Picturing Mind Paradox, Indeterminacy and Consciousness in Art & Poetry

Picturing Mind
&

General Editor:
Daniel Meyer-Dinkgrfe
Editorial Board:
Anna Bonshek, John Danvers,
William S. Haney II, Amy Ione,
Arthur Versluis, Christopher Webster
Picturing Mind
Paradox, Indeterminacy
and Consciousness in
Art & Poetry
JOHN DANVERS
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2006

Cover Design: Aart Jan Bergshoe
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of ISO
9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents -
Requirements for permanence.
ISBN: 90-420-1809-7
ISSN: 1573-2193
Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2006
Printed in the Netherlands
Contents
Preface 7
Part 1 Introduction an opening, an entering 11
Part 2 The knowing body: art as an integrative process of

cognition 17
Part 3 Interrogating appearances: being, seeing & showing

37
Part 4 The mutuality of existence: drawing, emptiness &
presence 65
Part 5 Picturing mind writing being 101
Part 6 The self as open-work: permeability, incompleteness

& revisibility 131
Part 7 Mind, the real & the other 159
Part 8 Where we are: locus of mind-in-the-world 191
Part 9 The ! the One & the Many: mysticism, art & poetry 261
Part 10 The discontinuum of consciousness: ambiguity,

indeterminacy & multiplicity 313
Part 11 A leaving, an unending. A folding, an unfolding 345
Bibliography 353
Index 363
*
For Philippa, Joanna, Tom and Jenny
Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to the research committee of the Faculty of Arts,

University of Plymouth, for awarding me a sabbatical semester in
which to do most of the writing of this book, and to colleagues in the
Faculty for their support and comradeship over the years. Id like to
thank the following journals, publishers and organisations for allow-
ing me to include revised versions of, or extracts from, papers in this
volume: NSEAD & its journal iJADE for most of an essay, The
Knowing Body: Art as an Integrative System of Knowledge, (1995)
and for extracts from, Towards a Radical Pedagogy: Provisional
notes on Learning and Teaching in Art & Design (2003); ISSEI for
extracts from book reviews (1998; 2005); and Trentham Books (2004)
for extracts used in Part 6.
Im also grateful for having participated in the affairs of ISSEI

(International Society for the Study of European Ideas), particularly its
conferences, over many years, and for a stimulating association with
Daniel Meyer-Dinkgrafe, the editor, and other members of the
editorial board of, and contributors to, the internet journal, Conscious-
ness, Literature and the Arts.
Many thanks to Pat and Dave for a few weeks of quiet reflection and
good reading in Pats studio in Colorado.
Finally Id like to thank all those students with whom Ive explored
many of the ideas in this book. Any merits the book may have are
largely due to countless stimulating interactions with enquiring minds
in seminars over many years. On the other hand the many faults of the
book are entirely my responsibility.
Preface
It might be useful to the reader to know something of the composi-

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

Pyrrho and Nagarjuna.
In Part 5 art and poetry are analysed as modes of picturing mind and
writing being, ways of opening and disclosing what it is to be part of
the consciousness of the world. Examples of works by Cy Twombly,
Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage are considered within a frame-
work of the poetics of Philip Whalen and Charles Olson.
Part 6 expands on the idea of art as a way of picturing mind by

analysing Umberto Ecos proposition of the artwork as open work
and Barthes theories about readerly and writerly texts. A theme
of the self as open work is developed as a way of thinking about
different aspects of consciousness, being and becoming. Reference is
made to the work of the artist Helen Chadwick, and to Merleau-
Pontys ideas about art as a process of embodiment and participation
in the world. These ideas are discussed in relation to reflections on
incompleteness, openness and revisibility another thematic strand
that weaves its way throughout the whole book.
In Part 7 notions of otherness and the real are discussed in relation to a

number of examples of artworks and poems by R.S. Thomas, Robin
Blaser, Robert Duncan, Minimalism, Ad Reinhardt and others. The
arts are considered as potential ways of gaining empathic access to
otherness, particularly with a brief reference to Fred Wahs thinking
about hybridity and colonisation. The idea of nature as other is
explored as an aspect of the thinking of Heidegger and Gary Snyder.
Part 8 explores many different approaches taken by artists and poets to

nature. The arts are considered as a locus of mind-in-the-world - how
we are and where we are as beings sharing a planet with other beings.
Themes of mapping, walking, journeying, emplacement and being-in-
the-world are discussed in relation to a varied array of examples: from
the writers and poets Guy Davenport, Gary Snyder, Kenneth White,
David Abram and Charles Waterton, to the artists Richard Long,
Susan Derges, Ian Hamilton Finlay, John Wolseley and others. Ideas
drawn from Goethe, Ruskin and studies of shamanism and Palaeo-
lithic cultures, are used to frame and shed light on the different
examples.
Preface 9
In Part 9 the particular modes of consciousness that have become

known as mysticism are explored in relation to contrasting descriptive
analyses proposed by William James, Bertrand Russell, Thomas
Merton, Heidegger and others. Mysticism is considered as a particu-
larly intense state of awareness and cognition, articulated and realised
in the writings and artefacts produced by artists, poets and mystics
within many cultures. Ideas about unity, unknowing, ineffability,
infinity and the metaphysics of light are discussed in relation to
examples of accounts of mystical experiences within the Christian,
Taoist and Sufi traditions, and in relation to the art and poetry of
Anish Kapoor, James Turrell, Agnes Martin, Jorge Luis Borges,
Kenneth Rexroth and others.
Part 10 continues many of the themes already introduced and consid-

ers these as they are manifested in particular modes of construction
and composition in the visual arts and poetry. Ideas about the discon-
tinuum of consciousness are discussed alongside indeterminacy,
contradiction, perspectivism, revisibility, non-dualism and associative
thinking - as qualities and principles that energise and direct many
forms of practice in the arts. Reference is made to the work of John
Cage, Thomas McEvilley, Anne Carson and Richard Rorty amongst
others.
The final section, Part 11, briefly condenses many of the above
strands of thought into the notion of a contrarium a clearing in
which apparent contradictions, conflicts and paradoxes are held in a
state of indeterminacy and open possibility. A visualisation of the
contrarium is presented in diagrammatic form a suggestion of what
might be called an aesthetics and poetics of indeterminacy.
NB. An important dimension of the book, almost a contrary text, are the
images and more unusual textual episodes that are presented as a visual
counterpoint to the main body of the text. These showings offer different
perspectives on, and manifestations of, the themes and ideas outlined
above. All the images are made by the author. They have been deliber-
ately left without annotations to emphasise their visuality. As quiet
interruptions to the hum of the text I hope they provide a parallel stream
of openings and clearings - other ways of picturing mind.
Part 1
Introduction
of the spangled mind
An opening, an entering
It is a misty late January day and the first white camellias are just
coming into bloom. A blurred penumbra of light hovers about the
delicate petals, faint emblems of a springtime yet to come. As I walk I
think of the book just beginning and my thoughts are as scattered as
the torn strands of bark that litter the shadows beneath a pair of
eucalyptus trees swaying elegantly in the breeze. All around me there
is birdsong, sounds of moisture dripping from high branches and the
occasional bark of a dog. These sensations and scattered thoughts
form unique patterns that exist for a moment and then dissolve one
into another. Each pattern is a moment of becoming, a shifting current
of attentiveness and engagement that, for loss of a better word, I call
my self.
This book is made out of many such patterns. It charts an unfolding of

thoughts and images within a dynamic sensory field that is complex
and ever-changing. To make some kind of constancy out of incon-
stancy is an ancient human endeavour, linking us to palaeolithic
ancestors who first took spit and charcoal to inscribe their presence on
the walls of dark caves. Just as those early glyphs and drawings were
superimposed upon each other in a layered history of doing, knowing
and being, so this book is a layered history of ideas, images, beliefs
and questions.
12 Introduction
Seen in another way the book represents a particular topography of

mind, a particular way of picturing and thinking about the world in
which I am a temporary participant. Ideas about practices in art and
poetry are interwoven with reflections on philosophies of art and
poetics. Occasionally another strand comes to the surface: thoughts
about ways of learning and teaching in the arts. These linear narratives
are punctuated by a more poetic non-linear discourse that includes
experimental texts, drawings and photographic images.
The book is organised in a way that emphasises the interdependence

of these strands and in a way that reflects the sudden shifts of aware-
ness and thought. I realise that it may be seen as a distant cousin of the
medieval tradition of the florilegium, a collection of extracts from
many sources put together in a way that is like a bunch of flowers.
G.R. Evans (2002: xxiii) mentions that Clement of Alexandria
compares his own collection, Miscellanies (Stomateis), to the diversity
of flora in a meadow, each flower and grass contributing a distinctive
form, colour and tone to the variegated field. I like the idea of the page
as a field of diverse texts and images, each one having its own distinct
morphology, a collection of voices speaking with varied rhythms,
diction and point of view. Within this collectaneum miscellaneum,
(ibid: xxiv) many themes, ideas and strands of argument are presented
as a mosaic or scrapbook, from which we draw our own conclusions,
make our own chain of connections (concatenatio) and encounter with
surprise unexpected juxtapositions and discontinuities. Maybe Robert
Duncan is referring to, and extending, this medieval tradition in his
own poetics, arguing in favour of the poem as a melee rather than a
synthesis, the poem as a field of many voices. (in Hoover 1994: 29) I
hope the present volume will be considered in a similar way.
*
Some of the most stimulating engagements of my life have been with
many of the individuals and ideas discussed in this book. I hope that I
convey to the reader something of the excitement, enjoyment and
critical uncertainty that I feel in encountering the minds of these
artists, poets and other thinkers from many different times, traditions
and cultures.
Introduction 13
The making of art and poetry involves both a sustained interrogation

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

of interest to three constituencies of readers: academics and research-
ers who will be expecting the usual academic conventions to be
applied; artists, poets and other practitioners who will be looking for
ideas and interesting ways of thinking about practice; and an audience
of general readers who may be curious about the arts and about ways
of interpreting and making sense of what artists do. Im trying to
14 Introduction
address all of these constituencies, while at the same time constructing

something that exemplifies at least some of the ways of thinking
discussed in the book. Thus the work, like many academic texts
produced over the past few years, is a hybrid. In places there are short
passages of argument, analysis and critical comment. These are
interposed with brief images, digressions, quotes and passing thoughts
that are not intended as a cumulative argument, but rather as a series
of condensations or illuminations a kind of sequential collage that
pictures or exemplifies what Carson, through Sappho, refers to as the
spangled mind. (2003: 357) I do this in the spirit of David Bohms
remark that theories should be presented like poetry because, like
poems, theories are insights, acts of perception, rather than hard and
fast conclusions. (in Ione 2002: 175)
*
To some extent any book, however academic or objective in tone or
content, is also part of an ongoing autobiography. And the autobio-
graphical project which is anyones life is subject to continuous
revision and reiteration, a project full of inconsistency and discontinu-
ity. Ive made no attempt to disguise such discontinuities, indeed I
hope, that the book can be seen as a testimony to revisibility and
changes of mind. Im not the product of such changes of mind, I am
these changes of mind. We are all involved in a process of continuous
transformation, an unfolding of identity set against changes of context,
situation, intentions and beliefs. I hope the various aspects of the book
convey something of these qualities.
*
of the spangled mind
In the notes to Anne Carsons (2003: 357) radical translation and
revisioning of Sapphos fragments, she discusses her interpretation of
Sapphos opening phrase, which she takes to be, poikilophron. Carson
considers this as referring to Aphrodites mind (phron), a mind that
is characterised as being, poikilos: many-colored, spotted, dappled,
variegated, intricate, embroidered, inlaid, highly wrought, compli-
cated, changeful, diverse, abstruse, ambiguous, subtle in other
words a spangled mind.
***
Part 2
The knowing body:

art as an integrative process of cognition
Scientists [] do not deal with truth []

they deal with limited and approximate
descriptions of reality.
(Capra 1992: 22)
Introduction
Many contemporary scientists and philosophers of science argue that
science is not so much about constructing theories which progres-
sively reveal the true nature of things, but is rather about formulating
limited and approximate descriptions or interpretations of the events,
processes and systems which constitute reality. This suggests a
convergence between science and art - in the sense that artistic
production, in many cases, can be seen as an attempt, through analy-
sis, invention, reformulation and synthesis, to construct approximate
descriptions and interpretations of reality.
In this section I explore some of the ways in which such descriptions

are formulated, and relate this process to the wider question of how
we should think about knowledge and perception. My aim is to raise
issues and questions rather than to formulate a linear argument. I draw
upon research in a number of fields - particularly in ecology, systems
theory, the philosophy of science, and the phenomenology of Mer-
leau-Ponty and his interpreters. I argue for a way of thinking about art
as an integrative process of cognition based upon three important
factors: our fundamental participation in the world as knowing bodies;
the perspectival nature of our interpretations of the world; and the
particular ways in which we integrate perceptual and conceptual
enquiries through the making of art. I also trace some of the changes
18 The knowing body
in the ways in which knowledge is described and formulated within

modernist and postmodernist paradigms, and suggest how these
changes support a revision of our views about the cognitive implica-
tions of art.
*
The visual arts as forms of knowledge
It could be argued that too much emphasis has been placed upon the
visual arts as forms of self-expression, and that this emphasis has led
to a neglect of the wider functions and significance of the visual arts,
both in cultural and educational terms. Im thinking here of the
expressive theories promulgated by Collingwood and Worringer, and
the expressive aesthetics exemplified in the ideas and practices of
artists such as Klee, Kandinsky, Munch and Pollock. At the centre of
expressive aesthetics lies the belief that the purpose of art is to express
emotion as directly as possible, to transfer emotional feeling in all its
purity and intensity from artist to audience via the artwork. Whether
this is possible and how we could know if the expressive transfer had
taken place are questions that immediately arise. Although this is not
the place to explore these issues, we can note that despite the central-
ity of expressive aesthetics to modernist practices and the subjectivist
legacy they bequeath to contemporary culture, such theories and
practices are problematic and should not be left unchallenged.
Although the visual arts do undoubtedly have a role to play in the
expression of feeling, many expressive theories tend both to neglect
other means of representing feelings and emotions, and also tend to
confirm the preconceptions of many academics that the visual arts are
marginal to the mainstream of education.
In order to counteract the distortions brought about by this situation it

is useful to think of the visual arts not primarily as forms of expres-
sion but as forms of knowledge (and artists as formulators of knowl-
edge) alongside literature, science, music and philosophy. This
provides a more inclusive way of categorising and thinking about art
and, at the same time, a return to a way of describing the visual arts
that was prevalent prior to the early decades of the 20th century.
In earlier centuries artists were seen as contributing to the whole

spectrum of human knowledge by picturing human and non-human
The knowing body 19
spheres of existence in iconic, indexical and symbolic images. Artists

produced visual and spatial narratives that were modes of analysing
and describing the world - showing us different aspects of the world,
how human beings are in the world, what we do and how we think and
feel about ourselves and the world about us. The obsession with
expressing emotion that characterised much of the art produced from
late eighteenth century romanticism, through to the many forms of
twentieth century expressionism, was closely associated with the
development of modernism and its excessive emphasis on subjectiv-
ism, individualism and the almost pathological cult of genius. This
narrowing of the parameters of artistic activity (at least within the
avant-garde echelons of high-art) was both extreme and relatively
short-lived. Since the 1960s, the expressive/self-expressive aesthetic,
although still operational (particularly in popular perceptions of art
and the artist), has become only one of many ideas, methods and
practices that compete within the cultures of postmodernism.
*
What do we mean by knowing and knowledge?
The terms know and knowledge have a complex etymological history.
Two distinct roots can be traced: to know by the senses; and to know
by the mind - from which at least three meanings developed:
Firstly - to recognise; to identify; to be able to distinguish
(one thing) from (another);
Secondly - to be acquainted with (a thing, a place or person);
to be familiar with; to have personal experience of (some-
thing); and,
Thirdly - to learn through observation, information or inquiry;
to find out; to be conversant with through study or practice; to
acquire skill in; to have a clear or distinct perception of.
Knowledge, also refers to a branch of learning; a science; or, an art.
It is self-evident that these definitions accurately describe many of the
diverse functions of drawing, painting, sculpture or other visual
constructs, and suggest a much more comprehensive view of their
significance.
*
20 The knowing body
Being, knowing and embodiment

These commonly accepted definitions and usages are couched in very
general terms, however we need to establish a more precise concep-
tual framework within which our understanding of knowledge can be
located, shedding light on the processes by which we gain knowledge
in everyday experience and through the making of, and engagement
with, the visual arts.
At the outset we have to establish a location for the processes of

coming to knowledge - an existential and physiological context
without which knowledge, consciousness and being are mere abstrac-
tions.
If we are not to perpetuate the mind/body dualism which has charac-

terised and bedevilled Western philosophy for many centuries, indeed
if we are not to amputate the mind from the body, we have to begin by
recognising that the primary site of each mind is a particular finite
corporeal body. A secondary site could be identified in the form of the
many constructs, messages and markers which the mind/body exter-
nalises and presents to others - all human production could be said to
constitute this secondary site - a body outside - a shadow of the
primary site. This corporeal body is the locus of the mind's operations,
providing its sustenance, systemic foundation and contact with the
world. The concept of the disembodied subject/mind reduces the
subject/mind to a fantasy, a rather implausible ghost or abstraction.
It is important therefore to think in more holistic terms, to see the

embodied subject/mind in interrelationship with other embodied
subjects. It is also important to acknowledge that though we can speak
of the mind and body as separate entities, we ought never to make the
mistake of believing they are anything other than integrated systems,
operationally active only together - mutually sustaining, validating
and energising.
It follows that philosophically we need to stress the way in which

epistemology and ontology are interwoven, that our knowledge is
acquired through our being-in-the-world, or as Paul Crowther (1993:
41) writes, describing Merleau-Ponty's view, our knowledge of the
world is gained through our body's exploration of the world.
The knowing body 21
*
The knowing body
Knowledge is rooted in our needs and intentions, and in our responses
to the situations in which we find ourselves. As we negotiate and learn
to handle the world we assimilate and construct a body of knowledge
which informs our attitudes and actions. The primary site of knowl-
edge is within the purposive consciousness which inhabits, or, more
correctly, is embodied as a particular physiological entity (my body:
your body). Knowledge is externalised in a secondary site comprising
the products of human learning - the constructs, messages and markers
referred to earlier. Included in this externalisation are the bodies of
knowledge which constitute the visual arts - paintings, sculpture,
films, photographs, installations and performances.
Knowledge can be described as referring to two or three spheres of

experience:
knowledge of the world;
knowledge of oneself; and
knowledge of a transcendent, transpersonal or ultimate reality
- God or the Ground of Being in Christian mysticism, Brah-
man in Hinduism, or sunyata in Buddhist terminology.
The latter perhaps having meaning for only a minority in our secular
and materialistic Western culture, but certainly of great importance to
many in the past and from other cultures.
The maxim of Aristotle that, there is nothing in the mind that was not
first in the senses, bears witness to the longevity of the view that all
knowledge, ultimately, is afforded by the mediation of the senses - the
embodiment of perception. However, it could be argued that a number
of distinct categories of experience are involved, each qualitatively
different to the others. For example:
the senses (perception);
the mind (rational and discursive thought);
22 The knowing body
the spirit (the eye with which we look at God, and the eye
with which God looks at us) - all of which are integrated, uni-
fied and interdependent.
Intuition could be placed in either, or both, of the mind or spirit

categories dependent upon the conceptual and cultural frameworks
being applied.
*
Coming to know - the senses
We come to know about the world through our perceptions of it -
through the butterfly net of the senses. This process can be described
either with reference to the classical five senses (sight, touch, hearing,
taste, smell) or to the more sophisticated models proposed by percep-
tual psychologists and neurologists. James Gibson (1968) suggests a
model in which the senses are described as five interdependent
perceptual systems:
Basic orienting system: the inner ear - specifying the direction
of gravity and the beginning and ending of body movement;
Auditory system: vibrations of air on the ear drum, specifying
the nature and direction of auditory events;
Haptic system: receptors in tissues and joints, specifying pos-
ture and movements of limbs and muscles, and touch at the
surface of the skin;
Olfactory system: taste and smell working together;
Visual system: specifying the structure of ambient light.
All these systems overlap and interact to provide as much information
as possible. Gibson stresses that this is an information-based network,
rather than sensation-based. Pliny, writing in the 1st Century AD,
would no doubt have agreed with him, for he describes the mind as
the real instrument of sight and observation. (in Gombrich 1977: 12)
The senses provide information to the brain which is already partially
ordered, selected and interpreted - rather than indecipherable masses
of raw sensory data. The basic orienting system and the haptic system
are particularly important in proprioception - the body's awareness of
The knowing body 23
itself - while the auditory, olfactory and visual systems are important
in exteroception - awareness of the external environment.
It is important to note that even in Gibsons systems view of percep-

tion there is a tendency to separate the perceiving subject from the
objects of perception. The perceptual systems are viewed as interac-
tive and interdependent but the relationship between these embodied
systems and the ambient world appears estranged. Gibson stresses the
need to consider the senses as active interdependent systems of
enquiry, concerned with finding out, investigating, exploring, sorting
and making sense.
Bronowski (1988: 364) writes:
The world is not a fixed, solid array of objects, out there, for it cannot be
fully separated from our perception of it. It shifts under our gaze, it interacts
with us, and the knowledge that it yields has to be interpreted by us.
According to Crowther, (1993: 41) Merleau-Ponty argues that our

fundamental contact with things arises from a practical synthesis -
from our handling them, looking at them, using them.
Crowther (ibid: 42) summarises Merleau-Ponty's theory of perception

in the following terms:
The body articulates the world into meanings by grasping it through the in-
tegrated operation of the senses, and relating what is thus grasped to its past
and future life. In this sense perception is creative.
Capra (1992:124) makes reference to the ideas of the neurologists,

Maturana and Varela, that, the world is brought forth in the process
of knowing. They believe that all doing is knowing, and all knowing
is doing. They argue, like Merleau-Ponty, that knowing is an activity,
a process, a participation, an encounter, a relating to. The dividing line
between perceptual activity and mental activity is shifting and ill-
defined, and the subject of much scientific debate. However, it does
seem that perception itself has selecting, categorising and unifying
functions. Analysis, evaluation and synthesis appear to take place to
some extent at the origin of input. The mind and its functions repre-
24 The knowing body
sent further levels of refinement and interpretation of perceptual

information, and new stages of evaluation, decision-making and
storage. Perception, memory, thinking and doing all contribute to the
prospective and speculative activity of coming to know the world -
exemplified in the arts as well as the sciences.
Similarly these factors are all utilised in knowing oneself - but it is

important to remember that the classical senses must be extended to
include proprioceptive systems such as the haptic and basic orienting
systems.
Coming to know God or acquiring knowledge of a reality immanent

within, or beyond, the veil of appearances which is our everyday
reality, is a process too complex and contentious to enter into here -
but suffice it to say that many would argue that it is possible - once
more through the medium of the senses and the powers of the mind,
coupled with divine grace, faith and a contemplative giving-up or
dissolution of the ego (to use Christian terminology).
*
Perception, memory, connectivity & consciousness: Edelman &
Ramachandran
Id like to jump from a consideration of perceptual and cognitive
systems to a brief discussion of ideas put forward by neuroscientists
like Gerald Edelman and Vilayanur Ramachandran, as they add
another dimension to our understanding of the ways in which our
embodied minds function. Edelman and Tononi, (2000) distinguish
between two kinds of consciousness: primary consciousness and
higher-order consciousness. The development of primary con-
sciousness in humans and some other animals involves an evolution-
ary shift that enables these animals to remember the common features
of a variety of percepts, in order to construct what Edelman refers to
as a concept. It is the ability to hold a concept of this kind in the
mind that enables an animal to learn from its experiences and to
modify its behaviour accordingly (for instance, to recognise percep-
tual cues, previously encountered, that signal danger, and thus to
take avoiding action). As Edelman and Tononi (2000: 109) state, The
ability to construct a conscious scene is the ability to construct, within
fractions of seconds, a remembered present. This, they argue, is one
The knowing body 25
of the defining characteristics of emerging consciousness. If evolu-

tionary selection adds to this important characteristic, the ability to
codify and share perceptual data and memories through the use of
language, of whatever kind, then higher-order consciousness has been
established. Edelman and Tononi provide detailed evidence to support
the very crude outline Ive given here. They argue that
when narrative capabilities emerged and affected linguistic and conceptual

memory, higher-order consciousness could foster the development of con-
cepts of the past and future related to that self and to others. At such a point,
an individual is freed, to some extent, from bondage to the remembered pre-
sent. (ibid: 195)
A vast new realm of possibilities opens up. The ability to experience

the present in relation to past and future enables the individual (and
maybe it is at this evolutionary stage that an individual develops the
potential to recognise its individuality) to plan, to imagine different
futures for itself, to categorise and discriminate with great sophistica-
tion and subtlety compared to a creature with primary consciousness.
Concepts and thinking flourish, and emotions, beliefs and desires
arise out of the enormously increased complexity of activity within the
brain. (ibid: 204) In this rudimentary account of the evolution of
consciousness we have reached a kind of consciousness that we
recognise as like our own. Edelman and Tononi refer to this state as
the incomparable richness of being: the complexity and informative-
ness of conscious experience. (ibid: 29)
Ramachandran (2003) approaches the development of language and

thought from a different perspective. He describes one important
element in the development of higher-order consciousness in terms of
what he calls, cross-modal abstraction, an ability associated with
particular neurological functions in the brain. The capacity of the
brain to abstract common denominators from a profusion of sensory
inputs lies at the heart of the whole process by which language and
thought arise. Ramachandran argues, eloquently, that underlying the
linguistic ability to use metaphor to relate the common features of two
apparently very different kinds of entities (for instance, the world
and a stage), lies the ability to recognise a common characteristic of,
on the one hand, a shape, and on the other, a vocal sound. As an
example of this kind of cross-modal abstraction he describes an
26 The knowing body
experiment in which respondents are presented with two shapes: one,

an irregular curvilinear form; the other, a sharp-angled form. The
respondents are asked which shape is booba and which is kiki. 95-
98 per cent pick the curvilinear form as booba and the sharp-angled
form as kiki. This is true even with respondents who are non-
English speakers. The effect demonstrates the brains ability to
engage in cross-modal abstraction of properties such as jaggedness or
curviness. (Ramachandran 2003: 84)
*
Subject and object as unified system or field
If we examine the writings of phenomenologists (particularly Mer-
leau-Ponty), Gestalt theorists, psychologists of perception like James
Gibson, neuroscientists like Edelman and Ramachandran, philoso-
phers of science like Kuhn and Capra, and a number of Buddhist
thinkers some similar attitudes are evident. For instance:
an emphasis upon a holistic 'systems' view;
a stress upon interactive interdependence (eg. of subject and
object, or different perceptual systems); and
an emphasis upon process.
When we look at perception we can see how these attitudes affect
understanding of the relationship between subject and object, per-
ceiver and perceived. While Gibson formulates a systems view based
upon five perceptual systems, we could go further and argue that the
primary system involved is that which integrates subject and object,
observer and observed - the energised, activated relationship between
perceiver and perceived needs to be considered as the primary system.
Linguistically we can divide this systemic relationship into subject
and object, me and the world, but in reality they are indivisible.
Perception, mind and consciousness are functions of the interaction

and fluctuating tension between body and world - in a sense they are
the skin, the surface belonging as much to the environment as to the
individual. Just as quantum physics illuminates the interactive
processes between apparently separate subatomic particles or events -
teaching us that the distinctions and divisions we make are to some
extent arbitrary and always conditional- so the experience of percep-
The knowing body 27
tion, of coming-to-know our world, also presents us with the basic

features of interconnection and indivisibility.
David Bohm, (1989: 55) the quantum physicist, writes:

We suggest that there is indeed a meaning to a reality that lies outside our-
selves but that it is necessary that we, too, should be included in an essential
way as participators in this reality. Our knowledge of the universe is derived
from this act of participation.
The observer is always part of the observation. To put this another
way: I look out at the world through a part of the world. The world
looks at a part of itself. I am part of the world's perception of itself.
Or: we gain knowledge of the world, of what is, through our implica-
tion in the world, through our assimilation into the world. In a sense
we are the consciousness of the world, of what is.
*
Knowledge and networks
Capra and others have pointed to the network as an important
diagrammatic icon of the new thinking in science; it is also significant
in relation to our understanding of knowledge and the visual arts.
Capra argues that as we perceive reality as a network of relationships,
our descriptions, too, form an interconnected network representing the
observed phenomena. In such a network there will be neither hierar-
chies nor foundations. (see Capra 1992: 133)
This sounds like a prospectus for postmodernism! The network, as a
whole, constitutes a multifaceted, multivalent and ever-changing body
of learning, description and interpretation. Any part of it, taken in
isolation (be it scientific theory or body of artworks), provides a
limited and approximate viewpoint - which is all any of us (individual,
group, institution or class), can propose. The notion of some kind of
objective certainty, or of a holy grail of ultimate truth, sought by many
and found by only a privileged few, can be seen as a potentially
dangerous misconception, or an irrelevant fantasy.
28 The knowing body
*
Achieving coherence and making sense
All knowing involves the utilisation of processes of selection, evalua-
tion, analysis and synthesis. It is obvious that these characteristics of
coming-to-know, of ordering and making sense, of achieving coher-
ence, are as typical of the arts as of the sciences. And while music
may be questioned as a way of knowing about the world this is no
more debatable than the case of pure mathematics. Both certainly
generate constructs which model or represent states of coherence or
relative incoherence. And in the case of music many have argued that
it also models in a programmatic or impressionistic manner states of
mind. Liebniz suggests a provocative analogy between numbers and
music: The pleasure we obtain from music comes from counting, but
counting unconsciously. Music is nothing but unconscious arithme-
tic. (in Sacks 1985: 195)
All knowing also involves the construction of propositions, models

and schema which are functionally related to our activities in the
world, and which are in a continuous process of modification and
revision. The repository of propositions and models which is a culture,
is only a reflection of that repository of propositions and models
which is an individual mind.
The organisation of material into a pictorial construct or system of

visual signs (for instance, a painting or sculpture) is analogous to the
process of ordering sensations and experience through the perceptual
systems and the mind. There is also a close analogy between the
process of making a visual construct and a view of learning as a self-
transcendent project fundamental to life. Fritjof Capra (1990: 309)
relates learning to biological development and evolution:
Living organisms have an inherent potential for reaching out beyond them-
selves to create new structures and new patterns of behaviour. This creative
reaching out into novelty, which in time leads to an ordered unfolding of
complexity, seems to be a fundamental property of life.
The speculative nature of learning, taking risks in order to enter new

states of knowledge, is also a primary feature of the making of art -
both in relation to the minutiae of handling materials, (for instance:
The knowing body 29
modulating colour across a surface; modelling a form in clay; or

finding the right marks for a passage of drawing), and in relation to
the development of ideas or a philosophy of practice.
The cognitive, perceptual, affective and performative qualities

required to make a coherent and significant visual construct, are as
profound, as diverse and as subtle, as those required in any other
branch of learning.
*
What kinds of knowledge do we find embodied in visual con-
structs?
If the visual arts constitute bodies of knowledge, what kinds of
knowledge do we find in them? A brief list may indicate some of the
variety and scope evident in even a cursory examination (these fields
of knowledge are not mutually exclusive and are likely to coexist in
the work of a particular artist).
Specific sensory information about the visible world

Artists provide sensory information about the visible world in terms of
colour, tonal values, surface texture, qualities of light and atmosphere.
For example, Constable's empirical approach - encapsulated in his
well-known statement:
Painting is a science, and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of

nature. Why, then, may not landscape painting be considered as a branch of
natural philosophy, of which pictures are but the experiments? (in Gombrich
1977: 29)
Eugene Fromentin, writing about Jacob Ruisdael, describes the way in
which Ruisdael gathers and represents information about the natural
world, especially the sky: He curves and spreads it, measures it,
determines its value in relation to the variations of light on the
terrestrial horizon. Fromentin also mentions Ruisdael's circular field
of vision, the painter's grand eye open to everything that lives. (in
Alpers 1983: 29)
Svetlana Alpers (1983: 122) writes of Dutch painting in the 17th

Century:
30 The knowing body
The aim of Dutch painters was to capture on a surface a great range of

knowledge and information about the world. They too employed words with
their images. Like the mappers, they made additive works that could not be
taken in from a single viewing point. Theirs was not a window on the Italian
model of art hut rather, like a map, a surface on which is laid out an assem-
blage of the world.
Specific structural information about the visible world

This kind of knowledge is the product of analytical enquiry and
observation, and is concerned with understanding the patterns and
structures which underpin the world of appearances. Work in this
category tends to present us with systems and essences and is con-
cerned with taxonomy as much as description. For instance, the
mathematical, geological and anatomical knowledge developed and
stored in landscape and figure paintings, sculptures and drawings from
the late 15th century onwards. The anatomical drawings of Leonardo,
and Stubbs' drawings and paintings of horses are obvious examples,
but a comprehensive listing would be vast and would have to include
the work of Cezanne and the earlier work of Mondrian, as well as
sculptors as varied as Michelangelo and Degas.
Ruskin expressed a view similar to Constable's notion of art as a

branch of natural philosophy, however he encouraged artists to
develop an acuity of perception which would identify the inner
structural properties of the natural world, rather than the surface detail.
(discussed in depth in Walton 1972)
Systematic two-dimensional models of three-dimensional space

Knowledge of this kind includes the countless forms of perspective
and projective systems (Eastern and Western), and the modelling of
solids. The visual arts share this epistemological territory with
mathematics and geometry. The ideas and drawings of Piero della
Francesca and Brunelleschi can be considered alongside Pythagorus
and Euclid as ways of formulating systematic diagrammatic models of
three-dimensional space.
Three-dimensional analyses of the interaction between volumes,

materials and mass in space
Although the European traditions of sculpture between the gothic and
modern periods seem predisposed to descriptive realism (which places
The knowing body 31
more emphasis upon ocular veracity than tactile truth), all sculpture to
some extent models the operation and experience of the haptic and
basic orienting systems, affirming our experience of corporeal weight
within a gravitational field - a celebration and analysis of embodi-
ment. Examples include works as varied as, Michelangelos David,
Rodins Burghers of Calais, de Koonings Clam Digger, Caros
Early One Morning, Rachel Whitereads House, as well as ancestor
stools produced in Ghana and Inuit shamanic masks.
Representations of subjective human experience

Knowledge acquired through reflection and speculation about what it
feels like to be a certain person in a certain place at a certain time -
encompassing psychological, existential and spiritual domains. This
includes ontological knowledge encoded, enacted and interrogated in
a huge variety of works produced by artists as dissimilar as Rem-
brandt (the self-portraits), Van Gogh, Francis Bacon, Bill Viola, Frank
Auerbach, Giacometti, Helen Chadwick or Cindy Sherman.
Presentations of what might be the case, what might happen or

has happened
The speculative domain of the imagination - of visual fictions, fables,
prophecy and historical reconstruction. Examples range from the work
of Titian, Rubens and Blake to Dali, Joel Peter Witkin, Clifford
Possum Tjapaltjarri and Paula Reago.
The latter two categories tend to present knowledge of ourselves, as

against knowledge of the world.
Presentations of the thing-in-itself or objecthood

There is also a category of art production characterised by its explic-
itly non-representational intent. The work of artists who aim to assert
the objectness of the object, the presence of the concrete, material
substance of the world. The art of the real - as manifested in certain
minimalist/process artists. This could be seen as constituting an
attempt to generate situations in which we gain unmediated direct
knowledge of the world, of what is - though many would argue that
this is impossible. Examples include minimalist works produced by
Don Judd, Richard Serra, Carl Andre. The sacred Kaaba in Mecca
32 The knowing body
could be seen as another example within the non-representational

framework of Islamic art. The famous Japanese temple rock garden of
Ryoanji or the one-stroke ink drawings of Nantenbo, can also be seen
as a manifestation of tathata or suchness, a showing of that which is
within a Buddhist context.
*
Art and science: concrete and abstract
Of course the visual arts, in the main, present knowledge in concrete
forms (indices of the body and its operations), through physically
insistent materials and processes, which are themselves functionally
linked to the maker, and the processes of manufacture. The knowledge
developed by the unified, interactive field of body/mind/environment
is itself embodied in artefacts and processes which are themselves part
of the interactive networks which constitute their context, site and
audience - a system or field of relationships.
Although Ive been arguing for a high degree of congruence between

the visual arts and the sciences it is also worth considering one or two
points of potential difference.
Science aims at a level of abstraction in its knowledge, a position in

which generalisations are possible, beyond and above the level of
specific cases. Science aims in some way towards theories which are
applicable, if not universally, then at least to as wide a range of cases
and situations as possible. The tendency (the danger if you like) is
towards disembodied knowledge, whereas we could say (in polarising
the possibilities) that the tendency in the visual arts is towards over-
embodied knowledge, that is hyperspecificity a situation in which
knowledge obtains, or is present, only in that particular ob-
ject/situation/case, and has no applicability, relevance or even accessi-
bility to other individuals or situations. This is the extreme subjectiv-
ity scenario in which highly subjective content has, and can have, no
cognitive significance to anyone else, perhaps because it is encoded
and enclosed in an arcane or private field of gravity, which, like a
black hole, might draw in but not radiate energy (in this case illumina-
tion or knowledge). Of course this degree of collapsing or imploding
subjectivity could be argued as an absence of any cognitive dimension
The knowing body 33
at all, on the basis that knowledge which can only be known by one
person (the artist/maker), cannot by definition be verified or recog-
nised as knowledge by anyone else. This would constitute a closed
system - which many would argue is the case with some kinds of
artefacts and processes, which deny access by virtue of their hyper-
subjectivity.
*
Knowledge, modernism and postmodernism
The way in which knowledge is described, categorised and formulated
has changed radically over the past century. Most recently this shift
can be seen in terms of the modernist/postmodernist divide.
Increasingly our study of knowledge is feeling the impact of holistic,

systems-based thinking evident in the sciences, and increasingly in the
arts. Modes of organisation, process and relationship have become the
focus of attention and enquiry. Fields of energy, indeterminacy,
dynamic interaction and interdependence are now emphasised and
valued, while the more deterministic emphasis upon establishing laws
and certainties governing inert solids and substances has been ques-
tioned and found to be unsatisfactory. The paradigm shift (if that is
what it is) from a Newtonian mechanistic, atomistic worldview, to a
worldview grounded in systems and process thinking, is evident in the
ways in which we engage with knowledge, and in the cultural mor-
phology of postmodernism.
This shift in the way knowledge and learning are viewed, constitutes a
move from a kind of epistemological absolutism to one of contingency
and relativity. In the former there is a relatively clear sense of what is
established, fixed, orthodox, and, by implication, true, as regards
bodies of knowledge and the objects of knowledge. In the new
scenario contingency, approximation and limitation are seen as
necessary conditions of any viewpoint or position. No single position
can be seen as holding a monopoly of truth, indeed diverse and
multiple viewpoints are affirmed and valued.
The modernist approach can be described as being essentially linear

and oriented about a vertical axis. Emphasis is placed upon achieving
understanding through a progressive development which is essentially
34 The knowing body
teleological and compartmentalised. There is a movement towards an

accretive accumulation of information and knowledge.
On the other hand the postmodernist approach tends to be non-linear,

or multi-linear, oriented about a lateral axis, emphasising connection,
relationship, interdependence and complexity. The web of energies
and relationships which characterises the world of nature is reflected
in the multifaceted and perspectival character of human understand-
ing. (See Part 10 for more on perspectivism). Knowledge is always
conditioned by the location, purpose and outlook of the knowing
subject. The process of knowing is essentially interpretative, never
absolute.
*
Summing up
In this survey of some of the issues and ideas about knowledge,
interpretation and the visual arts I have suggested that the cognitive
function of art parallels that of the sciences. I have identified some of
the ways in which the visual arts present us with embodiments of
knowledge in the form of processes and artefacts. We have seen how
this knowledge is the product of human participation in the world
through the medium of the body and its processes. We also recognised
how knowledge is inherently perspectival, an interpretation arising
from our participation in the world. This acknowledgement of the
interpretative basis for our knowledge, embodied in artefacts and pro-
cesses, led us to recognise the importance of integration and coher-
ence in the way we make sense of the world and in the way we make
art. Finally we have seen, I hope, how the integrative nature of the
models, constructs and processes manifested in the visual arts pro-
motes a re-integration in the observer - a reformulation of experience,
a re-constitution of the self and a re-interpretation of what is. Perhaps
we can also see the way in which all observers, that is all of us, are
participants, spiders if you like, spinning the web of interpretations
which constitutes culture.
***
Part 3
Interrogating appearances:
being, seeing & showing
A few years ago I was reflecting on Carel Fabritius painting, The

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

a taut smudged form
turns bluntly towards
a painters eyes.
38 Interrogating appearances
*
Introduction
In this section I examine some of the preconceptions and assumptions
attached to the practices of observationally-based drawing and
painting. My intention is to shed a fresh light on an ancient practice
that of representing the world of appearances (and disappearances)
and to challenge the notion that this is a relatively simple business of
reproducing whats out there. Questions are raised about the idea
that this involves a relationship of separation, division or dualism. In
considering the ontological and epistemological implications of
observationally-based art practices I also explore some of the relation-
ships between art practice and experience, and between theory and
practice. Existential, phenomenological and Buddhist viewpoints are
interwoven with strands of postmodern poetics. It is axiomatic to this
discussion that the art works being considered present us with iconic
and indexical signs of being, and constitute a topography of mind.
It would be reasonable to interpret what Im saying as suggesting that

there is still a lot of unfinished business in the field of observational
drawing and painting. That it is still a viable practice in the early
twenty-first century and is unlikely to be totally eclipsed by digital
technologies or conceptualist ideologies. Indeed the more we learn
about neurology, perception and consciousness the more interesting
and relevant these modes of manual representation become.
*
Observational realism - the pursuit of likeness
Standing in the margins of the modern/postmodern mainstream, and in
a sense oppositional to it, lie a range of practices, disciplines, ideas
and images which maintain and revitalise a distinctively European
tradition of observational realism an engagement with the world that
presents us with iconic and indexical signs of being.
Central to this realist tradition, or traditions (for there are many

distinctly different approaches at work here), lie three important
beliefs: one, the paramount value of lived experience; two, the need to
acknowledge and encounter a reality outside the self which is resistant
to our own actions and ideas, and which poses both a challenge and a
support to human existence; and three, a desire to interrogate and
Interrogating appearances 39
celebrate the appearance of that reality as it is mediated through

experience, through the interdependent processes of perception,
cognition, intuition and action.
In the traditions of observational realism, the pursuit, or construction,

of the real, perception is a multi-dimensional activity - a creative
process of doing, making and interpreting. It is also an integral part of
the process of becoming, the unfolding of identity and the construc-
tion of self. Realism, at least since the time of Cezanne, has been
concerned with analysing and celebrating the flow of perceptual
experience in all its complexity and evanescence. Painters like
Cezanne, Giacometti, Coldstream, Lopez-Garcia and Auerbach are
engaged in scrutinising the subtle micro-processes of becoming as
they are revealed in our perceptual negotiations with the world, with
the other. The activity of drawing and painting from observation is
both a process of deciphering and re-presenting, and, more fundamen-
tally, a participatory process of bringing the world to consciousness.
In a sense these artists draw the world into being. They negotiate with
the stuff of the world to determine what is and how it is. In doing this
they maintain an openness to whats real and outside, the materiality
of existing things.
In this kind of practice the subjective being of the artist encounters the
otherness which enfolds and permeates our subjectivity. The reciproc-
ity of self and other, and the mutuality of observer and observed, add
complexity to the business of trying to make a likeness - the real is
not a given, an absolute unchanging realm, it is instead the mutual co-
arising of perceiver and perceived in the activity of perception.
*
The popular vocabulary used to discuss observational drawing
and painting
When we attempt to observe and represent the world we experience a
situation full of contradictions, ambiguities and complexities. We tend
to recognise the world as something apart from us. We divorce seeing
from our other sensory functions, and we tend to separate our percep-
tions from our thinking processes. These tendencies mask or obscure
our actual condition which is that we are in, and of, the world
participants rather than spectators.
All artists who draw and paint from life, who attempt to represent
what they perceive through the manual application of pigment on a
relatively flat surface, have to confront these complexities.
The vocabulary that is often used to discuss observational or realist

practices is indicative of how such practices are conceptualised by
both practitioners and the general public. Typically we talk in terms of
a person painting or drawing directly from observation, painting
what they see, working from life, depicting the world of appear-
ances, or, maybe, empirically constructing a representation of their
immediate visual field. Such practitioners are seen as exponents of a
long and historically significant tradition of descriptive, realist or
retinal painting, which may now be in its death throes a guttering
candle of out-dated orthodoxy whipped by the winds of modern and
postmodern culture.
According to this well-established view the painter produces a

resemblance or likeness of the object of his or her vision, an illusion
of substance, space, volume, surface and light. An art of mimesis or
imitation. A mirror held up to nature. A window on the world. In C.S.
Peirces terms, an iconic image. The painter constructing a convincing
reproduction of something seen, or a cunning deception, reminding us
of what its like to view the world with one eye closed and ones head
held in a vice!
In these popular views of realist painting there is a clear distinction

between observer and observed, the seeing subject and the object of
sight. The painter as spectator makes a representation of external
reality, a reality outside, beyond, at a distance. Truth is a function of
the faithfulness of the correspondence between the representation and
that which is represented. In philosophical terms this constitutes a
picture theory of truth, and a realist theory of perception.
These terms present us with an over-simplified and misleading

description of what have always been complex, ambiguous and
problematic processes - the processes of perception, cognition, and
their constant symbiotic companion, the process of representation.
*
A participatory view of observation and representation in paint-
ing a practitioners viewpoint
For the painter these processes of perception, cognition and represen-
tation are participatory and improvisatory. As I look back at notes
made as I worked at observational drawing and painting I am con-
fronted with a personal history of the problematics of representation.
They remind me how complex are these activities and how difficult it
is to represent perceptual experiences and to engage in a discourse that
does justice to the complexity.
Here are some extracts from my working notes:
How can we separate what we perceive from what we know - the perceptual
from the cognitive? To pretend that the eye can be somehow divided from
the mind is nonsense!
Some days I gaze and see only the strangeness of the thing-in-itself, forever
out there, ungraspable and inviolate. An encounter with the web of appear-
ances spun by our spidery minds - a web which is a function of our relation-
ship with the world but which is also a screen behind which the world dis-
plays itself to itself! Maybe there are moments when that screen can be gen-
tly nudged to one side, like a curtain in a faint breeze, and then we can en-
counter the splendour of what IS - Tathata - suchness.
What is the threshold of discernibility, the point of recognition, the moment

at which we grasp what a thing is?
Where is the subject/object divide, the discontinuity between me and what I

observe? We have the sensation of looking, the visual-spatial-perceptual-
cognitive field is activated, the territory of enquiry resonates - and maybe
it's my volition which activates it, my desire to find, make sense, relate
to.... but, it feels as if there is a unified relational field within which my ac-
tions, thoughts and feelings are embedded - part of the countless shifting re-
lationships, interactions and probabilities which make up an indeterminate
universe of possibilities (of which the I we refer to, is just one set or com-
bination).
The painter is involved in a dynamic contemplation of an object, a question-

ing of its existence, status, materiality - its presence in the space - a space
which we also occupy and move through, see through and are sustained by.
It's the complexity of the experience that's so engaging: you're in a space,

surrounded by it (a room). You're trying to make sense of a part of that
space, but you can't separate it from its surroundings (which are your sur-
roundings). The visual field constitutes one set of data, but its the interac-
tive system of the whole sensory/cognitive field which you're experiencing
and analysing. And all of this is still only part of a larger process which in-
cludes the way in which the experience and analysis are embodied, through
the apparatus of representation, into a painting which both challenges, de-
lights and informs the viewer - causing the viewer's perceptual/cognitive
systems to resonate with the codes and signals and contours of the painting -
thus becoming themselves participants.
What I see is itself a representation, a retinal image, an excitation of the

cerebral cortex. When I draw Im trying to make a culturally viable repre-
sentation of a selective array of infinite possible representations within the
chemical factory that is my brain. From second to second, minute to minute,
I am a shimmering transcriber of changing sensations, pulses of light, ambi-
ent sounds, bodily movements and touches. And what emerges from these
chemical, biological and cultural interactions? Smudges of dust on a pale
surface!
These notes suggest both the complexity of the process of drawing

and painting from direct observation and the problems attached to
adopting an overly dualistic or binary approach to the interface
between subject and object. As I perceive the object before me I
become aware of the mutuality of perception, the interdependence of
subject and object. The hand holding the charcoal, the marks appear-
ing on the paper and the objects of perception inhabit a shared spatial
field - they are functions of the seamless reciprocity between the
interwoven energy fields which constitute this small part of the world.
The drawing being made is an analogical and indexical trace of my
mindbody negotiating, handling and participating in the world - a
world which is profoundly other on the level of material, biological
and chemical structure, but simultaneously a part of the cogni-
tive/perceptual field (me) at the levels of subatomic and neurologi-
cal fields of energy.
I seem to remember reading that Cezanne once said: man is a

shimmering chaos, and we are - a shimmering chaos in an infinity of
chaos or multi-dimensional complexity - which is all that there is. The
philosopher, Bryan Magee, adds his own observation on the theme of
mutuality of being: We are beings in amongst and inseparable from a
world of being, existences in an existing world, and it is from there
that we start. (1987: 258)
You could say every observational painting poses a question, rather

than makes a statement. Is this how it was? Is this what was seen or
thought or felt? Is this what actually happened? The painting
becomes a laboratory in which appearances are interrogated. The
practice of the painter involves a doubting intensity of looking, such
that the common-place becomes extraordinary and familiarity is
inhabited by strangeness.
Another layer of complexity that arises in considering these matters is

the false distinction that is often made between drawing from direct
perception and drawing from memory. In a later section well see how
difficult it is to separate these concepts, prompting a leading neurosci-
entist, Gerald Edelman (2000: 107-110), to use the term the remem-
bered present as a more precise and accurate description of how
memory is implicated in perception and cognition. (see Part 2)
*
Observational painting as enquiry into the real, resistant &
experienced world
In our experience of things-in-the-world we seem to encounter
volume, solidity, materiality, substance yet the appearance of
substance is deceptive when looked at through three different lenses.
Firstly, through our perceptual experience we discover that the object
is not a static stable entity but a dynamic part of a continually chang-
ing field of perceptual and interpretative activity. Secondly, through
our cognitive processes, particularly scientific modes of enquiry, we
encounter at the sub-atomic and quantum levels a world of interpene-
trating energies and forces. Thirdly, in considering our existential
condition we find our own identity or self to be anything but a fixed,
finite, object-like construction rather it is a matrix of at times
contradictory moods, feelings, thoughts, processes which somehow
cohere but are open to continual revision and transformation as we
negotiate changing circumstances and conditions. Our position as
observer is more transparent, indeterminate and inseparable from what
we observe than might at first be assumed.
Thus objects are events or fields of relationships, transactions

between observer and observed. They have no enduring substance or
self-identity, no permanent essence. They are relative, impermanent,
and ever-changing. And observational paintings present us with iconic

and indexical images which are the products of an engagement with
these event fields.
Robert Hughes (1990: 214), describing the coded morphology of

Auerbachs paintings, writes:
the clear purpose [] is to clarify Auerbachs struggle, not to express him-

self, but to define the terms of his relations to the real, resistant and experi-
enced world: which is what art must do [] if it is to be more than chatter.
Some of the above ideas about painting and drawing from observation
can be linked to ideas about experience, thought, perception and
notions of the real put forward by a number of poets from the 1960s
onwards. In exploring their ideas we can see, from another angle,
more of the complexities and paradoxes that surround our relation-
ships with the world - our entanglement in the unfolding mystery of
being with other beings in amongst the fabric of things. We share our
existence with beings who have purposes, needs and corporeal
presences that are not ours, and we exist in a world that has a pro-
found disinterest in our presence and an enduring materiality that is
both our habitat and spatial/temporal reference. Engaging with this
materiality gives rise to questions about reality and otherness, how we
experience and how we represent or express changing fields of
consciousness.
Art sheds light on the multi-facetted revolving dancehall globe which

is human experience and projects its infinite reflections (which are
poems, pictures, drawings, songs). It urges us to look here, listen to
this, feel the texture. Attend and learn what it is like to be human,
alive to so much. And as the mirrored globe rotates we are turned and
re-orientated and re-established. Some kind of dissembling and re-
assembling takes place. We are continually revising who we are, how
we are and what we do. We re-invent ourselves in the world, find our
engagement renewed, our being deepened and magnified.
Art, in these kinds of painting and poetry, acknowledges this revisabil-

ity and is an important agent of the process of self-constitution, a
process of bringing together, integrating and making coherent. And
the coherence or integration is dynamic, active and exploratory, not
passive, sedentary and fixed. It is also distinct from science in that it

rarely presents us with an explanatory exegesis. As Bronowski argues
(1978: 60): Science offers explanations [but] art carries a kind of
knowledge which is not explanatory. It may interrogate, celebrate,
condense and transform but it rarely explains.
*
Engaging with otherness
Camus (in LEtranger) writes of
the benign indifference of the universe.
In a painting by William Coldstream measurement is a central

concern. And the measure is set against whats out there. It is the
material world (which is also at the sub-atomic level the immaterial
world) that provides the gauge, template and otherness. The making,
looking, thinking and enjoying are a function of his surrender to that
other - the object or person in the space beyond, yet inhabited by,
Coldstream and his brush. It is this inquisitive seeing which is
significant. An attention to the whole visual and spatial field, and to
the interwoven processes of representation (which is the conceptuali-
sation of sight). And this attention to measure, measurement, distance,
proportion and interval is not an attempt to fix the seen, to hold the
view with a kind of painterly forceps, but a celebration of the improvi-
satory flux of seeing and being. The marks and dashes littering the
surface are an index of this improvisational encounter.
These words of Euripides come to mind:
For only to be alive and to see the light

Is beautiful. Only to see the light;
To see a blade of young grass,
Or the grey face of a stone.
(in Walker 1988: unnumbered last page)
And it is being up against the otherness of the grass and stone, the
grassy and stony light, which is crucial. For our being-in-the-world is
predicated on our being somewhere, on our inhabitance of a space, a
hole in everything that we are not (to paraphrase the sculptor, Carl
Andre).
In a more poetic voice, I try to say something about this by adding my

own words to part of the third of Samuel Becketts, Four Poems, 1948
(Becketts text in italics):
What would I do without this world faceless incurious

and all that involves
of another hand up against the face
resistant as granite to a pleading self
folding each lapping wave of consciousness
back towards an unknowing ocean
where to be lasts but an instant where every instant

spills in the void the ignorance of having been
and that ignorance is all we are
somehow foundered against what we can never be
without this wave where in the end

body and shadow are engulfed
all stemmed against obliteration
stoned as a cliff against moments of tide
what would I do without this silence where the murmurs die
The painter becomes the consciousness of that observed reality which

is his subject, making conscious, through marks & stains, the sub-
stance of what it is to see, to be aware like the poet Yvor Winters (in
Gifford 1974: 81): [] in an empty place / I met the unmoved
landscape face to face. Or, as Beckett describes Arikhas practice:
Siege laid again to the impregnable without. Eye and hand fevering
after the unself. (Beckett et al 1985: 10)
Side-stepping the self in order to fully attend to, and represent, the
thing/other, is important to painters like Arikha and Giacometti and to
objectivist poets like George Oppen and Charles Reznikoff. In
Reznikoffs words (1976: 20): Poetry presents the thing in order to
convey the feeling. It should be precise about the thing and reticent
about the feeling.
In his poem, Of Being Numerous, Oppen writes, There are things /

We live among and to see them / Is to know ourselves. (1976: 147)
In another poem, This in Which, Oppen refers to, The small nouns /
Crying faith (in Harding 2004: 17), and it is the small nouns that
the objectivists wished to celebrate in small acts of poetic realism.

They sought to honour the other as manifested in the material world of
things a world of substance, weight, texture, spatial extension,
suspended in light and shadow. According to Harding (2004: 17),
Oppen was fully implicated in this faith, which he could only describe as
the belief that consciousness exists and that it is consciousness of some-
thing. Not a prayer then, but a wish to speak of the worlds being there and
his being able to know it.
This could easily be applied to Coldstream, Arikha, Giacometti,

Lopez-Garcia and other observational painters.
*
Perception, participation and improvisation
The processes of perception involve an interaction and a tension,
between determinacy and indeterminacy. The focus of our attention is
inscribed with intention and determinacy, while the peripheral field is
permeated by indeterminacy.
There is always an improvisatory quality to perception. We speculate,

try out, and guess and test our perceptions. The head tilts and sways to
negotiate the visual and haptic space, to bring edges into line, to
corroborate a notion that it's one kind of surface out there and not
another. As we perceive (and in the perceptual disciplines of drawing
and painting from observation) we're not formulating certainties or
dealing with absolutes. Rather we're involved in conditional, impro-
vised negotiations within a speculative field of sensations, ideas,
memories, assumptions and intentions - a fluid stream of energies,
codes and conjectures.
It is this handling of the world which characterises our most intimate

awarenesses - an improvisation of being and knowing which is
embodied in the handling of paint, and in the pictorial conventions,
signs and gestures orchestrated into an observational painting - a
painting which embodies a transaction or negotiation with the world,
or rather renders visible a particular set of transactions in a world of
transactions.
The primary characteristic of perceptual experience is that it is

improvisatory, involving a constant oscillation between trial and error,
guessing and checking, inventing and deconstructing, taking risks and
exercising caution. These interactions are fundamental to our being-
in-the-world, to our sensing and knowing. This is how we are. The
history of painting from life is a history of critical enquiry into, and a
celebration of, these processes. Each painting embodying an improvi-
satory dance of perception, cognition and representation.
The morphology of a painting resonates with the syntax of interroga-

tion. The painter asks questions of the world, and in the world. Just as
perception is not a passive but an active process, so the process of
painting is animated by the need to find out and to try out, to enquire
and to interpret. This interrogation of appearances takes place in an
actual space, a particular site, and the painting becomes a pictorial
transcript of that spatial encounter. Or, to put it another way, the

painting is an analogical map of a particular physical and cognitive
field, framed, informed and inscribed with the painter's history - a
continuum of speculations, beliefs, premises and assumptions which
position the mind as surely as certain spatial co-ordinates position the
body.
Arikha (in Beckett et al 1985: 81):
Painting a portrait from life is a re-arrangement, through ones inner form,

of someones shape [] equivalent to the reorganisation of sand by the
wind [] its provisional but intensive [] a sort of seismic trace.
Painters such as Arikha, Giacometti and Cezanne attempt to actualise,

rather than describe, perception and cognition in the materiality of
drawings and paintings. This actualisation opens up to us the com-
plexity of seeing and representing, enabling us to engage with our own
perceptions, representations and interpretations, as the painters
grappled with theirs.
*
The false dichotomy of subject and object
We are active participants in the world, rarely passive spectators or
recipients of what the world throws at us. In a sense we constitute the
world, or at least we participate in its constantly evolving form. Yet
we can also feel the tension of separation. The process of looking,
which binds us to the world, also renders us apart - generating in us a
sense of division between us and the world, me and everything that is
not-me.
The painter, and observational paintings, deliver a kind of commen-

tary on this sense of separation, while at the same time reminding us
that the separation is an illusion, a product of an essentially linguistic
frame of reference, validated by generations of Cartesian and Newto-
nian thought.
When I sit here in this room for hour after hour there comes a point at
which I can no longer say, I am aware, but rather that, there is
awareness. The relationship is not between me here, and the world
out there, but rather, here is the world and my aware-
ness/consciousness is a part of it, dissolved into it. This is very

different to the feeling of me cocooned in my bubble of subjectivity
versus all those things and objects out there - me versus my exagger-
ated sense of the otherness of the world. An extreme version of this is
described in Sartre's novel, Nausea, in which the sense of otherness
infects even the protagonist's sense of himself - his own hand de-
scribed as an object not belonging to himself - the ultimate alienation
or dissociation.
In the work of Giacometti, Auerbach, Coldstream and others there is a

sense of connectedness, kinship and inseparability. However, separa-
tion, brokenness and the sense of otherness haunt these painters. The
process of representation illuminates the tension between our sense of
belonging and our sense of separateness.
In constructing the painting a tension arises from the painted forms

and marks as they signify, describe and assert their material presence.
An alternating current of ambiguous relationships, statements and
questions is generated. The painting exists as a dialogue between the
illusion of separation and the unavoidability of connectedness.
*
Coherence and integration
Our participation in the world, grounded in our bodys improvisatory
dialogue with its surrounding space, is characterised by a need to
make sense, to establish coherence and understanding. This is true of
our most intimate perceptual processes and of the grand speculations
we make about ourselves and the cosmos.
And this process of improvisation and participation is inherently

active. Our perceptual and cognitive models of the world are always
changing, continually being revised and reformulated in the light of
experiential activity. Because of this the marks, lines and smudges in a
painting can be seen as denoting co-ordinates of probabilities in a
dynamic field, rather than defining fixtures and substances.
Merleau-Ponty (2002) argues that as embodied subjects we are

implicated in the world, we are beings-in-the-world, rather than
detached observers. Our perceptions of the world arise from within the
world and they are always incomplete, changing as we move and

explore. There can be no certainty or finality to our perceptions, nor to
our selves. We are always open to an unfolding of our being-in-the-
world. As far as Merleau-Ponty is concerned we are continually
making and re-making ourselves. Giacomettis resolve every morning
to begin again, to scrub out yesterdays painting and to start afresh, is
symptomatic of his recognition that the perceptual object can never be
finalised and that his own emerging self-identity was somehow bound
up in the endless process of renewal through perception and represen-
tation.
Observationally-based painters acknowledge the revisibility of

perception and the making of art as an important agent of self-
constitution, a process of bringing together, integrating and making
coherent. And the making coherent is a dynamic, active and explora-
tory process, not passive, sedentary and fixed. It embraces complexity,
diversity, change and reformulation within a field of cultural and
historical connections and affiliations.
*
Language and experience.
Merleau-Ponty (2002) considered one of the fundamental aims of
phenomenology to be to re-engage with the pre-reflective world, a
world of non-mediated appearances. This pre-reflective world is a
world of pure and un-formalised experience an experience that is
pre-linguistic, or non-linguistic - what Husserl refers to as that as yet
dumb experience. (in Merleau-Ponty 2002: xvii) An experience of
the undifferentiated seamless reality of all that is.
This position is radically different to the views of many contemporary

critical theorists, many of whom argue that there can be no pre-
linguistic experience of the world. The theologian Don Cupitt (1994:
46) presents an extreme version of this position:
nobody can have conscious experience unless some kind of language or

sign-system has turned her sensations into perceptions [] we are always
inside language. We have no entirely prelinguistic experience or access to
reality.
In a similar vein Richard Rorty (1982: xx) argues against the idea of
getting back behind language to something which grounds it, or
which it expresses, or to which it might hope to be adequate.
Even if we agree with Cupitt and Rorty and believe that no-one can
have an unmediated experience of reality (indeed we might ask what
this could possibly mean - surely experience itself is the mediation) to
assume that this mediation is primarily linguistic is a literary conceit
based upon a misguided assumption that verbal conceptualisation and
discourse have imposed their colonising power over all realms of
human activity.
Merleau-Ponty and others remind us that the primary processes of

mediation are located in our neurological and perceptual systems - the
pre-reflective apparatus of engagement with which we negotiate our
bodily participation in the world. This can be linked to the Buddhist
view that reality itself has no meaning it is not a sign, pointing to
something beyond itself. (Watts 1965: 166 - my italics) To engage
with reality is to go beyond, or to pre-empt, signification. There is
something beyond language: the unself.
Syllables
spat at the world
hardly render it more
visible
We could argue that in this kind of direct engagement with what IS

events and things (which are particular kinds of events) have no
intrinsic identity or self-existence. A continuum of sensations and
unutterable experiences distinguish this pre-reflective domain from
the linguistic sphere. Identities dissolve, merge and re-emerge.
Evidence for this quality of experience can be found in the writings of
mystics and poets, in dance, music and the visual arts.
In Hindu and Buddhist terms, and in terms of much of modern

physics, the world is a fluid continuum of interpenetrating energies in
a state of endless play (lila, Sanskrit, play or cosmic dance). Though
we are of this world, grounded in it, our consciousness of self gener-
ates an illusion of separateness. One of the primary agents in the
construction of our sense of self and of this sense of separateness, is
language. Indeed there is a kind of equation in Buddhism involving

three terms: nama, rupa and maya. The term nama refers to the
processes of naming, classifying and trying to grasp the ungraspable
fluid forms of reality-as-it-is (rupa). These attempts (so typical of
language), which can never be realised in any deep sense, generate the
profound discontent and dissatisfaction referred to as maya - some-
times translated as 'illusion'. (see Watts 1989: 41-42)
These ideas can be linked to Merleau-Ponty's (2002: xvii) thinking: It

is the office of language to cause essences to exist in a state of
separation which is in fact merely apparent.
Our use of verbal languages involves us in two diametrically opposed

processes. The divisive, classificatory structures of language (particu-
larly the Indo-European languages) don't fit the seamless continuum
of reality, the world, or of our experience. Verbal syntax breaks up,
sub-divides and fragments what is ultimately indivisible (an indivisi-
bility acknowledged by physics, ecology, and by various religious and
philosophical traditions).
However we then have to use this language to speak of things and

events and of our experience in a coherent way. We have to use a
divisive syntax to make connections and relationships, to rebind and
unify what we are constantly pulling apart! This paradox at the heart
of our use of language creates a tension and an ambivalence in our
relationship to it.
Jack D. Flam (in Ashton, Buck & Flam 1983: 11) writes:
The language of [verbal] discourse is linear, and in using it we find our-

selves hard pressed to talk about more than one thing at a time; pictures, on
the other hand, are tabular, and colours and forms can have meaning in sev-
eral often seemingly contradictory ways at once.
Of course poetry often subverts the norms of linear language, generat-

ing ambiguity, contradiction and an open field of meanings that is
more typical of pictures and images within the visual arts. However
Nelson Goodman distinguishes between images as dense systems,
and texts as differentiated systems, acknowledging the dense integra-
tive structures of pictures unified into material gestalts - actualised,

specific and objectified. (in Mitchell 1994: 345)
*
Drawing and painting as processes of de-categorisation releasing
the unnameable
The codes and conventions and materiality of paintings are not easily
aligned with those of verbal languages. While there is a tendency in
verbal language to divide and categorise the indivisible and uncatego-
risable, a painting or sculpture has a tendency towards synthesis, and
towards affirming the concrete immediacy of visual and spatial
experience. Paintings can present us with indivisibility, inviting us to
encounter and participate in a unified perceptual and cognitive field -
the embodiment of undifferentiated experience.
To shed light from a very different angle on these matters it is useful

to consider ideas drawn from the Madhyamika school of Buddhism,
particularly the work of Nagarjuna. The Madhyamika shares the
Buddhist view that human suffering and dissatisfaction (dukkha) is
caused by our tendency to conceptualise the real, to mistake the
concept for the thing, to be unable to cope with impermanence,
relativity and the fact that nothing has an enduring self-identity.
According to Murti (1980: 209-228) the essence of the Madhyamika

attitude [] consists in not allowing oneself to be entangled in views
and theories, but just to observe, to attend, to be present. The
Madhyamika method is to deconceptualise the mind and to disburden
it of all notions, empirical as well as a priori. We can only know the
real, in the sense of have contact, engagement or experience of it, by
cutting away the layers of theories, ideas and views which through
idealisation and conceptualisation form all-pervasive cataracts which
prevent us from clear sight, or which muffle our ears, anaesthetising
our whole being. To the Madhyamika the real is free from all
predicates and relation. It is Sunya, [empty] devoid of every kind of
determination. [It is] invariably defined as transcendent to thought, as
non-relative, non-determinate, [] non-discursive, non-dual. The
real is undifferentiated, uncategorisable and unnameable. (See Part 4)
Painting, and many kinds of poetry which constitute a critique of

language, can act as a buttress against the reduction of the real
(Blaser 1974: 38) which is a characteristic of much of mainstream
philosophical/literary theorising in the West. Painting and poetry can
resist the reifying power of what Heidegger calls calculative think-
ing. (in Batchelor 1990: 38-40)
In some kinds of photo-realist paintings forms can become so conclu-

sive in depicting an object, that the object is pinned down - in a sense
obliterated or obscured or NAMED so comprehensively, that the
object becomes subsidiary to the label. The picture becomes too
definitive. A kind of nominative visuality removes the uncertainty and
revisibility of perception and representation, fixing the evanescence of
perceptual experience in a false and reductive exactitude. This quality
can be seen in photorealist paintings by Richard Estes and some of the
early works of Chuck Close. However in the later work of Close and
in works by Magritte and Victor Burgin these reductive tendencies are
problematised and interrogated .
In the case of painters like Auerbach, Coldstream, Arikha and Lopez

Garcia the aim is not so much to define or categorise or pindown, but
to release the presence of the object, and to dissect the processes of
perceiving, knowing and representing.
Andre Breton is reputed to have been contemptuous of Giacomettis

decision in the 1930s to work from life by painting a human head.
Giacometti wanted to construct a likeness a visual analogue of the
phenomenological encounter with a head but for Breton a head was
a head - something obvious, familiar - a generic human form that is
well-known and unsurprising, and therefore of little interest.
But what is a head? There is a general physiological definition - which

is almost a Platonic abstraction - but this head in front of me, what is
it? A matrix of infinitely varied qualities of headness, of personality,
of fluctuating appearances. And out of the head like twin searchlights
the gaze. In Giacomettis opinion it was the gaze alone that distin-
guished the head from a skull. Even my own head, that I see reflected
in a mirror or represented in snapshots in a family album, is something
I take for granted - rarely examining it in detail, except perhaps when
Im injured or unwell. This familiar and surprisingly heavy part of my

anatomy is actually unfamiliar and relatively unknown to me. But
when I begin to draw it, to study its shapes and surfaces, its contours,
volumes and colours, it becomes another country to be explored,
mapped and re-constituted in pigment on paper. I notice its distin-
guishing features, the particular bumps and hollows, hues and tones,
that identify this head as being different to my wifes or my childs or
any of the millions of other heads in the world. The activity of
drawing releases the headness of this particular head in a way that
surprises me. I am confronted with the strangeness and otherness of
my own head, such that the words my head become curiously
meaningless. The nominal categorisation of a corporeal presence is
undone and I no longer have a name for what I encounter. I can only
perceive and show through the medium of the drawing.
While Wittgenstein once referred to naming as the baptism of an

object, (in Fineberg 1995: 214) Philip Guston (ibid: 398) said of his
headlike black and white compositions of the mid sixties: if I think
head while I'm doing it, it becomes a mess [] I want to end with
something that will baffle me. Guston, talking to Harold Rosenberg
in 1966, also quoted Paul Valery: a bad poem is one that vanishes
into meaning, adding: In a painting [] it vanishes into recogni-
tion. (ibid: 398) What he seems to have meant was that the painting
(or drawing) should disturb the usual comforting chain of encounter-
ing and recognising which the naming of things often exemplifies.
Instead of recognition being a process of assuming and presuming, of
unthinking familiarisation, it becomes a de-familiarising process of
reformulation and making strange.
For Guston painting an object was not done to define or categorise or

label or pin down, but to release the un-nerving presence of the object
- a doubting intensity of looking, such that the common-place be-
comes extraordinary and familiarity is inhabited by strangeness. The
otherness of the material world is affirmed and encountered in an
activity of non-discriminating attention. Drawing and painting become
processes of actualisation and de-categorisation that release the
thingness of things from the binding structures of names and verbal
discourse.
I attempted to evoke this process of de-categorisation (as seen in

portraits by Auerbach or Giacometti) in the following extract from a
text entitled, 9 June 1992: Prompted by a Giacometti portrait:
Something unknown,
not knowing, unseen
but clearly seeing
.......
To look and feel

in the same face
that unexpected
presence of familiarity
turned inside out
- the sudden elusive
signature of
strangeness
Painters like Giacometti urge us to beware of nave realism (Blaser

1974: 37) a realism that seeks to reduce the complexity into simplic-
ity, the unexpected and inexplicable into the expected and explicable
to explain and to transcend, to become detached from the movement
and substance of the actual. Instead they attempt to show the complex-
ity of perceiving and experiencing, of confronting the unnameable
real. They give material form to Lawrence Weschlers idea (1982:

title) that seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees.
*
Seeing, showing the silence before words
We can see some of these ideas and issues at work in the poetry and
poetics of Robert Lowell and Tess Gallagher.
Robert Lowell writes:
The painter's vision is not a lens,

it trembles to caress the light.
[....]
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun's illumination
stealing like the tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning.
We are poor passing facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.
(from Epilogue, in Lowells last collection, Day By Day in Schweizer

1997: 165)
According to Harold Schweizer (1997), Lowell considers the painter

as somehow doing more than, or transcending, the action of the
camera lens. Some kind of grace is achieved by which Vermeer can
give a living name to things seen. A poetic naming which is qualita-
tively distinct from the processes of categorisation or taxonomy. And
perhaps poetry can pronounce a living name by overcoming its
function as a label. A return to a prelinguistic non-discriminatory
vision which the painter pictures but which poetry can only convey
through a subversion of language's other functions and effects.
In another poem, Shifting Colours, Lowell attempts to perceive

without the imposition of poor measures and meaning [] to see with
the grace of accuracy. (Schweizer 1997: 167):
I see
horse and meadow, duck and pond,
universal consolatory
description without significance,

transcribed verbatim by my eye.
As Schweizer comments: such writing yearns for its own oblitera-

tion. (Schweizer 1997: 167)
Tess Gallagher, in her poem Moon Crossing Bridge, writes, don't

mistake my attention / for the merely aesthetic.(Schweizer 1997:
179) Attending and being there aren't passive conditions they are
active often difficult processes. Attending through picturing is a task,
a discipline, a rigorous kind of observance.
In Zanzibar recently I visited a Hindu temple. The resident priest

showed us around. His rudimentary grasp of English and our lack of
any Swahili or Hindee made it difficult to communicate verbally. But
it did not prevent him showing us what was there. Indeed our attention
was enhanced by not speaking. These silent showings were profound
and memorable.
Showing, like seeing, is not powered by words. Its disclosures are a

testimony of light entangled in filaments of nerve. Our knowing
bodies improvise meaning and value out of the barest materials of
sight and touch. And this we can order and make sense of without
description - a presence felt, seen and recognised before the ivy of
words has time to cling and fasten.
Gallagher again:
[] the great illiteracy

of rain keeps writing over my days
as if to confirm the possibility
of touching everything
(ibid: 183)
There is a yearning here for the silence of seeing, of picturing, of

showing - a state of grace beyond or before words. How we turn even
in literature to showing rather than saying, to the poetic actualisation
rather than the prosaic description:
It is not easy to explain the way a blackbird does or a leafless elm or a

shadow more insistent than its parent thing.
A yearning to experience, to know, through poetry as through paint-

ing. An attempt to experience the silent empty non-dualistic reality of
being there. Attending to what is.
How to approach, to
disarm the reality,
to give something
of density, to make
a shadow equal to
the light
Anthony Hecht, (1993: 244) in his poem, The Venetian Vespers, asks
what is our happiest, most cherished dream / of paradise? and
answers to escape / From time, from history, from evolution / Into
the blessed stasis of a painting. Elsewhere in the same poem (ibid:
239) he writes, To give ones whole attention to such a sight / Is a
sort of blessedness. Near the end he adds, I look and look, / As
though I could be saved simply by looking. (ibid: 247)
And Charles Reznikoff, (1976: 109) who entitled his New & Selected
Poems: By the Well of Living & Seeing, uses similar language in his
short poem, Epilogue:
Blessed
in the light of the sun and at the sight of the world
daily,
and in all the delights of the senses and the mind;
in my eyesight, blurred as it is,
and my knowledge, slight though it is,
and my life, brief though it was.
*
John Berger (1996: unnumbered) gives us this image of poetry;
Word by word I describe

you accept each fact
and ask yourself:
what does he really mean?
[]
Birds like letters fly away
O let us fly away

circle and settle on the water
near the fort of the illegible.
*
Paintings give us highly specific insights into the ways in which we

handle, negotiate, explore and make sense of the world we both
inhabit and interpret. Paintings as embodiments of contact, touch,
learning and enquiry. Tokens of involvement, rather than tombstones
of detachment.
I look across the table and see what seems to be the skin of an object,
a discarded membrane, faintly opaque yet gathering in transparency -
as if in a kind of shyness the material which was the thing has retired
into another life, leaving only a memento of its presence. This skin is
not dead, or even inert, it glows with a faint light which illuminates a
possible future and an impossible past. Though it recalls other
presences and things it disavows any kind of identification. This ghost
of an object, nameless and intangible, fires the field of vision yet
refuses to be consumed. It shows but does not speak.
***
Post-Script
Another reason for continuing with this seemingly marginal activity of
drawing from observation is the recognition that the massive growth
in new technologies and the virtual realities, symbolic fields or veils
of appearance they engender, actually increases the need to acknowl-
edge and celebrate three important phenomena:
firstly, the primary conditions of our corporeal existence as

bodies in space;
secondly, the interplay between perception and cognition as
bodily processes;
and thirdly, the embodiment of knowledge and experience in
physical artefacts
which themselves inhabit a place in the world - artefacts which are

emblematic of the body's memory of itself carnal formulae, to use
Merleau-Ponty's haunting phrase. (in Crowther 1993: 42-43)
It is important to remember who we are and how we are in the world,

and not to forget the house we each inhabit - a house of thinking flesh
and feeling bone.
***
Part 4
The mutuality of existence:

drawing, emptiness & presence
Beware of clinging
to one half of a pair.
Huang-Po
(in McEvilley 2002: 468)
Introduction
In this section I continue with the theme of drawing from observation,
widening the frame of reference to include ideas drawn from Bud-
dhism, Spinoza, the Pyrrhonist school of early Greek sceptical
philosophy and other sources. The intention is to emphasise the
interdependence and interpenetration of all that exists and to raise
questions about the belief that we each have an essence that is separate
from all other essences, a self that observes a world out there. The
contrasting, but interrelated, ideas of emptiness (sunyata in Sanskrit)
and suchness (tathata in Sanskrit) are used as tools with which to
think about how we are implicated in the world and how art and
poetry can be considered as demonstrating presence within the flux
and mutuality of existence.
*
What I see is itself a representation, a retinal image, an excitation of
the cerebral cortex. When I draw Im trying to make a culturally
viable representation of a selective array of infinite possible represen-
tations within the chemical factory that is my brain. From second to
second, minute to minute, I am a shimmering transcriber of changing
sensations, pulses of light, ambient sounds, bodily movements, spatial
co-ordinates, histories of looking, archives of remembered images.
And what emerges from these chemical, biological and cultural
interactions? Smudges of dust on a pale surface!
66 The mutuality of existence
*
Still-life
Im looking at some objects set up as a still-life for drawing. When
Im drawing I see patches of colour and tone in a field of changing
light. I see edges defining shapes, contours formed by irregularities in
spatial distribution, volumes defined by gradations of tone and focus,
and I observe planes, grain and textures signalled by varying reflectiv-
ity of surface. Im attentive to nuances of shadow, to directions of
forms, to angles of tilt against horizontal and vertical axes. I notice
where shapes are in relation to each other, how one form meets
another and how the conjunctions of forms can be described by one
line a line that signifies an edge by dividing and uniting two shapes.
In my drawing I constantly move from the detailed weighing-up of
position, to the plotting of spatial relationships, to a sensing of the
balance, proportion and veracity of the whole drawing. The longer I
look the longer I draw. Each time I return to the drawing I notice
something that needs changing and each time I look at the still-life I
see something that was not how I thought it was. As I breathe my
view changes. As I move my head the visual field is subtly re-
configured. There is no end to this process of changing perception and
representation. Each drawing is always unfinished, a trace of attentive
engagement with an evanescent perceptual field. For most of the time
Im not thinking linguistically. Words dont often come to mind.
When they do it is often as questions: can this be right? Is this too
dark or too light? Should I erase this area or move this line? Occa-
sionally words arise as expressions of surprise or realisation: Oh, I see
thats how it is! Goodness, I was completely mistaken! How red is
that!
*
Still-life, again
Once again Im looking at the same set-up of still-life objects. On this
occasion Im not drawing. Im using words to describe what is before
me. I see a deer skull, various stones, bones and flower-heads with
stalks. I notice that the stones are of three kinds: large smoothly-
rounded pebbles from a nearby beach; flat flakes of shale dug up from
the garden, sharp-edged and dull brown in colour; and lots of small
gravelly stones in shades of ochre, brown and grey. The large rounded
The mutuality of existencee 67
pebbles are either evenly mottled or marked with distinctive shapes,

often deep purple-grey against pale blue-grey. The skull is broken. A
large part of one side is missing. Sharp edges catch the light against
the shadowed recess of the missing side. Pieces of jawbone are lying
flat in front of the skull. I notice another smaller skull, pale and finely-
formed, to the left and behind the large one. I wonder what kind it is.
The dried-up flower heads and attached stalks belong to a large poppy.
They look brittle and contorted. These objects lie on a rectangular
horizontal surface, draped in a canvas that is attached to the wall
behind. The canvas is stained in brown and reddish patches, with bold
dark-grey leaf shapes printed here and there, and small chevrons
arranged in double lines around a square. A bag hangs to one side. A
tall lamp casts bold shadows. The whole arrangement is against one
wall of a studio room that contains many other objects in stacks, on
shelves and in trays.
The words Im using are tokens of things, conceptual labels classify-

ing what I see into categories that can be used for many quantitative
and qualitative processes of description, analysis, narrative and
speculation. Thinking linguistically in this way is a very different
process to the process of drawing. We use each process to do different
things and each process exemplifies a different state of consciousness,
and different ways of knowing and being in the world.
In both drawing and wording, in representing my perceptual activity

in marks and words, I become aware of relationships that bind
together my perceptions and the things Im looking at. My move-
ments change the field of vision. What I see is conditioned to some
extent by what Im looking for, as well as what Im looking at. The
objects in front of me are also perceptual events, changing patterns of
light filtered and processed by an embodied mind. The observer is
intimately implicated in what is observed.
As I sit looking at the still-life I realise that it is anything but still,

rather it is a dynamic network of relationships that constantly shifts
and reorganises itself as I change my position spatially and cogni-
tively. I notice how my glance moves backwards and forwards, left
and right, up and down. I scan the field of vision in a continuous
dance of attention, shifting seamlessly from detail to detail within an
emergent whole. In this complex field I can focus on particular objects

or details but I can never shut out the immediate surroundings. Indeed
I realise that each object is an integral part of its surroundings.
Without its surroundings it would be infinite in size or extension, or it
would not exist. Object and surroundings, figure and ground, are
mutually existent. They arise together or not at all.
This mutuality of existence is a central insight of Buddhism and from

it various philosophical discourses and practices have emerged. Id
like to explore two terms and concepts in particular, to see how they
can be used to frame and elucidate the experiences of interacting with
the still-life as just described. The two terms are sunyata and tathata.
Sunyata, is often translated as emptiness or voidness (sunya is
empty or void). Tathata, is usually translated as suchness,
thusness or thatness. On the face of it they seem to be at opposite
poles. Surely there is either emptiness or there is suchness? In fact
these two concepts are interdependent and despite the apparent
contradiction they are two sides of one wafer-thin coin.
*
Sunyata emptiness
The ideas surrounding sunyata are articulated in great depth in
Nagarjunas Sunyavada, or Doctrine of the Void, otherwise known
as the Madhyamika or Madhyamaka, the middle way that, accord-
ing to Watts, refutes all metaphysical propositions by demonstrating
their relativity.(1989, p.62) Even the idea of sunyata itself, is relative
and void.
It cannot be called void or not void,

Or both or neither;
But in order to point it out,
It is called the Void.
(from the Madhyamika Shastra, in Watts 1989: 63)
According to Murti, at one level the Madhyamika approach is a

critique of all philosophy. (1980: 123) He writes:
The essence of the Madhyamika attitude [] consists in not allowing one-

self to be entangled in views and theories, but just to observe the nature of
things without standpoints. (ibid: 209)
This should not be interpreted as anti-intellectualism. Dreyfus

provides a wonderful account of the rich culture of intellectual debate,
analysis and critique within the Tibetan Buddhist monastic context.
However the purpose of this individual and collective intellectual
endeavour is to expose the contradictions and dualities inherent in any
conceptual position.
Dreyfus describes the situation as follows:
[In relation to conventional truth] we distinguish a pot from other objects,

such as a table, the maker of the pot, and the self who sees the pot. In dis-
cerning these conventional objects, we proceed through dichotomies such as
self and other, agent and object, pot and nonpot, and the like. In this way we
divide the universe of knowledge and reify these differences, as if these ob-
jects had their own essence and existed independently of each other. These
dualities enable us to classify these objects and appropriate them, but they
distort reality, for the objects do not in fact exist in the ways that we hold on
to them. This distortion in turn leads to suffering created by our grasping at
objects, which gives rise to attachment, aversion, and so on.
To free our minds, we need to undo the dualistic tendency to grasp objects
by reifying differences. To succeed in this effort, we need to realize that
things do not exist in the way we grasp them: that they are empty from ex-
isting through their own essence. (2003: 239-240)
Dreyfus points out that this emptiness (sunyata) should not be seen
as a conceptual object, for that would be to continue with what has
already been identified as a false or mistaken understanding,
this emptiness is not another type of object, a kind of supertruth, which

could be approached by differentiating it from other objects. It is also not
simply a rejection of the conventional, which would amount to a negative
reification [] To understand emptiness requires that one free oneself from
any reification, negative as well as positive. (ibid: 240)
Within Buddhism there are many different practices which are used to
realise emptiness. These range from the intellectual dialectics of the
Tibetan Madhyamika tradition, to the use of koans in Rinzai Zen, to
vipassana meditation in the monastic traditions of south-east Asia, to
the practice of zazen or shikan-taza (just sitting) in Soto Zen. These
practices, and the discourses, disciplines and ethical codes that are
integral to them, are used to release the participant from the bondage
and misunderstanding that conventional, dualistic, objectifying
thought engenders. Such practices are aimed at depriving the mind of
any object to hold onto, this leads it to relinquish its habit of
conceptualizing reality in dualistic terms. (Dreyfus 2003: 241)
As Dreyfus points out this should not be seen as a denial of the reality
of the material world or of our thoughts, beliefs and feelings.
Because objects are beyond determination, they are not completely nonexis-
tent. Hence, they can be said to exist provisionally or conventionally. Emp-
tiness does not cancel out the conventional domain but relativizes it. (ibid:
241)
In other words, as objects only exist as discrete objects by conven-

tion (having no separate essential existence) they do have a conven-
tional status or existence. Realizing sunyata or emptiness is to realise
that the conventions of dualistic thinking, interpretation and evalua-
tion are conventions. They do not accord with the undifferentiated,
nonrelational, tathata or suchness which is the actual.
Thus, rather than considering conventional distinctions unimportant, people

who have realized emptiness cease to absolutize them, seeing them as fluid,
fragile, illusionlike, and interrelated. (Dreyfus 2003: 241)
Crook (1990: 19) suggests that maintaining awareness of things as

they appear in conventional terms while simultaneously recognising
that they are empty of self-subsistence is one of the great conundrums
of life:
One of the most difficult aspects of Buddhist training was to see the world,
at one and the same time, both in the perspective of the conventional enti-
tiveness of things, and in the perspective of their emptiness of selfhood in a
world of interdependent origination.
This holding in mind of two apparently contradictory states or

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

distinctions. The heavy impasto gestures of Auerbach constitute
another. And the apparently more photographic smoothly articulated
brushwork of Vermeer constitutes yet another. It would be foolish to
describe one as being more correct than the others, or more truthful, or
more realistic. Each artist draws the line in different ways, dividing,
classifying, connecting and encoding the world in different sets of
pictorial conventions. In doing so each artist is being highly selective,
including and excluding different aspects of the visual field. In some
ways the wrongness would come in believing that one or other of
these artists was right, correct or more truthful. Each offers a relative
and limited picturing of the world.
Our conventionalised descriptions, analyses and interpretations can,

and do, take many different, sometimes contradictory, forms. And
these differences can, and do, generate conflicts. Realising or becom-
ing aware of the conventionalisation engenders tolerance and under-
standing, an acceptance that all descriptions, opinions and beliefs are
relative, conditional, and ultimately flawed, incomplete and revisable.
This can take the heat out of situations in which conflict is arising,
fostering mutual respect and an acknowledgement that there may be a
meeting of minds if we look through, behind or beyond our differ-
ences. We can recognise how our attachment to particular attitudes,
positions and beliefs, is just as misguided as anyone elses, if we
assume that our attitudes, positions and beliefs are somehow absolute
and unconditional. It is not that we no longer believe in this or that, or
that we always defer or yield to someone elses viewpoint. A realisa-
tion of the emptiness of all attitudes, beliefs and positions, can lead us
to take a wider view, a less intransigent position, and to seek mutual
understanding rather than to reinforce mutual misunderstanding.
A realisation of sunyata does not imply ethical neutrality or nihilism

though it has occasionally been misunderstood and misused by those
in power (Japanese kamikaze pilots are said to have made use of Zen
training). The ethical frameworks of the many Buddhist traditions,
however different they may be in emphasis and cultural articulation,
retain a profound respect for each other and for other religious and
philosophical systems and beliefs. One of the difficulties in categoris-
ing Buddhism as a religion or philosophy is this deeply ingrained non-
attachment to any particular viewpoint or system. Just as Wittgenstein

once described philosophy as an elucidation of language, (rather
than a system of new ideas or theories), so Buddhism can be seen as
an elucidation of the relative nature of all religions, philosophies and
languages.
Translated into ethics, the realisation of emptiness, leads to the

valuing of tolerance, respect, dialogue, peaceful co-existence, reli-
gious and philosophical freedom, and the valuing of social and
political structures that enshrine and promote such qualities. Intoler-
ance, disrespect, authoritarianism, violent enforcement of power and
the subjugation of others, and socio-political structures that enshrine
and legitimise such qualities, are not valued and have to be worked
against using appropriate upaya, skilful means that is, through
non-violent persuasion, argument and example. In some extreme
circumstances limited defensive violence may be considered as the
least harmful means of responding to a violent action but as in any
ethical framework these matters are the subject of debate and differ-
ences of interpretation. Some Buddhists would argue that violent
force, especially the taking of life, is always wrong. Others argue that
the idea of doing the least harm to the many is a middle way between
absolute pacifism (whatever that might be) and the use of force as a
ready solution to problems or conflicts. Probably most Buddhists
would agree that the use of violent force is always symptomatic of
failure, misunderstanding and an over-attachment to one position or
another.
In the literature and lore of Buddhism the ineffability of emptiness is

evoked or conveyed through suggestion, metaphor and direct action.
Koans, such as Joshus mu or the sound of one hand clapping are
both skilful means (upaya) that push us towards the realisation of
emptiness, and images that show us the conventional and relativistic
nature of language, rationality and habituated behaviour. The ineffa-
bility of emptiness, by definition ungraspable, uncontainable and
inexpressible in language, can be experienced. The attempt to show to
others, or point towards, this experience leads Zen practitioners to
employ a vocabulary of paradox, strangeness and instability. The
inexplicable violence or absurdity that erupts in some Zen anecdotes is
not there to provide narrative colour or to be unconventional, it is
there to jolt us into realising how much we are ensnared by convention

and by classificatory and dualistic thinking, and to prod us into seeing
through this web into the suchness of existence.
*
Emptiness & deconstruction
Dreyfus (2003: 241-245) traces some interesting connections between
Derridas deconstruction and Madhyamika dialectics, while at the
same time pointing out the profound differences between the two
philosophical methods. Dreyfus argues that Madhyamika practices of
dialectical debate and analysis can be characterised as deconstructive,
in the sense that such practices are used as a self-subverting ap-
proach to prevent the reification of emptiness, to undermine the
tendency to turn an insight into the essenceless, conventionalised
interdependence of all categories and concepts, into another essence or
categorisation. However the purpose of these practices is to bring the
Tibetan monastic practitioner to a realisation of the insights developed
and maintained by Madhyamika Buddhist traditions. The maintenance
and passing-on of traditional knowledge and values is paramount. As
Dreyfus points out this is very different to the postmodern questioning
and subversion of traditional narrative truths, readings and closure, in
favour of an endless process of interpretation and destabilisation of
meaning. Seen from the Madhyamika perspective, postmodern
deconstruction can be read as representing a nihilistic discarding of
conventional distinctions and thus a stance to be avoided. (Dreyfus
2003: 242)
Madhyamika ideas and practices, and sometimes Buddhism in its

many forms, have often been portrayed as being nihilistic. However
the dangers of nihilism have long been recognised and strategies have
been developed to identify and avoid nihilistic tendencies. In
Madhyamika dialectics the shooting-down of all positions, essences,
positives and negatives, binary categorisations and other forms of
intellectual rationalisation, are a means to the realisation of sunyata,
not ends in themselves. In inexperienced hands or outside the ethical
framework of Buddhism these practices could indeed lead to nihilism,
disorientation and delusion.
Such risks are well known to Madhyamaka, which has taken great pains to
distance itself from nihilism. The very name of this philosophy is meant to
underscore that it is the Middle Way between eternalism (ie., reification)

and nihilism. Emptiness is not nothingness. It entails not the demise of the
conventional world but the assertion [and realisation] that it is just that
conventional. (Dreyfus 2003: 242)
On the other hand the Madhyamika thinker, Nagarjuna, shares with

Derrida a belief in, the essenceless and hence enigmatic nature of
existence and the indeterminate and provisional character of interpre-
tation. (Drefyus 2003: 243) The indeterminate character of interpre-
tation is a reflection of the indeterminate nature of reality or tathata
a term that we will turn to soon and consider alongside sunyata.
*
Drawing again: becoming and being
There are times when Im drawing in the studio and I reach a moment
at which Im stuck, I dont know what to do next, or Im reflecting on
what Ive done, or just sitting with no particular purpose, just being
there. Unintentionally I become more contemplative and undemand-
ing. Im no longer asking questions or trying to see more accurately or
gauge proportions or measure this or that angle. Im in the space.
There is no longer any linguistic meta-thinking going on but I am
intensely awake, alert, attentive to the whole perceptual/spatial field.
Thoughts occasionally arise but they dissipate just as quickly, leaving
no footprint or turbulence. The discriminating mind dissolves and a
different state of consciousness arises. There is no longer a me
observing objects outside of me, there is no separation. There is only
the flux of sensations, a shimmering river of light, pulses of sound,
evanescent states of being. There is no hanging-on to what is there. No
sense of ownership of experience. Rather a letting-go, being an
integral part of an ongoing process. Being instead of becoming. Time
seems to be suspended, the march of personal history gives way to a
light-footed dancing on the spot. Somehow a non-discriminating
awareness has arisen. A kind of intense indifference, in which there
are no distinctions, divisions, boundaries and things. Only a lucid state
of presence in a vibrant field of energy.
Sometimes this is a momentary experience, occasionally there may be

a few such moments over a longer period. Sometimes the experience
continues while my hand moves over the paper and the drawing seems
to happen of its own accord. Then, quite suddenly, the discriminating
mind kicks in again. I return to analysing, turning-over ideas, spinning

a web of questions and intentions. Often, even after the intense
experience has evaporated, there is a continued lightening of
consciousness, Im hanging-on to thoughts and sensations less firmly,
some quality of the other state of mind persists. Often the drawing
flows more fluently, until, imperceptibly, the old self returns, interest-
ing incidents become distractions and I feel somehow apart from my
surroundings once more. This kind of experience is not uncommon. It
happens to many people as they draw, or undertake any kind of artistic
practice, or work in the garden, or walk, play sport or learn a new
skill.
There may be a connection here to something that the poet Chase

Twichell mentions in an article on Basho, the haiku poet. She writes
that she (Twichell) was trying to achieve what the poet Elizabeth
Bishop called, a perfectly useless, self-forgetful concentration.
(Twichell 2002: 61)
We can also relate this to an idea of Lawrence Weschler, (1982) who

wrote a book about the work of the sculptor Robert Irwin, entitled,
Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees. A title that
encapsulates one of the disciplines of drawing, that is, trying to see
through the assumptions and habits that come with naming and
categorising what is, in its raw presence, unnameable and un-
categorisable.
*
Impermanence
Another perspective on the whole notion of sunyata, the mutuality of
existence, is provided by consideration of another aspect of Buddhist
philosophy and practice: the recognition and analysis of the imperma-
nence of all things. Just as all objects (material and intellectual) have
no autonomous existence, no self-subsistence, so they have no
permanence. All things are in process of change. Existence is a flux of
chemical interactions within ever-changing fields of energy. Material
structures, chemical, biological and man-made, are impermanent at
both the sub-atomic level of quantum physics and at the level of
cosmological phenomena like stars and galaxies. We ascribe enduring
qualities and relative permanence to things, in order to categorise and
analyse them in verbal and mathematical languages, and to isolate
them as objects of desire and attachment. We tend to pay no attention
to the ceaseless change around and within ourselves. The Buddhist
practice of mindfulness counteracts this tendency by developing our
attentiveness to change in all its manifestations, including the flux of
perceptions, thoughts, images, desires and moods, we call our self.
It is worth quoting Henepola Gunaratana (1992: 39) at length as he

describes our situation in a succinct and dramatic way:
As you read these words, your body is aging. But you pay no attention to
that. The book in your hand is decaying. The print is fading and the pages
are becoming brittle. The walls around you are aging. The molecules within
those walls are vibrating at an enormous rate, and everything is shifting, go-
ing to pieces and dissolving slowly. You pay no attention to that, either.
Then one day you look around you. Your body is wrinkled and squeaky and
you hurt. The book is a yellowed, useless lump; the building is caving in. So
you pine for lost youth and you cry when the possessions are gone. Where
does this pain come from? It comes from your own inattention. You failed
to look closely at life. You failed to observe the constantly shifting flow of
the world as it went by. You set up the collection of mental constructions,
me, the book, the building, and you assumed that those were solid,
real entities [But] you can tune into the constant change. You can learn to
perceive your life as an ever-flowing movement. You can learn to see the
continuous flow of all conditioned things. You can learn this. It is just a
matter of time and training.
Gunaratana, is a highly respected Sri Lankan teacher, trained in the

vipassana meditation traditions of South-East Asia. He uses the
simple language of the popular training manual but he is describing a
fundamental characteristic of existence. He points to the relativity and
impermanence of all things and to the ways in which we fail to
recognise relativity and impermanence, attaching ourselves instead to
a belief in separateness and permanence. The phenomenological
techniques of vipassana meditation, zazen and other forms of mind-
fulness training, develop in Buddhist students the ability to attend to
consciousness in a precise and disinterested manner. They enable the
practitioner to be aware of the flow of experiences, the ceaseless
stream of thoughts, images, feelings and desires that occupy the mind
for so much of the time.
Through this kind of disciplined attention (very similar to the drawing

practice described earlier) the practitioner learns not only to watch the
flow of phenomena but also to recognise the habits of reification,
attachment, projection and repression that we use to try to avoid
confronting the conditions of our existence. With persistence, patience
and a kind of unlearning or undoing, this disciplined attentiveness
leads to a different experiential understanding of who we are and how
we, to a more compassionate understanding of the habits of attach-
ment and avoidance that lead us into dissatisfaction, frustration and
conflict. Such techniques have been developed in many religious,
philosophical and psychotherapeutic traditions, I have only focused on
the Buddhist examples because I have some experience as a practitio-
ner in this field though my experience has been woefully erratic.
After thirty-five or more years I still feel like a beginner, though a
beginner with more patience and compassionate scepticism than I had
ten or twenty years ago.
*
Tathata suchness
So, to the other side of the wafer-thin coin! We have seen how reality
can be considered as sunyata, empty of all essences. We have seen
how our dualistic and relational patterns of thought and language, both
construct and affirm a misguided view of reality, leading us to become

attached to objects, material and mental, as if they were self-subsisting
discrete entities. And we have seen how impermanence is a condition
of existence. Another way of thinking about reality is demonstrated in
the use of the term tathata, a term that points to the ultimately
undifferentiated, non-dual and non-relational suchness of existence.
With the idea and experience of emptiness comes a realisation that our
conceptualisation of the world involves discrimination, differentiation
and categorisation. As we think and verbalise we divide the world-as-
it-is into parts, things, this and that, object and ground, object and self,
me and you. As the Agama Sutra puts it: Because this thing exists,
that thing exists. If this thing doesnt exist, that thing doesnt exist.
(Harada 1998: 59) The existence of things, objects, concepts and signs
is relative, conditional, and a function of interdependence. As previ-
ously mentioned this interdependence is sometimes expressed as
dependent co-arising, what Ive referred to as the mutuality of
existence. However Buddhism proposes that through disciplined
attention, mindfulness and right thinking we can also experience the
presence of undifferentiated reality or tathata.
Alan Watts (1989: 67) points out that the Sanskrit root of the term
tathata, is the word tat (that in English). He suggests that this may
be based on a childs first efforts at speech, when it points at some-
thing and says, Ta or Da. He speculates that:
Fathers flatter themselves by imagining that the child is calling them by

name Dada or Daddy. But perhaps the child is just expressing its rec-
ognition of the world, and saying That!
However the term arose, tathata, is another key concept in Buddhist

practice. In affirming the importance of tathata Buddhism recognises
and celebrates the reality beyond, or rather before, the labels, con-
cepts, words and any conventionalised dividing-up of what is.
Buddhist practice affirms and realises the possibility of another mode
of experiencing, a way of encountering the suchness of everything as-
it-is, a non-discriminatory mode of consciousness that dissolves,
subverts or burns through linguistic thought. This pre-nominal, pre-
linguistic or non-linguistic mode of experiencing is not an experience
of a transcendent, absolute or ideal reality, in the Platonic or Hegelian
sense (though it may seem as if it is very similar). This reality does

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

God, because if there were anything outside God it would follow that
God had boundaries and was therefore finite. If God is infinite then
God must be co-extensive with everything. (Magee 1987: 102)
Looked at from another perspective, if nature is the totality of what
there is, (Quinton, in Magee 1987: 102) then both God and Nature
must be infinite and therefore they must be identical, one unitary
substance.
The idea that every thing is only an aspect of one infinite undifferenti-
ated substance can be seen as articulating, in a very different cultural,
historical and geographical context, similar insights to those we have
seen in Madhyamika philosophy. It is only by conventions of thought
and language that objects, ideas and things can be considered as
separate or discrete, for in truth they are all interdependent aspects of
an infinite and indeterminate reality. The realisation of this conven-
tional state, the interdependence of what may appear to be independ-
ent entities, or in Spinozas terms the lack of self-subsistence, is a
realisation of sunyata, emptiness. And the whole, the totality of all
that is, Spinozas God/Nature, can be described in Madhyamika terms
as tathata, suchness. Of course, they are different because they are
integrated into very different cultural and religious frameworks, but
even allowing for the differences it is interesting to see some similari-
ties in the ethical applications of these ideas.
According to Russell (1946: 596), Spinoza, like Socrates and Plato,

[and, we might add, the Buddha] believes that all wrong action is due
to intellectual error: the man who adequately understand his own
circumstances will act wisely. The Buddhas entreaty to his follow-
ers, to know thyself, and the importance placed on the use of upaya,
or skilful means, and right understanding, are indicative of the
Buddhist analysis of human dissatisfaction and suffering as being
caused by ignorance, delusion or misunderstanding. Understanding
comes through disciplined attention to how things are in the world,
through practices that develop the critical powers of the mind leading
to an intense clarity of consciousness. The Buddhist term, enlighten-
ment, is a state of seeing into the relative, conventionalised reality
maintained by linguistic structures, rationalisation and reification, and
also a clear recognition of the misguided beliefs, values and behav-
iours that arise from treating this reality as a true or absolute state of
affairs. Our desire to own or consume what we have reified and
divided into objects, causes us endless frustration and dissatisfaction.
We are trapped in our dualistic thinking. We want to hang on to what
is passing, clinging to fictional substances temporarily held apart from
everything that is. This misguided habitual attachment to any part of
the whole, as if it were truly separate and self-subsisting, is a failure to
understand the mutuality of existence sunyata, the interdependence
of everything. Right understanding, in the Buddhist sense, involves an
ability to see more clearly the provisional nature of linguistic categori-
sations and conventions, leading to a lightening of consciousness and
release from over-attachment.
These misguided attachments to objects (houses, cars, money, status,

roles, ideas, beliefs and values), as if they were absolutes, can be
linked to what Spinoza describes as our bondage to the passions,
those reactive emotions like hatred, anger, fear and envy, in which
we appear to ourselves to be passive in the power of outside forces.
(Russell 1946: 598) Russell quotes Spinoza: An emotion which is a
passion ceases to be a passion as soon as we form a clear and distinct
idea of it. (ibid) In other words, once we understand and accept the
relative nature of reality we no longer feel an obsessive attachment to
any part of it. Russell: In so far as a man is an unwilling part of a
larger whole, he is in bondage; but in so far as, through the under-
standing, he has grasped the sole reality of the whole, he is free.
(1947: 598)
Another aspect of Spinozas thinking that upset Christians and Jews

alike, was his view that even sins and other moral failings, in so far as
they were an integral part of the whole, are only sins and failings seen
from the finite perspective of human beings. As Russell puts it, In
God, who alone is completely real, there is no negation, and therefore
the evil in what to us seem sins does not exist when they are viewed as
parts of the whole. (1947: 594) This does mean that the notion of
sin has no meaning or value within the realm of human affairs, it
only points to the relative nature of sin, however conceived. Sins and
moral structures are not absolutes. This relativism contributed to
Spinozas wise generosity of spirit. He advised that we should develop
the active emotions including happiness, love and tolerance, which
are grounded in understanding, rather than cultivate (or repress) the

passive emotions such as anger, resentment and frustration, which are
caused by conditions or circumstances outside our control. And the
highest of the active emotions is what he calls the intellectual love
of God, the emotion that attends metaphysical understanding, a
comprehensive grasp of the nature of the world as a whole. (Magee
1987: 106)
It is no surprise that Spinoza did not expect Gods love to be returned.

He thought this a foolish expectation reflecting a misguided belief that
God was an object apart, another being with finite qualities or emo-
tions. As Magee (1987: 107) eloquently puts it:
No one has any difficulty, [Spinoza] said, in understanding that a person has
a passionate love of nature, yet we should consider such a person mad if he
wanted nature to love him back. Now because nature and God are one and
the same, the same thing is true about God. It is conducive to our happiness
to love God, but meaningless and absurd for us to expect God to love us.
This sense of wonder and respect, grounded in profound contempla-

tion, is accompanied by an awareness of the benign indifference of the
universe/God. The universe is not here for any purpose outside itself,
for there is no outside. Nature/God is without intentions or determi-
nate actions. If I remember rightly, this echoes the words of St. John
of Damascus: God is the ocean of indeterminacy.
*
Echoes of Boehme
These ideas of Spinozas about God as Nature, Nature as God, echo
the insights of many mystics within different religious traditions.
Jacob Boehme (1575-1625) wrote of the indeterminate ineffability of
God. Using a dialectical method not dissimilar to the Madhyamika, he
points towards God as the one sole existence, the undifferentiated
ground, or unground, of being maybe what weve been referring to
as tathata.
For it cannot be said of God that he is this or that, evil or good, or that he
has distinctions in himself. For he is in himself natureless, passionless, and
creatureless. He has no tendency to anything, for there is nothing before him
to which he could tend, neither evil or good. He is in himself the unground,
without any will towards nature and creature, as it were an eternal nothing.
There is no pain or quality in him, nor anything that could incline either to
him or from him. He is the one sole existence, and there is nothing before
him or after him by or in which he might draw or grasp a will for himself;
neither has he anything that generates or produces him. He is the nothing
and the all, and is a single will in which the world and the whole creation
lies. In him all is alike eternal, without beginning, equal in weight, measure
and number. He is neither light nor darkness, neither love nor wrath, but the
eternal One. (Bohme 1930)
This is a powerfully lucid and poetic evocation of the undiffentiated

suchness of being, as experienced by a German protestant master
shoemaker. Employing and extending the theological vocabulary of
his time and place, Boehme conveys the immediacy of his insights -
we get a taste of his consciousness raised to a level of intensity that
pushes language to its limits.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, (1911: 5) writing from a transcendentalist

position, condenses these ideas into one phrase: there is one mind
common to all. And he argues, in a way that Spinoza, and possibly
Boehme, would have agreed, that nature is its correlative.
*
Realities & reality
It is evident from what I have already written that there is much
confusion surrounding the term reality. Indeed it is obvious that we
use the term in different ways to mean different things in different
contexts. There are many realities rather than one. Id like to clarify
the way Im using these words.
I have drawn attention to two particular uses of the term reality. One,
is to describe the conventional differentiated realm of appearances, in
which we recognise and categorise things, objects, ideas and forms as
separate entities. In a sense this is a meta-reality, a human construc-
tion, maintained by language, conceptualisation and classificatory
patterns of thought. It is within this realm that we describe, analyse,
theorise and interpret. We weave this reality in ever more complex
and dense layerings of conventionalised thoughts, signs and behav-
iours. It is a semiotic web that has enormous power, enabling us to do
a huge variety of things. It is a web that is known as maya in Sanskrit,
a term that refers to nama, to name or classify, and rupa, forms
the naming of forms. This reality of human constructions, descrip-
tions and stories is tangible and dynamic. It presents a universe that is

a reflection of us. It is real in a relative and conditional sense. So long
as we recognise that it is woven by us, an aspect of our own self-
construction, it is useful, we can be creative with it and produce noble
ideas, theories and artefacts. But if we lose sight of the fact that it is a
human construction, a reality woven of signs, ideas and dreams, we
can find ourselves in deep trouble, afflicted by hubris, uncontrolled
desires and alienation from our environment. We become entangled in
a web that we have spun, unable to extricate ourselves, convinced that
the web is the one reality of many truths. We are seduced into believ-
ing that our own sparkling iridescent construction is all that there is.
To return again to the skull in the still-life we can see the seductive-
ness of believing such things. When I write or say skull I separate
an object from its field of existence. I create a phantom object
removed from the continuum of relationships and processes that are
integral to it. If it is taken to be the true state of things, the apparently
clearly defined, discrete, self-existing skull is a verbal/conceptual
illusion. I am deluded into a false sense of certainty about what it is,
where it is and how it is. I begin to see an object rather than a set of
relationships in an indeterminate field. This enables me to produce a
particular kind of simplified iconic diagram, an emblematic abstrac-
tion of the skull or a verbal taxonomy. Linguistic conceptualising
enables us to do things, to converse, to share or exchange narratives
and views, to construct useful systems of thought, description,
measurement and analysis. But we must keep in mind that these
discourses and practices are sets of conventions, constructions or
abstractions that reify differences, dividing and objectifying what is
actually indivisible and ineffable.
Which brings us to another mode of the real the undifferentiated

reality of everything-as-it-is, the other, suchness, Spinozas God or
Nature, Boehmes unground, the locus of our being-in-the-world - the
one non-relational discontinuum of being. On one level, of course, this
reality, as a concept, is also a socio-cultural linguistic construction.
But as an experience, a mode of consciousness, an actuality, it is
qualitatively different. It is what is left when all the talking stops, the
remainder, what is beyond the pale of discourse, the apophatically
insistent presence that hums and vibrates at the margins, or at the
silent centre, of language. It is the Ur-reality, the alpha and omega of

being. The ineffable state of unity described in paradoxical language
by mystics and poets within many traditions. According to Blyth,
(1964: 172) mysticism is the experience of an ever-present, aborigi-
nal oneness. It is the reunion of the I and the not-I. We can only point
to this state beyond opposites and dualities, or show it in actions or
metaphors, or come to a realisation of it. In the polarised shadow-
language of ontology we can equate differentiated reality with
becoming, and undifferentiated Ur-reality with being. But the Ur-
reality is also the linguistic reality! The idea of emptiness (the void)
has itself to be deconstructed and subjected to dialectical analysis.
In the Madhyamikasastra we find this summing up of the position:
It cannot be called void or not void,

Or both or neither;
But in order to point it out,
It is called the Void.
(Watts 1989: 63)
Similarly, in the Prajnaparamita Sutra, we find the famous statement,

Form is emptiness and emptiness is form. (see Suzuki, in Loori
2002: 67) But we should not attach ourselves to this statement for it is
also the case that form is form and emptiness is emptiness. Becom-
ing attached to any of these statements is to believe in them as objects,
as absolutes. Only by letting go of the reifications and differentiations
inherent in our linguistic conceptualising will we experience the fluid
indeterminacy of being. Only by realising abstraction can we realise
actuality.
Which is why, after we exhaust all the possibilities of debate, analysis

and dialectic, we are able to realise emptiness. Merton writes, (1968:
38)
Buddhist meditation, but above all that of Zen, seeks not to explain but to
pay attention, to become aware, to be mindful, in other words to develop a
certain kind of consciousness that is above and beyond deception by verbal
formulae or by emotional excitement [] Deception due to diversion and
distraction from what is right there consciousness itself.
Buddhist practices aim to bring us back from abstraction to the actual,

and there are modes of drawing and poetry that can be used for a
similar purpose to realise the actual in all its indeterminacy and
impermanence.
*
Kitaro Nishida
As I read Thomas Merton I come across his review of Nishidas first
book, translated into English as, A Study of Good, 1960. Kitaro
Nishida (1870-1945) was an eminent Japanese philosopher who
articulated Zen Buddhist insights and ideas in terms closely aligned to
the existentialist Christianity of Jacques Maritain and Gabriel Marcel.
Merton writes:
Like Merleau-Ponty, Nishida is concerned with the primary structures of

consciousness [] The starting point of Nishida is a pure experience a
direct experience of undifferentiated unity which is quite the opposite of
the starting point of Descartes in his cogito. (1968: 67)
Merton argues that, in contrast to Descartes objectification of

consciousness and self-awareness - the separating out of a self that
looks at the world from the standpoint of a detached thinking observer
- Nishida proposes that:
what comes first is the unifying intuition of the basic unity of subject and
object in being or a deep grasp of life in its existential concreteness at the
base of consciousness. This basic unity is not an abstract concept but being
itself. (ibid: 68)
And, as Merton points out, this fundamental reality is neither external

nor internal, objective nor subjective. It is prior to all differentiations
and contradictions. (ibid) It is the undifferentiated and irreducible
state of what is, the actuality of being.
*
Scepticism and Madhyamika Pyrrho and Nagarjuna
Even a cursory encounter with Madhyamika thinking is likely to bring
to mind some of the insights, methods and aims of Greek scepticism.
It may be useful and interesting to step sideways from the track we
have been following in order to briefly explore a stretch of territory
that has recently been mapped in a sustained manner by Thomas
McEvilley in his pioneering book, The Shape of Ancient Thought. But

in order to get our bearings some preliminary remarks about scepti-
cism may be helpful.
According to Julia Annas (2000) it is important to clarify the meaning

of the term sceptic and to separate out its popular negative associa-
tions from the Greek philosophical traditions that provide us with the
word.
The Greek term skepticos means, not a negative doubter, but an investiga-
tor, someone going in for skeptesthai or enquiry. As the late sceptic author
Sextus Empiricus puts it, there are dogmatic philosophers, who think that
they have found the truth; negative dogmatists, who feel entitled to the posi-
tion that the truth cannot be found; and the sceptics, who are unlike both the
other groups in that they are not committed either way. They are still inves-
tigating things. (Annas 2000: 69)
This undecidability or indeterminacy regarding notions of truth is a

fundamental characteristic of the sceptical approach, particularly as
articulated by Sextus Empiricus. Enquiry is always open-ended,
knowledge is always revisible, subject to changing experiences and
the flux of life. According to the sceptics:
Real enquiry, thorough investigation, will reveal that the situation was more
complex and problematic; we turn out never to have reason to commit our-
selves one way or the other, and so end up suspending judgment that is,
having a detached and uncommitted attitude to whatever the issue was.
(Annas 2000: 69-70)
Questions always spawn other questions. There can be no closure or

finality because there is no possibility of absolute knowledge. Our
perspective on anything is always relative, situated here or there. Just
as when we view the still-life, a slight tilt of the head, or movement
backwards or forwards, changes the array of tones, shapes and colours
in our field of vision. The longer we perceive and represent our
perceptions the more we come to understand our fallibility and the
more we relish the indeterminacy which leads to endless surprise.
There is no definitive drawing just as there is no terminus for our
investigations.
Likewise we can always find evidence and ideas to support both sides
of an argument. Rationality is a very effective tool, but it is effective
in many different directions, giving us a rational basis for believing
many apparently contradictory things. Rationality is therefore both too
powerful and too weak to help us in selecting what we can rely on as a
certain or lasting truth. All we can be certain of is that in the pursuit of
peace of mind, or happiness, rationality, as a way of binding together
the evidence we have gathered into a convincing argument or justified
belief, is of very limited value. No argument, truth or belief is depend-
able or resistant to change, transformation and contradiction.
Only the sceptic, who realizes the futility of commitment to belief, is tran-
quil; rigorous investigation brings suspension of belief [and, we might say a
lessening of desire and attachment] and this brings the peace of mind that
had been sought in the wished-for answers [] But [peace of mind only
arises] by not looking for it, merely being there when it arrives; and it ar-
rives as a result of the rigorous investigation that makes it impossible to
commit yourself for or against any position. (Annas 2000: 70)
This is remarkably similar to the Madhyamika dialectic that shoots

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

India, probably with the cultural apparatus for Greek education,
maintenance of language and intellectual pursuits, is provided by
McEvilley and his many sources. These include rock-cut inscriptions
found in Kandahar in the late 1950s and 1960s, which are written in
good scholarly Greek of the period, not an outdated or barbaric
Greek. (ibid: 360-361) The inscriptions, are executed in good-
quality, mid-third-century carving, indicating that this Greek commu-
nity was in touch with the mainstream Greek world. The evidence of
the inscriptions, along with other archaeological evidence found at the
sites, suggests that the inhabitants probably lived in the Greek
manner until at least the third-century.
McEvilley argues that profound similarities exist between the Pyrrho-

nist traditions of Scepticism and the Madhyamika Buddhism of
Nagarjuna and others. He maintains that mutual influence and
philosophical interaction is the most likely explanation for the
similarities of dialectical method, argumentation and the exempla used
to support arguments. (ibid: 498) He also notes the following:
current scholarship among Hellenists places Sextus [Empiricus the ency-

clopaedist and voice of the Pyrrhonist sceptical tradition] in the late second
and/or early third century A.D., and the current view of Buddhologists
places Nagarjuna in exactly the same time frame. It is, in other words, prob-
able that the two great ancient deconstructivists, East and West, were alive
at the same time. (ibid: 455)
It is likely that Pyrrho (c.360-c.275BC) had been a painter before he

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

McEvilley provides many examples of the similarities between the
traditions of Scepticism and Madhyamika Buddhism. I will discuss a
few of these as they add a number of interesting dimensions to the
themes weve been exploring. McEvilley outlines the purposes of the
sceptics dialectical method in terms similar to those used by Annas,
and we can see again the striking correspondence with Madhyamika
ideas and practices. According to McEvilley, Democritus, Pyrrho
[whom he refers to as Pyrrhon] and Sextus, were part of a counter-
tradition to the lineage of Parmenides and Plato. The latter used
dialectical argument to distinguish between the conditional realm of
phenomena and the unconditional realm of absolute reality (Platonic
ideas), on the other hand the Pyrrhonists used the dialectic as,
an antilinguistic or anticonceptual force that would blow away what the

Cynics called the smoke or mist of opinions and value judgments and re-
store attention to phenomena in themselves. In the one case, [Plato et al],
phenomena are considered unreal; in the other case, conceptualization about
phenomena is considered unreal. (McEvilley 2002: 420)
Through dialectical analysis all opinions were shown to be relative

and conditional, full of distortions, imbalances and false categorisa-
tions, thus shaping parts of experience to one model while repressing
others (ibid: 420) that may be equally valid. McEvilley outlines the
purpose that energises the sceptical method, as follows:
The study of counterarguments to ones own opinions was meant, according

to Sextus, to lead to a general state of epoche, suspension of belief, which
could lead in turn to a state of inner freedom from the domination of lin-
guistic categories (aphasia), which in turn will steady into an effective bal-
ance (arrepsia) which is naturally and effortlessly followed by a state of
imperturbability (ataraxia). (ibid: 420)
The purpose of the Madhyamika, according to Candrakirti (another

Madhyamika thinker), is to,
eradicate the innate tendency of conceptual thought to construct reified no-

tions of being (bhava) and non-being (abhava). Such reified concepts lead
to dispositions (samskaras) which keep one involved in the tumult of opin-
ions. One who attains a middle position between Being and non-Being is
said to have attained enlightenment and freedom. (McEvilley 2002: 456)
There are two sayings that are directly attributed to Pyrrho. One refers
to the lack of any essential self-existence, the nondifference of
things. McEvilley translates this saying as: Nothing really exists, but
human life is governed by convention. (ibid: 451) Brunschwigs
version is: things are entirely undifferentiated, undetermined and
undecided. (1998: 847) This echoes similar ideas in the Madhyamika
tradition. The second saying is: Nothing is in itself more this than
that. (McEvilly 2002: 451) Once again this is remarkably similar to
the Madhyamika advocacy of dialectical deconstruction to expose the
interdependence of all opinions, views and statements. McEvilley
reminds us that a key text of the Madhyamika is Nagarjunas
Madhyamakasastra, or the Treatise on the Middle Way. He argues that
middle way here refers to the indeterminate state between A and
not-A. (ibid: 455) Pyrrhonist sceptics and Madhyamika Buddhists
affirm the importance of the liminal position between A and not-A,
positive and negative, Being and non-Being. As McEvilley puts it:
Yes and No, [are] equivalent to the passions of grasping and fleeing that
make life a tumult, the position in between being the calm at the eye of the
hurricane, as it were. (ibid)
To assert any proposition, Yes or No, is according to Nagarjuna, to be

in error. (ibid: 456) Between positive and negative, this and that,
arises the undifferentiated state of aphasia, freedom from the
domination of linguistic categories (p.420) that, according to Sextus,
is a characteristic of mental balance. (ibid: 458-459)
Both Madhyamika and Pyrrhonist traditions use dialectical methods to

expose the relational and dualistic nature of appearances as con-
structed by language and argument and to enable their respective
students to realise the indeterminacy or suchness (tathata) of things.
Things, being of no fixed nature, are outside the distinction between Being
and non-Being, which is an essentialist dichotomy, and are similarly outside
of the categories of language, which are also rigid and essentialist. (McE-
villey 2002: 458)
It is interesting to note that the Greek term used by the sceptics to

denote the indeterminacy of things, the lack of essence or self-
existence, is aoristia, lack of boundary or definition. This may be

seen as corresponding quite closely to sunyata in the Madhyamika
tradition. McEvilley points out that the indeterminacy of things makes
them ungraspable in epistemological terms. Having no self-existence,
things cannot be circumscribed by concepts or defined or grasped
by linguistic terms. This ungraspable, ineffableness is what the
sceptics call akatalepsia. (ibid: 458)
In both traditions the dialectic operates on three levels ontological,

epistemological, and semantic or language-critical, (ibid) revealing
the limitations of linguistic construction and argument. Both schools
felt that what is usually called philosophy is a veil of words which
cuts the mind off from the reality of experience. (ibid) The silence,
indeterminacy and ineffability that arise when we are extricated from
our dependence on, or attachment to, the web of language, are
affirmed as positive qualities that are more likely to lead to, or
accompany, enlightenment and imperturbability. The critique of
linguistic conceptualisation is accompanied by an affirmation of direct
experience. Our attachment to linguistic categories and concepts leads
us to be disturbed, to take sides or, as McEvilley puts it:
[the] emotions or passions may be set going by words attached to events

rather than directly by events themselves by nomos or convention []
rather than by physis or nature. (ibid: 421)
In the practice of drawing from observation we encounter the un-

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

drawing, but rather, that we will recognise the conventionality of
modes of representation (nomos) and the indeterminacy of nature
(physis).
In both the Pyrrhonist and Madhyamika traditions, and in some kinds

of drawing practice, linguistic conceptualisation is turned against
itself, using dialectical methods, in order to point to, or realise, non-
linguistic states of consciousness, to encounter the actual. Paradox,
contradiction, nonsense, unorthodox marks and unfamiliar gestures
are employed to burst the dualistic bubble that reifies and distorts as it
refracts being through its transparent and mirroring skin.
*
The use of koans a dialectics of absurdity
Koans, like Hakuins, What is the sound of one hand clapping? or
Hui-Nengs, What is your original face? are now the stuff of clichd
commentary or comedy. But within the Zen tradition, particularly the
Rinzai school, they have a crucial role to play in a radical dialectical
method that forces Zen students to experience the absurdities and
paradoxes that arise within the web of language. Such methods are
used to cajole, trip-up, push the student into realising emptiness and
encountering suchness. The koan is used to pull the linguistic concep-
tualising rug from under our feet, to flip us over into suddenly
experiencing the undifferentiated, ineffable concreteness of existence.
In a kind of philosophical or existential slapstick manoeuvre the Zen
teacher uses the koan to bring the student face-to-face with a reality-
consciousness that is pre-linguistic, immediate and wholly indetermi-
nate. Hui-Nengs original face, Bankeis unborn and Suzukis
beginners mind, point to a state before words, concepts, rationalisa-
tion and description, a non-symbolic engagement with what is.
In attempting to use the mind to try to grasp or analyse the mind, we

behave like a dog chasing its own tail. Rationality, language, argu-
ment and opinions are self-generating modalities of thought. They add
to themselves in ways that may be interesting, exciting and stimulat-
ing, but they only enhance the desire for more excitement and stimula-
tion. Attachment to dualistic relational modes of thought leads to ever
greater disturbance, dissatisfaction and unease. Pyrrho and Nagarjuna
provide us with uroboric (self-destroying) methods with which to cut
the chain of relational thought that takes us nowhere. The koans
employed in Zen practice provide us with another mode of liberation
from the circularities of linguistic argument and either/or positions.
The practice of focusing the mind on trying to solve a koan as if it
were a puzzle, leads the mind to run in ever tighter circles until the
spinning grows unendurable. We realise the absurdity of trying to
grasp the ungraspable. At some point, having exhausted the rational,
conditional responses to the koan, each one turned down or brushed
off by the Zen teacher, the student hits a linguistic or conceptual brick
wall. A point is reached at which the futility of such a chase is realised
and the student lets go of the desire to solve the unsolvable. In this
state of exhaustion or resignation another mode of consciousness can
arise of itself, as sceptics and Zen practitioners say, unbidden and
unlooked-for.
In the Zenrin Kushu, a collection of Zen poems and aphorisms, the

paradoxical nature of setting out to realise emptiness is evoked as
follows:
You cannot get it by taking thought;

You cannot seek it by not taking thought.
(in Watts 1989: 136)
Only by no longer grasping at essences and relinquishing the desire

for answers can the sceptic states of epoche and aphasia, be realised.
Descriptions of these states echo the accounts of Zen students experi-
encing sudden insight (satori) into the emptiness of all things (sun-
yata) when they are at the end of their tether, no longer able to grasp
for the right (or wrong) response to the koan:
But [peace of mind only arises] by not looking for it, merely being there
when it arrives; and it arrives as a result of the rigorous investigation that
makes it impossible to commit yourself for or against any position.(Annas
2000: 70)
No matter how many times the dog bites itself, eventually it has to
give up, licking its painful tail or falling asleep in exhaustion.
*
Hanging over the precipice - letting-go
There is a Zen story in the collection of koans assembled by the
Chinese master Ekai (also known as Mu-mon - 1183-1260) that
highlights the conundrum faced by the Zen student. The collection, a
key text in the Rinzai school of Zen, is entitled, Mu-mon-kan or The
Gateless Gate. In order to appreciate the significance of the story we
need to know that Bodhidharma is the name of the revered first
patriarch of the Zen tradition, who carried the message and practices
of Buddhism from India to China, where Zen became established as a
dynamic tradition. Also, we need to be aware that opportunities for
enlightenment may only arise once, or rarely, in a persons life, so a
Buddhist would dearly want to take up the opportunity if it arose as
it does here when a man is asked a question in the spirit of a koan.
The Zen master, Kyogen, once said: A man hangs by his teeth from
the branch of a tree leaning out over a precipice. He is unable to grasp
the branch with his hands, or to get a foothold. He is stuck. Another
man asks him: Why did Bodhidharma come to China from India? If
the man doesnt answer, he loses his chance of liberation from the
wheel of attachment and becoming; if he does answer, he falls and
loses his life. What should he do? (my retelling of a version in Reps
s.d.: 94-95)
There is no solution to this existential puzzle, no logical way out of

what appears to be a metaphysical impasse. The Zen student can only
gnaw at the problem until all possible responses have been rejected.
Maybe then some action or gesture will be made that demonstrates to
the teacher that an understanding of sunyata and tathata has been
actualised in the students behaviour, in the way life is lived.
The move from an intense exercise of will, the exaggerated pursuit of

a desired goal or objective, to a non-intentional acceptance or resigna-
tion, is a feature of many accounts of the arising of undifferentiated
consciousness or states of imperturbability. In the Taoist tradition this
connectionless connection comes across in the term, wu-wei, which
means literally, not or non, action or striving. In other words
doing by not-doing, not forcing or striving for a particular end, but
simply allowing things to happen of their own accord. This notion is
expressed in the following well-known stanza from the Zenrin-Kushu,
an anthology of poems compiled by Toyo Eicho, in the fifteenth
century:
Sitting quietly, doing nothing,

Spring comes, and the grass grows by itself.
(in Watts 1989: 134)
We are not being advised to do nothing or to be carried along by

events subject to the whims of others. We are only being advised that
changes of attitude or consciousness, are often resistant to force or
will or imposition, indeed striving often reinforces the state from
which we are hoping to be released.
*
Drinking the void
In his translation of the poem by Su Tung Po (also known as Su
Shih), The Weaker the Wine, Kenneth Rexroth provides an excellent
summing-up of much of what has been written in this section. His
translation begins:
The weaker the wine,

The easier it is to drink two cups.
The thinner the robe,
The easier it is to wear it double.
Beauty and ugliness are opposites,
But when youre drunk, one is as good as the other.
And it ends:
Good men are their own worst enemies.

Wine is the best reward of merit.
In all the world, good and evil,
Joy and sorrow, are in fact
Only aspects of the Void.
(Rexroth 1971: 72-73)
***
Part 5
Picturing mind writing being
This poetry is a picture

or graph of a mind moving.
Philip Whalen poem, Since You Ask Me.
(in Whalen 1999: 50)
Introduction
In this section I examine the ways in which art and poetry provide us
with visual and textual manifestations of a mind at work sensing,
thinking, imagining, enquiring spinning a web of representations,
utterances, songs and showings that enable us to sense the shape and
quality of consciousness at the threshold between an embodied self
and the energy field of which it is an integral part. A consideration of
the work of Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, Philip Whalen and
Charles Olson is used to shed light on the ways in which the mind is
pictured and inscribed into images and texts. A brief analysis of John
Cages interest in no-mind (wu-hsin in Chinese) acts as a counter-
point to the main theme.
*
Cy Twombly, returning to Rome not as a stranger
It is a rare sunny morning in a very wet August. I sit at my desk with a
few books open before me. They are catalogues of exhibitions by the
American artist, Cy Twombly. Twombly was born in Virginia and
moved to Italy in 1957. He has lived there most of the time ever since,
marrying into an aristocratic Italian family. Looking at the reproduc-
tions of drawings, paintings, collages and sculptures I remember some
notes made a few years ago when I was trying to clarify my own
response to his work. The notes describe in a disordered but immedi-
ate fashion some of the qualities of Twomblys work that most struck
102 Picturing mind writing being
me at the time. (The passages in italics are taken from Varnadoe 1994,
and they include fragments from letters written by Twombly and
quotes that he cites in relation to his own work.)
Born 1928, in Lexington, Virginia. Neo-classical Palladian architecture, Jef-

fersons Monticello, sensual languor & lingering romance of fallen gran-
deur - all aspects of the Southern country in which Twombly grew up.
In 1951 Twombly enrolled at Black Mountain college where he encountered

John Cages ideas.
Pictorial poetics grounded in literature.
Eroded ancient surfaces. Irrational ritual & fetish. Erotic grit liquid gestures.
Roman ruins. White song of experience. Crumbling chalk, bleached bones.
Curling loops of lines, scratched repeated scars, claw-marks faint tremors to
turbulence. Illegible signs & assertive words.
The reality of whiteness may never be analysed. Whiteness of becoming. A

crisis of sensation or release or ecstacy.
Sept. 6th 1952: finally in Rome / a large room overlooking the Piazza di
Spagna / walked miles / so excited to see everything at once / work each
morning in my room then site see in the afternoon / then to Florence for
awhile & Venice
Scumbled clouds, fluttering hearts. Signature, place & date as pictorial tes-
timony. Fragments of names. Naming as ritual evocation of being, of time,
of human presence, of place.
Oct. 15th 1952: a week in Florence / return to Rome not as a stranger
John Crowe Ransome, the poet, wrote a book entitled: The Worlds Body.
In it he said: An idea is derivative & tamed. The image is in the natural or
wild state / we think we can lay hold of the image & take it captive, but the
docile captive is not the real image but only an idea, which is the image
with its character beaten out of it.
Undated, Tangiers: just returned from digging at a Roman bath / North Af-
rica is covered with wonderful Roman cities.
Searching for city of light. Sweeping dust aside. Clouds of dust inscribed
with images & texts. Scratched signs of passing time, Europes debris &
bones.
Picturing mind writing being 103
Words of George Seferis: suns in your eyes , birds on your shoulder / dawn
/ birth / vast dilation of time / you were remade drop by drop / worn thin
you search for the light.
Now we whitewash the floor & walls & ceiling - we remake ourselves mo-
ment by moment scattered castles washed away with each tide.
Much of Twomblys work from the late 1950s onwards, includes

words, phrases, names and other references to classical Greek and
Roman culture. The textual elements sit alongside, on top of, or
beneath, an array of marks, gestures, stains and scribbles, orchestrated
within a complex visual field. Bursts of highly saturated colour
punctuate a ground of creamy whites, delicate pinks and pale blues.
There is a sensuality to the work that is redolent of warm surfaces
touched by generations of hands. Twombly uses the vocabulary of
Abstract Expressionism, expanded to include his own distinctively
agitated line and idiosyncratic handwriting.
Over and over again we encounter references to the ancient history,

culture and geography of his adopted Mediterranean home. We get a
sense of what it is like to be a North American emigrant taking up
residence in a place where history, legends and myths seem to be
inscribed into actual buildings, walls and gardens. The ruins are a
visual and tactile literature of epic events that have been torn, tram-
pled and quoted - and used as a measure of harmony and loss by
generations of visitors. Twombly provides us with a record of his
passionate exploration of this territory, a territory that is both physical,
spatial, intellectual and psychological. We are shown what it is like to
be in this place, for him to reorient himself away from a north-
American locus and to make a home in southern Europe. He gives us a
cognitive map of his presence in this land of grand narratives and
earthly delights. He pictures a process of assimilation, surprise,
acculturation and growing familiarity, as he puts down roots over a
period of forty years or more. Metaphors, of war, journeying, dis-
placement and coming home recur in phrases drawn from classical
literature phrases scribbled into the liquid paint with the urgency of
someone wanting to note down quickly a passing thought. In Adonais,
1975, we find these phrases, which come from Shelleys poem with
the same title: He is a portion of the loveliness which once he made
more lovely / He has out-soared the shadow of our night. Twombly
seems to share with the Romantic poet a conception of beauty as a

passing thing that seems always to be slipping from our grasp. In
Popes neoclassical version of the Iliad, in Virgils Eclogues and
Spencers The Shepheardes Calender, Twombly finds a beauty that is
both corporeal and abstract, of skin and spirit. Metaphors of body,
place and thought are combined on to painted surfaces that analogi-
cally picture his embodied mind.
In Twomblys work we find a characteristic of many of the art works

Im interested in, that is, the way in which they present us with iconic
and indexical signs of being, while also constituting a topography of
mind. These characteristics can be related to particular modes of
composition and interpretation in poetry. The interaction between
these modes of picturing and writing the world (mind) also provides
the dynamic for establishing a kind of associative, analogical herme-
neutics which Im using to reflect on my own work and the work of
others. These are some of the ideas and issues Ill be exploring in this
section.
I probably ought to mention that in my mental landscape Cage and

Beuys rub shoulders with Ruskin, Sesshu and Samuel Beckett, and the
unknown makers of palaeolithic art work alongside poets like
Rexroth, Hopkins and Snyder. Reproductions of Rauschenbergs
Dante drawings lie on the table alongside The Maximus Poems of
Charles Olson and The Open Field of Kenneth White.
*
Writing Being
Painting, drawing, poetry and other arts can be considered as modes of
transformative experience, and as seismic traces (in Beckett et al
1985: 81) of being and becoming. But this should not be taken as
necessarily supporting an expressive theory of art. Indeed the poet
Robin Blaser (1974: 38) argues against the tendency to reduce poetry
to the expression of the man, the expression of the personality [which
is poetry as] invented thought, the unreal, the fictive, [] the tran-
scendence that is not attached. He argues instead for poetry as
primary thought, a way of experiencing - part of the body/mind
active in the world a mode of being and coming to know. Poetry and
art are indices of openness, of experience unfolding in the making. A
process of realisation both making real, making reality - and

realising the self. What Rilke might have meant by his phrase, we are
all bees of the invisible. (Blaser 1974: 41)
This brings to mind Charles Olsons argument (in Allen & Creeley:
186) against the tradition of Greek philosophy the tradition of
Socrates readiness to generalise, Aristotles logic and classifica-
tion, and Platos idealism, with its separation of form from content.
This tradition tends to push lived experience into the background
until it becomes a kind of existential wallpaper against which the
furniture of abstraction, generalisation and categorisation stand out as
real objects. Well return to Olson later in this section.
Art shines a light on human experience, urges us to look here, listen to

this, feel the texture. Attend and learn what it is like to be human,
alive to so much. And as we participate in the dynamic field of the
artwork we are turned and re-orientated and re-established. Some kind
of dissembling and re-assembling takes place. We re-invent ourselves
in the world, find our engagement renewed, our being deepened and
magnified.
And as we compose so are we composed. For composition involves

the making of ourselves as much as the making of something else. The
painting or poem or piece of music is a vehicle (amongst other things)
for the process of self-constitution.
Artworks can also be seen as agents of contact, touch, learning and

enquiry, and as associative and analogical fields or zones of interpre-
tation. Poems or artefacts acting as tokens of involvement, rather than
tombstones of detachment.
Davvetas, (1987: 22) describing Twomblys work, explains that:
The Greek word for painting, zographike, is a compound of the words

graphike (writing) and zoon (living being) [] this word means (for the
Greeks at least) [] the art of writing down life [] a desire on the part of
Being to inscribe, to sketch what is most impressive or surprising in life
(that which is [].
*
*
Picturing mind
The term picturing mind refers to both a mind that makes pictures
and the making of pictures that are enactments or analogues of mind.
Im using mind here in the Buddhist sense of the whole body/mind
field of consciousness including perceptual sensations, emotions,
thoughts and moods.
Morris Croll describes an informal prose style, developing in the 16th

Century with Montaigne and others, that can be applied to other kinds
of poetry and art processes and products that: portray not a thought,
but a mind thinking. (in Bernstein 1986: 587) Which echoes Mon-
taigne himself saying: I stray from the path, but it is rather by license
than oversight. My ideas follow each other, but sometimes it is at a
distance, and they look at each other, but with an oblique gaze. (in
Bernstein 1986: 587) Artworks that exhibit these characteristics are
enactments of a mind at work and play, mapping both the interwoven
threads of reiterated themes, images and ideas, and the discontinuous
unrelatedness of whatever comes to mind or excites the sensory field.
Coleridges notebooks manifest these qualities in precise profusion.

As Perry observes (2002: viii), the Notebooks moment-to-moment
life testifies to quite a different sort of truth: not unity and encompass-
ing synthesis at all, but his minds immense and multiple activity, in
all its unmeeting extremes. Though Coleridge seems to have yearned
for a unity, a grand synthesis of ideas, his notebooks testify to a more
radical and unusual achievement: the realisation of a grand disunity
that accommodated the myriad-mindedness of his own conscious-
ness. His interest in Spinoza stems largely from an almost morbid
fascination with Spinozas struggle to find the reconciliation of the
many with the one of a plurality with unity. (Perry, 2002, p.viii)
However, in Coleridges own thinking and writing, it is the plurality
that shines through. In a haunting phrase Coleridge refers to his work
in the notebooks as the activity of the self-watching subtilizing
mind. The notebooks record the unfolding of thoughts, impressions,
feelings and sensations what Coleridge described as the flux and
reflux of the mind in all its subtlest thoughts and feelings. (Perry
2002: vii)
Charles Bernstein uses Crolls observation when exploring the

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

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

footedness of thinking that enables these artists and poets to cover a
lot of ground without leaving a heavy footprint. Themes, ideas, issues,
questions and images are concisely brought into the open. The
thinking is associative, alive to contradiction, multiplicity and ambigu-
ity. There is rarely a sense of finality or conclusion. Non sequiturs are
common. Ideas are on the move, slipping from point to point, return-
ing, circling, taking a new direction.
Scalapino suggests that in Whalens writing the disjunctive qualities

of thoughts as they move and unfold testify to the occurrence of time
as being, or being as time. (in Whalen 1999: xvi) The writing is both
an enactment and a history of thought and of being of becoming. As
Scalapino notes, (ibid) there is something conversational about
Whalens poetry which is also true of Cages writing and much of the
poetry of Carson. There is an intimacy of tone and structure, though
without any sense of cloying self-expression or confessional disclo-
sure. The language mixes street-vernacular with academic reference,
diaristic notation with the open confidentiality of a love-letter. There
is a sense that the reader is known and welcomed into the writing as it
happens. The fluidity of thought, of ideas and images coming and
going, is exemplified in the writing and in the expectation that the
reader will be active rather than passive, complicit in the construction
of meaning and a participant in the playful and improvisatory devel-
opment of the work. Whalen, like Kerouac, was aware of the similari-
ties of compositional method between his own writing and jazz
composer-musicians like Thelonius Monk. Whalen (1999: xvii)
suggests that Monks works are extracts from a continuously unfold-
ing music that is going on all the time. You see him listening to it
when hes out walking around / its going all the time. The music
reflects the improvised indeterminacy of life as it is lived and remem-
bered and reflected upon.
According to Scalapino, (in Whalen 1999: xvii)
One of Philip Whalens poems might be written over a period of several

years in a notebook, then typed and chopped into separate lines which, ar-
ranged on the floor, are comparisons of different moments or periods of
time and his mind at those times.
Although Whalen claimed his poems werent collages they do have

the structural density of collage and the disjunctiveness of image and
fragment that collage displays in the hands of , for instance,
Rauschenberg, though perhaps without the tonal and thematic har-
mony of the analytical cubist works of Picasso and Braque or of
Schwitters merz constructions. Most of the poems are dated, adding
to the sense of an unfolding history or becoming.
Sometimes Whalens writing is as terse and evocative as a haiku by

Basho or Issa:
Early Spring
The dog writes on the window

with his nose
30:iii:64
(Whalen 1999: 97)
More usually Whalens poems are like Thelonius Monks jazz

compositions. They have the feel of extracts from an ongoing dialogue
or inscription like journalistic jottings or scenes from a travelogue
one well-known sequence even has the title, Scenes of Life at the
Capital. Given the variety and unformulaic character of his work it is
hard to typify, but here is an extract that conveys the flavour. The title
is itself very Whalenesque:
Plums, Metaphysics, and Investigation, a Visit, and a Short

Funeral Ode, In Memory of William Carlos Williams:
Smog this morning

Hot soupy sun
The mailman brought all the wrong letters
The air stinks, the birds are in somebody elses yard
Boys left a yellow broom in the plum tree
(the plums are still green, however)
I hear the Scavengers Protective Association complaining
about the garbage cans, I
worry about the fragility of my verses

their failure to sound fresh and new
By God, heres the garbage men stealing green plums!

(Whalen, 1999: 85)
Whalens playful irreverence, comedic sensibility and world-weary

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

and material organisation on the part of the artist. We get a sense of
Rauschenbergs mind at work, finding images, selecting material,
placing, moving, overlapping, layering and erasing or painting over

with opaque white or coloured washes. As in the case of Whalens
poetry the drawings can be seen as a graph of the minds movement
full of discontinuities, surprising juxtapositions and odd rhythms
orchestrated into a complex non-linear structure. Each drawing brings
together diverse materials into a provisional order that suggests both
simultaneity, remembering and the now. While the drawings refer to
history and events, both in Dantes narrative and in Rauschenbergs
contemporary media culture, they are drawn in the present tense. The
synchronicity of consciousness is displayed within each page, while a
more linear progression is suggested by the succession of pages, each
one subtitled, Canto I, II, III, and so on.
Rauschenberg invites us to participate in the activity of drawing,

composing, ordering and interpreting. Very little is dictated by the
artist. We arent being told what to think or how to respond. We are
presented with states of indeterminacy, in which we have to think and
respond. We meet both Rauschenberg (and perhaps Dante) mind to
mind. The drawings invite us to enter the mental territory of another
human being and to see and explore a mindscape that is both similar
and yet very different to our own. We see the distinctiveness of
Rauschenbergs patterns of thinking and his particular ways of
ordering and composing. We see what he notices, values and how he
makes connections. We get a sense of the tenor of his perceptual and
cognitive activity as it is enacted and made manifest in the work. In
our engagement with the drawings we encounter the multiplicity of
Rauschenbergs mental operations and the dynamic networks of
thought, visualisation and culture that form and inform his particular
presence in the world.
*
Charles Olson, projective verse and composition-by-field a
manifesto
In 1950 an essay by the poet Charles Olson was published in Poetry
New York. Entitled, Projective Verse, this brief text was enormously
influential on the radical poets of the USA. Olson (in Scully 1966:
282) takes a stance in the essay against what he sees as the longstand-
ing dominance of closed verse, a kind of writing that foregrounds
surface style and form at the expense of method and content. He also
takes issue with poetry as the private-soul-at-any-public-wall or

what Keats refers to as the Egotistical Sublime. Olson argues in
favour of a poetics in which content determines form and poetry
becomes more than self-expression. He wants to see an open kind of
verse in which the form develops according to the rhythms of thought
of the poet and content emerges from that place where breath comes
from a place which, for Olson, is somehow not the ego or self, but
a source of energy outside the poet.
Olson puts forward three simplicities that anyone writing projective

verse, or OPEN verse, or COMPOSITION BY FIELD, will
recognise as crucial to the making of a poem. (Scully 1966: 272)
Delivered in Olsons typically cryptical, conversational style, these
simplicities constitute both a manifesto and a statement of composi-
tional method organised into three related points. The first refers to the
kinetics of the thing, the importance of considering poetry as a
transfer of energy from where the poet got it (he will have some
several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to,
the reader. (ibid: 272) This sounds like a straightforward statement of
expressive theory in the Collingwood or Kandinsky tradition: art
consists of a direct transmission of emotional feeling from artist to
audience via the artwork. But this is not what Olson has in mind. He
emphasises that the poem itself must, at all points, be a high energy-
construct and, at all points, an energy-discharge.(ibid: 272) The poem
is a kind of electrical battery, holding concentrated energy within
itself and releasing it as required by the user.
The poet organises the holding and releasing of energy through the
orchestration of breath in syllables and lines. And the line comes []
from the breath, from the breathing of the man who writes, at the
moment that he writes. And it is the PLAY of a mind we are after,
enacted and displayed in the breath, in the swift currents of the
syllable and in the dance of the line.(ibid: 275) To affirm the impor-
tance of the breath, Olson puts forward an interesting etymology:
Is comes from the Aryan root, as, to breathe. The English not equals the
Sanskrit na, which may come from the root na, to be lost, to perish. Be is
from bhu, to grow. (ibid: 274)
Olsons second simplicity,

is the principle, the law which presides conspicuously over such composi-
tions, and, when obeyed, is the reason why a projective poem can come into
being. It is this: FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF
CONTENT. (ibid: 272)
In composition by field form is never predetermined. Forms are

never to be taken down off the shelf and filled with a particular
content. This was one of the bones of contention between Robert
Duncan and Olson. Duncans use of a wide variety of historical poetic
forms (particularly sonnets and ballads) was anathema to Olson and
smacked of a return to the straightjacket of closed verse, the kind of
preformed subjectivist construction he detested. For Olson, style is
the man (in Davidson 1991: 128) and to take on the style of another
is somehow to be untrue to oneself. To decide at the outset to write a
poem in sonnet form is to attempt to force the genie into a bottle, to
push the organic clay into a constricting mould and to formularise the
liquidity and changefulness of a mans life. Presumably to produce a
poem that happened to have a sonnet form as a result of composition
by field would be entirely honourable, as the form was not predeter-
mined and had arisen organically out of the content.
We can note in passing that Olson uses a dualistic vocabulary that

assumes a separation between form and content, which is also typical
of the formalists and closed versifiers with whom he takes issue. What
distinguishes one from the other is that Olson is against the imposition
or adoption of predetermined forms, while practitioners of closed
verse are not. Davidson points out that Olsons position affirms, a
certain Coleridgean faith in the organic synthesis of ideas and form,
while also asserting the power of the creative will over a world of
fluctuating ideas. (Davidson 1991: 129) Im not sure that Coleridge,
or Olson, would entirely agree with the latter remark, as they both
seemed to conceive of creativity as a flux of ideas and images,
temporarily connected by associative and dissociative thinking in
which the individual will was somehow sidestepped, transcended or
subverted.
The third of Olsons simplicities refers to the process of the thing,

how the principle can be made so to shape the energies that the form is
accomplished.(Scully 1966: 273) For Olson this is a process in which
ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY

LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION (ibid: 273) a statement he
got from Edward Dahlberg. This process involves an ongoing open-
ness to whatever arises in consciousness, a willingness to engage with
whatever comes to mind:
at all points [] get on with it, keep moving, keep in, speed, the nerves,
their speed, the perceptions, theirs, the acts, the split second acts, the whole
business, keep it moving as fast as you canin any given poem always, al-
ways one perception must must must MOVE, INSTANTER, ON AN-
OTHER! (ibid)
The urgency of the statement is typical Olson. He is enacting and

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

mental operations are mapped as they occur in all their complexity,
multilayerings and ambiguities. In a sense nothing lies outside and
whatever comes to mind can be included in the emergent structuring
of the work. As far as possible Olson is aiming for immediacy,
conviction and a directness of speech that is as close as he can get to
the manner and tempo of thinking and perceiving.
*
Some implications of Olsons poetics a poetics of cognitive
immediacy
Olson is critical of the subjectivism that has excellently done itself
to death.(ibid: 280) He adopts and modifies the term objectivism,
(the movement associated with Oppen, Zukofsky, Niedecker,
Reznikoff, and less directly Williams and Pound) coining his own
term objectism, which involves,
the getting rid of the lyrical interference of the individual as ego, of the
subject and his soul, that peculiar presumption by which western man has
interposed himself between what he is as a creature of nature [] and those
other creations of nature which we may, with no derogation, call objects.
For a man is himself an object [] (ibid)
According to Olson the previously dominant (but now dead) poetics of

lyrical self-expression is the product of a distorted relationship
between man (and Olson usually means the male of the species!) and
nature, a relationship of separation that means the poet shall find
little to sing but himself, and shall sing, nature has such paradoxical
ways, by way of artificial forms outside himself. (ibid: 281) Olson
seeks to change this situation in which artificial forms mirror the
artificiality of our conception of how we stand in relation to nature
how we stand apart from, rather than a part of, nature. The poet (and
thus the poem) can derive energy from nature if, paradoxically, he
stays inside himself, if he is contained within his nature as he is
participant in the larger force. (ibid) This re-configured relationship,
in which human being is participatory in natures being, leads to a
situation in which the poet articulates, enacts or projects energies
from outside himself he projects something of the energy field of
nature. It is in this sense that the projective act, which is the artists
act in the larger field of objects, leads to dimensions larger than the
man. (ibid) It also leads to a compositional process in which his [the
poets] shapes will make their own way. Despite Olsons oft-
criticised macho arrogance, his projective poetics is grounded in a
kind of ecological aesthetics. Human beings can give voice to the
energy fields of nature (in which they participate) if they listen as
participants rather than as spectators divided off from nature by
artificial aesthetic codes and forms. Returning to the breath (and
breath is mans special qualification as animal) means returning to
that place where breath comes from, where breath has its beginnings
in other words to nature.(ibid: 281-282)
I am no Greek - from The Kingfishers (in Weinberger 1993: 123)

In his 1965 essay, Human Universe, (in Allen & Creeley 1967: 185-
196) and in other statements and references throughout his work,
Olson rails against the influence and tradition of the Greeks. He sees
this tradition as being constrictive and as leading to a false perception
of how things are in the world, particularly the place of human beings
in the world. He is critical of the Greeks notion that all speculation
[is] enclosed in the UNIVERSE of discourse. (ibid: 186) [Uni-
verse] is their word, and the refuge of all metaphysicians since as
though language, too, was an absolute, instead of (as even man is)
instrument. The turning of language, particularly logic, into an end in
itself, marks a decisive turning away from the phenomenal world of
direct experience a substitution of the abstract or ideal for the actual.
Olson goes on to say that the Greeks notion of discourse, in which,
logos [is] given so much more of its part than live speech, removes
us from the two phenomenal universes that really matter and to which
we need to return the two a man has need to bear on because they
bear so on him: that of himself, as organism, and that of his environ-
ment, the earth and planets. (ibid)
For Olson, three aspects, or inventions, of Greek discourse hugely

intermit our participation in our experience, and so prevent discov-
ery. The first is, Socrates readiness to generalize, his willingness
(from his own bias) to make a universe out of discourse. Instead of
logos, and the reason necessary to it, being tools that we must
master in order to do and think in specialised abstract ways, they
become ends in themselves final discipline. (ibid) Beyond logos
and reason, is direct perception and the contraries which dispose of
argument. The harmony of the universe, and I include man, is not
logical, or better, is post-logical, as is the order of any created thing.
(ibid) In other words nature is post-logical, or alogical, and to try to
define or describe it as an extension of human logical discourse is both
hubristic and divisive. For Olson, the actuality of experience, of
consciousness, of being-in-the-world is more important and more
real than logos, and abstraction, rationalism and generalization take
us away from the actual.
While Socrates is held responsible for the substitution of discourse for

direct perception, Aristotle is seen as providing the technical means
for this process of substitution and separation, namely, logic and

classification. The centrality of logic and classification to the
(western) human intellectual enterprise, and to the mindset of genera-
tions of philosophers, artists and poets, is something Olson deplores,
because they have so fastened themselves on habits of thought that
action is interfered with. (ibid) Action, that is us acting and being
present in the world, is also interfered with by Platonic idealism and
its separation of form and content. The realm of Ideas becomes more
important than the realm of human experience, abstraction becomes
more important than actuality adding to our sense of disengagement
and separation from the complex and multi-facetted, alogical, realities
of our consciousness in nature.
Logic, idealism and classification distort by generalising, abstracting

and separating-out, by disengagement from the continuum of direct
experience.
For any of us, at any instant, are juxtaposed to any experience, even an
overwhelming single one, on several more planes than the arbitrary and dis-
cursive which we inherit can declare. (ibid: 187)
For Olson, there is only one absolute, if there are any, and it is this
one, you, this instant, in action. (ibid) It is this which is at the heart of
Olsons poetics a desire, a yearning for a restoration of the human
house (ibid: 189) by restoring our presence in the world, a presence
that ignites in each moment of consciousness, signified by the ways in
which we act, perceive and hold ourselves in relation to nature and
other beings. The affinities between Olsons ideas and aspirations and
those of phenomenologists like Husserl or Merleau-Ponty, and with
pragmatists like John Dewey, or process philosophers like Heraclitus,
Whitehead and Bergson, are obvious. All emphasise the centrality of
consciousness to philosophy, all recognise that change is a condition
of our being in the world and all are critical, in very different ways, of
idealism, abstraction and rationalism. They all draw attention to our
participation in the world and offer ideas as to how we can be more
attentive to, and more openly integrated into, the processes of nature.
At the beginning of Maximus Poem V, Olson has this, dated January

15, 1962:
A Later Note on
Letter# 15
In English the poetics became meubles furniture-

thereafter (after 1630
& Descartes was the value
until Whitehead, who cleared out the gunk

by getting the universe in (as against man alone
& that concept of history (not Herodotuss,

which was a verb, to find out for yourself:
.
with Whiteheads important corollary: that no event
is not penetrated, in intersection or collision with, an eternal

event
The poetics of such a situation

are yet to be found out
(Olson 1968a: pages unnumbered)
What Olson seems to be saying here, in a manner that is both elliptical

and direct, (simultaneously baroque and realist), is that the tradition of
the Greeks embodied in Descartes empirical rationalism (the Dis-
course on Method was first published in 1637) had become part of the
intellectual furniture of English culture, and continued so until
Bergson, Whitehead and others come along, conceptualising humans
experientially as beings integrated into natures processes of becom-
ing. In this view time, and history, consist in an infinitely complex
interweaving of processes - processes that are both changeful in
themselves and endlessly providing opportunities for more change.
The rationalist determinism in much of Olsons Greek tradition is
pushed aside in favour of a more open-ended indeterminism that
affirms contingency, emergence, novelty, and creativity [as] among
the fundamental categories of metaphysical understanding, (Rescher
2002) and as characteristics of human existence.
Olsons love of the contemporary Maya - and love isnt too strong a
word to describe the affection and respect evident in the Mayan
Letters (1968b) and elsewhere in his writings - is partly the result of
how they seem to reside in their world rather than as we seem to be as

spectators, always with one foot outside the door or with our minds
keeping up a commentary (rationalising, classifying and idealising)
about our experiences rather than experiencing directly. The desire to
re-establish poetry as a mode of experiencing is what links Olson to
other poets and songmakers, from Blaser and Spicer, to Rothenberg
and many unnamed tribal poets, to Fred Wah and back to Coleridge,
Hopkins and Cummings.
All of these poets share a belief in poetry as a way of voicing the

world, a way of picturing consciousness that is our presence in the
world. They would no doubt share the yearning and questioning that
drives Olson to ask:
There must be a means of expression for this, a way which is not divisive as
the tag ends and upendings of the Greek way are. There must be a way
which bears in instead of away, which meets head on what goes on each
split second, a way which does not in order to define prevent, deter, dis-
tract, and so cease the act of, discovering. (1967: 188)
In Olsons hands these aspirations and methods often give rise to a

poetry that is simultaneously provocative, erudite and hard to fathom,
displaying a very public, almost confrontational, intimacy. His letters
and essays have the same qualities. We come away, even when we are
at times confused or perplexed, with a strong sense of a particular
human beings presence in the world, a sense of the body, breath and
mind of a man of considerable learning, whose prejudices, assump-
tions and ideals are candidly and forcefully stated in a manner that
brings to mind Samuel Johnson. Olson reminds us that he is geo-
graphically and culturally situated within an east coast, North Ameri-
can, western context, yet he is also eager to look outside that context
to move poetry to a less egocentric subjectivist position. His poetry is
often recondite, even esoteric, in its references, with a seductive use of
demotic speech and marvellously contorted syntax.
Sometimes the particularities of Olsons experiences and his reluc-

tance to generalise or abstract from them, can lead us, paradoxically,
to search for keys or commentaries outside the poetry as a means of
access and understanding. The particularities of Olsons direct
speech and his attention to the unfolding of consciousness can
generate an opacity and obscurity that characterises the man while at

the same time enclosing his meanings behind walls that can be
impenetrable and unclimbable. I am excited to encounter these walls
and to glimpse the garden within, but I may well wish I could enter
through an OPEN or more welcoming door. Perhaps the letters and
essays provide a more accessible hinterland in which we can retain
our bearings, while the poetry is a more forbidding territory in which
we see Olsons mind stripped of cues and clues, without the apparatus
of handshakes and welcomings that conversation and dialogue tend to
include. However in all his writings Olson succeeds in opening-up
new territories of mind and place, and in articulating and deploying a
compositional method that has proved enormously useful to many
poets working since the 1950s.
As an example of Olsons poetics in action here are two more extracts

from The Maximus Poems. Note how the words and phrases are
distributed across the page, both horizontally and vertically, taking
shape within the open space or field of the page. Olson makes use of
the capabilities of the typewriter to precisely orchestrate the spatial
layout of words, phrases, images and ideas. Lines, dispersed across
and down the page, are determined by the poets breath and unfolding
perceptions, and in turn act as a score for our readings of each poem.
A shifting network of connections and associations develops as the
page is scanned, more akin to the participatory engagement with a
painting than with a poem organised in more traditional lines. The
poem as visual field becomes an analogue for the field of conscious-
ness or mind.
The first extract comes from Maximus Poem IV (Olson 1968a: pages
unnumbered):
Maximus, March 1961 - 2
by the way into the woods
Indian otter
orient
Lake ponds
show me (exhibit
myself)
The Cape Goliard first edition of Maximus Poems IV, V, VI, is large
format (11x8 inches) and this passage sits in the upper half of an
otherwise empty page. It reads like a highly condensed annotation, a
travellers note, in which the ambiguities of orient (in the sense of
the east and to position oneself geographically) are juxtaposed
against the descriptive topographical details that convey both a sense
of physical place and cultural affiliation (with native Americans and
animals). In this context, being in nature, Olson presents another
ambiguity his desire both to be shown (maybe where he is,
culturally and geographically) and to show himself. These can be read
as notes to himself, reminders of what hes about, his desire to re-
orient himself away from the western tradition of separation from
nature and towards the traditions (exemplified, in this instance, by
native Americans) that conceptualise human beings as animals within
nature.
The cultural/geographical interface is a prominent feature of the whole

sequence of Maximus Poems and my second extract is a further
illustration of this underlying theme. This passage also comes from
Poem IV. It is the second half of a poem spread over two pages and is
more orthodox in layout and syntax. However it does convey Olsons
concerns with place and with placing himself as a bodymind within a
geography that is not European. Olson comes back again and again to
the question of how to establish a new socio-cultural position that
takes account of the move made by European emigrants to the eastern
seaboard of the USA and the opportunity to conceive a new polis that
draws equally on indigenous cultures and ecologies. Olson appears to
have devised the cover of the Cape Goliard edition, which shows a
schematic map of the earth before the huge mass of Gondwanaland
split apart to form Africa and the Americas separated by the Atlantic
Ocean.
Maximus to Gloucester, Letter 27 [withheld]
.
No Greek will be able
to discriminate my body.
An American
is a complex of occasions,
themselves a geometry
of spatial nature.
I have this sense,
that I am one
with my skin
Plus this plus this:
that forever the geography
which leans in
on me I compell
backwards I compell Gloucester
to yield, to
change
Polis
is this
(Olson 1968a: pages unnumbered)
*
John Cage picturing no-mind
If we turn to John Cage we find our ideas about picturing mind turned
upside-down. Cage returns again and again in his conversations and
writings to Meister Eckhart and Huang-Po. In his reading of Chu
Chans translation of, Huang-Pos Doctrine of Universal Mind
(1947) Cage was particularly taken with the paradoxical idea of no-
mind (wu-hsin, Chinese; mushin, Japanese). Huang-Po, like many
Zen masters, was concerned to liberate his students from the reflexiv-
ity and circularity of thinking-about-thinking. He pointed to the
absurdity of trying to use rational analysis and argument to solve

problems that are the product of excessive dependence on rational
analysis and over-intellectualisation. Trying to use the mind, in this
sense, to work on the mind, is foolish it only adds to the problem.
No-mind doesnt refer to blankness or absence of thought, let alone
empty-headedness, it is a shorthand term for the practice of a kind of
directness or spontaneity that is epitomised in the ink paintings of
artists like Sesshu, Hakuin or Nantenbo. Disciplined in the ways of
Zen, these painters exercise a gestural fluency that comes from a
profound unity of thought and action. The pictorial form is enacted in
a swift stroke of the brush. There are no second thoughts. No clinging
to the idea or intention beyond the moment at which it simultaneously
arises and is realised. In this sense no-mind is the state of mind in
which things are done without attachment to passing thoughts, in
which mind and body are working fluently together unhindered by the
doubts, anxieties and uncertainties that are the product of over-
attachment, habit and obsessive thoughts-about-thoughts-about-
thoughts.
Being free of the entanglements of the monkey-mind (the everyday

discriminating mind) requires a constant mindfulness, a non-
discriminating attentiveness to the NOW, a sharpness of being-at-one
with the world without clinging or hanging on to misleading concep-
tualisations of the world. These misleading conceptualisations include
the idea that the world is broken up into discrete entities and that these
entities somehow correspond to the arbitrary classifications and
divisions that are generated by linguistic thinking. No-mind is
ontological and epistemological nondualism.
Cage translates the practice of no-mindedness into a compositional

methodology that presents sounds as sounds rather than as symbols or
tokens of expression. He argues that sounds are separate from, and in
a sense unrelated to, the meanings, interpretations and responses that
arise when we hear them. Sounds are sounds. They are nothing less
and nothing more than themselves. They are what they are. He
considers one of his functions to be to liberate sounds from abstract
ideas and [] to let them be physically uniquely themselves.
(Nyman 1999: 42) His role as a composer and writer is to act as an
agent-provocateur for clear listening, non-discriminatory awareness

and open-mindedness.
Cage considers the members of an audience to be creative participants

in a dynamic aural/spatial continuum in which sounds occur, not as a
vehicle for ideas, but as moments of experience unique and never-
to-be-repeated. He urges, prompts, seduces or occasionally forces an
audience to attend to what is happening, to engage, to become aware.
He often constructs or orchestrates situations in which the audience
attend to ambient (unplanned, uncomposed, indeterminate) sound as if
hearing it for the first time (for instance, his notorious piece, 4'33"
often referred to as his silent composition). The noise of everyday
life, usually excluded from serious music, is included and reconsid-
ered or reclaimed as music. We are given an opportunity to recognise
the empty and marvellous (a Zen expression) beauty of our every-
day sound world. The gap between life experience and musical
experience becomes indistinct. Our cultural categorisations are
destabilised and we are encouraged to examine and change our
assumptions, beliefs, ideas and values. I remember hearing Cage in a
radio interview many years ago, saying that three of his most impor-
tant experiences early on in life were: feeling that he wanted to change
the world, realising he might not be able to, and deciding that he could
change the way he looked at or experienced the world!
The practices of non-attachment and of non-discriminatory awareness

that are integral to no-mindness enable us to step outside the control of
the egocentric little-mind and exercise our true nature as agents of
big-mind or beginners mind terms often used in Buddhist
discourse. We are freed of the fixations and anxieties of clinging, of
what Erich Fromm (1979) refers to as the having mode of existing,
and we are able to realise what he calls the being mode. Cages
method is process-based. He gathers materials (actions, words,
sounds, paint, etc) and sets in motion a rigorously adhered-to compo-
sitional method. Once this structuring process has been chosen it is
followed through to whatever formal enactments (rather than conclu-
sions) are realised. Cage as agent, author or auteur determines the
process but accepts whatever occurs however surprising, discordant,
messy, harmonious, dull or exciting it may be. His compositional
processes imitate nature in her manner of operation, a phrase he
took from Coomaraswamy and to which he referred many times in his

long career. (Cage 1966: 194) The use of coin-tossing, I-Ching
hexagrams and other chance or aleatoric methods, enables Cage to
enact no-mindedness in relation to sound, words and visual forms. The
music, texts and paintings that emerge from these processes of
determined indeterminacy present us with enactments of beginners
mind.
Cage orchestrates his materials and forms in relation to the unformed

undifferentiated ground out of which they come to our attention. In the
case of music, sounds unfold in time against the ground of an ambient
sound field a field we often refer to as silence, but which Cage
considered to be unintended sound. In the case of texts, words are
arranged in relation to the spaces of the blank page. The interdepend-
ence of sound and silence, word and white page, brush mark and
paper surface, is something Cage emphasises over and over again. The
forms of a musical composition are those aspects of the auditory field
that we attend to and value within a given period of time. There is
nothing essentially different or distinctive about musical sounds as
considered in relation to non-musical sounds - just as there is no
essential distinction between garden plants and weeds. The former
happen to be the sounds/plants we value and attend to, the latter are
those we dont value or we choose to ignore. By blurring the bounda-
ries of these categories, or by affirming their interdependence, Cage
reminds us of the artificial distinctions we make between art and life,
and between music and noise.
Cages insistence on the importance of the undifferentiated

ground/silence out of which all forms/sounds arise and to which they
all return, is reminiscent of Meister Eckharts Grund or ground of
being. Cage makes reference to Eckhart in many of his writings and
conversations. In the Indeterminacy section of Composition as
Process (Cage 1966: 39), the Ground of Meister Eckhart is repeatedly
mentioned as being a state in which the composer/musician/audience
can identify with whatever eventuality arises in the course of a
performance. He writes:
Turning away from himself [the performer] and his ego-sense of separation
from other beings and things, he faces the Ground of Meister Eckhart, from
which all impermanencies flow and to which they return. Thoughts arise
not to be collected and cherished but to be dropped as though they were

void. Thoughts arise not to be collected and cherished but to be dropped as
though they were rotten wood. Thoughts arise not to be collected and cher-
ished but to be dropped as though they were pieces of stone. Thoughts arise
not to be collected and cherished but to be dropped as though they were the
cold ashes of a fire long dead.
In all aspects of his work Cage presents us with situations in which we

can exercise no-mindedness and demonstrations of Cages own
attempts to achieve no-mindedness and to stand in the groundless
ground of Meister Eckhart. According to Pritchett (1994: 46) Eckhart
believes
an inner emptiness which he refers to with such words as silence, igno-

rance, unselfconsciousness, or unknowing is necessary for the realiza-
tion of God. To be in such a state, Eckhart says, is to have true spiritual
poverty, to be completely detached and indifferent to the will, knowledge
and desires of the self.
Whatever the extent of Cages realisation of this state, it was undoubt-

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

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

uniformity over the globe and the only alternative to passive head-in-
the-sand liberalism seems to be some kind of fundamentalist closure
or dystopian ennui - this still seems to be an important aspiration: to
recognise the interdependence of ontology and epistemology in our
becoming as agents of art and poetry - a holding together of being and
knowing in a state of unfolding lucidity. And this moment-by-moment
forming of the work is inclusive of many kinds of practice and
experience for instance: sudden insight, extended reverie, critical
analysis and reflection, subjective epiphany and intertextuality. The
work becomes a sedimentation of mind - a phrase of Robert
Smithsons both as sedimentary product and the process of sedimen-
tation itself. Or, to put it in another way, we can think about the
collaborative making of art and poetry by artists, poets, active partici-
pants and readers, as writing being, picturing mind.
***
Part 6
The self as open-work:

permeability, incompleteness & revisibility
This open or indeterminate presence,

the indefinite nature of man, in Vicos words.
A.R.Caponigri. (quoted by Blaser 1975: 301)
There is no language for being. Kenneth White.

(quoted by Padmakara 2004: 51)
Introduction
In this section I explore the idea that perceptual systems, artworks and
the self all share qualities of permeability, revisibility and incom-
pleteness - qualities that can be linked to Merleau-Pontys theories of
perception, Umberto Ecos idea of the open work and Barthes
notion of the writerly text. I also briefly touch on some of the
implications of these ideas for learning and education.
The text is organised in a series of discrete units that shed light on this
theme from different perspectives. There is no linear argument, in the
usual sense. Instead there are multiple associations, cross-references
and examples, orchestrated in a way that enacts and reflects upon the
idea of an open work. The reader is invited to participate in the
construction of meaning and interpretation.
*
Image: a trainride with Montaigne
Im on a train, early morning, travelling from Exeter to Paddington.
Outside mist and low cloud and silver light infusing distant hills. After
a night spent turning over ideas about identity and becoming, Im only
half-awake. I listen to the usual collage of sibilant voices, conversa-
132 The self as open-work
tions coming and going, wheel swish and whoosh of passing trains,
hiss of rain, sneezes, whispers. And this field of sound is curiously
like my own field of thoughts as they rise and fall, condensing into
shape and then dissolving into incoherence. I turn over the pages of a
newspaper and come across an article by Martin Kettle entitled, We
all have one thing in common our differences. Kettle (2004: 24)
refers to Montaignes essay, On the Inconstancy of Our Actions, in
which he criticises the habit of even the best writers who,
stubbornly [try] to weave us into one invariable and solid fabric [] Any-
one who turns his prime attention on to himself will hardly ever find himself
in the same state twice [] Every sort of contradiction can be found in me,
depending upon some twist or attribute: timid, insolent; chaste, lecherous;
talkative, taciturn; tough, sickly; clever, dull; brooding, affable; lying, truth-
ful; learned, ignorant; generous, miserly and then prodigal. I can see some-
thing of all that in myself, depending on how I gyrate; and anyone who
studies himself attentively finds in himself and in this very judgment this
whirring about and this discordancy. There is nothing I can say about my-
self as a whole, simply and without intermingling and admixture.
A woman talks to her mobile phone: I need to get back. No one is

feeding them. She laughs. Outside an orchard is illuminated by
sunlight between dark shadows. Cows in a field are suspended in mist,
heads pointing north. Above them two crows head south. The chemis-
try of mind is alive with all this Montaigne, inconstancy and
conversations of mist and light.
*
Image: artwork as open-work
An open igloo made of metal struts and sheets of glass stands in a
gallery space, with a bare-limbed branch protruding from the top. The
artist, Mario Merz, calls it: Igloo with a Tree. The story-maker inside
us begins to stir. We see it as a statement about the colonisation of
tribal peoples, or the expropriation of vernacular architecture by late
modernist European high art, or a witty juxtaposition of tree and arctic
houseform. The ancient symbol of a tree of life points to some kind of
resurrection of ethnicity in the face of global capitalism.
The structural simplicity of the shelter points to a post-industrial age

of subsistence architecture in which we endlessly recycle materials.
We shudder at the way the branch seems to be trying to escape the
The self as open-work 133
glass-toothed dome, a leafless dying gesture of resistance, memorial to

a way of life no longer sustainable. We notice how the glass reflects
back at us our own image as coloniser - a consumer eager to find a
new taste to stimulate our easily jaded palettes. And yet we can also
see through the glass, through the domed form, taking in the rest of
the room, seeing other spectators consuming the art in the same
hurried manner.
We voice all these stories and more. And none seems more true than
another. There is no mono-meaning, no single content or point - only
multiple stories woven around the spare arcs of metal, planes of glass
and filigree of wood. There is also wordless wonder, perplexity or
surprise, a mute engagement or silent encounter with the artwork. In
the end it defies consumption, it is both meaningless and meaning-full,
valueless and invaluable.
Umberto Eco (1989) provides us with a way of articulating and

rationalising our varied interpretations of Merzs glass and metal
structure. The igloo can be seen as a perfect exemplar of Ecos idea of
the open work. According to Eco the open work constitutes a
field of open possibilities (ibid: 86) arising from its susceptibility to
countless different interpretations which do not impinge on its
unadulterable specificity. Hence, every reception of a work of art is
both an interpretation and a performance of it. (ibid: 4) Eco refers to
Pousseur, who observed that the poetics of the open work tends to
encourage acts of conscious freedom on the part of the performer
and place him at the focal point of a network of limitless interrelation-
ships. (ibid) In an open work we are invited to make the work
together with the author. (ibid: 21) According to Eco open works are
unfinished. He gives examples of open works by the composers
Luciano Berio and Karlheinz Stockhausen, suggesting that the author
seems to hand them on to the performer more or less like the compo-
nents of a construction kit. (ibid: 4) Eco adds that every work of art,
[] is effectively open to a virtually unlimited range of possible
readings, each of which causes the work to acquire new vitality.
(ibid: 21) Open works tend to be evocative, suggestive, ambiguous
and indeterminate as to meaning and interpretation.
Ecos poetics of the open work can be usefully applied to a diverse

range of artworks in music, theatre, literature and the visual-spatial
arts. A few examples of the countless artworks that are made fairly
explicitly within a framework of open construction and participatory
interpretation include: most of the music, writings and later curatorial
projects by John Cage (eg. Rolywholyover: a Circus, planned by Cage
but only realised after his death in 1992); Einstein on the Beach
(1976), a landmark musical collaboration between Philip Glass and
Robert Wilson, in which an unfolding series of tableaux (that are as
significant visually as they are musically) generate a complex collage
of sounds and images with no conventional plot or narrative; B.S.
Johnsons novel, The Unfortunates (1969), a collection of twenty-
seven discrete sections of text, which, apart from the first and last
section, are intended to be read in a random order or in whatever order
the reader decides; artworks by Joseph Beuys (eg. the Eurasia series
of performance/lecture/illustrations from the 1960s); sited public
works by Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer, often including fragments
of text or controversial statements; Anthony Gormleys, Field series,
beginning in the late 1980s, in which the artist invites people to make
small hand-sized heads out of clay which are then displayed
(sometimes in their thousands) in galleries or other public locations;
and Susan Hillers work, At the Freud Museum (1992-94), a collection
of discarded objects of no monetary value, arranged with texts in
boxes displayed in a large glass cabinet (or vitrine). In this work Hiller
makes a connection between the archive of domestic and other objects
in The Freud Museum at the London house where Freud once lived,
narratives suggested by the collection, and dreams. The viewer is
invited to interpret, reflect upon and make sense of this collection of
disparate materials, which is open to multiple readings and ways of
seeing.
*
Roland Barthes: readerly & writerly texts
In his book S/Z, Roland Barthes (1990) analyses a short story by
Balzac, entitled Sarrasine. His analysis leads him to identify multiple
meanings, codes and signifiers within the text. Readers normally
combine these various strands together into a supposedly cohesive,
centralized meaning. (Luco 1999) Barthes calls this kind of textual
reception an example of a readerly text (lisible) in which the power
appears to reside with the author, the reader is relatively passive and
the connotational aspects are subordinate to the denotational. Denota-
tion refers to the most literal and limited meaning of a word, regard-
less of what one may feel about it or the suggestions and ideas it
connotes. (Cuddon 1999: 215) Connotation refers to the suggestion
or implication evoked by a word or phrase, or even quite a long
statement of any kind, over and above what they mean or actually
denote [] a connotation may be personal and individual, or general
and universal. (ibid: 176) Different groups of people may recognise
very different connotations in relation to the same word.
Barthes suggests the writerly text (scriptible) as an alternative to the

readerly text. When presented with a writerly text the reader is
encouraged, or forced, to become an active participant in the produc-
tion of meaning. A writerly text [] makes demands on the reader;
he or she has to work things out, look for and provide meaning [] a
writerly text tends to focus attention on how it is written [] it calls
attention to itself as a work of art. (Cuddon 1999: 725-726) Barthes
writes:
The writerly text is ourselves writing, before the infinite play of the world
[] is traversed, intersected, stopped, plasticized by some singular system
(Ideology, Genus, Criticism) which reduces the plurality of entrances, the
opening of networks, the infinity of languages. The writerly is the novelistic
without the novel, poetry without the poem. (1990: 5)
The readerly text is grounded in sets of conventions and codes (for

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

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

mind. In this view of education, learner and teacher are active partici-
pants in personal and collective acts of story-making, and learning is
always indeterminate as to outcomes. Rather than consumers of
education we are producers of learning - enacting or performing our
learning within a field of open possibilities.
Given that much of our social life, particularly education, is highly

institutionalised, a number of questions arise as to the viability of the
notion of living and learning as open work. How can we, each in our
different ways, resist the encroachment of narrowly-focused utilitari-
anism and determinism in so many fields of human activity? How can
we maintain a more emancipatory and transformative view of life
life as an unfolding of learning about ourselves, each other and the
world about us? How can we keep sight of the need to develop
ourselves as social beings by engaging critically in mutually reward-
ing relationships with others - exchanging experiences, values and
beliefs through stories, images and other cultural activities? And how
can each of us develop our unique current of consciousness within the
great ocean of human being how do we become more fully alive to
ourselves, to each other and to the world in which we live?
In order to become more fully alive, to be open to experience and to

reconstitute ourselves day-by-day we need to find ways in which our
gifts, skills and aspirations can be identified, developed and exercised
within a conceptual framework that is questioning, critical and
analytical - yet attentive, celebratory and able to sing. We need to be
able to distinguish between important and unimportant needs, and to
separate out the strands of manipulation and coercion that all social
institutions deploy. We need to embrace the discontinuities of life and
the endless puzzles that engage us as inquisitive beings, and we need
to relate to each other in ways that are indeterminate and open -
enabling those we meet to interpret, to make meanings and to demon-
strate their own particular perspective through surprising stories and
inventive actions and forms.
*
Image:
Theosophists teach that primeval man is a vast dispersed be-
ing.
(from the poem, Apprehensions, in Duncan 1970: 36)
*
Self as open-work
We can also use the idea of the open-work to refocus our thinking
about notions of self, identity and subjectivity. Heidegger provides
one starting-point for thinking in this way. At one point in his book,
Irrational Man (1990: 217), Barrett is discussing Heidegger. He
writes:
My being is not something that takes place inside my skin (or inside an im-
material substance inside that skin); my Being, rather, is spread over a field
or region which is the world of its care and concern. Heideggers theory of
man (and of Being) might be called the Field Theory of Man (or the Field
Theory of Being) in analogy with Einsteins Field Theory of Matter, pro-
vided that we take this purely as an analogy.
In Heideggers view human existence involves being-in-the-world,

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

world, the world being conscious through us. Each of us presents a
distinctive worldview in so far as we are located at different points
within the wider field, yet we offer shared perspectives in so far as our
fields of being conjoin, inter-flow and eddy around each other as

currents do in a stream or river.
*
Revision & reiteration
We can also look at the self as an open field of accretive activity, a
building site of infinite revision, reiteration and rebuilding.
We are all revisions of each other and of the first homo sapiens who
noticed that they werent each other.
Revisions.
Reworkings.
Retellings.
Reiterations.
We show and speak ourselves in many different ways, yet all are
variations, reiterations, reworkings and reshowings of themes, patterns
and structures that are recognisably of this bodymind, this locus of
becoming, knowing and doing, this current of being, this many-
roomed house of bone and light.
*
Image: self as ocean
The self is a multi-dimensional construction metaphorically more
like an ocean or a cloud than a tree or substantive object. It is not an
it but rather a dynamic set of interdependent processes like
currents, tides, chemical interactions, solutions and dissolutions, drifts
and waves and ripples of light. This oceanic self has within it knots of
tangled linguistic and emotional seaweed, flitting thought-fish that
dart about (rapid and hard to catch), deep mood gullies beyond the
reach of surface sunlight, passing bouts of shark-anger, delicate
sensitivities like the finest coral, drifting clouds of luminescent joy,
moments of starfish surprise, jellyfish paradoxes, slippery eel self-
delusions but this is all metaphor and association, taking us away
from the indefiniteness of becoming.
*
*
Concordances
A few months after presenting a paper that touched on the idea of the
self as open work I spent time thinking through this idea in order to
include it in this book. As often happens in these situations the mind
becomes sensitive to coincidences, to peripheral concordances and
connections. While glancing though a Buddhist journal I encounter a
reference to Kenneth Whites philosophy of open systems and
open being. (Padmakara 2004: 51) As we inhabit and give voice to
the world it is no surprise that we notice similar patterns and rhythms.
As we travel through common territory, we notice the same distinctive
rocks, hear the same mournful cry of circling buzzards and sit down in
the same places of rest. And these places and sights and sounds give
rise to similar ideas, ideas that we convey in similar phrases in a
common tongue.
*
Image: another trainride
The green pulse of trees, bushes, fields rapidly scanned as they flash
past the train window infuse my thoughts and feelings. There is
nothing irrelevant to consciousness, only the ebb and flow, expansion
and contraction, of object and ground, attention and inattention.
*
Being & becoming
Being can be thought of as consciousness-for-itself and in-itself,
whereas becoming is consciousness projected into the world or,
consciousness-of-the-world and in-the-world. While becoming is
historical, set in time, being is somehow ahistorical, out of time. Being
has no history. Becoming is history.
*
The language-train
As always the language we use to try to come to grips with experience
is imprecise, constricted by its own history in such a way that we can
only hint at what we mean, point in a certain direction, set a process of
interpretative construction in train and then stand back and watch in
surprise as the train careers down unseen tracks, ending-up in destina-
tions that were not those we intended. Language has a momentum of

its own, an organic energy and complexity that is unpredictable.
*
Becketts mess
Beckett told Tom Driver in a 1961 interview:
We cannot listen to a conversation for five minutes without being acutely

aware of the confusion. It is all around us and our only chance now is to let
it in. The only chance of renovation is to open our eyes and see the mess. It
is not a mess you can make sense of. (in Perloff 1996a: 133)
The renovation that Beckett may have had in mind is a process of

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

We perceive an object glowing with all the insistent force of its
vibrant ISness, and yet it also moves with the pulse of our own
perceptions, our attentiveness - the modulations of our scanning
senses.
Consciousness expands and shrinks according to changes of habitat

and place, ambient conditions, our will and body-states. We open and
close, embrace and resist, accept and deny moment-by-moment,
day-by-day. As poets and mythweavers we aspire to an openness of
consciousness, to an expansive field of sensing, imaging, associating
and connecting. As statisticians, bureaucrats and followers of others
we constrict the field in order to control, manage, reify and neutralise
the otherness of the world and its beings.
Edelman and Tononi (2000: 22) acknowledge the changing scope or

breadth of consciousness: When we let sensory input freely take
possession of our conscious states, paying no attention to this or that
in particular, consciousness is as receptive and broad as it is natural
and effortless. This observation by two neuro-scientists coincides
with the ideas and practices of Buddhists involved in zazen medita-
tion, as well as many other schools of religious thought and the
experiences of mystics the world over. The exercise of disciplined
undifferentiated attentiveness is something that underpins many forms
of meditation and prayer, and many kinds of drawing practice within
the visual arts.
Attending to the visual/spatial field of consciousness as accurately and

directly as possible - trying to see around perceptual habits and
assumptions in order to gain a clearer, less encumbered view of the
world is an aspiration of many students of observational drawing in
those art schools where such practices are still part of the curriculum.
This kind of disciplined attentiveness is fundamentally philosophical.
It involves a phenomenological analysis of the dynamics of perception
and of representation. In my own practice of this approach to drawing
I have noticed how my visual acuity develops alongside a calm and
disinterested engagement with the world. The desire for analytical
exactitude in relation to the visual field seeps out into a more critically
reflective attention to ideas, statements and behaviours in myself
and others. There is an obvious connection here between this kind of

drawing practice, philosophical analysis and forms of meditation
developed in many religious traditions.
One can spend a lifetime analysing and refining one or another facet of
ones conscious experience [including] the attainment of blessed states of
pure, unencumbered perception. (ibid: 22)
Although Edelman and Tononi make this statement, they seem unsure
about whether such blessed states are possible. It is nearly impos-
sible for us as humans to revert to or even contemplate a state of
consciousness that is completely free of the self. (ibid: 24) But
nearly impossible is a suitably cautious position to take, recognising
that in some individuals, who have undergone lengthy training or who
have a particular and, probably very rare, aptitude, it may be possible.
*
Against reductivism
I take down from the shelf John Cages book of conversations, For the
Birds. I open it at random and this is what I read:
The function of art at the present time is to preserve us from all the logical
minimizations that we are at each instant tempted to apply to the flux of
events. To draw us nearer to the process which is the world we live in.
(Cage 1981: 80-81)
*
Consciousness, self & fluid systems
In relation to consciousness, to being and becoming, it is useful to take
a systems view. From a systems perspective we can see that an
excitement or activation of a part is an excitement or activation of the
whole the whole in this case being both infinite and indeterminate,
for there are no boundaries to consciousness in an absolute sense, only
the changing, fluctuating margins or periphery, where awareness or
thought dissipates into the otherness of the world or beings. This is
chaos or complexity theory, the butterfly effect translated into the
realm of human consciousness. We see something that delights or
puzzles the eye, and the bodymind is delighted or puzzled. We hear
sounds that intrigue or disturb us and our whole being becomes
intrigued and disturbed. There is no confinement, only mutuality
between interdependent neurological systems. The sensory, mental

and imaginative spheres of consciousness are dynamically interactive.
This why when we come out of a particularly stimulating concert,
everything we see and hear and think hums with a revitalised energy
and freshness the darkness vibrates, the silence murmurs with
potential. It is also why when we are in love, (the ultimate systemic
excitement), the whole world seems different. Our states of con-
sciousness are a function of our participation in, and interrelatedness
with, the world, through our sensory and cognitive systems.
As self-conscious human animals we exist in a state of perpetual

becoming. Our perceptual and symbolic memory gives us a sense of a
past and our cognitive volition gives us a sense of a future, and our
present being is framed within these temporal possibilities or horizons.
We have a sense of becoming, of moving in time towards another
state, of changing and being in process. This often gives rise to a sense
of being in transition, of being in-between, on our way to another
state. This can be both pleasurable and productive and, at times, lead
to dissatisfaction and a sense of incompleteness. Disciplines that
refocus attention on the here-and-now provide an important antidote
to the negative effects of our sense of temporality, paradoxically they
re-ground our experience of becoming in a profound sense of appar-
ently timeless being.
William James coined the phrase stream of consciousness and it still

has viability as a description of the field of becoming. It points to a
sense of change, to a movement through time and a sense of continu-
ity. Despite the flow of events and experiences, James points out, we
retain a sense that the self remains the same while our existence
continues. (in Lodge 2002: 14-15) David Lodge (2002: 14) suggests
that, recent scientific work on consciousness has stressed its essen-
tially narrative character. The idea of the self as a quasi-literary
fiction has taken root in many areas of philosophy, psychology,
cultural theory and semiotics. One interesting paradox in this account
of selfhood is the obvious fact that the self is both a narrative con-
struction and somehow the author of, or authorial voice within, that
narrative. We are simultaneously the unfolding story, the story-maker
and the primary storyteller.
Yet the story also has a momentum of its own. We are born, we find
ourselves here without intending to be, we undergo many experiences
that seem not to be of our making and eventually we die. At times we
feel ourselves to be agents of our particular self-narrative, while at
other times, we feel as if we are being written by events, circum-
stances and other external factors or forces. Ideas of destiny, karma,
fate and Gods work have been used to make sense of these seem-
ingly uncontrollable elements within our self-narratives. The stream of
consciousness encounters rocks, changes of gradient and direction,
and feeder tributaries that determine, to some extent, the character and
quality of the flow. The story we are is formed by the interaction
between self and circumstance, organism and environment, stream and
valley. Our story is as much dialogue as it is monologue. We are
narratives of interaction, mutuality and reciprocity, as well as narra-
tives of volition, independence and individuality.
Lodge (2002: 31) identifies another interesting characteristic of the

sense of self-as-narrative, that is the gaps, discontinuities or unknowns
that occur within the stream of consciousness. He suggests that
consciousness is a narrative full of lacunae. We are conscious of
existing in time, moving from a past that we recall very patchily, and
into a future that is unknown and unknowable. While memory is the
material or medium of our self-narrative, the forgotten and the
unknown give shape and outline to our story. We are as much the
product of what we have forgotten and do not know, as we are of what
we remember and know. In a sense each of us is a hole or gap in
everything we are not. The image of each of us suspended in, and
supported by, a cloud of unknowing is both powerfully poetic and
analogically accurate. This via negativa or negative theology of
consciousness provides a counter-tradition to the strand of beliefs and
ideas which tend to assert the individualistic autonomous character of
the self, identity and personhood. (I explore this and other aspects of
mysticism in Part 9)
*
Unlearning, unknowing and letting go
What is it to know? Are learning and knowing synonymous? Is to
learn to know, or is it to be with not-knowing - to be dynamically
resigned to uncertainty and to an open-ended series of speculations?
Unlearning is an important process within art education - a disciplined
letting-go of habits of thought and practice. Unlearning, unknowing,
letting go and wordlessness can be seen as modes of being and doing
(or undoing) that contrast with, though dynamically related to,
rational, acquisitive, worded and cognitive modes. Learning and
unlearning involve destabilisation, transformation, change - processes
of dissolving opacity, undoing knots - but only to move to the next
knot, the next eddy in the flow. All we can do is exchange one
conundrum for another in a process that is more akin to free associa-
tion than logical progression or problem-solving.
*
Image:
We are thinking bones muscles of imagination in a field of light.
*
Consciousness and the phenomenal body
In Part 2, I discussed ideas about the knowing body and Id like to
return to this theme from a slightly different perspective. In Phenome-
nology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty (2002: 66) provides a working
definition of his form of phenomology: to rediscover phenomena, the
layer of living experience through which others and things are first
given to us. His revised phenomenological perspective is based on
the centrality of the body as the subject of perception. The term
Merleau-Ponty uses for the embodied subject is the phenomenal
body. (in Craig 1998: 322) In his view body and mind cannot be
separated. He argues that all consciousness is, in some measure,
perceptual, in that it draws upon our habitual sub-personal experience
of the world. (ibid: 323) Merleau-Ponty extends his philosophy of
embodiment to include language, which he describes as a form of
anonymous corporality (ibid) a kind of second body enabling us
to project our ideas and perceptions beyond our selves and to share
our lives with others.
In his book, Critical Aesthetics & Postmodernism, Paul Crowther

(1993) provides an excellent analysis of Merleau-Pontys ideas, from
which the following comments are drawn. According to Crowther,
Merleau-ponty believes that, our fundamental knowledge of the
world comes through our bodys exploration of it. Consciousness is
not a purely mental phenomenon, but a function of the integrated
operation of all the senses. And perception doesnt deal in pure
sense data, but nodes of meaning which emerge as a foreground []
against the background depth of the whole perceptual field. (Crow-
ther 1993: 41) Perception is thus an encounter with meanings.
Things impress themselves upon the body [as] intersensory
presences or emblems of a certain style of being, (Crowther 1993:
41-42) or as Merleau-Ponty (1964: 50) puts it: I perceive in a total
way with my whole being: I grasp a unique structure of the thing, a
unique way of being, which speaks to all my senses at once. As
Crowther (1993: 42) puts it: Our knowledge of the world is thus
founded upon the bodys relating and habituating itself to things.
Such encounters will leave behind them not so much mental pictures
or memory-images as carnal formulae, structures made from all the
sensations and experiences of the subject.
The acquisition of language, of course, facilitates this sedimentation and en-

ables carnal formulae to be projected in thought or imagination even
when the things or situations that originally gave rise to them are not pre-
sent. (ibid)
And the visual/spatial arts constitute other, particularly effective, ways

of projecting carnal formulae.
Crowther (1993: 42) argues that in Merleau-Pontys thinking, per-

ception is creative, the body does not find meaning pre-existent in the
world, but calls such meaning into existence through its own activity
our handling of the world. And this activity is, for the most part,
pre-reflective; the body operates amongst, and upon, things, persons,
and situations without being explicitly and directly aware that it is
doing so. A lot of the neurological activity happening within our
bodies doesnt surface as part of our conscious awareness. At any one
moment we are unaware of much of what is going on in our brain and
nervous system.
Merleau-Ponty argues that our fundamental modes of being, knowing

(and doing) are pre-linguistic, or non-linguistic. The body knows,
makes meaning, before the intervention of language, and conceptuali-
sation. Meaning comes before language.
According to Paul Crowther, in Merleau-Pontys thinking about art,
we find that the artwork is defined and given its rich meaning by virtue of
occupying a unique half-way position between perception and reflection.
Unlike ordinary language and abstract thought, it has a sensuous immediacy
that comes close to that of our fundamental perceptual contact with the
world. Unlike perception itself, however, it preserves and articulates the
most crucial invisible scaffolding of the situation it is expressing [the
carnal formulae referred to above]. (Crowther 1993: 51-52)
At the centre of Merleau-Pontys aesthetics (which was never devel-

oped as a comprehensive theory he died mid-career in 1961 at the
age of 53) lies his view that art is an organic, seamless development of
the processes of perception. Art is one of the ways we handle the
world a very special kind of handling (he argues) but nevertheless
one of the ways in which our body inhabits and explores and articu-
lates the world. The artists handling of a medium (the material of his
or her art) is but an extension of our perceptual handling of the world.
As such, it is, like other modes of perception, an agent and negotiator
of meaning. It is probably because he brought the body to the
foreground of his philosophical thinking that he wrote with such
immediacy and sensitivity about the visual and spatial arts.
Merleau-Ponty argues that we are active participants in the world and

of the world, not passive observers, outside, removed or separate from
the world (which is the position taken by much of Western philosophy
since Plato). And as embodied subjects exploring and handling the
world, we each can have only a particular perspective or view of the
world at any one time. This means that truth and experience and
knowledge are always contingent. We can never have an all-
encompassing view. Our view will always be incomplete, and
therefore we can never be certain about the truth of our view, only of a
degree of probability and ambiguity ingrained in our perceptions.
There can be no absolute, final truth or knowledge or experience of
anything. This is a form of perspectivism with profound social and
cultural implications. (see Part 10)
Merleau-Ponty takes this idea further in considering artworks. He

suggests that the artistic construct or artefact, is not just a product of a
particular mode of representation or interpretation. It is rather a site
of endless processes of representation, interpretation and signification
processes that are enacted every time someone engages with the
work. So there is a constant interplay between modes and moments of
interpretation. The work occupies, or is, a zone of interpretation, and
interpretation is a complex activity involving: perception, engage-
ment, recognition, response, critical awareness and re-presentation.
Merleau-Ponty stresses the social nature of these processes. The zone
of interpretation of the artwork is energised by embodied subjects
who meet and interact, exchanging signs, meanings and messages.
The artefact is both a product of embodiment and a social construct
a product of the mutuality of perception and experience. As Gary
Brent Madison (1981: 169) points out, Merleau-Ponty believes in the
indivisibility of the subject and the world, they constitute one single
system and are correlates of each other. The world is the field of
existence, and existence is being in the world, a project of the world.
(There are some similarities between this view and that of Spinoza,
and ideas about the mutuality of existence discussed in Part 4)
*
Image: many-mind & no-mind
He thought he knew who he was, but he was wrong. Whenever he
thought deeply, tried to get as far as he could into his mind, he found
there was no one there, or there were many there, a choir of voices,
singing different songs but in some kind of loose harmony as if they
knew each other very well, most of them having sung together for
most of their lives. But a new voice was added every now and again,
going back to the early days when everything was new and the songs
were only just beginning.
Sometimes this is how it seemed as he felt inwardly and thought

deeply. But on many occasions the voices grew quieter and a vibrant
silence was experienced. There was no one at home, yet he felt at
home. There was no song, no choir and no solitary singer. Yet he felt
more intensely alive, more awake and aware than at other times, and
more assured of being there, existing in a fullness that seemed to be
overflowing with possibility and an emptiness that seemed to be all
there could ever be.
*
Plot or no plot?
Writing about the work of B.S. Johnson, Jonathan Coe (2004) argues
that Johnson had no time for plot because, in Johnsons words,
Life does not tell stories. Life is chaotic, fluid, random; it leaves myriads of
ends untied, untidily. Writers can extract a story from life only by strict,
close selection, and this must mean falsification. Telling stories really is
telling lies.
Of course, Johnson is talking about plotted stories, stories with

predetermined structures, stories that do not include Becketts mess.
As I see it life is full of stories but they are indeterminate in structure,
content and meaning. They are intricately interwoven threads in a
complex multi-dimensional fabric. Each life has no plot or predeter-
mined structure and life-stories are improvised in relation to encoun-
ters with other life-stories and through participation in the changing

ecologies of environment and culture.
*
Becoming tomorrow draws us on spiked on times sharp
arrow
David Cooper (1999: 3), in his critique and re-interpretation of
existentialism, Existentialism: A Reconstruction, writes:
First of all, human existence is said to have a concern for itself. As Kierke-
gaard puts it, the individual not only exists but is infinitely interested in ex-
isting. He is able to reflect on his own experience, take a stance towards it,
and mould it in accordance with the fruits of his reflection. Or, as Heidegger
would say, humans are such that their being is in question for them. Second
to quote Kierkegaard again, an existing individual is constantly in the
process of becoming [so we always have to consider human beings in rela-
tion to] the projects and intentions which [they/we are] on the way to realis-
ing [] As Heidegger puts it, the human being is always ahead of
himself, always unterwegs (on the way).
Or, according to Ortega y Gasset, a persons existence, consists not

in what it is already, but in what it is not yet [] Existence [] is the
process of realising [] the aspiration we are. (in Cooper 1999: 3)
This emphasis on the projective, intentional dimension of becoming
belies the popular view of existentialism as being entirely concerned
with the now, the moment, the eternal present. The future always
beckons, drawing us forward on the journey of life. Becoming in this
sense is also anticipation, expectation, a looking forward whether
with hope or dread.
Becketts, Waiting for Godot, (1965) dramatises the tension between

the present and the future, portraying Vladimir, Estragon, Pozzo and
Lucky as characters whose sense of the interminable present is
skewered on the arrow of time, sharpened and barbed with dreadful
optimism and hope. Godot is tomorrow, the next day, the next
moment, the treadmill of becoming. Becketts gloomy humour is one
response to this situation. Pozzo: Have you not done tormenting me
with your accursed time! Its abominable! (1965: 89) And the final
lines: Vladimir: Well? Shall we go? Estragon: Yes, lets go.
Followed by the stage direction: They do not move. (ibid: 94) The
curious conjunction of happenstance events on the remorseless
escalator of life, generates an absurd logic that gives Waiting for

Godot its unique bite and power. The next moment, tomorrow, going
on and on, and the hopeful despondency they induce, continually draw
the protagonists away from the present moment, which seems always
humdrum, mundane and a waste of time precisely because the future
has them in its grip.
*
Helen Chadwicks, Ego Geometria Sum
In Ego Geometria Sum (1982-84) the British artist, Helen Chadwick
constructed ten objects out of plywood, each with photo-emulsion
images on the visible surfaces. Displayed on the walls of the gallery
were a companion series of photographs of Chadwick herself interact-
ing with the objects (carrying, holding, lifting, turning). Chadwick
writes (1989: 9):
Suppose ones body could be traced back through a succession of geometric

solids, as rare and pure as crystalline structures, taking form from the pres-
sure of recalled external forces the incubator, laundry-box, font, pram,
boat, shoe, wigwam, bed, piano, desk, horse, temple, high school, door
and if geometry is an expression of eternal and exact truths, inherent in the
natural law of matter and thus manifestations of an absolute beauty, predes-
tined, of divine origin then let this model of mathematical harmony be in-
fused with a poetry of feeling and memory to sublimate the discord of past
passion and desire in a recomposed neutrality of being.
Chadwicks text and Ego Geometria Sum itself, make references to

psychology, personal history, memory and feeling, counter-balanced
by ideas of mathematical order, geometry and absolute beauty.
Chadwick seems to be seeking a resolution of what are often seen as
opposing or mutually exclusive qualities (eg. feeling & mathematics),
a bringing together of rationality and intuition, impersonal geometry
and personal memory, in a recomposed neutrality of being. This is
not the hyper-subjectivist discourse of romanticism or expressionism,
nor the modernist formalism promoted by critics like Clement
Greenberg and Michael Fried.
Chadwick stands to one side of the symbolic order she is employing.

She takes a quasi-scientific or objective stance toward her memories
and subjective experiences, juxtaposes these against the abstract forms
of geometric solids in a way that encourages us to question how
identity, desire and feeling are ordered and reconstituted through the
fiction of remembering. Alongside these concerns with autobiogra-
phy and socialisation (notice how the images/objects reflect particular
social moments or points of change - incubator, font, pram, etc.)
Chadwick also plays with some of the uneasy relationships between
the traditions of flat-surface imagery (photography) and sculptural
objecthood - traditions and disciplines which tend to be treated
separately within modernism. Photography and sculpture, image and
object, are deliberately integrated into a new kind of narrative of
material objects, equivalents for selfhood, within a bounded safe place
[where the] minutiae of personal history are collapsed into an ideal-
ised universe. (Chadwick 1989: 11)
Thirty years are reduced to ten geometric solids, exactly determined by

what took place at a particular point in time. These accidents of matter
constitute the past, the collisions between my body as a growing child and a
succession of everyday cultural objects These fugitive traces offer evi-
dence of the passage of time, the effects and constraining influence of so-
cialisation [] The abstract geometry embodies the principles of perma-
nence. (Chadwick 1989: 11)
In emphasising the body, socialisation, fertility and what she calls

our inherent bisexuality (ibid) Chadwick is representative of a shift
from the masculine, patriarchal, not-to-say macho world of subjectiv-
ist modernism to a postmodern culture that, at its best, is more
sensitive to questions of gender, sexual identity and feminist thinking.
Chadwick doesnt accept the subject as a given. She questions the

idea of an essential self as the source of authenticity and self-
expression. Instead she gives us a series of material embodiments of
the process of self-construction. Our subjectivity is the product of our
interactions with the world, our being-in the-world and our interac-
tions with others. Our subjectivity, identity and sense of self, are
social, cultural and personal. They are as much public as private. In
Chadwicks work the subject and the self are considered as fields of
possibility, they are open in the same sense that Ego Geometria Sum
can be considered as an exemplification of Ecos idea of the open
work.
*
Perception, artwork & self incompleteness & open-endedness
Heideggers concept of Dasein, Barthes notion of the writerly
text and Ecos idea of the open work, suggest useful ways in which
we can relate ideas about perception and our being in the world, to
ways of thinking about artworks and ourselves as open works.
These ideas also relate to Merleau-Pontys thinking about perception,
the artwork and the self. In Merleau-Pontys work, as in the writings
of Heidegger, Barthes and Eco, there is an acknowledgement, indeed a
celebration, of incompleteness and open-endedness. Perceptual
activity is always in a process of revision and reformulation. We
modify our perception of something as we move around, scan, pick it
up, taste it, smell it, listen to what it does if we shake it or bang it
against something else. We gain experience of it and become familiar
with its qualities, which are also qualities of our interactions with it.
The reciprocity of perception is fundamental to our experience of the
world. There is no end to the possibility of enhancing our experience,
we are only limited by the extent and depth of our attentiveness.
Likewise with the artwork there is no end to our perception of it or

to the stories we can weave about it. Our interpretations are revised,
reformed and sometimes wholly transformed by further encounters
with it. This open-endedness of possibility is always present, in some
way, in our transactions with artworks. Conditions can affect this state
of possibility. For instance, in a physical sense we may be unable to
touch the surface of an art object or we may only be able to experience
an object or a performance through reproduction. On the other hand
we may read or be told something about an artist or an artwork that
predisposes us to view them or it, or think about them or it, in a
certain way. The artwork itself may be presented to us in a way that
encourages or discourages a variety of possible responses. A lack or
surfeit of supplementary information may leave us feeling either
without a starting-point or point of access (though what we perceive is
always a starting-point) or we may be overwhelmed by too much
supplementary information or by information that is too dictatorial or
definitive. These physical modes of contact (or distancing), our
previous knowledge and experience, and our emotional and intellec-
tual states, all frame and effect our ability to engage with an artwork.
The openness of the relationship between artworks and our selves
fluctuates with time, circumstance and the rhythms of attentiveness

and mindedness that we bring to each encounter.
In relation to the self we can see how incompleteness, instability and

openness also apply. The self as process, rather than as object, is in
continuous construction. We weave and compose as we are woven
and composed. There is no end to self-construction except in death,
and even then we might consider the finite ego-self as being dissolved
into, or reformed as, another kind of construction which is the network
of objects and stories we have made in the world and the memories
and stories associated with us that are made in the minds of others. In
this sense our artefacts and stories, our bodymind, are continued,
revised and absorbed into the collective stories of a culture, into the
unfolding communal mind.
***
Part 7
Mind, the real & the other

Robin Blaser speaks of the
unrecognised disaster of a world
devoured into the human [form].
(in Nichols 2002: 30)
It is this deep blankness is the real thing strange.

[]
The contradictions cover such a range.
(from the poem: Let it go, in Empson 2001: 99)
Far away the writhing city

Burns in a fire of transcendence
And commodities. The bowels
Of men are wrung between the poles
Of meaningless antithesis.
The holiness of the real
Is always there, accessible
In total immanence.
(Kenneth Rexroth 2003: 545)
In this section I discuss ideas and experiences of the real and the
other in relation to the arts and human consciousness. Is it useful,
significant or valid to speculate about, believe in and experience an
outside, a realm that exists indifferent to the ways, perceptions and
constructions of human beings? If it is, how can we re-establish and
affirm the importance of this realm as a counter-balance, frame of
reference and measure for our human domain? And how can we
develop modes of articulation, rhetoric, discourse and action that take
account of a reality that is both a flux-field of energy and light, a
realisation of mind and a concatenation of matter? How do we resolve
the apparently opposing ideas of constructivism and realism, anthro-
pocentrism and ecology, the abstract/ideal and the actual?
160 Mind, the real & the other
We live in a culture in which social-constructionism dominates critical

thinking about science, the arts and philosophy this is a positive
development in that we recognise, and take responsibility for, the arts,
philosophy and science as contingent, relative and endlessly revisable
human constructions. The pursuit of, or belief in, the truth, or a
knowledge that is absolute and unconditional, is widely seen as
problematic or even dangerous despite the flowering of forms of
fundamentalism that are premised on a belief in absolutism and one
truth (however different and contradictory these absolute truths may
be). However there are also dangers in pushing constructivist ideas
and beliefs too far, such that the universe is considered as residing
within, or constructed by, human mental and linguistic activity, and
that there is nothing other than this realm of human discourse.
It is important to acknowledge at the outset that there are many kinds

of otherness, including, nature, a transcendent reality or order,
nothingness, the gods, God, other human beings, other beings, other
races, another gender, the unconscious, death, even, in Nausea,
Sartres study of alienation, the otherness of ones own body. In the
following notes Im going to consider particular ideas of otherness in
relation to nature and indeterminacy, and to set these alongside ideas
of the real as articulated and enacted in the work of various poets
and artists.
Although mysticism is often portrayed as an encounter with otherness

the otherness of God, the divine, a transcendent reality it is also
recognised that the mystic encounters the oneness of everything, the
mutuality of existence, the indivisibility of all that is. In the latter case
there is no other - otherness is an illusion or delusion arising out of
misguided belief or limited understanding or a distorted view of how
things are. (Aspects of mysticism are discussed in more detail in Part
9)
*
Nothingness as Other
In his remarks on nothingness as a concept within Pascals thinking
and within existentialist philosophy, Barrett (1990:116) argues that
the idea of Nothingness or Nothing had up to this time [Pascals
Mind, the real & the other 161
time] played no role at all in Western philosophy. This is a very bold

statement, excluding as it does an important strand of Christian
theology (which Barrett may not consider as philosophy), that is the
apophatic tradition or the via negativa both of which are discussed
in Part 9 of this book. Setting aside this omission Barrett does point to
the tendency, particularly in the tradition of Scholastic philosophy, to
consider the Nothing, nihil, as a purely conceptual entity, an empty
abstraction that lay at the farthest reaches of thought. (ibid: 117)
Barrett goes on to argue that it is with Pascal that Nothingness (Barrett

employs the upper case) becomes an experiential reality. Pascal
encounters the contingency of his being, a state or condition which is
rendered meaningful and profound in relation to the awareness that we
are always on the edge of non-being. This realisation hit Pascal
(pardon the pun) when he was almost flung through the open door of
his carriage as it swerved on a road by the Seine. The possibility of
instant annihilation haunted Pascal for the rest of his life. The contin-
gency of being born here and now, and at the same time the possibility
of ceasing to exist at any moment, are the primary conditions that all
human beings have to face. Barrett argues that Pascal is anticipating a
central concern of later existentialists like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and
Heidegger. For Pascal, Nothingness is the ultimate other - that which
stands outside, beyond, or contrary to, a persons life as such it is
also that which defines or delimits our existence.
While Pascal thinks of Nothingness, as nihil, the ultimate negative that

defines being as the positive, Barrett argues that for Heidegger,
Nothingness is a presence within our own Being. (ibid: 226) It is not
outside of Being (again Barrett uses the upper case) but an integral
part of human Being. The difference between Pascal and Heidegger
can be explained by a profound shift in the conception of Being as
articulated by the two thinkers. According to Barrett, Heidegger
conceives of Being as a field that is not co-extensive with a particular
human body:
My Being is not something that takes place inside my skin (or inside an
immaterial substance inside that skin); my Being, rather, is spread over a
field or region which is the world of its care and concern. (ibid: 217)
Heidegger calls this field of Being, Dasein which can literally be

translated from the German as being-there. In Heideggers view
Dasein is without essence, it is indeterminate, a field of possibilities,
some of which can be actualised by an individual in the course of his
or her life. To find ourselves thrown into Dasein, aware of the
contingency and indeterminacy of our existence, is also to be aware of
the ever-present possibility of Nothingness within being-there. As
Hamlet puts it, to be, or not to be, that is the question both options
are integral to Heideggers idea of Dasein. He also considers Dasein
to be a clearing or opening in which entities become present, or, as
Zimmerman puts it, the openness in which presencing transpires.
(1993: 244) Death, non-being, is one of the possibilities open to me at
any time. According to Zimmerman (ibid: 242-243) the clearing or
opening which characterises human being is itself a kind of absence or
nothingness, a space in which things can present themselves and thus
be. Heidegger argues that the space of Dasein is also a social space,
being-there is also being-with, we are together in Dasein
overlapping, as it were, in our fields of care and concern. Hence, in
contrast to Pascal, Nothingness, or absence as he sometimes refers
to it, is not for Heidegger a manifestation of otherness, rather it is a
part of Dasein, our being-there.
Connections can be made between Heideggers Dasein as openness or

clearing, ideas derived from Merleau-Ponty about the artwork as a
zone of interpretation, (see Part 6) and Umberto Ecos idea of the
open work (a term Ive used elsewhere in this book, in the extended
sense of the self as open work see Part 6). In each case reference is
being made to the artwork, to being-there and to the self as a nexus
of possibilities, a dynamic space within which potential is actualised
or not, interpretations are formed and re-formed, actions are modified
and reframed, stories and images are revisioned, and beliefs and
values are endlessly revised. There is also a connection to the idea of
the contrarium (see Parts 7 and 10) as a locus of contradictions,
paradoxes and unresolvable polarities a field of liminal experience,
of becoming, of betweenness, in which irreconciliable oppositions are
recognised and handled as manifestations of the indeterminacy and
mutuality of existence.
It is important to note that nothingness as used above is not a synonym

for sunyata, emptiness, as used in Part 4 of this book.
*
In his poem, Thing Language, Jack Spicer brings together an image of
the indifference of the ocean, to which no one attends, and the field of
poetry, an ocean of white and aimless signals, to which no one
listens.
This ocean, humiliating in its disguises

Tougher than anything.
No one listens to poetry. The ocean
Does not mean to be listened to. A drop
Or crash of water. It means
Nothing.

Aimlessly
It pounds the shore. White and aimless signals. No
One listens to poetry.
(in Blaser 1996: 217)
*
Can nature, in its indeterminacy, be considered as the ultimately
indefinable Other?
In The Song of the Earth (2001), Jonathan Bate discusses the idea of
nature as other. He refers to Adornos recognition that even to talk
about the beauty of nature is to violate what he called the non-identity
of nature as the epitome of the non-human. (151) Bate cites
Adornos remark, in Aesthetic Theory, that:
As an indeterminate something, natural beauty is hostile to all definition

As Valery remarked, the beautiful may require the slavish imitation of the
indeterminable quality of things. (ibid)
Bate returns a number of times to the question as to why the other-

ness of nature isnt more central to discussions about the other in
cultural theory and literary criticism in particular. He asks, why the
recovery of the repressed Others of woman and black in cultural
criticism since the 1960s has not generally been accompanied by a
recovery of nature, the original Other. (ibid: 35) While not really
answering this question he does highlight the way in which the terms
woman and black have been linked to nature:
Hence the common association of woman and black with closeness to

nature, with instinct and biology, of man and European with rationality
and with transcendence of nature. (ibid)
Bate goes on to analyse these familiar stereotypes as they arise in the

work of Rousseau, the Romantics, Shakespeare, and more recent
authors including Aime Cesaire and Edward Kamau Brathwaite. He
considers the figure of Caliban as emblematic of many of the issues
surrounding the use of a colonising language (English and other
European tongues) by the colonised. Caliban has to write back in
the language bequeathed to him by Prospero (ibid: 82) a language
that Caliban and all peoples who occupy what Wah calls a hyphen-
ated position (see below) have to reconfigure, destabilise and
hybridise in order to be able to speak. In order to avoid the assimila-
tive tendency in language - the way in which a colonising language
suffocates dissenting voices - a process of defamiliarisation has to take
place, a reclamation of meanings, rhythms, metaphors, diction and
vocabulary such that the otherness of the colonised speaker/writer is
retained and projected into the dominant discourse.
Of course, an obvious problem with any notion of otherness, including

nature as other, is that we are in danger of perpetuating a potentially
misleading binary opposition, affirming both a sense of either/or and a
sense of separation between humankind and nature a dichotomy that
does not fit with the idea or experience of humanity as one dimension
of a polymorphous nature an integral part of the natural world. This
ambivalence in our attitude to who we are and where we are can only
be resolved by recognising that we are both a part of, and separate
from, nature depending how we use the term nature.
Heidegger (from The Question Concerning Technology) sums up the

situation regarding one aspect of otherness very succinctly:
Man [] exalts himself and postures as lord of the earth. In this way the il-
lusion comes to prevail that everything man encounters exists only insofar
as it is his construct. This illusion gives rise in turn to one final illusion: it
seems as though man everywhere and always encounters only himself.
Nature is the Other, the Outside, that stands as a reminder that this is an illu-
sion, the hubris of a humanity that forgets wherein it dwells, on what ground
it stands, what air it breathes, what other beings co-inhabit its spaces. (in
Bate 2001: 68)
It is one thing to think or feel we are a part of everything, it is quite

another to think we are everything! Bate uses Heideggers point to
support one of the main arguments in his book, namely that the:
Land, the ocean, the polluted air, the endangered species cannot []
speak for themselves. The ecocritic [and, presumably, the ecopoet] has no
choice but to speak on behalf of the Other. The ecocritical project always
involves speaking for its subject rather that speaking as its subject: a critic
may speak as a woman or as a person of colour, but cannot speak as a tree.
(ibid: 72)
Speaking for other species and the biosphere as a whole is indeed an

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

[] As Valery remarked, the beautiful may require the slavish imitation of
the indeterminable quality of things. (ibid)
We can see here a connection, perhaps somewhat surprising, between

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

centric personalisation and empathic imagining. The danger is always
that nature becomes too domesticated, too soft and furry, and that we
lose sight of the indescribable otherness that inhabits the described.
R.S.Thomas sums this up in the doubled image of a barn owl as soft /
feathers camouflaging a machine - a machine that repeats itself year
/ after year. (Thomas 2001: 319) In a similar vein Rexroth reminds us
of the indifference of stones, the remote otherness of the geosphere,
the cold and cruel apathy of mountains. (Rexroth 2003: 161)
*
R.S. Thomas
The Welsh poet R.S.Thomas spent a lifetime making poems out of his
experiences as a priest ministering to his rural congregation. Births,
deaths and hard-working lives are recorded, celebrated and analysed
in a terse yet passionate speech that situates these passing lives within
the ancient topography of the Welsh hills, and against the timeless
silence of a God who often seems as remote and obdurate as a rock
face. Many of Thomass poems seem to rise out of a knot of conflict-
ing forces. The poets relationship with God is at times a combat in
which Thomass own beliefs and values seem to be tested to breaking
point. In a poem entitled, The Combat, Thomas (2001: 291) writes,
We have wrestled with you all / day, and now night approaches, / the
darkness from which we emerged / seeking. And when the seekers
emerge they find that God seems to be absent: And anonymous / you
withdraw, leaving us nursing / our bruises, our dislocations. The
latter phrase could be taken as a precise description of the poet-
priests role to nurse the bruises and dislocations of his people.
Thomas rails against the failure of language to name, describe or
comprehend God, and against the inability of science or any human
endeavour to tell us who you are. God is the ultimate Other, an
unfathomable presence, which is often an absence, that beckons us
while at the same time belabouring us with your silence. At the end
of their lives the people, and, we imagine, Thomas himself, die / with
the knowledge that your resistance / is endless at the frontier of the
great poem.
Somewhere in the interstices of Thomass drystone sentences, in the

pauses between lines and in the shadows between images, is the
presence and absence of another Being. The poet pits his craft and his
theological guile against the resistance of this divine Other, that is
always retreating into darkness or light whenever the words seem
about to frame its silhouette against the page. Thomas spends a
lifetime trying to get at this presence, a presence that is also an
absence, chipping away at the infinite resistance with his urgent
syllables and his poetics of stone, hard labour, resignation and
unexpected grace. Thomas enacts a surgery of the soul which few
poets have attempted, tracing innumerable defeats and disappoint-
ments, rare epiphanies and long nights in which he seems to have been
forsaken by a harsh and unforgiving God.
Thomas reminds us that there will always be a gap, almost an incom-

patibility, between the otherness of nature and God, and the affairs of
human beings, The poem in the rock and / the poem in the mind / are
not one. (ibid: 95) However long the poet or scientist struggles to
map the universe, which is also the face of God, success will not
come. The Unreachable will always recede into the darkness, an un-
navigable country. Thomas offers his poems as both a fiery rebuke
and a fitful supplication, somehow to draw God out of His muteness
into a listening and a speaking, into a dialogue that affirms the
existence of both parties:
And I would have

things to say to this God
at the judgement, storming at him,
as Job stormed, with the eloquence
of the abused heart. But there will be
no judgement other than the verdict
of his calculations, that abstruse
geometry that proceeds eternally
in the silence beyond right and wrong.
(ibid: 331)
While Thomas writes within a theological framework and in a

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

in the morning, with the garden
in the afternoon. Evenings I
fish or coming home empty-handed
put on the music of

Cesar Franck. It is enough []
(ibid: 325)
The coming home empty-handed is typical of his, at times, jaunty

grimness!
Thomas views art and poetry in many ways: as a tower of Babel; a

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

reality that has presence and actuality. Instead it is seen as an abstrac-
tion or as a commodity or resource that is an extension of, or projec-
tion of, the human realm (that is our own desires, imaginings and
fears). Despite some similarities between social constructivism and
Mahayana or Madhyamika Buddhism, Snyder argues that there are
profound differences (see also Part 4 of this book). While the Western
constructionist tradition tends to devalue nature, dismissing it as either
a fiction or a commodity, Buddhism accepts the ontological reality of
the realm we inhabit with other beings - a spatially extensive domain
alive with processes and powers that are nonhuman. However, as
Snyder notes, Buddhist thinkers and practitioners also recognise that
our contact with, and participation in, the universe is mediated in
many different ways:
our seeing of the world is biological (based on the particular qualities of our
species body-mind), psychological (reflecting subjective projections), and
cultural construction. (2000: 387)
But the purpose of Buddhist practice is to enable individuals to

examine ones own seeing, so as to see the one who sees and thus
make seeing more true. (ibid) Through meditation techniques like
zazen, disciplined attention and phenomenological analysis, aligned
with a carefully developed ethical code, practitioners come to see the
biological, psychological and cultural structures which frame knowing
and being, and the ways in which these structures are maintained by
human desires, fears and attachments. To be unable to recognise these
structures, and the cords of attachment that bind us to them, traps us in
a vicious circle of delusion and dissatisfaction. It is only by seeing
clearly these structures and attachments at work in us, becoming
enlightened as to the actual state of things, that we can engage with
the world with equanimity and freedom.
Paradoxically, Western social-constructionism and deconstructivism,

can be viewed as simultaneously de-materialising, reifying and
idealising nature. The notion that nature, suitably apostrophised, is
only a linguistic construct, a term that only has meaning in relation to
other linguistic binaries (nature/culture, human/nonhuman, natu-
ral/unnatural), de-actualises nature and turns the world we inhabit into
an abstraction within a discourse of abstractions and human projec-
tions. As Snyder writes: In the past, the idea that the external world
was our own invention came out of some variety of idealist thought.
(1994: 29) One of the many positive features of recent constructionist
thinking has been the recognition that all knowledge is perspectival,
(see Part 10) that is, that we all look at things and ideas from different
positions, and that we need to take account of these different positions
when we put forward our own views and in developing understanding.
But sometimes this emphasis on recognising multiple perspectives or
viewpoints, as advocated by thinkers as different as Rorty, Derrida,
Eco, Barthes, Dennett and Kristeva, can be accompanied by a failure
to recognise that we always see and think from some position, that we
are located somewhere in the scheme of things, and that we look at
something from a particular position.
Richard Rortys (1999) emphasis on science and the arts as providing

descriptions rather than grand-narratives or precise explanations
of the ways things are, is a welcome acknowledgement of the contin-
gency and revisibility of human thought. But a description necessitates
something to be described, and this aspect of his descriptive theory is
often not mentioned or downplayed not least by Rorty himself.
Descriptions, perspectives and positions, within the discourses
of constructionism, are often treated as if they floated in a vacuum,
unrelated to the Other that stands outside human discourse whether
that Other is nature, reality, another human being, a stone, a bird, a
star, a language or language itself or death, or, for that matter, the
otherness of growth and decay, or the virus that afflicts us or the
benign bacteria that lives in our gut. The universe exists regardless of
our descriptions, an indifferent Other against, and within, which we
live our lives like motes of dust in a sunbeam.
To come at this from a slightly different angle Id like to consider a

few statements by Rorty a philosopher I hold in high regard as an
articulate exponent of the social constructionist position. In Philoso-
phy and Social Hope (1999: 48) he discusses statements like: Every-
thing is a social construction, and All awareness is a linguistic
affair. He takes the former to be a characteristic slogan of the
European tradition, following on from Foucault, while the latter is
typical of recent American developments in philosophy. He states that
both statements amount to much the same thing, namely that we shall
never be able to step outside of language, never be able to grasp

reality unmediated by a linguistic description.
While this may be seen as a fairly innocuous statement, it does beg a

few questions. For instance, what is meant by grasp, by reality
and by description? As Ive already suggested description implies or
necessitates a something to be described. If all that can be described is
another description then the idea of never being able to grasp reality
is redundant and we are in the realms of tautology and infinite
circularity. Rorty seems to recognise this point and tempers his own
position as follows:
Both [statements] are ways of saying that we should be suspicious of the

Greek distinction between appearance and reality, and that we should try to
replace it with something like the distinction between less useful descrip-
tion of the world and more useful description of the world. (ibid)
The world remains as a shadowy entity, lurking behind innumerable

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

ern) social constructionism, an anthropocentric humanism so pervasive and
enveloping that we cant see through it or out of it (of course, that would
be impossible, I hear constructionists saying), may well account for the
rootlessness, the unpositioned transcendentalism of much current thinking,
action and being. As if we exist no-where, no-place, no-time. The evapora-
tion of a sense of other, outside, reality, in which we participate, rub up
against, find ourselves located whether we like it or not, leads both to politi-
cal ennui and inaction (for politics is only about words, claims and counter-
claims, a set of fictions within fictions, variations of discourse that do little
to change material circumstances because there are no material circum-
stances), and to a sense of unreality as if we live virtual lives within a vir-
tual insubstantial universe. Environmental awareness, concern and action
slip down the agenda insofar as we convince ourselves that the environment
is somehow unreal compared to the reality of human culture. The world
becomes an abstraction rather than the spatially substantive habitat of count-
less beings as Snyder (1969) puts it, our Earth House Hold.
*
The otherness of the object the quest for the thing-in-itself
Imagine youre walking in a city park, following a lawn-edged path
between trees and bushes. Suddenly your eyes and body are drawn to
a dark cube that sits implacably on the earth. As you get closer you
notice that it is only slightly taller than you and about as wide as your
outstretched arms. It is square, made of a metal that is tarnished and
mottled, non-reflective and unassertive. It sits there, occupying space,
an index of gravity, manufacture and geometric uniformity. There is
no decorative embellishment to disturb the symmetry or to relieve the
smoothness of surface although the metal has a patina that suggests
time, age and the effects of weather. The object seems to resist the
minds usual habit of inventing stories and metaphors to frame and
consume what is seen. This alien thing has weight, substance and
materiality in a way that is different to our own. We feel its stillness,
solidity, heaviness and cold surface against the mobility, lightness,
sensitivity and warmth of our own body. In a curious way it affirms
our aliveness in contrast to its own inert and obdurate otherness.
For a time, in the early nineteen-sixties, a number of artists working in

the USA made objects that had many of the qualities of our imagined
cube. Coming into public prominence in 1966 with an exhibition
entitled, Primary Structures, at the Jewish Museum, New York, a
movement known as Minimalism or ABC Art, included artists who
tried to strip away the subjective emotionalism of painters like
Jackson Pollock, Willem De Kooning, Franz Kline and Mark Rothko,
in favour of a geometric art of cool lucidity an art centred on objects
and facts rather than on personalities and feelings. Robert Morris,
Sol LeWitt, Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Richard Serra and Tony Smith
(who made a sculpture in 1962 entitled, Die the singular form of
Dice - very similar to our imagined object), were associated with these
developments, and for a time were very influential within the late
modernist art scene.
Another artist Mel Bochner, writing about this kind of art, quoted
Husserl, go to the things themselves, and Hume, no object implies
the existence of any other. (in Battcock1969) The intention was to
make objects that affirmed objectness or objecthood, the singular-
ity of things in the world. Objects that gave rise to an immediacy of
response in those who experienced it a perceptual wholeness or

gestalt that was pre-linguistic or pre-conceptual. The object (and it
was sculpture rather than painting that dominated this period of avant-
garde activity) asserted its uniqueness and material presence, so
insistently that story-making, rationalisation, aesthetic theorising and
symbolism became redundant or unimportant. The silent simplicity of
the thing, stripped of its connotations and intellectual embellishments,
stood as the real, the outside, the object in contrast to the subject, the
other in contrast to the self.
Of course we may see the quest for the thing-in-itself, as hopelessly

misguided. While Kant (see Honderich 1995: 436) argued in favour of
the idea of things-in-themselves (noumena), as a necessary pre-
condition of a realm of appearances (phenomena), he also argued that
we can only know things as they appear, not as they are in themselves.
In Kants view things-in-themselves are transcendent and unknow-
able. The idea that the object, which for the Minimalists constituted
the immediately apprehensible stuff of the world, was, for Kant, a
transcendent unknowable, is one of the paradoxes that reminds us how
different are the interpretations we weave about the world.
*
Marjorie Perloff reminds us that Wittgenstein, the architect of linguis-
tic/analytical philosophy, acknowledges in the Tractatus that, The
world is independent of my will. (Perloff 1996a: 134)
*
The other, outside and real in the poetics of Robin Blaser,
Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan
We can extend this line of thinking in another direction leading us,
perhaps paradoxically, to make connections between picturing mind,
the construction of self and the voicing of the otherness of the world.
The poet Robin Blaser quotes his friend and fellow poet, Jack Spicer
(speaking to a group of poets in 1965) describing poetry as coming
from the outside rather than from the inside.(1996: 273) It is a
dictation of the moment. An utterance of the world, rather than an
utterance of the personality (though it may be that too) - the otherness
of reality speaking through the poet. What Gary Snyder in a radio
broadcast once referred to as the stuttering voice of revelation. In

this kind of approach to poetry and art (for we get it in the work of
Twombly, some of Rauschenberg, Yannis Kounellis, Giacometti,
Charles Reznikoff and in the drawings of Joseph Beuys, and in Cages
music and prints), we encounter what Blaser refers to as
a reopened language [that] lets the unknown, the Other, the outside in again
as a voice in the languageThe safety of a closed language is gone and its
tendency to reduce thought to a reasonableness and definiteness is dis-
turbed. (Blaser 1996: 276)
Although this might seem like a rehashing of Romantic notions of the

poets muse speaking through the poet, it is different. In the case of
Romantic inspiration the muse is usually figured as inside the poet,
and the complementarity of this other, deeper, self is articulated in
another voice (female - anima) speaking from inside the (male) poet
rather than, as Blaser argues, a giving voice to something outside, to
the outside/nature/other. This notion of the poet giving voice to an
outside is, in many ways, a return to an earlier Greek and Latin way of
thinking that inspiration is divine, coming from the gods.
In both the rationalistic determinism of the preformed work, (the

separation of idea, concept or design from the made form, in say, the
writing of a sonnet, fugue or haiku), and the irrationalistic subjectivity
of expressionism in its countless forms, there is a tendency to resist
the demands or even the existence of the outside, the other, the unself.
The former by avoiding the existential uncertainties of an exploratory
mode of composition, the latter by wrapping the personality of the
artist around everything such that the other is squeezed out and any
kind of outside is denied. Both are forms of enclosure keeping the
unself at bay.
According to Spicer,
speech is between two silences [] It does not break our contact with the
things, but it draws us from our state of confusion with all things in order to
awaken us to the truth of their presence.
Blaser adds,
I wish to take it back to the composition, the ontology, the beginning of a

language that is full of the world. It is within language [in this kind of po-
etry] that the world speaks to us with a voice that is not our own. (Blaser
1996: 279)
Blaser argues that the poem or artwork presents an exhibition of the

world (Heideggers phrase), or more precisely an unfolding of
awareness, not of the individual against the world, but of the world
through the individual. What Buddhists rather grandly call the
cosmic mind. Artworks arise through a process of emptying, being
attentive and open to all kinds of otherness. (see Blaser 1996: 279) We
become the consciousness of the world rather than the consciousness
of our self, though paradoxically we encounter in this way the open
or indeterminate presence, the indefinite nature of [humankind].
(Blaser 1996: 301)
Dante, (in De Monarchia, suggests that (quoted by Robert Duncan

1968: flyleaf): The universe speaks to us and in us, and we but
imitate in what we call our language the real speech which surrounds
us, out of which, indeed, we are born. He refers to: Gods art,
which is Nature.
For Duncan, the universe speaks through the poet in many voices. In
The Venice Poem, he writes: I am like an empty shell / tortured with
voices. / Alone, I know not where I am. / I cry out. / My voices
answer. (1968: 83) He often refers to conversations with compan-
ions, dialogues with other voices in many forms and stylistic modes
a distinctive characteristic that establishes Duncans polyvocal
identity as a poet.
Speaking as a poet, Robin Blaser (1974: 38) argues against the

tendency to reduce poetry to the expression of the man, the expres-
sion of the personality [which is poetry as] invented thought, the
unreal, the fictive, [] the transcendence that is not attached. He
argues for poetry as primary thought which has density, as
opposed to poetry in the tradition of Pope, which is an idea system
[with] imagery, metaphor, and so on [as] adornments of those ideas.
Popes is an instrumentalist project, poetry as didactic vehicle.
Blaser opposes this use of the poetic not as operational, not as

actually dense in language itself, not as literal to experience so that
language itself is experience and part of the mind, part of the body
a mode of being and coming to know. In Blasers view poetry and
painting expose us to the real, they are indices of openness, of
experience unfolding in the making - poetry as realisation. What Rilke
might have meant by his phrase, we are all bees of the invisible. (in
Blaser 1974: 41)
Blaser, (1996) in The Practice of Outside, argues that poetry is

necessary to the composition or knowledge of the real. For Spicer
and Blaser poetry is an act or event of the real, rather than a dis-
course about the real. (Blaser 1996: 271) Blaser describes how Spicer
sought to lose the I and to gain what he variously called a dictation,
the unknown, an outside in other words to find a voice for, and in
relation to, the unself or other. (ibid: 272)
Blasers ideas bring to mind Charles Olsons argument against the

tradition of Greek philosophy (going back to Socrates readiness to
generalise, Aristotles logic and classification, and Platos idealism
with its separation of form from content) a tradition which fore-
grounds logos (discriminating language) and reason, pushing lived
experience of the instant and tangible real into the background a
kind of existential wallpaper against which the furniture of language
stand out as virtual objects. (in Allen & Creeley 1967: 186) Poetry and
painting can be instruments of the real extending out from the Greeks
enclosed universe of discourse. Olson writes, Beyond [logos &
reason] is direct perception and the contraries which dispose of
argument. The harmony of the universe, [] is not logical, or better,
is post-logical.(ibid)
And the universe is purposeless energised by a cosmic playfulness

(lila, in Sanskrit what we might now call playful chaos) in which
indeterminacy is more pervasive than determinacy and complexity is
more characteristic than simplicity. The universe is brimming with
random events and casual arbitrariness in which short-lived episodes
of linear determinacy are continually being absorbed back into the
state of endless play.
The aspiration to openness, the desire for poets, or perhaps poems, to

be instruments of the real, crops up in the work of many poets. As an
example here is Lew Welch, (1973) in Hermit Poems, No 9:
I saw myself a
ring of bone
in the clear stream
of all of it
and vowed
always to be open to it
that all of it
might flow through
and then heard

'ring of bone' where
ring is what a
bell does.
*
Another approach to the question, what is the real (the real as other),
is taken by Slavoj Zizek, whose ideas are discussed by Miriam
Nichols (2002: 37). According to Nichols, Zizeks notion of the real
is,
the site of the impossible, the real is that which cannot be undergone. It is
the exterior surface of specular consciousness (inseparable in Moebius fash-
ion from the interior), and as such it would include materiality, futurity,
and death the nothing that withdraws from every appearance of some-
thing.
Or, in Blasers terms (1993: 117):
at the edge
of the words
the silence is the Other

at the edge of my words
a
move
ment
- from Blasers poem, Image-Nation 5 (erasure
Zizeks notion of the real as a place that can be neither occupied nor
avoided (Nichols 2002: 37) is also the real of the other, the material
world, the something that is not us. The real, in the form of death and
the future, is also the unknown and indeterminate, a field of potential
or possibility, just as the material universe (the other) is indeterminate,
a field of energies in a state of constant change. Nichols argues that
Blasers mode of construction, in the form of the serial poem, is also
indeterminate, without a telos a wandering that does not know
where it is going, but only where it has been. (ibid)
The real is, in Zizeks view, the impossible, something at, or beyond,
the borders of consciousness. At this point ideas of real and other
coincide. The other is seen as that which is outside language, its
double or polarity or generative field. In his essay, Recovering the
Public World, Andrew Mossin argues that the other, and the real, is
present and primary to our speaking, (in Nichols 2002: 161) The
language of poetry is positioned at the interface of visible and
invisible, thought and unthought (Ed Rasula, quoted by Mossin in
Nichols 2002: 161) and, we might add, self and unself, knowing and
unknowing, self and other the doubling skin which is inside and
outside.
[]
the words do not end but come back
from the adventure
the body is at the edge
of their commotion
[]
words foment
a largeness
of visible
and invisible worlds
they are a commotion
of one form
(from Blasers poem, Image-Nation 5 (erasure, in Blaser 1993: 113 & 117)
This commotion of words takes place at the meeting of inside and

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

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

Light in art is not light.
Space in art is space.
Time in art is not time.
[]
The nothingness of art is not nothingness.
Negation in art is not negation.
(in Bois 1991: 127)
This sounds like a contrariness that might disguise a kind of aesthetic

fundamentalism, a chipping away that eventually reveals an essence
about which we can be certain. But Reinhardt ridicules the pursuit of
essences or truths in art, or in religion, or in art as religion. He uses
contradiction and negation to destabilise the reader (and the viewer of
his paintings), to subvert any attempt at explanation and rationalisa-
tion of visual art, and to bring us back to the actuality of our encounter
with artefacts. He does this in a manner that recalls the practices of
Madhyamika Buddhism or Pyrrhonist scepticism, and the negative
theology of many mystics. Bois notes that Reinhardt was a reader of
religious texts, particularly about mysticism, while at the same
denying that art had anything to do with religion. (Bois 1991: 28-29)
In his essay, Art-as-Art (first published in Art International in 1962)

Reinhardt states, in his usual vehement tone:
The one thing to say about art is its breathlessness, lifelessness, deathless-
ness, contentlessness, formlessness, spacelessness, and timelessness. This is
always the end of art. (in Bois 1991: 122)
Only three years later he states, just as vehemently, that the end of art
is not the end. (ibid: 127)
*
Robin Blasers essay, The Practice of Outside, (1996) moves with a
kind of fumbling clarity, always in a state of unfolding, the indefinite-
ness opening out in such a way that we can see the creases and can
never get rid of them. As when a tightly crumpled piece of paper,
opened out, displays its history, the creased and possibly torn evidence
of its crumpling and unfolding. This condition of Blasers writing, as
he interprets and reiterates Spicers own crumpledness, leaves us
always with uncertainty as we try to make out whats written on the
creased and unfolded page.
*
I remember once listening to the painter, Howard Hodgkin, on the
radio - he mentioned the evasiveness of reality.
*
Hybrids, hyphens and margins
These ideas can be linked to the work of the Chinese/Canadian poet,
Fred Wah. In his poetry and poetics Wah explores the hyphened
position, a hybridised identity. He writes:
The half-breed shares with the nomadic and diasporic, and the immigrant,
the terms of displacement and marginalisation. Yet the hybrid, even in those
relegated spaces of race and ethnicity, is never whole. It is the betweenness
itself, however, that becomes interesting. (Wah 2002)
This notion of the hyphened position can also be applied to any of

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

fodder for a resistance to being a fixture of colonization. Writers have to
make choices about language and when youre writing in the language of
the colonizer any overt play against the grain can be generative. (Wah 2002)
Most of us have to use the language of the colonizer to survive the

impoverished formulaic discourses of bureaucracy, officialdom and
consumerism - what Guy Debord calls informationism). (in Rothen-
berg & Joris 1998: 419) Art and poetry provide ways to revitalise our
thinking and to re-awaken ourselves to the open-work of being and
becoming. The arts present us with modes of living and speaking
against the grain, enabling us to recognise our own hybridity and to
establish kinship with others (however distant in time and space) who
share a hyphened position at the margins of the dominant culture.
This brings us back to Robin Blaser (1996: 277) who seems to be

anticipating Wahs thinking when he writes:
in the contemporary experience, the formal, public language does not hold
and our language in the midst of a recomposition has to account for what is
stopped, lost, loose and silent.
Blaser argues that the formal, public language, which may also be
Wahs language of the colonizer, can be resisted or destabilised
through the continual recomposition of a renewed speech (ibid:
279) This speech takes account of the stopped, lost, loose and silent,
the indefiniteness of the outside, the formlessness and impossibility of
the other.
Blaser refers to this articulation of doubleness and polarity, the

interpenetration of inside and outside, as a contrarium (ibid: 278) A
term which brings to mind many of the themes Ive been exploring in
this book: self and unself; ideal and actual; suchness and emptiness;
determinacy and indeterminacy; and the mutuality of existence. One
characteristic of the contrarium is that its dynamic polarities are never
resolvable through a formulaic rationalist discourse but only through
the continual recomposition of lived experience and the open work.
The polyvocal contrarium cant be posited in simple terms as the
expression of the singular self. As Blaser (ibid) puts it: Such polarity
is not reductive to a simple-minded authenticity or to a signature that
is only ones self. To realise or actualise the contrarium in the arts
and in life is to bring into play the dynamics of otherness and the real -
the polarities of self and unself, visible and invisible - within a

subjectivity that is no longer an expression of the illusory, unhyphen-
ated, singular self. We are all manifestations of the contrarium - half-
breeds and hybrids, liminal presences on the edge of otherness. To
seek for a fixed essence or purity is to falsify the way we are and the
way all things are. For reality is a confluence of identities, imperma-
nent and indeterminate as wind and cloud, and to be precise we are
neither, this nor that, one thing nor an other yet we are also this
and that, self and other. Poets like Blaser, Spicer and Duncan try to
actualise the irreducible indefiniteness of the contrarium in their work.
As Duncan puts it: I dont seek a synthesis, but a melee. (Hoover
1994: 29)
*
In some ways the arts can be seen as a way of gaining empathic access
to the otherness of the social web in which we are situated. When
Thomas Nagel poses the question, what is it like to be this or that?
He is also affirming the importance of the arts to philosophical
enquiry and to socio-cultural relations - in that the arts endlessly pose
this kind of question and provide us with countless equally valid and
varied responses or realisations to such questions. Artists present us
with complex material and symbolic enactments of what it is to
inhabit this particular space, to be embodied minds interacting with
other embodied minds (beings, artefacts, buildings, habitats, histories,
cultures), what it is to be both flesh and bone, and light and energy-
processing consciousness. Artists and poets can articulate what it is
like to be in the liminal space between beings, between the self and
the unself.
Apart from its importance to developing cultural, psychological and

philosophical understandings this facility of the arts also has implica-
tions for politics. Christopher Ricks makes this very clear in a brief
discussion of William Empsons position. It is worth quoting Ricks
remarks in full:
Empson said one of the reasons we have arts and literature is that it gives us
sympathetic access to systems of belief [and we might add ways of being]
that are not our own. Some terrible recent developments seem to value
solely in a work of art those things that corroborate what you already think.
It assumes that the end of politics is establishing that your position is the
only one for which anything can be said. But the thing that Empson most
valued in the arts was that it allowed him to realise that intelligent, sensitive,
compassionate and very good people could disagree with him. (in Wroe
2005: 22)
*
In his poem, Compass, translated by Richard Wilbur, Jorge Luis
Borges suggests another paradox. On the one hand we can consider
the things of this world as a manifestation of a Divine language:
All things are words of some strange tongue, in thrall

To Someone, Something, who both day and night
Proceeds in endless gibberish to write
The history of the world
(Borges 1985: 109)
An idea that echoes Jacob Boehmes belief that God inscribes all
things in the world with His signature. On the other hand, as Borges
points out, there is something beyond language, a world that in its
actuality, materiality, immateriality and mystery is forever unreach-
able except through associations, subtle allusions and the well-tried
symbols and metaphors that illuminate the darkness of human history
in stories, poems and pictures: Beyond the name there lies what has
no name. And between the nameless and the word, the Divine other
and the otherness of the real, we make our way, reiterating the
remorseless codes of biology and poetry. Borges reminds us how we
fumble to make a fire that burns for moments and is then extinguished
by the breeze of history. How we stumble towards understanding and
how self-knowledge eludes us:
And this my being which escapes me quite,

My anguished life thats cryptic, recondite,
And garbled as the tongues of Babels fall.
(ibid)
*
As I read again Martin Bubers, I and Thou, I make notes to myself -
words or phrases used by Buber are woven into fragmentary thoughts
about otherness, presence and art:
Even if it was hell. Nothing at all. Only everything. Where is there room for
it to unfold, to present itself? The relation is all. The relationship is every-
thing, of which there is no thing, and nothing else. When the actual is all,
there is no other. It is a difficult reading, the reading of what is. There is no
translation, only a pointing & a recognition & a retelling & an opening to it
all
only to glimpse, to be fa-

miliar
yet to be witness to the
strangeness
of things as they are the
carpet
now illumined by patches
of light
and moving shadows that
trace the
breeze outside
Only the acceptance of the presence is required and only when we are
present is the word decomposed & revealed as another presence
we can only
witness, there is
nothing more,
or less,
to be done
***
Part 8
Where we are: locus of mind-in-the-world
Geography is the wife of history,

as space is the wife of time.
(Davenport 1984: 4)
I sit listening to the wind []

work in a field that is neither
that of thought nor of faith.
The great work-field.
(White 1990: 151)
Is there a scholarship that grows

naturally as the lichen.
(Thomas 2001: 471)
Its an intense geography

that is never far removed
from your body.
(Snyder, in Davidson 1991: 13)
I live in a red cedar house near the top of a steep hill overlooking the
city of Exeter. It is an unusual house designed and built by an architect
who was also a sailor. At the front of the building is a balcony, like a
captains lookout, facing south, with a view to the silver estuary in the
distance. We have almost an acre of land bounded on the western side
by a hedge that may be over six hundred years old. On the eastern side
a line of Monterey Pines shades the new executive housing and drains
the red-clay soil of summer moisture. To the north, at the back of the
house, is a small piece of woodland, a copse of turkey oak, holm oak,
sweet chestnut, ash, sycamore and southern beech, interspersed with
holly and hawthorn. Over the hill behind us is a deep valley where roe
192 Where we are
deer spend the days in sleep and silence, coming out at dawn and dusk
to graze around the stream and up the valley sides.
I know this place intimately. I feel at home here. Im familiar with

most of its resident population of larger animals. I look out for the
snails that gather around the front door on wet evenings. I hear the
craark of a pair of visiting ravens as they are pestered by anxious
crows. I know where all the badger trails are and where their public
toilet is. I remember the spot where I buried a roe deer, not yet stiff,
after its chest had been torn open by a fox. And I can see where I laid
a fox to rest a couple of years ago after it had curled up and died near
a wooden den we had made years before for our children. Early each
summer Ive seen broods of slow worms and grass snakes raised in
our compost bins and watched the newts coming up for air in the tiny
pond. Each autumn Ive carefully picked-off tiny ramshorn snails
from the decaying lily leaves that Ive cleared from the water, drop-
ping the delicate spirals back into the pond with hardly a ripple. In the
airways above the garden I know where the bats wheel and turn above
the clearing in the copse and how they sweep the length of the plot
only to turn again above the magnolia and sweep back up the hillside
time after time. I can see where the hornets nest used to be in the
infirm turkey-oak and where the biggest of the turkey oaks had to be
cut down when it had become too diseased and fragile to leave.
From our position here on the sheltered coast of an Atlantic promon-

tory we can watch storms blowing in from the southwest, full of rain
and silvergrey fury. Occasionally cold winds come down from the
Arctic lifting the needles of the Monterey Pines like sprays of frost
against dark sky. Very occasionally a thin golden film of Saharan
sand, perhaps whipped-up by the feet of Berber tribesmen, dusts the
leaves of grass and shrub. Our weather comes from all points of the
compass, a rising and falling of atmospheric pressure drawing in these
ghost winds, rains, mists and exotic dusts. Mostly it is a mild, benevo-
lent climate that provides for all kinds of creatures and plants. The
Devon clay is hard and deeply fissured in dry summers, lead-heavy in
winter. The house opens its pores in the short days, gaps opening in
the plaster of the walls as the clay beneath expands. In summer the
clay shrinks and the gaps close. The house breathes with the seasons.
Where we are 193
This intimacy of perception and feeling for where we are comes from
being in a place for many years, participating in its seasonal changes
and being attentive to what goes on here. Working the land, drawing,
photographing and walking the same walks over and over again salts
the skin with local knowledge and sensory delights. Nuances of light,
cloud formations and nocturnal sounds are revealed incrementally
over days, months and years. This sensory history is stored on the
skin, in the muscles, eyes, ears and tongue. And the sensory history is
one current of my being in this place, interwoven with other currents
of travels, encounters, geographies and cultures - all inscribed in
memories, images and symbolic narratives that constitute me as a
being-in-the-world.
*
Introduction
In this section I want briefly to explore some ideas surrounding our
being-in-the-world, our experience of place, what it is to be where we
are. I also discuss some of the ways in which the arts address, investi-
gate and celebrate our being-in-the-world. Drawing on diverse sources
I enquire into the metaphysics of emplacement, how we are as
participants in the natural world, mingling with other beings and
forces in a changing environment that is both physi-
cal/geological/geographical and cultural/symbolic/mythological. We
live in a multi-storied world, a place of complex interwoven stories
that are inscribed in the topography of every locality we inhabit. We
are minds overlapping and inter-mingling with other minds and
information-processing systems in a world of stratified codes and
layered histories, a world of evolutionary, cultural and cosmological
change all of which forms the locus of our being here, constituting
the medium of our presence as much as the air constitutes the medium
we breathe.
*
My touch is of the world. My skin is the skin of things, dealings with
other beings, encounters with other skins. I am here in this space,
amongst the textured weight & resistance of other substances, the
material universe of densely-structured lumps of matter. And yet I am
also a condensation of light in a field of light a prism through which
energy is transmitted and refracted.
194 Where we are
*
Kenneth White, in The Blue Road (1990: 117), quotes Mishima, trying
to describe a new kind of writing he was moving towards, he calls it
confidential criticism:
The I Ill be concerned with wont be that of my strictly personal history,

but something else [] Reflecting on the nature of this other self, I came to
the conclusion that it was very much a question of the space I happened to
be physically occupying.
*
According to Guy Davenport (1984: 4):
The imagination [is] rooted in a ground, a geography. The Latin word for
the sacredness of a space is cultus, the dwelling of a god, the place where a
rite is valid. Cultus becomes our word culture, not in the portentous sense it
now has, but in a much humbler sense. For ancient people the sacred was
the vernacular ordinariness of things: the hearth, primarily; the bed, the wall
around the yard.
*
Mapping & genealogy
Palaeolithic to contemporary hunter-gatherers and myth-makers:
Pyrrho. Sextus Empiricus. Pelagius. Erigena. Duns Scotus. The desert

fathers. Heraclitus. Diogenes. St Jerome. Countless hermits, scholar
monks and cloud-drifting nuns. Spinoza. Han-shan. Tu Fu. Basho.
Clare. Waterton. Ruskin. Thoreau. Muir. Rexroth. Snyder. White.
Celtic & Norman. Atlantic edge. Gulf Stream Drift. Westerlies,

souwesterlies.
Mindscape & Landscape topography, cartography, ideography.
Bodymind & Mindbody. Oceanic-mind & River-mind.
Force-fields, energy-fields, scent-fields, sight-fields, sound-fields,

touch-fields, fields-of-consciousness, analogical-fields, symbolic-
fields. Olson: composition-by-field.
Where we are 195
Stone, fibre, flesh, dust & light.
Cultures of being. Archives of knowing. Intelligences of moss, lichen,

microbes, trees, bugs, birds, four-leggeds, two-leggeds
Layered histories. Transmission of knowledge & information: gene to

gene, mind-to-mind, hand-to-hand, eye-to-eye, ear-to-ear
*
Fred Wah
George Bowering (Wah 1980: 14) in writing about the Canadian poet,
Fred Wah, notes his emplacement, his rootedness, the embeddness of
his language in the local topography. Wah writes from a position in
and amongst his British Columbian territory: I try to be the place.
(ibid) This, despite his sense of himself as a hybrid, an occupant of a
hyphenated position. Bowering discusses Wahs poetry as a
function of attention, an attending to the world:
Wahs poems tangle with [the?] phenomenal, the first act of noticing some-
thing, and they try to signify it without over-using societys name for it,
which latter is next to be peeled away after we have discarded abstraction
and description, and their simi-lies. In the poem Here, we catch the poets
attention as it is caught, attention being for Wah more important than reflec-
tion. (ibid)
In his poetry, Wah often exercises and celebrates the power of naming
things, while at the same time pushing against the tendency that
naming and describing have of setting up a barrier to attention, a
nominal lens that distorts and refracts the light of attentiveness. In his
poem, Havoc Nation, he articulates the complexity of this situation:
this is a hard language to work out

the images keep interrupting the talking
trees keep being pictures of themselves
my words keep meaning pictures
of words meaning tree
and its not easy
to find myself in the picture
(Wah 1980: 66)
196 Where we are
Somehow the poet has to use the language as a scalpel to cut the
symbolic cord that binds the word tree to the idea-picture or
representation, and then to re-energise the word with treeness in
such a way as to distil the act of perception into a poetic presence on
the page.
Bowering suggests that Wahs approach to composition reflects his

thinking about the self as implicated in the world, a participatory and
ecological perspective:
We remember that Coleridge and Duncan both insist on a co-operation (and

varying leadership) among the physical-mental faculties, rather than the
generalship of the mind in a composers individual chain of being []
keeping in mind [Wahs] identification of self with ecosystem, we associate
his poetic with the view that Pierre Dansereau argues for flora, that different
plant species naturally co-operate on site, as opposed to the basic puritan-
capitalist (E.J.Pratt) idea that they compete for range. (in Wah 1980: 14)
*
Heading East from Aberystwyth
Travelling through Welsh hills towards Mercian heartlands brings to
mind Kenneth Whites intellectual nomadism journeying through
layered histories, shifting geographies and overlapping territories and
cultures. Grey slate stained with lichen and wiry gorse, jackdaws
nesting in shadowed clefts, cultures of bacteria in tiny cups of rain-
water, mist infusing everything with Atlantic tears and mild air. Celts,
Mercians, Romans, Vikings, Saxons, Normans, Africans, Indians,
Pakistanis, Pagans, Hindus, Muslims, Christians migratory flows of
song and story, myths inscribed into earth and air. These islands
where Eurasia meets the wild western ocean, rocky cloud-makers,
storm-shields, stepping-stones to horizons of wave and fabled lands
inhabited by strangers and speculations. The diaspora of hybridised
migrants who wandered the Eurasian landmass had to find ontological
equivalents for these interweavings of intelligence and being. From
Palaeolithic hunters and picture-makers to travelling monks and
scholars of many faiths, the need to mark, inscribe, name and sing was
as essential as the need to find food, drink and rest. These were
thinkers on the edge of thought clouds meeting mountains, sky
meeting sea, islands on the edge of a continent. For these wanderers,
and for us, place-names are markers, words stabbed into the earth to
Where we are 197
locate us, to tell where we stand in relation to tree, river, hill, low
place, high place; what we are near to, above, below; what we can see
from here; what happened here. Ways of signing this place and
singing this land.
*
Robert Duncan (1968: jacket) quotes Dante in De Monarchia: Gods
art, which is nature.
*
In his poem, World, World, George Oppen speaks of what it is to be in
a place, to meet the resistance of stone and air and light and to sing of
being here:
The self is no mystery, the mystery is

That there is something for us to stand on.
We want to be here.
The act of being, the act of being

More than oneself.
(1976: 143)
*
Sightline. Scanning the visual field my eyes encounter a small
painting: a skyscape with a gull
the mind blinks into attention. There is this pen & the page, a
scattering of other pens & pages, a blur of tones & muted colours at
the edge. Oranges come into view, focus on dry taut dimpled skins,
puckered here & there with age & loss of fluid. Vision runs along
surfaces that shine & dance the light, then to shadow, a stone, a chunk
of flint like a sharp fractured bone. Beside it theres a softness, a grey
bundle of sheeps wool & a memory of gathering handfuls on a
hillside, clumps stuck to barbed wire, knots of it, rubbed off by
passing sheep. Sight moves higher past ranks of books, some leaning
left, others right, to a shelf beneath the low ceiling. Leaning against
the pale greygreen wall is a dark blue field of colour topped by a pale
blue band beneath which is a light grey silhouetted form of a bird, a
seagull still, but vibrant a chromatic episode of quiet insistence in
this cluttered field of sensations.
198 Where we are
*
In rivermist lost in rain
grief is a bridge
over which we walk
a pair of swallows divided
by life & loss
*
Mountains & walking
Gary Snyder, the mountain laureate, writes of walking as both
measure and discipline, and as a primary mode of being. Through
walking a place our sensory intelligence develops, we get to know the
lie of the land, our body moves with the topography of hill, valley,
shadowed forest and illuminated plain.
We learn a place and how to visualize spatial relationships, as children, on

foot and with imagination. Place and the scale of space must be measured
against our bodies and their capabilities. A mile was originally a Roman
measure of one thousand paces To know that it takes six months to walk
across Turtle Island/North America walking steadily but comfortably all day
is to get some grasp of the distance. (Snyder 2004: 8)
Walking is one of what the Chinese refer to as, the four dignities
Standing, Lying, Sitting and Walking. They are dignities in that
they are ways of being fully ourselves, at home in our bodies, in their
fundamental modes. (ibid) Snyder also discusses the myths woven
around mountains and how these relate to ancient Taoist cosmologies:
Mountains also have mythic associations of verticality, spirit, height, tran-

scendence, hardness, resistance and masculinity. For the Chinese they are
exemplars of the yang: dry, hard, male and bright. Waters are feminine:
wet, soft, dark, yin with associations of fluid-but-strong, seeking (and
carving) the lowest, soulful, life-giving, shape-shifting. (ibid: 10)
Mountains and waters are bound together as two interpenetrating and

interdependent vectors of geography and myth. Walking in the
mountains, fording streams, being enveloped in moisture-laden clouds
on rocky paths, is to activate and realise the mythic structures that are
immanent in the landscape. Knowledge is transmitted from age to age
through the symbolic codes embedded in the cultural ecology of each
locality.
Where we are 199
Davidson (1991:13) argues that for Snyder, and for his contemporar-
ies, the poets Lew Welch, Joanne Kyger and William Everson,
place is both the source and the ground of numinous presence [] To walk
in the landscape is to establish connections between animate and inanimate
realms, the resulting poem being the necessary articulation of those interde-
pendencies [the poems] are not intended to be descriptions of the events but
re-enactments, testifying through the poetics of open form to the vitality of
an open universe.
For Snyder landscape is an ecological model (see Davidson 1991:

12) rather than an allegorical or symbolic subject. Cataloguing
landforms and the plants and animals that inhabit a particular bio-
region is an important part of the poets role to give song to the
natural world to locate ourselves within the ecological web. Snyder
is also an activist, very aware of his other responsibilities, particularly
the need to prepare the landscape for future habitation. (ibid) His
poetics combines a belief in giving voice to the land and its inhabi-
tants, a feeling of reverence and kinship with the ways of the natural
world and those who work with it, and a sense of responsibility to
hand on to future generations a sustainable presence in the landscape.
Mind and mountains, poetry and waters, myths and land are insepara-
ble and mutually reinforcing. The landscape, with all its constituent
energies and beings, is alive with inherited knowledge, passed along
lines of culture from microbe to microbe, plant to plant, animal to
animal, bird to bird, human to human. As we walk in the landscape,
attentive to our footfall and to the landscape that flows through and
around us, biological and cultural evolutionary realms are fused in
narratives of stone, water, fibre, filament, flesh, bone, air and light.
Each strand of the ecological web sings its songs, tell its tales,
inscribes its drawings, and all are orchestrated in a great improvisatory
gesamkunstwerk that is forever evolving in an ocean of indeterminacy.
*
To write is to move. Dispersal of
a presumed and constructed world.
(Wah 2000: 18)
200 Where we are
*
Walking & thinking, trails & associations
Richard Long, the English sculptor, has made walking a central
feature of his art practice. He has walked and photographed the traces
of walks all over the world. In 1967 he photographed A Line Made by
Walking, the record in flattened grass (and photographic emulsion on
paper) of walking backwards and forwards along a line in a field. On
another occasion he walked a line in a daisy-covered field, picking off
the daisy heads as he walked. The resulting daisy-less trail was a trace
of absence, of minimal erasure in a drawing made by walking.
Sometimes he piles stones at places along his route, or picks up a
stone in one place and puts it down in another, before picking up
another stone and putting it down further along the route, and so on
for the length of a walk. Over the years since the mid-1960s Long has
walked some places many times, particularly on Dartmoor, not far
from his Bristol home.
What I have always liked about Dartmoor is that it is this big empty place
which nevertheless has traces of all these layers of human history, like the
tinners or farmers or whatever. And I suppose after so many years I can also
say that it has traces of my own walks and history on it. So I cant go to
Dartmoor now without being aware of a lot of my own history, my walks
that have criss-crossed it for thirty years, and that becomes part of the
cumulative richness of the work. (in Gooding & Furlong 2002: 139)
Longs walking sculptures resonate with associations and histories,

both personal and collective. They bring to mind our own experiences
of walking from place to place, noticing features of the landscape,
smelling the air, picking things up as we walk. We also think of those
peoples who have come before us, tramping the earth as traders,
explorers, nomads, soldiers and monks. With only a few remote
exceptions, most places on land have been seen, crossed, touched,
slept on and sung about. Human walking trails are woven over each
other, in places gathering in tracks that are sometimes hundreds,
maybe thousands, of years old. Everywhere these human peregrina-
tions are overlaid with animal trails, where badgers, foxes, rats and
smaller creatures have impressed their weight on the earth as they
move about on their daily and seasonal journeys. In the sky above
invisible flight-paths mark the migration routes and food-gathering
movements of birds and bats. Within the soil similar patterns mark the
countless journeys of beetles, worms and other subterranean creatures.
Where we are 201
And in the oceans and waterways amphibians and fish leave chemical
and auditory traces of their migrations and movements. Richard Long
adds his trails to this accumulation of inscriptions, an index of his own
life interwoven with the lives of others over centuries and millennia.
In 1990 Long made a piece of work entitled, Sound Circle: A Walk on

Dartmoor.(reproduced in Gooding & Furlong 2002: 143) The record
of the walk, presented as an artefact, is a map of the area with a circle
delineating the route taken. At intervals along the circle single words
are placed at right angles, describing sounds heard or sources of
sounds: wind, grasshoppers, wind, grasshoppers, larks, wind,
aeroplane, larks, buzzing, bleating, buzz, squelching, larks, cropping,
stream, wind. This bringing together of word, sensation and place is
echoed in similar practices of speaking the land amongst hunter-
gatherers and indigenous peoples across the world. Associative
thinking, often of a subtle and complex kind, is characteristic of oral
traditions that bind together place and idea, story and stone, perception
and symbolic memory.
In the following set of Navajo Correspondences, we can see how

these associations are set out in a poetic list that weaves together
highly disparate phenomena:
1. red willow
Sun
yellow
2. arrow
Wind
Cicada
arrow-crossing
life
3. aspen
white
summer
pink
4. Bat
Darkness
wing feather
Big Fly
202 Where we are
5. Big Fly
feather
Wind
skin at tip of tongue
speech
(in Rothenberg 1972 p.309)
The linkage between Longs practice as a sculptor and the art of

poetry is sometimes very obvious. In 2002 he made a work entitled, A
Four Day Walk on Dartmoor, it consists of a verbal statement:
NATURAL FORCES
WALKING WITH THE FORCE OF GRAVITY

IN THE FORCE OF THE WIND
THROUGH THE FORCE OF RIVERS
ALONG MAGNETIC FORCE BY COMPASS
OVER GEOLOGICAL FORCE ON THE STICKLEPATH FAULT
(reproduced in Gooding & Furlong 2002: 141)
There is a sense here of landscape as physical force, as lived experi-

ence and as idea. Different modes of explanatory description are
placed in sequence in a way that echoes this song, one of Five Teton
Sioux Songs:
where the wind is blowing
where
the wind
is blowing
the wind
is roaring
I stand
westward
the wind
is blowing
the wind
is roaring
I stand
(in Rothenberg 1969: 205)
All of Richard Longs art walks are in non-urban places, often through
wilderness or rural areas with few human inhabitants. However, other
artists and poets have made records of walks and journeys through the
Where we are 203
mutter and clutter of urban environments, where the layered density of

trails, routes and journeys is much greater, forming a multi-
dimensional carpet of associations, memories, myths, images and
songs.
Heres Kerouac writing about being on a bus moving through rural

and urban terrains:
I took the Washington bus; wasted some time there wandering around; went
out of my way to see the Blue Ridge, heard the bird of Shenandoah and vis-
ited Stonewall Jacksons grave; at dusk stood expectorating in the Kanawha
River and walked the hillbilly night of Charleston, West Virginia; at mid-
night Ashland, Kentucky, and a lonely girl under the marquee of a closed-
up shop. The dark and mysterious Ohio, and Cincinatti at dawn. Then Indi-
ana fields again, and St Louis as ever in its great valley clouds of afternoon.
The muddy cobbles and the Montana logs, the broken steamboats, the an-
cient signs, the grass and the ropes by the river. (Kerouac 2000: 232)
The litany of names interposed with snappy descriptive phrases marks

the changing environment as vividly as a more lengthy and detailed
account. The rhythms and disjunctive images of journeying are
conveyed in a concise reportage which is not unlike the Navajo
Correspondences. In both, mindscape and landscape are integrated
vectors of the same experience, different dimensions of moving
through a place.
And heres Snyder again, walking in downtown Naha, on the island of

Okinawa:
Ads and signs everywhere: my eyes couldnt leave the writing alone. Some
part of my mind effortlessly soaked up long-forgotten Chinese characters
and syllabary-written loan-words and sallied out to reassemble its old flu-
ency. A few more bends and the lane was heading due east [] There were
path-wide breaks paved in between structures, some might be passages. A
student in a blue dress came up one so I took it and was carried through (de-
scending steps and being funnelled between old stone walls) to a wider
street totally packed with cars and trucks, lined with storefronts and signs, a
basin of rumbling and honking [] I walked on up the intensely active
street. I began to feel the landscape with my skin, a somatic sensation of
mirroring or echoing that comes with re-cognitions that are below the con-
scious threshold. (Snyder 2000: 384 & 385)
204 Where we are
Snyder vividly evokes the experience of being in an urban landscape,

the density of sensations and the interpenetration of matter (walls,
trucks) and symbols (ads and signs).
Alain De Botton (2003: 57) gives a different perspective on the

enmeshing of mindscape and landscape: Journeys are the midwives
of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations
than a moving plane, ship or train. Walking is the template for these
later modes of transport and though the speed of travel may change
the interaction between environment, senses and thought remains as a
constant heightening consciousness, stimulating imagination,
engendering dynamic sequences of association and juxtaposition.
Kenneth White is a nomadic poet, navigating in his writing a huge

geographical terrain (his Collected Poems is entitled, Open World).
Yet he is also an inhabitant of particular places, most recently as a
settler beside Lannion Bay in northern Brittany. While some poems
journey through diverse times, places and ideas, others chart the
familiar territory around his home. In Finisterra or The Logic of
Lannion Bay, he brings to mind the history of this Atlantic promon-
tory, which was Roman ground / before it yielded / to the syntax of
Christianity (2003: 575), a place of heather, thorn and pine (ibid:
576) and he speculates on earlier inhabitants:
something like those old taoists

who founded the Academy of Gulls
(a bird and an eye, a bird and an eye:
ideogram for monastery)
an academy without walls
(ibid: 576-577)
As a latter-day member of the Academy of Gulls he is given to

walking, to tramping the damp lanes and headlands, studying the
terrain and charting its physical and symbolic topography:
as one who has studied

the grammar of granite
I have walked here
as one who would equate
landscape with mindscape
I have walked here
as one who loves
Where we are 205
the ways and the waves of silence

I have walked here
(ibid: 577)
In other poems he writes about trying to learn / the language of that

silence / more difficult than the Latin / I learned in Bergen / or the
Irish in Dublin.(ibid: 523) As a poet White walks through a geo-
graphical space that is also the space of consciousness, of mind, and to
understand both spaces, a man needs to fix his knowledge / but he
also needs an emptiness / in which to move.(ibid: 524) Hence he has
to study in an academy without walls, where the gulls and stones
have as much to teach as the human scholars and writers.
*
Alice Oswalds Dart
Another example of the relationship between walking and poetic
utterance comes in Alice Oswalds long poem, Dart. In constructing
her text Oswald makes use of conversations and interviews she
recorded with people connected with the whole length of the river,
from its source in Cranmere pool high on north Dartmoor to Dart-
mouth and the sea. The voices of fishermen, poachers, foresters,
farmers, stonewallers and walkers are interlaced with the voice of the
river itself and some of its non-human creatures and imaginary
presences. The language is resonant with the music of water, with
local words and phrases and with the changing rhythms of each stage
of the river as it speeds and slows to the estuary. Near the beginning
there is the following sequence which speaks of walking and rivering:
I dont know, all I know is walking.

[]
What I love is one foot in front of another. South-south-west and
down the contours. I go slipping between Black Ridge and White
Horse Hill into a bowl of the moor where echoes cant get out
listen,
a
lark
spinning
around
one
note
splitting
206 Where we are
and
mending
it
and I find you in the reeds, a trickle coming out of a bank, a foal
of a river
one step-width water

of linked stones
trills in the stones
glides in the trills
eels in the glides
in each eel a fingerwidth of sea
in walking boots, with twenty pounds on my back: spare socks,

compass, map, water purifier so I can drink from streams, seeing
the cold floating spread out above the morning,
tent, torch, chocolate, not much else

(Oswald 2002: 2-3)
A little later she gives voice to the two tributaries of the Dart before
they join at Dartmeet:
in that brawl of mudwaves

the East Dart speaks Whiteslade and Babeny
the West Dart speaks a wonderful dark fall

from Cut Hill through Wystmans Wood

and the West Dart speaks roots in a pinch of clitters
the East Dart speaks coppice and standards
the East Dart speaks the Gawler Brook and the

Wallabrook
the West Dart speaks the Blackabrook that runs by the
prison
(ibid: 10-11)
This is a conversation, a disputation of tongues: at loggerheads, lying

next to one another on the / riverbed / wrangling away into this valley
of oaks. (ibid: 11) There is the same reverence for names and for
naming, for finding the right word, for crafting a song that has the
intonation and music of the landscape, that the Teton Sioux demon-
strate, or the Navajo, or any indigenous people who give voice to a
Where we are 207
particular place, articulating the intelligences that inhabit the locality,

picturing the mindscape that is immanent in landscape.
*
Wah, wander & wonder
In Fred Wahs writing, the notion of journey has been a very con-
scious element. (Wah 2002: 1) Wah shares with Snyder a mode of
writing that is infused with the physicality of movement and labour, a
fluency in the handling of space, tactile experience and being out-
doors.
Timber Cruising, for example, located a physical environment that juxta-

posed geographical spatiality with body rhythm [] Movement implies all
sorts of possibilities for writing. Besides the obvious parallels with map-
ping, necessary for the formal innovation I was interested in, the cluster of
connections around journal and journey became important formal avenues
for my writing (ibid)
In the prose beginning of his poem, Cruise, Wah provides a succinct

manifesto of his poetic project at that time (early 70s?):
so I told myself I would go out wandering not over the world but in the
world until I found instant upon instant of that minute contact with a piece
of it I would be out there in it with everything else collecting measure-
ments with my senses in a timeless meandering through the wonder. (Wah
1980: 70)
This play on wander and wonder is typical of Wahs sensibility,

drawing in equal measure on Olsons projective verse, the objectivism
of, say, Oppen and Niedecker, the Chinese Taoist tradition and the
oral poetries of indigenous peoples. The wandering is also intellectual
and scholarly, there is a sense of Wah, and many other writers
including Carson, Pound, Duncan, Rothenberg, et al, wandering
through the libraries of the world, from book to book, poem to poem,
grazing on the fields of knowledge, metaphor, narrative and image
that unfold with each opening of a page, each looking and reading.
*
And the poet is a wanderer.
(Davenport 1984: 188):
*
208 Where we are
Coming home: emplacement, locus, locality

At the same time all wanderings start somewhere and often return to
the same place. In Wahs case this place is the interior of British
Columbia, near the Kootenay River, a place that Wah considers to be,
local to me, making up a picture of a world I am native of. (Wah
1980: 126) Journeys, physical and intellectual, move out from this
locality and move back to it, leaving leads to homing, a returning that
marks the gravitational pull of a familiar hearth.
Writing has a lot to do with place, the spiritual and spatial localities of the
writer. I see things from where I am, my view point, and I measure and
imagine a world from there. (ibid)
Gary Snyders locus is the watershed of the South Yuba river in the
foothills of the Sierra Nevada, Northern California - geographically
not far south of Wahs territory. According to Dodge (in Snyder 2000:
xix) Snyders work as poet, writer and activist, has been at the
mythopoetic interface of society, ecology, and language that he
chose as his fields of inquiry, his point of multiple attention. The title
of his first book of poems, Riprap (published in 1959), suggests
something of the distinctive interweaving of physicality and meta-
physicality in much of Snyders work to date.
Ive come to realise that the rhythms of my poems follow the rhythm of the
physical work Im doing and the life Im leading at any given time which
makes the music in my head which creates the line. (Snyder 1966: sleeve-
notes)
Part of his work as a member of a trail-crew on the Sierra Nevada

involved picking up and placing granite rocks in tight cobble patterns
on hard slab.
What are you doing? I asked old Roy Marchbanks. Riprapping, he said.
His selection of natural rocks was perfect, the result looked like dressed
stone fitting to hair line cracks. Walking, climbing, placing with the hands. I
tried writing poems of tough simple short words with the complexity far be-
neath the surface texture. (ibid)
In the title poem from Riprap, Snyders intelligence draws on the

geology and ecology of the place and is articulated in a text of short
studded lines that are almost indexically linked to the work of the
Where we are 209
trail-crew. There is a fusion of mind and body, a sense of cosmologi-

cal magnitude inlaid with a dexterous handling of the gritted earth:
Lay down these words

Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:
Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall
riprap of things:
Cobble of milky way,
straying planets,

Crystal and sediment linked hot
all change, in thoughts,
as well as things.
(Snyder 1966: 29)
*
Basil Bunting: Briggflatts
In his long poem, Briggflatts, Basil Bunting constructs both a mythic
journey (geographical, cultural and historical) and a poetic topography
of places significant to the poet, from Northern England to Italy to
Alexanders empire and back to Northern England. The scope and
210 Where we are
scape of the poem are articulated in language suffused with the

rhythms, dialect words and sounds of Buntings Northumberland
homeland and the north-west Yorkshire of Brigflatts itself - a Quaker
community and meeting house that is now in the county of Cumbria
(note the different spelling to the poems title). Buntings reworkings
of passages from the Libro de Alexandre, a thirteenth century Spanish
account of the life of Alexander the Great (see Pursglove 2002)
provide one of many compass points in the poem. Although Brigg-
flatts can be seen as addressing similar issues to Romantic poetry, (for
instance, the rift between humankind and nature, the progressive
severance (Greaves 2005: 65) exacerbated by industrial, technologi-
cal and scientific revolutions), Bunting articulates these issues in a
less subjectivist tone than that used by the Romantics and attempts a
rebinding of what has been torn apart. The modernist formal devices
of the poem, linking him more to Pound and Eliot than to Words-
worth, are used to give voice to seasonal change, to relationships
between mind and matter and to the intricate interweavings of human
culture and nature.
The well-known second stanza of Briggflatts is worth quoting again,

as it encapsulates many of the themes of the whole text and gives us
the sound of the music, as crafted as a dry-stone wall:
A mason times his mallet

to a larks twitter,
listening while the marble rests,
lays his rule
at a letters edge,
till the stone spells a name
naming none,
a man abolished.
(Bunting 1968: 51)
As with Ted Hughes, and more indirectly Kenneth White, Gary

Snyder and Fred Wah, this is a Romanticism reformulated in the light
of a profound change of consciousness, an ecological awareness of
relationship, connectivity, process and interdependence. Nature is both
less domesticated and aestheticised, and not seen as a lost paradise
that may yet be regained. Humanity is seen as a participant in nature,
sharing in its evolution, its pleasures and its pains. The remorseless
indifference of natural forces is acknowledged alongside the brief joys
Where we are 211
of existing the lines that precede the coda at the end of Briggflatts,
have a Beckett-like quality of resignation: Starlight quivers. I had
day enough. / For love uninterrupted night. (ibid: 70) While earlier
Romanticism sings of the lark ascending, Bunting describes the
Painful lark, labouring to rise! (ibid: 51) He attempts to give voice
to specific locations as dwelling places and habitats of many organ-
isms, human and non-human, and as sites of complex histories,
evolutions and cosmologies. Greaves (2005: 69) points to the revised
Romanticism that underlies Buntings poetic project:
This is a delicate anthropomorphism in which culture and nature, the visual

and the auditory, tenor and vehicle, weave in and out defining each other,
closely intertwined to form an exquisite web through which past guilt
(whats done) is at last healed, thereby integrating humankind into the
complex set of relationships between it and the environment, the mind and
the world.
Cycles of seasons, birth and death, comings and goings of organisms,

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

Of course alongside place as home and emplacement as settlement or
being at home, there is also displacement, a state (temporary or
permanent) of being homeless or seeking a home or wanting to return
to a home. Wahs idea of writing as movement is the process that
bridges his sense of home and his sense of being part of a displaced
diaspora of immigrants in his case Chinese Canadians, but the
diaspora includes all those marginalised peoples who are not part of
the European descendency that forms the socio-politico-cultural
hegemony in Canada. The diaspora also includes, paradoxically
perhaps, the indigenous peoples of Canada who are marginalised and
displaced (culturally and, in some cases, geographically) within their
own land. Wah identifies with all of these peoples, for whom home
is a complex notion, about which they have ambivalent feelings and
thoughts. In the field of writing, especially poetry, Wah argues that
this sense of displacement, and the hybridised identity that goes
with it, generates a syntax of disruption and discontinuity evident in
Wahs own writing and that of other Canadian minorities.
As an example, Wah gives the following extract from Jeannette

Armstrongs poem, Blood of My People - Armstrong is an Okanagan
Salish woman writing in English rather than her native language:
forward a red liquid stream that draws

ground upward that shakes earth and dust to move
to move a long line before settling
quietly back into soil
(in Wah 2000: 56)
According to Wah,
the gaps that punctuate her poem reflect the nomadic cut and refuse to settle
into Englishs placement of expected syntax and, more basically and politi-
cally, into both the imaginary [Canadian?] nation and its ideological assault
on the land.
(ibid)
If identity and the self are, at least partially, emplaced in language, as

well as in the environment, then we ought not to be surprised if
displacement from one leads to displacement from and within the
Where we are 213
other. Landscape, mindscape and wordscape are interdependent

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

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

her presence in the landscape, she is an active participant rather than a
neutral observer cut off from her surroundings by the camera, lens and
eyepiece. Although highly-skilled and experienced as a photographer
Derges is working in collaboration with the indeterminate processes of
water flow, atmosphere and light - a dialogue that is both intimate and
surprising. Derges:
Whats interesting is that working without a camera in this way is a very

primitive kind of photography using just the interaction of the light, the
transparency or opacity of the water and the light-sensitive paper By
working at night, the whole landscape can become a darkroomI wanted to
immerse myself in the environment. (in Lowenstein 2000: 79)
Derges water studies are closely in tune with Goethes methods and
Ruskins ideas about working in and with the landscape to understand
Where we are 215
and attend to what is actually present, what is going on in the place,

trying to absorb the phenomenological, intuitive and imaginative data
in as accurate and lucid a manner as possible. There is also a connec-
tion to Alice Oswalds study of the Dart. Whereas Oswald gives voice
to the whole length of the river, its dynamics, physiology and culture,
Derges focuses on very specific episodes in the river and visualises
these in the chemistry of light moving through water on to light
sensitive paper. Although both demonstrate a participatory engage-
ment with their subject, Oswald and Derges aim to reveal the qualities
of each river in as unadorned and concise a manner as possible. Their
position is not that of Romantic poets like Wordsworth, Shelley or
Keats, filtering views of the landscape through lenses of highly-
coloured subjectivity, telling us as much, or more, about their own
moods, emotions, aspirations and values as they tell us about nature.
Derges and Oswald see themselves as representatives of a place,
agents of perception, consciousness and representation working in
collaboration with ambient conditions to articulate the genius loci of
both rivers. While their values, ideas and feelings are manifested in
the decisions they make, the material they select, the particular sites
they study and the materials they employ, these are all exercised with
great self-restraint, allowing the rivers to speak and picture the
distinctive presences of Dart and Taw - rather than drawing attention
to the distinctive presences of Oswald and Derges. And in the act of
speaking and picturing the rivers, expanding human consciousness to
embrace the non-human world, poet and artist learn something about
their own being-in-the-world.
I was aware of the dissolving of boundaries between myself and the water.
It felt as if through working with the water I was learning a lot about my
own internal energy states. Certainly working with a direct method like that
gave me a much more tangible understanding of what was happening all
around me. It was also teaching me quite a lot about myself. (in Kumar
2004: 22)
In the act of stepping aside, not imposing herself and her views,
assumptions or emotions on the river as subject, Derges found what
many practitioners of disciplined attention have found, which is that
the processes of being and becoming are revealed with great clarity
and detail. The practice of zazen and other forms of mindfulness
meditation, and the practices of many scientists, artists and others who
216 Where we are
attend to phenomena without comment or interference, enable

practitioners to observe dispassionately the ways in which the undif-
ferentiated flux of consciousness becomes the linguistic, conceptualis-
ing self, and how this process can lead to a sense of separation arising
between the individual and the world. Through the practice of art and
poetry, Derges and Oswald dissolve this sense of separation and
present us with the flux of consciousness realised in photographic
images and poetic texts.
*
A metaphysics of emplacement
In recent years a spate of neologisms have been coined that speak of
an emergent metaphysics of emplacement, a renewed sense of
belonging to the earth, or an awareness that we need to reconstruct
our ties with the place in which we live. The terms, ethnopoetics
(Tedlock & Rothenberg), bio-regionalism (Snyder and others) and
geopoetics (Kenneth White), and the ideas that surround them,
revision our being in the world as embodied minds interpenetrating
with other embodied minds and beings in a multi-dimensional
geophysical space. This ever-changing space - call it Gaia (Lovelock
& Marguelis), earth-house-hold (Snyder), geosphere-biosphere-
noosphere (Teilhard de Chardin) or global village - is composed of
many interdependent layers and domains, each one in an active
mutually-responsive relationship with all the others. These layers and
domains are alive with an astonishing variety of organisms that inhabit
more or less every nook and cranny of the planet, however inhospita-
ble some places may seem (from underwater volcanic vents to
Antarctic ice hundreds of metres thick). These organisms (microbes,
bacteria, fungi, animals, plants, humans, et al) constitute a sentient,
information-processing dimension of multiple consciousnesses and
intelligences an interweaving of cultures, of which human culture is
only one example.
Each culture encapsulates and articulates a particular way of looking

at, knowing about and being in the world. As human beings we can
perceive, conceive and handle the world from many perspectives, each
one focusing on a different quality or characteristic, and each one
providing a distinctive set of models, descriptions and value systems.
For instance: we can focus on the material stuff of the world the
Where we are 217
chemistry of solids, gases and liquids; we can examine the proc-

esses and energies at work throughout the environment the physics,
ecology and meteorology of the planet; we can attend to the temporal
sequencing of events the histories and evolutionary cycles of
everything. We can also focus on the diverse cultural patterns that
distinguish each form of life in relationship to other forms, processes,
geologies and locations. In observing these cultural patterns we
become aware of the endlessly varied ways in which organisms
interact with each other, the ways in which they inhabit, handle,
consume and transform their environment, and the ways in which they
encode their experiences of being in a territory, however large or
small the organism or the territory might be. Art and poetry, alongside
the sciences and other disciplines, offer insights into, and enactments
of, these different perspectives.
*
Kenneth White & geopoetics
The Scottish poet, Kenneth White, has been instrumental in develop-
ing geopoetics, an example of a perspective on poetry and the
environment that crosses disciplinary boundaries in order to achieve a
more holistic synthesis of knowledge. White develops his geopoetics
out of a study of two emblematic figures: the German philosopher,
Friedrich Nietzsche, and the French poet, Arthur Rimbaud. Both men
were what White (2004: 234) calls intellectual nomads they were
travellers in both the territories of ideas and geography. They both
attempted to make sense of their place in the world in relation to the
topography of landscapes and mind. White quotes Nietzsche, looking
back on his travels: I decided to go away into foreign parts, meet
what was strange to me. [] Following a long vagabondage, full of
research and transformation, with no easy definition. [] You feel
space growing all around you, the horizon opens. (ibid: 235)
While Nietzsche wanders in a relatively small European territory

(Germany, Switzerland, France, Italy), Rimbaud strikes out further
afield (France, Switzerland, Italy, England, Indonesia, Ethiopea). In
one of his poems, he writes, If I have a taste left for anything at all,
its for the earth and stones. (ibid) White expands the field of
geopoetics to include both other poets and writers like Whitman,
Novalis, Thoreau, Rilke, Ezra Pound and Hugh MacDairmid, and
218 Where we are
thinkers like Heidegger, Einstein and the French linguist Gustave

Guillaume. The ideas and images of these figures (with the addition of
non-Western poets like Han-shan and Basho) are interwoven by White
into a matrix or map that offers a framework within which we can
think about a world-culture. The work of the geopoetician is to
integrate aspects of many cultures into a new coherence. (ibid: 247)
He doesnt mean by this a kind of universal uniformity, but rather a
dappled, varied, many-stranded fabric that reflects the morphologies
of many regions, climates, altitudes and social organisations. The
sense of unity prevalent and operative in geopoetics is that of an
archipelago, full of islands of many shapes and sizes. (ibid) For
White, the intellectual nomad is one who steps outside his immedi-
ate cultural and geographical context in order to map a bigger space
and to make sense of the many histories, voices and ways of being of
humankind.
*
Cold Mountain and rock & bark poetry
The writing of poetry about and within the natural world has a long
history in China and Japan. Andrew Schelling identifies a particular
strand of the Chinese poetic tradition that is called shih-shu, rock and
bark poetry:
Rather than being brushed on silk or paper, shih-shu were written on scraps
of bamboo, scratched into bark, on rocks, or pecked into cliff faces.
(in Pine & OConnor 1998: 3)
Han-shan, or Kanzan in Japanese, who lived in the Tang dynasty

(c.7th-8th centuries A.D.) was an early exponent of this form of sited
poetry - poetry about nature, written with natural materials and placed
in a natural location. In Han-shans case, his name translates as Cold
Mountain and also refers to the place in southern China with which
he is associated. As Snyder (2000: 521) notes:
[Han-shan] is a mountain madman in an old Chinese line of ragged hermits.

When he talks about Cold Mountain he means himself, his home, his state
of mind [] His poems, of which three hundred survive, are written in
Tang colloquial: rough and fresh. The ideas are Taoist, Buddhist, Zen.
Where we are 219
In the preface to the traditional collection of Han-shans poetry,

assembled by Lu Chiu-yin, the Governor of Tai prefecture, Chiu-
yin begins to construct, or add to, the myths surrounding the poet.
Han-shan is described as a kind of wild and holy fool, who lived as a
tramp in the mountains near the Buddhist centre of Tien-tai. In later
paintings and poems Han-shan is usually represented as being
accompanied by Shih-te, (Jittoku, in Japanese) who, according to
Chiu-yin, ran the dining hall at a nearby temple. The two characters,
are a Tang dynasty double-act: Han-shan, the comic; with Shih-te, as
his foil or straight-man. The former is usually depicted with a scroll,
the latter with a broom. Chiu-yin has to enlist the help of local monks
in gathering information about Han-shan and Shih-te:
to find out how they had lived, to hunt up the poems written on bamboo,
wood, stones, and cliffs and also to collect those written on the walls of
peoples houses. There were more than three hundred. (ibid: 523)
Han-shans poems are full of obvious and subtle metaphors, telling

associations and diverse references to Buddhist and Taoist ideas and
beliefs. They are also saturated in vivid images and concise descrip-
tions of natural forces, events and beings. The passage of time and the
transitory quality of human experience are continual themes: Slowly
consumed, like fire down a candle; / Forever flowing, like a passing
river. (ibid: 525) Han-shan has lived in the world of human affairs,
studied history and literature, but without solving any of the riddles of
existence or finding equilibrium. Only by disciplined attention and
seeing into the undifferentiated nature of things has he been able to
find peace and joy often referred to as immortality in the Taoist
tradition. In one of the poems he tells how, as a young man, he
travelled widely and,
Entered cities of boiling red dust.

Tried drugs, but couldnt make Immortal;
Read books and wrote poems on history.
Today Im back at Cold Mountain:
Ill sleep by the creek and purify my ears.
(ibid)
Only by letting-go of his cravings and attachments (both to gaining

worldly goods and success, and to finding wisdom) does he open up
another state of mind, another dimension of consciousness. And this
220 Where we are
new state, to an observer, looks like foolishness, or seems too ordinary

to be worthy of respect. A critic says to him: Your poems lack the
Basic Truth of Tao. But Han-shan knows different. He realises that
the old-timers / Who were poor and didnt care, were much wiser
than the Taoist scholar-critic, who misses the point entirely, / Men
like that / Ought to stick to making money. (ibid: 526) While
acknowledging the tendency towards a rather sentimental aestheticisa-
tion of poverty and old-age, which as previously mentioned is a
common conceit of Chinese poetry, we have to recognise the impor-
tant messages that the metaphors carry about self-knowledge, the
untying of bonds of desire and attachment, and about the inter-
dependence of all things.
The picture that Han-shan constructs of himself and his environment

is intrinsically ecological. He is one strand of being amongst many, a
facet of the collective existence or mind. In describing the landscape
about him he is also describing the topography of his own conscious-
ness, as we can see in this poem:
Cold Mountain is a house

Without beams or walls.
The six doors left and right are open
The hall is blue sky.
The rooms all vacant and vague
The east wall beats on the west wall
At the centre nothing.
(ibid: 525)
*
Ian Hamilton Finlays stone poems
The Scottish word-sculptor, Ian Hamilton Finlay, can be considered as
a contemporary exponent of shih-shu, rock and bark poetry. Coming
to prominence with the concrete poetry movement in the 1960s
Finlay has devoted his career to the placing of words and short texts in
the landscape. His garden at Stoneypath in southern Scotland, has
been transformed into a sculptural habitat for his epigrammatical
poems, mostly carved in stone (though some are cast in bronze).
Finlay is interested in the ways in which cultures assimilate nature and
in the ideologies at play when places are mythologized and poeticised.
His tone is usually ironic, critical and laconic. In one part of his
garden, near the edge of a pool, is a small rough-sided stone cube into
Where we are 221
which is carved, on the smooth upper surface, Albrecht Durers

distinctive monogram. The stone sits on a patch of grass and meadow
flowers. Finlay gives it the title, Das Grosse Rasenstuck (The Great
Piece of Turf ) after Durers famous watercolour. On one level Finlay
pays homage to the iconic painting, on another level, we find our-
selves smiling at the joke. Durers painted celebration of a mundane
patch of vegetation is here both quoted and actualised as a real patch
of vegetation, but within a cultivated and artistically composed
environment.
The references throughout the garden, especially to the neo-classical

landscape paintings of Poussin and Lorraine and to the related
traditions of European garden design, emphasise the domestication of
landscape, the narrative structures that, at times, suffocate and obscure
any sense of natural process and presence. In his Unconnected
Sentences on Gardening, (in Beardsley 1998: 205) Finlay refers to
Poussin and Salvatore as Cops and Robbers, for they and other
makers of culture could be accused of having stolen the landscape of
agriculture and the agrarian working classes, and the landscape of
commons and topographical diversity, and replaced them with a
designed space that reflects the taste and power of the aristocracy, the
landed gentry. In his work Finlay rarely presents an obvious
position or straight-forward opinion. There is usually an ambivalence
and ambiguity that provokes contrasting responses and interpretations.
The landscape, any landscape, is a complex site of innumerable
cultures and histories, human and non-human (though Finlay focuses
almost entirely on the human). It is also a site of contested values and
experiences. The hunter-gatherer, the farmer, the city-dweller, the
industrialist and the miner, all have a different sense of what the
landscape is and what it means. The landscape of recreation is a
different place to the landscape of work or real estate development or
military planning, even though it may be the same physical space.
When we see the ominous shape of a conning tower of a nuclear

submarine, carved in slate, silhouetted against the waters edge by
Lochan Eck, our experience of the open sheep-grazed moorland is
unsettled. Finlays sculpture, Nuclear Sail, shifts our attention to a
radically different set of thoughts, feelings and images. The sense of
militarism and conflict trespasses on our walk through the tranquil
222 Where we are
country. Battles, power struggles and violence come to mind, maybe

reminding us that the struggle for existence goes on at all levels within
nature, a counter-balance to the cooperation and mutuality that binds
organisms and beings together.
The tenor of Finlays thought comes through in these other extracts

from his Unconnected Sentences on Gardening (ibid):
A garden is not an object but a process.

Flowers in a garden are an acceptable eccentricity.
[]
Superior gardens are composed of Glooms and Solitudes and not of plants
and trees.
[]
Embark on a garden with a vision but never with a plan.
Finlay, like Han-shan and other shih-shu poets, experiences, repre-

sents and celebrates the landscape as a place where ideas, thoughts
and moods are indwelling. He shares with the Zen-minded designer of
the rock and raked-gravel garden of Ryoanji a belief in the cultivated
landscape as a site for instruction, learning and metaphysical enquiry.
He displays a more overtly interrogative stance to the concept of
landscape than his predecessors - questioning its status as social,
political, cultural object, the garden as art rather than nature as
wilderness - but his poetic handling of words and objects has the same
economy as his Chinese and Japanese forbears and a similar ethics of
respect links his questioning ambiguousness to their religious clarity.
In both cases the processes of nature, refracted through the prism of
art and culture, provide a limitless store of narratives, meanings and
teachings, when subjected to intelligent and open-minded contempla-
tion.
*
Nature as represented and conceptualised in Chinese and Japa-
nese painting and poetry: Taoist & Buddhist perspectives
The term Tao (referred to in some more recent translations as Dao)
is found in the earliest literature of China. It is very ancient and
underpins both Confucian and Taoist philosophy and practices.
Despite its importance and ubiquity it is very difficult to define, or at
least it has many subtle definitions, or perhaps, even better, it has no
Where we are 223
definitions. Many writers note that the Tao is invisible and name-
less. (Sze 1967: 15) It can be shown or pointed to, but it cannot be
verbally defined or conceptually grasped. The Tao is also the source,
the origin, the mother of all things (Sze 1967: 16). All things emerge
or arise from the Tao, and return to the Tao. The Tao is the formless,
indefinable, undifferentiated, matrix or potentiality out of which forms
arise (yin & yang - see below), temporarily exist and dissolve back
into. This dynamic, restless process is similar to the way we perceive
forms, colours, objects set against the ground or field of vision as in
the figure-ground relationship in Gestalt theory.
Western commentators have sometimes tried to identify the Tao with

God, perhaps taking up Spinozas identification of God with Nature.
However, as Watts points out, whereas God produces the world by
making (wei), the Tao produces it by not-making (wu-wei). (Watts
1989: 16) The process by which thoughts, ideas, things, forms and
objects emerge from the Tao is more like a process of growth than a
process of designing and making - a spontaneous arising into a state of
becoming out of the ground of being. Taoism often seems perverse to
the Western mind because it seems to value nothing as much as
something, the unknown as much as the known, letting go as much as
holding on! Because the Tao operates on its own terms and in its own
way it is wise not to interfere and not to try to grasp what cannot be
grasped. For trying to grasp or hang on to the flux of experience, or
trying to perpetuate moments of pleasure, beauty, love or success - or
moments of pain, ugliness, hate or failure - leads to frustration,
dissatisfaction and suffering. From the Taoist perspective natural
processes, the processes of life and living, are in constant flux and
cannot be halted or prolonged beyond their autonomous, self-
organising duration.
These ideas and realisations align very closely with Buddhist insights
and practices. Indeed the early history of Chan (Zen) Buddhism in
China is a history of dialogue and rapprochement between Indian
Buddhism and Taoism. Taoist ideas can be expressed in Buddhist
terms as the Four Noble Truths (diagnosing human dis-ease and its
cure). In Sanskrit, the ancient Indian language of Buddhism, these
are:
224 Where we are
1. dukkha - often translated as suffering but also meaning dissatis-

faction, a sense of incompleteness, anxiety, angst and a feeling that
things are never quite right or harmonious;
2. trishna desiring, clinging or grasping, the cause of dukkha -

which is the result of our ignorance (avidya) about the nature of life as
a process of constant change, impermanence, flux (anitya) - this
applies equally to our own identity and self-hood, which in Buddhist
terms is not an enduring, fixed, entity but a process of moment-by-
moment becoming (anatman absence of an enduring self, as
opposed to the Hindu notion of the atman the enduring transcendent
self and jivatman, the individual soul, or essential self);
3. Buddha said that dukkha and trishna can be overcome, that as a

consequence or our own efforts we can come to enlightenment by
seeing things as they really are, understanding that all things and
ourselves are impermanent, realising that clinging leads to frustration,
while letting-go leads to liberation (moksha, nirvana, or satori in Zen
terms);
4. the fourth Noble Truth is The Eightfold Path - the route to

enlightenment and understanding advocated by the Buddha, a method
or teaching (dharma) by which we can find a way out of, or through,
the vicious circle of desiring, clinging, losing, being dissatisfied,
desiring again, and so on.
According to Brian Brown:
early Buddhism identified existence as a thoroughly contextual process: no

person or thing is an independent, self-subsisting reality From its origin,
then, the Buddhist tradition reflects a conceptual framework rooted in the
central intuition of an ecological perspective where nothing exists in
autonomous isolation.
(in Tucker & Grim 1994: 126)
All phenomena, including animals, plants, geological processes,

clouds, and humans, are mutually interdependent. (see Part 4) This
emphasis on mutuality, reciprocity, on relationship and process is
central to the idea of sunyata - a term that is usually translated as
emptiness, meaning empty of separate existence, not empty or void
Where we are 225
of any existence whatsoever! To consider anything as separate from

anything else is to hold a view that contradicts this reality of interpen-
etration and mutual interdependence, and is to be in a state of igno-
rance (avidya). Buddhism anticipates contemporary ecological
thinking, especially the deep ecology of Arne Naess, and ideas put
forward by Capra and others about the interconnectedness of all life
the web of life.
For most Buddhists liberation is a day-to-day, moment-by-moment

process of getting to know our monkey mind through careful
observation in meditation (zazen) - letting-go of habits, obsessions and
all manner of clinging behaviours as they arise, and moving on to the
next tangle in the thread of our lives. As far as possible this process
involves non-intervention, letting things be, not adding fuel to the fire
- practicing wu-wei as Taoists advocate. When actions, thoughts,
feelings happen, they should happen cleanly, leaving no residue or
trail, no stain - for there is no enduring self to be stained, only an
illusion of permanence built up from the sediment of earlier actions,
thoughts and feelings which we foolishly try to preserve (good
thoughts and feelings because we like them, they make us feel good,
and bad ones because we want to change them into good ones!) Our
endlessly chattering mind, in constant dialogue and argument with
itself, is in many ways the main constituent of what we call our self
- we come to think and feel that this is what we are - despite the fact
that in those moments when the chattering stops or dies down, rather
than ceasing to exist we often feel more alive, alert and in harmony
with the world!
Within the arts of Chinese Chan and Japanese Zen traditions,

emphasis is placed on disciplined spontaneity, on recognising the
impermanence of things and celebrating the processes of life, experi-
ence, change and becoming. Paintings, tea-ceremonies, gardens,
calligraphy and poetry provide both a path to understanding or release
(satori), a means of celebration, and a way of illuminating a path for
others showing or pointing the way by example. Up until the end of
the 19th Century Chinese landscape painting, poetry and other arts
were produced by monks and scholars, many of whom also had
positions in local government or worked for the Emperor. Hence
travel, moving from place to place, is a common theme as highly
226 Where we are
educated poets and artists were moved from region to region across
the vast country. A sense of loss, transitoriness, evanescence comes
through in a great number of works.
Landscape paintings, often inscribed with calligraphic poems,

represent carefully observed natural features transformed into highly
conventionalised signs and compositions - which many masters
subvert or use to their own individual ends. Garden makers, who may
also be painters and poets, create microcosmic analogues for the
natural landscape, the most famous of which is probably the stone and
raked-gravel garden at Ryoanji temple in Kyoto, Japan. In all the arts,
practitioners maintain a dialogue through practice with the histories
and traditions of their discipline. Poems may be re-workings of earlier
poems, or be based on, or written on, earlier paintings. Painters will
work in the style of earlier artists, or transpose earlier themes or
scenes into contemporary idioms. Notions of individual artistic
identity are very different to post-Renaissance Western models.
For many centuries Japanese artists modelled themselves on Chinese

masters. It was not until Sesshu came along that Japanese landscape
painting asserted its own distinctive qualities. After a visit to China in
1467 he recounted how his trip brought home to me the greatness of
my own [Japanese] teachers Shubun and Josetsu. He learnt most
from nature and the customs of the Chinese people His acceptance
of direct experience marked the true foundation of landscape painting
in Japan. (Matsushita 1974: 71-77)
Absorption in the landscape, becoming one with all that exists, are
aspirations and goals that typify these Chinese and Japanese traditions.
Human beings, animals and birds are integrated into the natural
environment, often as small forms within the large space of the
painting. Often we may have to look closely to find the peasant in a
field, the fisherman in a boat, or the scholar sitting in his bamboo hut.
Events seem not to be directed by the human figures, who are only a
small part of the larger story of the picture - humans are depicted as
participants in nature, rather than dominant powers or central charac-
ters.
Where we are 227
*
Metaphors, Allusions, Yin & Yang
Metaphors, symbols, allusions and associations are nearly always
threaded into artworks in ways that may be not be at all obvious to a
Western viewer or reader. In ancient China the dark and light sides of
a valley were referred to as yin and yang. These terms were taken up
into the Taoist tradition and were used to signify the two main
dynamic forces that arise from the formless Tao. Yin represents: dark,
female, passive, night, supple. Yang represents: light, male, dynamic,
day, strong. However yin and yang are not separate entities, they are
interdependent - reciprocal forces that maintain the dynamic balance
of the world. In the traditional symbol for yin and yang notice how
they embrace each other, how they each include a hole or eye through
which the other can be seen, and how together they form the circle of
the Tao.
In Chinese landscape paintings, trees (swaying, dynamic) may

represent yang, while a mountain (passive) represents yin. The
interaction of dark and light tonality across the picture plane parallels
the interaction of yin and yang. The empty space of the painting is
the formless undifferentiated Tao out of which forms (both yin and
yang) arise. At another level a fisherman sitting in a boat may also
represent the activity of silent meditation fishing for understand-
ing and enlightenment in the depths of the mind/Tao. Mists often
represent the Tao out of which mountains and rivers emerge. Underly-
ing everything in the landscape are the natural forces of changing
seasons, cycles of growth and decay, motions of wind, cloud and
water. The space of the painting may also be a metaphor for the mind.
Birds flying across a space may allude to thoughts arising in the mind,
or even monks searching for truth!
*
228 Where we are
Wabi, Sabi, Aware & Yugen

Traditional Japanese aesthetics (especially within Zen poetry &
painting) makes use of four concepts (wabi, sabi, aware, yugen) that
many writers have struggled to translate into English - but which are
important to an understanding of how landscape is represented and
attended to in Japanese culture.
Suzuki (1973: 22-23) describes wabi as meaning, poverty or not to

be in the fashionable society of the time:
To be poor not to be dependent on things worldly to be satisfied with a

little hut a dish of vegetables picked in the neighbouring fields, and per-
haps to be listening to the pattering of a gentle spring rainfall.
However we need to keep in mind that painters and poets of the Zen
schools were usually reasonably well-off scholars, or they were monks
who were supported by their institutions and the charity of local
people. The poverty alluded to is a poverty of the mind rather than
the at times grinding poverty of peasants or later working-classes!
Wabi is a state of being quietly content with the mystical contempla-

tion of Nature and to feel at home with the world. Suzuki adds, we
all seem to have an innate longing for primitive simplicity, close to the
natural state of living.(ibid)
Watts refers to wabi as catching a glimpse of something rather

ordinary and unpretentious in its incredible suchness(tathata). As
examples of this mood or quality he gives Blyths translations of two
haiku (unascribed):
A brushwood gate,
And for a lock -
This snail.
Winter desolation;
In the rain-water tub,
Sparrows are walking. (in Watts 1989: 186)
In many examples of Japanese (and Chinese) traditional landscape

painting economy of brushwork, a kind of poverty of means, is
combined with asymmetry, a balanced imbalance, to produce a beauty
Where we are 229
of imperfection that seems to arise from apparent simplicity and

effortlessness in execution. According to Suzuki (1973: 24-25) when
beauty of imperfection is accompanied by antiquity or primitive
uncouthness, we have a glimpse of sabi - a quality that is much
prized by Japanese connoisseurs. He defines sabi as literally
meaning loneliness or solitude. As an example he quotes the
teamaster, Fujiwara Sadaiye:
As I come out
To this fishing village,
Late in the autumn day,
No flowers in bloom I see,
Nor any tinted maple leaves. (ibid)
Watts (1989: 186) describes sabi as being, loneliness in the sense of

Buddhist detachment, of seeing all things as happening by them-
selves in miraculous spontaneity.
On a withered branch
A crow is perched,
In the autumn evening.
With the evening breeze,

The water laps against
The herons legs.
Sleet falling;
Fathomless, infinite
Loneliness. (ibid:185-186)
[Blyths translation echoing an old Chinese poem about snow falling on
snow]
According to Watts (ibid: 181): When the moment evokes a more

intense, nostalgic sadness, connected with autumn and the vanishing
away of the world, it is called aware. For example:
The evening haze;

Thinking of past things,
How far-off they are!
(ibid: 187)
230 Where we are
Watts adds: and when the vision is the sudden perception of some-
thing mysterious and strange, hinting at an unknown never to be
discovered, the mood is called yugen. (ibid: 181-182)
The sea darkens;

The voices of the wild ducks
Are faintly white.
(ibid)
Note that in all these examples human experiences are represented in

relation to nature, to a landscape within which human beings move
and which forms the main object of contemplation or reflection. The
idea of naturalness, as a state of acting in accordance with nature, is
affirmed as a quality to be attained and demonstrated in poetry or
painting. Note also the links with Romantic sensibility in the Euro-
pean tradition, especially ideas of the sublime put forward by Burke
and Kant, and the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich. It is no
coincidence that R.H. Blyth, the translator of the haiku quoted above,
wrote a book entitled, Zen in English Literature and Oriental Classics,
in which he traces many connections between Zen sensibility and
English poetry, particularly the Romantics.
*
The Goethean method of observing and reading the landscape
Interesting similarities and differences can be traced between the ways
in which Taoist hermits and classical Chinese and Japanese artist-
poets engage with landscape and Goethes ideas about observing the
natural world. Both emphasise the importance of attention to what is
present, a patient and rigorous phenomenological method, while also
advocating the use of imagination and intuition in opening up the
meanings that arise when we attune ourselves to a particular location
or aspect of nature.
The Goethean method comprises four stages. First, using perception

to see the form, second, using imagination to perceive its mutability,
and third, inviting inspiration to reveal the gesture. The fourth stage
uses intuition both to combine and to go beyond the previous stages.
(Brook 1998: 56) Goethean science aims at a participatory identifica-
tion with the objects of enquiry, which are not seen as remote and
autonomous but rather as close and woven into the sensory field of the
Where we are 231
scientist. The approach is holistic and deeply ecological. The natural

scientist could be said to be an agent of consciousness in, and of, the
world realising the forms of nature in forms of human thought. This
empathic method is accompanied by an ethical dimension, a sense in
which the Goethean scientist is empowered to act on behalf of the
natural forms. Conservation, guardianship, care and advocacy are
integral to the scientific project, not an optional ethics that may or
may not be attached to a science considered as objective empiricism.
Science in Goethes view is value-laden rather than neutral, giving
voice to natural forms and beings. As Brook (ibid: 57) puts it: Being
one with the object allows an appreciation of the content or meaning
of the form as well as the form itself. The Goethean method is as
much about the development of sensual and emotional awareness to
experience phenomena as fully as possible, developing a sense of
wonder to the world, as it is about the gathering of information and
the construction of theory. (ibid: 52)
This approach to science has obvious parallels with artistic disciplines

like drawing (for instance as conceived by Ruskin and as practiced by
artists from Palaeolithic times to contemporary exponents like Susan
Rothenberg or Joseph Beuys) or poetry (for example, in the work of
Clare, Wordsworth, Ted Hughes, Snyder, Heaney and the poetries of
many indigenous tribal peoples). In each discipline heightened
awareness and attunement to the topographical and ontological
structures of nature are combined with an intention to picture or sing
the world of natural phenomena. Drawing and poetry become methods
of phenomenological enquiry and modes of consciousness, as well as
modes of showing and singing.
In his poem, What You Should Know To Be A Poet, Gary Snyder

advises aspirant poets to learn:
all you can about animals as persons.

the names of trees and flowers and weeds.
names of stars, and the movements of the planets
and the moon.
your own six senses, with a watchful and elegant mind.

(Snyder 1970: 50)
232 Where we are
*
John Wolseley
The above poetic prospectus outlined by Snyder could be applied to
the work of John Wolseley, an English artist resident in Australia
since 1976. Wolseleys paintings and drawings bring together themes
of journeying, visual and spatial enquiry, botanical and topographical
analysis, and a sensory recording of being-in-a-place. These themes
connect to Snyders poetic practices, to Goethes scientific methods
and to the ideas of John Ruskin described below.
Wolseley grounds his practice, quite literally, in the Australian bush.

As an artist educated within the British/European context he has had
to find ways of engaging with a landscape that was not only strikingly
different to that of northern Europe but also culturally framed in very
different ways. The tensions and contradictions between the traditions
of white European immigrants and the indigenous peoples of the vast
Australian landmass were played out in the slow development of a
Western mode of representation that could do justice to the distinc-
tive non-European terrain. Through the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries painters tried to apply the conventions and ideas being
developed in Paris, London and New York. By the nineteen-fifties
artists like Sidney Nolan and Arthur Boyd had developed styles that
combined European modernist (expressionist) modes of representation
with narratives and themes drawn from the history of exploration and
settlement that were also the focus of novels like Voss by Patrick
Wright (published in 1957). However it was only with the work of
artists such as Fred Williams in the sixties and seventies, and Wolse-
ley in the eighties and nineties, that a revisioning of the Australian
landscape was fully established. While Williams developed a gestural,
calligraphic mode of painterly abstraction related to American artists
like Motherwell and De Kooning and also to late Monet and to
Bonnard drawings, Wolseley adopted and revised a mode of topog-
raphical representation that extends back to eighteenth century English
water-colourists and botanical artists, and to Ruskins practices in the
nineteenth century.
While the European tradition tends to be about standing back and

viewing landscape from a distance, Wolseley and Williams picture the
experience of being in or passing through a particular terrain. In
Where we are 233
Wolseleys case this involves a mode of pictorial construction that

combines many different viewpoints, including close-ups, birds-eye
images and geological and botanical details, brought together into
sensory maps of particular localities or inter-connected geographies.
Like Williams he makes most of his work on site, often in terrain that
is remote and inhospitable. Working with watercolour, graphite and
other media on paper, many works are large (eg. 1.5 x 2.0 metres)
made up of smaller units produced at campsites on extended journeys.
The interweaving of multi-perspectival drawings, suggestive of
changing spatial orientation, bodily movement and shifting ideas
about scale, perception and representation, bring to mind Snyders
poems of working in the landscape and Charles Watertons writings
about his travels. No fixed position is taken, geographically, perceptu-
ally or culturally.
Wolseley seems to be constantly trying to work out where he is, how

he is positioned in relation to the natural environment around him and
how to make sense of his own cultural hybridity as an Englishman,
in Australia, in a landscape suffused with the iconography, symbolism
and myths of indigenous peoples who have struggled to survive the
colonial encroachments of Western culture. In his charting of narra-
tives of journeying, sensory enquiry and ecological interconnected-
ness, Wolseleys work, though very different in method and style, has
a curious relationship with the work of contemporary aboriginal artists
like Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri. A similar process of mapping linked
to storytelling and visual representation links both artists, despite the
differences of personal background and culture. It is as if Wolseley
has taken the ideas and methods advocated and practiced by Ruskin
on his travels through Europe, and transposed them to this radically
different context. Yet the transposition works very effectively,
enabling Wolseley to engage with, analyse and picture his surround-
ings in a manner that is both visually arresting and meaningful.
Underlying Wolseleys practice is a profound recognition of the world

as process, both physically extensive and indeterminate in form and
unfolding structure. Wolseley (1999: 45) quotes F. David Peat,
describing the ideas of the physicist David Bohm:
The stable forms we see around us are not primary in themselves but only
the temporary unfolding of the underlying implicate order. To take rocks,
234 Where we are
trees, planets or stars as the primary reality would be like assuming that the
vortices in a river exist in their own right and are totally independent of the
flowing river itself.
As an artist Wolseley (2000: 3) analyses the world as both an indeter-

minate process and a physical presence. Painting is a manipulation of,
and a representation of, the materiality of the world:
concerned with the physical makeup of matter and a certain attachment to

the structure and texture of the surrounding world. Our ideas are actually
expressed within tactile stuff or matter the medium of paint.
However, he notes how, at the same time, he is trying to describe in

his work:
a kind of inter-weaving of very light, almost invisible, elusive and allu-

sive strands and traces. I think a quality of lightness, of the idea that land-
scape is made up of fields of energy, is the kind of thing drawing can do
rather well I feel that once we have learnt to see, feel, smell, and hear
these subtle geographies, then we can enter into the sumptuous weave of
structures which is the sand dune, a spinifex plain, or a forest. (ibid: 7)
As with Ruskin and Goethe, art and science are modes of empathic
engagement, involving an intensification of experience which is
analytical, integrative and celebratory. This form of enquiry is
characterised by participation and involvement rather than by separa-
tion and standing back in an attempt to be a neutral observer.
Wolseleys intention is both poetically ambitious and a prosaic

recognition of how things are. He tries to convey in his paintings:
The idea that our nervous system, our dreams and our visions are one with
the patterns and movements which connect a flower to the drifting of conti-
nents and the whirling of galaxies. Matter does not exist independently of
us. If we so allow, we can be the Earth thinking. (1999: 46)
Like Ruskin and Goethe before him, Wolseley is trying to enter into
the presence of a particular place, to experience both the substance of
stone and tree and the insubstantial flux of changing structures, events
and processes that constitute our being-in-the-world. This also means
engaging with histories of being, cultures of presence, inscribed in the
stories, myths, images and landforms around us what Wolesley
Where we are 235
calls, the primal morphology of a place, the fields of energy

immanent in a particular patch of ground. And these histories of being
are woven out of many strands: human, animal, plant, mineral
filaments of light and matter bound up in ever-changing pools of
consciousness.
*
Drawing nature: Ruskins disciplined attention
The visible world was to Ruskin a reflection of God, a sacred domain
manifest in the most mundane stone or leaf or cast of light on a house
front. In Ruskins thinking the relationship between ethics and
aesthetics is very close. Honesty regarding what is seen and the way
things are, is fundamental. Drawing should be an engagement with the
visible, with the sensory field, as uninflected as possible by personal-
ity or ego. Drawing was for Ruskin a discipline for unknowing, letting
go and accepting the grace of nature a kind of liberation from
assumptions and from habits of perception and thinking. Seeing is a
sacred act:
The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something,
and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who
can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is po-
etry, prophecy, and religion, - all in one. (Ruskin, in Hewison 1976: jacket
quote)
The task for Ruskin is to see the structural processes of nature as they
manifest themselves in natural forms like rocks, rivers, leaves and
mountains. This means the artist has to see through the labels and
ideas that he or she may have about the landscape, in order to see what
is actually there. At the end of Modern Painters I, Ruskin advises that
all artists should go to nature in all singleness of heart [] neglecting
nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing. (in Walton 1972:
53)
In 1842, while drawing a tree at Fontainebleu, Ruskin noticed how

when he attends more to the tree, to what his senses reveal of the
strange organic form before him, and attends less to his idea of what
the finished drawing should look like, the lines in the drawing
somehow compose themselves into forms that have the presence of
236 Where we are
the tree. (see Hewison 1976: 41) In a letter written about the same
time Ruskin advises a college friend who is learning to draw:
Now, when you sit down to sketch from nature you are not to compose a
scene from materials before you. Still less are you to count stones or
measure angles. You are to imbue your mind with the peculiar spirit of the
place. (in Walton 1972: 37)
This is remarkably similar to Goethes empathic method. There is also

an intriguing echo of the Taoist idea of wu-wei, doing by not-doing.
By attending fully to the Fontainebleu tree Ruskin recounts how the
drawing seemed to materialise of itself, unforced and unexpected.
Ruskin had a sophisticated awareness of how the senses operate as a

function of a mind. Walton notes (ibid: 98): in Ruskins work we feel
his concern to record not only the sensations of the eye, but their
reactions on the mind, sympathies, and emotions. And Ruskin
himself argued that by drawing, students actually obtained a power
of the eye and a power of the mind wholly different from that known
to any other discipline. (in Hewison 1976: 172) The unfolding of
sensations, of thinking through images, and of constructing represen-
tations through trial and error, are integral aspects of the process of
drawing. Drawing is both perceiving, imaging, thinking and represent-
ing. Seeing through the discipline of drawing was for Ruskin the
ordering of intelligence, a mode of metaphysical insight and philoso-
phical enquiry. (see Hewison 1976: 197)
A surprisingly large proportion of Ruskins drawings appear to be

unfinished, or at least they dont have the quality of finish, com-
pleteness or conclusion that most professional artists demonstrated in
the early nineteenth century. The process of drawing as thinking with
pencil on paper is always in evidence. We can see the way in which
Ruskins mind is working, how he tries to find visual analogues for
his perceptual handling of the world. Observation, in his case, is
participation. Ruskin is in the environment, in the mist, sun and rain,
sensing the light and touch of what is around him. He anticipates
Cezanne in his struggle to be true to his sensations, to record some-
thing of the complexity of sensing and representing the world. Many
of Ruskins drawings are of fragments of the visual field, fragments
which nevertheless convey, suggest or evoke the quality of the whole.
Where we are 237
Somehow fugitive traces of what is passing through Ruskins sensing

mind are inscribed on the pages of his notebooks and sketchpads, still
alive with the improvisatory movements of eyes, body, hand and
mind. The way in which lines tail off into white paper and then pick
up another aspect of the visible landscape elsewhere on the page,
suggests the endless unfinished business of perception, of being in a
place, as well as suggesting the tracery of connections between things.
Ruskins father despaired of his sons methods but he recognised that
there was something in the drawings: all true truth itself, but truth
in mosaic [] a mass of hieroglyphics. Ruskin described his practice
as a constant habit of making little patches and scratches of the
sections and fractions of things in a notebook. (in Walton 1972: 67)
These discontinuities of form and the practice of drawing as notation

are indicative of Ruskins awareness of the flux of nature, both in
relation to the changing light, season and form of the landscape
around him and to his changing perceptions of these conditions. In
Ruskins view the artist had a special role in drawing attention to the
dynamic processes and rhythms that infused all of nature from the
obvious patterns of growth and decay in plants and animals, to the less
obvious patterns of change in mountains. In 1854-55 he writes about
the need to move away from depicting natural forms as static features,
but rather to convey, not so much what these forms of the earth
actually are, as what they are constantly becoming. (ibid: 76)
A lifetime of notational practices in writing and drawing led Ruskin to

the realisation that the world is process. While he may have begun his
artistic life believing that an observer was somehow removed from the
object of observation, he certainly came to the view that we are all
active participants in the world. In this he anticipates more recent
thinking about ecology and interconnectedness, perceptual systems
and physics, an outlook exemplified by Bronowskis remarks:
The world is not a fixed, solid array of objects, out there, for it cannot be
fully separated from our perception of it. It shifts under our gaze, it interacts
with us (Bronowski 1977: 364)
*
238 Where we are
Where we are 239
*
Perception as Participation
The ideas of Goethe and Ruskin can form a bridge between the Taoist
approach to landscape and the phenomenological approach outlined
by David Abram in his exploration of the ways in which indigenous
peoples engage with their world. Early on in his book, The Spell of the
Sensuous, (1997) Abram outlines some key characteristics of the
phenomenological ideas of first Heidegger and then Merleau-Ponty.
He then makes use of Merleau-Pontys approach and vocabulary to
make connections between our own perceptual experience and the
experiences of indigenous peoples, particularly the shaman/magician
who is a key figure in hunter-gatherer cultures.
Acknowledging his debt to Levy-Bruhl (French anthropologist)

Abram writes: animals, particular places and persons and powers
may all be felt to participate in one anothers existence, influencing
each other and being influenced in turn. (1997: 57) This notion of
participation arises (in Merleau-Pontys view) from our basic percep-
tual experiences which are always participatory, involving, an active
interplay [] between the perceiving body and that which it per-
ceives. Prior to all our verbal reflections, at the level of our spontane-
ous, sensorial engagement with the world around us, we are all
animists. (ibid) He uses the term perception to mean: the concerted
activity of all the bodys senses as they function and flourish to-
gether. (ibid: 59)
He also makes use of Merleau-Pontys term, the flesh of the world,

by which he means the zone of contact between us, our bodies and the
world - the fusion between skin and air, eye and light, tongue and food
- our reciprocal relationship with the world:
We can experience things - can touch, hear, and taste things - only because,
as bodies, we are ourselves included in the sensible field, and have our own
textures, sounds, and tastesWe might as well say that we are organs of
this world, flesh of its flesh, and that the world is perceiving through us...
our experience of the forest is nothing more than the forest experiencing it-
self. (ibid: 68)
240 Where we are
This view connects closely with the worldview of many indigenous,

oral cultures. Abram quotes Richard Nelson (writing about the
ecology of the Koyukon Indians of north central Alaska):
Koyukon people live in a world that watches, in a forest of eyes The sur-
roundings are aware, sensate, personified They must be treated with
the proper respect. (ibid: 69)
Abram suggests that this view could be the basis for an environ-
mental/ecological ethics based upon respect, attentiveness and
attunement - grounded in the reciprocity of awareness, the participa-
tory nature of our experience within the flesh of the world - a
sensorial empathy with the living land that supports us. (ibid: 69)
Note the similarity of vocabulary and approach to that of Goethean
science.
Abrams emphasis on the reciprocity of perception affirms what is

evident to us in our most intense moments of awareness. In such
moments it is as if the nucleic self is dissolved, the observing subject
becomes one with the observed object. The sensory field is itself
energised and alive. We are only one facet of this dynamic field. Just
as we experience textures and tastes, we ourselves are textures and
tastes. Just as we listen to the sounds of the world we are ourselves
emitting sounds and being listened to. As we process information at
the genetic, metabolic, sensory and symbolic/linguistic levels we are
integral to other information processing systems within other organ-
isms (human and non-human, animals and plants). We are knowing
and unknowing participants in fields of information transaction that
constitute the hum of communications between all points in the web
of existence.
Within oral cultures participation in the web of existence is mediated,

celebrated and speculated upon in vivid and complex linguistic
structures that are rooted in sensory experience:
In indigenous, oral cultures language seems to encourage and augment

the participatory life of the senses, while in Western civilisation language
seems to deny or deaden that life, promoting a massive distrust of sensorial
experience while valorising an abstract realm of ideas hidden behind or be-
yond the sensory appearances. (Abram 1997: 71)
Where we are 241
In oral cultures, words do not speak about the world; rather they
speak to the world [] to the expressive presences that, with us,
inhabit the world. (ibid) Songs and tales are modes of address,
greetings, supplications and celebrations of the phenomenal world.
Conversations and dialogues with other beings, human and non-
human, are central to the evolution of languages around the world:
You surprise me, crow

whenever you see wolf people
you get way up on some branch
(Tlingit song, in Rothenberg 1972: 156)
*
You, you, caribou
yes you
long legs
yes you
long ears

(Eskimo, Magic Words for Hunting Caribou, ibid: 47)
*
In the very earliest time,
when both people and animals lived on earth,
a person could become an animal if he wanted to
and an animal could become a human being.
Sometimes they were people
and sometimes animals
and there was no difference.
All spoke the same language.
That was the time when words were like magic.
(Magic Words - after Nalungiaq, ibid: 45)
Abram (2004: 20) writes about the ways in which the landscape also
provides a mnemonic device for the storage and retrieval of oral
narratives:
Thus, while the accumulated knowledge of our oral ancestors was carried in
their stories, the stories themselves were carried by the surrounding earth.
The local landscape was alive with stories! Travelling through the terrain,
one felt teachings and tellings sprouting from every nook and knoll.
Mithen (1998: 190) agrees that in southwest France for instance, the
evidence of caves and rockshelters covered with paintings (dating
242 Where we are
from 40,000 years ago) suggests that the Upper Palaeolithic hunters
were also living in a landscape full of symbolic meanings. The
natural world is also a social and symbolic world, a place in which
minds, beings, places and forces interact and interpenetrate in a
complex and ever-changing field of cultures.
Old-man-stone
As a boy I can remember wandering beside granite tors and across
bilberry-covered commons, through my uncles farmland to a nearby
monastery. Wherever I looked, the walls, old barns, massive rocky
outcrops and scrubby woods held memories of things that had
happened to me and my friends. These personal links to the physical
Where we are 243
terrain were inter-mingled with other tales and significances that came
from local lore and legend. This is the place in the old quarry where
the body was found below dead mans drop. This is where the witch
lived. This ruin is where the old sisters lived who built the walls over
there. This huge rock is the old man of the forest, who sat here for so
long waiting for his woman to come home that he turned to stone and
he still gazes longingly at each sunset hoping to hear her voice. The
land was shaped as much by these fables and images as by the forces
of geology and climate.
Ive photographed and drawn the old-man-stone from my childhood

many times over the years. It is emblematic of so many things:
patience, endurance, hope, tragedy, a stoic indifference to passing
circumstances, an agedness that is indifferent to time. It teaches me as
much about sitting meditation as any Zen master or Taoist elder. It is a
powerful reference point in my bodys negotiation of space and
geography, and in the layered history of my mind.
I think of the old-man-stone when I read the following Omaha

poem/song:
Unmoved
from time without
end
you rest
there in the midst of the paths
in the midst of the winds
you rest
covered with the droppings of birds
grass growing from your feet
your head decked with the down of birds
you rest
in the midst of the winds
you wait
Aged One
(Abram 1997: 71)
There is a remarkable similarity in the ways in which the Omaha and

my childhood friends think of the rock as a presence, a teacher and a
marker. A deep-rooted sense of the landscape as intelligent presence
links my Leicestershire, Charnwood Forest, post-second-world-war
cultural milieu and the culture of a people of the North American
244 Where we are
plains. In each case human beings feel themselves to be implicated in

the natural world, participants in the histories of flesh, leaf and stone
that make up the cultural ecology of the land. Day-to-day existence is
woven through with mythic tales and images that condense in particu-
lar natural features and places. The landscape is conceptualised and
felt as a realm of interwoven presence and otherness, strangeness and
familiarity, human and non-human, physical stuff and immaterial
energy.
*
Nature is Big Mind, an indeterminate field of interpenetrating beings
and intelligences. Everything causes everything else - mutual co-
arising. And every thing is a process, an event, a burst of informa-
tion, sensation, experience illuminating Big Mind for a moment then
melting away into a pool of history that becomes accessible and
shared through a symbolic memory of stories, songs, poetries, images,
artefacts and dance.
Nature is complex, full of intricate patterns, woven through with

unfathomable strands of causation that generate indeterminacy out of
determinacy. Chance events arise at the interstices of countless lines
of intention, desire, evolutionary instinct and cultural play, as beings
and processes live their interdependent networks of existence. In
Hindu cosmology the universe is characterised as lila, a state of
cosmic play a state of endlessly changing interactions that are
ultimately non-intentional, indeterminate, serendipitous and joyful. To
live wisely and to be fulfilled is to be at ease with complexity, change
and indeterminacy.
This leads me to think of John Cage, trying to fulfil two vocations in

his art and music. On the one hand, learning from Coomaraswamy,
Cage was moved to imitate nature in her manner of operation - not
representing appearances, but constructing compositional processes
that are analogous to the operational modes of nature; and, on the
other hand, he believed art had a primary function to sober and quiet
the mind so that it is in accord with what happens. (quoted in Brown
2000: 45) Art could be a way of developing openness and flexibility
of mind, grounded in non-judgemental attentiveness and clarity of
perception. Art that imitates the structural modes of nature presents us
Where we are 245
with opportunities to develop modes of being, thinking and perceiving

that enable us to lead everyday lives in accordance with nature.
Everything we do and experience can be a means of fulfilment and
enjoyment. Doing as nature does is to be in harmony with the way
things are, to be attuned to natures processes - to be, to feel and to
think as one of the infinite manifestations of Big Mind.
*
The great Japanese poet and walker, Matsuo Basho, had similar
beliefs to Cage about the vocation of the poet. As befits a master of
haiku poetry he expressed the heart of his kado, or Way of Poetry, in
the following concise statement: Follow nature, return to nature, be
nature. (Sam Hamills translation, in Basho 2000: 177) On his death-
bed Basho (ibid, p.168) wrote in a matter-of-fact way about the
vicissitudes of life, sensing perhaps that his walking days were over:
Sick on my journey,
only my dreams will wander
these desolate moors
*
In his poem, Poet, Kenneth White (1966: 51) has this to say about the
poetic voice:
I have said nothing for so many days

my skull lying at the edge of a tide
now when I open my mouth to speak
it is the sea that speaks
*
Songs are thoughts, sung out with the breath when people are moved by great forces
& ordinary speech no longer suffices. Man is moved just like the ice floe sailing here
& there in the current. His thoughts are driven by a flowing force when he feels joy,
when he feels fear, when he feels sorrow.
- Statement by Orpingalik, Netsilik Eskimo (Rothenberg 1969: 360)
*
Art can be seen as being part of a much bigger enterprise: the activity
of coming to know the world and coming to know the self, a process
246 Where we are
that involves a reorientation of being-in-the-world, a regrounding, a

revised way of being and doing. Ontology indivisible from epistemol-
ogy and making things.
*
An Atlantic storm blows in at night, up and over Dartmoor, around the
north-western shoulder of Haldon Hill, swooping down into the Exe
valley. City lights cast a warm glow to the underbelly of low fast-
moving clouds. The old yew thrashes about and the Monterey pines
hiss in dark winds. At 3.00am my mind stirs with badger, owl and
ghostly deer alert to whip of branch and scent of moor-shadowed
ocean. The rush of air and pulp of sound brings me history of gull-
flicked waves. A confusion of energies condensed into sharpness of
sensation. A taste lingers of many yesterdays, clamorous and calm.
*
Phenomenology, shamanism & indigenous peoples
Taking as a starting point extracts from David Abrams book, The
Spell of the Sensuous, (1997) Id like to briefly explore some of the
beliefs and practices that typify the relationships between indigenous,
tribal peoples and the natural world. In doing this it is inevitable that I
will be simplifying and generalising about a complex field of study.
However it is important to get a sense of how our hunter-gatherer
ancestors (and contemporaries though these are few and far be-
tween) think about the natural world, particularly as the hunter-
gatherer (and subsistence pastoralist) system is the most enduring kind
of social organisation that we have known sustained in one form or
another by Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens for up to 100,000 years.
Arguments about the length of human history continue, and dates are
continually being pushed back. Homo Sapiens (our species) have been
around for at least 40,000 years (probably much longer), and our close
relatives the Neanderthals (also hunter-gatherers) inhabited Europe
and the Near East for almost 100,000 years. This longevity attests to
the effectiveness of hunter-gathering as a way of life. Its quite a
thought that according to Richard Fortey (1997: 359) a small species
of mammoth - often hunted by early humans - survived on Wrangell
Island until 5,000 years ago, when the first pyramids were being built!
Where we are 247
The first cultivation of crops - especially cereals - began in different

parts of the world between five and ten thousand years ago.
It is important to keep in mind that most tribal or indigenous peoples

around the world are (or were in recent or ancient times) hunter-
gatherers or subsistence pastoralists (growing food largely for them-
selves), with an oral, visual and material culture. They are, or were,
often nomadic for all or part of the year.
*
The shaman
In order to give something of the flavour of indigenous, tribal
cultures it is useful to consider the role of the shaman and the world-
view associated with shamanic practices. Within many, or most,
hunter-gatherer cultures, the shaman is a key figure, occupying a
central position of power, respect and influence. The shaman in
Mircea Eliade's arresting phrase is a technician of the sacred, a
mediator between the realms of nature and human beings, between the
conscious and subconscious/dreamworld, the living and the dead.
Shamanism is an archaic technique of ecstasy. (Eliade 1964) The
shaman has a primary integrative function, holding together the tribal
group (and in some cases holding together the shaman's own identity
and self), making coherent the seeming incoherence of human
experience in an environment that could appear hostile and uncertain,
full of mysterious energies and forces. The shaman acts as a healer in
a holistic sense - he/she heals him/herself, other tribal members, the
social group as a whole - and also heals any rift that may occur
between the human and non-human realms. The shaman repairs any
tears in the fabric of our relationships with the four-leggeds, winged-
ones, crawling creatures, trees, stones and winds!
Abram argues against the popular notion that shamanism is about

humans attempting to contact the supernatural realm, instead he
makes the point that the shaman/magician is mostly concerned with
more fully entering the natural realm, becoming more fully conscious
of the phenomenal field that includes non-human beings - animals,
plants, trees, waters, clouds, even rocks and mountains. We are
participants in this realm not spectators - although the dominance of
the dualistic Cartesian tradition tends to make Westerners act, feel and
248 Where we are
think like spectators, separated from the world we co-habit with other
creatures.
[In] indigenous cultures, the sensuous world [the natural world] itself re-
mains the dwelling place of the gods, of the numinous powers that can ei-
ther sustain or extinguish human life. (Abram 97: 10)
The purpose of shamanistic magic, according to Abram, is to establish

experiential contact with the non-human realm - developing an
ecological awareness grounded in human perception.
Magic, then, in its most primordial sense, is the experience of existing in

a world made up of multiple intelligences, the intuition that every form one
perceives is an experiencing form only by altering the common organi-
sation of his senses will [the shaman/magician] be able to enter into rapport
with the multiple sensibilities that animate the local landscape. (ibid: 9)
Hence the importance within shamanic practices of dreaming, trance

states and the use of hallucinogenic substances.
One characteristic of the tribal view of the universe is of a sacred

entity (uni-verse), an integrated whole. The universe is composed of
parts which are interdependent, interwoven and alive - animate rather
than inanimate.
In Earth House Hold (1969: 123) Gary Snyder writes:
Everything was alive the trees, grasses, and winds were dancing with me,
talking with me; I could understand the songs of the birds. The phenome-
nal world experienced at certain pitches is totally living, exciting, mysteri-
ous, filling one with a trembling awe, leaving one grateful and humble
Abram links this idea that everything was alive to a belief that
intelligence is not an exclusively human faculty located somewhere inside

our skulls, but is rather a power of the animate Earth itself, in which we
humans, along with the hawks and the thrumming frogs, all participate. It is
to know, further, that each land, each valley, each wild community of plants
and animals and soils, has its particular style of intelligence, its unique mind
or imagination evident in the particular patterns that play out there. (Abram
2004: 21
Where we are 249
Human culture as evident in what we produce, and how we act, sing,

visualise and symbolise the world, is one amongst many cultures of
plants, animals, bacteria and other organisms in all the diverse habitats
of the earth. Each eco-system is a culture, a particular style of
intelligence, finely tuned to its patch of earth, territory or migratory
domain.
While we conceptualise, quantify and categorise the world through

language, measurement and rational analysis - leading us to think
about animals, plants, other entities and each other as things and
objects quite separate from ourselves - the role of the shaman is to
affirm and maintain our contact with, and attention to, the world-as-a-
whole. The shaman reminds us of our place within the flux of natural
presences and processes. Through the disciplined power of his or her
personality and a remarkable range of techniques the shaman accesses
all the various realms of nature (both living and dead - death being to
the shamanic mind just one more strand in the web of life), and uses
this integrating, connecting and transmuting power for the benefit of
the whole community.
Hunting consciousness
Weston La Barre (1972) has shown how our own physiology has
changed very little since palaeolithic times. Both our brain and body
evolved into their present form in order to cope with the needs,
stresses and delights of a hunter-gatherer life-style. While our modern
Western worldview may be very different to that of hunter-gatherer
peoples we have common perceptual and imaginative aptitudes, and
we still inhabit and participate in an environment of natural forces,
processes and beings - even though we may act and think as if we
didnt!
250 Where we are
Snyder writes about hunting (from his youth onwards he has spent a
lot of time with Native Americans of the Pacific North West):
To hunt means to use your body and senses to the fullest: to strain your con-
sciousness to feel what the deer are thinking today, this moment; to sit still
and let your self go into the birds and wind while waiting by a game trail.
Hunting magic is designed to bring the game to you - the creature who has
heard your song, witnessed your sincerity. (Snyder 1969: 120)
Snyder argues that hunting is a primary context within which con-

sciousness (the senses, thought, will and imagination) is developed
and tuned. Awareness is heightened, the mind is disciplined and
explored. The condensation and externalisation of these experiences
Where we are 251
and disciplines into narrative, song, poetry and drawn imagery is also
the beginnings of religion, in the sense that religion (religio to
connect) is a disciplined engagement with the web of interpenetrating
energies which is the world a world of beings, trees, plants, rocks,
valleys, streams, clouds, shadows and light.
Brody makes a similar point:
Hunter-gatherer knowledge is dependent on the most intimate possible con-

nection with the world and with the creatures in it [] Rather than seeking
to change the world, hunter-gatherers know it. They also care for it, show-
ing respect and paying attention to its well-being. (2001: 254)
And the shaman is a primary knowledge-bearer, using
sleep and unconsciousness [& alcohol, peyote, etc.] to move through the
walls around reality in order to know it better [] The dreamer makes a
journey into the land, although his body remains asleep in the safety of his
home. The dreamer [hunter] crosses the boundary between humans and
animals, making contact with his prey [] The events of the dream are re-
lied upon as a guide to trails and the location of animals. In this way, dream-
ing is [hunting] or a phase of gathering [] Dreamers are aware of the
facts; their brains are full of the right kinds of knowledge. But they leave it
to a final intuition to see the correct choice [] Intuition is a way of pay-
ing the closest and deepest possible attention to the world (Brody 2001:
258-260)
Lommel (1972: 117) suggests that the special psychic techniques of

[] the shaman, have evolved out of the religious concepts of the
hunter. The shaman believes that by entering into trance states he or
she can enter the consciousness of other beings, particularly animals.
This use of trance, brought on by hallucinogenic drugs and ascetic
practices (for instance, sleep deprivation or fasting), is common
amongst shamanic cultures around the world hence Eliades
reference to shamanism as archaic techniques of ecstasy. Lewis-
Williams (2002: 133) also claims that shamanism is fundamentally
posited on a range of institutionalized altered states of consciousness.
He provides an eloquent argument, supported by a wealth of examples
as evidence, in favour of the idea that the visual, aural and somatic
experiences of [altered] states give rise to perceptions of an alternative
reality that is frequently tiered (ibid) hence the idea of realms
above and below the everyday reality. With the assistance of spirit
252 Where we are
helpers, who usually appear in a dream or trance state, shamans can

communicate with other beings, move between different realms of
being and gain knowledge of the other intelligences that inhabit the
world. The image of the sky-ladder appears many times in shamanic
myths. The shaman could use a sky-ladder to climb from one world to
another in a universe composed of a multitude of layers inhabited by
evil spirits, good spirits, kinds of animals, winds, rains, and all other
kinds of beings. Lewis-Williams also argues that the behaviour of the
human nervous system in certain altered states creates the illusion of
dissociation from ones body (ibid) a phenomenon that may explain
the frequent references to out-of-body experiences, the ability to fly
and possession by spirits within shamanic cultures.
Another characteristic of the shamanic view of the universe is that

nothing is fixed, one thing can become another, can be two or more
things at once. Time can shift and be dislocated. Space can be com-
pressed or expanded at will. There is an acute awareness of indetermi-
nacy, process and change - a deep sense of the fluidity of the universe
- a universe of ceaselessly modulated energies that are interpenetrating
and interdependent. Lommel (1972) argues that the artefacts associ-
ated with shamanism, the images, clothes and devices connected with
their work, are full of this changeful nature. They embody a deep-
rooted experience of unpredictability and instability, and are full of
transformations, associations, layers of meaning and significance. The
rhythms and energies of life are ever-present and it is this presence
which the art of shamanism makes visible and tangible to the commu-
nity. Examples of these qualities can be found in artefacts from many
different cultures, for example: the masks of the Inuit peoples of the
far north; palaeolithic cave drawings from many parts of the world;
Yaqui masks from northern Mexico; Australian aboriginal drawings &
petroglyphs.
It is interesting to note that we rarely find, if at all, visual representa-

tions of landscape as such within these cultures. That is, landscape as
a panoramic view, distanced from an observer. What we do find are
iconic, indexical (and symbolic) signs, representing beings, forms and
phenomena within the landscape. Natural forms are located in nature,
bison, for instance, are drawn on rocky forms that suggest the con-
tours of a bison. Landscape as a subject of art comes later as human
Where we are 253
beings conceptualise landscape as something out there, external,

viewed from a distance. In the art of hunter-gatherers and the other
practices of shamanic cultures, human beings are represented, or
considered as, participants in the fields of energy, consciousness and
intelligence, which make up the natural world.
*
Neanderthals & Homo-Sapiens: congenital atheists & social-
ised dreamers
Archaeologists and anthropologists have long speculated on the
origins of art as a mode of cognition, expression and construction, and
the possibility that these origins lie within the shamanic practices of
ancient hunter-gatherer cultures. David Lewis-Williams offers some
interesting insights about the development and significance of art and
Id like to very briefly discuss a few of the ideas he puts forward.
Lewis-Williams book, The Mind in the Cave, is a very detailed
account of how metaphor, mind, image, society and cosmos coa-
lesce and how at a fundamental level these phenomena are informed
and energised by the working of the universal human nervous
system. (2002: 144) His book presents a cognitive and neurological
account of the origins of art and culture. Lewis-Williams is highly
sympathetic to the belief of the French anthropologist and ethnogra-
pher, Andre Leroi-Gourhan, that art was the expression of ideas
concerning the natural and supernatural organization of the living
world. (in Lewis-Williams 2002: 63) These ideas, and the coded
representations of these ideas, are subject to change over the Palaeo-
lithic period. These changes reflect how the brain and changing
social relations were shaping the mind. (ibid: 68)
In explaining the differences between Neanderthals, who seem not to

present us with art as we would recognise it, and early Homo
Sapiens, who do, Lewis-Williams makes use of Edelmans concepts
of primary and higher-order consciousness. (see Part 2) He argues
that the evolution of higher-order consciousness goes hand-in-hand
with the development of language and other encoded modes of
signification (including what we would call art). As an example, he
makes the point that language makes possible auditory hallucina-
tions: it is only with language that inner voices can tell people what
to do [] not only do shamans see their animal spirit helpers; the
254 Where we are
spirits also talk to them. (ibid: 189) This marks a crucial stage in the
development of consciousness. The mind manifests images and
altered states of consciousness, these are not only experienced by
certain individuals (for instance, shamans), but are also retained in
memories and shared with others through vocal utterances (the
beginnings of poetry and song) and visual/spatial signs and symbols
(cave paintings and the making of particular kinds of encoded arte-
facts). Also, Lewis-Williams argues, (ibid: 190-192) higher-order
consciousness enables dreams to be remembered and talked about.
This development of socialised dreaming means that communities
can share, interpret and apply symbolic value to dreams in a way that
was not possible before. This may be one distinction between Nean-
derthals and Homo-Sapiens.
While Neanderthals may well have passed through periods of REM

sleep, (the rapid eye movement stage of sleeping associated with
dreaming) and probably did dream, (like dogs and some other ani-
mals), they could not remember what they had dreamt or experienced
in vision states of altered consciousness, and couldnt talk about
such experiences. Therefore, Lewis-Williams claims, they were
congenital atheists. (ibid: 192) This may be one important reason
for the presence of art in the cultures of Homo-Sapiens and not in that
of the Neanderthals: art objects are tokens of dreaming, symbolic
testimonies to visionary experiences and altered states of conscious-
ness. Homo-Sapiens could fix the images that they held in a
remembered state in their minds. According to Lewis-Williams,
the first two-dimensional images were thus not two-dimensional representa-

tions of three-dimensional things in the material world, as researchers have
always assumed. Rather, they were fixed mental images. In all probability
the makers did not suppose that they stood for real animals, any more
than the Abelam [a people indigenous to New Guinea, studied by anthro-
pologists in very recent times] think that their painted and carved images
represent things in the material world. (ibid: 193)
Lewis-Williams remarks on dreaming and visionary states suggest

some of the reasons for the importance of visions and the vision
quest in shamanic cultures. Jerome Rothenberg (1972: 197) includes
the following two vision events in his anthology of poetries of the
indigenous peoples of the Americas:
Where we are 255
Eskimo
Go to a lonely place & rub a stone in a circle on a rock for hours & days on
end.
Sioux
Go to a mountain-top & cry for a vision.
He also includes a peyote vision of the Winnebago people. Here is an

extract (Rothenberg 1972: 358-359):
sleeping
would see great snakes
would cry out & get up
raise my cover & look around
had someone called me?
[]
would see things happening in a distant country
ghosts on horseback drunk
[]
was looking at the [peyote] button I saw
an eagle
with outstretched wings
each feather
had a mark it looked
at me but I was looking
all around me
wondered
if it would disappear
then
when I looked another way
it did
*
Body as gathering-place, mind of the many
We are all manifestations of the mutuality of existence, participating
in the interpenetration and interdependence of all things, including
organisms with each other and with the environment. Our human skin
can be seen as a porous interface with everything that surrounds us
and as the skin of the world. There is a unity of inside and outside. At
the chemical, micro-biological and quantum levels there are no easy
and obvious distinctions between one organism and another, or
between organism and environment, subject and object, observer and
256 Where we are
observed. We are all implicated in the whole of existence, participants

in the web of being.
A vivid description of this interdependence is given by Lewis Tho-

mas. He describes how, in the most intimate way, each of us provides,
in each of our bodies, a habitat for other organisms. Ecosystems are
woven into each other. When I say me am I really referring to a
whole community of organisms of which me is the collective title?
Am I an assembly of immigrants, a place in which many organisms
reside? How can I call this body mine when it is a gathering-place
of creatures, all of whom are tenants, residents, citizens? Arent my
thoughts and feelings as much theirs? Is the consciousness that
arises in this body a collective consciousness? Whose is this mind I
treat as if it were mine? Shouldnt I be replaced by we and mine
by ours?
There they are, moving about in my cytoplasm They are much less
closely related to me than to each other and to the free-living bacteria out
under the hill. They feel like strangers, but the thought comes that the same
creatures, precisely the same, are out there in the cells of seagulls, and
whales, and dune grass, and seaweed and further inland in the leaves of
the beech in my backyard, and in the family of skunks beneath the back
fence, and even in that fly on the window. Through them, I am connected: I
have close relatives, once removed, all over the place. (in Capra 1990: 294)
Where we are 257
*
Charles Waterton
The Victorian naturalist and traveller, Charles Waterton, (1782-1865)
writes vividly about the natural history of his native West Riding of
Yorkshire and the more exotic ambience of South America. As a
Catholic, Waterton had a strong sense of his familys history as part of
an oppressed minority in a largely Protestant country. Many of his
forebears had left England to live in more congenial surroundings in
Belgium, Spain, North and South America, and New Zealand. Maybe
Watertons sense of himself as an exile in his own country, a Catholic
in a country of Hanoverian rats, led him to identify with what he
came to see as the increasingly oppressed lives of the flora and fauna
of his homeland, and to identify with the peoples and natural envi-
ronment of places he visited on his travels to Spain, British Guiana
and North America. Waterton was a fine writer, who could convey
vividly and concisely both the flavour of the places he visited and
detailed information about the habitats, behaviours and appearance of
the plants and animals he encountered. His eccentricities have been
the subject of many stories and biographical essays and dont need
repeating here. He was a solitary who seems to have had few close
relationships his marriage to Anne, the daughter of Charles Edmon-
stone, an old friend from British Guiana, only lasted a year before
Anne died after giving birth to a son, Edmund.
In between his travels Waterton returned to the family home at Walton

Hall in Yorkshire. The house stood on a wooded island in the centre of
a thirty-acre lake, and Waterton turned the whole estate of three-
hundred acres into a refuge for native wildlife. From 1813 onwards he
introduced a regime of management on the estate that outlawed the
use of traps and guns. He planted trees and ground cover, put up
nestboxes, roofed hollow tree-trunks as nesting places, and built stone
structures that supported ivy and other climbers to make yet more
dwelling places for wildlife. At this time, Walton Hall, like most other
estates in England, had been denuded of wildlife due to the game-laws
which protected species like grouse, pheasant and partridges, but
allowed non-game birds to be shot. Waterton writes of this period:
Kites were frequent here in the days of my father; but I myself have never
seen one near the place. In 1813, I had my last sight of the buzzard. It used
to repair to the storm-blasted top of an ancient oak which grows near the
258 Where we are
waters edge; and many and many a time have I gone that way, on purpose
of getting a view of it. In the spring of that year it went away to return no
more, and, about the same period, our last raven was shot on its nest by a
neighbouring gentleman. (in Blackburn 1991: 53-54)
By the 1850s Watertons protective and supportive regime had

transformed the estate into a haven of animal, plant and birdlife. The
numbers of birds observed on the lakes and its surrounds point to the
success of his scheme: between 3,000 and 5,000 waterfowl [of great
variety] 90 adult herons in the heronry, and 5,000 wood pigeons,
800 rooks, and 100 carrion crows. (ibid: 171) There were also 100
kestrels, 100 sandmartins as well as kingfishers, nightjars, rabbits,
weasels, hedgehogs, adders, toads, bats and other species - an impres-
sive testimony to Watertons achievements as a conservationist. As
Blackburn points out (ibid: 170) most visitors to Walton Hall in the
middle of the nineteenth century seem to have considered Waterton
himself, and the abundance of wildlife that surrounded him, as a rather
romantic and fanciful creation. Walton Hall was a strange island of
bio-diversity in an area that was otherwise suffering the same degrada-
tion of species to be found elsewhere in England, an area that was also
becoming rapidly industrialised. Waterton resisted the encroachment
of soap factories and other industrial plants in his locality, because of
the effects they were having on the environment. His outlook and his
activism anticipate, by almost a hundred years, the beginnings of the
conservation movements in North America and Europe.
Blackburn (ibid: 42) describes Watertons aim as a writer: to draw

his audience into the landscape, and then to show them how to look
and what to look for, while he himself remained [] out of sight. He
encouraged his readers to look close with a quiet mind. (ibid) He
was a dispassionately accurate describer, in the tradition of naturalists
like Gilbert White, but he also became, as he reflected more deeply on
what he has witnessed, an articulate advocate on behalf of the natural
world. As an example of his ethical code as a naturalist out in the
field, and of his qualities as a writer, here is an extract written in 1812:
to give the world a finished picture [of Guiana] may appear a difficult task
[] but look close at it, and it is nothing at all; provided thou hast but a
quiet mind [] the genius which presides over these wilds will kindly help
thee through the rest. She will allow thee to slay the faun and to cut down
the mountain-cabbage for thy support, and to select from every part of her
Where we are 259
domain whatever may be necessary for the work thou art about; but having
killed a pair of doves in order to enable thee to give mankind a true and
proper description of them, thou must not destroy a third through wanton-
ness or to show what a good marksman thou art: that would only blot the
picture thou art finishing, not colour it.
[] And if, in the cool of the evening, thou hast been tempted to stray too
far from thy place of abode, and art deprived of light to write down the in-
formation thou hast collected, the fire-fly, which thou wilt see in almost
every bush around thee, will be thy candle. Hold it over thy pocket-book, in
any position which thou knowest will not hurt it, and it will afford thee am-
ple light. And when thou hast done with it, put it kindly back again on the
next branch to thee. It will want no other reward for its services.
(Waterton 1925: page not known)
This extract was written before his conservation project at Walton

Hall got underway. As time went on he turned away from his earlier
practices of killing animals to obtain specimens for study, preferring
to observe them alive - in their natural habitat. He became an active
conservationist, a participant in the landscape, as well as a quiet
observer. He empathises with the natural world, with the other
organisms and beings that inhabit the Walton Hall estate, without
being overly sentimental or anthropocentric. He acts as an attentive
listener and observer, as well as a voice for disenfranchised species
and habitats, in much the same way that Gary Snyder, Alice Oswald
and Kenneth White do today.
Waterton died in 1865. According to a friend, Norman Moore, He

died just as the rooks were beginning to caw and the swallows to
chirp. He died as he always said he would, sitting up, and conscious to
the last. (ibid: 212)
*
It is New Years Day. It is always new years day. Silvergrey light
follows a fleshpink dawn. The nights fireworks and distant revelling
are gone. There is an exhausted silence about the city. Across the
valley hills merge into clouds. A magpie screeches. A robin sings.
There is no end to the unfolding light.
***
Part 9
The ! the One & the Many:

mysticism, art & poetry
Make of yourself a light,

said the Buddha,
before he died.
(Oliver 1990: 4)
John Scotus Eriugena conceived of

the universe as a revelation of God
in His ineffable beauty.
(Eco 2002: 18)
Introduction
In this section I explore a body of ideas about states of being and
knowing that have come to be called mystical, and I relate these
ideas and experiences to examples of art and poetry that could be
considered as manifestations and enactments of mystical states of
mind. While tracing ideas and practices that have certain characteris-
tics in common, we also need to be mindful of the very different
cultural contexts and belief systems informed by, and surrounding,
mysticism. In order to contrast with, contradict or disrupt whatever
continuity the unfolding discussion may have, I have added various
fragments, quotes and notes. The intention is that these constitute a
kind of critical or poetic counterpoint to the main themes.
*
Claims, questions, criticality
In thinking about mysticism and the possible relationships between
mysticism, art and poetry, we need to keep our feet on the ground and
maintain a critical stance. We need to ask questions and not be carried
along by the tendency, in some quarters, to accept vague arguments,
262 The ! the One & the Many
definitions and evidence as soon as the terms mysticism, spirituality

and the sacred are mentioned. In this section I first present an over-
view of mysticism by describing characteristics of mystical experi-
ences drawn from the literature. I then use a number of examples to
show how experiences or qualities, defined as mystical, can be
considered as being manifested in particular artworks. Given that
mysticism is a formalisation of accounts of particular kinds of
experiences, characteristics of which have been described in remarka-
bly similar terms by individuals from many different cultures, it seems
reasonable that we should look for evidence of the validity of claims
made about possible relationships between art and mysticism, in
accounts of the making of, and engaging with, particular artworks. In
discussing the work of Kapoor, Martin, Turrell, Borges and Rexroth in
this way, I have no intention of suggesting that this is the only way in
which their work can be interpreted, nor am I suggesting that these
artists intend their work to be seen as mystical. Indeed Im fairly
sure that all of them would resist this kind of characterisation. How-
ever I hope that as one of the many ways of discussing what these
artists do, the comments below will be considered as being illuminat-
ing and useful.
*
A note on the silhouettes: these are extracts from a series of brief
textual portraits, of artists, poets, writers, thinkers, et al, composed
over the past eight years or so. Like visual silhouettes they are
extremely compressed, a reduction resulting from a process of erasure
and editing, such that some indexical trace of the subject is revealed in
what remains a composition through removal and loss. Most of the
Silhouettes are derived from verbal collages which are themselves the
result of extracting words, fragments of sentences or distinctive modes
of syntax, and re-composing these into a new structure that conveys
something of the mind of the subject. Unaltered longer phrases are
indicated by italics.
*
Defining mysticism
Although there have been, and are, many different ideas about the
meaning of the terms mystical and mysticism we need to establish
at the outset a clear distinction between the tendency in many contexts
The ! the One & the Many 263
to use these terms as synonyms for mysterious, unclear, vague or

inexplicable, and the meanings ascribed to these terms in the religious
and philosophical context. In the former case there are associations
with wizards, magic, mists and even anything with a mystique
attached to it these are not associations that add to any understand-
ing of mysticism in the sense that it is being used in the following
pages.
There is a point at which the popular and theological conceptions of

mysticism converge, namely, that the etymology of the word mystic
can be traced back to the Greek mysteries: A mystic was one who
had been initiated into these mysteries, through which he had gained
an esoteric knowledge of divine things and been reborn into eternity.
(Happold 1970: 18). As Happold points out, this original conception
of the mystic changed over time, particularly in the fusion of Greek
and Oriental philosophy which occurred in the centuries immediately
preceding the birth of Christ. (ibid.) In more recent times the terms
mysticism and mystical are used to describe particular qualities of
experience or modes of consciousness within the context of theology,
religious studies or philosophy. Happold (1970), James (1982),
Wolters (1961) and Merton (1968, 1973) all concur in describing
mysticism as a set of beliefs, practices and traditions that arise from a
core of distinctive experiences. Russell (1963) takes a more analytical
approach that focuses on the ideas and beliefs of mystics and philoso-
phers who share such beliefs. Rather than try to propose a generic
definition I will provide some examples of the ways in which these
writers use the term. In doing this it will be apparent that though there
is a convergence, with the exception of Russell, upon describing
mysticism in experiential terms, there are both many very clear
similarities, and some differences in approach.
*
William James: four marks of mystical states
William Jamess famous study, The Varieties of Religious Experience,
was first published in 1902. It is one of the first serious attempts to
examine religious experiences, rather than religious ideas, theories and
public doctrines or rituals. In his study Jamess interest and focus is on
individuals, in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to
stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine. (James
1982: 32) He includes the non-deistic traditions of Buddhism and

Emersonian transcendental idealism in his study, referring to them
as Emersonian optimism and Buddhistic pessimism! (34) Nor is
atheism a defence against inclusion in Jamess definition of religion.
He quotes a colleague who describes a student manifesting a fine
atheistic ardour as follows: He believes in No-God, and he worships
him. (35) This is a typical James observation, even though second-
hand, it has his characteristic tone of wry humour, benign scepticism
and good sense. James refers to the striking and sudden unifications
of a discordant self (483) as characteristic of the process of conver-
sion to a religion something that also seems to typify the mystical
experience.
In a chapter devoted to mysticism James provides four marks of the

mystical state:
[1] Ineffability [.] it defies expression [.] no adequate report of its con-
tents can be given in words [.] its quality must be directly experienced.
[2] Noetic quality. Although so similar to states of feeling, mystical states

seem to those who experience them to be also states of knowledge. They are
states of insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect.
(380)
James suggests these are the two prime marks, but he adds two
supplementary characteristics.
[3] Transiency. Mystical states cannot be sustained for long. [Thirty min-
utes to two hours maximum, he gauges]
[4] Passivity [.] the mystic feels as if his own will were in abeyance.
(381)
In relation to these states he argues that Some memory of their

content always remains, and a profound sense of their importance.
(381) James the psychologist characterises mystical experiences in
terms of particular qualities of consciousness and their effects, rather
than on the content of the experiences. He is interested in describing
the objects of consciousness, objects that may be present to our
senses, or they may be present only to our thought. (53) Indeed, in
his usual inclusive manner, James describes all kinds of examples of
states that have the above qualities, from the feeling that Ive been
here before, to states produced by intoxicants and anaesthetics,
especially by alcohol, (387) and the ecstasies of St. Theresa and
Meister Eckhart. He delights in the varieties of these experiences and
in the idiosyncratic nature of each reported instance he provides as
examples.
*
[] The bottle is empty.
The fire has gone out in the stove.
Everywhere men speak in whispers.
I brood on the uselessness of letters.
-Tu Fu (in Rexroth 1971: 6)
*
F.C. Happold: seven characteristics of mysticism
In F.C.Happolds later study of mysticism, first published in 1963, the
author takes a somewhat different approach to James. Happold (1970:
38) disregards those false types of so-called mysticism such as
spiritualism, occultism, and the like practices that enjoyed consid-
erable popularity at the end of the nineteenth century in the artistic
salons of Europe and North America, when James was gathering
material for his milestone text. Happold sets these phenomena aside in
order to focus on mysticism as a particular and distinct sort of
spirituality (39) which he sets out to examine from three points of
view, as a type of experience, as a way of knowledge, and as a state of
consciousness. (39) When it comes to describing the characteristics
of mystical states, Happold takes his cue from James. Ineffability, a
noetic quality, transiency and passivity are listed as the first four of
Happolds seven characteristics, following closely Jamess descrip-
tions. The other three are, the presence of a consciousness of the
Oneness of everything, (46) a sense of timelessness (47) and the
conviction that the familiar phenomenal ego is not the real I. (48) In
relation to the first of these, All creaturely existence is experienced as
a unity, as All in One and One in All. In theistic mysticism God is felt
to be in everything and everything to exist in God. (46) In relation to
the second the mystic feels himself to be in a dimension where time
is not, where all is always now, (48) - what is often referred to as
the eternal present. T.S.Eliot may be alluding to this sense of
timelessness when he writes in Burnt Norton, to be conscious is not
to be in time. (Eliot 1936: 188) As far as the third is concerned,

Happold suggests that mystics experience the presence of a true Self
that is constant and unchanging and divine. (48) He considers the
true self to be synonymous with Atman in the Hindu traditions and
with the spark, the centre, or apex of the soul, and the ground of the
spirit (48-49) in Christian mysticism. In some ways these three
additional marks of mystical states provide a sense of the content of
such states, something that James only includes through case studies.
In regard to the noetic quality of mystical experience, Happold writes:
The Indian philosopher Radhakrishnan [] calls mysticism integrated

thought, in that it brings together in a new pattern, i.e. integrates them, in-
stead of, as in analytical thought, breaking them into parts. It thus relates
them into a meaningful whole. It is a sort of creative insight. (37)
This connects to Russells observations about mystical insight (see

below). Happold also mentions another aspect of mysticism, the belief
that mystical experience involves a union with Reality or God (which
may be felt as transcendent or immanent). He quotes Ruth Underhill:
Mysticism is the art of union with Reality. The mystic is a person who has
attained that union in a greater or lesser degree; or who aims at and believes
in such attainment. (38)
*
Guy Davenport (1987: 41) urges us to read Plutarch and Montaigne
to reflect on this inner life rationally [making us] at peace with
ourselves. Both men were sceptics with Stoic minds and well-
tempered good natures.
*
Bertrand Russell: Mysticism and logic
Bertrand Russell in his brief, highly sceptical and very informative
essay, Mysticism and Logic, proposes four characteristics of philoso-
phical mysticism or mysticism within philosophy. Underlying
mysticism is,
the belief in insight as against discursive analytic knowledge: the belief in a

way of wisdom, sudden, penetrating, coercive, which is contrasted with the
slow and fallible study of outward appearance by a science relying wholly

upon the senses. (Russell 1963: 14)
For Russell the beliefs of mystics are the result of reflection upon the
inarticulate experience gained in the moment of insight. (ibid) This
accords with the views of James and Happold that ineffability is one
of the primary characteristics of the mystical experience. Russell
argues that the mystic values, and makes use of, insight, revelation
and intuition, above reason and analysis, the modes of knowing
preferred by philosophers in the western tradition. He connects these
mystical modes of knowing to a belief in the conception of a Reality
behind the world of appearances and utterly different from it. (14) It
is this reality which the mystic has insight into the mystic lives in
the full light of the vision. (15) This belief in another reality is
Russells first characteristic of mysticism. The second is its belief in
unity, and its refusal to admit opposition or division anywhere. (ibid)
Hence, in Russells view, the mystical nature of Heraclituss contra-
dictory assertions for instance, that good and evil are one. Russells
third characteristic is the mystical metaphysics of Time. This is an
outcome of the denial of division; if all is one, the distinction of past
and future must be illusory. Russell notes that this belief is evident in
Parmenides, Spinoza and Hegel. As a fourth characteristic, Russell
proposes the belief that all evil is mere appearance, an illusion
produced by the divisions and oppositions of the analytical intellect.
(ibid) If all is one, it follows logically that not only can there be no
division into past, present and future, but also, as Heraclitus states,
there can be no division into good and evil. Russell reminds us that
Spinoza also considered good and evil to be illusory, irreconcilable
with a belief in the Reality of the All.
Russells approach is analytical and philosophical. His focus is upon

the beliefs and ideas that characterise mysticism as a metaphysical
tradition, rather than upon the experiential evidence that James and
Happold place at the centre of their studies. As one might expect of a
logician and mathematician, Russell uses the tools of logic to analyse
and criticise the shortcomings of mysticism as a strand within phi-
losophy. However he does commend mysticism as an attitude
towards life but not as a creed about the world. (16) Maybe what
he really means is that mysticism may offer beneficial insights into the
living of our lives, even if it doesnt fulfil the requirements, or follow
the rules, of logical philosophy. Also one could argue that philosophy
involves the analysis and structuring of statements about the world,
while mystics are attempting to point to the way the world is, or the
way states of affairs are in the world. As such mystics and philoso-
phers may be concerned with two very different levels or kinds of
order and two different modes of discourse - one employing proposi-
tional logic and the other employing a poetry of immanence and
insight.
*
The Spanish poet, Antonio Machado, in his poem, Rebirth, reminds
us that:
The deepest words

of the wise men teach us
the same as the whistle of the wind when it blows,
or the sound of the water when it is flowing.
(in Reid 1998: 207)
*
Clifton Wolters and The Cloud of Unknowing
In the introduction to his translation of The Cloud of Unknowing,
Clifton Wolters describes contemplation as the awareness of God,
known and loved at the core of ones being. (Wolters 1961: 36) This
awareness always involves a sense of otherness to which the soul
turns as to its home. (37) Both Wolters and Merton use the term
contemplation to mean the disciplined cultivation of mystical
experience. Wolters argues that contemplation involves the setting
aside of thinking in human terms and opening ourselves to the divine
grace, the presence of God.
That we can see the Nought and the Nowhere to which our journey has
brought us is the presence of God himself. For he is No-thing, and No-
where. The very unknowing, full blind and full dark, is the knowing of
him [.] And the life of contemplation is just this unknowing knowing, this
blind seeing, this presence which is unfelt. (38)
The Cloud of Unknowing was written around 1370 by a priest (he

gives his blessing in the final paragraph) who may have been from the
East Midlands of England - the evidence of his diction and vocabulary
suggest this. The book seems to have been written as an advisory text
for a twenty-four year old disciple, as such it combines kindness,

practicality and good sense, with vivid descriptions of the authors
own mystical experience. The author advises his student to let go of
this everywhere and this everything in exchange for this no-
where and this nothing. Our outer self calls it nothing, but our
inner self calls it All. (134-135) In these brief extracts we encoun-
ter not only the gist of the authors advice but also the vocabulary of
contradiction, paradox and inversion that typifies many mystical texts.
*
A poem by the Japanese poet, Ikkyu (1394-1481) who trained in
the Rinzai tradition of Zen:
We eat, excrete, sleep, and get up;

This is our world.
All we have to do after that
Is to die.
(in Watts 1989: 162)
*
Thomas Mertons Louisville vision
Thomas Merton was a Trappist monk who entered the monastery of
Our Lady of Gethsemani near Louisville, Kentucky, in 1941. He was
based there until his accidental death in December 1968 at a gathering
of monks in Bangkok, Thailand. Mertons extensive writings, includ-
ing poems, are grounded in his experiences as a contemplative. He
writes about mystical experiences as one who feels he has had such
experiences and also as one who feels the need to analyse and discuss
his experiences within the context of Christian theology and, towards
the end of his life, in relation to Buddhism, particularly Zen. In his
journal and in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, he describes a
mystical experience he had on 18th March, 1958, in his local town of
Louisville what he later refers to as his Louisville vision. This
experience involved an intense feeling of community with the people
he mingled with on the street, a realisation that I loved all these
people, they were mine and I theirs. It was like waking from a dream
of separateness. He adds, This sense of liberation from an illusory
difference was such a relief and such a joy that I almost laughed out
loud. (in Shannon 1987: xii-xiii) Shannon notes that Merton saw the
contemplative experience as an experience of oneness and transcen-
dent unity. The quaint translation of Julian of Norwich [late four-

teenth, early fifteenth century English mystic] puts it this way: Prayer
oneth the soul to God. (8)
Mertons experience has many of the marks of the mystical experi-

ence identified by James and Happold: it was very brief; it arose,
unbeckoned, in a casual everyday context; it had a noetic quality,
giving Merton an insight into the structures of relationship that were
normally hidden; it involved a profound sense of unity; and it marked
a transformation in Mertons sense of self. For Merton, this experi-
ence, and many others he had in the course of his life, convinced him
that this sense of unity was the real state of things, a state that we
needed to rediscover if we were to become more fully human: We
are already one. But we imagine that we are not. And what we have to
recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we are. (in
Shannon 1987: xvi)
*
Traditions of describing mystical experiences
In his book about Thomas Merton, William H. Shannon provides a
concise overview of two ways of describing mystical experiences,
commonly used in theological literature. He distinguishes between the
kataphatic and apophatic traditions. The kataphatic tradition is,
the tradition of light [] an understanding of God through affirma-
tion (the Greek word kataphasis means affirmation). (Shannon 1987:
9) The apophatic tradition is:
the tradition of darkness and negation (the Greek word apophasis means
negation or denial). [] sooner or later, the contemplative must renounce
the minds activity, put out the light of the intellect, and enter into the dark-
ness, wherein there is an experience of the ineffable reality of what is be-
yond experience. The presence of God is known, not in clear vision, but as
unknown. (10)
While it is regrettable that Shannon gives the impression, if not the

intention, of being anti-intellectual, he does convey the differences
between the two traditions which are also known as the via
positiva and the via negativa. He places Merton firmly in the latter
tradition, a tradition that thrives on paradoxical expressions. (11)
For instance, Merton himself writes about the wordless darkness
that is also the apophatic light, God is experienced as a dazzling
darkness or as the brightness of a most lucid darkness. (in Shannon
1987: 11) As we saw in relation to Eckharts writings this use of
paradox and contradiction is very typical of the discourses of mysti-
cism.
The way in which mystics use words is often obscure, paradoxical and
difficult because our everyday language is inevitably concerned
with our self-centred relationship with the world. We place impor-
tance on doing, getting, having, holding and knowing, and these are
seen as positive qualities (because they enhance and affirm the self). It
is no surprise, therefore, that the language of mysticism should often
appear negative - because it is describing and articulating a process of
inner transformation, self-surrender or self-transcendence. Giving-up,
surrendering, losing, not-doing, unknowing, forgetting - these become
the terms given importance and value. From the perspective of social
psychology Erich Fromm provides a stimulating analysis of the
language of being (in contrast to having) and its related politics and
ideology, in To Have or To Be (1979).
*
Heidegger, mysticism, nothingness
Martin Heidegger had, in many ways, an ambivalent attitude towards
Christianity and institutionalised religions. In his early writings he was
influenced by the German Dominican monk and mystic Meister
Eckhart (c.1260-1327/8), who advocated inner transformation as a
goal of the religious life, believing that human beings could achieve
unity with God in this life. Eckhart emphasised the ineffable nature of
God, struggling to find a vocabulary that could convey Gods resis-
tance to categorisation and conceptualisation. We find in Eckharts
writings, and in Heidegger, the use of paradoxical expressions that
characterise many statements made by mystics and by those who
attempt to write about mystical experiences. Gerda von Brockhausen:
Mystical language stands in strong contrast to rational thought. It tries to

approach the ineffable by using hints, symbols, antithesis and paradox and
by feeling in the dark. [.] Thus we see the importance of silence [] for
the language of mysticism. (in Schierz 2003: 40)
Eckhart refers to the ineffability of God as, Nothingness, Unfa-

thomable Ocean, a way without a way, and dark light. (Schierz
2003: 41) Michael E. Zimmerman (1993: 241) writes about Eckharts
use of the term, Divine Nothingness from Heideggers perspective:
The Divine cannot be regarded as a super entity existing somewhere

else, but instead constitutes the unconditioned openness or empti-
ness in which all things appear. Meister Eckhart argued that humans
are at one with this openness. So lacking is any distinction between
ones soul and the Divine, in fact, that one who is awakened to Di-
vine Nothingness forgets all about God and lives a life of release-
ment (Gelassenheit), moved by compassion to free things from suf-
fering.
Zimmerman identifies connections between the thinking of Eckhart

and Heidegger, and we can relate these to Buddhist conceptions of the
Bodhisattva, a being who refuses to enter a state of nirvana, or
complete enlightenment and freedom from suffering, in order to help
other beings achieve this state. Zimmerman (1993: 241) argues that
Heideggers notion that human existence is the openness, clearing, or

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

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

the strategy of knowing by unknowing, opening up to nothingness,
practiced by many mystics. As Merton affirms, (see above), the
grace of mystical experience, contact with God, is not something
that can be willed or engineered. Accounts of mystical experiences
often reveal the unbidden nature of such events, in many cases they
occur when all hope is lost, or when the individual has given up, or
when circumstances seem to be against the onset of such experiences.
It could be argued that at such times of letting-be an individual may
be more open and receptive to the grace of being whether it is in
Heideggers non-theological sense or in Mertons context of Christian
belief. Certainly letting-go, or non-attachment, is a key element in

Buddhist practices of awakening to the flux of existence.
Happold writes of this state of letting-go in a slightly different way:
In the state of Contemplation [the mystical state] there is found a self-

forgetting attention, a humble receptiveness, a still and steady gazing, an in-
tense concentration, so that emotion, will, and thought are all fused and then
lost in something which is none of them, but which embraces them all.
(1970: 70)
There may be a connection here between the state of Contemplation,

as described by Happold and suggested by Heidegger, and states of
mindfulness and non-attachment in Buddhist practices of meditation
particularly vipassana and zazen. Merton was particularly interested in
exploring the potential connections between Zen Buddhism and his
own contemplative tradition as a Trappist monk. His dialogues with
D.T. Suzuki, whose thinking was deeply informed by the Rinzai
school of Zen, trace some of the similarities and differences between
the two bodies of experience. In Mystics and Zen Masters (1967) and
Zen and the Birds of Appetite (1968) Merton contrasts the dualistic,
Cartesian, consciousness, with its separation of subject and object, and
body and mind, with another mode of consciousness which, he argues,
starts not from the thinking and self-aware subject but from Being,
ontologically seen to be beyond and prior to the subject-object
division. (1968: 23) Merton goes on to suggest that:
Underlying the subjective experience of the individual self there is an im-

mediate experience of Being. This is totally different from an experience of
self-consciousness. It is completely non-objective. It has none of the split
and alienation that occurs when the subject becomes aware of itself as a
quasi-object. The consciousness of Being (whether considered positively or
negatively and apophatically as in Buddhism) [see below] is an immediate
experience that goes beyond reflexive awareness. It is not consciousness
of but pure consciousness, in which the subject as such disappears. (1968:
23-24)
Mertons description here accords with the qualities of unity and

oneness that have been proposed as characteristics of mystical
experience - a state of non-duality that is consistent with Russells
contention that mystical unity refuses to admit opposition or division
anywhere. (Russell 1963: 15) Merton also describes the impact that
this kind of experience has on our conception and understanding of

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

kind of ontological openness and an infinite generosity which com-
municates itself to everything that is. (1968: 24-25) This idea of a
ground of openness is a return to a discourse about mysticism that
once more seems close to Heidegger, and Eckhart.
*
Samuel Becketts character, Lucky, in Waiting for Godot, gives us
another kind of eloquence as he scathingly disputes the idea of a
benign and transcendent God:
Given the existence as uttered forth in the public works of Puncher and
Wattman of a personal God quaquaquaqua with white beard quaquaquaqua
outside time without extension who from the heights of divine apathia di-
vine athambia divine aphasia loves us dearly with some exceptions for rea-
sons unknown but time will tell and suffers like the divine Miranda with
those who for reasons unknown but time will tell are plunged in torment
plunged in fire[] (Beckett 1965: 42-43)
*
Wittgenstein and the ineffable
From a perspective somewhere between Russell and the other writers
Ive mentioned, Wittgenstein shines his inimitable light on the matters
under discussion. In the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, first pub-
lished in an English translation in 1921 (with an introduction by
Russell) Wittgenstein builds a stringently logical series of statements
about language and knowledge, and about the relationship between
these constructs and the world.
In both the early thinking behind the Tractatus and the later thinking
of the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgensteins philosophical
project is the elucidation of language, the dissolving of apparent
problems, conflicts and misunderstandings by a logical analysis of the
workings of language as a tool or game. Philosophy is a struggle
against the bewitchment of our understanding by means of language.
(Hacker 2000: 336) However he also recognises that language has
limits, that there is a realm of the unsayable.
According to Schierz, (2003: 41) not only did Wittgenstein formulate

the logical prerequisites for the possibility of any meaningful linguistic

proposition about the world of facts in language, but he also set the limits of
everything sayable. The ineffable really does exist. This reveals itself. That
is what is mystical.
Schierz (41) quotes Wittgenstein: It is not how the world is that is

mystical, but that it exists, and this existence of the world is ineffa-
ble, unapproachable by language. In his notebooks Wittgenstein
acknowledges that the world is independent of my will. (in Perloff
1996: 29) According to Dieter Mersch,
Wittgensteins ethics are based on the that experience, the experience of

existence as existence. As language, this experience contains the sheerest
emptiness because no sentence can lead to this experience, nor is any sen-
tence derivable from it. Nevertheless as experience, it contains the most ex-
treme form of disorientation possible, i.e. the confrontation with the Ulti-
mate Enigma. (in Shierz 2003: 42)
Paradoxically this Ultimate Enigma is existence, being here,

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

Wittgenstein writes:
6.4 All propositions are of equal value.

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

the world as it is. All propositions are equally redundant in the face of
the Ultimate Enigma which is the existence of the world. There is
no value in the world because the sense of the world, human values,
language and philosophical ideas, must lie outside the world. The
world, where everything happens as it happens is beyond, or
perhaps before, values, ideas, human constructs, intentions and
desires. The radical shift in Wittgensteins thinking between the
Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations can be seen as the
result of a realisation that language cannot represent or picture the
world, cannot somehow re-present it in words, as is suggested in the
famous statement at the end of the Tractatus: Whereof one cannot
speak, thereof one must be silent. To analyse the relationship
between linguistic statements and the world as it is, is pointless
because there is no relationship in any causal or indexical sense.
Therefore Wittgenstein, after the Tractatus is completed, focuses on
clarifying the workings of language, which he feels he can say
something about. The world as it is is purposeless, indeterminate
and ineffable to be experienced as empty and marvellous, in the
words of Te-shan. (in Watts 1989:131) Tathata (suchness) is the
Buddhist equivalent of Wittgensteins that experience, the experi-
ence of everything as it is. We can point to this state of affairs, we can
manifest it in actual objects and events in the world, and we can
experience it in silence or with nonsensical, non-propositional
exclamations or affirmations: Ah! Doh! Eureka! Yes! But we cant
express it or define it or explain it.
It is no surprise that Russell, while he thought Wittgensteins Trac-

tatus was wonderful, (Perloff 1996a: 30) had reservations about a
strand of mysticism that he claimed was in Wittgensteins thinking.
Russell writes (in a letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell, 1919):
I was amazed to learn that he has become a complete mystic. He reads peo-
ple like Kierkegaard and Angelus Silesius and is thinking seriously of be-
coming a monk. This all began with William Jamess Varieties of Religious
Experience. He has penetrated deep into mystical modes of thought and
feeling, but I think (although he would not agree), that what he likes best in
mysticism is its power to stop him from thinking. (Perloff 1996a: 30)
Although Russell is probably wrong to call Wittgenstein a complete

mystic, whatever that may be, it is very likely that Wittgensteins
thinking was informed by his readings, during the war years, of north
European writers like Tolstoy, Schopenhauer and Silesius. Kierke-
gaard would probably have disapproved of the idea that he was
himself a mystic in the sense that we have been using the term - he
took a more sceptical stance towards such matters, in some ways more
akin to Wittgensteins position. However reasonable or unreasonable
we consider Russells comments to be, according to Perloff, Wittgen-
stein didnt like Russells introduction to the Tractatus. Unsurpris-
ingly, by this time relations between the two men, who had been close
for a time, had become strained. (Perloff 1996a: 30)
*
According to the novelist, Dorothy Allison:
There is a place where we are always alone with our own mortality, where
we must simply have something greater than ourselves to hold onto God
or history or politics or literature or a belief in the healing power of love, or
even righteous anger. Sometimes I think they are all the same. (in Rorty
1999: 161)
*
Taoism: the way of the willow
Note. The term Taoism has been changed to Daoism in many
recent works, in line with a move to a more accurate translation and
accuracy of pronunciation likewise with the terms, Tao/Dao and Tao
Te Ching/ Dao De Ching. However, given that most of the texts
consulted in this study use the term Taoism and that the older term is
still current in public discourse, I have chosen to use Taoism
throughout this book to avoid confusion. I apologise to Chinese
speakers and scholars if this causes offence.
The vocabulary of Taoism echoes that of the Christian mystics.

Contradictions and paradoxes are common as is the use of negatives
where we might expect to find positives. While the term Tao is often
translated as the way, Happold (1970: 149) suggests that another
meaning of perhaps greater importance, is to consider the Tao as the
Univided Unity out of which the phenomenal world that we know
arises (the myriad creatures). It can be seen that Happold is fitting
Taoism into his framework of mystical characteristics that I outlined

earlier. However other scholars support the idea that the Tao is both
the Way and the One. (see Lau 1963: 16)
Watts (1989: 15) makes the important point that the Tao is the
indefinable, concrete process of the world, the Way of life. In other
words the Tao is a dynamic undifferentiated field of energy or process
that is indefinable and ineffable. It works, according to Taoists,
spontaneously by not-working, it makes by not-making, it is a self-
organising system and its process is one of growth in which it sponta-
neously divides itself into parts, as cells divide in a growing organism.
(see Watts 1989: 16-17) This process of acting by not-acting is
denoted by the Chinese term wu-wei. (ibid: 19) Metaphorically this
process of action is likened to the action of wind and water, to
flexibility, fluidity and bending rather than rigidity. The willow
survives the force of the wind by being supple and bending with the
wind rather than trying to resist it. The hard stone is eroded by the
action of flowing water. Notice in these few comments the obvious
paradoxes. The Taoist sage, hermit or mystic, follows the Way, he or
she emulates the Tao, using wu-wei, doing by not-doing, knowing by
not-knowing, as a way of being in the world. The universe is inten-
tionless or purposeless, therefore to act in a purposeless way, without
clinging to things and ideas, to act selflessly, is to act in accordance
with the flow of the universe. Self-centred actions resist the flow of
existence like a stone in a stream. The Taoist practitioner learns to
bend with the flux of existence, to be at one with indeterminacy and to
allow things to happen of their own accord, to let go of habits of
thought and behaviour, to be released from conditioning.
It is commonplace to consider Taoism as a complementary strand of

beliefs and practices to the Confucian system of ethics and social
values that have dominated Chinese society since ancient times.
Certainly the Taoist emphasis on letting-go, release from conditioning,
following the natural way, doing by not-doing, seems to be the mirror
image of the Confucian emphasis on social and filial responsibility,
and on political order and continuity. The Taoist practitioner seems to
be releasing him or herself from these social pressures and conven-
tions in order to achieve greater harmony with the Tao. How to do this
without being a mindless sponge or a passive spectator of life is
something that the Taoist learns through disciplined practice with a

teacher and close observation of his or her own actions.
Something of the flavour of Taoist thinking can be gleaned from the

following excerpts from the Lao Tzu or Tao Te Ching (Lau: 1963)
The way conceals itself in being nameless. (102)
The way begets one; one begets two; two begets three; three begets the myr-
iad creatures. (103)
I do my utmost to attain emptiness;

I hold firmly to stillness.
The myriad creatures all rise together
And I watch their return. (72)
Have little thought of self and as few desires as possible. (75)
In the pursuit of learning one knows more every day; in the pursuit of the
way one does less every day. One does less and less until one does nothing
at all, and when one does nothing at all there is nothing that is undone. (109)
These statements arent intended as a recipe for unthinking torpidity

or literally doing nothing at all. Instead, the Tao Te Ching provides
a philosophical framework and a carefully-honed manual of advice for
working with the Tao not against it. When one does nothing at all
against the flow of existence or against the natural order of things,
when one lives attuned to the Tao, there is nothing that is undone.
To live in accordance with the Tao is to live in harmony with patterns
of growth (and decay) and interdependence, and to develop a more
ecological (egoless) sense of self, informed by contemplative insight
into the undifferentiated unity of existence.
From The Song of Realising the Tao (Cheng-tao Ke):
Like the empty sky it has no boundaries,

Yet it is right in this place, ever profound and clear.
When you seek to know it, you cannot see it.
You cannot take hold of it,
But you cannot lose it.
In not being able to get it, you get it.
When you are silent, it speaks;
When you speak, it is silent.
(in Watts 1989: 145)
*
Sufi mysticism
Al-Ghazali (1059-1111) was a leading Islamic scholar who converted
to Sufism later in his life. He writes eloquently of the Sufi aspiration
of self-mergence in God and the world, and attempts to describe this
state from the position of those who have attained it.
[Those who] return from their Ascent into the heaven of Reality, confess
with one voice that they saw nought existent there save the One Real. Some
of these arrived at this scientifically, and others experimentally and subjec-
tively. From these last the plurality of things fell away in its entirety. They
were drowned in the absolute Unitude, and their intelligences were lost in
Its abyssTherein became they as dumbfoundered things. (in Happold
1970: 260)
Note the equating of Reality and the One, the reference to science as a
path to God (mathematics and geometry, particularly were fields of
study in which Islamic scholars excelled) and to the way in which
distinctions and differentiations give way to the undifferentiated
totality of the absolute Unitude. Note also how those who experi-
ence this ecstatic state of union with God are rendered speechless,
unable to describe this state in terms that would be intelligible to
another. Many of the marks of mysticism are evident here.
Jalalud-din Rumi (1207-73) one of the best known Sufi poets, likens
this process of mergence with the divine, to being consumed by a
benign fire, in other poems he uses the metaphor of the ecstasy of love
a traditional trope of Sufi literature.
He set the world aflame,

And laid me on the same;
A hundred tongues of fire
Lapped around my pyre.
And when the blazing tide

Engulfed me, and I sighed,
Upon my mouth in haste
His hand he placed.
(Happold 1970: 257)
*
!
The the One & the Many
If the whole of existence is One (Spinoza, Emerson and Eckhart
provide three different examples of such a belief) or in a state of
mutual co-arising (in the Buddhist sense), manifesting both such-
ness (tathata) and emptiness (sunyata), then we cannot determine
the essence or nature of entities because there are no entities or things
other than the One. It follows that all divisions, categorisations and
distinctions, which we might impose upon aspects of the One (which,

of course, can have no aspects because there is no way that we can
stand outside or apart from the One in order to look at an aspect) are
artificial conventions that have no reality in relation to the One.
There are many ways in which we divide up the indivisible world. The
divisions and categories are relatively arbitrary - agreed and main-
tained through conventions, habits and routines. The different ways in
which cultures divide up the world are encoded and reinforced in
languages, laws, theories, beliefs, rituals and behaviours that vary
from place to place and time to time. Mysticism could be considered
as a counter-balance to these differentiating tendencies, an experienc-
ing of the indivisible One, a reminder of the arbitrariness of how we
divide the One into the Many, and a critique of the belief that any
division is absolute or pre-determined.
If the One is an indivisible, unified, universal continuum, then there

can be no things or entities, just as infinity cant be broken down
into finite parts. Things or entities are linguistic conceptualisa-
tions that do not accord with the state of Oneness the naming of
parts must be a questionable or impossible practice if there are no
parts within an indivisible whole. There can be no differentiations in
an undifferentiated totality. The totality is a multidimensional form-
less infinite field that we cannot comprehend, analyse or picture. No
wonder then that Wittgenstein argued that linguistic statements cannot
represent or picture the world. Only silence (contemplation in
Mertons sense) opens up the possibility of an encounter with the
world as it is.
However it may be possible to consider some kinds of art and poetry

as modes of pointing, showing or demonstrating how the world is -
through metaphor, paradoxical language, poetic images or forms of
visual/spatial representation. Minimalists like Richard Serra, Carl
Andre and Donald Judd, and other sculptors and installation artists
like Eva Hesse, Rachel Whiteread, Jannis Kounellis and Marina
Abramovic, have produced works that can be considered as material
enactments or presentations of the ineffability and actuality of the
world.
In relation to oneness and non-relationality, spatial artists such as

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

false dichotomy, for the One and the Many are both linguistic
terms within the realm of differentiation and relational conventions.
Perhaps we should point to the undifferentiated totality by using an
exclamation mark
!
or a nonsense sound like Blah or Kwatz.
!
The is the inexpressible actuality of all that is. (Maybe we can sound
this symbol by making a click noise with the tongue as is used by
the !kung people of the Kalahari within their musically distinctive
language).
*
One mind
Ralph Waldo Emersons essay, History, begins with this proclamation
of his Transcendentalist belief:
There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to
the same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the right of rea-
son is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato thought, he may
think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen any
man, he can understand. Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to
all that is or can be done. (Emerson 1911: 5)
*
Nature mysticism
Happold (1970: 43) writes about nature-mysticism as follows:
Nature-mysticism is characterized by a sense of the immanence of the One

or God or soul in Nature. In a very typical form it is expressed in Words-
worths lines:
A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.
Richard Jefferies, the nineteenth century English writer, describes in

his spiritual autobiography, Story of my Heart, his experiences on a
hill he used to walk to as a youth:
I was utterly alone with the sun and the earth. Lying down on the grass, I
spoke in my soul to the earth, the sun, the air, and the distant sea far beyond
sight. I thought of the earths firmness - I felt it bear me up; through the
grassy couch there came an influence as if I could feel the great earth speak-
ing to me Through every grass blade in the thousand, thousand grasses;
through the million leaves, veined and edge-cut, on bush and tree; through
the song-notes and the marked feathers of the birds; through the insects
hum and the colour of the butterflies; through the soft warm air, the flecks
of clouds dissolving - I used them all for prayer (in Happold 1970: 386)
Later in the same text he writes:
Now is eternity, now I am in the midst of immortality Open my mind,

give my soul to see, let me live it now on earth, while I hear the burring of
the larger bees, the sweet air in the grass, and watch the yellow wheat wave
beneath me. (ibid: 392)
*
Nature as our creation
As an expression of her chronic uneasiness with Nature-mysticism,
Joyce Carol Oates quotes, approvingly, Oscar Wilde, writing at the
end of the 19th Century:
Nature is no great mother who has borne us. She is our creation. It is in our
brain that she quickens to life. Things are because we see them, and what
we see, and how we see it, depend on the Arts that have influenced us. To
look at a thing is very different from seeing a thing At present, people see
fogs, not because there are fogs, but because poets and painters have taught
them the mysterious loveliness of such effects. (in Halpern & Frank 2001:
231)
*
Dakota Wise Man (just prior to 1890)
The following extract was considered by Levi-Strauss, in his book,
Totemism, to exemplify, a metaphysical philosophy common to all
the Sioux from the Osage in the south to the Dakota in the north,
according to which things and beings are nothing but materialized
forms of creative continuity. (in McLuhan 1973: 177)
Everything as it moves, now & then, here & there, makes stops. The bird as
it flies stops in one place to make its nest, and in another to rest in its flight.
A man when he goes forth stops when he wills. So the god has stopped. The
sun, which is so bright & beautiful, is one place where he has stopped. The
moon, the stars, the winds, he has been with. The trees, the animals, are all
where he has stopped, and the Indian thinks of these places & sends his
prayers there to reach the place where the god has stopped & win help & a
blessing.
(ibid: 37)
An oak leaf is a thought. It is a manifest idea.

All of nature is some intelligent beings
meditation on being.
(Davenport 1984: 244)
*
A geometry of infinity? Mysticism and the infinite

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

opposed to what is not ineffable is to make it finite once more. To say
anything is to say too much!
McFarlane goes on:
The Infinite is paradoxical and contradictory. Yet, while it cannot be de-

fined or represented in rational terms, it is nevertheless profoundly mean-
ingful. The Infinite is a numinous reality that has flooded the human mind
with awe and inspiration for thousands of years. Throughout history, the in-
tuition of the Infinite has been known by equally profound and paradoxical
terms: the Absolute, the One, the Unconditioned, the Unlimited, the Indi-
visible, and the Indefinite. Philosophers have identified it with Reality and
Truth. Mystics have called it God, Brahman, Allah, and Tao. (ibid)
To which list could be added, the Void, Emptiness and the Ocean of
Indeterminacy a phrase used by St John of Damascus to speak
about God.
McFarlane proceeds to outline the history of the infinite as a mathe-

matical concept, from Pythagoras to Zeno, to Aristotle and Duns
Scotus. He then discusses the contribution made by Nicholas of Cusa
(1401-1464) to these historical developments. Apparently Nicholas
had a mystical illumination in 1437 during a journey home from
Constantinople. (ibid) This vision had a profound effect on his

thinking enabling him to discuss the infinite in relation to what he
calls the coincidence of opposites. His mystical insight involved an
apprehension of God as beyond, or antecedent to, distinction and
indistinction, antecedent to any limits, categories or propositions.
McFarlane remarks, According to Nicholas, this logic of infinitude
unites opposites, transcends comparison, overcomes limits of discur-
sive reasoning, and goes beyond both positive and negative theology.
(ibid) In order to understand the concept of the coincidence of
opposites it may be useful to look at the example of another concept
which Nicholas introduced into fifteenth century philosophy, learned
ignorance. McFarlane writes:
Learned ignorance itself is a coincidence of opposites, for it teaches that the

more we know our ignorance, the more we attain to true knowledge. Thus,
as learned ignorance is perfected, knowledge and ignorance coincide. (ibid)
Just as if we travel in a straight line any point on a sphere will be

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

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

sial idea that there was only one God, an eternal sphere. Borges
describes how Plato, in the Timaeus, considers the sphere to be the
most perfect and uniform shape, because all points on its surface are
equidistant from the centre. (ibid)
By the twelfth century a French theologian, Alain de Lille, articulates

what Borges calls this formula, which future generations would not
forget: God is an intelligible sphere, whose centre is everywhere and
whose circumference is nowhere. (ibid: 7) Through medieval
writings, Dantes Divine Comedy and into the Renaissance the
metaphor is repeated. By 1584, Giordano Bruno, explaining Coperni-
cuss ideas about space, writes: We can state with certainty that the
universe is all centre, or that the centre of the universe is everywhere
and the circumference nowhere. (ibid: 8) Borges claims that while
Bruno found the idea of infinite space to be liberating, Pascal in the
seventeenth century, found it abhorrent (it was a labyrinth and an
abyss). (ibid) Borges delights in paradoxes and he notes that Pascal
hated the universe, and yearned to adore God. But God was less real
to him than the hated universe. In his manuscript Pascal begins to
write A frightful sphere, the centre of which is. But frightful
(effroyable) doesnt appear in the final published version. What does
appear, driven perhaps by the genetic force of metaphor, is: It
[nature] is an infinite sphere, the centre of which is everywhere, the
circumference nowhere. (ibid: 9)
I dont know why Borges omits Nicholas of Cusa from his history of
this particular metaphor. Maybe, as the blind director of the national
library, Borges had an acute awareness of both infinity and the finite.
The thousands of books that were his responsibility must have seemed
an infinite archive of writing and reading. On the other hand, even for
someone with a prodigious memory (which Borges had), forgetfulness
trims the infinite to a finitude of repeated stories and remembered
metaphors. In his poem, In Memory of Angelica, Borges reflects on
another face of infinity.
How many possible lives must have gone out

in this so modest and diminutive death,
how many possible lives, which fate would turn
to memory, or else oblivion?
[]
like her, I am dead to infinite destinies
which chance makes inaccessible to me.
[]
A slab of marble tends her memory.
Over us looms atrocious history.
(1979: 177)
Out of the infinite possibilities that each coming into existence

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

Polish the lenses time and again.
[]
Free of metaphor and myth, he grinds
A stubborn crystal: the infinite
Map of the One who is all His stars.
(1985: 213)
In, Le Regret DHeraclite, he imagines Heraclitus, whose thinking we

only know from fragments and from the writings of so many men,
looking back on the flux of a life which was never his and never that
of a man he particularly envied. This is the whole poem:
I, whove been so many men, have never been

He in whose embrace Matilda Urbach spent.
(263)
He ascribes these two lines to Gaspar Camerarius, in Deliciae

Poetarum Borussiae, VII, 16. Given that many of Borges ascriptions
are hoaxes, attributions to fictional authors, I am left, as so often in
reading this Quixotic Argentinian confabulist, unsure of my ground,
uncertain what to believe, feeling all kinds of meanings and references
slip through my fingers. It is no coincidence that Borges titled one of
his collections of poems, The Book of Sand.
*
Mysticism, Dasein, indeterminacy & the open work
Id like to add a few brief points to the various accounts and working
definitions of mysticism given by James, Happold, Merton, Russell, et
al. Mystical experiences involve, at some level, a destabilisation or
deconstruction of the subject and a reconstruction in a form that the
individual feels to be qualitatively different. Nearly all accounts
suggest that some kind of transformation occurs to, and in, the
individual for instance, expressed as a process of unknowing,
entering a darkness or a state of egolessness or unity, experienc-
ing a profound sense of nonduality, and a heightened awareness of
being here. The experience of unity often involves a perception of
the dissolution of boundaries, categories and divisions and a profound
feeling of relatedness with all that is, an awareness of the mutuality of
existence. These experiences, which are somehow both destabilising
and harmonious, liberating and reassuring, give rise to a re-oriented
sense of self and a revitalisation of the personality that is often very
long-lasting. Accounts of mystical experiences also present a sense of
letting-go, an experience of being that is more like an opening or
clearing in which things arise without intention or will an accep-
tance of indeterminacy and interdependence. We can relate Heideg-
gers thinking about Dasein as an openness, a clearing or a nothing-
ness to Umberto Ecos concept of the artwork as an open work
extended in relation to the self: the idea of the self as an open work, a
site of unfolding possibilities, a field of relationships and potential
mergence with all that is. And these ideas can be linked back to
concepts of indeterminacy and infinity, and to emptiness and
suchness as discussed in Part 4.
*
Anish Kapoor: vertiginous stone and infinite space
Anish Kapoor is an example of an artist, who for a time at least, made
work that manifests qualities of the mystical via negativa. In a
conversation with Friedhelm Mennekes, Kapoor acknowledges his
interest in the German mystic Meister Eckhart, references to whose
writings he came across in the books of Ananda K. Coomaraswamy.
According to Kapoor, Coomaraswamy saw life as a totality and [he]
was convinced that artistic endeavour was a unifying process so that
each individual artist would become an integral part of this synthesis.
(Kapoor & Mennekes 2003: 243) Kapoor refers to his need to mani-
fest a kind of emptiness in his work, a quality that, paradoxically, he
achieves by a process of letting-go, stepping outside, or inside, his
own volition: The real work must be without intention. (244) As an
example of such a work he describes his sculpture, Descent into
Limbo, made for the Documenta 9 exhibition in 1992:
Upon entering the building, you could only see the hole in the floor: the
dark descent. The darkness hovered between meaning and non-meaning and
moved between nothingness and the absolute centre of everything, between
abundance and emptiness and yet it was not abstract. (246)
Using dense matt black or deep blue pigment to line holes or concaved
recessions in stone, Kapoor manages to induce a sensory disorienta-
tion in those who encounter works like Descent into Limbo, Adam or
Void Field the latter works made in 1989. The light-absorbent
qualities of the pigment remove the reflective cues that enable us to
perceive spatial depth. The dark holes or recessions appear to be
infinite - sensory voids that often induce a feeling of vertigo. Descent
into Limbo maximises this sense of instability and disorientation by
presenting the viewer/participant with a stark hole in the floor, a
hole that could be bottomless, a deep well or abyss. What is particu-
larly interesting in Kapoors work is the coming together (a coinci-
dence of opposites?) of a rich sensory experience and a feeling of
nothingness or infinite space, material physicality and metaphysical
emptiness. In making the first of his Void series, a bowl-shaped form,
coloured on the inside with a very, very dark blue, Kapoor describes
how he realised that his previous work
had been full of content. Now for the first time it was truly empty [] It
was a very clear dark void form. Dark and empty. The opposite of the Pla-
tonic idea of looking into the light from the back of a dark cave. This was
darkness. The only content that was necessary, was already there. (244)
He refers to these dark voids as spaces of the possible. (245) For

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

into a wilderness All words to dust did chafe the air Miseries & wants
were puddle into a drought, as if my own light did drown them A small
rain of joy did rise I was dreamed into a stone & into a melting & lost all
skinfolded form into this shimmering These rags of words are not enough
How would it be to touch you into what it is How to put fingers to eter-
nity or to swim with the void Neither here nor there nor doubting nor any
certainty nor any ashes of this quick fire It is & I am shadowed by its
light
(composed from fragments of John Bunyans, To Be a Pilgrim)
*
Kenneth Rexroth
Seemingly a long way from Borges narratives of infinitude and
Kapoors vertiginous sculpture, stands the work of the poet, Kenneth
Rexroth, many of whose writings explore a mystical sense of being
and the immanence of the divine in nature. While Rexroth wrote
extensively about experiences which manifest in an ecstatic form
many of the characteristics of mystical insight, he was also a writer
deeply engaged in the social, political and cultural debates of his time.
He was a radical intellectual, critic and activist who did much to
develop the artistic culture of the Bay Area around San Francisco.
Despite his notoriously turbulent life, his womanising and his many
fractured relationships with other intellectuals, artists and poets,
Rexroth produced a body of work that is distinguished by its accessi-
bility, lucidity and eloquence. At times rhapsodic and ecstatic,
sometimes angry and full of protestations at the injustices he per-
ceived around him, much of his writing is measured and elegiac, the
voice of someone who finds in the space of the poem a place in which
to step aside from the flow of conflicts and suffering (received and
inflicted) that often overwhelmed him. The process of writing poems
seemed to afford Rexroth both a way of reflecting on and detaching
himself from conflict and suffering, and maintaining contact, however
briefly, with a more harmonious and joyfully ecstatic mode of being.
The tension between these two strands of discourse is evident, not
only in Rexroths life, but in many of his poems and translations. In
Time Is the Mercy of Eternity (Rexroth 2003: 545) he writes:
Far away the writhing city

Burns in a fire of transcendence
And commodities. The bowels
Of men are wrung between the poles
Of meaningless antithesis.
And yet this image of conflict is immediately followed by these lines:
The holiness of the real

Is always there, accessible
In total immanence.
For Rexroth, the holiness of the real is a state that is immanent in

the whole of life, to be found within the everyday affairs of the
writhing city, not in some other reality or in the cloisters of acade-
mia or the institutionalised church. Undoubtedly Rexroth himself
found it hard to realise this state, except in the making of his poetry
and in his life-long practice of walking, climbing and camping in the
Sierras. In his political thinking Rexroths sought to unite apparently
mutually-exclusive strands of egalitarian socialism and anarchist
individualism. He was suspicious of institutions and mainstream
political organisations.
In For Eli Jacobson, written in 1952 to commemorate the death of an

old friend, he reflects on the hopes of an age of social emancipation
and harmony that he and Jacobson thought, naively, they would live to
see realised: the new / world where man was no longer / wolf to man,
but men and women / were all brothers and lovers / together. We will
not see it. (ibid: 541) However, though he recognises that this
golden age will not happen, he believes that it was, and is, worth
working for. He reckons that Jacobson had a good life. Even all / its
sorrows and defeats and / disillusionments were good. (ibid) This
acceptance of the sorrows and defeats provides a note of realism to
offset the romantic left-wing dreaming that might otherwise make this
an overly-sentimental poem. For Rexroth, the pursuit of social justice
and the egalitarian state is an integral part of the poets agenda, even
though he knows that these aspirations may never be fulfilled indeed
he knows that all this has happened before, / many times. (ibid)
Underpinning Rexroths social and political activism is a belief that

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

mindscape. Inscribed into the poems of Tu Fu and Rexroth there is a
melancholy air, a yearning for peace and tranquillity. In his translation
of Tu Fus poem, Written on the Wall of Changs Hermitage,
Rexroth/Tu Fu writes: Life whirls past like drunken wildfire.

(Rexroth 1971: 4) Rexroths troubled personality, stormed by anger,
cruelty and remorse, yet aspiring to compassion and care, found a
companion in time, an ancient counsel in the sensitive mind of Tu Fu
who, like Rexroth, addressed both the public powers of the day and
the many intimate friendships he both sought and disturbed. Both Tu
Fu and Rexroth seem to have been envious of, and in awe of, those
who have found peace of mind and stillness in action:
[] You have learned to be gentle

As the mountain deer you have tamed.
The way back forgotten, hidden
Away, I become like you,
An empty boat, floating, adrift.
(Rexroth 1971: 4)
Rexroths range of reading was extensive, and many poets, students

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

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

evil of his history, are not to be excused, let alone somehow compen-
sated for, by his poetry. But he does demonstrate in his writing a
profoundly self-aware and self-critical analysis of his own shortcom-
ings. In his work we see how a flawed and troubled life, scrutinised
and stripped bare by contemplation, can be laid out for us so that we
can see its geometry, / Its crystallography, and / Its astronomy. The
poem becomes a kind of clearing in which the contraries that make
up a persons life are presented without much comment or judge-
mental analysis. In Rexroths case the exercise of a poetic discipline
can be considered as equivalent to the disciplines of prayer and
meditation in a monastic context, or to the merging of self in love or
nature found in Sufism or transcendentalists like Thoreau, or to the
letting-be that Heidegger advocates as a mode of understanding
human being.
*
Liminality
moth to light moon trees stone

a web of inbetweens
a collecting & a dispersing
so it goes afternoon
into evening into
night and the infinite
dawn
*
Fire in the House
Consider the metaphor of a fire, which burns too fiercely, threatening
to engulf the house. The fire is the self, or monkey mind, driven by
wanting, craving, discriminating, dividing and categorising. Most of
our time is spent throwing more and more fuel on the fire - feeding the
flames. The Taoist and the mystic argue that we need to deny the fire
its fuel in order to find peace, understanding and freedom. Or as a Zen
master might say: leave the fire alone and it'll die down all by itself.
As noted above the Taoist calls this wu-wei, doing by not-doing.
But, we might ask, what's wrong with the fire burning fiercely? Isn't
this what drives us to progress, change, invent new things, improve
our standard of living? Isn't the mystical way a recipe for passivity,
for social and political inaction and stasis? Isn't the fire what drives
our moral action - our sense of right and wrong, justice and injustice?
Isn't our True Self, rooted in the Ground of Being, likely to lead to an
amoral indifference to social and political conditions? No doubt at
various times and in some places these criticisms have been legiti-
mately directed at mystics, times when a quietist passivity has
dominated mystical practices in such a way as to lead to a world-
weariness or a removal from worldly affairs or a tacit complicity in
social injustice or political inequality. On the other hand there are
many examples that can be put forward to support the contention that
mystical states of consciousness can energise individuals to speak and
take action against injustices and inequalities and towards peaceful-
ness, tolerance and emancipation. There are many Quakers who might
be included in a list of examples, though some of them might object to
the term mystical being applied to their encounters with that of
God in everyone. Hildegard von Bingen, Gandhi, Tolstoy, Thoreau,
Charles de Foucauld (the founder of the order of contemplatives called
the Little Brothers and Sisters of Christ), Thich Nat Hanh, Joseph
Beuys and Thomas Merton are other names that come to mind.
*
Mary Oliver, (1990: 6) in her poem, Spring: There is only one
question: / how to love this world.
*
The metaphysics of light
In a poem from the second volume of his religious verse, Silex
Scintillans (1655), Henry Vaughan begins with:
They are all gone into the world of light!

And I alone sit lingering here;
Their very memory is fair and bright,
And my sad thoughts doth clear.
And ends with:
Either disperse these mists, which blot and fill

My perspective (still) as they pass,
Or else remove me hence unto that hill,
Where I shall need no glass.
(in Gardner 1966: 275-277)
Maybe Vaughan intends a double meaning here. On the one hand he is

referring to the dead, to angels and souls; on the other he could be
referring to moments of insight, flashes of mystical lucidity, glimpses
of the divine. Gardner points out that, in Vaughans day, perspective
was a term used to denote spy-glass. The analogy of the lens or
window is a familiar device in mystical literature. The idea is that we
look at the world through a glass lens. The glass itself is the individu-
alistic self. Self-awareness consists of being aware of the glass. The
more we are aware of the glass, the less we are aware of the world
beyond. The reality of the glass overtakes and dominates our aware-
ness of the reality of the real world.
In Cartesian consciousness and rationalistic analytical thinking the

glass is emphasised. We draw grids, lines and compartments on its
surface in order to categorise, divide and quantify what is out there.
Mystics suggest that in doing this what we see becomes distorted and
modified by the glass. The disciplines of mysticism are used to clean
the lens and to focus on the reality itself. In the words of Jacob
Boehme: If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would
appear to men as it is, infinite. (in Wilson, 1957) Given that many
mystics seek a re-union with the Ground of Being, the ego or indi-
vidualistic self is often considered a hindrance - one of the barriers
dividing us from Reality. Therefore the ego has to be made transpar-
ent, the glass has to be cleaned and purified in order to let in the light
of divine illumination. Mysticism urges us not to mistake the glass,
the lens or the image on the lens, for the real world. Of course, in
using the metaphor of a lens and the world we are maintaining a
dualistic mode of thought and expression that mystics question and
refute. There is no lens separate from the world. Lens and world are
interdependent facets of one integral reality - the ! as described above.
The metaphor of cleaning the lens can be linked to what Blaser calls
the metaphysics of light tradition within mysticism. This tradition is
complemented by, or entwined with, another strand of mystical
thought that Blaser traces from Dionysius the Aeropagite (Pseudo-
Dionysius): we now call it the agnostic, but the agnosia was the
business of working always with the darkness, the unknown, and the
incomprehensibility. (Blaser 1974: 52) Blaser claims that Pseudo-
Dionysius influenced Dante into believing that the real is light itself,
that it begins in light and that it ends in light, both, and so as a
consequence whatever is substantial, the way the real moves, what
makes it continuous and full and alive, is the nature of light. (Blaser
1974: 36) And this is the light of illumination, of understanding light
as energy and the awakened mind, the meeting of physics and meta-
physics.
In the words of Thomas Vaughan (the brother of Henry Vaughan),

matter is the house of light. (in Blaser 1974: 46) It could be argued
that the mind has a similar relationship to the body, as Vaughans light
has to matter. The mind is the dynamic resonating wave-pulse of the
body, the neurological light or consciousness.
*
The vagaries of belief and logic:
Belief in a reality quite different from what appears to the senses arises with
irresistible force in certain moods, which are the source of most mysticism,
and of most metaphysics. [] When the intensity of emotional conviction
subsides, a man who is in the habit of reasoning will search for logical
grounds in favour of the belief which he finds in himself. But since the be-
lief already exists, he will be very hospitable to any ground that suggests it-
self. (Russell 1963: 21)
*
James Turrells light projections
The American artist, James Turrell, has used natural and artificial light
in many of his works since the mid nineteen-sixties. One way of
framing and interpreting Turrells work is in relation to the meta-
physics of light tradition. In the single wall projections, like Decker,
1967, an intense rectangle of white light is projected on to a wall
surface within a confined interior space that is otherwise dark. The
appearance of the rectangle of light changes depending upon the angle
at which it is viewed. Sometimes it seems to be part of the wall, at
other times, or from other angles, it may appear to be a luminous sheet
hovering a few inches away from the wall. In other instances it seems
as if you were looking into an unfathomable space that receded into
the wall an effect not dissimilar to viewing the dark voids in
Kapoors works, though produced with brightness rather than dark-
ness. Turrell doesnt set out to deceive those who observe and
participate in his work. He remarks:
All of these pieces existed at the limits or very slightly inside the limits of
the physical space. They affected the viewers awareness of the space and
tended to create a hypothetical or imaginary space within the gallery that
could be dissolved on approaching the image. In all the Projection Pieces, it
was important that the quality of illusion be both convincing and dissoluble.
(in Birnbaum 2002: 64)
The perceptual conundrum posed by Decker and other works, is on

one level the product of ambiguous visual and spatial cues, and on
another level it is a conflict between appearances and reality. Indeed
works like this, and, it could be argued many of the works of Kapoor
and Agnes Martin, raise questions about what is real? What is it that
we are experiencing? To what extent are our perceptions reliable or
true? What is the relationship between our perceptions and the
world out there? We switch from one reading of the work to
another.
In the case of another series of Turrells works, the cross corner

projections (examples include: Afrum-Proto, 1966, and Catso Blue, or
Catso Red, 1967), the perceptual and cognitive riddles are more
dramatic. In these works the rectangle of light is projected into the
corner of the gallery space in such a way that from a distance there
appeared to be a cube floating off the floor, yet in some manner
attached to the corner of the space. From a distance this space had
solidity, but appeared to be literally composed of light. (ibid: 59) The
illusion of luminous corporeality was extremely convincing, yet it
dissolved when the observer moved to another position in relation to
the work. The object (the cube of light) only existed as a fleeting
phantom, a perceptual construct that the viewer could see was there
and yet not there. The relativity of perception could be experienced in
a very intense way. We could consider this as an eloquent demonstra-
tion of the Buddhist concept of sunyata, emptiness, in that the bright
cube, like all objects, could be seen to have no essential self-existence,
it only existed as a transitory manifestation of relationships and
interdependence. Looked at in Taoist terms we could see the appear-
ance of the cube as a manifestation of the way in which the myriad
creatures arise out of the inchoate unity of the Tao, or in Eckharts
terms the Many appearing out of the One.
In a conversation with Richard Whittaker (2005) Turrell, who was

brought up as a Quaker, mentions that My grandmother used to tell
me that as you sat in Quaker silence you were to go inside to greet the
light. That expression stuck with me. This suggests a direct connec-
tion with the metaphysics of light tradition though many Friends
would dispute this way of articulating it. Like many Quakers, Turrell
prefers not to use the grandiose language of theology to talk about his
beliefs and experiences. In talking about two astronomer colleagues
who attend his local Quaker meeting, he may also perhaps be talking
about himself and his artmaking:
In some ways they have difficulty with organized religion, but in another
way they are peering into this face of God every night where the real awe
of it is absolutely evident to them. But to have some way to express this in
the secular world is difficult for them, very difficult. On the other hand, they
are some of the more devout people I know. (ibid)
He tells of other events in his early life that have a bearing on his later
work:
I was out in a garden when I was a child, and things took on a life and a lu-
minance that was like this near-death experience, with eyes open. Then
once, in Ireland I was coming in a boat, in from Fastnet toward Whitehall. It
was absolutely still. A silver light came about that bathed everything. This
was an experience I had in a conscious, awake state. (ibid)
He goes on:
I would like to have the physicality of my light at least remind you of this
other way of seeing. [] Its terrible hubris to say this is a religious art. But
it is something that does remind us of that way we are when we are thinking
of things beyond us. (ibid)
Turrells installations can be considered as viewing chambers,

spaces in which the act of seeing and sensing a space are intensified,
problematised and celebrated. Nothing is represented. What we
encounter are instances of perception, light and dark, qualities of
space and experiences of being in a space. Turrell provides us with an
opening or clearing in which perceptions, thoughts, phenomena
arise, and in which we experience an intensification of being. In
engaging with works by Kapoor, Martin and Turrell, we may feel a
sense of disorientation and destabilisation as we grapple with the
riddles they pose. While the context may be secular rather than
religious, an art gallery rather than a monastery or temple, it may not
be too far-fetched to describe these experiences as momentary
awakenings to a way of being that is close to mystical experience as
described by mystics and philosophers over the centuries.
*
Silhouette: Thomas Traherne
I was a stranger from dust I rose in my bones was knowledge all things were
spotless & pure & nothing in the world and yet out of nothing all tears & quarrels
were brought to pass in silence did I see how soft the stars did entertain my senses
these eyes & hands did seek the lofty skies & touch chaos all that is born dies into
the dust of light from which all things rise: trees & wheat, lively air & time, smiles &
sorrows, rare & ordinary things
(composed from fragments of texts used by Gerald Finzi in Dies Natalis, opus 8
including quotes from Trahernes Centuries of Meditation and Arioso)
*
Jacob Boehme: The true heaven is everywhere, even in that very
place where thou standest and goest. If mans eyes were but opened
he should see God everywhere in his heaven, for heaven stands in the
innermost moving everywhere. (in Palmer, 1954)
*
Agnes Martin
Since the nineteen-sixties the American painter, Agnes Martin, has
made works that employ a few basic elements. Thin graphite lines and
watercolour or acrylic paint (usually applied in thin washes) are
structured in accordance with an underlying grid. Sometimes the
graphite and/or colour take the form of vertical or horizontal lines or
bands, sometimes there is an explicit grid drawn with graphite or
coloured ink. For the past thirty years or so, the larger paintings have
been made on square canvases either six-feet or, more recently five-
feet, in size. Smaller works, often only nine or ten inches square, have
been made on paper.
Formally, Untitled #8, 1977, is a typical work from the period,

although it is made with India ink, graphite and gesso on a six-foot
square canvas. Horizontal graphite lines are repeated close together
across the whole width of the canvas. Five vertical lines are arranged
at equal intervals to form a grid. When a work like this is encountered
the response of viewers is often one of surprise. Words like beauti-
ful, delicate and subtle are accompanied by phrases like so
rich, what a presence they have, the stillness is captivating and
they have a kind of aura about them. Simple means are used to
generate both simple and much more complex responses. Untitled
#8, has the stability one would expect from a square object. From a
distance it is the pale tonality and the simple squareness that one sees.
Moving closer we become aware of a shifting sensation as our eyes
begin to perceive the lines that seem to hover or quiver within the
square field. The stillness of the object as a whole seems to be
disturbed by this shimmering of lines - lines that are themselves
slightly modulated and uneven as the graphite picks out the undulating
surface of the canvas. The work has a phenomenological immediacy
and complexity that belies its apparent simplicity. There is a kind of
subtle disorientation at work, an undermining of certainties and
expectations. The perceptual processes of trying to focus on thin lines

repeated in close proximity to each other against a ground that is
spatially hard to fix in relation to the lines, generate feelings of
indefinability, formlessness and intensity.
In a very different form to that generated by Kapoors work, we

experience a similar kind of intense inability to rationalise or make
definite our place in the world (the space surrounding the work). We
come face-to-face with the indefinable and the ineffable, the threshold
of perception and cognition. Martin writes: My interest is in experi-
ence that is wordless and silent, and in the fact that this experience can
be expressed for me in art work that is also wordless and silent. (in
McEvilley 1993: 71) Paintings like Untitled #8, present us with a
vivid experience of the way in which forms (lines) arise out of an
undifferentiated ground the way the Many arise out of the One. The
painting presents us with a plane of attention and awareness (in
Haskell 1992: 102) - a vehicle for contemplative states of conscious-
ness. In this sense it plays a similar role to prayer in the discipline of
monks like Merton or to the mandala in the practices of Tantric
Buddhism both of which function as a plane of attention and
awareness, a device for distilling mystical insight out of the flow of
everyday experience.
Martin writes very eloquently and concisely, conveying the ideas and
beliefs that underpin her art practice. Here are a few examples without
commentary:
The silence on the floor of my house

Is all the questions and all the answers that have been known in
the world (Haskell 1992: 25)
I used to look in my mind for the unwritten page

if my mind was empty enough I could see it (ibid: 16)
These paintings are about freedom from the cares of this world
from worldliness
When your eyes are open

you see beauty in anything. (ibid: 17)
Anna C. Chave argues that a kind of egolessness sets Martin apart

from her male peers. (in Haskell 1992: 132) There is something very
non-assertive and humble about Martins work that Chave suggests
may be anachronistic at a time when self-assertion has been the
watchword of feminists. However, as Chave points out, Martins
humility and self-effacement have been remarkably effective in terms
of the respect and the amount of serious critical attention given to her
work by the male-dominated art establishment.
While it is usual to frame Martins work within the context of mini-

malist art and classicism, Thomas McEvilley (1993: 69-70) argues
that in her writings and her work there are echoes of Taoist texts, a
body of literature with which Martin has lived closely. There is a
suggestion in Lao Tzu, that to follow the Way of the Tao all precon-
ceptions, judgements and worldly knowledge must be abandoned. As
evidence that Agnes Martin sympathises with this idea McEvilley
quotes from Martins unpublished lecture notes, On the Perfection
Underlying Life:
If it is the unconditioned life that you want [,] you do not know what you
should do or what you should have done. We will just have to let everything
go. Everything we know and everything everyone else knows is condi-
tioned. (ibid: 72)
This takes us back to Mertons description of his sense of liberation

from an illusory difference arising in his Louisville vision, and to
the unknowing knowing of the author of the Cloud of Unknowing,
and to the aspiration towards, and experience of, self-surrender or
mergence in the accounts of Sufi and other mystics. It also accords
with the Taoist ideas of letting-go of socially conditioned values and
behaviours in order to act in accordance with the Tao.
*
Marcel Duchamp & Pierre Cabanne: a dialogue about not-believing
in being
Duchamp: [] I dont believe in positions.

Cabanne: But what do you believe in?
Duchamp: Nothing, of course! The word belief is another error. Its like
the word judgement. Theyre both horrible ideas, on which the world is
based.
Cabanne: Nevertheless, you believe in yourself?
Duchamp: I dont believe in the word being. The idea of being is a human
invention Its an essential concept which doesnt exist at all in reality.
(in McEvilley 1999: 55)
*
John Cage on this life and the Tao of art:
Art is not an attempt to bring order out of chaos but simply a way of wak-
ing up to the very life were living, which is so excellent once one gets
ones mind and ones desire out of its way and lets it act of its own accord.
(in Perloff 1996b: 202)
*
in the spiders web
the spider is
free
*
Silhouette: Lucrezia Tornabuoni de Medeci
No more desire, no more that hides what is, no more is heard, her prayer as spark
from wood from stone mere breath no more, already spent this sign no more is
heard, not once no more this sign, this spark, divine speech unable to hide no
more to speak, why do you say, to discern such spark a mere breath awakens not to
see to discern such devout breath a mere spark will fly that hides before it comes to
be
To fabricate one day such desire, one day to make known such love & to conceal
death, fears, suffered times of nothing concealed alone such desire made known
For a long time the other said in that place whence such desire concealed had suffered
a long time: a long time I have wanted to tell you, so captured & bound to me always
as the breath is bound free no more to speak
(composed from fragments of de Medecis, Sacred Narratives, in Tylus 2001)
*
Neither this, nor that
Montaigne, in his Apology for Raimund Sebond, reminds us to
suspend judgement and conviction , to doubt all theories and concepts,
including God and mysticism: Is it not better to remain in suspense
than to entangle yourself in the many errors that the human fancy has
produced? (in McEvilley 1999: 13)
*
Neither here nor there
In the dark world of the pond there is another version of this world
the symmetry of reflections binds the two where they meet is
neither here nor there a nowhere exists that is this invisible skin
this transparency where the light changes direction the shaft of lily
breaks (yet is unbroken) the skater meets its opposite number (yet
there is no number to this once and only world
*
In the end
there is
only
!
Part 10
The discontinuum of consciousness:

ambiguity, indeterminacy & multiplicity
I dont see a synthesis,

but a melee.
Robert Duncan
(in Hoover 1994: 29)
These fragments I have shored

against my ruins.
T.S.Eliot, The Wasteland
(in Eliot 1936: 77)
In this section I briefly describe some of the structural ideas and

methods that are employed in the present volume and link them to the
work of other artists and writers. I also trace some of the historical
vectors that shape my thinking and place the compositional ethos
manifested and discussed in these pages into a wider cultural frame-
work particularly in relation to ideas about knowledge.
In writing this section I ought to point out that Im interested in

making and discussing a kind of art that imitates nature in her
manner of operation. (Cage 1966: 194) Ive adopted this notion about
art from John Cage, who, in turn, got it from Coomaraswamy. Implicit
in this approach is a belief that somehow structures in art, modes of
composition, should approximate to structures and processes operating
in the wider world.
*
Composing the Text
The text in many parts of this book is organised in a series of sections
which are both freestanding and in some way related to the others.
314 The discontinuum of consciousness
Each section and sub-section illuminates a different aspect of the field

of enquiry. The images, and the more unusual texts and formatting,
provide a visual enactment or complementary picturing of some of the
ideas under discussion. The fragmentation and discontinuity within
the text are presented as forms of resistance to normalising discourses
of knowing, making and being. The sequencing of text fragments and
images is intended to surprise, to disrupt expectations and to encour-
age associative thinking on the part of the reader - an invitation to
participate in the construction of meaning and interpretation. The
reiteration of some ideas and themes in different sections generates
rhythmic patterns of attention and insistence that parallel the ways in
which we turn over ideas and phrases in our mind, coming at the same
notion from different angles in order to open out different meanings
and possibilities.
Our consciousness is characterised by its multi-dimensional complex-

ity. We process information, sensations and memories in convoluted
chains of images, linguistic patterns, moods and emotions. There is a
layered simultaneity to this processing that adds to its complexity and
to the indeterminacy of meanings, actions and possibilities that arise
from moment-to-moment. In our everyday thinking and minding,
sequences of linear argument are interrupted by reiterations of phrase
and word, detours of association and analogy, eruptions of uncon-
nected images and changes of emotion or mood. This interweaving of
many threads is what gives such resonance and richness to our sense
of being and becoming. We are these complex, fluid, ever-changing
currents of embodied mind - episodic rhythms of linear continuity,
non-linear discontinuity and multi-linear complexity. Collage,
montage, dialogues, networks and layered structures approximate
more closely to the multi-dimensional topography of consciousness
than do single monological narratives or isolated images.
In this book the intermittent continuity and discontinuity, within a

multi-linear field, is also meant to be an enactment of mind, a pictur-
ing of how I am in the world and a record of how images, thoughts,
feelings and ideas arise in consciousness consciousness that is
grounded in the world an embodied mind implicated, through
sensory and symbolic fields, in the ebb and flow of light and matter.
Somehow Im trying, probably with limited success, to combine both
The discontinuum of consciousness 315
a buzzards view of things, soaring above the terrain with a keen-eyed

precision of focus and optical nuance, and a badgers feel of things at
ground level, snuffling into the earth, nudging and scraping at the
tactile grubbiness of mattered space. Trying to combine material
topography and energy field spectroscopy bone and light skin and
eye - rootedness and nonlocality specificity and indeterminacy.
*
Assemblage, Pound & play
Andre Furlani (2002) has written perceptively about Guy Davenports
fiction and essays. He refers to what Davenport calls architectonic
form, a mode of construction that Davenport uses in much of his
work. Furlani writes: In architectonic form, meaning may be gener-
ated more in the interstices between images, citation, and passages of
dialogue than in the content of these elements. Davenport applies the
term assemblage to his work, rather than story.
He traces his compositional indebtedness to early modernists like

Pound and the Vorticists, arguing that a work of art is a form that
articulates forces, making them intelligible. (1987: xi) Furlani (2002)
suggests that in his short stories Davenport has adapted the ideo-
grammatic method of Ezra Pounds Cantos, where a grammar of
images, emblems, and symbols replaces that of logical sequence.
Furlani adds that Davenport follows his modernist precursors in
assuming that a new subject entails the renegotiation of formal
convention.
Despite Furlanis contention that there is a close parallel between

Davenports prose method and the Cubists, the process of renegotia-
tion that happens with each work marks a significant difference
between Cubist (and possibly Vorticist) methods and Davenports
own. Cubist structural modes are developed by Picasso, Braque and
others from work to work over a number of years (say between 1908
and c.1918). Those who employ a Cubist style during this period,
work with that style as a given. Even Picasso, normally a magpie
collector and user of different styles, becomes single-minded in
developing the compositional vocabulary of, firstly, analytical Cubism
and then, synthetic Cubism. In this sense the formal concern domi-
nates all others. Renegotiation, in the sense that Furlani applies it to
Davenports work, is minimised or suspended in favour of a continu-

ity of formal development.
Furlani ends his article by suggesting that a principle of play is at

work in Davenports assemblages: In contrast to the linear, continu-
ous, and temporal conventions of traditional fiction, Davenport
models his texts on the multi-dimensional, discontinuous and spatial
principles of the playing field.
*
In his essay, Ernst Machs Max Ernst, Davenport writes:
A page, which I think of as a picture, is essentially a texture of images

The text of a story is therefore a continuous graph, kin to the imagist poem,
to a collage a page of Pound, a Brakhage film. (1984: 374-375)
*
The discontinuum of consciousness
It seems likely that discontinuity is a structural feature of conscious-
ness. Deepak Chopra (2005: 9) claims that the world is a discontinu-
ity, and every experience arises because of the discontinuity. He goes
on to explain:
If I go to see a movie I see on the screen a continuous picture, but when I go

to the projection room I find out that there is a series of still frames with lit-
tle spaces in between. If I move the reel fast enough, I cannot see the off:
I can only see the on; so I experience in consciousness a continuity. But
the reality is that the movie is a discontinuity. (ibid)
Chopras views seem to be supported by the findings of Dale Purves

at Duke University. According to Oliver Sacks, Purves and his
colleagues have analysed in detail the way in which we perceive
rotating blades of a fan or spokes of a moving wheel, and the related
phenomena of the wagon-wheel illusion which occurs when the
rotating wheels of a wagon in a cowboy film seem to stop or go
backwards. The wagon wheel illusion reflects a lack of synchronisa-
tion between the number of frames per second at which the film
moves and the speed of the rotating wheels. Sacks comments that
having excluded any other cause of discontinuity (intermittent lighting, eye

movements, etc), [Purvess team] conclude that the visual system processes
information in sequential episodes, at the rate of three to twenty such epi-

sodes per second. Normally these sequential images are experienced as an
unbroken perceptual flow. (Sacks 2004: 5)
It may be that movies seem so life-like to us precisely because they

are composed of discrete frames projected at a speed that approxi-
mates to our own process of visual perception. As far as Purves is
concerned
it is precisely this decomposition of what we see into a succession of mo-

ments that enables the brain to detect and compute motion; for all it has to
do is to note the differing positions of objects between successive frames,
and from these calculate the direction and speed of motion. (in Sacks 2004:
6)
Perhaps the discontinuities evident in the films of Stan Brakhage, in

the collages and assemblages of Schwitters and Rauschenberg, and in
the textual constructs of Davenport, Pound, Carson and many other
poets, are reflecting, or approximating to, the structural discontinuities
embedded in the apparent continuity of consciousness.
*
Waking-up: self-discipline rather than self-expression
John Cage, in an interview with Daniel Charles, speaks of the rela-
tionship between art and the world-as-process:
The real [is not] the world as it is [] it is not, it becomes! It moves, it

changes! It doesnt wait for us to change [] The world, the real is not an
object. It is a process [] The function of art at the present time is to pre-
serve us from all logical minimizations that we are at each instant tempted
to apply to the flux of events. To draw us nearer to the process which is the
world we live in. (in Perloff 1996b: 196-197)
This aspiration of Cages, to draw near to the process which is the

world we live in, is stated in a slightly different way when he quotes
Coomaraswamys injunction that art should imitate nature in her
manner of operation a phrase Cage comes back to many times in
his writings and conversations. (see Cage 1966: 194) The artists job
is not to express him or her self, but to generate structures that
approximate to the processes that operate in nature. These structures
are complex, usually made up of many linear determinate strands,
interwoven and layered in such a way that the unfolding totality is an
indeterminate, highly complex, conglomeration of forces and con-

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

had a way of referring to God as the ocean of indeterminacy. If we
connect this with Spinozas identification of God with Nature, the
totality of existence, then we can think of nature and existence as an
ocean of indeterminacy. Within this ocean are countless currents of
determinacy, linear threads of will and intention, maybe even fila-
ments of destiny or fate, but these are frail things, entwined and
knotted like seaweed in such a way that they only add to the indeter-
minate whole.
Indeterminacy is a characteristic of many aspects of life (and of art).

We cant determine how a person will live, what opportunities they
will realise out of all those that are presented to them. Nor can we
determine these things in relation to ourselves. Weather patterns,
natural events, illnesses, accidents, epiphanies, moods, conflicts,
ecstasies these all exhibit high levels of indeterminacy and contrib-
ute to the indeterminacy of our own existence. We have to live with
uncertainty, instability, ambiguity and contradiction. We cant
determine with any accuracy how someone will respond to an art-
work; what thoughts or feelings they will have; what meanings and
interpretations they will make of a painting, or a poem, let alone of
another person or the world.
Heisenberg and Bohr have argued that at the quantum level we can
either observe the momentum of a particle, but not its position, or we
can plot its position but not its momentum. The non-localised effect of
the observer on the observed leads to a deep unpredictability, an
inherent indeterminacy, in relation to our observations and to the
reality that is observed. According to David Bohm (1989: 79-80)
Heisenbergs original formulation of his theory, as the uncertainty
principle suggested that a particle did have a position and momen-
tum, but these facts were unknown to the observer. Neils Bohr argued
that the term ambiguous (or, we might claim, indeterminate) was
more precise, indicating that the values and meaning of the terms
position, momentum and trajectory are inherently ambiguous
they cannot be defined or determined however sophisticated the
observer or the observational apparatus. Jacob Bronowski (1977: 365)
suggests that this principle means that no events, not even atomic
events, can be described with certainty, that is, with zero tolerance.
Therefore, Bronowski argues, another way of thinking about Heisen-

bergs theory is as a Principle of Tolerance: All knowledge, all
information between human beings can only be exchanged within a
play of tolerance. We have to live with indefiniteness and indetermi-
nacy, and be open to the opinions and knowledge of others, who will
be looking at things from a different perspective, a different point and
moment of observation.
Another aspect of indeterminacy connects with ideas discussed in

section 4. If objects and entities are mutually dependent, existing
only as manifestations of a web of relationships, then they have no
essence or fixed identity. Objects have no autonomous self-existence,
they only exist in relation to all that surrounds them. They are neither
this nor that. In the realm of appearances, conventions and linguistic
categorisations we give names to objects, but we need to keep in mind
that we are giving names to evanescent manifestations of the flux and
indeterminacy of existence. As McEvilley (2003: 12) puts it, this
type of indeterminacy goes beyond the problem of knowledge into
ontology. In this mode, we cannot know what something is, not
simply because our information is incomplete, but because it isnt
anything in particular at all.
John Cage (1966: 35-40) is particularly associated with indeterminacy

in relation to music and the arts. In the section entitled, Indeterminacy,
of his three lectures on Composition as Process, Cage is largely
concerned to demonstrate how music which is indeterminate with
respect to its performance is often composed using determinate
means. It is only when these determinate strands (parts) come together
that indeterminacy is generated in the performance each perform-
ance is always different because the parts are always played differ-
ently. We can also point to the indeterminacy involved in all perform-
ances in music, dance and theatre. Scripts, scores and choreography
are all interpreted and played in slightly, or radically, different ways
by different actors, musicians and dancers. Similarly, all the visual
and spatial arts (painting, sculpture, installation, photography, film,
video, etc.) are indeterminate as to reception, however fixed or
determinate the artefact may be. The response of an audience,
individually or collectively, cannot be predicted and may be very
varied. The meanings or interpretations given to a work of art are
highly indeterminate leading to endless critical disputes and chang-

ing critical values, even over a short period of time.
Some artists, composers, choreographers and writers may set out to

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

precisely what Cage is trying to overcome. Cages aspiration is similar
to that expressed by T.S. Eliot, in his oft-quoted aphorism, The role
of art is not to express the personality, but to overcome it. For Cage,
abiding by the outcome of a chance procedure, a decision-making
process outside the immediate aesthetic control of the composer,
opens up the possibility of transformation and surprise: If I am
unhappy after a chance operation, if the result does not satisfy me, by
accepting it I at least have the chance to modify myself, to change
myself. (ibid: 225) Accidental deviations from what is written,
mistakes, are another matter in that they become part of the
indeterminate field of the work they are not intentional and therefore
lie within the realm of purposelessness and play.
In the preface to Lecture on the Weather, Cage (1980: 5) writes about

his selection of passages from Thoreaus writings, using chance
procedures. He argues that:
chance operations are not mysterious sources of the right answers. They
are a means of locating a single one among a multiplicity of answers, and, at
the same time, of freeing the ego from its taste and memory, its concern for
profit and power, of silencing the ego so that the rest of the world has a
chance to enter into the egos own experience whether that be outside or in-
side.
Cage is questioning, among other things, the need to select only one
option out of many. His remarks suggest an affinity to the Pyrrhonist
position, articulated by Sextus Empiricus, that we need to suspend
judgement, to find a way of negotiating the multiplicity, complexity
and ambiguity of life and art that doesnt involve coming down on one
side or another of a binary divide. As Cage writes in his collage/essay
on Jaspers Johns, The situation must be Yes-and-No not either-or.
Avoid a polar situation. (in Perloff 1996b: 213) Or as he writes in his
Lecture on Commitment, We are not committed to this or that. As the
Indians put it: Neti Neti (Not this Not that). We are committed to the
Nothing-in-between whether we know it or not. (Cage 1968: 119)
*
Paradox, contradiction, ambiguity

Were all enmeshed in multiple paradoxes and contradictions, a kind
of confusion of multi-polar gravitational forces pulling us in many
different, often opposing, directions. How do we resolve these
contradictions? Can we? Do we need to? Isnt any persons life a
bundle of contradictions, an entanglement of conflicting hopes,
emotions, memories, ideas and attachments? Isnt this how we are?
Each of us is as much a nexus of unresolvable divergences and
conflicts as we are a continuity and a harmony. These forces are often
irreconcilable, yet we have to find ways of living with them and
making sense of fluid complexity.
William Empson, the author of Seven Kinds of Ambiguity, argued that

life involves maintaining oneself between contradictions that cant be
solved by analysis. (in Phillips 2005) Adam Phillips suggests that
Empson believed that,
We should not be trying to resolve the contradictions, the conflicts in our

lives, []; rather, we should straddle them. We are carried along by the
difficulties we have and the art of living was not, in Empsons striking view,
to try to solve them, which, in any case, is impossible, but to formulate them
as incisively as possible. This is what he thought great literature did for us
and why it was worth our attention. (ibid)
Haffendon, in his biography of Empson, describes him as a connois-

seur of conflict. (ibid) Empsons view seems to echo Wittgensteins
idea that philosophy is an elucidation of language, a process of
trying to say what can be said as lucidly as possible, and to be as clear
about what cant be said. It also brings to mind the Pyrrhonist notion
that we shouldnt be sucked into any conviction that this or that
argument is correct, or to take sides in disputes, or to make judge-
ments. Rather we should hold all possibilities in suspension (Sextuss
epoche), a state of mind in which all dualities and oppositions are seen
with equal clarity and treated with equal respect a kind of compas-
sionate disinterest or dispassionate interest.
*
If we consider the world as a world-in-process and that indeterminacy
is a significant characteristic of our lives, and if we also acknowledge
that there is a need to balance or suspend judgement in the face of the
multiple contradictions, ambiguities and paradoxes that we are
presented with, then we might agree that it may be wise to doubt and
to live with uncertainty as a positive quality. Being non-dogmatic,
tolerant, accepting of impermanence and open to changes of mind and
revisions of opinion, may be less foolish than being dogmatic,
intolerant, resistant to impermanence and closed to revisions of
opinion. Maintaining a state of dispassionate interest or compassionate
disinterest in the multiplicity of views, beliefs and values that sur-
round us, and exercising a robust non-attachment to one fixed belief or
opinion, may be useful ways in which to cope with, and to enjoy, the
complexity and diversity of life. It may be that we should aim to stand
firmly at a point of balance, to be a pivot and an opening, to find the
midpoint, to be in a state of betweenness in the contrarium. (See

elsewhere in this section and Part 7 for more about the contrarium).
*
Kathleen Jamie, the Scottish poet, writes:
[] my job is not to get angry and proselytise. [] It would be easy to

jump in and be judgemental and start ranting [but what] I wanted to do []
was get the ego out of the way and just look and see whats there. [] Po-
etry is a sort of connective tissue where myself meets the world, and it rises
out of that, that liminal place. (in Scott 2005: 23)
*
Perspectivism, revisibility & ideas about knowledge
In relation to some of the topics already explored (the knowing body,
the self as open work, picturing mind, the locus of mind-in-the-world
and the mutuality of existence) we have seen how we are all impli-
cated in the world as knowing bodies, mutually existent beings
without essences or discrete boundaries. As such we each have a
situated presence within the spatio-temporal field. We each constitute
a particular localised nexus of changing relationships with other
beings, energies, cultures and minds. We are in a sense interstices of
consciousness in the continuum of existence. We each have a perspec-
tive on the world that changes in the light of experience. We revise
what we think and we are revised by what we think and experience.
Id briefly like to explore some ideas about perspectivism, revisibility,
and knowledge.
The term perspectivism is often employed to describe the philoso-

phical positions taken by Nietzsche and Ortega Y Gasset, and Im
using it in a similar but broader sense. (for a brief overview of
Nietzsches thinking see Honderich 1995: 622)
Perspectivism involves a belief that knowledge is always partial,

incomplete, indeterminate and contingent. There can be no absolute,
objective or complete view of any subject, topic, idea or issue. Our
knowledge and opinions are always informed and guided by our
learning, by those we learn from and the context in which we develop
our understandings. They are also framed by our needs, intentions and
expectations, and by our beliefs and values. Each perspective, our own
and those of others, needs to be considered on its merits, as shedding

light from a different angle, and in relation to other perspectives, as
providing a more rounded picture. No perspective should be consid-
ered as definitive or as representing the final word on a particular
topic. There can be no neutral, omniscient or objective view.
Multiple perspectives are to be welcomed. Diversity, difference and
pluralism are factors to be encouraged in all contexts as they are likely
to provide a more balanced and comprehensive view. But it is impor-
tant to keep in mind that, just as a our view of an object changes from
moment-to-moment with the scanning motion of our eyes and the
movements of our head and body, and as our knowledge of the same
object is constantly modified by picking it up, touching it, tasting it
and by discussing the object with others, so our perspective is subject
to change and revision as our position, context and relationships with
others and the world change.
*
Silhouette: John Cage
The role of the composer is other is no longer is being, is free is a wild goose
chase, full circle back again to piano & dry fungi, direction (no stars) woodpecker
solos & a startled moose
our poetry now is the realisation that

we possess nothing
Out of a hat comes revelation & a pianist on the way, she said she would play
slowly on the way she would play slowly she said on the way she would play, play
slowly everything, he said, is repetition slowly she would play she would say
playing slowly she hoped to avoid making mistakes, but there are no mistakes only
sounds intended & unintended a glass of brandy
*
Revisibility
Given the relative, ever-changing and perspectival condition of
knowledge, it follows that all views, theories & opinions are open to
revision. Indeed effective learning, if we are to avoid dogmatism,
prejudice and eventually bigotry, involves a constant willingness to
revise, re-think and re-formulate to be open to new facts and
ideas, and to seek out alternative perspectives that are challenging and
revitalising. The inherent revisibility of knowledge has implications
for our thinking about evaluating what we think and do and what
others think and do. Judgements can only ever be tentative and
conditional, subject to continuing revision over time. Critical opinions
and judgements can only be made from a particular perspective, at a
specific moment, in a continuum of changing views. Any mis-
representation or reification of this process (for example, by represent-
ing a particular judgement as final and summative, or as a fixed
measurement or a quantitative fact rather than as a qualitative
opinion) ought not to go unchallenged. Contradictions and tensions
are likely to arise from the imposition of absolute and dogmatic
regimes of criticism, judgement and interpretation which do not
acknowledge the perspectival nature of knowledge, the ways in which
all ideas, theories and descriptions are relative, limited and subject to
change. In the light of these factors it could be argued that we should
encourage and create situations in which many views are considered,
many voices are heard and taken into account. Indeed we might go
further and argue, like the Pyrrhonist sceptics, that it is better to
suspend all judgements (epoche), to withhold agreement or disagree-
ment with any proposition or view, as far as possible, in order to see
clearly how things are and to keep in mind the multi-perspectival and
revisible nature of knowledge.
*
Gobbling & singing
As I write this book I wonder how I can string it all together? This
interweaving of views all of them conditional fumblings in semi-
darkness. Do I use another voice altogether? Insert a meta-narrative
that comments on the book being written, the unfolding of ideas, the
many changes of mind? Or do I leave them to speak for themselves? If
I introduce another voice should it be a quizzical, disinterested
Pyrrhonist, for whom all writings are scratchings in the dust? Pyrrho
himself started out as a painter. He and I cant forget the fact that all
our representations, theories and ideas are so much spit and pigment,
marks against oblivion, possibilities of the moment, rendered obsolete
almost as soon as they are made. All our utterances are little more than
the eloquence of crows or gulls. Very occasionally, against all the
odds, we rise to the compass of song, the melodic fluency of a
blackbird or a robin or the clichd nightingale. No matter what we say
or write we can do no more than release it into the air. Like a leaf or a
feather it may catch the breeze and be lifted high or it may immedi-
ately spin to the ground. Whatever happens, it will eventually join all
the other feathers and leaves trampled underfoot, unnoticed by
anyone, subject to decay and chemical transformation, becoming in
time so much compost, detritus or soil out of which other things
grow in their turn. All opinions and ideas, however lofty, are subject
to the laws of gravity, to the pull of contingency and uncertainty, to
the necessity of perhaps, maybe, it appears or it seems
never the certainty of it is true. Likewise with decisions all can be
rationalised as correct and incorrect. Arguments can be made to
confirm the validity of this course of action and the opposite course.
One is no more or less subject to proof or surety than another. I
always act in the full knowledge that I could have done something else
equally as valid, and probably equally as worthwhile or as worthless.
To do something in the belief that I do the right thing is to believe that
this leaf will not fall to the ground. To be attached to this belief, rather
than that belief, is to be deluded, to defy gravity, to gobble like a
turkey while thinking I sing like a thrush.
*
In her fictional essay in 29 tangos, entitled The Beauty of the
Husband, Anne Carson (2001: 21) quotes a note that Keats wrote in
his copy of Paradise Lost: one of the most mysterious of semi-
speculations is, one would suppose, that of one Minds imagining into
another. Yet this is what we do, or attempt to do, every time we read
a book, or gaze at a painting, or encounter an art installation, or
converse with a friend or stranger.
In the same work Carson makes many other suggestive references to

consciousness. At one point she speaks of the dip and slant /of
mindfulness. (ibid: 75) Later she entwines the vocabulary of neurol-
ogy into her poetic diction:
Hole in time shows this moment to me and to you, / ragged where edges of
synaptic change / melt off into / blurred walls of other days a flashbulb
memory neurologists say. / It has both explicit and implicit circuitry. (ibid:
79)
Combining strands of thought articulated by Zeno and Bergson about

the indivisibility of time, with the pseudo-problem of an essential
self, she remarks, by dividing pure movement into minutes, hours,
years, we raise / the pseudo-problem of an underlying self whose
successive states / these are supposed to be. (ibid: 123)
*
The threads of our thinking are often invisible or as slender as
gossamer, and the threads are continuous with our sensations and with
the fumblings of our hands and mind, and with what we read and see
and make what the world entwines us in and in us.
*
It is likely that indeterminacy, as Ive described and discussed it, can
be linked to ideas about complexity or chaos. James Gleick (1990:
43) writes: The study of chaos has provided a seemingly paradoxical
insight: that rich kinds of order, as well as chaos, can arise arise
spontaneously from the unplanned interaction of many simple
things. Scientists tend nowadays to refer to complexity theory
rather than chaos theory, given that one of the main tenets of such
theories is to demonstrate and analyse the way in which very simple
determinate structures or sequences of events can very rapidly give
rise to exceedingly complex and eventually indeterminate structures
and sequences. A few simple phrases of musical notes, when repeated,
layered or phased, as in a work by Steve Reich or Philip Glass, can
generate very complex melodic and rhythmic structures. Hence the
richness and structural density of some works of so-called Minimalist
music. Note how the language and the ideas of spontaneously
arising forms and orders seem to echo the Taoist idea of the myriad
creatures arising from the undifferentiated matrix of the Tao.
Gleick (ibid: 30) quotes Cyril Stanley Smith, a metallurgist and an

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

poetry is to do something other than to endorse or reflect the dominant
discourses of a society, which in our case may be the anodyne, jargon-
filled discourses of bureaucracy, management and consumer culture,
what Debord (Rothenberg and Joris 1998: 419) calls information-
ism, then it may well be perceived as difficult and resistant to easy
interpretations. It is likely to make us uncomfortable and to work
against our habits of reading and thinking. As W.S. Graham writes, in
his poem, A Note to the Difficult One, we stand in [our] vocabulary,
a vocabulary of the familiar, trying to translate and make sense of
terrible words always just beyond us, the words of a poetry that the
poet enunciates very clearly in a new language. (Sinclair 1996:
212) It is this new language, resisting the familiar transparency of
habitual responses and easy meanings, which gives works by many
artists and poets a kind of difficulty. But this difficulty is only
another way of saying that it makes us think, question, consciously
engage and interpret. Art of this kind is not easy to digest, it resists
consumption. As Sinclair (1996: xvii) puts it, poetry will always be
that splinter of bone that is left when the rest of the skeleton has been
devoured.
*
George Bowering, in his essay, Robin Blaser at Lake Paradox, writes,
If paradise is around us in fragments, as Ezra Pound wrote in his
Pisan prison, one can assemble those fragments in a poem as they are
disbursed in a life. (in Nichols 2002: 94)
*
Associative thinking
In a discussion about Becketts textual construction in his later short
works (for example, How It Is and Ill Seen Ill Said) Perloff (1996a:
139) notes Becketts use of the phrase the voice of us all as a
description of his mode of speaking in these works. This mode of
address is a kind of disinterested describing, seeming to come from
just outside a protagonists consciousness - a voice from the margins.
Becketts characteristic rhythm in this period of his writing is de-
scribed by Northrop Frye as, associative rhythm, a rhythm which
often moves along independent of syntactical coherence. According to
Perloff (1996b: 189) associative rhythm,
whose unit is the abrupt, discontinuous, repetitive, heavily accented

phrase of ordinary speech currently exercises an important metapoetic
function: it calls attention to itself as discourse, refusing to fulfil what John
Cage would call our either-or expectations.
My own thinking, as enacted in this book, tends to be associative.

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

long stretches. Each climb orchestrated by eyes, body and mind in
relation to the changing terrain and a sense of direction, an improvised
sequence of moves, pulls, footfalls and scrambles. At times there is a
clear objective or goal, at other times the climbing may be its own
objective.
*
Michael Davidson (1991: 78) writes, The poem should not be a
demonstration or description of states of consciousness, but should
itself manifest the energies of those states. At different points in this
book I am attempting to do what Davidson suggests the poem should,
or could, do.
*
Indeterminacy, dualism & non-dualism: Cartesianism & pragma-
tism
One important aspect of the philosophy of Descartes is what is called
mind-body dualism, that is, the belief that the mind is a non-
physical substance. (Anon 2000: 217) This separation of mind and
body, aligned with Christian dualisms such as, God/humanity,
spirit/matter, heaven/earth, became one of the foundations of scientific
and philosophical thinking in the West. These ideas, combined with
Descartes famous statement, cogito ergo sum (I am thinking,
therefore I exist), tend to privilege thought, rationality and reason,
over feeling, irrationality and intuition. Philosophical and scientific
enquiry is a process of constructing rational answers to rational
questions. Reliable knowledge can only be established through the
exercise of reason and rationality. We can see from this how science,
objectivity (as opposed to subjectivity), abstract thinking and human
consciousness can be valued more highly than the arts, subjectivity,
sensory perceptions and the non-human. The focus of science be-
comes rational understanding (by systematically dividing, categorising
and finding reasons) and the use/exploitation of the physical world (a
material world, separate from the human mind and from the divine
realm of God). It is important to keep in mind that the term dualism, in
the philosophical sense, implies not just the dividing-up of the world
and ideas into binary pairs or opposites, either this or that, but the
belief that we have to choose between these opposites in favour of one
or other side, and that we place a higher value upon the chosen side.
Thus mind is not only separated from body but also comes to be
considered as having greater value. Rational thought is not only
separated from emotion or intuitive thought, but is also considered as
more important. Thus a hierarchical set of relations and values
accompanies the basic division into dualities.
*
Towards non-dualism: Richard Rorty & pragmatism
Descartes presents us with one very influential form of dualistic
thinking within the European tradition. Richard Rorty is an example
of a contemporary philosopher who argues against the dualistic
thinking integral to mainstream Western philosophy. He continues the
tradition of pragmatism founded by the American thinkers, C.S.Peirce,
William James and John Dewey (to whom Rorty acknowledges a
particular debt).
Rorty (1999: xviii) argues that, We anti-Platonists cannot permit

ourselves to be called relativists - since that would imply accepting
Platonic dualities like absolute & relative, or ideal & actual. Rorty
resists employing Platonic terminology and questions the Kantian
and Hegelian distinction between subject and object [] the Cartesian
distinctions which Kant and Hegel used [] and the Greek distinc-
tions which provided the framework for Descartes own thought.
(ibid: xviii-xix) In other words he is against the use of, or rather
reliance upon, oppositional dualities like: mind or body, absolute or
relative, real or apparent, true or false. Rorty doesnt believe that the
philosophical problems that such dualities raise, are any more self-
evident or essential than any other problem or question that philoso-
phers might wish to ask. The Platonic-Cartesian-Hegelian tradition
has insisted that these problems are found, in the sense that they are inevita-
bly encountered by any reflective mind. The pragmatist tradition [and the
strand of thinking exemplified by Foucault, Derrida, Merleau-Ponty and
Gadamer] has insisted that they are made - are artificial rather than natural -
and can be unmade by using a different vocabulary [discourse] than that
which the philosophical tradition has used. (ibid: xxi-xxii)
Rorty is arguing against an essentialist view, that problems are self-

existing entities waiting to be found, in favour of a constructivist
view, that problems are problems only in relation to particular

questions we ask or aspirations we have in other words in relation to
what we want to do in the world.
Rorty goes on,
pragmatists have no use for the reality-appearance distinction, any more

than for the distinction between the found and the made. We hope to replace
the reality-appearance distinction with the distinction between the more use-
ful and the less useful. (ibid: xxii)
Note that any use of language involves the setting up of binary

oppositions or dualities. Each concept, word or term implies an
opposite concept without which it would make no sense for instance,
more useful as opposed to, less useful. Hence, even a philosopher
like Rorty, arguing against dualism, has to employ dichotomies or
dualities in his argument. The question is, what is a particular philoso-
pher trying to do in the world? How is the language being used, and
what is it being used for? Rorty, and his pragmatist precursors,
consider human beings as organisms/animals actively participating in
the world, not sitting outside the world objectively observing what
goes on. Organism/environment, human/animal and man/world arent
considered as binary oppositions. Humans are animals doing their
best to develop tools which will enable them to enjoy more pleasure
and less pain. Words are among the tools which these clever animals
have developed. (ibid: xxiii)
According to pragmatist thinking truth is not something out there,

an absolute or universal object or goal. We cannot regard truth as a
goal of enquiry. The purpose of inquiry is to achieve agreement
among human beings about what to do, to bring about consensus on
the ends to be achieved and the means to be used to achieve those
ends. (ibid: xxv) Truth is one of the words we use to describe these
agreed ways of doing things. False statements are ways of doing
things that dont work - that arent useful to us, that dont provide
useful descriptions upon which we can act.
Rorty believes that there is no need to search for, or construct, a

unitary explanation, grand design, narrative or philosophy, and
certainly no justification for supposing such a unitary view (eg.
Christian, Western, Islamic, Marxist, Capitalist, and pragmatist!) will

be shared by others. In the same way we shouldnt assume priority for
the universal or abstract or ideal over the unique, concrete or idiosyn-
cratic.
For Deweyian pragmatists like me, history and anthropology are enough to
show that there are no unwobbling pivots, [eg. universal truths] and that
seeking objectivity is just a matter of getting as much intersubjective
agreement as you can manage. (ibid: 15)
In Rortys view philosophers are not here to provide principles or

foundations or deep theoretical diagnoses, or a synoptic vision. (ibid:
19) Instead he seems to argue that philosophy is about trying to clarify
what we are saying and thinking, trying to find intersubjective
agreement and developing ways of thinking and speaking that
usefully enable us to live together with greater pleasure and less pain.
Sharing our infinitely different descriptions of the world is one of the
ways in which we can do this. Rorty quotes (approvingly) Andrew
Goodman: There is no one Way the World Is. Instead, as Rorty
says, there is no one way it is to be accurately represented. But there
are lots of ways to act so as to realize human hopes of happiness.
(ibid: 33) This is an argument in favour of pluralism, encouraging us
to celebrate diversity and difference.
These ideas go against those articulated by Plato and Descartes that

present us with a set of either/or, yes/no, true/false distinctions and
that also prioritise abstraction, rationality, universal truths and
ideals. Rationalism, a tradition that includes the ideas of Plato,
Descartes, Kant, Hegel and others, assumes that human problems
can be solved by reason, that there are answers to all our questions
that can be found through the use of logical thinking. Rationalists
tend to view logic, mathematics and geometry as the highest achieve-
ments of human beings - because they are most certain, stable,
rational, abstract and universal. According to the rationalist prospectus
determinacy is a positive attribute, indeterminacy is problematic.
Other qualities and attributes, that seem to lie outside the orbit of
rational thought are viewed with suspicion or considered to be
undependable. Thus feelings, moods, unconscious drives, moods,
intuition and chance are things to be overcome or transcended by
rationality. Of course, this way of thinking marginalises or devalues a
large proportion of human experiences and attributes. It also projects

on to the non-human sphere a level of determinacy and human reason
which may not correspond with the indeterminacy and flux of the
world and its creatures. This fact alone tends to reinforce in rational-
ists a sense of separation between the human and non-human, between
us and the world.
*
Colorado incident
I hear voices outside the movement of bodies at work the rhythms & intonations
of American English apart from the word silence I can make out nothing of what
is said. But the crunch of boots on gritty earth the scraping of plant pots the
drawing-in of breath & the quietness of things being lifted says it all
*
Doubt, uncertainty & non-attachment
In his book, Sculpture in the Age of Doubt, (1999) Thomas McEvilley
affirms the importance of sceptical doubt as a positive attitude to take
in the face of competing opinions, facts, theories and assertions of
value or morality. McEvilley draws on sources in the Greek tradition
(Zeno, Pyrrho, or Pyrrhon, of Elias and Sextus Empiricus), the
resurgence of interest in Pyrrhonist thinking in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries (Montaigne, Pierre Bayle) and in Mahayana
Buddhism (ancient Indian sutras and the Zen master, Hakuin). Ive
already discussed some of the relationships between the early Greek
and Buddhist traditions (see Part 4) and how a sceptical strand of
thinking is evident in both. Id like to add a few remarks at this point
to emphasise the importance of doubt and uncertainty and to suggest
that the suspension of judgement is not a sign of weakness or indeci-
siveness in a negative sense, but a sign of positive openness, compas-
sion and balance in the midst of competing dogmas, beliefs and
prejudices.
McEvilley provides many examples of statements from his sources

that highlight different aspects of the sceptical tradition. In the
Mahaprajnaparamita Sastra, a group of Buddhist texts probably
originating from around 100 B.C., the Buddhas aspirations for his
disciples are that they should be free from passion for doctrine, free
from attachment to doctrine, free from partisanship They do not
quarrel about the nature of things. (McEvilley 1999: 6) If, as the
Buddha argued and demonstrated, entities (physical and mental
objects) have no self-existence (see Part 4) then it is foolish to
believe that doctrines and dogmatic statements that this, or that, is the
case, can be true in any absolute or essential sense. To cling to such
doctrines or dogmas as if we were clinging to something that was
unarguably correct, an accurate reflection of how things are, is to be
misguided.
To analyse any dogma or doctrine in depth, is to expose its flaws, the

relativity of its arguments and the one-sidedness of its statements.
Philosophy, theology, metaphysics and critical theories from many
cultures and times, provide us with countless examples of such
analyses about all dogmas, doctrines and apparent truths. Therefore to
be sceptical of any doctrine or truth is to acknowledge its limitations,

to recognise that all knowledge and beliefs are perspectival, open to
revision and only exist insofar as they relate to other doctrines and
truths. So to be sceptically doubtful of all positions and perspectives is
to be mindful of their interdependence and to recognise that they are
empty of any existence in themselves. Hakuin, a Japanese Zen
master in the Rinzai school, advised his students to enter into what he
called the great doubt. He says, When a person faces the great
doubt it is just as though he were standing in complete emptiness []
At the bottom of great doubt, lies great awakening. If you doubt fully,
you will awaken fully. (ibid: 5) Stephen Batchelor, in his book, The
Faith To Doubt, (1990) provides an interesting analysis of attitudes to
doubt in Buddhism, and its use as a positive activity in the Zen
tradition. Batchelors writings, like McEvilleys, can be seen as
anticipating the current resurgence of interest in scepticism as an
important counterbalance to dogmatic belief, especially in the sphere
of institutionalised religion.
To return to McEvilley, he suggests that,
Renaissance humanists of the sixteenth century, like Montaigne, living in a

period of heightened doubt, experienced the liberation, joy, and quietude of
the realization that the huge body of dogma they had been labouring under
had been unnecessary all along, and happily laid it down (at least in spirit).
(ibid: 14)
He goes on to suggest that our present postmodern culture can be

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

analysis and dialectic, an opening and a clearing in the forest of
knowledge, opinions and beliefs, rather than the planting of more
trees.
To doubt and to embrace uncertainty is to let go of false certainty and

the illusion of absolute knowledge. Doubt is the natural accompani-
ment of learning not to grasp at passing truths, beliefs and values as if
they were constant and universal. It is the not-grasping and the non-
attachment that leads to inner balance, equilibrium and the wisdom of
unknowing as distinct from the view that to know is to be
certain of what we know. And to be attached to the certainty of what
we know is dogmatism.
*
In the tenth section of his poem, The City of the Moon, Kenneth
Rexroth writes:
Buddha took some Autumn leaves

In his hand and asked
Ananda if these were all
The red leaves there were.
Ananda answered that it
Was Autumn and leaves
Were falling all about them,
More than could ever
Be numbered. So Buddha said,
I have given you
A handful of truths. Besides
These there are many
Thousands of other truths, more
Than can ever be numbered.
(Rexroth 2003:709-710)
*
In Part 8 I wrote about the connections between thinking and walking.
Here is another connection, through associations between the rhythms
and actions of walking in a landscape and thinking in a mindscape:
Thinking is constant motion,

heel & toe, rise & fall,
adding always to what is already
footed, pressed in the trail, no line
between thoughts and things

seen touched imagined feared
desired
& looking
sucks in words & silences, the
gravitational pull of commentary
mapping explaining questioning.
Images hover in a pool of light
until some other thought arises,
door opens, light spills again
into sense of something that has no
word, unspoken stone heeled or
turned as we walk, tuned to another
step, another minding, this to
that to this again and so on.
Thinking is forgetting, footprints
erased by wind and rain, yet some
history of erasure remains, an
archive of loss, of no more no
less no more no less, each
footfall the first and last, til
light consumes and songs
are sung that we will never
hear
*
We can conceive of the artist/poet as a gatherer or hunter-gatherer,
gathering together in one place-object-text the fruits of the forest. The
forest being both the locus and life of the poet experiences, percep-
tions, feelings, imaginings and dreams and the layered histories,
narratives and cultures of other forest-dwellers the common-wealth
of beings for whom the poet acts as consciousness, voice, scribe,
mythmaker and imagemaker.
*
In the heat even the house quivers Dervish ecstasy turns weight to water
tremored like bees wings there is nothing on which to focus no anchorage for the
eye.
*
Improvisation & association
Stephen Greenblatt, the founder of New Historicism, describes how
he writes in a state of heightened receptiveness to random connec-
tions. Hes attuned, like a hunter, to the detail and complexity of the
environment around him though its more likely to be a library or
study than a stretch of woodland or savannah. Greenblatt becomes

highly attentive to the potential ideas and associations that leap out at
him from whatever he reads and reflects on. He seems to be describ-
ing a state that is akin to a musician or actor working on a group
improvisation a state of fluid responsiveness and mutuality of
thought:
If its working for me I feel I could run up and down these shelves [] and
open books at random and things would jump out at me Ive always
worked that way, feeling controlled serendipity. If something is working,
almost anything I touch can swim into sharp focus and I can use it. (in
Miller 2005)
*
Multiplicity
In seeing, reading and thinking we are enlivened by variety. The eyes
move from form to form, event to event. The mind is buoyed-up by
scanning, by the free flow of associations, crossings-over and inbe-
tweens. Perceiving, sensing, thinking and imagining are functions of
relationship, jumping from similarities to differences, resemblances to
strangenesses. The world is a polymorphic place and the mind is a
polyphonic and polyvisual register of the worlds variety.
*
Another Colorado incident
Overheard: twenty-five years of reading while operating signals on the railroad
I had it down to a fine art I hope so, said his companion digging the freshly
thawed earth.
*
The story invents a writer
In 1978, Italo Calvino refers to the collection of fragments that is my
oeuvre. (in Wood 2003: 8) He suggests that writing, inventing,
imagining are integral aspects of the process of what Merleau-Ponty
calls self-construction. Like Borges, Calvino writes stories that offer
a commentary on, and an enactment of, his own changing identity.
Both writers share an interest in history as a succession of stories,
stories that are told and retold in ways that reflect the times and the
teller. The stories are diverse and the tellings are often divergent,
opening up a new perspective or a new constellation of meanings. As
Michael Wood (2003: 8) suggests, Calvinos understanding of history

leads him to learn to live with invention and diversity rather [than] a
dream of integration. As the author writes so he has to reconfigure
himself in relation to the world and reformulate himself as an entity in
the world. Calvino: Every time I have to invent, alongside the book I
have to write, the author who has to write it, a kind of writer who is
different from me. (ibid) Inventing his text, the author invents a self.
The story remakes the storyteller. Each new story produces a new
author. The writer is many, and one.
Happenstance: words on a bus-ride
there were two of them
blackthorn in snowy flower

hes lost
she looks lost
intense green of field & hedge
last Christmas he died now shes going to sell up

it hits ya
buzzard swoops
a lamb skips over a
shadow
weve lost quite a few
river thick with tide
***
Part 11
A leaving, an unending.
A folding, an unfolding.
Exiled on the shivering sea, my brothers were

the cackling gannets and whimpering petrels.
All humanity were strangers who lived in the
silver city where trees grew and
laughter still had a place.
As a homeless outlaw I left behind

the dust of the world in order to tramp this
bleached and fickle whale-road where God
metes out hatred and compassion
with equal
indifference.
(my own variation on extracts from

The Wanderer, in The Exeter Book
a collection of Anglo-Saxon poems and riddles)
*
In following the various convoluted trails and themes of this book we
are left with the conundrum of how to draw these together into a
meaningful resolution? How are we to make sense of the many
contradictions and apparently insurmountable dichotomies: self and
other; ideal and actual; energy and matter; suchness and emptiness,
and so on? Of course the short answer is that there is no resolution or
conclusion. The open work by definition is never closed, the crumpled
page of being is inscribed with the creases and stains of its own
history and is open to new states of crumpledness. Instead of a
resolution or conclusion we find only the contrarium, a zone of
balanced oscillation in which multiple perspectives are suspended in
the open-work which is our lived experience.
346 A leaving, an unending
A leaving, an unending 347
*
Infolding and unfolding
In a typically complex many-stranded essay, that begins with a
discussion of Ruskins own multi-fibred essay in episodic letter form
(Fors Clavigera), Guy Davenport makes an interesting point about
writing and reading: The daedelian artist infolds, he makes a compli-
catio. We beholders are involved in an explicatio; we unfold to read.
(1984: 51) I like the idea of the artist/maker infolding, while the
audience/reader unfolds. We could extend this notion to include the
possibility that the making of the self is like an infolding, the self
being a complicatio. In observing the self, and in meeting another self,
we become engaged in an unfolding, an explicatio. In relation to both
the self and the artwork/text the process of infolding, unfolding,
refolding and unfolding goes on and on. Each encounter involves
another infolding and unfolding. And each folding leaves a trace, a
crumpling, an adding to the texture and history of the complicatio.
The self, the artwork, life can be considered as crumpled pages of
text or drawings, endlessly open to infolding, unfolding and refolding.
*
Indeterminacy, again: A and not-A: A(not)A
As Thomas McEvilley (2003, p.11-12) points out, the ideas and
practices of Madhyamika Buddhism and Pyrrhonist scepticism, show
how we become caught between two laws of logic. On the one hand
the Law of the Excluded Middle which insists that there is no middle
position between this and that, or yes and no. Every entity must be
either A or not-A as a logician might put it. And on the other hand the
Law of Identity, which insists that each thing is itself and nothing
else. An entity cant be both A and not-A. To go against these basic
premises would bring the house of logic down about our ears and
leave us staring into the void. However this is precisely where many
Buddhist and sceptical thinkers place themselves, and where we are
all, in some ways, placed, whether we like it or not. From the perspec-
tive of these thinkers the laws of identity and the excluded middle are
faulty premises upon which to build a metaphysics, let alone a way of
living. We are misguided, and in danger of misguiding others, if we
construct a belief system based upon determinacy and apparent
certainty. Instead we have to recognise that entities do not have a
fixed and enduring identity. Things are only what they are in relation-
ship with other things. They are mutually co-arising as Buddhists

might say. Things have no clear or constant essence, we can only
differentiate between things as they exist in relation to other things.
Identities are relative, maintained by a web of conditional differences
within a field of existence that is unconditional and undifferentiated.
There is no this or that, in any ultimate sense, there is only an inclu-
sive middle. All things exist in a zone of indeterminacy, mutual
relationship and endless flux. While certainty may be a goal of
idealism or a characteristic of delusion, uncertainty is a quality of the
actual.
*
In the words of John Cage:
The situation must be

Yes-and-No
not either-or.
Avoid a polar situation.
(in Perloff 1996: 213)
*
Or, as William Empson, the author of Seven Kinds of Ambiguity,
points out: life involves maintaining oneself between contradictions
that cant be solved by analysis. (in Phillips 2005)
*
The contrarium
This book has involved the unfolding of a crumpled page, a page of
notes towards a metaphysics of indeterminacy, notes that trace some
of the features of the mutuality of existence. It would not be consistent
to bind the various strands of thought together into one string or rope,
better to hold the various threads in an inconsistency of possibilities,
an emerging order that is never stabilised or unified. For it is in the
perpetual flux of possibilities and ever-changing perspectives that we
live our lives, a contrarium in which all things are possible, where all
perspectives have a place in the scheme of things and in which artists
and poets working in many disciplines and media, offer their images
and narratives alongside those of philosophers, scientists, mythmakers
and mythcritics. And the contrarium is itself a field of indeterminacy,
a zone of mutually interdependent, and often mutually antithetical,

ideas, conjectures, insights, speculations, understandings and misun-
derstandings.
I briefly discussed Robin Blasers term, the contrarium in Part 7.

Because the image and idea of the contrarium seems important here is
the relevant passage again:
Blaser refers to this articulation of doubleness and polarity, the interpenetra-

tion of inside and outside, as a contrarium (1993: 278) A term which
brings to mind many of the themes Ive been exploring in this book: self
and unself; ideal and actual; suchness and emptiness; determinacy and inde-
terminacy; and the mutuality of existence. One characteristic of the con-
trarium is that its dynamic polarities are never resolvable through a formu-
laic rationalist discourse but only through the continual recomposition of
lived experience and the open work. The polyvocal contrarium cant be
posited in simple terms as the expression of the singular self. As Blaser
(ibid) puts it: Such polarity is not reductive to a simple-minded authenticity
or to a signature that is only ones self. To realise or actualise the con-
trarium in the arts and in life is to bring into play the dynamics of otherness
and the real - the polarities of self and unself, visible and invisible - within a
subjectivity that is no longer an expression of the illusory, unhyphenated,
singular self. We are all manifestations of the contrarium - half-breeds and
hybrids, liminal presences on the edge of otherness. To seek for a fixed es-
sence or purity is to falsify the way we are and the way all things are. For
reality is a confluence of identities, impermanent and indeterminate as wind
and cloud, and to be precise we are neither, this nor that, one thing nor an
other yet we are also this and that, self and other.
Another way of looking at the contrarium is as a state or clearing in

which contraries are held in suspension, a state of inbetweeness, an
attentive unknowing in which contraries arise and are observed
without comment or judgement. In a sense, the contrarium can be
seen as a bowl or vessel in which possibilities that may be diametri-
cally opposed are held in a coincidence of opposites, to use Nicho-
las of Cusas term, (see Part 9) an alchemical chamber out of which a
dynamically hybrid energy will be released.
The coincidence of opposites includes many of the different vectors

intersecting within, and, to some extent, forming, the embodied
subject that is each individual. I have discussed some of these in this
book: self and other; ideal and actual; matter and energy; suchness and
emptiness. To some extent we all have to find a point of dynamic
equilibrium at the coincidence of opposites. We have to live in the

continuum that is also a discontinuum, manifesting a certainty that is
also a profound uncertainty. We move in a world of hard and soft
things, handling objects that have weight, texture and substance. Yet,
at the same time, we perceive these things as shifting patterns of light,
colour and tone, forms that change and reform themselves as we
interact with them, eventually becoming other entities as they are dis-
integrated or in process of growth or decay. We also know, through
the extended sensuality of our sciences, that these apparent substances
are also fields of energy in constant motion, devoid of any solid
essence.
We are all reiterations of becoming, different ways of writing being or

picturing mind. We are all open works, incomplete essays in what it is
to be human.
In Spencers translation, Joachim de Bellay writes of Rome (in

Colegate 2002: 233):
That which is firm doth
flit
& fall
away,
And that is flitting,
doth abide
& stay.
Maybe
***
Afterword
In writing this book Ive realised that the book I wanted to write has
already been written. It lies in the fragments of Heraclitus and Sappho,
the sayings of Pyrrho of Elias, in the pages of works written by
Montaigne, Spinoza, G.K. Chesterton, Jorge Luis Borges, John Cage,
Kenneth Rexroth, Thomas McEvilley, Georges Dreyfus, and many
others, and in artworks made by our anonymous Palaeolithic and tribal
ancestors, and in works by Fabritius, Sesshu, Sengai, Chu Ta, Ruskin,
Cezanne, Giacometti, Beuys, Martin, Kapoor, Whiteread, Twombly,
Turrell, and many other artists. I am indebted to all of these authors
and artists for saying and showing what I wanted to say and show
much more eloquently than I have been able to do. I also thank them
for leading me to realise what I wanted to convey to you, which is
only to reiterate what they have already revealed many times through
the centuries. Very similar ideas, images, concerns and debates have
migrated from generation to generation since our earliest ancestors
made marks on the walls of caves whiling away what time was
available to them. These migrations from mind to mind and age to age
are traced in countless languages, codes, symbols and objects,
orchestrated into a polyphonic celebration of what it is to be here,
what it is to awaken to the empty and marvellous existence that comes
and goes without purpose or end.
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Index
Abram, David, 8, 239, 240, 241, 243, Blake, William, 31

246, 247, 248, 353 Blaser, Robin, 8, 57, 104, 105, 108,
Abramovic, Marina, 284 109, 121, 159, 163, 170, 176, 177,
Ackling, Roger, 213 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 185, 186,
Adorno, Theodor, 163, 165, 166 187, 303, 331, 349, 353, 358
Alpers, Svetlana, 29, 353 Blyth, R.H., 86, 228, 229, 230, 354
Andre, Carl, 31, 45, 175, 284 Bochner, Mel, 175
Annas, Julia, 88, 89, 90, 91, 96, 353 Bodhidharma, 96
Arikha, Avigdor, 46, 47, 49, 55, 353 Boehme, Jacob, 83, 84, 85, 188, 298,
Aristotle, 21, 105, 118, 179, 288 299, 302, 307, 358
Armstrong, Jeannette, 212 Bohm, David, 14, 27, 233, 319, 354
Arp, Hans, 321 Bohr, Neils, 319
artwork as open work, 13234 Bois, Yves-Alain, 183, 184, 354
artwork as zone of interpretation, 150, Bonnard, Pierre, 232
162, 321 Borges, Jorge Luis, 9, 188, 262, 290,
associative thinking, 33132 291, 292, 293, 296, 341, 351, 354
Attwood, Margaret, 213 Botton, Alain De, 204
Auerbach, Frank, 31, 39, 44, 50, 55, Bowering, George, 195, 331
57, 72, 357 Boyd, Arthur, 232
aware, 228, 229 Bradshaw, Dove, 321, 357
Bacon, Francis, 31 Brakhage, Stan, 317
Bankei, 95 Braque, Georges, 110
Barth, John, 135 Brathwaite, Edward Kamau, 164
Barthes, Roland, 8, 131, 134, 135, Breton, Andre, 55
136, 156, 172, 321, 353, 357 Brody, Hugh, 251, 354
Basho, Matsuo, 76, 110, 194, 218, Bronowski, Jacob, 23, 45, 237, 319,
245, 353, 360 320, 354
Batchelor, Stephen, 338 Brooks, William, 321
Bate, Jonathan, 163, 164, 165, 166, Brunelleschi, Filippo, 30
353 Bruno, Giordano, 291
Beckett, Samuel, 46, 49, 104, 142, Buber, Martin, 188
151, 152, 211, 276, 331, 353 Buddhism, 7, 21, 26, 32, 38, 52, 53,
Berger, John, 60, 353 54, 65, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74,
Bergson, Henri-Louis, 119, 120, 329 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 86, 87, 90,
Berio, Luciano, 133 91, 96, 107, 126, 128, 141, 171,
Bernstein, Charles, 107, 108, 353 178, 184, 218, 219, 222, 223, 224,
Beuys, Joseph, 104, 108, 134, 177, 225, 229, 264, 269, 272, 274, 275,
231, 301, 351 278, 283, 299, 305, 308, 337, 338,
Bingen, Hildegard von, 301 347, 353, 354, 355, 358, 360, 361
bio-regionalism, 216 Bunting, Basil, 209, 210, 211, 354,
Bishop, Elizabeth, 76 356
364 Index
Bunyan, John, 296 Dante Alighieri, 104, 111, 112, 178,

Burgin, Victor, 55 197, 291, 303
Cage, John, 8, 9, 101, 102, 104, 108, Danvers, John, 7
109, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 134, Dasein, 138, 156, 162, 273, 277, 293,
144, 166, 177, 244, 245, 310, 313, 318
317, 318, 320, 321, 322, 326, 331, Davenport, Guy, 8, 191, 194, 207,
348, 351, 354, 358 266, 287, 315, 316, 317, 347, 355,
Caliban, 164 356
Calvino, Italo, 341, 342, 361 Davidson, Michael, 114, 191, 199,
Candrakirti, 91 332, 355
Capra, Fritjof, 17, 23, 26, 27, 28, 225, de Kooning, Willem, 31, 175
256, 354 Debord, Guy, 186, 330
Cardew, Cornelius, 321 Degas, Edgar, 30
Caro, Anthony, 31 Democritus, 91
Carson, Anne, 9, 14, 108, 109, 207, Dennett, Daniel, 172
317, 328, 329, 354 Derges, Susan, 8, 214, 215, 216, 357
Cesaire, Aime, 164 Derrida, Jacques, 74, 75, 136, 172,
Cezanne, Paul, 30, 39, 42, 49, 72, 333
236, 351 Descartes, 80, 87, 120, 332, 333, 335
Chan, Chu, 124 Dewey, John, 119, 333
Chadwick, Helen, 8, 31, 153, 154, Dillard, Annie, 166
354 discontinuum of consciousness, 5, 9,
Chave, Anna C., 309 313, 316
Chesterton, G.K., 351 doubt, uncertainty and non-
Chopra, Deepak, 316, 354 attachment, 33739
Clement of Alexandria, 12 Dreyfus, Georges, B.J., 69, 70, 71,
Close, Chuck, 55 74, 75, 351, 355
Coldstream, William, 39, 45, 47, 50, dualism and non-dualism, 33236
55 Duchamp, Marcel, 136, 309, 310, 321
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 107, 114, Duncan, Robert, 8, 12, 114, 138, 176,
121, 196, 358 178, 187, 196, 197, 207, 313, 355
Collingwood, R.G., 18, 113 Durer, Albrecht, 221
Constable, John, 29, 30, 354 Eckhart, Meister, 124, 127, 128, 265,
constructionism, 160, 171, 172, 174 271, 272, 273, 275, 276, 283, 294,
contrarium, 9, 162, 186, 325, 345, 295, 305, 318
348, 349 Eco, Umberto, 8, 131, 133, 134, 136,
Coomaraswamy, Ananda K., 244, 154, 156, 162, 172, 261, 293, 321,
294, 313, 317 355
Croll, Maurice, 107, 108 Edelman and Tononi. See Edelman,
Crook, John, 71, 355 Gerald
Crowther, Paul, 20, 23, 62, 148, 149, Edelman, Gerald, 24, 25, 26, 43, 143,
355 144, 253, 355
Cubism, 315 Eliade, Mircea, 247
Cummings, E.E., 121 Eliot, T.S., 275
Cunningham, Merce, 321 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 84, 283, 286,
Cupitt, Don, 51, 52, 355 356
Dahlberg, Edward, 115 Empson, William, 159, 187, 188, 324,
Dali, Salvador, 31 348, 356, 358
Index 365
ethnopoetics, 216, 359 276, 277, 293, 295, 300, 318, 354,
Euclid, 30 361
Euripides, 45 Heisenberg, Werner, 319, 320
Everson, William, 199 Heraclitus, 119, 194, 267, 292, 351
Fabritius, Carel, 37, 351 Hesse, Eva, 284
Feldman, Morton, 321 Hiller, Susan, 134
Finlay, Ian Hamilton, 8, 220 Hodgkin, Howard, 185
Flam, Jack D., 53 Holzer, Jenny, 134
florilegium, 12 Hopkins, Gerald Manley, 104
Fortey, Richard, 246 Huang-Po, 65, 124, 354
Foucauld, Charles de, 301 Hughes, Robert, 44
Foucault, Michel, 136, 172, 333 Hughes, Ted, 210, 231
Francesca, Piero della, 30 Hui-Neng, 94
Fried, Michael, 153 Husserl, Edmund, 51, 119, 175
Fromentin, Eugene, 29 hybridity, the hyphened position,
Fromm, Erich, 126, 271 18586
Furlani, Andre, 315 Ikkyu, 269
Gallagher, Tess, 58, 59 indeterminacy, 5, 9, 33, 47, 83, 86,
Gandhi, Mahatma, 301 87, 88, 89, 92, 93, 108, 109, 112,
geopoetics, 216, 217 127, 128, 160, 162, 163, 166, 179,
Giacometti, Alberto, 31, 39, 46, 47, 186, 199, 244, 252, 275, 280, 293,
49, 50, 51, 55, 57, 177, 351, 359 313, 314, 315, 318, 319, 320, 321,
Gibson, James, 22, 26 324, 329, 335, 348, 349
Glass, Philip, 134, 329 infinity and mysticism, 28793
Gleick, James, 329, 330, 356 James, William, 9, 145, 263, 278, 333
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 8, 214, Jamie, Kathleen, 325, 359
230, 231, 232, 234, 236, 239 Jefferies, Richard, 286
Gogh, Vincent van, 31 Johns, Jaspar, 322
Goodman, Nelson, 53 Johnson, B.S., 134, 135, 151, 321
Gormley, Anthony, 134 Johnson, Samuel, 121
Graham, W.S., 330 Joyce, James, 135
Greenberg, Clement, 153 Judd, Don, 31, 175, 284
Greenblatt, Stephen, 340, 358 Kandinsky, Wassily, 18, 113
Gunaratana, Henepola, 77, 78, 356 Kant, Immanuel, 176, 230, 333, 335
Guston, Philip, 56, 359 Kapoor, Anish, 9, 262, 285, 294, 295,
Hakuin, 94, 125, 337, 338 296, 304, 306, 308, 351, 356, 357
Hanh, Thich Nat, 301 Keats, John, 113, 215, 328
Han-shan, 218, 219, 220, 222 Kerouac, Jack, 109, 203, 357
Happold, F.C., 263, 265, 266, 267, Kierkegaard, Soren, 152, 161, 278,
270, 274, 279, 282, 286, 293, 299, 279
356 Klee, Paul, 18
Hardy, Thomas, 166 Klein, Yves, 285
Hecht, Anthony, 60, 357 Kline, Franz, 175
Hegel, G.W.F., 333 koan, 94, 95, 96
Heidegger, Martin, 8, 9, 55, 138, 152, Kounellis, Yannis, 108, 177, 284
156, 161, 162, 164, 165, 170, 173, Kristeva, Julia, 172
178, 218, 239, 272, 273, 274, 275, Kruger, Barbara, 134
Kuhn, Thomas S., 26
366 Index
Kyger, Joanne, 199 Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de, 107,

La Barre, Weston, 249 131, 132, 266, 311, 337, 338, 351
Laib, Wolfgang, 285 Morris, Robert, 175
Levi-Strauss, Claude, 287 Mossin, Andrew, 181
Lewis-Williams, David, 251, 252, Motherwell, Robert, 232
253, 254, 357 Munch, Edvard, 18
LeWitt, Sol, 175 Murti, T.V.R., 54, 69, 358
Liebniz, Gottfried Wilhem, 28 mutuality of existence, 5, 65, 68, 77,
Lodge, David, 145 79, 82, 151, 160, 162, 186, 255,
Lommel, Andreas, 251, 252, 357 293, 325, 348, 349
Long, Richard, 8, 200, 201 mysticism, 5, 9, 21, 86, 146, 160,
Lopez-Garcia, Antonio, 39, 47 184, 261, 262, 263, 264, 265, 266,
Lorraine, Claude, 221 267, 271, 272, 273, 276, 277, 278,
Lowell, Robert, 58 282, 286, 287, 288, 292, 293, 295,
MacDairmid, Hugh, 217 302, 303, 311
Machado, Antonio, 268 Mysticism, 9, 266, 284, 288, 293,
Madhyamika - school of Buddhism, 303, 356, 359
54, 69, 70, 74, 75, 80, 81, 83, 87, Nagarjuna, 8, 54, 69, 75, 87, 90, 92,
89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 171, 184, 95
347 Nagel, Thomas, 187
Magee, Bryan, 42 Nantenbo, 32
Magritte, Rene, 55 nature as other, 16366
Marcel, Gabriel, 87 Nicholas of Cusa, 288, 290, 291, 349,
Maritain, Jacques, 87 358
Martin, Agnes, 9, 285, 304, 307, 356 Niedecker, Lorine, 108, 115
Maturana and Varela, 23 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 161, 217, 325
McEvilley, Thomas, 9, 65, 88, 89, 90, Nishida, Kitaro, 87
91, 92, 93, 308, 309, 310, 311, Nolan, Sidney, 232
320, 337, 338, 347, 351, 357 Oates, Joyce Carol, 287
McFarlane, Thomas J., 288 object as other, 17576
Medeci, Lucrezia Tornabuoni de, 311 observational painting and drawing,
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 8, 17, 20, 6568
23, 26, 50, 51, 52, 53, 62, 87, 119, Oliver, Mary, 166, 302
131, 148, 149, 150, 156, 162, 239, Olson, Charles, 8, 101, 104, 105, 108,
321, 333, 341, 357, 358 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 118, 119,
Merton, Thomas, 9, 86, 87, 263, 268, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 179, 194,
269, 270, 271, 273, 274, 275, 284, 207, 358
293, 295, 299, 301, 308, 309, 358, Oppen, George, 46, 47, 115, 197,
360 207, 358
Merz, Mario, 132 Oswald, Alice, 205, 206, 215, 216,
metaphysics of light, 3023 259, 358
Michelangelo, 30, 31 Po, Su Tung, 97
Minimalism, 8, 175 Palaeolithic, 8, 194, 196, 231, 242,
Mithen, Steven, 241, 358 253, 351
Mondrian, Piet, 30 Parmenides, 91, 267
Monet, Claude, 232 Pascal, Blaise, 160, 161, 162, 290,
Monk, Thelonius, 109, 110 291
Peirce, C.S., 40
Index 367
Perloff, Marjorie, 128, 142, 176, 277, Rothko, Mark, 175

278, 279, 310, 317, 318, 322, 331, Rousseau, J.J., 164
348, 358 Rubens, Peter Paul, 31
Perspectivism, 325 Ruisdael, Jacob, 29
Picasso, Pablo, 110 Rumi, Jalalud-din, 282
picturing mind, 8, 107, 124, 129, 176, Ruskin, John, 8, 30, 104, 194, 214,
325, 350 231, 232, 233, 234, 235, 236, 237,
Plato, 81, 91, 105, 150, 179, 286, 291, 239, 347, 351, 357, 360
335 Russell, Bertrand, 9, 80, 81, 82, 90,
Pollock, Jackson, 18, 175 263, 266, 267, 274, 276, 278, 279,
Pope, Alexander, 104, 178 293, 304, 359
postmodernism, 19, 27, 33, 338 Ryman, Robert, 285
Pound, Ezra, 217, 315, 331 Ryoanji, 32, 222, 226
Poussin, Nicolas, 221 sabi, 228, 229
Prospero, 164 Sartre, J.P., 50, 160
Purves, Dale, 316, 317 Scepticism, 87, 90, 91
Pyrrho, or Pyrrhon, of Elis, 8, 87, 90, Schierz, Kai Uwe, 276
91, 92, 95, 194, 327, 337, 351, Schopenhauer, Arthur, 279
354 Schweizer, Harold, 58, 59, 355, 359
Pythagorus, 30 Schwitters, Kurt, 110, 317
Ramachandran, Vilayanur, 24, 25, 26, Scotus, Duns, 194, 288, 299, 330
359 Seferis, George, 103
Ransome, John Crowe, 102 self as open work, 13839
Rauschenberg, Robert, 8, 101, 104, Serra, Richard, 31, 175, 284
108, 110, 111, 112, 177, 285, 317, Sesshu, 104, 125, 226, 285, 351
321 Sextus Empiricus, 88, 90, 194, 322,
Reago, Paula, 31 337
Reich, Steve, 329 Shakespeare, William, 164
Reinhardt, Ad, 8, 182, 183, 184, 354 shamanism, 8, 239, 246, 247, 248,
Rembrandt, 31 249, 251, 252
revisibility, 8, 9, 14, 51, 55, 131, 172, Sherman, Cindy, 31
325, 326 Silesius, Angelus, 278, 279
Rexroth, Kenneth, 9, 97, 98, 104, Sinclair, Iain, 330
159, 166, 194, 262, 265, 296, 297, Smith, Cyril Stanley, 330
298, 299, 300, 330, 339, 351, 353, Smith, Tony, 175
356, 359 Smithson, Robert, 129, 356
Reznikoff, Charles, 46, 60, 115, 177, Snyder, Gary, 8, 104, 170, 171, 172,
359 173, 174, 176, 191, 194, 198, 199,
Ricks, Christopher, 187 203, 204, 207, 208, 209, 210, 216,
Rilke, Rainer Maria, 105, 179, 217 218, 231, 232, 233, 248, 250, 259,
Rimbaud, Arthur, 217 360
Rodin, Auguste, 31 Socrates, 81, 90, 105, 118, 179, 356
Rorty, Richard, 9, 52, 170, 172, 173, Spicer, Jack, 121, 163, 176, 177, 179,
279, 333, 334, 335, 359 185, 187, 353
Rosenberg, Harold, 56 Spinoza, Baruch, 65, 80, 81, 82, 83,
Rothenberg, Jerome, 121, 186, 202, 84, 85, 107, 151, 194, 223, 267,
207, 216, 231, 241, 245, 254, 255, 283, 288, 292, 319, 351
330, 359 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 133
368 Index
Stubbs, George, 30 Welch, Lew, 129, 180, 199

Sufi - mysticism, 9, 282, 309 Weschler, Lawrence, 58, 76, 360
sunyata, 7, 21, 65, 68, 69, 70, 72, 74, Whalen, Philip, 8, 101, 108, 109, 110,
75, 77, 78, 81, 82, 93, 96, 97, 163, 111, 112, 360
224, 275, 283, 305 White, Gilbert, 258
Suzuki, D.T., 274 White, Kenneth, 8, 104, 131, 141,
Tao, 220, 222, 223, 227, 279, 280, 194, 196, 204, 210, 216, 217, 245,
281, 288, 305, 309, 310, 329, 357, 259, 358
360 Whitehead, A.N., 119, 120
Taoism, 9, 97, 198, 207, 218, 219, Whiteread, Rachel, 31, 284
220, 222, 223, 227, 230, 236, 239, Whitman, Walt, 217
243, 277, 280, 281, 301, 305, 309, Wilde, Oscar, 287
329, 330 Williams, Fred, 232
tathata, 7, 32, 65, 68, 70, 75, 79, 81, Wilson, Robert, 134
83, 92, 97, 142, 228, 283 Winters, Yvor, 46
The Cloud of Unknowing, 268, 361 Witkin, Joel Peter, 31
Thomas, Lewis, 256 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 56, 73, 128,
Thomas, R.S., 8, 166, 168 129, 136, 176, 276, 277, 278, 279,
Thoreau, Henry David, 194, 217, 298, 284, 324, 356, 358
300, 301, 322 Wolseley, John, 8, 232, 233, 234, 361
Titian, 31 Wolters, Clifton, 268
Tjapaltjarri, Clifford Possum, 31, 233 Wood, Michael, 342
Tolstoy, Leo, 279, 301 Wordsworth, William, 166, 210, 215,
Traherne, Thomas, 306 231, 286
Tu Fu, 298 Worringer, Wilhelm, 18
Turrell, James, 9, 262, 285, 304, 305, writerly and readerly texts, 13436
306, 351, 353, 361 wu-wei, 97, 223, 225, 236, 280, 301
Twichell, Chase, 76 Xenophanes of Colophon, 290
Twombly, Cy, 8, 101, 102, 103, 104, yang, 198, 223, 227
105, 108, 177, 351, 355, 360 yin, 198, 223, 227
Valery, Paul, 56, 163, 165, 166 yugen, 228, 230
Vaughan, Henry, 302, 303 zazen, 70, 78, 143, 171, 215, 225,
Vermeer, Jan, 58, 72 274, 277
Vinci, Leonardo da, 30 Zen Buddhism, 70, 72, 73, 86, 87, 94,
Viola, Bill, 31 95, 96, 97, 124, 125, 126, 218,
vipassana, 70, 78, 274 222, 223, 224, 225, 228, 230, 243,
wabi, 228 269, 274, 275, 277, 301, 337, 338,
Wah, Fred, 8, 121, 164, 185, 186, 354, 356, 358, 359, 360
195, 196, 199, 207, 208, 210, 212, Zeno of Elea, 329
213, 360 Zenrin-Kushu, 97
walking art and poetry, 198207 Zimmerman, Michael E., 272
Waterton, Charles, 8, 194, 233, 257, Zizek, Slavoj, 180, 181, 182
258, 259, 353, 360 Zukofsky, Louis, 115
Watts, Alan, 52, 53, 69, 79, 86, 95,
97, 223, 228, 229, 230, 269, 278,
280, 281, 360

Picturing Mind Paradox, Indeterminacy and Consciousness in Art &amp; Poetry

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Picturing Mind

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2006

Part 2 The knowing body: art as an integrative process of

Part 3 Interrogating appearances: being, seeing & showing

Part 6 The self as open-work: permeability, incompleteness

Part 7 Mind, the real & the other 159

Part 8 Where we are: locus of mind-in-the-world 191

Part 10 The discontinuum of consciousness: ambiguity,

Part 11 A leaving, an unending. A folding, an unfolding 345

For Philippa, Joanna, Tom and Jenny

I am very grateful to the research committee of the Faculty of Arts,

Im also grateful for having participated in the affairs of ISSEI

It might be useful to the reader to know something of the composi-

suchness, are discussed in relation to the sceptical dialectics of

Part 6 expands on the idea of art as a way of picturing mind by

In Part 7 notions of otherness and the real are discussed in relation to a

Part 8 explores many different approaches taken by artists and poets to

In Part 9 the particular modes of consciousness that have become

Part 10 continues many of the themes already introduced and consid-

of the spangled mind

This book is made out of many such patterns. It charts an unfolding of

Seen in another way the book represents a particular topography of

The book is organised in a way that emphasises the interdependence

The making of art and poetry involves both a sustained interrogation

In writing a book like this Im trying to make something that will be

address all of these constituencies, while at the same time constructing

The knowing body:

Scientists [] do not deal with truth []

In this section I explore some of the ways in which such descriptions

in the ways in which knowledge is described and formulated within

In order to counteract the distortions brought about by this situation it

In earlier centuries artists were seen as contributing to the whole

spheres of existence in iconic, indexical and symbolic images. Artists

Being, knowing and embodiment

At the outset we have to establish a location for the processes of

If we are not to perpetuate the mind/body dualism which has charac-

It is important therefore to think in more holistic terms, to see the

It follows that philosophically we need to stress the way in which

Knowledge can be described as referring to two or three spheres of

Intuition could be placed in either, or both, of the mind or spirit

It is important to note that even in Gibsons systems view of percep-

Bronowski (1988: 364) writes:

According to Crowther, (1993: 41) Merleau-Ponty argues that our

Crowther (ibid: 42) summarises Merleau-Ponty's theory of perception

Capra (1992:124) makes reference to the ideas of the neurologists,

sent further levels of refinement and interpretation of perceptual

Similarly these factors are all utilised in knowing oneself - but it is

Coming to know God or acquiring knowledge of a reality immanent

of the defining characteristics of emerging consciousness. If evolu-

when narrative capabilities emerged and affected linguistic and conceptual

A vast new realm of possibilities opens up. The ability to experience

Ramachandran (2003) approaches the development of language and

experiment in which respondents are presented with two shapes: one,

Perception, mind and consciousness are functions of the interaction

tion, of coming-to-know our world, also presents us with the basic

David Bohm, (1989: 55) the quantum physicist, writes:

All knowing also involves the construction of propositions, models

The organisation of material into a pictorial construct or system of

The speculative nature of learning, taking risks in order to enter new

modulating colour across a surface; modelling a form in clay; or

The cognitive, perceptual, affective and performative qualities

Specific sensory information about the visible world

Painting is a science, and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of

Svetlana Alpers (1983: 122) writes of Dutch painting in the 17th

Picturing Mind Paradox, Indeterminacy and Consciousness in Art & Poetry

Picturing Mind Paradox, Indeterminacy and Consciousness in Art & Poetry