him down. The next day I took every catalog and most of the magazines to the recycling center. In the pantry was a big stack of newspapers, all from the same day, the day my stepmother’s obituary was printed. I cut one of the notices out and got rid of the rest of the stack. I put letters from friends and relatives in a special basket. I put all the bills in one place. I threw away the credit card offers and the donation requests—more would come soon, no doubt. I threw away the paperwork from the hospice, and the funeral parlor. That was over now. He no longer needed those papers. He had no use for the books given to my stepmother such as, Remarkable Recoveries or I’m Having a No Hair Day: Humor and Healing for People with Cancer. Once I was finished with the paper-based debris I tried to tackle some of the other clutter—(“Come on Dad, you have six pepper grinders”). But it didn’t take long before I realized that he didn’t share my agenda. Instead of pushing the issue I put the brakes on my busyness and sat down beside him to look at old pictures. That evening we went out for pizza and when we got home I tested his blood sugar again; it was a little higher than it had been the day before. I gathered the equipment—the insulin, the syringes, the alcohol; I prepared the needle, only this time I didn’t hand it to him. This time he exposed his belly and I wiped it with alcohol and inserted the needle into his flesh. It wasn’t that difficult really. I can’t tell you why I was so horrified the night before, but on this night it was different. It was nothing that I worked on or made myself do. It was simple. Something shifted. Perhaps I was thinking less of myself and more of him. I wasn’t ready to leave him the next day. I had more organizing, more cleaning, more cooking, more listening, more nursing to do. The next night his blood sugar was even higher. “Dad, why does your blood sugar level keep going up although I’m giving you your insulin every night?” “That’s because you’re not giving me my morning dose.” “What? You never told me you needed it in the morning too” “Oh, yeah.”

So the next day it was 30 units in the morning and 30 units at night, but his sugar kept creeping up. He told me to give him 50 units the next

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morning and I did. I was feeling very competent with this nursing stuff now. But at lunch time he didn’t look so good. When my sister called he couldn’t remember anything he wanted to tell her. He went to his bedroom to take a nap. When I tried to wake him for dinner he was incoherent. He didn’t recognize me; he was moaning. I was sure he was having a stroke. Maybe he was dying. All I wanted to do was hold his hand. One of my brothers arrived just then and I asked him to call 911. After that we called one of my sisters—a real nurse—who said to check his blood sugar again. I did, and it was 28. He was in insulin shock and was indeed dying. The paramedics, sweet gentle men, gave him glucose intravenously and he soon returned to normal. So much for my brief nursing career; I almost killed my first patient—my father. The next day I was the one who needed TLC. I wasn’t ready to go anywhere until I was sure that he was all right. So my two-day visit turned into a week. But with my brother there I felt that I could, should, leave. At dawn I slipped into my cabin on wheels waiting patiently in the driveway. I headed north toward the forest. I thought the rain would eventually lighten up, but it didn’t. The road was a snake of winding curves. When I stopped for gas and checked my progress on the map I learned that I had made a wrong turn ten miles back and I was now heading north-east, toward home, instead of north-west, toward the forest. Ten miles is not so far, but I couldn’t make myself turn away from home. As much as I wanted to be in the presence of that forest, I wanted to be in my husband’s presence even more. I checked the map for the shortest route to the highway and headed for it. My hiking boots were unworn, and the mattress in my truck was unused, but the time scale of an old growth forest is nothing like ours. It would wait for another year. The next year I tried again. Same truck, same things packed, same twelve-hour drive to Dad’s. His hand had healed, but his mind had slipped further into never-never land. His life revolved around doctor visits and getting prescriptions filled. This time when I drove him to the pharmacy he put some adult diapers into the shopping basket. Back at the house I studied the little pill bottles and tried to figure out his daily dosages of each. Which ones with food? Which ones on an empty stomach? I got the little compartments of the holder filled but I couldn’t imagine that he would do this on his own after I left. He was still able to inject himself with insulin, but would he bother? Or would he forget? I couldn’t be sure. He was still cooking, but frequently burning himself or the food. I was petrified that he would start a fire. Things were rapidly getting out of control but he refused to consider moving. He was still mister tough guy. At the very least he needed a nurse to check on him every day, and, thank

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God, he agreed to that as a favor to me (that’s how I put it anyway). So on this visit I was making phone calls and setting up interviews with nurses. I had been invited to give a talk at a nature center that was tantalizingly close to the old growth forest; and since Dad had never heard me speak publicly about forests he was anxious to come along. I couldn’t figure out how I could watch over him and visit the old growth too. In fact I could barely figure out how to get him comfortably to the talk which was only sixty miles away. With some effort he was at last cleaned, dressed, medicated and in the car. We arrived early so we had time to eat at the lovely mountain village. I would have liked to stroll around the town a bit, but that wasn’t possible with Dad. With every step he took I feared a fall. I was grateful that there was a parking space just outside an open, nice looking, restaurant. When we sat down in the restaurant he didn’t look very well. He was pale and shaking. Already his chemistry was out of balance—perhaps low blood sugar again. I walked up to the service counter and asked, I thought nicely, for some bread or rolls. When the bleached-blonde behind the counter tried to tell me they didn’t have any bread I was on the verge of doing a Jack Nicholson in Easy Rider. We finally settled on the fact that I was willing to pay for the bread. Dad was shaking so badly by the time it arrived that he couldn’t even butter it. To spare his dignity I acted as if nothing was wrong while I broke off little pieces, buttered them, and put them on the plate in front of him. Inside of me, though, my heart and brain screamed in unison: this is the last time I’ll ever go out with my father in public. My brain was fine with that, this was way too much work, but my heart was hollow. This is the last time I’ll ever go out with my father in public. I smiled at him across the table and put a piece of the buttered bread in my mouth. And it was the last time. On my next visit I didn’t even bother bringing my boots; I flew down and rented a car. Dad was in a hospital bed in his living room. He had twenty-four hour nursing care. He knew who I was, but I wasn’t sure if he remembered my name and I didn’t want to ask him. Neither one of us needed that. I no longer had to worry about him forgetting his medications or burning down the house; he couldn’t get out of bed. The hospice nurses had taken him off all medication—including the insulin. His blood sugar numbers no longer mattered. I was hoping for deep, meaningful conversation; but it was too late for that. I consoled myself by squeezing fresh orange juice for him.

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II. Measuring the Beauty of Forests I am a scientist. So when I planned a project that would take me to many ancient forests I thought it likely that I would observe some aspect of forest ecology that would lead to further study, including, probably, experiments of some sort. But after visiting thirty old growth forests, spread across the eastern U.S., I came to a single overwhelming conclusion: to me, old growth forests were beautiful. I mean really beautiful—the kind of beautiful that could change your vital signs.2 And I met other people who confirmed my experience; they had felt it too. This led me to wonder if older forests were universally perceived as being more beautiful than younger forests. I knew that what I felt in the forest was real, and I knew it was conditional upon the age of the forest; but what kind of proof did I have? What was this thing called beauty, anyway? Did it even exist? You might say of course it does, we all know beauty exists; but if that is true, if it is real, we should be able to measure it, right? And if we can measure it then perhaps we can answer this: is the experience of beauty universally objective (similarly experienced by all of us) or is it entirely personal, and therefore subjective? I had a hunch that it was universal, but the saying, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” was parroted by everyone I discussed the topic with, so perhaps there was truth there too. It took almost a year of serious reading to determine which disciplines were having intelligent conversations about beauty. Artists were discussing it, but had nothing coherent to say about it except that it used to be important in art, and then it became old fashioned, and now they were unsure if it was important again or not. Some landscape architects were discussing it, but mainly through the subtopic of “views.” A few psychologists had attempted to work on the topic of nature’s beauty, but were a shrinking marginalized fringe. Philosophers had long been the group willing to tackle difficult topics, such as beauty, but it seemed to me they went wrong sometime around Kant’s era, and for a while they made no progress at all. Recently, contemporary philosophers such as Allen Carlson and Glenn Parsons claimed that biologists should be the ones to study nature’s beauty, because they were the ones who understood how it

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A number of experiments have shown that forests can indeed affect people’s vital signs. See Lee, J. J., Park, B. J., Tsunetsugu, Y. Y., Ohira, T. T., Kagawa, T. T., & Miyazaki, Y. Y. (2011). Effect of forest bathing on physiological and psychological responses in young Japanese male subjects. Public Health 125 (2), pp. 93–100.

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all worked, but this message never made it across the academic divide to the science department; biologists were not discussing beauty at all. So I planned an experiment that could translate the feeling of beauty into numbers, and with that I entered the netherworld between science and non-science. For my experiment I chose two forests, each across a dirt road from the other, each dominated by pines trees, each flat and dry. The major difference was that one forest had been logged fifty-seven years ago and the other had been logged eleven years ago. My hypothesis was that the older forest would be judged more beautiful; but I needed subjects to confirm this, I needed a data set and some statistical analysis. While I was testing my older-forest beauty hypothesis, I thought I might also test the “serious beauty” hypothesis suggested by the philosophers who purported that knowledge of ecology might lead to an enhanced experience of beauty. Maybe the older forest seemed so beautiful to me because I understood how it worked? Maybe if I taught my experimental subjects about the workings of the forest it would seem more beautiful to them too. This idea seemed worth investigating. In exchange for teaching forest ecology to all fifteen sections of the Introductory Biology class, I was able to involve them in my research. Each class was brought to our forested field station and then randomly divided in half. Half the class had the ecology lesson before going to the forest and the other half had it after. The groups going to the forest alternated in seeing the younger or the older forest first. Each student held a clipboard with a data sheet. On the sheet was a horizontal line for each forest with the center marked “Neutral,” the far left marked “Unattractive,” and the far right marked “Beautiful.” Students were asked to simply put a mark on the line corresponding to their rating of the forest. Three-hundred thirty-four data sheets later the hypothesis that older forests are more beautiful was confirmed. Interestingly, ecological knowledge seemed to make no difference in the ratings. So much for the “serious beauty” hypothesis; it was rejected. Apparently beauty is not located in the mind. At least it is not in the part of the mind where conceptual knowledge is stored. It may indeed be in the senses. In the same way that we do not have to be taught to smell or hear, we do not have to be taught what is beautiful. Maybe beauty is a sense of its own. Maybe beauty is the seventh sense. Baby rhesus monkeys do not thrive without the touch of their mothers. Perhaps we do not thrive without some minimal level of beauty. I feed myself on the beauty of ancient forests at every opportunity. I can feel this exposure to beauty making me stronger. I am a different person than I would be without the forests. But it is interesting that I have chosen to

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direct this increased energy and insight toward speaking out for the forests. Hmmm. Lately I have been wondering if the forests have manipulated me, with their beauty, into doing their bidding. And beauty is not just experienced by the eyes of course; I hear their beauty, I breathe their beauty. We do indeed have a relationship, the forests and I.

III. Measuring Animal Waves Kesshh … Kesshh … Kesshh … From my hammock I could hear the waves rolling in one after the other. But on this particularly magical beach, just when I was sufficiently lolled by the waves to begin thinking of them as background (or, more likely, not thinking at all), a wave would arrive that brought my awareness back with a snap. KERAACK—that one wave in (how many?) shook my frontal lobe back to its buzzing. All waves move in toward the shore, break, and then flow back out to sea carrying a margin of white lace; it is tempting to add: always the same; but this to-and-froing is, in reality, the only similarity one wave shares with the next. Just as the philosopher Heraclitus said, “you can’t step in the same river twice,”3 so too you cannot listen to the same wave twice. And my buzzing brain wondered about what else in nature was always the same or always different, depending upon how closely one looks. The list is endless. Heraclitus could have as easily said, “you can’t walk through the same forest twice,” or “you can’t breathe the same air twice,” or, my personal favorite, “you can’t kiss the same person twice.” But the wave thing adds a different dimension. It is not just a change that happens in one direction, like our aging, but it is a change with a going and a coming. And I considered that animal populations could be thought of as waves too—especially the bird flocks that are like feathered foam moving through the sky. Two years ago when I visited this beach I watched pelicans gliding back and forth in patterned groups just above the breaking waves, their heads swiveling in search of snacks swimming just beneath the surface. When I waded out into the water I was sometimes surprised by a nearby splash caused by a pelican diving into the ocean. When I sat on the beach in the late afternoon watching the Earth turning away from the burning sun, and the red solar ember being extinguished by the watery ocean, the waves would glint mauve and the swooping birds would break my heart with their beauty. 3

The quotes from Heraclitus are from Heraclitus: the Cosmic Fragments trans. G. S. Kirk, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1954.

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After dark the birds all flew to the same large rock offshore, a rock that glowed famously white because of the birds’ excrement. I assumed that the pelicans would be there every year, but when I returned the next year, on exactly the same date, I looked expectantly for the pelicans—and they were gone. A few circled the white rock, but they no longer flew formations down the crest of the waves. I missed the pelicans, and I wondered aloud about their absence, but no one had an explanation. The pelican wave had washed over this place and it was flowing back to the sky-ocean, or cresting in some other place. I always thought of pelicans as tropical, until the day I saw them gliding over the waves of my favorite Maryland beach. Anomalies happen in the bird-sky, and I thought this was one, until I saw more and more pelicans every year. The pelican wave reached Maryland in 1987, but the story is not so simple as a swelling wave. A bit of history is necessary to understand what happened. Pelicans were once very abundant on the Atlantic Coast, so abundant that they were thought of as pests that competed with fishermen. Sadly, the typical response of humans, when we suspect that another organism is interfering with our economic prosperity, is to kill the organism. After World War I Americans were no longer distracted by killing other humans and they began slaughtering pelicans in great numbers. The pelican wave ebbed, along with the waves of many other bird species that were being killed for their food choices, or their ornamental feathers, or just because. But the eco-angels were watching, and in 1918 the Migratory Bird Treaty Act was passed. It banned the killing of pelicans, among other birds, and the pelican population rebounded. But the wave would crest again and the pelican population would once more dwindle. It was human-caused again this time, but more from our innocent stupidity than from the purposeful pulling of a trigger. In the 1950s we began spraying the Earth with the new chemicals we had invented for killing smaller flying pests. By now everyone knows that DDT caused the thinning of eggshells, and that it was responsible for the decline in eagle populations, but not as many are aware that pelicans were affected too. The recovery of the pelican population slowed, then stopped, and then the numbers declined drastically. By 1970 there were no brown pelicans left in Louisiana and they were declared an endangered species. But again, just as the wave reached its nadir, a few angels were watching—one by the name of Rachel Carson—and the result was a ban on DDT use and production in the US. The ban has resulted in a recovery of all fish eating birds—including pelicans—a recovery wave that continues to grow. This growing wave has spilled over onto my Maryland seashore and shows no sign of retreat yet.

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In 1991 there were close to fourteen thousand pelicans on the eastern seaboard and now there are over thirty thousand. But we know that the population will not continue to grow forever. Like the waves by the shore we know that someday, for some reason, the population will wane again. These waves of population are one of the most certain things we know about life on planet Earth. Pick a species, any species and try to count how many there are. Now keep counting year after year. Make a graph of your results. I assure you it will not be a straight line; the population will not have held steady. Depending on your time scale and the reproductive rate of your species the graph will either look like part of one large wave or like many small waves. For most species we know that this happens, we just don’t know why. In the case of the pelicans we have identified a few causal agents, but in most cases we cannot even do that. It’s not that the scientists haven’t tried—the books and papers on population biology could fill a small library—it’s just that we have not reached any sort of consensus. There are two major obstacles to this scientific work: first, data on the number of organisms must be collected for many years so that one has a long term data set; and secondly, the factors which might cause population fluctuations must be measured too. In other words, my casual observation of fewer pelicans on the Mexican beach last year will not cut it scientifically. We need data. And could the variation be caused by too few fish, a delayed dry season, or continued exposure to DDT? Or perhaps something completely different? We know that overfishing is a problem worldwide and it is straining the survival of many species that depend on wild fish—but is the fish population in this particular spot declining? Most likely, but we do not have any numbers. DDT was banned in the US in 1972, but it continued to be manufactured and used in Mexico until 1999. In fact equipment used to spray DDT for mosquito control was rinsed out in the rivers that empty into the ocean where the pelicans here feed. So it could be the DDT. Then again, it could be anything. The most well studied case of animal population fluctuation is the case of the snowshoe hare. This rabbit-like animal that lives in northern regions was a popular subject of study because there happened to be a long term data set showing that the population of hares varied over time. The graph of hare numbers looked like a series of choppy waves running across the paper. These waves (called “cycles”) came to the attention of biologists in the 1930s. In trying to determine what might cause the population fluctuations of the hare, another long term data set was discovered—the population of lynx. This was very convenient, because the lynx cat eats hare and the lynx graph, too, looked like a series of waves. Matching up

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the two graphs the biologists became very excited; it appeared that the population waves of the hares and the lynx were similar. The biologists superimposed the two graphs; they were not perfectly in sync but they appeared to be related, and there appeared to be a periodicity of approximately ten years. “Aha,” I imagine the biologists exclaiming, with visions of publications dancing in their heads, “The lynx population grows and eats the hares, thus the hare population declines. As a result of declining hare populations the lynx population, now short on food, declines as well. But when the lynx population shrinks the hare population will start to rebound.” Thus the predator-prey model of population fluctuation was born. Ecology was a very young science then and not many principles had been established for this new branch of biology, but the predator-prey model seemed to be one true thing ecology could call its own. To this very day graphs of the hare and the lynx population fluctuations can be found in every ecology textbook and in most of the general biology textbooks. Often students are required (as I was) to memorize the formulas that describe the relationship between predator and prey populations. But the truth is always so subtle—if, indeed, there is any such thing as truth. I can no longer teach the principles illustrated in glossy color in the textbook. Maybe I know too much—about what we don’t know. I know, for instance, that the numbers of hares and lynx shown on the graphs do not represent the number of living animals that someone counted, instead they represent a count of dead animals, or, more precisely, dead animal skins. You see, the reason we have that nice long term data set is because the British company that bought skins from the trappers in North America kept good records. Those numbers represent skins that trappers sold. How closely they represent the numbers of actual animals is open to speculation. We have no idea if the trappers exerted the same level of effort every year. Another problem with the data set is that the locations of animal capture varied geographically. In other words, some of the hares were trapped in areas where there were no lynx, and in some of the areas where lynx were captured no one bothered to trap the hares. What looks like a marvelous data set at first glance, crumbles upon closer examination. The theory does not hold up to scrutiny either. Further examination of the data revealed that the hare population was controlling the lynx population, and not the other way around. It appears now that the plant populations (which also vary) are controlling the hare population and the lynx are just the end of the line in a long chain of things affected by the plants. And what controls the plant populations? Perhaps insect populations or rainfall. And what controls the rain? Well, you tell me …

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sun spots?? Ye gads. Pay no attention to those thick texts, we know nothing. The more I learn the more difficult it becomes for me to stand in front of a class expounding principles. When I was young and ignorant I taught the predator-prey model with gusto. Later, when I tried to teach the subtleties I just confused everyone. Now, I generally just skip over that part of the chapter and tell the students, as I have told you, that all populations vary and in most cases we have no idea why. The most predictable graph is the one of human population growth. It just keeps climbing higher and higher every year like a gigantic tsunami. But even that wave will eventually break. Perhaps with a shuddering KERAACK when it is least expected. All we know for certain is that our planet cannot sustain the growth of our species indefinitely. That wave too must recede someday. But still I wondered about the pelicans, and I missed them. I am a trained ecologist—does that carry with it some responsibility for seeking answers? I could dedicate many, many hours of a limited lifetime trying to untie the complicated knot of pelican population fluctuations. But I prefer not to. I prefer, now, to step back and see the wave of pelicans washing over the planet, never the same from year to year. In this way I am more like the philosopher Heraclitus than I am like my fellow biologists. Heraclitus recognized a divine unity to the cosmos, an interconnectedness of all. Yet on a more intimate scale all we see is change and motion. This is the paradox of the river: always the same, but always different. Even opposites are different halves of the same thing. “The road up and down is one and the same,” said Heraclitus. “There is no such thing as a start and a finish of the whole circumference of a circle: for every point one can think of is a beginning and an end.” This year—same time, same place—the pelicans have returned. Some of the locals speculate that it was the avian flu that reduced the population last year, but no one seems to know for sure, and I am skeptical. Instead of spending my days here doing research I prefer to swim with the little fish and to watch the pelicans glide and then dive—turning their heads and closing their wings at the last possible second. Like feathered spears they dash into the sea to grab a fish, surface to swallow, and then lift off slowly with large flapping wings. I love the pelicans. They are riding the wave of their species population and I am riding the wave of my species population. And of course each of us are riding the wave of our individual lives. I stand knee deep in the water looking at the pelicans flying overhead. One pelican twists his head slightly to look at me, and as he does I see a drop of water fall from his beak. Incredibly, it lands on my

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upper lip and I feel as though I have been kissed, or blessed, by a winged one. Maybe I am no longer a scientist. Who can say where a wave ends.

IV. Measuring Messages in the Wind I have been wondering about communication. As humans we communicate through verbal language, body language, and written language (which originates in our bodies). So our sensuous body is very involved in communicating preferences and desires. But what about trees? Do they even have bodies? Of course they do, but those bodies do not move easily and they originate no sounds of their own. Their capacity for what we call language is nonexistent. And yet we hold them in our thoughts, we touch them; we have a sensuous relationship with them. Now let’s take that exploration one step further: what about the wind? Does it have a language? None that we can yet discern. Nor does it have a body in the way that we do, or even the way trees do. There is no “life” there, yet there is still a sensuous relationship between humans and the wind. It touches us; we see its effects; it influences our behavior. Think about the parallels between how the wind communicates and the mysterious types of communication that occur in close relationships. My husband and I were together for thirty-five years, and we noticed that language wasn’t always necessary to communicate thoughts. Other couples have mentioned this same experience—synchronicities that cannot be easily explained—coincidences that go beyond coincidence. My husband developed cancer. When it was evident that he was not going to get better, that things were only going to get more difficult on that long slide, there came a day when the house was finally free of visitors, and fresh snow blanketed everything outside the windows with a muffled purity. I pulled my chair closer to my husband’s living-room hospital-bed and smiled at him. Well if you have to go this would be a good time, I thought to myself. Then he said out loud, “OK, let’s get this over with.” Those were his last words. He went quickly and easily. The wind started gusting and soon miniature tornadoes of sparkling snow were dancing across the smooth white lawn. I watched through the window as they danced and combined, got larger and then smaller, changed directions, and spun in place. I had never seen anything quite like it. Even with my husband’s still-warm dead body next to me I could gasp at the beauty of the spectacle, nature’s beauty. I sensed that his spirit was somehow involved in what I was witnessing. My husband no longer had a body (or perhaps I should say his body no longer had a spirit), but was this a type of communication? There are

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numerous instances of passing spirits associated with strange wind events. Read about Treya Killam Wilber for one example. As she was dying, the strongest winds ever recorded in her town were blowing; then suddenly the wind speed dropped to zero. Her husband, Ken Wilber, noted that the ancients had a saying: “When a great soul dies a great wind blows.” And it was not until my husband’s memorial service that I heard the poem by Mary Elizabeth Frye which starts: Do not stand at my grave and weep; I am not there. I do not sleep. I am a thousand winds that blow; I am the diamond glints on snow.

In meteorology class I learned about what causes wind (pressure differentials) and how to predict which direction it will blow; but beyond these basic levels of understanding, wind, like beauty, is one of the phenomena we understand very little about. No meteorologist can predict the path of a dust devil that appears in a farm field. (Indeed, why a devil?) Or where a waterspout will appear in the ocean. Even on a much larger scale, weather scientists resort to guessing when it comes to predicting where a tornado will touch down, or what path a hurricane will take. There is still mystery in the wind, just as there is mystery in what becomes of our spirits after death. Why not associate these two mysteries? I experienced beauty in the ancient forests and I kept feeling my husband’s presence in the wind. On a still day at the place his ashes were buried I would swing the chimes hanging in the tree and light incense. Then the wind would begin to blow. Prayer flags fluttered in the breeze. Perhaps wind is one way those without a body can communicate. Wind speed is easy to measure. So what should we do with this hypothesis? What type of experiment would you design if you were a scientist? One would need data of course, and perhaps clipboards and pencils. The channeled entity Ramtha calls the wind the Unknown God and after meditating on the wind for many years he says he was able to become a part of it. According to his teachings he eventually ascended from his physical body by becoming the wind. Ramtha tells us, Converse with the wind. Dance in the moonlight. Love the dawn. They will teach you everything there is about life, for they are it, and they will live on when all of this dies … Understand what I have told you? I am just beginning to.

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V. Measuring the Dragons that Fly After he was gone for two years I went back to that beach with the pelicans. I met a woman there who told me that I needed to participate in the Ayahuasca ceremony. I should ingest the medicinal plant that would connect me even more deeply with all other plants. There is a story I need to tell about that, but first, some background. Years ago I went away to a weekend workshop where I was led on a guided meditation to find my “power animal.” Yea right, I thought at the time. But to my surprise when the meditation began with a beating drum I saw, in my mind’s eye, a tree trunk with a hollow at the base. I felt myself travel down it and come upon a pond with reeds growing along it. And an animal did, indeed, appear. It was a dragonfly. I liked dragonflies a great deal, but I never really thought of them as my special power animal. When it became apparent that my husband’s cancer was terminal, and we were still at the Mexican clinic, I walked around the dirty, crowded, border town for an hour everyday just to get some exercise and to avoid going crazy. Along the route was a fabric store that I stopped in frequently. I was not someone who sewed, and it had been many years since I had visited fabric stores. In this fabric store, however, I fell in love with a Chinese brocade that had a pattern of multi-colored dragonflies on a turquoise-blue background. There was just something about it that delighted my eyes. After stopping to look at that fabric day after day, I decided that I should buy it to take home. When I returned to the clinic I showed him the dragonfly fabric I loved, but I did not mention the white linen I had purchased for his shroud at the same time. After he died, and had been wrapped in his shroud and then cremated, I went to Burning Man—a place of salt deserts so severe that I had never seen a plant or animal of any kind there. I called it a pilgrimage. I got up before dawn on the second morning and carried our wedding garments— now thirty-three years old—across the wide desert and toward the temple, just as the sun rose. I joined the others who were already there, chanting and praying. In that sacred space I was drawn to a particular place where I wanted to hang the garments. When I sat to take the garments and the tacks out of my pack the tears began to flow. I was saying goodbye to him, yes, but I was also saying goodbye to that wonderful time in my life when I was part of a couple. There was a ceremony when we joined, and now there would be a ceremony for the unjoining. I was no longer a married woman. With the sound of beautiful music and chanting down below I alternated between

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crying and getting my task accomplished. When the garments were hanging to my satisfaction I dissolved into a surprisingly deep session of grieving. It was powerful, good, grieving, and when I emerged from it I moved outside into the warm late-morning sunshine. After a few minutes of sitting and letting the sun dry my uplifted face, a simple, yet most incredible, thing happened. A dragonfly landed next to my hand! It must be dead, I thought. Someone must have brought it here and it has been blown to this spot. That would have been amazing enough, but then it moved. It was alive! I held out my hand and the fantastical insect crawled onto it. I was crying again now, but I was deeply happy at the same time. I held the spirit creature up to my face; I looked into its light-brown eyes for a few long moments, and it seemed to look into my light-blue ones before it flew away. I knew I would never completely understand what had happened, but I did know that it was a magical happening. I met no one else who had seen a dragonfly in the middle of that barren desert. And for it to come to me in that sacred place, in that sacred moment, was almost too much to comprehend. Could we calculate the probability of this event? Would the infinitesimally small number mean anything to anyone but me? There are layers upon layers to this life and we only see the very surface. What more is there behind this shiny layer we call reality? The writer Luis Urrea says that dragonflies are the guardians of the spirit world, the afterlife. One day, as he walked with notebook in hand, a huge red dragonfly flew up to his face and hovered at eye level as though it was staring into his eyes. They stared at each other for a moment and then it flew away. Moved by some unknown impulse he shouted, “Hey come back!” and it flew straight back to his face and hovered in front of his eyes again. Who would like to do the probability calculation for that one? Just a few months after I met the woman at the pelican beach I made my way to Peru for the ancient Ayahuasca healing journey. I felt a deep truth in what she had said—it was indeed my time. During our first lunch in the jungle, just before our small group was to go before the shaman to share our intentions for the ceremony, someone complimented me on my dragonfly necklace and I shared my story. After lunch we entered the ceremonial lodge and sat on cushions facing the shaman. As I started to talk about why I was there one large dragonfly appeared and flew back and forth over the shaman’s head. The others pointed and smiled at me, as if surprised. I smiled too, but I was not surprised at all.

CONTRIBUTORS Linda Ardito, Ph.D., Professor of Music, Dowling College. Anne Ashbaugh, Ph.D., Professor of Philosophy, Towson University. Christos Evangeliou, Ph.D., Professor of Philosophy, Towson University. Alphonso Lingis, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Penn State University. Joan Maloof, Ph.D., Professor of Biology, Salisbury State University. John Murungi, Ph.D., Professor of Philosophy, Towson University. Shannon Mussett, Ph.D., Professor of Philosophy, Utah Valley University. Gayil Nalls, Ph.D., Independent, interdisciplinary artist, philosopher, and theorist; she earned her doctorate from The University of East London; writes for the magazines Psychology Today and Nautilus; and resides in New York City and the Hudson Valley. Gerald Phillips, Ph.D., Professor of Music, Towson University. Bongrae Seok, Ph.D., Professor of Philosophy, Alvernia University. Richard Wilson, Professor of Philosophy, University of Maryland at Baltimore County.