ATROPOS PRESS new york • dresden General Editor: Wolfgang Schirmacher Editorial Board: Giorgio Agamben 3LHUUH$OIHUL Hubertus von Amelunxen Alain Badiou Judith Balso Judith Butler Diane Davis Chris Fynsk Martin Hielscher Geert Lovink Larry Rickels Avital Ronell Michael Schmidt )ULHGULFK8OIHUV Victor Vitanza Siegfried Zielinski Slavoj æLçHN © 201 by *DEULHOOH&ROOHW Think Media EGS Series is supported by the European Graduate School FRYHUGHVLJQE\'DPLHQ0RQDFR ATROPOS PRESS New York • Dresden 151 First Avenue # 14, New York, N.Y. 10003 all rights reserved  = H UR6SDFHV 3RwHVLVDQGWKH$UWRI &ROODERUDWLYH&UHDWLYLW\ *DEULHOOH&ROOHW Contents Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .9 Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .11 PART I: The Theories 1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .15 1.1 The Course of the Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .17 2. What is Called Zero? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .27 2.1 Zero and Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .30 2.2 Zero and Theology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .32 2.3 Zero and Philosophy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .37 2.3.1 Zeno . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .37 2.3.2 Zero, Jacques Derrida and The Poets: A One Act Play . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .40 3. Poïesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .53 3.1 Poet as Maker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .54 3.2 Poiesis and Dēmiourgia. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .57 3.3 Poiesis’ Relationship with Creation, Destruction and Metamorphosis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .59 3.4 Poiesis and Plato’s Nature of Eros . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .62 3.5 Poiesis and Giambattista Vico . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .68 3.6 Poïesis with Martin Heidegger and Henri Bergson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .75 3.7 Poïesis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .84 4. What is a ‘Genius’? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .85 PART II: The Arts 5.A Synoptic Archeology of the Poetry-Poets . . . . . . . . . . .101 5.1 The Early Period . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .102 Egypt and Iraq . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .102 Greece . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .104 5.2 On Missionary Prophesying . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .108 4 Table of Contents 5 Dante Aligheri. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .112 5.3 On Evolving Limits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .114 William Shakespeare . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .114 5.4 On Liberated Stream of Consciousness . . . . . . . . . . . . . .118 5.4.1 Goethe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .118 5.4.2 Charles Baudelaire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .124 5.4.3 William Blake . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .128 5.4.4 Emily Dickinson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .135 5.5 On the “thing-in-itself ” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .143 Samuel Beckett . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .143 5.6 Into the Zone . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155 5.6.1 Alessandro De Francesco . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .157 6. A Synoptic Archeology of Visual Poets . . . . . . . . . . . . . .167 6.1 The Early Period . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .167 6.2 Diegetic and Mimetic Forms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .176 Greece . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .178 Rome . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .179 6.3 Art as Symbolic Representation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .180 Renaissance Period . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .181 Baroque and Rococo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .185 Symbolic Shades of Light. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .186 Neoclassical Period . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .189 6.4 On Conscious Liberation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .189 Romantic Period . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .189 Realist Movement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .193 Impressionists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .194 6.5 On Subconscious Liberation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .195 Post Impressionist / Expressionist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .195 6.6 On Cutting it All to Pieces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .196 6.7 On Elimination. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .199 Abstract Expressionism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .199 6.8 Back Into the Empty Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .201 7.A Synoptic Archeology of Sound Poets. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .209 7.1 The Early Period . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .209 Echoes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .209 Rhythm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .212 Silence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .214 7.1 The Art of Melody and Harmony . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .219 7.2 The Art of Discord . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .220 6 Z(e)ro Spaces 7.3 The Art of Dissonance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .222 7.4 The Art of Noise . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .227 7.5 The Beginning of Silence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .229 7.6 The Art of Resonance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .231 7.7 Sonic Boom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .233 7.8 Silence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .235 PART III : Conclusion 8. D’où Venons Nous / Que Sommes Nous / Où Allons Nous: The Birth of the Art of Collaboration: Creating Fictive World Formulae . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .239 BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .243 This book is dedicated to my son, Julien, whose boundless love, cheer and encouragement always keeps me inspired. I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Alessandro De Francesco, who never failed to extend his eyes, ears, exacting intellect, poetic sensibility and emancipating sense of humor and delight throughout the entire process of the work. Without his support and humble creative genius I may have never made it to the finish line. I would like to equally extend gratitude to the sweetest two ladies, and the kindest man I know, who’ve expressed the most heartfelt friendship, comfort and laughter as I plodded through the abyss. To my philosopher friend, who’s encyclopedic brain always keeps me on my toes, my theological friend who always read the work and offered great advice, and my ex-husband, who always believed in me no matter the circumstance helped fund me through this work: Xavier Chevalier Sarah Hannis Julia Hölz Sina Badiei Jason W. Hammonds Mark Camaj To Wolfgang Schirmacher: without your genius the European Graduate School and the priceless inspiration it breathes into life, would quite simply never exist—all of this work was inspired by your willingness to offer education a more fertile earth. Foreword GABRIELLE COLLET’S WORK Z(e)ro Spaces: Poiesis and the Art of Collaborative Creativity is an ambitious theoretical experiment whose aim is to produce a general approach to the notion of collaboration through a vast series of historical examples taken from different artistic practices. Collet’s purpose is to produce a theory able to support an innovatory pedagogical project where some of the key-themes of her theoretical propositions come into practice. Collet’s démarche is inspired by French Deconstructionism and therefore fruitfully spans from chapters written in academicphilosophical English to creative writing re-formulations of her thesis, such as in particular theatrical dialogues where the philosopher will of course sense a sometimes ironical reference to Plato’s method. In those dialogues, in a perfectly metabolized deconstructionist fictional approach, philosophers, artists and writers of different epochs discuss together as they were the characters of the same play, so that Collet’s theory of collaboration acquires not only a pedagogical purpose, but also a diachronic and trans-disciplinary theoretical geography. By the same token, the deconstruction doesn’t only attack the academical style or the geo-historical linearity, but also the different artistic and literary genres approached by Collet and the traditional distinctions made within those genres, like for instance between a literary poetry-poetry and (external) experiments such as sound, performative, visual and concrete poetry. The different poetic and artistic examples belong to the wider and more comprehensive notion of poiesis - a notion that is increasingly being used in the contemporary thought 9 10 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part I — The Theories (e.g. in Fabien Vallos’s theory of art) - from the Greek poiein” (to make). The poiein defines a concept of poetry as a collection of practices and collaborative contexts able to modify and influence the real. Hence, fiction in Collet’s study must not be understood as a creation of parallel representational dimensions: through the core concept of Fictive World Formulae inspired by Giambattista Vico and Markus Gabriel, Collet uses the notion of “fiction” as a generator of possibility. A fictive world, in other words, is what Deleuze calls the “virtual” : not a parallel world or a constructed representation, but a poiein as creation of possibility within the real. The theme of possibility is in this sense underlying and sustaining the whole project: the purpose of an intellectual and pedagogical collaboration, suggests Collet, is to create possibility; collaboration consists in generating possibility. This is maybe the ultimate meaning of what Collet calls “Zero spaces”. Alongside with Alain Badiou’s ontological notion of ensemble vide, the zero space is an empty space not in a nihilistic sense, but as a void that contains all the possibilities that can be generated in collaborative contexts. The Zero space is the space in which the fictive world formulae are created. It is a literal, in-the-world model of creation. As the author doesn’t fail to underline, the “zero” is not only a set but also a circle, i.e. a context of collaboration in which the poiein as creation of possibility can take place. Alessandro De Francesco Preface I BELIEVE IT IS OF IMPORT TO ANNOUNCE, at the behest of the critical readers who will approach this work, that the lens through which I myself entered it, was an intentional modification/alteration even minimization of concepts and language so as to hopefully make the work accessible, and eventually, capture mostly the attention of the poets who may have little or no prior visitations with theory, or whose modus operandi in embracing living and creating, (rather than scholarly research), may in the same light, greatly benefit from a brief examination of theory which acts merely as an aid in consciousness through their creative processes. As I wrote this work with the objective of creating a basic theory for an arts collaborative foundation I wish to create, so that poets from the four quarters of the whole, (visual, sound, performance, poetry), may venture forth in the propositions I make in the argument, to collaborate poetically, making Fictive World Formulae annually, in the capable position that the spectators examine themselves, internally, externally, historically, separately and as a whole common brea(d)th of existence, as it was yesterday, is in perpetual motion today, and might arrive in the future, or as the artist Paul Gauguin inscribed in his painting, “D’où Venons Nous / Que Sommes Nous / Où allons nous, (Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?). 11 PART I The Theories 1. Introduction In the case of the creative mind, it seems to me, the intellect has withdrawn its watchers from the gates, and the ideas rush in pell-mell, and only then does it review and inspect the multitude...Hence your complaints of unfruitfulness, for you reject too soon and discriminate too severely. —SCHILLER, Letter 1st of December 1788 I’m not saying that Resnais, and Prigogine, or Godard, and Thom are doing the same thing. I’m pointing out, rather, that there are remarkable similarities between scientific creators of functions and cinematic creators of images. And the same goes for philosophical concepts, since there are distinct concepts of these spaces. —Alan SOKAL For the authors of those great poems which we admire, do not attain to excellence through the rules of any art; but they utter their beautiful melodies of verse in a state of inspiration, and, as it were, possessed by a spirit not their own. —PLATO THIS BOOK—a detective-style investigation—arose out of curiosity for the common experience documented universally by ‘poetic geniuses’ throughout the span of recorded humanistic expression. Intended originally to focus on an archaeology of the poetry-poets1 adventures of our past, as 1 Alessandro De Francesco, Pour une théorie non-dualiste de la poésie (19601989), PhD dissertation, University of Paris-Sorbonne, PhD advisor: Georges 15 16 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part I — The Theories most customary inquiries do, the journey took a number of detours and bypaths ending in what one can only imagine as nothing more than the beginning into a world of potentialities. What began as a quest to better understand the sublime occurrence in the act of poetic ingenuity: the moment when nothing and infinity transpierce the physical and mental awakened being, urging it to express what is sometimes considered mystic—the unknown, unknowable, even unto the poet It-self, ended as a discovery that this experience is so universal and timeless—repeatedly recounted throughout the history of documented vestiges of creation, in all fields where creative acts occur, that it almost seemed futile to further investigation. This non-tangible, indescribable, timeless space where the so-called transcendent/immanent occurs within an individual, stimulating the apparition of creation, came to be conceptually known as, (for lack of a better nomination), a zero space. So then, what about it? Traversing disciplines far and wide, lost and groping in the dark, the investigation crossed through ages and seas of philosophy, religions, mythologies, biographies, poetry, literature, art, and music until years passed and it occurred that perhaps the focus wasn’t really about this sea of zero spaces after all. They were all over the place—global —ubiquitous. It might take over two thousand pages or more to document a genealogy of their presence(s) in the past, and present. So what happens next? Rather, how does the mindful knowledge of the existence of this space we go into when creating—help aid towards a progressive future? Molinié, pp. 21-22 and 380-381. Poïesis and the Art of Collaborative Creativity 17 1.1 The Course of the Research The characteristics and regulations of intellectual history today are such that to try and deal in one work with a range of texts, art, music and performance spanning the period from cavemen to the contemporary world would be to invite derision, if not ridicule. No matter. The subject was too curious to be abandoned. But it would need to be handled in a particular way; it would need to take the form of a step by step investigation synthesized simplistically into compartments of compact and diluted brevity from which a spawning of endless other investigations might arise—and that is exactly what this research has come to be. As the topic is so universal and timeless, different recipients will have different reactions to what is omitted, whether in terms of topics covered, levels of detail, or of discussion of scholarly debates. These omissions are inevitable in a work of this scope, since its aim is not to be comprehensive but rather to trace a selective analysis with an overall coherence, for the poets themselves. The first section of the dissertation begins by exploring the etymology and implications of the titular word Z(e) ro across varying disciplines: a multiplicity of usages in the contemporary world. Extending through the fields of theology, physics, and philosophy—through this brief encounter with the concept and vicissitudes of zero, we hopefully arrive at a more concrete appreciation for the word as the eponymous conceptual space used in this work. The next section offers a careful examination of the word poiesis—as many know, from the Greek verb poieō, infinitive poiein, “to make form”. This primary sense of making form is significant when discussing the term poiēsis in the context of poetry and poetics. “The poet is homo faber (man, the 18 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part I — The Theories maker) and the poem as the made thing are commonplaces that persist throughout the history of Western poetics, often in tension with other formulations that identify the ‘poetic genius’ as prophet and seer (Latin vates), as a vessel of the divine inspiration, or as ‘the transcendent voice of the age’”2; either that, and/or utterly mad: the dyonisian/apollonian contrast of oscillating historical perspectives. The poetic geniuses or creators of epics, mythologies, visions, and travel guides to better living, (i.e. philosophers, political leaders, religious founders, etc.) have been characterized since time immemorial in stark, diametrically opposed considerations—and all the multiplicities in-between. Perhaps all are at least partially correct in their assessments. It transpired from here, that while these ‘geniuses’ from all disciplines, (including but not limited to the visual-poets, sound-poets, performing arts-poets, and poetry-poets)3, were recounting throughout history their experiences in this sort of mystic space of creation we will call for lack of a better term, zero space(s)—just as frequently these ‘poetic geniuses’ seemed also to be the ones carrying the burden for prophecies and visions—often lost and wandering in solitude through the centuries; their words and/or creations often discovered posthumously. As solitude and isolation has been a common theme amongst creators especially since the aggrandizing technological advances in telecommunications and media—yet, collaboration amongst artists has been known to stimulate and awaken more 2 Greene, Roland, Stephen Cushman, Clare Cavanagh, Jahan Ramazani, Paul F. Rouzer, Harris Feinsod, David Marno, and Alexandra Slessarev. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2012. Print. 3 Alessandro De Francesco, Pour une théorie non-dualiste de la poésie (19601989), PhD dissertation, University of Paris-Sorbonne, PhD advisor: Georges Molinié, pp. 21-22 and 380-381. Poïesis and the Art of Collaborative Creativity 19 profound communications and hence, elaborate creations— this work will argue for the advancement of collaboration amongst the poetic arts, (visual, sound, performance, poetry) towards an objective of creating Fictive World Formulae. (This nomination is created in combining references to both Giambattista Vico’s notion of the fictive as the third ground between truth and fable that we properly see as being opposed to one another, (see chapter 3.5), and Markus Gabriel’s definition of the metaphysician as “a creator of world formulas”). The formula changes to formulae in a conceptual sense, as the replacement of the mother’s milk, when organic nourishment is lacking. What are we creating to feed the world into a sustainable existence? In other words, the collaborating poets would essentially become contemporary meta and pata-physicians, (from Alfred Jarry’s definition of pataphysician as “the science of imaginary solutions, which symbolically attributes the properties of objects, described by their virtuality, to their lineaments”)4 These, what we will call mepaphysicians, will invent works through sound, visuals, words and movement, and the use of both metaphor and pataphor, to create potentialities of global mythologies each year, hence, Fictive World Formulae which could be transmitted via contemporary technological advancements, to a global audience. Subsequently, we will continue with a brief analysis of the etymological development of the word ‘genius’. What is a ‘genius’, where does the concept originate, does it have any significance today? 4 Jarry, Alfred, and Simon Watson. Taylor. Exploits & Opinions of Doctor Faustroll, Pataphysician: A Neo-scientific Novel. Boston, MA: Exact Change, 1996. Print. p.21-23 20 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part I — The Theories Next, the work traces through a synoptic archeology of encounters with the poetry-poets5 through the ages. We will observe the changing focus, paradigmatic shifts and delivery through different epochs, weaving across the globe and attempt at determining which (non)-direction the contemporary literary world is moving in order to examine the thread of zero spaces engaging the movement and wordsmiths multiplicity of descriptions and usages of their awareness in the space therein At this point, we will examine another synthesized version of poiesis in visual artistry: from the first known beginnings of visual creations in cave paintings to key movements and periods spanning the duration of human existence. Witnessing the global trends of influence via the lens of the neuropsychological (en)optic model of the seven principles of perception— replication, fragmentation, integration, super-positioning, juxtaposition-ing, reduplication, and rotation—we will attempt at unearthing the alternating usage through the evolution of visual perceptions throughout time. Perhaps once we examine these particulars, we may be able to see where the visuals are taking us today. Music and sound art can be traced back to prehistoric times and is often interrelated with the visual and linguistic. In this section of the work we will investigate the origins and evolution of this wordless, visionless art that has the power to evoke the most profound and penetrating reactions in the human psyche. Traversing the realms of melody, harmony, discord, dissonance, noise, resonance, sonic boom and silence this section of the study will attempt to work out the common fiber of zero spaces echoing through the history of music and 5 Alessandro De Francesco, Pour une théorie non-dualiste de la poésie (19601989), PhD dissertation, University of Paris-Sorbonne, PhD advisor: Georges Molinié, pp. 21-22 and 380-381. Poïesis and the Art of Collaborative Creativity 21 sound and into the contemporary world. As thus far in the investigation the work has piecemeal dissected the operative words in the title-tiles of the collage, Zero-Spaces: Poiesis and the Art of Collaborative Creativity, we now arrive at the last two implicit wor(l)ds of the research, collaboration and creativity. Creativity: the ancient moniker, poïesis: making form. This contemporary appellation known predominantly now as creativity is a term which can be defined as: to create is to act in the world, or on the world in a new and significant way. To act in the world is to perform an action; to act on the world is to form or make something. The verb ‘to create’ (French, créer, German, schöpfen) is different from ‘to make’ (faire, machen) or ‘to produce’ (produire; erzeugen) as neither of these necessarily involves newness. What in Latin differentiated creare from facere (to make) was the sense of bringing something into the world which did not previously exist. The former was used of generating a new entity (e.g. Lucretius ‘natura creatrix’), or of begetting a child, or of establishing a new legal status. At a certain point in time, (in the last 150 years), the paradigmatic shift in the exceptional value placed on this conceptual attribute within a human being, changed from one of irresolute, unprincipled, often vulgarly hedonistic and sometimes intolerably insane connotation of the creative spirit, “to the belief that the human creative attribute is unproblematically benign. With respect to the latter, contemporary society offers individuals a high degree of personal freedom by cherishing individuality –to realize a unique self has become a new kind of imperative. Though the very molds which have made this realizable also contradict its fulfillment.”6 6 Mason, John Hope. The Value of Creativity: The Origins and Emergence of a Modern Belief. Aldershot, Hampshire, England: Ashgate, 2003. Print. 22 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part I — The Theories [t]he inherent obverse of ‘Be your true Self!’ is…the injunction to cultivate permanent refashioning, in accordance with the postmodern postulate of the subject’s indefinite plasticity…in short, extreme individualism reverts to its opposite, leading to the ultimate identity crisis: subjects experience themselves as radically unsure, with no ‘proper face’, changing from one imposed mask to another, since what is behind that mask is ultimately nothing, a horrifying void they are frantically trying to fill in with their compulsive activity…7 The social fragmentation which has co-existed with this shift in belief (the ever more diminished sense of belonging in a wider society) has compromised the level of recognition that can endorse such uniqueness. We have no globalcommunity myth(s) to unite us—few collaborative creative efforts which without trying manumit the unique speciality within the individual poetic creator(s). “At the beginning of the 20th century the undiscovered territory was that which lay within; at the start of the 21st century the vanishing continent is that of collective experience, or common identification, or shared values. What we are left with is intensely pronounced particulars delivering ever more diminishing returns. As the aggregate of ‘creative individuals’ increases, their produce seems more reductive, less inspiring, and the effects: infinitely fading. One of the explanations for this could be found in the discrepancy between our attitude to art (based on historical achievements and the promise which the aesthetic has offered in the past) and what contemporary art (visual, musical and literary) indeed provides.”8 7 Zizek, Slavoj. The Ticklish Subject: the Absent Centre of Political Ontology. London: Verso, 1999. 8 Mason, John Hope. The Value of Creativity: The Origins and Emergence of a Modern Belief. Aldershot, Hampshire, England: Ashgate, 2003. Print. Poïesis and the Art of Collaborative Creativity 23 The fact that with the simplistic motion of our finger, we have access to an immeasurable world of visual(s), objects, musical compositions, compilations of sound bites, and literary texts which traverse through centuries of creations until the contemporary day, has crippled our need for new art. While in the music, visual and literary arts “the shared symbolic languages and conventions of the previous five centuries have broken down, the result appears to be an abundance of talent, invention, wit and brilliance - but a scarcity of significance”9. It is due to this notion, perhaps, that the word poïesis is slowly making a comeback in our vocabulary. Enough of the ‘creatives’: where have the ‘poetic geniuses’ and visionaries gone, how can we find them, and perhaps bring them back and inspire them to help guide us into the next global epoch? Especially at this point in our civilization, when technical accomplishments have raised the specter of the annihilation of all living beings, the healing power of art is needed. In the encounter of humanity with its historical fate, the possibility of creative transformation of the demonic forces of history must be kept open. The use of the arts as a means of healing the soul testifies to the inherent power of men and women to confront the depths of their own pain and to emerge with a sense that life is indeed worth living.10 — Stephen K. Levine Thereupon, we come to our final word in the titular locution: collaboration. 1802, from French collaborateur, from Latin collaborator, past participle of collaborare “work with,” from col- “together” + laborare “to work”. 1860, from 9 Ibid. Levine, Stephen K. Poiesis: The Language of Psychology and the Speech of the Soul. London: Jessica Kingsley Pub., 1997. Print. 10 24 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part I — The Theories French collaboration, noun of action from Latin collaborare. In a bad sense, “traitorous cooperation with an occupying enemy,” it is recorded in 1940 with reference to the Vichy Government of France collaborating with the Nazi party in Germany. Throughout the research we will probe the varying continents on the planet to discover how new forms of creation are popping up which seem to sprout from multiple forms of collaboration. We will explore briefly the tensions derived from the original meaning and how they are implicated (or not) in today’s usage of the word across the varying disciplines. Further we will consider how efficient contemporary collaborators are at working together and why ‘creative collaboration’ seems to be the buzzword of the new century in more than just the artistic scene. Finally, the work will attempt to thread all the pieces together to determine whether it could be worth the experiment to gather thee poetic geniuses while we may, (sound, visual, performance, poetry), with the help of strategic conductors, curators and editors, in varying pockets around the globe, to go into their zero spaces, both alone and together, engaging in collaborative creative projects to develop potentialities of global mythologies, or Fictive World Formulae, (FWF’s) –engaging the world, but more-so, motivating people to come together and awaken humanity to take action against the collective suicide towards which it is heading. Ecological crisis is caused by our anthropocentric world view—we don’t respect, or care for anything else except ourselves, we are turning Poïesis and the Art of Collaborative Creativity 25 nature and ourselves against us. What we call nature is our own generation, making— how do we get rid of these self understanding of humanity—by thinking! Philosophers said we are like Gods, can do anything, everything is to serve us, we need to criticize that!11 In order to do so, we would need to use the invent of modern technology and our contemporary media and communication devices to broadcast, free of charge, each year, the realization of such global scale productions to awaken the masses into ‘thinking’—through collaborative poetic creations (between the four artistic disciplines) which provoke imaginations into action. And into the zero spaces... Schirmacher, Wolfgang, “MEDIA AESTHETICS: The Homo Generator.” European Graduate School, Saas-Fée. Aug. 2011. Lecture. 11 2. What is Called Zero? FROM THE FACILE etymological-metaphorical linkage to inspiration and creativity, to the uncanny symbolic partnerships one can almost effortlessly unite through examining current findings in scientific fields, Zero, as the identifying nomination to pre-creative space, moreover as the overarching repeated concept examined in this work, seemed almost predisposed to assuming itself as the leading titular role. Zero, from the French, zéro; from Venetian, zero, which (together with cypher) came via Italian zefiro, “wind from the sea”, from Arabic Safira = “it was empty”, Sifr = “zero”, “nothing”. Just as inspiration is derived from the Latin inspirare ‘inspire, inflame, blow into’, stimulation or arousal of the mind, feelings, etc., to special or unusual activity or creativity. A breath of wind from the wings of madness. Charles Baudelaire “Les Fleurs du Mal” 1857 The ancients suggested that creative ideas are breathed into a human agent by some divine or mystical force (daemon or genius). “...whatever powers are considered possible transmitters of the inspired idea, the receiver always knows that in a sense, beyond their own efforts, they have housed visitors from elsewhere in their thought. Inspiration— 27 28 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part I — The Theories breathing life into something, intuition, the instantaneous appearance of the idea or a gaping open of the new... Whoever experiences inspired ideas can, even in post-metaphysical or hetero-metaphysical times, understand themselves as host or matrix for the non-own.”12 In his Key of the Sciences, the Persian encyclopedist Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Khwarizmi asserts that while calculating, if no number appears in the place of tens, one should use a little circle “to keep the rows.”13 Row: “line of people or things,” Old English ræw, “a row, line; succession”, from ProtoGermanic, rai(h)waz (cf. Middle Dutch rie, Dutch rij “row”;” Old High German rihan “to thread”; Old Norse rega “string”).. from PIE root rei- “to scratch, tear, cut” (cf. Sanskrit rikati “scratches.” rekha “line”). The circle one was to draw to ‘keep the rows’ was called sifr, “empty” in Arabic. This was the earliest mention of the name sifr, which would eventually become zero. Scratching beneath the surface of zero, blown from the wind into an empty space. Upon return, stringing together people / things—weaving magnificent new images, musical compositions, poetic language, speech. Poiesis, after zero. As the decimal zero and its then contemporary mathematics extended beyond the Arabic world and over to Europe in the Middle Ages, words derived from sifr and zephyrus came to refer to 1) calculation, as well as 2) privileged knowledge and secret codes. A mysterious, mystic knowledge where secrets revealed themselves before joining forces with their cousin(s): calculation, assessment, analysis, examination, investigation, inquiry, study, learning, education, knowledge, wisdom. Sloterdijk, Peter. “The Allies; Or, The Breathed Commune.” Introduction. Bubbles. Cambridge, Mass: Semiotext(e), 2011. N. pag. Print. 13 “0 (number).” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 03 Jan. 2014. Web. 03 Mar. 2014. 12 What is Called Zero? 29 Then we probe a bit further and ask, why choose a ‘little circle’ to keep all the rows (of people and things) together ? As opposed to say, a triangle, square, a simple dot or infamous slash? So let’s consider the circle for a brief moment: halfway across to the center is a radius, passing the center to the other side we understand as a diameter, all the way around in the eternal return we have the circumference. In order to escape the samsaric circumference, we need to dive into the void. The ratio of traveling all the way around any circle, to taking the daring route across the unknown void is ∏ (pi) – what is otherwise known as a transcendental number. Transcendence means different things to different disciplines. We’ll focus here on philosophy and religion (world mythologies, metaphysical world formulas, or as we call them here, fictive world formulae). In short, for religion, transcendence is the concept of being entirely beyond the universe (not a living being), in other words, you couldn’t arrive there unless you were dead—hence fictive world formulae, for as the saying goes, nobody has ever died and lived to tell about it. Philosophy understands it as climbing or going beyond some ‘philosophical concept of limit’ –so essentially, one could potentially get there still breathing. We’ll consider the zero space as the non-concept of nothing and infinity, beyond the limit. It cannot be defined or discussed or reached through linguistics, fundamentally. Thus, the transcendental non-concept blown into the void of the circle making its way across as it threads through residuals of people and things in a dreamscape like universe, privileged by the calculating cousins running around the circumference on the lookout for the daring ones who may at any minute climb there way out and back onto the surface. Zero, as infinite space. 30 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part I — The Theories 2.1 Zero and Science To explore in depth the significance of zero across the sciences would be hubristic coming from an author who has a puerile knowledge of the science disciplines. However, it would also be imprudent to use zero as a titular concept and not acknowledge altogether its presence in the sciences. Thus, we will explore for a moment a basic overview of the conceptual relevance to the metaphoric zero in the scientific milieu of physics. Zero-point energy, also called quantum vacuum zeropoint energy, is the lowest possible energy that a quantum mechanical physical system may have; it is the energy of its ground state. All quantum mechanical systems undergo fluctuations even in their ground state and have an associated zero-point energy, a consequence of their wave-like nature. The uncertainty principle requires every physical system to have a zero-point energy greater than the minimum of its classical potential well. This results in motion even at absolute zero. In the meditation of nothing and infinity—within a zero space, the observer is still, silent, everything in the universe can be observed as it passes—breath, breathing, life is still beating. There is motion, even at absolute zero. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle approximately states that complementary variables (such as a particle’s position and momentum, or a field’s value and derivative at a point in space) cannot simultaneously be defined precisely by any given quantum state. We are always in motion, even when sleeping. Especially when dreaming. In particular, there cannot be a state in which the system sits motionless at the bottom of its potential well, for then its position and momentum would both be completely determined to arbitrarily great precision. One never knows What is Called Zero? 31 what lurks within a zero space, infinitely reshaping, alteration, complex variation. Therefore, the lowest-energy state (the ground state) of the system must have a distribution in position and momentum that satisfies the uncertainty principle, which implies its energy must be greater than the minimum of the potential well. As long as you keep breathing, the source will keep supplying. In quantum field theory, the fabric of space is visualized as consisting of fields, with the field at every point in space and time being a quantum harmonic oscillator, with neighboring oscillators interacting. In what is known as the Casimir effect, the vacuum energy contains contributions from all wavelengths, except those excluded by the spacing between plates. As the plates draw together, more wavelengths are excluded and the vacuum energy decreases. The decrease in energy means there must be a force doing work on the plates as they move. The zero-point energy of a system consisting of a vacuum between two plates will decrease at a finite rate as the two plates are drawn together. The vacuum energies are predicted to be infinite, but the changes are predicted to be finite. In other words, within a zero space (vacuum energy), there lie infinite possibilities (intuition / subconscious), when coming up to surface, potentialities decrease as one approaches the rational (consciousness) — a finite rate (as the two plates are drawn together). ‘there must be a force doing the work on the plates’ –when poiesis and creation arrives, why from the infinite is only finite creation born? The seat of the soul is there where the inner and outer worlds meet. —Novalis 32 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part I — The Theories Richard Feynman commences his infamous Caltech lectures with his most pithy statement of all scientific knowledge: “If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generations ..., what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is ... that all things are made up of atoms – little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another. ...”14 It occurred that while examining the metaphysical and pataphysical, as necessary to comprehending the import in creating fictive formulae and in explaining the nature of zero spaces, that it would also be of equal importance to consider the physical implications of zero as well. It is with this in mind that theories within the domain of contemporary physics were scanned. As it haphazardly turned out, those as described within the physical world in relation to zero, seemed to remarkably mirror the notions of the conceptual space reflected in this study. Hence, this brief meditative interruption of scientific notions of Zero. 2.2 Zero and Theology If we took all the world religions, all the spiritually induced philosophies and conceptual theories from around the globe and threw them into a pot on boiling water—dissolved fat straight to the bone, we would be left with same result: eliminate desire, (physical, material, economic), social 14 Feynman, R. P., R. B. Leighton, and M. Sands. “The Feynman Lectures on Physics.” 1963. Lecture. (p.1-2) What is Called Zero? 33 obligation, (familial, cultural and filial), and fear from our thoughts to arrive at tranquility of mind—universal theological dogma. The lexicon, visuals and sounds/music used to depict this space one would arrive in such a condition, is as diverse as the infinite space and time of the stories that were created around the paths one might take to get there. To culminate all the words used to describe this conceptual moment/space into a cohesive representative of the ever growing totality, this work will simply suggest that this type of condition is one of many that can be experienced within and coming out of zero space(s). Naturally, the theological objectives aim to arrive at an ideal type of experience, though not necessarily always the one experienced when following their so-called ‘determined paths’. Something like our modern day sales trick to convince the masses—right next to the image for advertising, (though we know using image for mass persuasion is thousands of years old). In any case, it is interesting to note that for some odd reason, the ideal of this experience is realized through theological visuals around the globe, in little (and sometimes big) circles—the symbol, as well, of the zero. 34 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part I — The Theories Metaphorical representation of divine emanation of successively constricted Olamot (Spiritual Worlds) within the surrounding Ein Sof (Divine Infinity). The attributes and qualities of God and of the Adam Kadmon or Divine Man, God’s Image emanate out from a center that is nowhere or nothing, being infinite, to a circumference both everywhere and finite. Gustave Dore’s image of the Christian concept for beatific vision from Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. What is Called Zero? The ba gua, a symbol commonly used to represent the Dao and its pursuit. The eight doors of Jannah, in Muslim belief 35 36 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part I — The Theories Hinduism: Image of the “surest way to Nirvana” Buddhism: Traditional Tibetan Buddhist Thangka depicting the Wheel of Life with its six realms. The universe as envisioned in Goussin de Metz’ “L’image Du Monde,” published in 1245. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Fr.14964, fol. 117 What is Called Zero? 37 Day after day, day after day We flow with breath and motion; As fluid as a titanium ship Upon an infinite ocean. Circles, circles, everywhere, And all the religions did shrink; Circles, circles, everywhere, What’s a poet to think? 15 The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end. —Ralph Waldo Emerson We dance around in a ring and suppose, but the secret sits in the middle and knows. —Robert Frost 2.3 Zero and Philosophy 2.3.1 Zeno To begin this section we will travel back in time to a philosopher whose appellation itself is closely linked to Zero, and his paradox of The Dichotomy. The philosopher’s name is Zeno. Zeno’s dichotomy paradox goes like this, (slightly reworked): Suppose Alain Badiou wants to catch a stationary bus so he can get to a place where he could potentially witness an event, or give a lecture discussing the finite and infinite to arrive at a truth concept such as The One. Before he can get there, he must get halfway there. Radius. Before he can get halfway there, he must get a quarter of the way there. Before traveling a quarter, he must travel one-eighth; before an eighth, one-sixteenth; and so on. This description requires one to complete an infinite number of tasks, which Zeno maintains 15 Pun on the ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, published 1798; “water, water, everywhere”. 38 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part I — The Theories is an impossibility. Impossible to think one’s way through to the other side. Hence, imagining or inventing a finite concept or ‘truth’ through the use of mathematics or logic, is an impossibility. The logicians and mathematicians fail to cut across the void. The only way to potentially get there is through the imagination, or movement—getting up off the sedentary tush in the armchair and diving, swimming, walking, running, dancing or whatever suits you. This sequence also presents a second problem in that it contains no first distance to run, for any possible, (finite) first distance could be divided in half, and hence would not be first after all. Hence, the trip cannot even begin. Or impossible, once again, to calculate an origin, once again again, only to be done through imagination—inventing fictive creation stories, (which as we know are older than the written word itself)—or by getting up and moving, dancing (see aboriginal ritual mythologies). The paradoxical conclusion then would be that travel over any finite distance can neither be completed nor begun, and so all motion must be an illusion. Accordingly, Vico’s dreamscape. An equally valid conclusion, as Henri Bergson proposed is that motion (time and distance) is not actually divisible. This argument is called The Dichotomy because it involves repeatedly splitting a distance into two parts. Tension: evil and good. In the infinity of dualisms where nothing is ever quite in our reach to be tangible, resting in a continual oscillation from side to side, and around and around, we get our entire history of philosophy. In the paradox, it seems as though the implications lead to a blurring of the distinctions between these invented dualisms to a meditation on a third What is Called Zero? 39 way, or as Vico would suggest, a fictive way, through the imagination, or literal: walking. But how does this relate to ‘zero space’ (as the eponymous conceptual space in the text) and philosophy? Quite simply, if we attempt at defining a zero space as nothing and infinity, then it becomes clear the only way to experience either/both, in response to The Dichotomy paradox, is through the imagination and/or moving, (i.e. the olympic athlete arriving in ‘the zone’, or dancing). We know for certain, if we get up at point A and walk or move a certain distance to point B, there is no reason why we wouldn’t arrive, and it seems almost idiotic to consider otherwise. Though as re-worked through the logic of Zeno’s paradox, it is mathematically impossible for the result of getting there when constantly living in dualities and slicing things in two. Hence, as a philosophical endeavor, we might say that Zeno would have been in favor of the phenomenological approach of eliminating the dualisms, the interior and exterior, the mind and body, and accordingly, combining them for a closer investigation of zero spaces, the outside in. If it is mathematically impossible to find a logical solution to the obvious, then how could it be possible to find a logical solution to anything unless using our imaginations or physically experiencing it for proof that one can move from point A to point B. As the two problems presented make it impossible to find a starting point, 0, or ending point, infinity, then it seems appropriate that a conceptual Zero space, is, using the same logic, impossible to precise, and only able to be experienced through the imagination, or through moving, making, poiesis. 40 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part I — The Theories 2.3.2 Zero, Jacques Derrida and The Poets: A One Act Play Enters Lord Byron from stage left, looks around struts into center stage twirling a cane, looks down at Derrida sitting at his desk chewing on the tip of his pencil while staringout the window thinking. LORD BYRON We of the craft are all crazy...some are affected by gaiety, others by melancholy, but all are more are less touched..16. DERRIDA Madness is therefore, in every sense of the word, only one case of thought (within thought). It is therefore a question of drawing back toward a point at which all determined contradictions...in the form of given, factual historical structures, can appear, and appear as relative to this zero point at which determined meaning and non-meaning come together in their common origin. From the point of view which here is ours, one could perhaps say the following about this zero point...17 LORD BYRON What is this you say about a point? I have never seen a point, there is an infinite space we plummet into, you mean to say....a zero space, perhaps? A giant shadow appears on the wall as the closet door opens and coughing is heard. As the Being inside slowly appears the shadow cast on the wall gets smaller and smaller until the shadow and the man become one. 16 Gardiner, Marguerite, George Gordon Byron Byron, and Ernest J. Lovell. Lady Blessington’s Conversations of Lord Byron. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Pr., 1969. Print. 17 Derrida, Jacques. “Cogito and the History of Madness.” Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. London: Routledge, 2001. N. pag. Print. What is Called Zero? HUSSERL Excuse me, Lord B., but I’m trying to listen, and you’re cutting off his words—he’s referring to what I called a zero point of orientation: the region of pure consciousness. You can’t “go there” with consciousness; instead you have to let the worldly go away and then inhabit what’s left. “What can remain, if the whole world, including ourselves with all our cogitare, is excluded?” LORD BYRON A zero space, of orientation. HUSSERL I suppose you could call it that, now let him continue... DERRIDA Thank you, Edmund. As I was saying: Invulnerable to all determined opposition between reason and unreason, it is the point starting from which the history of the determined forms of this opposition, this opened or brokenoff dialogue, can appear as such and be stated. It is the impenetrable point of certainty in which the possibility of... the narration of the totality, or rather of all the determined forms of the exchanges between reason and madness are embedded. 18 Andre Gide flutters down on cupid wings in a giant cloth diaper and taps Derrida over the head with a wand and then speaks. ANDRÉ GIDE The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes, n’est ce pas? DERRIDA It is the point at which the project of thinking this totality by escaping it is embedded. By escaping it: that is to say, by exceeding the totality, which—within existence—is 18 Ibid. 41 42 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part I — The Theories possible only in the direction of infinity or nothingness; for even if the totality of what I think is imbued with falsehood or madness, even if the totality of the world does not exist, even if non-meaning has invaded the totality of the world, up to and including the very contents of my thought, I still think, I am while I think. 19 Ralph W. Emerson comes swimming across the floor as a river magically appears passing underneath the desk of Derrida . He climbs out of the river in a transparent bathing dress and shakes himself off in a fantastic display of enthusiasm. EMERSON The maker of a sentence launches out into the infinite and builds a road into Chaos and old Night, and is followed by those who hear him with something of wild, creative delight. ANDRÉ GIDE I completely agree with you, Ralph. One does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time. Thunder and lightening are heard outside and the room begins to shake. Suddenly there is a crack of lightening, a bright white flash and explosion followed by smoke and a slow dispersion into visibility when a man in a superman costume with a giant Z . on his chest appears in the middle of it and begins to speak casually. NIETZSCHE Even the philosophical man has the presentiment that this reality in which we live and have our being is an illusion, that under it lies hidden a second quite different reality. DERRIDA Even if I do not in fact grasp the totality, if I neither 19 Ibid. What is Called Zero? understand nor embrace it, I still formulate the project of doing so, and this project is meaningful in such a way that it can be defined only in relation to a pre-comprehension of the infinite and undetermined totality. 20 ANDRÉ GIDE When intelligent people pride themselves on not understanding, it is quite natural they should succeed better than fools. DERRIDA This is why, by virtue of this margin of the possible, the principled, and the meaningful, which exceeds all that is real, factual, and existent, this project is mad, and acknowledges madness as its liberty and its very possibility. This is why it is not human, in the sense of anthropological factuality, but is rather metaphysical and demonic: it first awakens to itself in its war with the demon, the evil genius of non-meaning, by pitting itself against the strength of the evil genius, and by resisting him through reduction of the natural man within itself.21 The phone rings, Derrida puts on speaker phone and a voice is heard. J O H N M I LT O N Demoniac frenzy, moping melancholy, / And moon-struck madness. Derrida hangs up the phone, only for it to ring again, and again, he puts it on speakerphone. S A M U E L TAY L O R C O L E R I D G E My case is a species of madness, only that it is a derangement of the volition, and not of the intellectual faculties. 20 21 Ibid. Ibid. 43 44 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part I — The Theories NIETZSCHE Just as the philosopher behaves in relation to the reality of existence, so the artistically excitable man behaves in relation to the reality of dreams. DERRIDA In this sense, nothing is less reassuring than the Cogito at its proper and inaugural moment. The project of exceeding the totality of the world, as the totality of what I can think in general, is no more reassuring than the dialectic of Socrates when it, too, overflows the totality of beings, planting us in the light of a hidden sun which is epekeina tes ousias.22, 23 A RT H U R R I M BAU D The first study for the man who wants to be a poet is knowledge of himself complete: he searches for his soul, he inspects it, he puts it to the test, he learns it. As soon as he has learned it, he must cultivate it! I say that one must be a seer, make oneself a seer. The poet becomes a seer through a long, immense, and reasoned derangement of all the senses. All shapes of love suffering, madness. He searches himself, he exhausts all poisons in himself, to keep only the quintessences. Ineffable torture where he needs all his faith, all his superhuman strength, where he becomes among all men the great patient, the great criminal, the great accursed one—and the supreme Scholar! For he reaches the unknown! ...So the poet is actually a thief of Fire! JOHN MASON HOPE Yes, but calm down, Arthur, let us not forget: Prometheus stole the fire from the gods. How did he do that? By hiding it in a giant fennel-stalk. By that means he was able to carry the fire away from Olympus, down to human beings. It was the fennel-stalk, ferula communis, with its soft pith and hard rind, which made his gift possible. 22 Ibid. “Because it is beyond being” (epekeina tes ousias, a phrase from Plato’s Republic 509b) 23 What is Called Zero? 45 The knowledge Prometheus brought us was not only about creative capacity and power; it was also about how to contain it. 24 ANDRÉ GIDE I agree John, and in addition to the beginning of Arthur’s comment: Know thyself? A maxim as pernicious as it is ugly. Whoever observes himself arrests his own development. A caterpillar who wanted to know itself would never become a butterfly. A wall size Ipad tablet lights up against the wall behind Derrida’s chair flashing a news brief—as he slowly turns to read it out loud: “It’s actually hard for creative people to know themselves because the creative self is more complex than the noncreative self,” Scott Barry Kaufman, a psychologist at New York University who has spent years researching creativity, told The Huffington Post. “The things that stand out the most are the paradoxes of the creative self ... Imaginative people have messier minds.” DERRIDA Thank you, Scott Barry Kaufman, for that enlightening and profound insight. Astonishing how as modern technology advances, language used within it becomes increasingly more vapid... And Glaucon was not mistaken when he cried out: “Lord! what demonic hyperbole? daimonias hyperboles,” which is perhaps banally translated as“marvelous transcendence.” This demonic hyperbole goes further than the passion of hybris, at least if this latter is seen only as the pathological modification of the being called man. Such a hybris keeps itself within the world. Assuming that it is deranged and excessive, it implies the fundamental derangement and excessiveness of the hyper24 Mason, John Hope. The Value of Creativity: The Origins and Emergence of a Modern Belief. Aldershot, Hampshire, England: Ashgate, 2003. Print. 46 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part I — The Theories bole which opens and founds the world as such by exceeding it. Hybris is excessive and exceeds only within the space opened by the demonic hyperbole. Flying in through the window with a black batman costume on and landing on top of Derrida’s desk with a loud THUMP. G E O R G E B E R N A R D S H AW The true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art. To women he is half vivisector, half vampire. He gets into intimate relations with them to study them, to strip the mask of convention from them, to surprise their inmost secrets, knowing that they have the power to rouse his deepest creative energies, to rescue him from his cold reason, to make him see visions and dream dreams, to inspire him, as he calls it. He persuades women that they may do this for their own purpose whilst he really means them to do it for his. He steals the mother’s milk and blackens it to make printer’s ink to scoff at her and glorify ideal women with. He pretends to spare her the pangs of child-bearing so that he may have for himself the tenderness and fostering that belong of right to her children. Since marriage began, the great artist has been known as a bad husband. But he is worse: he is a child-robber, a blood-sucker, a hypocrite, and a cheat. Perish the race and wither a thousand women if only the sacrifice of them enable him to act Hamlet better, to paint a finer picture, to write a deeper poem, a greater play, a profounder philosophy! For mark you, Tavy, the artist’s work is to shew us ourselves as we really are. Our minds are nothing but this knowledge of ourselves; and he who adds a jot to such knowledge creates new mind as surely as any woman creates new men. In the rage of that creation he is as ruthless as the woman, as dangerous to her as she to him, and as horribly fascinating. Of all human struggles there is none so treacherous and remorseless as the struggle between the artist man and the mother woman. Which shall use up the other? that is the issue between them. And it is all the deadlier because, in your romanticist cant, they love one another. What is Called Zero? 47 Two woman are walking past the window and stick there heads in. CHARLOT TE WHIT TON Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult. MARGARET MEAD Women want mediocre men, and men are trying hard to become as mediocre as possible. A knock is heard at the door. Politely walking in dressed in a conservative suit he walks over to Derrida’s desk and hands him a book wrapped in gift paper. He looks around and speaks soberly. A NAT O L E F R A N C E It is the certainty that they possess the truth that makes men cruel. The screen flashes white static and suddenly the sound of a Skype call is ringing. Derrida answers and a face appears on the screen and speaks. DEJAN STOJANOVIC Even great men bow before the Sun; it melts hubris into humility. DERRIDA Okay, okay. As I was saying...The extent to which doubt and the Cartesian Cogito are punctuated by this project of a singular and unprecedented excess—an excess in the direction of the nondetermined, Nothingness or Infinity, an excess which overflows the totality of that which can be thought, the totality of beings and determined meanings, the totality of factual history—is also the extent to which any effort to reduce this project, to enclose it within a determined historical structure, however comprehensive, risks missing the essential, risks dulling the point itself. 48 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part I — The Theories A little girl crawls out from under the desk of Derrida with a lollipop in her mouth and little dress. She takes the lollipop out of her mouth stares into his eyes and speaks to Derrida. LITTLE GIRL We know where you’re going with this Uncle Jackie, you will eventually reveal the tension wherein the text reveals its own assumptions about language, and in so doing dictates a statement about undecidability, the difficulties inherent in totalization, their own readability, or the limitations of textual authority. But I think that’s just the point the poets are trying to tell you. They know there are limitations in spoken language. The ghost of Spinoza flashes on the screen behind Derrida’s chair. SPINOZA To use language is only a crutch, something you do because you cannot communicate otherwise. DERRIDA Such an effort risks doing violence to this project in turn (for there is also a violence applicable to rationalists and to sense, to good sense; and this, perhaps, is what Foucault’s book definitely demonstrates, for the victims of whom he speaks are always the bearers of sense, the true bearers of the true and good sense hidden and oppressed by the determined “good sense” of the“division”—the “good sense” that never divides itself enough and is always determined too quickly—) risks doing it violence in turn, and a violence of a totalitarian and historicist style which eludes meaning and the origin of meaning. LITTLE GIRL They know its violent, Uncle Jackie—that’s why so many of them kill themselves trying. They go into their zero spaces and when they come out language isn’t enough to express the overwhelming experience inside. 49 What is Called Zero? SEAMUS HEANEY To Robert Lowell You were our night ferry thudding in a big sea, the whole craft ringing with an armourer’s music the course set willfully across the ungovernable and dangerous. DERRIDA Yes, yes, yes, I get the zero space (s) concept: To grasp the operation of creative imagination at the greatest possible proximity to it, one must turn oneself toward the invisible interior of poetic freedom. One must be separated from oneself in order to be reunited with the blind origin of the work in its darkness. This experience of conversion, which founds the literary act (writing or reading), is such that the very words “separation” and “exile,”which always designate the interiority of a breaking-off with the world and a making of one’s way within it, cannot directly manifest the experience; they can only indicate it through a metaphor whose genealogy itself would deserve all of our efforts.25 LITTLE GIRL I’m sorry Uncle Jackie, you did understand what they were trying to say, my mistake. But regarding a comprehensive genealogy of zero spaces—that would take thousands of pages... DERRIDA But to continue what I was saying...For in question here is a departure from the world toward a place which is neither a non-place nor an other world, neither a utopia nor an alibi, the creation of “a universe to be added to the universe,” according to an expression of Focillon’s cited by Rousset. This 25 Derrida, Jacques. “Force and Signification.” Writing and Difference. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1978. p.7-8 Print. 50 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part I — The Theories universe articulates only that which is in excess of everything, the essential nothing on whose basis everything can appear and be produced within language; and the voice of Maurice Blanchot reminds us, with the insistence of profundity, that this excess is the very possibility of writing and of literary inspiration in general. Only pure absence—not the absence of this or that, but the absence of everything in which all presence is announced—can inspire, in other words, can work, and then make one work. The pure book naturally turns toward the eastern edge of this absence which, beyond or within the prodigiousness of all wealth, is its first and proper content. The pure book, the book itself, by virtue of what is most irreplaceable within it, must be the “book about nothing”.26 Spinoza flickers on the screen again. SPINOZA Like I keep saying, is anyone listening: to use language is only a crutch, something you do because you cannot communicate otherwise. DERRIDA As writing, communication, if one insists upon maintaining the word, is not the means of transport of sense, the exchange of intentions and meanings, the discourse and “communication of consciousnesses.” We are not witnessing an end of writing which, to follow McLuhan’s ideological representation, would restore a transparency or immediacy of social relations; but indeed a more and more powerful historical unfolding of a general writing of which the system of speech, consciousness, meaning, presence, truth, etc., would only be an effect, to be analyzed as such. It is this questioned effect that I have elsewhere called logocentrism.27 Ibid. 27 Derrida, Jacques. “Signature Event Context.” Limited Inc. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1988. Print. 26 What is Called Zero? 51 LITTLE GIRL My mum says that’s why we need to bring in all the poets, not just the (p)oetry poets, but the (s)ound, (v)isual and (p) erformance poets, (P.S.V.P) as well—we need to move forward through collaboration, co-poiesis I think she calls it. The poets still need to precise language through ‘unconcealment’, their individual locales of existence, genius loci’s, I think the Roman’s called them. They need to name for their discourse the hypostasis of place(s), past, present—intuited by the individual poets who’ve sprouted in varying locales around the globe, (equal distribution of inter-continental representation-not just the western domination), within the collaborative group, so that they can communicate a common comprehension invoked by the sound, and then visual infused with performance, attempting to illuminate for the spectators without necessary language. With the economy of language, and through the use of visual, sound and movement we could potentially reach a common global comprehension without needing so many translations and the loss therein within language. After each unique place is captured in all the spectrum and shades of colors from black to white, even colorless, as is: sometimes provocative displays, (ecological, political, polemical, controversial)—the acoustic and visual signature of place—accessing and divulging covered-up pockets of earth: transparency for all nations), to the extreme diametrically opposed calming and inspiring displays—the multiplicity. The Poetists (dramatist-poet-orchestrators), will attempt to weave together over-arching narrative (through the parts of the non-narrative) to create, each year, new fictive world formulae in magical realist shades. A school for poets to engage in copoiesis in a global effort as well to experimentally practice a mini avowed-operative community28 where the individual is equally as important as the whole and must collaborate to define identity through the other expressions aside from their own. A platform for our poets to go into zero space(s) alone 28 Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Inoperative Community. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, 1991. Print. Blanchot, Maurice. The Unavowable Community. Barrytown, NY: Station Hill, 1988. Print. 52 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part I — The Theories and separately—where Others are always waiting up at the surface. Where after the year is over, through contemporary media and communications—will always be waiting there up at the surface—until after a certain number of years, all the countries in the world can be represented, then repeat. DERRIDA To be a poet is to know how to leave speech. 29 Blackout. 29 Derrida, Jacques. “Edmon Jabès and The Question of the Book.” Writing and Difference. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1978. 85. Print. 3. Poïesis POÏESIS: (from the Greek verb poieō, infinitive poiein, “to make form”). The verb, not the noun, was dominant in usage first. There was movement involved in the act—physical, perhaps mental, or even spiritual. A premeditated choice of movement. The poetic choice. A choice of moving in the (non) direction of the poetic, the non-space of captivation, creation. A zero space. In the context of poetry, the substantive poiētēs (poet) was long more common than the abstract noun poiēsis. The person who chose to move in the poetic discipline, as a discipline itself, (or perhaps poiesis chooses the person). In sooth, the art of poetry as such was often denoted as poiētikē, from which the discipline of poetics obtains its name. In general usage, the verb poiein retained as primary meaning an act of formation and transformation of matter in the cosmic sphere in relation to time. Though ultimately, as a social practice, it involves technē (art) and thus belongs to the world of art. Poiēsis in the sense of making form is still present in the language of biology and cybernetics (as in autopoiesis, the self-generation of living organisms) or medicine (as in hematopoiesis, the process by which bone marrow produces red blood cells). Similarly in biology, the word parthenogenesis: ORIGIN mid 19th cent.: modern Latin, from Greek parthenos ‘virgin’ + genesis ‘creation.’ A virgin-creation, a creation born from an untouched, pure being. A divine gift. Or, a fantasized version of one—for a multitudinous array of outcomes. The basic human need for illusion, petit plaisirs, 53 54 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part I — The Theories ecstasies, or simple motivation to continue on—moments of transpiercing into zero spaces—some call the sensation in the moment of momentous events. Events force the spectator into movement, into participation rather than spectating. The virgin-creations as transporters. Transportation into a zero space through the art of poetic-making. 3.1 Poet as Maker “It is important to observe this primary sense of making form when discussing the term poiēsis in the context of poetry and poetics. The poet is homo faber (man, the maker) and the poem as the made thing are commonplaces that persist throughout the history of Western poetics, often in tension with other formulations that identify the poet as prophet and seer (Latin vates), as a vessel of the divine inspiration, or as the transcendent voice of the age.”30 The parthenogenetic creator. The divine creator who’s been created from the divine. Especially when the complement or alternative has been an idealist program for poetry—for instance, the Aristotelian notion of poetry as mimesis as adapted in the European Renaissance—“the notion of poetry as poiēsis has held an undiminished power, perhaps because it explains what other programs often cannot: how we encounter a poem as object, how a poem radially alters reality, how a poem is actually made...The history of Western poetics includes many episodes in which idealist or even metaphysical claims for poetry are answered (and not necessarily contradicted) by corresponding claims that proceed from poiēsis: e.g. Philip Sydney’s fusion 30 Greene, Roland, Stephen Cushman, Clare Cavanagh, Jahan Ramazani, Paul F. Rouzer, Harris Feinsod, David Marno, and Alexandra Slessarev. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2012. Poïesis 55 of Platonism and Aristotelianism in his Defense of Poesy (written ca.1580, pub. 1595) meets its counterpart in George Puttenham’s contemporaneous Art of English Poesy (1589) which begins with this statement: “a poet is as much to say as a maker... A reductive but not inaccurate thesis would have it that this tension between idealist creating and materialist making permeates the entire history of signification of the term poiēsis.” 31 Perhaps in the context of this thesis, it is more in the condition of making sans ideals—the creation of the collaborative poetmakers, (dēmiourgias-poetēkē), or rather: experiments in a multiplicity of poetic makings. In the 20th century renewed attention to poiēsis was the outcome of a modernist hope to rid the encumbrance of the romantic genius. Romanticism’s definition of genius as a person driven by a force beyond his or her control and as an ability that surpasses the natural and exceeds the human mind makes it virtually identical with the Classical notion of divine madness or frenzy.32 The internalized creator. Drug taker. Naval gazer. Altered perceptual navigator. Narcissistic word fabricator. “Modernist poetry and critics often named the poem not as fiction, ideation, or reflection but as new reality in itself: described the poetic act as the making of a new thing”.33 Modernists focused more on skill and ability: the objectivists— in the spirit of Dante’s praise of Arnaut Daniel as “miglior fabbro del parlar materno” (a better craftsman of the mother tongue, Purgatorio 26.117), echoed in T.S. Elliot’s dedication to the The Waste Land (1922)—celebrated the poet as the agent of creation rather than instrument of representation. 31 Ibid. Young, Edward. Conjectures on Original Composition: 1759. Leeds: Scolar, 1966. Print. 33 Ibid. 32 56 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part I — The Theories Though Eliot believed, as an agent of creation making a new thing, Others were often needed to aid in conception and birth, “the task of creation for the poet was to discern the ‘inert embryo...germinating in him...even though he cannot identify this embryo until it has been transformed into an arrangement of the right words in the right order.’ Since they possessed the perspective provided by distance, collaborators were especially welcome to step in and help facilitate that organizational process.”34 Similar to Eliot’s ideas on the ‘agent of creation’ were those of his predecessor, the poet Paul Valéry, in his early theoretical essay “The Introduction to the Method of Leonardo Da Vinci” (1894), “It is this that is grand. In these men there is a double mental life, which deserves the name of method. They observe their spontaneous perceptions which ignore internal logic, and force themselves to mimic them, to reproduce them. They observe the incessant flow of ideas, provoke new combinations and look for conjectures, for relating the results.”35 Homogenerator.36 ..the intellect has withdrawn its watchers from the gates, and the ideas rush in pell-mell, and only then does it review and inspect the multitude.. —SCHILLER 34 Badenhausen, Richard. T.S. Eliot and the Art of Collaboration. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge UP, 2004. Print. 35 Valéry, Paul, and Thomas MacGreevy. Introduction to the Method of Leonardo Da Vinci: , Translated from the French of Paul Valéry of the Académie Française by Thomas McGreevy. London: J. Rodker, 1929. Print. 36 Schirmacher, Wolfgang, “MEDIA AESTHETICS: The Homo Generator.” European Graduate School, Saas-Fée. Aug. 2011. Lecture. Poïesis 57 3.2 Poiesis and Dēmiourgia In this specific sense, one might identify in modernist thinking something of the developing theoretical frame of poiēsis. Its most ancient appearance in Homeric Greek (as poiein) pertains primarily to working on matter, shape or form and only secondarily to abstraction, whereby it might suggest availing or producing forms. As philosophy takes over in the classical Greek imaginary, this primary materialist notion of poiēsis becomes degraded relative to praxis (action) or dēmiourgia (creation). Yet is curious to account in etymological conscientious, the root reference to dēmiourgia bears a sort of communal influence. Demos (populous): the masses. As opposed to poiētēs, who encounter form as object, dēmiourgos is one whose work derives its primary meaning from the public sphere, as the word itself shows: dēmos + ergon. This ergon (work) covers a range of action: a dēmiourgos can be a seer as much as a doctor. Doctor: originally an agentive noun of the Latin verb docēre ‘to teach’. Etymologically, there seems to blend a working together with Others to see as much as to teach, or rather guide, as if, into the act of poiesis itself—into the space of the creator. “Arguably because of the Christian investment in the notion of creation out of the absolute, but no doubt also because of the epistemological permutations of Platonism from the Hellenistic era onward, the referential framework that comes to measure the genius of a poet is drawn not from poiēsis but from dēmiourgia.”37 How easily can the poet interact and engage the Other? The Nietzschian conflict in 37 Greene, Roland, Stephen Cushman, Clare Cavanagh, Jahan Ramazani, Paul F. Rouzer, Harris Feinsod, David Marno, and Alexandra Slessarev. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2012. Print. 58 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part I — The Theories Birth of Tradgedy begins here, perhaps, when Apollonians take over as creative force. The chameleon-like poet flutters alongside the land, crossing seas, color-shifting in the spectrum of populous. The Deleuzian schizophrenic-poet, is not schizophrenic—they know when they change colors, transform, there is a conscious transformation, unlike the schizophrenic-unconscious of the shifts. (An unintentional misunderstanding perhaps). In the overwhelming spectrum of all the colors there is also black and white, both are zero spaces. There is seen an equal amount of darkness as light, both can be equally blinding. Solitude. What is needed now is both Apollonian and Dyonisian collaborators waiting up at the surface with open eyes, ears and arms—community and collaboration. In this sense, the chaos of experience would be instantly released and as such, not felt or seen as a madness, but a normal experience in the creative process. And Something’s odd – within That person that I was And this One – do not feel the same Could it be Madness – this? —Emily Dickinson 1830 – 1886 In his work, Stephen K. Levine recognizes this experience as common to most primitive cultures, of which we all essentially originated, in the role of the archetype healer. “Shaman are the prototype of the artist as therapist. They are masters of ceremonies who employ diverse media for healing purposes. Their healing is accomplished by a journey to the other world, the world of the spirits or gods. The journey is perilous, since they may lose their own souls in the process and be unable to return. Only their inherence in the community ensures they will have a home to return to.38 38 Levine, Stephen K. Poiesis: The Language of Psychology and the Speech of the Soul. London: Jessica Kingsley Pub., 1997. Print. Poïesis 59 Relating back to the notions of Plato, “one might say (though in Timaeus both notions are intertwined) that dēmiourgos is still in effect a worker who commits an ergon, even if this ergon is the universe itself, while the poet is the shaper who shapes forms.”39 —which may be opined as his distinction between the philosopher and the poet. Because for Plato, “shaping forms is, in the last instance, inevitably misshaping, de-forming—hence, his alarm for the poet as a shaper who transforms morals, essentially a political, not ethical, act that leaves no place for the poet but exile from the city.”40 Do I dare disturb the universe.41 3.3 Poiesis’ Relationship with Creation, Destruction and Metamorphosis Plato’s review is summoned from the perspective of what will become the philosophical (and later, theological) desire to mobilize a non-destructible, absolute truth. As poiesis is making, there involves the notion of carving, which in turn is a form of reshaping; thus, to form is always to transform, realized, in a materialist way, as the process of bringing otherness to bear on the world, as opposed to receiving otherness as external authority. Hence, eradicating the absolute authority which Plato, not unlike Hitler, sought. In this respect, inherent in the infinitive poiein is also an element of destruction, and there is no external guarantee that would absolve any poiēsis of the destructive elements of the alteration it performs. In response to this one might consider that a better word for destruction would be metamorphosis. 39 Ibid. Ibid. 41 Eliot, T. S. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. New York: Ameron, 1930. Print. 40 60 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part I — The Theories In that case, Martin Heidegger seemed to be moving in the right conceptual direction in his philosophical striving to find it in his threshold occasion42: a moment of “ecstasis” when something moves away from its standing as one thing to become another. Though in nothing and infinity, (zero space), ‘ecstasy’ simply doesn’t equate in any etymological sense. In a zero space, there is only that, nothing and infinity. Emotion no longer exists. Nor desire. Nor almost anything, within the poet. There is simply stasis, almost no movement, grey matter, the poet’s frequency is reduced to a state beyond thinking, simply observing, in a suspension of judgment. It’s a pre-creative space, a temporal visit where nothing happens, nothing and infinity; everything happening in the cosmos can exist in these spatial vibrations encountered through the interceptions of the receiver—and only when one comes back to conscious presence may the creator have the potential to give birth or fine tune a creation. Though there is insurmountable documented evidence in the annals of history concluding many have missed the opportunity, and as well turned to anesthetics of sorts, even committed suicide—as each experience can be both overwhelming and frightening. Yet, one may potentially not recognize that something had taken place to begin with—the body reacting before mind. Possibly, it is the more disciplined mind that can identify the observation and capture and transmit it before it disintegrates into the distance. The journey is perilous, since they may lose their own souls in the process and be unable to return. —Stephen K. Levine It is at the moment of coming back to conscious presence when the creator may have the potential to experience a 42 Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. New York: Harper, 1962. Print. Poïesis 61 kind of metamorphosis, and her/his creation can simply be born. There is no real ‘thinking’ that takes place during the process of birth—it is more a natural primitive reaction to the experience itself, a pure being-in-the-moment, just as in child birth. Though it is important to note that most philosophers are male, hence, unable to encounter a primary physical/ mental/spiritual intensity in the experience of pregnancy and event of childbirth and thus only capable of writing, even metaphorically about it without any precision. Nevertheless, the philosopher Husserl comes closest with his conceptual zero point of orientation: the region of pure consciousness. You can’t “go there” with consciousness; instead you have to let the worldly go away and then inhabit what’s left. “What can remain, if the whole world, including ourselves with all our cogitare, is excluded?” 43 However what seems ironic or even peculiar about the historical search for comprehension of the aesthetic-creativepoetic-experience, is the fact that the philosophers have been at each others throats desperate to exact the experience in the sacred land of ‘zero spaces’ for millennia—while at the same time, the poetic-creators have been riding the waves out, surfing, crashing, toppling on their heads and getting back up to do it again for just as long. 43 Husserl, Edmund, and Donn Welton. The Essential Husserl: Basic Writings in Transcendental Phenomenology. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1999. Print. 62 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part I — The Theories 3.4 Poiesis and Plato’s Nature of Eros Poiein, as both creative and destructive action, is sustained by the modernist persuasion. The grapple between what is called “private” and “public” poetics has not resolved, historically, the social orders presented by the idea of the poet as a shaper of forms. Staggeringly dragged out, the impact of Plato’s political bias has been crucial in the development of modernity. Debates of the Platonic significance of the term poiēsis often regulate themselves to its principal conjuration in the Symposium, where the conviction is imbued with diverse configurations of Eros. In the Symposium section 207d of The Nature of Eros, Diotima describes how mortals strive for immortality. The death instinct. In all begetting and bringing forth upon the beautiful there is a kind of making or poiesis . In this genesis there is a movement beyond the temporal cycle of birth and decay. According to Plato, such a movement can occur in three kinds of poiesis: (1) Natural poiesis through sexual procreation, (2) poiesis in the city through the attainment of heroic fame and finally, (3) poiesis in the soul through the cultivation of virtue and knowledge.44 This love of wisdom, (cultivation of virtue and knowledge), when connected with the activity of Eros, strives to grasp the beautiful in a manner far beyond the previous stages. It is not concerned with any earthly manifestation of beauty, whether this be in bodies, souls or science, but rather the nature of the Beautiful Itself. This is the final goal of erotic activity (210e). 44 Cavalier, Robert. Symposium Outline. The Nature of Eros. Carnegie Mellon University, n.d. Web. 17 Feb. 2014. Poïesis 63 —And in fact artistic experience lies so incredibly close to that of sex, to its pain and its ecstasy, that the two manifestations are indeed but different forms of one and the same yearning and delight...his poetic power is great, strong as a primitive instinct; it has its own unyielding rhythms in itself and breaks out of him as out of mountains. —Rainer Maria Rilke, Letter Three, Viareggio, near Pisa (Italy) April 23, 1903 If sex weren’t pleasurable, as a species we would have no drive to procreate. Hence, it is only logical, that whatever drives us to the places of creative inspiration, demands allure with just as much persuasion—but once in, conception, gestation and then giving birth, there is equal transformation, discomfort and pain. No pain, no gain. A simplistic aphorism. But unless one is sadomasochistic, it seems illogical to qualify it as the final goal of erotic activity. While Plato had numerous laudable conceptual ideas used as a base/foundation even for many contemporary philosophers still, perhaps he was off the mark in his assessment of this third realm of poiesis. Most prominent in history, artists attempt but are unsuccessful in resisting the calling. Many are thus compelled to numb their senses during these forced responses by anesthetizing the failed resistance and “going in” without sobriety, or rather clarity. Hence, our exemplary history of drug/alcohol addicted literati. Forsaking one’s creative compulsion may be recognized in Lacanian spheres as corking the unconscious stream of signifiers, though I would go further and say awareness of signifiers are experienced only at the first level of passing through when entering and coming out of a zero space. Once in a zero space, the personal is no longer—it is nothing and infinity, at that depth personal is so meshed with everything it would no longer be recognizable, 64 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part I — The Theories or more, the personal is eradicated. Whether this gesture of corking is done in an unconscious or conscious mode, or why one might consciously cork their own well-source of inspirational unconscious flow is debatable. In either case this will eventually lead to a bursting out of the bottle, geyser style: spreading selves round the environment to be witnessed by the others in chaotic/erratic form(s). Repression is not sustainable. (Hence, our exemplary history which has likened many poetic temperaments to divine madness for some 3000 years.) It also will and can be allayed temporarily with additives filling in the gap—the external imaginary object a, perhaps is a form of those additives, which can multiply or vary in intensity according to said subjects satisfaction and/or appreciation with its environment and sociological/economical/ domicile comfort level. Running the gambit of appropriated addictions and obsessions from sexual, drug, material, speech, food, travel and so on and forth; anything to try and prevent the cork from bursting. Anything to prevent one from facing their own music—following the pied piper down the lane into an unfamiliar zero space. Perhaps this is where the pathology of mania resides so often—fully forced resistance. And therein lies the paradox of the zero space(s) conundrum—the philosophers lust after experiencing it, while the poets, at certain points in their lives, get entirely fed up with the curse of the repeated experience altogether. Perhaps it’s time to level the playing field, and consider collaboration? Plato’s stages of the ascent have allowed a bringing forth upon the beautiful (qua means) which eventually leads to a transcendent gasp of the Beautiful Itself (qua end). It is here that we have arrived at the Forms, (inspirational poetic creations), for we are comprehending the idea of the Beautiful Poïesis 65 (212a).45 Despite Plato’s belief of one being able to comprehend the idea of the beautiful in this place, (an idealized illusion) the poet Rilke chimes in, With nothing can one approach a work of art so little as with critical words: they always come down to a more or less happy misunderstanding. Things are not all so comprehensible and expressible as one would mostly have us believe; most events are inexpressible, taking place in a realm which no word has ever entered, and more inexpressible than all else are works of art, mysterious existences, the life of which, while ours passes away, endures. —Rainer Maria RILKE, Letter One, Paris, February 17th, 1903 Diotima describes the nature of this Form as ever existent, neither coming into being nor passing out of being, hence beyond the world of Change and Becoming (211a). It is eternal and timeless, self-subsistent and independent (211b). It is that which “in-forms” all particular instances of beauty while remaining distinct from those instances (211b).46 ...taking place in a realm which no word has ever entered, and more inexpressible than all else are works of art, mysterious existences, the life of which, while ours passes away, endures. —Rainer Maria RILKE “Thus through the intellectual contemplation of the Beautiful itself one can, according to Plato, as far as is granted to mortals, participate in an “immortal realm” and achieve that highest good afforded to man(212a)”.47 45 Cavalier, Robert. Symposium Outline. The Nature of Eros. Carnegie Mellon University, n.d. Web. 17 Feb. 2014. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid. 66 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part I — The Theories Perhaps in modern day this would fall under the realm of dramatized narcissism? There was another man in history who believed he knew what the highest good afforded to man was, his name was Adolf Hitler, and we know what results from this way of thinking. In the technological media age if mass genocide and socio-pathological torture and murder is one’s game, then claiming to know the highest good afforded to man should be a clear indication to evacuate. After all, “to a limited being it’s limited understanding is not felt to be a limitation”, said Ludwig Feuerbach before influencing Nietzsche. Socrates completes his recollection and concludes by telling Phaedrus and the others that Eros is mankind’s greatest helper insofar as careful attention to erotic activity can lead us upwards to the realm of the Forms (212b).48 So let’s recap, we concur that creative and sexual energy are potentially born from the same force, and as such drive the primitive desire to create despite all obstacles that may stand in the way of the maddening poetic spirit. The underlying question is: did Plato really have the power in him to take himself with his ‘intellectual contemplation’ to that next “immortal realm” and balance the forces? He does after all recount, For the authors of those great poems which we admire, do not attain to excellence through the rules of any art; but they utter their beautiful melodies of verse in a state of inspiration, and, as it were, possessed by a spirit not their own. Note that the beautiful, as it is used here, refers to the sensible manifestation of the beautiful itself. It is upon this 48 Ibid. Poïesis 67 mode of presentation that Eros engenders and begets. As such, the beautiful here acts as a medium for erotic activity. But, as we have seen this mode of presentation contains within itself a provocation beyond itself insofar as it is the visible manifestation of the eidos (essence) of the Beautiful. This indicates that the end (purpose, goal) of erotic activity is to gaze upon and intellectually possess the Beautiful qua Form. Thus, the ultimate goal of the activity of Eros is a transcendent “possession” of the eidos of Beauty (of 210e-211d) but the means toward this involves an engendering upon the visible modes of beauty.”49 And then Plato proceeds to exile the poets from the city. Perhaps we might consider for a moment Plato in the archetype personality of the obsessive-compulsive in contemporary day: neuro-biological evidence indicates that sentiments of love decreases brain levels of serotonin, the neurotransmitter responsible for mood and flexibility. Low serotonin means you can get stuck on ideas—you become obsessed. In extreme cases, the serotonin shortage can trigger obsessive behaviors, such as exhibiting extreme jealousy. We probe further into this analysis by taking a closer look at the Interlude between Socrates and Agathon (198 –201c), before he proceeds to the the effects of eros. Here we are informed “love is neither the possession of the beautiful nor the possession of the good but involves rather a striving for that which it lacks”. Poor Plato. He lacked the power to enter a ‘state of inspiration’ in which he himself could be ‘possessed of a spirit not his own’ in order to come out of it creating beautiful melodies and poetry, or any art for that matter. Merely thoughts. Could it be that this lack led to his very own definition of love—striving 49 Plato. “Symposium.” Symposium. N.p., n.d. Web. 17 Feb. 2014. 68 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part I — The Theories for that which it lacks? As he became more and more obsessed with the conceptual idea in the third realm of poiesis, (the after zero space where creative inspiration is conceived), and perhaps compulsively jealous and frustrated in his ‘intellectual contemplation’ of knowing this unforeseen space must exist, yet unable to experience it firsthand—hence, the exile of the poets, his unrequited love. Plato’s pharmakoi.50 Love is madness; if thwarted it develops fast —Mark Twain As specified by Plato in his Symposium, the ultimate power of poiēsis consists not in the shaping of form or even the erotic creation and production of life but in the transformation of the soul by virtue of philosophical practice. In his usurpation of poiēsis, philosophy defeats poetry. But was poetry ever itself in a competition with philosophy to begin with? If the poets had to live under such stringent mind control, would there have even been poetic creations in the history of humankind? But most importantly, if the poets were given the choice— would they even want the ability to experience the perpetual intensities and zero spaces? 3.5 Poiesis and Giambattista Vico It is not so difficult to believe, in the long march of Western thought, whereby the squabble between poetry and philosophy is persistently conducted, the promoters of poiēsis as material (trans)formation are those who object to the seductions of Platonism and its (l)imitations. Scarcely any, 50 Derrida, Jaques. “Plato’s Pharmacy.” Tel Quel (1968): Print. Poïesis 69 however, explicitly name poiēsis as such to the matrix of their philosophical quest. Giambattaista Vico would indubitably be one such theorist, whose Scienza nuova (New Science 1725) expands the Renaissance interpretation of poiēsis beyond the task of imitatio natura (imitation of nature, or mimesis) and admittedly launches the thinking of history as a poetic venture. He believed “to comprehend fully the reality of the past, we must participate in the process whereby individuals, peoples, and entire cultures and societies figured their futures through imaginative projections of their wills.”51 Furthermore, poetic histories cause us “to rethink the past and reconsider what we might plan for the future”52. The poetic visionaries. Giambattista Vico believed that the key to understanding our past was through metaphorical speech, which he called Poetic Wisdom. Faithful to the philological methodology, he espies that, “for the Latins, verum (the true) and factum (what is made) are interchangeable.”53 This prompts him to articulate how the ancient sages reached a vital awareness that humans had strayed from maintaining—predominantly that, “the true is precisely what is made”.54 Hence, we as humans make our own truths—what we do not make, we cannot truly know. If we were to accept this statement in the first degree, one might consider that a bit of humility when encountering the Others, might go along way—if, of course, at any time, we would like to experience the closest form of alterity—that is: we did not make the Other, (unless they are our children, and 51 Price, David W. History Made, History Imagined: Contemporary Literature, Poiesis, and the past. Urbana: University of Illinois, 1999. Print. 52 Ibid. 53 Vico, Giambattista, Jason Taylor, and Robert C. Miner. On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians: Drawn out from the Origins of the Latin Language. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2010. Print. 54 Ibid. 70 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part I — The Theories even so), so to try and understand them, would require pure observations, (poet), interactions,(dramatist), compassion, (theologian), suspended judgement, (rarely anyone outside of zero space) and vulnerable receptivity, (all the poets), to arrive at a Poetists role in representing character in as true to form as possible. A further visual example of this philological method is offered when Vico uses money and the image of coins to discuss the origin of language, arguing that the earliest Gentile nations, “expressed themselves by gestures”, “used signs to fix the boundaries of their estates”, and “made use of money”.55 By establishing this, Vico moves on to claim that naming, money and the law all stem from the same Greek root nomos, signifying law, and from it we get nomisma, (money). Vico continues in detail through his text to approach history in such a manner as he discloses his entire philosophical project as an effort to replace a “rational metaphysics with a poetic metaphysics based on metaphoric saturation”.56 Hence, myth as poiesis. “The criterion and rule of the true is to have made it. Accordingly, our clear and distinct idea of the mind cannot be a criterion of the mind itself, still less of other truths. For while the mind perceives itself, it does not make itself.”57 Thus, history, according to Vico, is really a form of poiesis, the act of making in language. Vico believes history is a narrative constructed in the minds by those who think the past, thus we experience human history through the memory of poetic imaginations, “Memory is the same as imagination, which for that reason is called memoria Vico, Giambattista, and Thomas Goddard Bergin. The New Science. __. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1948. Print. 56 Price, David W. History Made, History Imagined: Contemporary Literature, Poiesis, and the past. Urbana: University of Illinois, 1999. Print. 57 Vico, Giambattista, and Thomas Goddard Bergin. The New Science. __. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1948. Print. 55 Poïesis 71 in Latin...Memory thus has three different elements: memory when it remembers things, imagination when it alters or imitates them, and invention when it gives them a new turn or puts them into proper arrangement and relationship.”58 These three elements—memoria, fantasia, and ingegno—comprise memory as a whole, which, Vico asserts, “is the same as imagination”59 The act of naming, the metaphoric enterprise par excellence, he says, involves the construction of an imaginative universal (universale fantastico), which he claims is the key to The New Science. For Vico, there does not exist an antecedent “empirical or historical order of events...(that the poetic mind)..rendered into fabulous form. They (events themselves) are given form through fables.”60 It is the poetic, primitive mind that gives shape to events; without such arranging, experience continues as incoherent. A dreamscape. Vico is convinced that all of civilization becomes visible from this inceptive poetic act: transcribing, organizing, adapting the irrational dreamscape of past experiences into rational, coherent form. Synthesizing similar experiences of Others into discourse of a common purpose. “The institutions of religion, marriage, burial, forms of state—in short, all cultural institutions—grow out of metaphoric saturation effected by imaginative universals that in and of themselves are fables. These fables, stories, and metaphors make up the sensus communis, the linguistic and semiotic network that connects people within a given culture: through these acts which (Hayden) White calls acts of metaphorical projection, the human world comes to be. Vico’s understanding of this process, White argues, led him to 58 Ibid. Ibid. 60 Verene, Donald P. Vico’s Science of Imagination. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981. Print. 59 72 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part I — The Theories conceive of the fictive as the third ground between truth and fable that we properly see as being opposed to one another.”61 “While it is difficult to speak of Vico’s direct philosophical descendants, in retrospect, a vast trajectory of strains of thought either in avant-garde poetics (from the 19th century on) or political aesthetics (especially heterodox tendencies unfolding out of Hegelian Marxism) engages with similar views of history as poiēsis.”62 I’m not saying that Resnais, and Prigogine, or Godard, and Thom are doing the same thing. I’m pointing out, rather, that there are remarkable similarities between scientific creators of functions and cinematic creators of images. And the same goes for philosophical concepts, since there are distinct concepts of these spaces. —Alan SOKAL One such descendent may be noted in Nietzsche’s edict when he applies the coin representation to communicate to us that truth is metaphorical—or rather, that truth is a lie. Truths, he declares, “are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins that have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer coins”.63 Furthermore, he writes, “The drive towards the formation of metaphors is the fundamental human drive which one cannot for a single instance dispense with in thought, for 61 Price, David W. History Made, History Imagined: Contemporary Literature, Poiesis, and the past. Urbana: University of Illinois, 1999. Print. 62 Greene, Roland, Stephen Cushman, Clare Cavanagh, Jahan Ramazani, Paul F. Rouzer, Harris Feinsod, David Marno, and Alexandra Slessarev. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2012. Print. 63 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, and Daniel Breazeale. Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870’s. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities, 1979. Print. Poïesis 73 one would thereby dispense with man himself.”64 In Beyond Good and Evil he presents the following question: “Why couldn’t the world that concerns us—be a fiction?” Heidegger, as well, so it seems, in his original conception of Being is nothing short of a restatement of Vico, or Heidegger recapitulating Nietzsche reiterating Vico. Being, in early Heidegger, is “that on the basis of which beings are already understood.” According to him one might say that the understanding of being is the style of life manifest in the way everyday practices are coordinated. “A culture’s understanding of being allows people and things to show up as something — people show up as heroes in Greece and as Saints in the Middle Ages, for example, and things for the Homeric Greeks were flashing up to be admired, while for Christians they were creatures to be mastered and interpreted. Put generally, the shared practices into which we are socialized provide a background understanding of what counts as things, what counts as human beings and what it makes sense to do, on the basis of which we can direct our actions towards particular things and people. Thus the understanding of being creates what Heidegger calls a clearing (Lichtung). Heidegger calls the unnoticed way that the clearing both limits and opens up what can show up and what can be done, its “unobtrusive governance (Waltens).”65 With the exception of his new concept of “the clearing” it sound like an echo: Vico is convinced that all of civilization becomes visible from this inceptive poetic act: transcribing, organizing, adapting the irrational dreamscape of past 64 Ibid. Dreyfus, Hubert L. “Being and Power: Heidegger and Foucault.” University of Berkeley Philosophy Department. Regents of the University of Berkeley, 2004. Web. 25 Feb. 2014. 65 74 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part I — The Theories experiences into rational, coherent form. Synthesizing similar experiences of Others into discourse of a common purpose. “The institutions of religion, marriage, burial, forms of state—in short, all cultural institutions—grow out of metaphoric saturation effected by imaginative universals that in and of themselves are fables. These fables, stories, and metaphors make up the sensus communis, the linguistic and semiotic network that connects people within a given culture: through these acts which (Hayden) White calls acts of metaphorical projection, the human world comes to be. Without going too far off topic, it is perhaps important to link in this string of Vico’s descendants with one more important philosopher and his concept of power (that could be interesting for a further investigation elsewhere), Michel Foucault. While Heidegger’s clearing could easily be linked as a naming of the moment or place where Vico’s notion of universale fantastico takes place, (the act of naming, the metaphoric enterprise par excellence, he says, involves the construction of an imaginative universal), his clearing both limits and opens up what can show up and what can be done. For a philosopher who believes in thinking as poiesis (see the section on Heidegger), there would be a limit in this space, because a zero space had not been reached prior. For the sake of this study, we would call his clearing, the moment after a zero space, (when thinking and contemplation can occur—for in the zero space, let us not forget, there is only nothing and infinity). “According to Foucault, power has suffered a parallel misunderstanding as Heidegger’s clearing. In general, many of Foucault’s difficult remarks concerning power make sense if we take him to be getting at a social clearing with an emphasis on the way the everyday practices of individuals and groups are coordinated so as to produce, perpetuate, and delimit what people Poïesis 75 can think, do and be. For Foucault, power, like Heidegger’s being, is no fixed entity or institution, but is incarnated in historical social practices.”66 “One needs to be nominalistic,” (as Vico tells us we do in universale fantastico-we name the social practice), Foucault tells us, “power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society.”67 Here, history as poiesis moves on to the political. Through the collective gathering of forces (poetic geniuses) who are flexible enough to move, (movement), bend and dabble with resilience in Poetic Wisdom or in balancing the Nietzschean DNA, (Dionysian and Apollonian), can we arrive at a certain sense of Foucauldian power? 3.6 Poïesis with Martin Heidegger and Henri Bergson Of all contemporary philosophical engagements with poiēsis, respectively, Martin Heidegger’s experience seems to remain most prominent. Heidegger claimed to discover the original concept of poiēsis in a large extent through his return to the Pre-Socratics, (reminiscent of the philological method of Vico and Nietzsche, et al. ). In Heidegger’s work, poiēsis is eventually invoked as the overcoming of the ancient squabble between philosophy and poetry by attempting to elucidate the original relationship between poiesis and noein (thinking). Poïesis then becomes the activity or occurrence through which the world is transformed and continued either through poetical creations or philosophical thinking. 66 Dreyfus, Hubert L. “Being and Power: Heidegger and Foucault.” University of Berkeley Philosophy Department. Regents of the University of Berkeley, 2004. Web. 25 Feb. 2014. 67 Foucault, Michel, and James D. Faubion. Power. New York: New, 2000. Print. 76 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part I — The Theories “Whereas philosophical thinking is explicitly concerned with the sense of Being, original poetry, while implicitly concerned with the sense of Being, does not make the issue thematic.”68 Poïesis, for Heidegger, is not technical production or creative genius but the reconciliation between thinking matters and ‘a fundamental horizon of reality’. Poiesis becomes a site of ‘disclosure’ (A-letheia) of Being “which is conceptually broader than, and so can assume the modality of, either philosophical or poetical discourse. Otherwise put: the concept of poiesis furnishes the analogical unity, (the conceptual native birthplace of an original production) of the poet and philosopher”69. In fact, poiesis as a space, where both the poet and philosopher can enter as a conceptual place laden with a well-spring of creative Ideas or Thoughts. “Higher than actuality stands possibility.”70 However, if poiesis is defined in these Heideggerean terms as a conceptual birth place for both creative Ideas and Thinking, then poiesis as a concept is not understood as a zero space, but rather, the space that comes after a zero space, the birth, not the gestation. For when one enters a zero space, there is simply no thinking what-so-ever. As stated earlier: a zero space is a pre-creative space, a non-temporal visit where nothing happens, nothing and infinity, everything happening in the cosmos exists in these spatial vibrations encountered through the vibration of the receiver—and only when one comes back to conscious presence may the creator have the potential to give birth—produce and fine tune a creation. Heidegger, however, while not explicitly saying so, may 68 Alexander Ferrari Di Pippo. The Concept of Poiesis in Heidegger’s An Introduction to Metaphysics. In: Thinking Fundamentals, IWM Junior Visiting Fellows Conferences, Vol. 9: Vienna 2000 69 Ibid. 70 Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. New York: Harper, 1962. Print. Poïesis 77 have recognized this: in his Poetry, Language, and Thought, and in particular the essay entitled “The Origin of the Work of Art”. Here Heidegger describes the value of the work of art as a means to open a “clearing” for the appearance of things in the world, or to ‘disclose’ their meaning for human beings. This ‘clearing’ is related to his concept of Aletheia, which as mentioned earlier is ‘disclosure’ or ‘unconcealment’. What he fails to point out in his work is the original word for ‘mysticism’ is derived from the Greek μυω, meaning “I conceal”. In fact, what it seems Heidegger has done is taken the original Greek word for ‘mysticism’ and ‘de-mystified’ it by bringing it to a surface where it can be revealed through a work of art. Because of its variable meanings, even in serious treatments, any definition of ‘mystical experience’ must be at least partly speculative. 71 As such, speculation being defined as something that is merely asserted in an ad hoc fashion rather than following logically from general principles would demand ridicule and disrespect in his strict discipline. Heidegger couldn’t conceivably include a mere assertion in place of a logic in his philosophy. Defined as ‘a theory or attitude held by a person or organization that acts as a guiding principle for behavior’, philosophy as guide cannot be built on mere assertions. So he eliminates the before of the ‘un-concealment’, while alluding to it by covertly naming it the place of de-mystification. In this sense, he may have very well realized a conceptual existence of the place we call a zero space after-all. But it was certainly not a place both the poet and philosopher could go, nor one he could with any serious respect in the discipline discuss directly in the philosophical discourse. Perchance he knew it was a place where the philosopher could Gellman, Jerome, “Mysticism”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2011 Edition, Edward N. Zalta (ed.) Plato.stanford.edu. Retrieved 2014-02-26. 71 78 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part I — The Theories potentially help the artist clarify and precise through language, after the experience was had. Conceivably that is where he meant philosophy and poetry become united. (And it doesn’t seem to be too conceptually distant from Nietzche’s DNA marriage.) The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes. —Andre Gide 1869-1951 Perhaps, there is more insight in this troubling relationship between Heidegger’s notion of poiesis and the ‘pre-poiesis zero space(s)’ to which this research conceptualizes, as inadvertently observed by Nietzsche in his Birth of Tragedy. Nietzsche states that the poet observes and the dramatist engages the Others while observing: ...physiological phenomena between which we can observe an opposition ... My friend , that is precisely the poet’s work — To figure out his dreams, mark them down... to speak out from other bodies and souls, then that person is a dramatist... and ...if someone just possesses the capacity to see a living game going on and to live all the time surrounded by hordes of ghosts, then that man is a poet. If someone just feels the urge to change himself and to speak out from other bodies and souls, then that person is a dramatist.72 In both of the passages, it is evident that in order to create in the act of poiesis, to be both poet and dramatist 72 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, Oscar Levy, and Robert Guppy. “The Birth of Tragedy.” Complete Works. The First Complete and Authorized English Translation. New York: Russell & Russell, 1964. N. pag. Print. Poïesis 79 (what we will nominate as a Poetist), we must face the Other, autrui with a detachment that can only be learned in facing the fear of potential suffering we know Others may transmit. Yet at the same time, within a certain detachment, one must still maintain the capacity to experience the intensity of the Other(s), without letting it personally affect oneself—a sort of d(a)ttachment. The in-between de/a to tach(e)ment. As if: the stain (tache) must be made without resisting a trace, and yet, one must learn how to clean out the stain in the aftermath, less it befoul the Being. No one can cause us suffering if we learn to both observe, engage and cleanse thoroughly. Confidence and strength within the vulnerability. ORIGIN early 17th cent.: from late Latin vulnerabilis, from Latin vulnerare ‘to wound,’ from vulnus ‘wound.’. We cannot be wounded if we envision our center as a metaphorical rock. The rock can absorb all weather and climate while remaining itself. Emotional intelligence and near alterity can only be learned by facing our fear of experiencing the Others, throwing ourselves into the sharks, courage, steady breathing—aware of the transformative process going on within us, aware of the Others transformative energies. Knowing we can return to our Being un-befouled rock at any given moment by the simple click of our imaginations, it is the experience of humanity we seek. To detach while both observing the process within as well as within the other, emotions can present themselves sans will, fear of them is eliminated, they cannot dominate, they will pass. If we resist them, they stay for awhile, just as the opponent works harder in the game when competition puts up a fight—once you surrender, the opponents get bored and move on. No action is the best action.73 We must consider the advantageous results of not only exploring and precis-ing ‘the poets’ space but equally, the 73 Schirmacher, Wolfgang, “PARALLEL ETHICS” European Graduate School, Saas-Fée. Aug. 2011. Lecture. 80 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part I — The Theories dramatist’s place of entry. That is, their capacity to willingly and quite naturally attempt experiencing alterity: to speak from other bodies/souls in a multiple phenomenological experience. To understand reactions to them without being attached to those reactions. Perhaps if the many could practice performing this task as a standard core in education, the world might very well eventually one day find peace. However, it would be no easy task—no action is also the most complicated reaction. Showing no action as the emotional disruptions run through you, breaks limits within the self and leaves the witness that much closer to surviving repeated zero space(s), the ethical comfort zone, quotidian, no matter which Other is nearby. Introspection and Outer-spection, resting in the ethical home74, no matter where you are. Already in the Introduction to Metaphysics, 1936, Heidegger forwards what will eventually become the central focus of his work: poetry is thought itself (dichten ist denken), and thereby all philosophical thinking is truly poetic and vice versa. Even if one can trace theological elements in Heidegger’s invocation of poiēsis as radical creation, his gesture does, in part, return to the radical poiein its radical formative force. But just like the Platonic/Socratic notions Heidegger was attempting to bypass, he too, gets stuck in remaining at the threshold without leaping. The Kierkegaardean leap of faith. As mentioned earlier in the Platonic analysis, there is no comprehending in the nature of the Beautiful, nor is there thinking in the pre-act of poiesis, or in order for poiesis to occur— in zero space(s), pre-creative birth, there is neither comprehending, nor thinking. Heidegger, while attempting to move beyond Platonic description of poiesis, seems to get caught 74 Ibid. Poïesis 81 in the same trap. Though he thoughtfully tries not to relegate poetry to an inferior form than philosophy, as Plato did, and attempts to plant poet and philosopher on equal ground, he too, seems to miss the mark in his description of the complete before and after in poiesis. The curious mystery is whether he was intentionally evasive? Was he writing with the poets’ best interest in mind, or was he writing for himself? And just what was it that he and Paul Celan discussed out there in the black forest? From here, we will determine that zero space(s) are not poiesis, but rather pre-poiesis, the before and yet, sometimes during, the making. It is neither a place of comprehension, nor thinking, and never was, or will it be, in any sort of competition with philosophy. It simply is un-nameable, that’s why it is zero—there is no description for it, as a non-nominal space it isn’t anything—nothing and infinity. But Heidegger does return to the radical poiein its radical formative force. This force resonates in discourses of modernity, both aesthetic and political. According to philosophers an entire society can be said to engage in poiēsis in its radical moments of self-determination, (see Foucault’s power concept). In this sense, and bearing reference to Vico, poiēsis can be linked to history in the making. In The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Heidegger acknowledges that “Because the Dasein is historical in its own existence, possibilities of access and modes of interpretation of beings are themselves diverse, varying in different historical circumstances.” But he adds that “it is for this reason that there necessarily belongs to the conceptual determination of being and its structures...a destruction— a critical process in which the traditional concepts...are destructed down to the sources from which they were drawn. Only by means of this destruction can ontology fully assure itself in a phenomenological way of the genuine character of its concepts.”75 75 Heidegger, Martin. The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982. Print. 82 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part I — The Theories “This (historical) making cannot be said to have a precise temporality; hence, traditional methods of historiography cannot grasp it. Its working is a perpetual re-working that would not spare even itself as an object of that work. (The commonplace notion of a poem always being at work on itself, on making itself into a poem, should be understood here as an elemental force of poiēsis.) The duration of shaping matter into form, as Henri Bergson would have it, occurs in, (or as) a radical present. This is a paradoxical condition, which is why its boundaries exceed the capacity of both narration and symbolization and can only be grasped in a performative vein. The energy of poiēsis is dramatic: literally, to form is to make form happen, to change form—including one’s own. The social and political substance of poiēsis is thus signified not only by its constitutively transformative power, which would be a mere abstraction, but by the fact that, since its ancient Greek meaning, it pertains to humanity’s immanent (even if perpetually self-altering) encounter with the world.” 76 Duration, as elucidated by Bergson, is both a homogeneity and heterogeneity, a composition from similar parts and a composition from dissimilar parts, the one and the many, unity and multiplicity, constantly in movement, moving, transforming, changing shape and consistency, dancing—just like the human mind—but, being mobile, flexible, it cannot be comprehended through motionless concepts or static. There is performance in duration, the performance of World qua world. Can you imagine watching Heidegger dance? Like the French at their social events even in 2014, always two-stepping 76 Greene, Roland, Stephen Cushman, Clare Cavanagh, Jahan Ramazani, Paul F. Rouzer, Harris Feinsod, David Marno, and Alexandra Slessarev. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2012. Print. Poïesis 83 or following any steps of any formalized dance style they’ve recently taken classes for. There is no natural flow—everything is movement through thinking, what’s the next step, removed from innovation and moving with sensations, removed from self expressing self in the world. Old school. Nineteenth century style-continental living. Perhaps it’s time to gather thee philosophers while we may and break out on the dance floor—bust some moves, movement, get the adrenalin pumping, and start really inventing, shall we? Maybe a little small dose of ecstasy (ecstasis) may help those philosophers to initially break out of their wallflower stance? Those German love doctors knew how to cook it up to get the mood flowing, even in Heidegger’s day. Perhaps he may have benefitted from a dose or two.77 Bergson consequently alleges that one can only be in the grips of duration through his method of intuition. Flowing without thinking,(indicative of Husserl’s zero point of orientation). Two images from Henri Bergson’s An Introduction to Metaphysics may help one to grasp Bergson’s term intuition, the limits of concepts, and the capacity for intuition to recognize ‘the absolute’. If such a thing as an ‘absolute’ were to even exist—but there is something inconceivably too linear, finite, and man-made-like, so it seems, with such a word, a limit on his own conceptual, so to speak. Peradventure, let’s call it an amalgamation of the infinity of energy flowing within any given location, and beyond if going deep enough, let’s call it ones intuitive capacity to recognize ‘a zero space’. In either case, the first image Bergson evokes to intuitively perceive this is that of a city. (We are prompted to recall here the Roman’s understanding of ‘the genius loci’, or the 77 “Utopian Pharmacology. MDMA / Ecstasy and beyond.” Utopian Pharmacology. MDMA / Ecstasy and beyond. BLTC, 2010. Web. 02 Mar. 2014. 84 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part I — The Theories poetic genius’ of a specified locale: see chapter 4). Analysis, or the creation of concepts through the divisions of points of view, can only ever give us a model of the city through a construction of photographs taken from every possible point of view, yet it can never give us the dimensional value of walking in the city itself. One can only grasp this through intuition; likewise the experience of reading a line of Homer. One may translate the line and pile commentary upon commentary, but this commentary too shall never grasp the simple dimensional value of experiencing the poem in its originality itself. The method of intuition, then, is that of getting back to the things themselves 78 by simply wandering, observing, and letting the things pass through you. 3.7 Poïesis collided-life-forms-intersect, rotating-face(s)-of-selves, one of the multiplicity is seen, once. another, yet again. position in the gliding river as collision claps, sole determinant. impacted from behind, form turns sideways, falls as the water, downward. frontal hit, two forms tumble. external worlds, combine process. stand, forge against current. sit, surrender to stream. repeat. sometimes, unmovable. feet embedded under stones. frozen water, mid-summer, climatic intensity—zero. observe becoming. eyes, skin below surface, then rise. 78 Bergson, Henri, and Mabelle Louise Cunningham Andison. The Creative Mind. New York: Philosophical Library, 1946. Print. 4. What is a ‘Genius’? G ENIUS: FROM LATIN genere, gignere, to ‘beget, bring forth’ or gigno, genui, genitus, “to bring into being, create, produce.” (Homologous to poïesis). Genius in Roman mythology originating from δαιμων (demon) in Greek referred to “an attendant inner spirit assigned to every person at birth, governing their fortunes and determining their character.” By extension, the sense of genius as guardian spirit was applied to specific groups, or to a particular place, as in the term genius loci”79 Once again, a conceptual notion of zero space as a place of inspiration—or perhaps, a zero-spatial-est—one who can enter the loci of the inner spiritual, or transcendent space, as unique to each location (hypostasis of place)–and bring into being, create or produce. The genius was necessarily a Being who lived in and through poiesis. The local poet, genius loci. It was believed that every individual, family, and city had its own genius. In that sense, every individual, family, and city was believed to have the capacity to bring into being, create and produce, something. The genius received special worship as a household god because it was thought to grant success and intellectual powers on its disciple. (A muse). On this basis, the word came to nominate a person with unique intellectual as well as creative powers. In art, or the visual depiction of the Roman genius, we discover often the portrayal of a winged 79 Negus, K. and Pickering, M. (2004). Creativity, communication, and cultural value. London; Thousand Oaks; New Delhi: SAGE Publications. 85 86 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part I — The Theories young person; as if: flying off in liberation as recognized in the natural independence of the child who is still free from the imposition of logos, You think you can’t get out of the logos, but in fact you can use it to get out. Getting into something is just as important as getting out of something. Get out of what you have learned—curiosity, the unexpected, bring it back, (childhood). Logos is such a knowledge, phenomenon, how to do things. Without knowledge we couldn’t live, for everyday life we need logos. Theory and practice all have logos in it. But the act itself is the techne (art), a certain understanding, but no logos. The moment you walk you are in techne.”80 This notion is not far off from Sextus Empircus whose conceptual suspension of judgement was the hallmark for ancient Greek skepticism. According to him, suspension of judgment liberates one from any form of intense agitation, both intellectual and emotional, that is associated with maintaining definitive beliefs about how things really are. The suspension of judgment is therefore ataraxia, freedom from worry. What Wolfgang Schirmacher points out is that while getting rid of the logos allows one to enter into this state where curiosity and the unexpected flourish, the imagination runs wild and creations abound—the logos and knowledge is still needed in maintaining everyday life, less we be primitive animals. There is a classical balance required. The balance between preserving convictions, opinions and assertions that drive one to produce, and releasing all into the movement of suspension where one lets the wind carry them where it will and liberates into a zero space. Perhaps it is this: observation Schirmacher, Wolfgang, “MEDIA AESTHETICS: The Homo Generator.” European Graduate School, Saas-Fée. Aug. 2011. Lecture. 80 What is a ‘Genius’? 87 followed by intervention, and then repeat. That is the poet and the dramatist combine: Poetist. One would necessarily need to participate in suspension of judgment both alone in reflection and while engaging with Others, followed by utilization of the logos upon that reflection and again, while engaging in discourse, with Others. There can be no permanent choice of existing in one or the other, for in doing so we would either become too apathetic or authoritarian robot. Therefore, going into a zero space could be considered, in a skeptical sense, a suspension of judgment, knowledge, opinion and emotion, followed by a return to the logos wherein the creator marries the experience within the suspension into the filter of the logos. Pre-poïesis and poïesis. Nothing and infinity occurs in suspension of judgment purely because when suspended the openness allows us to observe and absorb infinitely everything in the World and cosmos and all that we’ll never truly understand, from the ant making its way across blades of grass in the garden carrying the mortar to build its castle with the members of it’s community, to zen blank spaces of meditation where not a single thought enters one’s mind—and within that equivalent of nothingness there is temporality, for example: twenty minutes of pure suspension without thought in meditation is equivalent to eight hours of sleep. There are contemporary brain and heart surgeons in life or death, eighteen hour surgical performances who can attest to the efficiency of such practice. It is both physical and mental recharge. But there is a dark side, within the infinity extreme forms of negativity reside as well—intense pain, rage and violence, for example. Repeated visits are bound to interact with the spectrum of experiences within the infinity including the intensely displeasing. Stuck too long within it, there is pure madness. 88 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part I — The Theories Also illustrated through art was the genius of place, which was mostly depicted as a large snake. While in the Christian dogma the snake is pejoratively conceived, in most all other mythologies, it maintains a positive connotation of a living form which can experience physical rebirth, (shedding of skin), repeatedly—hence, one might interpret the visual snake in the representation of genius of place, as the place which is open to re-invent itself through the evolution of time and with seasonal transformations. Daemon, or genius, in Roman times, was regarded as an authentic source of human creativity. While it seems apparent that the two are interrelated: the winged person and the snake. The one who can fly into a suspension of judgement, and the other who can come back to logos to use knowledge enabling the shedding of old skin to recreate a place into something new and evolved. “Not long after Plutarch, Apuleius asserted in his own reflection on the “god” of Socrates the direct correspondence of the Greek daimon and the Roman genius. The coupling allowed Romans to see their own genii in Greek demons, and vice versa. Thus can the learned Varro speak of the genius in terms that borrowed from Plato’s conception of the daimon as the rational part of the soul. “Genius,” he writes, in a now lost manuscript cited by Saint Augustine, “is the rational soul (anima rationalis) of each man.” Apuleius maintained that position while further incorporating the received Greek notion that human beings were guided not only by a good god, a friendly daimon-genius, but an evil one as well. Whereas the good genius was simultaneously the god of the soul of each man—dwelling “in the inmost sanctum of the human mind in the function of consciousness itself ” —the evil genius What is a ‘Genius’? 89 represented our potential for wickedness and depravity.”81 Or as stated earlier, an inability to balance forces while processing negativity for too long within the suspension of judgment— then creating or destroying under its influence. Hence, a battlefield of the conflicting forces of what was once called the divine. If one were to consider potentialities within the psychology of the two dimensions of total suspension and total logos, we might better understand the history of the genius as it arrives at its apex of fascination within the Romantic period until Hitler. To reiterate: if one remains within the suspension of judgment such things from debauchery to sheer violence may be enabled, as the apathetic observer never arrives in a logos or an emotionally compassionate or sympathetic state to consider any harm in instinctive reaction: beyond good and evil. However in the same light, if one remains in the logos without ever suspending themselves from judgment, they might equally get caught up in a robotic repetition of monotony without ever progressing towards a more enlightened state of existing, drones. At a certain period, the terms daemon and genius bifurcate, Greek daemon was turned to demon in Christianity that was no longer both the good and the bad within the genius, as it had been with the original concept found with the Greeks, but instead an evil, distrustful, enemy to inspiration— especially if it was not validated by the Church as having ‘the right source, ‘ i.e. the Scripture interpreted by the Church in conformity with the dictates of the moment and its current relevance. The privilege of freethinking and expression that the 81 McMahon, Darrin M. Divine Fury: A History of Genius. New York: Basic, 2013. Print. 90 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part I — The Theories ancient Greeks entertained was overpowered by a limited path of Christian faith, entering centuries of sanctified logos. Genius lumbered through the middle ages as less auspicious than its previous praise. It held its position in culture, nonetheless, through the Renaissance and exploded into a sort of cult religion in the Romantic period. As the altered religious and political environment changed, i.e. God was dead, Christianity lost its power and capitalism celebrated original creativity and individual invention, geniuses eventually became the new replacement for god-like idols: In God’s absence, human beings were free to assume elements of power, taking on capacities that they had long attributed to him. Yet the same withdrawal also had a more negative effect, including a haunting sense of loneliness and abandonment that was all the stronger for the flight of the angels and the retreat of the guardian companions. To those whom God had partially forsaken, to those without a comes or friend, the universe could seem a lonely and disorienting place...At no time had human beings lived alone in this way, without mediators and intercessors to the divine. And it was at just this moment (and for closely related reasons) that they began to turn their gaze in earnest from the “always already there” to the “yet to be realized,” focusing intently on the future as the privileged place of human making, the site of disclosure of the new and the unknown...they began to look forward on time’s horizon, seeking the unexpected, the original...Geniuses offered assurance that special beings still animated the universe, that someone stood between the ordinary and the unknown, the sacred and profane, that a privileged few could see where the many were blind. Revealing, disclosing, guiding, creating, the genius enchanted a world threatened by disenchantment.82 McMahon, Darrin M. Divine Fury: A History of Genius. New York: Basic, 2013. Print. 82 What is a ‘Genius’? 91 Essentially it wasn’t until the first decades of the twentieth century that the genius’ political power was fully realized in the self-conception and enhanced public image of Adolf Hitler through the full array of modern mass media. In 1914, Hermann Türck in his work The Man of Genius, used the unlikely pairing of Napoleon and Jesus to demonstrate his point that the savior and the conquerer were “alike in their striving after the highest, eternal state of being.” His administering the pair side by side was willfully Hegelian— destruction and creation were adjoining relations, deliverance and death shared a common cause.83 In this sense, where the Greek demon and Roman genius had bifurcated in the terminology of the Christians, they were once again reunited in the aggrandizing cult following of the Romantic notions of the kind. The dangerous connotations associated with the ‘genius’ was the lack of moral ground the notion possessed—the genius was revered for the alleged profundity of his work and in effect, person, regardless of its content or moral consequences. In Thus Spoke Zarathrusta, Nietzsche wrote, “What is good and evil no one knows yet, unless it be he who creates. He, however, creates man’s goal and gives the earth its meaning and its future. That anything at all is good and evil—that is his creation.”84 Hitler rose to power using these very notions for his political campaign in his call for a “dictator who is genius” in a speech delivered in 1920. “Progress and the culture of mankind are not products of the majority, but they rest exclusively on the genius and the energy of the personality,” he observed in his Mein Kampf, and further in a speech in 1938 he stated, “whether or not we can today call geniuses of eternal standing Türck, Hermann. The Man of Genius. London: Black, 1914. N. pag. Print. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, and R. J. Hollingdale. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1969. Print. 83 84 92 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part I — The Theories our own is difficult to judge, but in the end it is of little consequence for our actions. What is of great consequence, however, is the preservation of an environment in which true geniuses can be nurtured.” Reminiscent here is the Romantic notion of a brotherhood of genius that represented “the kinship of humanity in its many different expressions,” however the self proclaimed ‘genius’ Hitler was unfortunately not interested, or referring to preserving an environment in which the kinship of humanity’s geniuses could be nurtured, but rather where the German Aryan race as the hierarchically strongest genius blood in a eugenic sense, could be nature-d and nurtured. The triumph over Hitler and his Nazi party marked a peripeteia in the Romantic apotheosizing of the notion of genius, positioning people on guard against investing in human idols with such power. In 1957, Roland Barthes in his work called Mythologies, observed, “the more the genius was materialized under the guise of his brain [Einstein], the more the product of his inventiveness [his brain] came to acquire a magical dimension.” In 1958 Hannah Arendt wrote of “the commercialization and vulgarization of genius” as a practice that was slowly dissolving the “great reverence the modern age so willingly paid to genius, so frequently bordering on idolatry.”85 The yearning to establish the genius’s fundamental distinction is pertinacious, and the human craving for the transcendent and the extraordinary is significant, no less in the present day than “when Socrates’s contemporaries first marveled at his daimonion... This gradual expansion of genius—in effect, its democratization and globalization—gathered momentum in the aftermath of 1945. The development marked, in some sense, a return to an 85 Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: U of Chicago, 1958. Print. What is a ‘Genius’? 93 older understanding of genius as a faculty possessed by all... Charles Spearman, the analyst of the all-governing g, was prepared to admit ‘every normal man, woman and child is...a genius at something’” 86 These new configurations of genius carrying within them ancient notions of the ubiquitous sense of the word, reduced the term to a mere masterly talent in one domain or another. In modern usage, genius calls attention to an innate ability generating intellectual eminence and unprecedented creativity, identifying a distinct type of human — a rare individual who is “acutely innovative, original and superior”87. Genius has been often opposed to talent as an innate creative ability and the highest manifestation of creativity to a mere predisposed response to education. Unlike talent, “original genius was truly exceptional and by definition was to be exempt from the rules, customs, and obligation that applied to the talented”88. Genius is also defined by accomplishments and often yields a great influence over contemporary and succeeding generations.89. Accordingly, the best indicator of genius is fame: “For the most part, to be identified as a genius an individual must become famous, and the fame must be attained for making durable contributions to cultural or political endeavors”90. (Here we are 86 McMahon, Darrin M. Divine Fury: A History of Genius. New York: Basic, 2013. Print. 87 Negus, K. and Pickering, M. (2004). Creativity, communication, and cultural value. London; Thousand Oaks; New Delhi: SAGE Publications. 88 Runko, M. A. and Albert, R. S. (Eds.) (1990) Theories of creativity. Newburry Park, CA: Sage Publications. 89 Albert, R. S. (1983). Genius and eminence: the social psychology of creativity and exceptional achievement. International Series in Experimental Social Psychology: International Series in Experimental Social Psychology, v. 5. Oxford, New York: Pergamon Press. 90 Simonton, D.K. (1984). Genius, creativity, and leadership: Historiometric inquiries. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. 94 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part I — The Theories reminded of the second realm of Plato’s notions of poiesis in his Symposium). The ideology of genius as an exceptional personality possessing some extraordinary qualities assumes that the function of genius is to eliminate alienation, (of the self and the world from themselves), and to establish “a higher order in which unity is achieved or restored, and in which humanity is fully realized”91. Or in the words of the prominent literary critic Harold Bloom: “Greatness may be out of fashion, as is the transcendental, but it is hard to go on living without some hope of encountering the extraordinary...appreciation is a better mode for the understanding of achievement than are all the analytic kinds of accounting for the emergence of exceptional individuals. Appreciation may judge, but always with gratitude, and frequently with awe and wonder... By appreciation, I mean something more than ‘adequate esteem’. Need also enters into it, in the particular sense of turning to the genius of others in order to redress a lack in oneself, or finding in genius a stimulus to one’s own powers, whatever these may emerge as being...Appreciation may modulate into love, even as a consciousness of a dead genius augments consciousness itself. Your solitary self ’s deepest desire is for survival, whether in the here or now, or transcendentally elsewhere. To be augmented by the genius of others is to enhance the possibilities of survival, at least in the present and the near future... Genius is no longer a term much favored by scholars, so many of whom have become cultural levelers quite immune from awe. Yet, with the public, the idea of genius maintains its prestige, even though the word itself can seem somewhat tarnished. We need genius, however envious or uncomfortable it makes many among us. It is not necessary that we aspire after genius for ourselves, and yet, in our recesses, we remember that we 91 Currie, R. (1974). Genius: An ideology in literature. London: Chatto & Windus. What is a ‘Genius’? 95 had, or have, a genius. Our desire for the transcendental and extraordinary seems part of our common heritage, and abandons us slowly, and never completely.”92 Genius, however, in the current trend for material gain, and wealth idolization, is not simply used to describe thinking new paradigmatic thoughts and creating new things, but more so, how these things can be utilized to make more money. The endgame, so it seems in contemporary day, is always about money. As recent as 2011, in the well-regarded German newspaper Die Zeit, a special issue was devoted to “geniuses who have changed our life,” wherein the profiles of all included were contemporary billionaires profiling such modern incarnations as the Starbucks chief executive Howard Schultz; Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook; Miuccia Prada, the Italian designer; Ingvar Kamprad, founder of Ikea; and, of course, Steve Jobs, widely hailed at the time of his death, in 2011, as a genius.93 This current trend of appreciation for those with money leads to a void in common consciousness—one driving the will to create a fortune for conspicuous consumption leading to over production and ecological disaster, rather than the will to create awe and wonder stimulating one’s own power and transcendental consciousness. As suggested by Harold Bloom, “We all (need to) learn to distinguish, firmly and definitively, between genius and talent. A ‘talent’ classically was a weight or sum of money, and as such, however large, 92 Bloom, Harold. “What Is Genius?” Introduction. Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds. New York: Warner, 2002. P. 5 Print. 93 Thadden, Elizabeth Von. “Visionäre: Die Unserer Zeit.” Die Zeit Nº 42 (2011): n. pag. 18 Oct. 2011. Web. 10 Mar. 2014. 96 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part I — The Theories was necessarily limited. But ‘genius’, even in its linguistic origins, has no limits.”94 Between the talent of those who make fortunes and the genius of those who create works that lead the spectator to be, in the words of the ancient Loginus, “Touched by the true sublime your soul is naturally lifted up, she rises to a proud height, is filled with joy and vaunting, as if she had herself created this thing that she has heard,” this dissertation argues for the latter to be brought back to public consciousness. 94 Bloom, Harold. “What Is Genius?” Introduction. Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds. New York: Warner, 2002. P. 7 Print. PART II The Arts 97 98 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part Ii — The Arts The Fourfold of the Arts: Literary (& performance) / Visual (& performance) / Sound (& performance) POETRY OR STORYTELLING PREDATES WRITING. The earliest poems are believed to have been orally recited or sung to a group: singing, sound amongst vividly painted bodies, moving, motion. If we could imagine our ancestors sitting by a fire at loss for interaction or entertainment: people begin tapping, humming, singing, banging, a poetic Being in the midst of the circle, (if there was), in the middle of their wilderness, stands up instinctively and begins to invent a ‘story’, the only story evocative of the moment—a conglomeration of the many events experienced by the people—the people of a clan. The poet, (or poets), of the location—genius loci. It is through these written stories we may witness the beginning of Vico’s history as poiesis in action. These stories represent examples of the first recorded poiesis as a making form through the imaginary and experiential, (memoria, fantasia, and ingegno- in universale fantastico) — hence, through the use of metaphor/myth, as was purported by Giambattista Vico in his New Science. The most important part in the beginning was perhaps the will to communicate, to draw intensive energy together within the group, to create a union of trust and understanding of sorts. It would seem that in such an initial gathering a person gifted with ease in communication would stand first, followed The Fourfold of the Arts 99 by an enthusiastic listener who added conceptions and descriptions of the visual realm he/she envisioned throughout the story—while all the while, others would react though song, breath, whistle, taps or whatever sound was inspired in a response to the intensities of the moments, creating a rhythm — or any combination initiating or inspiring the next. Eventually the Others would begin to join in, perhaps in movement or theatrical performance. We can imagine how the works were first evoked or presented, but what is remaining in written form was the first recorded experience of poiesis, or rather, history as poiesis. The Poets—most obvious when you look directly in their eyes—there is more to learn than words might describe. The musical ones are frequently the most silent, resonating an octave profoundly lower than most until in the movement of creation, sound illuminates the eyes. The visual artists often speak the most until in the movement of creation, silence and stone tranced glance. The poetry and the performance poets oscillate or conjugate between the two. Some favoring one side or the other—the musical writers, the visual writers. (Nietzsche names them the lyric or epic poets.) Then there is the Poetist, the poet-dramatist, who both observes and participates—can essentially move in-between, in and out, inverting positions like the acrobat with seemingly distinct ease, belonging to neither, accepted as either, never quite feeling at home anywhere, and yet, everywhere seemingly at ease, chameleons: the orchestrators of the scene. Why some react to a given moment through instinctively bellowing out words, visuals, sound or movement will never be known to anyone, ever—or perhaps maybe when we die. All we can try to understand is what happens when we are 100 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part Ii — The Arts summoned, sometimes even without awareness, to react. To be aware of what transpires up through, during and after the poiesis, the creation, the liberation, the provocation to live with renewed energy—to respond to life. We accept never knowing why we are born with the will to create, why we are inspired to continue when experience: trials, tribulations, trauma, and trepidation wear our energy almost too thin to move on. When the world around us seems steeped in murky shadows. When we choose to close our eyes, let darkness prevail and feel too weak to continue. Sound. Imagination. Creations of visuals in our mind. Storytelling. Words. Fantasies of potential future stories. Stories of Others—to liberate ourselves, to communicate, to alleviate, to laugh, to love—to shock, shatter and provoke eyes wide open. We accept that we will never know why, but that doesn’t stop us from considering what to do with the inspiration received. First, perhaps it is important to consider what the Others before us have done and ask the questions as posed by the artist Paul Gauguin Where do we come from, What are we? Where are we going?95 95 Gauguin, Paul. Where Do We Come From, What Are We? Where Are We Going? 1897-1898. Oil on canvas. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. 5. A Synoptic Archeology of the Poetry-Poets The world is at every moment the attained manifestation of God, as the eternally changing, eternally new vision of the person who suffers most, who is the most rent with contradictions, the one with the richest sense of protest, who knows how to save himself only in illusion.96 —Friedrich Nietzsche Meeting the extraordinary in another person is likely to be deceptive or delusion-ary. We call it “falling in love,” and the verb is a warning. To confront the extraordinary in a book—be it the Bible, Plato, Shakespeare, Dante, Proust—is to benefit almost without cost. Genius, in its writings, is our best path for reaching wisdom, which I believe to be the true use of literature for life...Vitatlity is the measure of genius. We read in search of more life, and only genius can make that available to use...Since we do not know how else to account for Shakespeare (or Dante, Cervantes, Goethe, Walt Whitman), what can we better do than return to the study of the ancient idea of genius? Talent cannot originate, genius must.97 —Harold Bloom Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, Oscar Levy, and Robert Guppy. “The Birth of Tragedy.” Complete Works. The First Complete and Authorized English Translation. New York: Russell & Russell, 1964. N. pag. Print. 97 Bloom, Harold. “What Is Genius?” Introduction. Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds. New York: Warner, 2002. P. 4 Print. 96 101 102 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part II — The Arts 5.1 The Early Period Egypt and Iraq Two of the oldest surviving poems are the Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor from ancient Egypt, and/or the Epic of Gilgamesh from what is currently known as modern day Iraq –both are said to date back to around 4500 B.C.E., with some sources arguing over the precise dates. Both stories could equally be classified under the umbrella of ‘wisdom literature’: stories dealing with the question of good and evil in the world, just as the demons and geniuses of the Roman and Greek times would proceed and prehistoric man had begun, (see chapter on The Early Period in visual art). These are our first known written traces of history as poiesis. Evocative once again of Vico’s notion of ‘Poetic Wisdom’: the metaphorical speech of our past that is true from what is made. And in the act of making, (poiesis), both enact tales which can be used as metaphorical manuals for living within a given society. Both tales, in fact, are the closest written evidence we have discovered to confirm that for the past 7000 years, at least, humans were living, exploring their worlds, surviving, feeling, hurting, killing, loving, living, dying, and trying—at the least, to understand and make sense of where they came from, what they were doing here, and where they were going next, inbetween all the busy commotion of living and dying. Creating language, as if to release the weight of non-understanding, so that maybe one day they would discover a truth. Truth seeking, as primal instinct, so it seems, even then—like sex, eating or sleeping. Of course, even then, as now, some may have had instinct to submerge into the energy of another motivated by pure fascination and admiration, even love, of the Other; while A Synoptic Archeology of the Poetry-Poets 103 others may have violently engaged in the act, purely interested in personal libidinal alleviation, like in believing the genius as one who makes a fortune. Love is what makes sex more than masturbation. If there is no love even if you are really with a partner you masturbate with a partner.98 —Slavoj Zizek The Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor, our first encounter with documented written creation, is, in short, an ancient text containing an archetype narrative of magical/mystical myth: an uninitiated hero is sent on a sea journey, he becomes thrown off course by a storm, encounters an enchanted island, confronts a monster, (a giant snake), survives, and returns home wiser for the experience. In contemporary language this might be rendered: a character on a spiritual quest journeys through the cosmos, meets a primordial god, and returns with a vision. In essence, homologous to the journey taken in the process of creation: thrown, fallen or suspended into a zero space, experience of nothing and infinity, is shocked, shattered, or provoked, returns to the surface or consciousness filled with only the will to create. So he/she writes the tale in metaphoric fantasized form. The literary history of the Epic of Gilgamesh starts with five unconnected Sumerian poems about ‘Bilgamesh’ (Sumerian for Gilgamesh), king of Uruk, (modern day Iraq). Four of these were used as source material for a combined epic in Akkadian. As a written language, Akkadian is first verified in Sumerian texts from ca. the late 29th century BC, some 98 Interview. HARTtalk. BBC World Service. 12 Jan. 2010. Television. 104 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part II — The Arts 1600 years after the stories were apparently begun orally. From the second half of the third millennium BC (ca. 2500 BC), texts fully written in Akkadian begin to appear. Hundreds of thousands of texts and text fragments have been excavated to date, covering a vast textual tradition of mythological narrative, legal texts, scientific works, correspondence, political and military events, and many other examples. By the second millennium BC, two variant forms of the language were in use in Assyria, (Northern Mesopotamia, or Iraq) and Babylonia, (Southern Iraq) known as Assyrian and Babylonian respectively. This first combined epic, known as the “Old Babylonian” version, dates to the 18th century BC and is titled after its incipit, (first few words of the first line of the text), Shūtur eli sharrī (“Surpassing All Other Kings”). Only a few fragments of it have survived. The later “Standard Babylonian” version dates from the 13th to the 10th centuries BC and bears the incipit Sha naqba īmuru (“He who Saw the Deep”), in modern terms: ‘He who Sees the Unknown’. One need not state the obvious relativity to our conceptual zero space in this, one of the very first recorded tales of mankind. In this sense, we might say, since the first recorded story of man, the unknown space of zero, was explored. History as poiesis began here with a description of a journey into the unknown as its central theme. Greece The ancient Greeks positioned distinguished importance on literature. Innumerable authors deem the beginning of the western literary tradition with the epic poems of The Iliad and The Odyssey for the masterly craftsmanship in portraying the timeless dualisms of war and peace, honor and disgrace, A Synoptic Archeology of the Poetry-Poets 105 and love and hatred. We will focus here mainly on the tale of the Odyssey, another epic journey originally thought to be transmitted orally. In the spirit of what we call magical realism today, the tale is about the warrior Odysseus returning home from the Trojan war, (recounted in the prequel, the Iliad). During his return home the highly intelligent and cunning main character, known as a polymath, continually runs into strange creatures and monsters and one strange culture and land after another, attempting to prevent him from getting home to his wife and son. Though the story is said to have been written by the Greek poet Homer, some sources believe there was never one poet, but rather The Odyssey is a compilation of the gradual evolution of stories told orally from the homecoming of soldiers for hundreds of years. The original compilation of stories was known as The Returns: tales of soldiers quests to return home from war and all the conflicts encountered in their journeys. Once again, indicative of Vico’s notion of history as poiesis. Homer, by transcribing all the stories into poetic written form, largely formed the foundation of the Greek, secular and Western world virtues: The Iliad and The Odyssey taken together communicate the recurring theme noted in the chapter on genius, that man is not a mindless body who should, like an animal, act blindly on his emotions or instinct; nor is he a mystical soul/mind who should shun this world and seek to escape his body and this life. Rather, Homer’s work communicates that man is a being of both mind and body — and that given this fact he must act in a certain way, he must live up to his nature and not shrink from it. Specifically, man must have inner strength and outer strength. Inner strength means man must use his intelligence and value his mind; he must also have the ability 106 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part II — The Arts to keep his blind inner passions or emotions in check to avoid recklessness. Outer strength means that man must be able to effectively fight to achieve and / or protect his values, especially kleos (“glory” won through great deeds).99 Some three hundred years after Homer, before the tragedy, there was an era of static, idealized plastic art in the form of sculpture that represented the Apollonian view of the world. Then came Aeschylus and his new invention of written dialogue and interactive characters, inventing the craft of what we now call drama. Aeschylus, as well as Sophocles created a body of work which Nietzsche, in his The Birth of Tragedy, considered the last great creations of artistic mastery in which all the spectators were drawn into the sublime act of the collaborative creation itself, or what we call here, the creators inspired zero spaces. Before this time, the Dionysian element was only to be found in the wild delight of festivals and drunkenness, but most paramount, in music. The combination of these elements in one art form gave birth to tragedy. Nietzsche asserts that the tragedy of Ancient Greece was the highest form of art due to its mixture of both Apollonian and Dionysian, (Nietzschean DNA), elements into one seamless ensemble, allowing the spectators for the first time, to come into contact with the all-embracing spectrum of the human condition through the spectacle. The Dionysian element was located in the music of the chorus, while the Apollonian element was located in the dialogue which gave a concrete symbolism that balanced the Dionysiac imaginary. Basically, the Apollonian spirit was able to give form to the abstract Dionysian. 99 Homer : His Accomplishments, Beliefs, Ideas, Biography. Heroes. Western Culture Global, n.d. Web. 09 Mar. 2014. A Synoptic Archeology of the Poetry-Poets 107 Nietzsche locates in classical Athenian tragedy an art form that transcended the skepticism and negativity of an essentially meaningless world. The Greek spectators, by taking a gaze into the abyss of human suffering as witnessed through the spectacle: hardship, distress, misery, wretchedness, adversity, tribulation, pain, agony, anguish, trauma, torment, torture, hurt, affliction, sadness, unhappiness, sorrow, grief, woe, angst, heartache, heartbreak, stress—and affirming, proclaiming and pronouncing it before the public, passionately and joyously, declared the validity of their own existence. They knew themselves to be infinitely more than inconsequential creatures, finding self-affirmation not in another world, not in a life to come, (as the religions would attempt to have humanity believe for the next two thousand years), but in the terror and ecstasy alike celebrated in the performance of these tragedies. The intensities: felt, observed, witnessed, experienced. Thus, to be saved, it comes close to the healing magician, art. Art alone can turn those thoughts of disgust at the horror or absurdity of existence into imaginary constructs, which permit living to continue. These constructs are the Sublime as the artistic mastering of the horrible and the Comic as the artistic release from disgust at the absurd.100 Nietzsche insists, “the illusion of culture was wiped away by the primordial image of man” for the spectators; they associated with and as the chorus energetically, “so that they imagined themselves as restored natural geniuses.”101 But in 100 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, Oscar Levy, and Robert Guppy. “The Birth of Tragedy.” Complete Works. The First Complete and Authorized English Translation. New York: Russell & Russell, 1964. Print. 101 Ibid. 108 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part II — The Arts this condition, they have an Apollonian fantasized mirage of themselves, of the energy they’re personifying. It’s a vision of the god, of a zero space, appearing before the chorus on the stage. The performers and the scenario are the establishment of that fantasized vision, the essence of which is the enraptured disembodiment of the zero space, of the inseparable and oscillating bliss and suffering of human existence. In fact, according to Nietzsche, the performance was able to capture the audience and bring them all into what we call here the zero space(s) of the poets themselves, ..nothing can be more obvious than that the poet is only a poet because of the fact that he sees himself surrounded by shapes which live and act in front of him and into whose innermost being he gazes. Through some peculiar weakness in our modern talent, we are inclined to imagine that primitive aesthetic phenomenon in too complicated and abstract a manner.102 Hence, an encounter with the four arts, beginning with the drama, (Aesychlus’s literary invention of writing drama), and adding the visual, sound and performance in the staged production, collaborating together to draw the spectators into the place of creation itself. 5.2 On Missionary Prophesying Amidst the errors there shone forth men of genius; no less keen were their eyes, although they were surrounded by darkness and dense gloom. —Petrarch 1367 102 Ibid. A Synoptic Archeology of the Poetry-Poets 109 “Religion ceases to be an inexplicable hallucination and takes a foothold in reality.”103 Once the oral traditions were documented in written form by the scribes, ancient thinkers sought to determine what makes the varying poetry and drama distinctive as a form and what distinguishes good poetry from bad, resulting in the development of “poetics”, or the study of the aesthetics of poetry and what we know today as literary criticism. Eventually, written poetry would be appropriated into religious texts and influence religious movements. Religion, earliest known etymology from: relegere/religare: the former— to gather things together or pass over the same ground repeatedly; the latter: to bind things together. By recalling the story of the people, this ancient artistic practice assisted in uniting people by creating a sense of community through common ideas, laws, genealogy and a shared history. Though, as Giambattista Vico has pointed out in his New Science, the ancient sages reached a vital awareness that humans had strayed from maintaining—predominantly that, “the true is precisely what is made”. And in doing so, the Old Testament, the first of the three Western Abrahamic religions, (Judaism, Christianity, Islam), was compiled and edited by various men over a period of centuries, with many scholars concluding that the Hebrew canon, which spurred the other two dominant western religions, was solidified by about the 3rd century BC. 104 As people begin to create religions by gathering stories of the past told from poets throughout the centuries who 103 Bowker, John. Introduction. The Oxford Dictionary of World Religions. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997. Print. 104 Lim, Timothy H. (2005). The Dead Sea Scrolls: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 41. 110 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part II — The Arts imagined the world and beyond around them, the rational gatherers observing closely recognized the poets had a different kind of spirit than the rest of the crowd, (i.e. Plato sending them into exile). Through their poetic practice they had the capacity to reshape and reform through the imaginary, all that lay within their worlds. Both creation and destruction. This was poignantly noted by Plato, who seems to have been influenced in his philosophies by the Eleusinian Mysteries, which in turn, (and not surprisingly), influenced, in part, some creations in the Christian New Testament. According to Thomas Taylor, “the dramatic shows of the Lesser Mysteries occultly signified the miseries of the soul while in subjection to the body, so those of the Greater obscurely intimated, by mystic and splendid visions, the felicity of the soul both here and hereafter, when purified from the defilements of a material nature and constantly elevated to the realities of intellectual [spiritual] vision.” And that according to Plato, “the ultimate design of the Mysteries … was to lead us back to the principles from which we descended, … a perfect enjoyment of intellectual [spiritual] good.”105 The Roman philosopher Cicero would concur hundreds of years later: For among the many excellent and indeed divine institutions which your Athens has brought forth and contributed to human life, none, in my opinion, is better than those mysteries. For by their means we have been brought out of our barbarous and savage mode of life and educated and refined to a state of civilization; and as the rites are called “initiations,” so in very truth we have learned from them the beginnings of life, and have gained the power not only to live happily, but also to die with a better hope. —Cicero, Laws II, xiv, 36 105 Taylor, Thomas, Alexander Wilder, and Albert L. Rawson. The Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries. A Dissertation. New York: J.W. Bouton, 1891. Print. A Synoptic Archeology of the Poetry-Poets 111 The poets doing the imagining, or working in poiesis, would not be easily convinced into believing and following one Absolute Idea—after all, the stories they created were no ultimate guidebook of laws for the universe, especially when the universe was constantly in motion and change—they themselves could create multiple possibilities just imagining it. It would be a bit hubristic to think any one person or one vision should determine the way in which an entire society was expected to live, forever. But unless they expected to live themselves, eventually they would need to play the game now being forced upon them for many centuries to come. The Eleusinian Mysteries were the first of the Western “Sacred ways” in which initiation into the cult could assure you life after death. However, if you slipped and revealed the ‘secret mysteries’ to anyone outside the cult, the penalty was death. In fact, the tragic playwright Aeschylus was allegedly tried for revealing secrets of the Mysteries in some of his plays, but was acquitted. So by the actions and decisions invested in the powers that be, beginning with Plato and his ultimate rationalizing objectives, the poets were relegated to ranks of the madmen(women) of society. The mysteries continued to bear influence on thinking up through and including the early Roman times, until around the 4th century AD when the Christian invaders would descend upon their sacred sites and destroy them all, while naturally appropriating some of their ideas, namely, that following their ‘religion’ would assure you a place into the afterworld, only this time the cult was called The Christians. Everyone was to follow the stories that had been imagined without question, including the poets (story makers) 112 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part II — The Arts themselves, less they be exiled or beheaded. Eventually, the poets thus forth began to create in the religious imaginary, as their patrons and sole bread and butter came from the aggrandizing religious ruling class. The literature which evolves from this period forward and throughout the middle ages is predominantly theological in nature, as the Catholic clerics were the intellectual center of society and their writing generated the greatest quantity. While there does exist secular writings from the period: epics, chivalric romances and many stories of unrequited longing, the majority are anonymous. The bulk of poets attributed their works as re-tellings and embellishments of stories they’d heard from the Church fathers. One need not stretch imagination too far to comprehend the stifling and prominent fear of death the poets amongst the land shared during this period in which creating beyond the limits put forth by the Church, ended. The poets, after all, could go into their own personal zero spaces and share their creations with their families and close friends as often as they liked without feeling the need for notoriety or fame in the cities, (Plato’s 2nd realm of poiesis—one, perhaps the most sincere of poets have no need for)—as the isolation of poets began its ascent in time. Dante Aligheri At the end of the medieval ages and leading the people into the early Italian Renaissance period, an Italian poet emerged who’s work and name will live on, perhaps for as long as the planet exists. Dante Alighieri and his work, The Divine Comedy, is an imaginary encapsulated period piece which defined the essence of the époque at the tail end of its journey. Dante wrote most of his poetry in the Italian vernacular instead of Latin, A Synoptic Archeology of the Poetry-Poets 113 a choice that would influence the entire course of western literary development. In it we witness magnificent poiesis fantasizing within the confines of a space that informed it. The genius poet, suspended in judgment, surrendered to the 800 year old meta-narrative that dominated his world, mourning the loss of his family, contemplating an unrequited love of his youth, and having become literally blind, he fell privy to existing and elaborately creating in the only story he knew, he dreamed, he lived, quotidian—an imaginary into the Christian dualism of hell and paradise. But if we look closely, the last word in each of the three parts of the Divine Comedy is stelle (“stars”) –a light, into the cosmos of the unknown, perhaps the poet, too, was simply seeking balance, either that, or escape. Chiming in from the not so distant future of this encapsulation, we hear sounds of Vico declaring his imaginative universal (universale fantastico). Many of the poems surviving the ancient world are the very framework we use to develop our grasp of the details from these cultures of our origins—the lifestyles of our ancestors. Their poems are often stories about mystical subject matter, as well as politics and wars, and the important organizing myths of societies. But all of them, whichever direction they take, discuss journeys within the abstract darkness (zero spaces) and out again. The poets throughout time retell the experiences in infinite accounts. Eventually varying stories were appropriated by the organizing leaders who in turn paid the scribes, (or who were scribes themselves), to create stories of which the masses of people would believe and follow as universal law. These could be used to tame and control society, to convince them that theirs was the true path needed to be followed to enter into eventual liberation from universal suffering: Paradise, Ein Sof, 114 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part II — The Arts Nirvana, Apeiron, Jannah, Tao, Absolute, Ultimate, Beatific Vision, etc.. The circles of truths, keeping the rows of people thread together in their societies. The main paradigmatic shift Dante offered the world was the change of literary language from sanctified Latin verse, to common vernacular, in his case, Italian. Quite simply, a notion of informality was introduced. 5.3 On Evolving Limits William Shakespeare As the Christian sanctioned middle ages were coming to an end, and early Italian Renaissance was blossoming into full bloom around continental Europe and England, ‘rational thinking’ philosophers and political leaders alike began to consider once again the importance of poets. And the world certainly needed a makeover. Thus began the ascent into the heart of the Renaissance period, the beginning of the rejection of gods and religion, characterized by the adoption of a humanist philosophy and focus, the recovery of the classical literature of Antiquity and benefitting from the spread of printing in the latter part of the 15th century. Finally, in 1564, the world gives birth to Shakespeare, the first genius poet-dramatist in almost two thousand years to create a universal life altering body of work. And just how did Shakespeare manage such a paradigm shift through his work? According to the literary theorist, Harold Bloom, in his work Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, “Literary character before Shakespeare is relatively unchanging; women and men are represented as aging and dying, but not as A Synoptic Archeology of the Poetry-Poets 115 changing because their relationship to themselves, rather that to the gods or God, has changed. In Shakespeare, characters develop rather than unfold, and they develop because they re-conceive themselves. Sometimes this comes about because they overhear themselves talking, whether to themselves or to others. Self-overhearing is their royal road to individuation, and no other writer, before or since Shakespeare, has accomplished so well the virtual miracle of creating utterly different yet self-consistent voices for his more than one hundred major characters and many hundreds of highly distinctive minor personages.”106 ‘Self-overhearing’, or perhaps a precursor or foreshadowing to what will eventually metamorphosis into interior monologue, or the beginning of what both poets and novelists alike will later use as stream-of-consciousness as the world moves hence forward from the collective experience, deeper and deeper into the individual experience. In essence, Shakespeare becomes one of our first human psychologists creating through his poiesis the first of what we come to understand as character becoming conscious of their own consciousness as well as those of others, (what will eventually develop through the evolution of literary works as consciousness of one’s own subconsciousness), and in doing so, allows the audience and readers that capacity to encounter themselves and become conscious of their own development and thoughts in the process. “Imitations produce pain or pleasure, not because they are mistaken for realities, but because they bring realities to mind.”107 106 Bloom, Harold. “Shakespeare’s Universalism.” Introduction. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York: Riverhead, 1998. N. pag. Print. 107 Shakespeare, William, and Samuel Johnson. The Plays of William Shakespeare in Eight Volumes. London: Printed for J. and R. Tonson, 1765. Print. 116 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part II — The Arts In comparison with the previous discussion of Nietzsche’s analysis of the Greek tragedians, we discover a common theme within these works of the presentation evoking a similar response as the Greek spectators, who, by taking a gaze into the abyss of human suffering as witnessed through the spectacle, declared the validity of their own existence. The difference between Shakespeare and the Greek tragedies, however, is in the collective versus the individualistic focalization. Samuel Johnson, in his work on Shakespeare published on 10 October 1765 as The Plays of William Shakespeare, in Eight Volumes, is one of the first literary critics to declare that Shakespeare’s greatness was in his precision and poignant portrayal of human nature in such a diversity of persons that his works become universal in scope and not merely a social phenomenon. Or as Harold Bloom puts it, “An experiential critic above all, Johnson knew that realities change, indeed are change. What Shakespeare invents are ways of representing human changes, alterations not only caused by flaws and by decay but effected by the will as well, and by the will’s temporal vulnerabilities.” In this invocation of the will found in Bloom’s analysis of Shakespeare’s capacity to display the ever changing desires of man, we are reminded of Arthur Schopenhauer’s work on The World as Will and..Vorstellung (Ideas, Representation), written in 1818, 108 some 250 years after the Bard. Richard E. Aquila in his recent translation of Schopenhauer’s work109 changes the original Vorstellung translation to Presentation and states that the world that we perceive is a “presentation” of objects in the theatre of our own mind; the observers, the “subject,” each Schopenhauer, Arthur, and E. F. J. Payne. The World as Will and Representation. New York: Dover Publications, 1966. Print. 109 Schopenhauer, Arthur, David Carus, and Richard E. Aquila. The World as Will and Presentation. New York: Pearson Longman, 2008. Print. 108 A Synoptic Archeology of the Poetry-Poets 117 craft the show with their own stage managers, stagehands, sets, lighting, code of dress, pay scale, etc. The other aspect of the world, the Will, or “thing in itself,” which is not perceivable as a presentation, exists outside time, space, and causality. Schopenhauer used the word “will” as human’s most familiar designation for the concept that can also be signified by other words such as “desire,” “striving,” “wanting,” “effort,” and “urging.” Schopenhauer’s philosophy holds that all nature, including man, is the expression of an insatiable will to life. It is through the will that mankind finds all their suffering. Desire for more is what causes this suffering. Or in Nietzsche’s follow up with the will to power110 as a struggle against one’s surroundings that culminates in personal growth, selfovercoming, and self-perfection. From there, spurns, Freud’s will to pleasure111, Adler’s individual psychology112, and Frankl’s will to meaning113: all uniquely different interpretative conceptions of the will. Though no matter which definition or concept of the will one subscribes to, it is clear that whatever it is, it involves the individual, personal drive and motivation in existing towards or for something. And from Shakespeare’s body of work, the world opens into this new realm of exploration: literature as the representation of the individual’s personal journey through time, whether clothed in allegory, metaphor and allusions, or directly stated. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, Walter Arnold Kaufmann, and R. J. Hollingdale. The Will to Power. New York: Random House, 1967. Print. 111 Freud, Sigmund, Josef Breuer, James Strachey, Anna Freud, and Angela Richards. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Vintage, 2001. Print. 112 Adler, Alfred. The Neurotic Constitution: Outlines of a Comparative Individualistic Psychology and Psychotherapy. New York: Moffat, Yard, 1917. Print. 113 Frankl, Viktor E., and Ilse Lasch. Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy. Boston: Beacon, 1962. Print. 110 118 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part II — The Arts 5.4 On Liberated Stream of Consciousness A man exists for culture, not for what he can accomplish, but for what can be accomplished in him...he wishes more to know the history and destiny of man; whilst the clouds of egotists drifting about him are only interested in a low success.114 —Ralph Waldo Emerson The temporal and reasoned height and fall of the Enlightenment and through the the eighteenth century was shifting gradually from the past to the future, with a new emphasis on becoming, on progress, on development and growth. The change of focus in literature and the arts in the dawning of the romantic period—from aesthetics of mimesis to an aesthetics of originality was a symptom of that shift.115 5.4.1 Goethe Goethe, the literary genius who drove the world forward into the romantic period, shifted the tone of literature, from the Shakespearean universal outward inspection of Others, to the universal inward gaze of the self; a self in relation to the Zeitgeist of the times. The Romantic shift in perspective validated intense emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions and harnessing the power of imagination to envision and to escape the confines of conflictual transgressions in the outside world: population growth, urban sprawl and industrialism. Goethe’s monumental contribution to the world perhaps Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Representative Men. S.l.: Bohn, 1850. Print. Gauchet, Marcel. The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1997. Print. 114 115 A Synoptic Archeology of the Poetry-Poets 119 dwells in his ability to demonstrate through his forthcoming personalized creations, the ability for the artist to liberate themselves through the creative process. While his work is extensive and the two examples that follow are but a morsel of his exemplary lifetime achievement, they serve to illustrate best his premier notions of spiritual/mental liberation through a lifetime of creative undertaking. Goethe’s philosophy of creativity revolves around what he called das Dämonische (the demonic). According to him, the process of the creation represents a strange exorcism, as the entire daemonic creative force of the author is transposed in his universal literature. In one of his discussions with Eckermann116 regarding the demonic, Goethe makes the following mention which is often quoted in the works residing upon this subject, that “..in poetry, especially in that which is unconscious, before which reason and understanding fall short, and which therefore produces effects so far surpassing all conception, there is always something dæmonic” The demonic, as Goethe repeatedly maintains, should not be confused with the diabolic, but rather in the Greek notion of an attendant inner spirit assigned to every person at birth, governing their fortunes and determining their character. It represents the mysterious power which can be manifested not only in certain personalities but in things, events or entire epochs. In his Poetry and Truth the author says “...this demoniacal element can manifest itself in all corporeal and incorporeal things, and even expresses itself.”117 The demon, or in Goethe’s vision the demonic, manifests itself both in humans, animals and 116 Eckermann, Johann Peter, Johann Wolfgang Von. Goethe, Frederic Soret, and John Oxenford. Conversations of Goethe. S.l.: Bell, 1883. Print. 117 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von. Poetry and Truth. London: Bell, 1908. Print. 120 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part II — The Arts things, which is not so important as it is its shift from one to another. Goethe’s demonic comes out of him and passes this time not into an animal but into a thing, more specifically, his own works. “Goethe believed in his own daemons, who seem to have endowed him with occult energies, including parodistic appropriation of all his forerunners, from Homer on to Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Wisdom, according to the later Goethe is equivocal in his renunciations, and it is difficult to reconcile his achieved wisdom with his sly outrageousness.”118 “When a work was finished, it became uninteresting to me; I thought of it no more, but busied myself with a new plan.”119 Nonetheless, Goethe had a special relation with two of his works. The first, The Sorrows of Young Werther, and the other, Elegy from Marienbad. Although both of them liberated Goethe from some despairing conditions, these two works represent at the same time two extremes of the way in which the author liberated himself by transposing his suffering into poetry. In Goethe’s own testimony in Poetry and Truth regarding the process of creating The Sorrows of Young Werther, he states: By these convictions I freed myself, not so much from the danger as from the whim of suicide, which in those splendid times of peace, and with an indolent youth, had managed to creep in. Among a considerable collection of weapons, I possessed a handsome, well polished dagger. This I laid every night by my bed; and, before 1 extinguished the candle, I tried whether I could succeed in plunging the sharp point a couple of inches deep into my heart. Since 1 never could succeed in this, I at last laughed myself out of the notion, threw off all hypochondriacal fancies, and resolved to live.120 Bloom, Harold. “Hokmah: Lustre 4.” Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds. New York: Warner, 2002. 160-61. Print. 119 Eckermann, Johann Peter, Johann Wolfgang Von. Goethe, Frederic Soret, and John Oxenford. Conversations of Goethe. S.l.: Bell, 1883. Print. 120 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von. Poetry and Truth. London: Bell, 1908. Print. 118 A Synoptic Archeology of the Poetry-Poets 121 In order to detach himself temporarily from the “suicide fixation”, Goethe determines Werther to commit suicide for him, creating thus a character who decides to die so that his creator may live. In one of Goethe’s candid testimonies regarding the origin of The Sorrows of Young Werther he recounts: ...but, to be able to do this, with cheerfulness, I was obliged to solve a poetical problem by which all that I had felt, thought, and fancied upon this important point should be reduced to words...For by this composition, more than by any other, I had freed myself from that stormy element, upon which, through my own fault and that of others, through a mode of life both accidental and chosen, through design and thoughtless precipitation, through obstinacy and pliability. I had been driven about in the most violent manner. I felt, as if after a general confession, once more happy and free, and justified in beginning a new life.”121 A tragic reality had thus become a masterpiece of German literature. And by some mystifying process the “suicide fixation” which Goethe freed himself by writing The Sorrows of Young Werther, was transmitted to the public. Goethe confesses in this respect: “But while I felt relieved and enlightened by having turned reality into poetry, my friends were led astray by my work ; for they thought that poetry ought to be turned into reality, that such a moral was to be imitated, and that, at any rate, one ought to shoot oneself. What had first happened here among a few, afterwards took place among the larger public; and this little book, which had been so beneficial to me, was decried as extremely injurious.” 121 Ibid. 122 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part II — The Arts zAs Madame de Staël once stated, Werther caused more suicides than the most beautiful woman in the world. In Poetry and Truth, Goethe allocated many pages to The Sorrows of Young Werther, conceivably still amazed by the devastating effect the book had on its audience. Perhaps the overnight success and effects the book had on its readers demonstrates more about the audience or society itself than its intrinsic value or author. Goethe , in his astute poiesis was working within the zeitgeist of his time: an age that was haunted by ideas of suicide. “The effect of this little book was great, nay, immense, and chiefly because it exactly hit the temper of the times. For as it requires but a little match to blow up an immense mine, so the explosion which followed my publication was mighty, from the circumstance that the youthful world had already undermined itself: and the shock was great, because all extravagant demands, unsatisfied passions, and imaginary wrongs were suddenly brought to an eruption.”122 Or, as Harold Bloom says it, “If it was irony, such irony was wholly Goethean, another original mode, nature’s own irony speaking through an individual.”123 Contrasting in content, though equivocal in the process of liberating the author from the chains of daemonic frenzy, Elegy of Marienbad, the manuscript which Goethe, “prized above all the rest,” became a demonic work, par excellence, and in the words of the literary scholar and poet Friedrich Gundolf : “... almost everything Goethe writes from here on consists of moral reflections and applications which are either calm, almost rigid or severe, energetic approvals and disprovals uttered with superiority.”124 Or otherwise stated, Ibid. Bloom, Harold. “Hokmah: Lustre 4.” Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds. New York: Warner, 2002. 175. Print. 124 Gundolf, Friedrich. Goethe. Berlin: G. Bondi, 1916. Print. 122 123 A Synoptic Archeology of the Poetry-Poets 123 all works thereafter lack ‘demonism’ or rather, are no longer inspired by possessed creative frenzy. Goethe states in one of his conversations with Eckermann. “This time the counterweight of the demonic is not taste but wisdom (die Weisheit).” It shall not only calm the impulses of the demonic of which Goethe is possessed, but will substitute it for good after the exorcise represented by the Elegy from Marienbad: Now am I far! And what would best befit The present minute? I could scarcely tell; Full many a rich possession offers it, These but offend, and I would fain repel. Yearnings unquenchable still drive me on, All counsel, save unbounded tears, is gone. Flow on, flow on in never-ceasing course, Yet may ye never quench my inward fire! Within my bosom heaves a mighty force, Where death and life contend in combat dire. Medicines may serve the body’s pangs to still; Nought but the spirit fails in strength of will.125 After a lifetime of extreme hard work and perseverance, Goethe becomes the exemplary literary genius who succeeds in extinguishing his demon forever, “... why should I care such wisdom vast to know?” His inner balance is re-established after sheer confusion by an equally demonic love as the elegy occasioned. “Goethe’s hyper-trophied will specific to the demonic man ceases to exist after the Elegy from Marienbad.”126 In doing so, Goethe paradigmatically sets the rest of the world on a path of exploration to better understand the conscious and subconscious relationship in the individual 125 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. Elegy from Marienbad. Translated by Edgar Alfred Bowring 126 Râmbu, Nicolae. O demonismo da criação na filosofia de Goethe. Trans/ Form/Ação,Marília, v. 35, n.3, p. 67-80, Set./Dez., 2012. 124 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part II — The Arts mind. For the sake of this work, we will focus solely on the succeeding literary implications from this major shift in introspective and hyper-individualistic concentration. And Goethe said, Yes, Shakespeare, humanity is infinitely vast, but let’s look inside the individual and discover how to find individual peace, and then maybe we can move forward. 5.4.2 Charles Baudelaire Be always drunken. Nothing else matters: that is the only question. If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, be drunken continually. Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will. But be drunken. And if sometimes, on the stairs of a palace, or on the green side of a ditch, or in the dreary solitude of your own room, you should awaken and the drunkenness be half or wholly slipped away from you, ask of the wind, or of the wave, or of the star, or of the bird, or of the clock, of whatever flies, A Synoptic Archeology of the Poetry-Poets 125 or sighs, or rocks, or sings, or speaks, ask what hour it is; and the wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: It is the hour to be drunken!” —Charles Baudelaire, Get Drunk While Goethe showed the world it was possible to break limits and extinguish one’s suffering through dedication, hard work and perseverance in the creative process by obtaining wisdom enough to balance and thus liberate ones repeated suspension in zero spaces, Baudelaire showed the world other ways of usurping limits in his confessions of humiliation, debauchery and perennial residence with altered perceptions within one’s creative space. From excessive drinking, to smoking opium and hash, he was the first poet to so lavishly and openly submit his private dirt to the pressure of the most meticulous art. Baudelaire as the original beatnik, some one hundred years before the Beatniks were—intoxication and creation were his openly declared modus operandi. One could say, he shamelessly opened the world to artistic hedonism, or perhaps, self-medicated in a courage-less attempt to escape and liberate himself. He is credited with coining the term modernité (modernity) to designate the fleeting, ephemeral experience of life in an urban metropolis, and the responsibility art has to capture that experience, “By modernity I mean the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent which make up one half of art, the 126 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part II — The Arts other being the eternal and the immutable.”127 Baudelaire begins his famous essay “The Painter of Modern Life” with a general theory of Beauty. His idea is that Beauty has two elements: one is “eternal and invariable,” and the other is “a relative circumstantial element”—an element that goes by a series of aliases: “contemporaneity, fashion, morality, passion.” As a theory, it does not arrest one immediately. But with this theory Baudelaire is doing something unusual to the history of aesthetics. The shift is in how he sketches the relationship between the two elements of beauty. It used to be that they happily existed beside each other, the eternal and the everyday. But no, he argues. If you want the eternal at all then the only route to it will be through the banal and ubiquitous quotidian, through the everyday dresses and make-up and sex lives of one’s era. This is the source of his strange uniqueness: this assertion that the only metaphysical art is a sketched picture of modern manners, as in the engravings of Constantin Guys, or in his own writing: all paintings of “the fleeting moment and of all that it suggests of the eternal.”128 There is nothing more profound, in Baudelaire’s revolution, than surfaces. And the closest surface is the map of one’s own feelings. Humiliation, in other words, is the point at which Baudelaire discovers his own portal into the eternal.129 In addition, Baudelaire introduced the world to symbolism in literature which would influence the literary art for the century to come. In Roberto Calasso’s recently published work, La Folie Baudelaire, he begins with his definition of Baudelaire’s modern condition. “In Baudelaire’s time, thinkers were obliged Baudelaire, Charles, and Jonathan Mayne. The Painter of Modern Life, and Other Essays. London: Phaidon, 1964. Print. 128 Thirwell, Adam. “How Baudelaire Revolutionized Modern Literature.” New Republic 21 Feb. 2013: n. pag. Web. 21 March 2014. 129 Ibid. 127 A Synoptic Archeology of the Poetry-Poets 127 to commit an ‘infinite sin’. . . : to interpret infinitely, without a primum and without an end, in unceasing, sudden, shattered, and recursive motion.” This infinite interpretation, he argues, was the new Parisian atmosphere—and it was Baudelaire’s personal territory: “The real modernity that takes shape in Baudelaire is this hunt for images, without beginning or end, goaded by the ‘demon of analogy.’ ” And the reason why interpretation is infinite, argues Calasso, why this hunt for images and analogies goes on forever, is that sometime in the nineteenth century in Paris it became apparent that there was now no canon against which interpretations could be defined. There was no orthodoxy. “And perhaps never as in Baudelaire, in the graphs of his nervous reactions, was that situation so manifest.” This, concludes Calasso, is the secret of Baudelaire’s continuing shock value: “It is not something that concerns the power or the perfection of form. It concerns sensibility.”130 Baudelaire was the most sensitive instrument for recording the modern condition of total semantic confusion.131 Semantic confusion will eventually become the cornerstone of the contemporary novel that in the century which follows him, usurps poetry. This, perhaps is where he creates the paradigmatic shift. Not surprisingly, one of Baudelaire’s last incomplete projects was a novel. In 1852, writing to his editor Auguste Poulet-Malassis, he declared: “I am decided from now on to remain apart from all human polemic, and decided more than ever to pursue the superior dream of the application of metaphysics to the novel.” For Baudelaire, the novel was the natural successor to his Calasso, Roberto, and Jean-Paul Manganaro. La Folie Baudelaire. Paris: Gallimard, 2011. Print 131 Thirwell, Adam. “How Baudelaire Revolutionized Modern Literature.” New Republic 21 Feb. 2013: n. pag. Web. 21 March 2014. 130 128 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part II — The Arts inventions in the art of poetry. Two years later, in 1854, Baudelaire admonished his friend, the novelist Champfleury, that “the Novel is an art more subtle and more beautiful than the others, it is not a belief, no more than Art itself.” As the young up and coming novelist Adam Thirwell points out, “All his paradoxes are still here. The metaphysical is still a problem for the novel, and so is the investigation into the limits of humiliation. They may even be the same thing. For the deep problem is still the problem of writing a kind of confession, a kind of truth. And the question is, how do you do this better than Baudelaire?”132 By turning the banality of everyday into art and exposing the world—forcing observation on humanities dirty devices and habits, Baudelaire shifted the tone of the times, still influential to date. And Baudelaire said, Yes, Goethe, lets look inside the individual, but in order to do so, we need visuals of the mundane surface –with added methodical storytelling, we need poetic prose, the novel. 5.4.3 William Blake I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Man’s. I will not Reason & Compare; my business is to Create.133 In the line above, written in 1804, some 210 years ago, William Blake summons for what we call here, the creation of Fictive World Formulae. In his The Marriage of Heaven and Hell etched between 1790 and 1793, he invents his own including many of the basic religious ideas developed in his major prophecies. Blake analyzes the development of organized Ibid. Blake, William, and Geoffrey Keynes. Jerusalem; the Emanation of the Giant Albion. 1804. Printed by W. Blake. Clairvaux, France: Trianon; Distributed by B. Quaritch, London, 1974. Print. 132 133 A Synoptic Archeology of the Poetry-Poets 129 religion as a perversion of ancient visions: The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could perceive. And particularly they studied the genius of each city & country, placing it under its mental deity; Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of & enslav’d the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects: thus began Priesthood; Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales. And at length they pronounc’d that the Gods had order’d such things. Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast. The “system” or organized religion, according to Blake, keeps man from perceiving the spiritual in the physical. The gods are seen as separate from man, and an elite race of priests is developed to approach the gods. Instead of looking for God on remote altars, Blake warns, man should look within, perhaps to the place we call here, a zero space. Blake’s poem satirizes oppressive authority of church and state. His minor prophecies are more than political commentaries but rather analyses of the universal forces at work when repression and revolution clash. The “just man” has been turned away from the institutions of church and state, and in his place are fools and hypocrites who preach law and order but create chaos. Blake claimed that those who proclaim restrictive moral rules and oppressive laws as “goodness” are in themselves evil. Hence to counteract this repression, Blake announces that he is of the “Devil’s Party” that will advocate freedom of energy and satisfied desire. Not unlike Friedrich Nietzsche’s work, Beyond Good and Evil, which he would published almost one hundred years later, Blake’s The “Proverbs of Hell” are constructed to shock the reader out of his commonplace notion of what is good and what is evil: 130 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part II — The Arts Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion. The pride of the peacock is the glory of God. The lust of the goat is the bounty of God. The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God. The nakedness of woman is the work of God. According to Blake, the oppressive nature of church and state has created repulsive prisons and brothels. As well, he claims sexual energy is not an immanent “evil,” but the restraint of that energy is. He believes the preachers of morality fail to understand that God is in all things, including the sexual nature of men and women, or what we established earlier with Rilke’s poems, the creative nature. Blake is not advocating moral and political anarchy, but a proper balance of energy and its opposing force, reason. Reason, by Blake, is defined as “the bound or outward Circumference of Energy.” The threshold between pre-poiesis, (zero space), and poiesis, between the mystic and the conscious calculated reason. Reason is a vital and necessary force to define Energy, and “without contraries is no progression,” Blake announced. The problem now is that the forces of reason have predominated, and the forces of energy must be let loose. Compared with Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche exposes the deficiencies of those usually called “philosophers” (as opposed to Blake’s church and state or ruling political and religious philosophies) and identifies the qualities of the “new philosophers”: imagination, self-assertion, danger, originality, and the creation of values, (Blake calls is ‘energy’). He then contests some of the key presuppositions of the old philosophic tradition like self-consciousness, knowledge, truth, and free will, A Synoptic Archeology of the Poetry-Poets 131 (Blake’s reason), explaining them as inventions of the moral consciousness. In their place he offers the will to power, (Blake’s forces of energy), as an explanation of all behavior; this ties into his perspective of life, which he regards as beyond good and evil, denying a universal morality for all human beings. This is where the two diverge: for Blake, reason is a ‘vital Circumference’ which can define the forces of energy, the one can not live without the Other. He believes a balance is needed. Nietzsche obliterates limits altogether. Religion and the master and slave moralities feature prominently as Nietzsche re-evaluates deeply held humanistic beliefs, portraying even domination, appropriation and injury to the weak as not universally objectionable. Blake, on the other hand, abhorred slavery and believed in racial and sexual equality—he lived in a suspension of judgment as an embraced lifestyle, balancing it through his creations. Several of his poems and paintings express a notion of universal humanity: “As all men are alike (tho’ infinitely various)”. In his poem, “The Little Black Boy”, narrated by a black child, white and black bodies alike are described as shaded groves or clouds, which exist only until one learns “to bear the beams of love”: When I from black and he from white cloud free, And round the tent of God like lambs we joy: Ill shade him from the heat till he can bear, To lean in joy upon our fathers knee. And then I’ll stand and stroke his silver hair, And be like him and he will then love me. 132 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part II — The Arts Nietzsche, on the contrary, in his work The Will to Power134 declares, “woman! One-half of mankind is weak, typically sick, changeable, inconstant... she needs a religion of weakness that glorifies being weak, loving, and being humble as divine: or better, she makes the strong weak—she rules when she succeeds in overcoming the strong... Woman has always conspired with the types of decadence, the priests, against the “powerful”, the “strong”, the men..” Nietzsche proclaimed the sky is the limit and judged everything and everyone underneath it, though he remained within limits of generalized judgment of the outside world to which he took very little part. “To Generalize is to be an Idiot,” Blake declared. If we pour him through the sieve of Blake’s psychology, we might distinguish between the two divergences through their empirical perspectives: Nietzsche was an erudite scholar, Blake a trained apprentice in the craft of engravings and a painter who also wrote poetry and was self-taught though experience and observation. Nietzsche was a solitary, socially awkward hermit who read, wrote, and walked alone. Blake was married for 45 years to a dear companion who encouraged and supported him through his craft throughout his life and learned the art of engraving to help him with his work. He engaged the world and loved his family. Nietzsche shut himself up and his sexuality or physical/sensual awareness is a mystery still explored to present day.135 “Organized religion”, according to Blake, “keeps man from perceiving the spiritual in the physical”. Was Nietzsche trying to organize a religion to claim himself the superman creator of his own new 134 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, Walter Arnold Kaufmann, and R. J. Hollingdale. The Will to Power. New York: Random House, 1967. Print. 135 Köhler, Joachim. Zarathustra’s Secret: The Interior Life of Friedrich Nietzsche. New Haven: Yale UP, 2002. Print. A Synoptic Archeology of the Poetry-Poets 133 religion or transvaluation of new values?136 Replacing one set of values with another—the Übermensch (superman) was to be the meaning of the earth and Nietzsche admonishes his audience to ignore those who promise other-worldly hopes in order to draw them away from the earth. A new God, who doesn’t promise paradise or afterlife. The turn away from the earth is prompted, he says, by a dissatisfaction with life, a dissatisfaction that causes one to create another world in which those who made one unhappy in this life are tormented. The Übermensch is not driven into other worlds away from this one. But are not the faculties of imagination, originality and creativity, (those qualities what Nietzsche identified as the qualities needed for the “new philosophers”) used for the very function of creating other worlds in our imaginations? And was Nietzsche really engaging the world and not driven away, escaping into his little isolated castle in the sky? Nietzsche desired a ‘superman’ — that is, for a new human who was to be neither master nor slave; he praised the ecstatic and creative self, with the artist as his prototype who could say, ‘Yes’ to the self-creation of a new world on the basis of nothing; Blake said: I must Create a System, or be enslav’d by another Man’s. I will not Reason & Compare; my business is to Create As Blake’s work remained in obscurity until the mid1900s, it is highly unlikely that Nietzsche knew of his existence. Blake’s complete poetry, however, is festooned with cross-references to the same idea voiced differently in Nietzsche. Until they diverge. While Nietzsche denies a limit on universal morality, the other less erudite and living wholly in the imagination, self-assertion, danger, originality, and the 136 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. The Antichrist. New York: Arno, 1972. Print. 134 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part II — The Arts creation of values, that Nietzsche proclaimed as the new way forward and Blake simply called ‘energy’, recognized that Nietzsche’s idea of what he called reason, self-consciousness, knowledge, truth, and free will was not an invention of moral consciousness as Nietzsche declared, but rather a vital force needed to define the other. While Blake sought to embrace the Other, Nietzsche sought absolute isolation. The two were simply parts of the whole. Blake was free, and recognized the necessity for balance, yet the philosopher got lost in another absolute and proclaimed domination, appropriation and injury to the weak as not universally objectionable. If he couldn’t find love for himself, who else could he find it for? He had a taste of the other side of reason and couldn’t find a way to live it—so he sent it into exile like his predecessor, Plato. Perhaps here we may pour Nietzsche’s biographical, sexual (creative) perspective through the Blakeian sieve once more and consider Blakes comment in his Proverbs of Hell: Prudence is a rich ugly old maid courted by Incapacity. He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence. While Nietzsche had intensely insightful ideas regarding performance and poetry in his DNA, his philosophical and political conceptions could only breed what would eventually be called Fascism led by a man named Hitler. What he missed was what Blake declared when he said that sexual energy is not an immanent “evil,” but the restraint of that energy is. In the end, perhaps it is fair to say that looking beyond good and evil has its limits. Blake understood that a century before Nietzsche. Without Others to share oneself: domination, appropriation and injury may seem justified, or as Jim Morrison once chanted: People are strange when you’re a stranger A Synoptic Archeology of the Poetry-Poets 135 Faces look ugly when you’re alone, Women seem wicked when you’re unwanted, Streets are uneven when you’re down. And Blake said, Yes, Baudelaire, we certainly need visuals, and a story to coincide, but mostly we need to find balance within the forces that bring us to create, and in a more sublime way then debauchery, or how can we move forward? 5.4.4 Emily Dickinson “Soto”- Explore Thyself Therein - Thyself shall find The Undiscovered Continent : No Settler - had the Mind.137 Sōtō Zen or the Sōtō school (曹洞宗 Sōtō-shū) is the largest of the three traditional sects of Zen in Japanese Buddhism. It emphasizes Shikantaza, meditation with no objects, anchors, or content. The meditator strives to be aware of the stream of thoughts, allowing them to arise and pass away without interference.138 Although Emily was writing this poem to her brother, Austin, it embodies the crux of her entire work of almost 1800 poems, all of which were written in solitude, without any 137 Dickinson, Emily, 1830-1886. A. (Emily) note/poem to Austin [Dickinson] [ca.1864] Pencil; 1p. MS Am 1118.5 (B19). Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. 138 “Soto.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 28 Apr. 2014. Web. 15 May 2014. 136 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part II — The Arts sincere desire to be known by the outside world. She alone negates the second realm of Platonic poiesis by example: willing to die without being recognized as the poet she would posthumously become – the embodiment of the pure poetic soul, without need for fame. Born and died fourteen years before Friedrich Nietzsche, Emily Dickinson demonstrates for the world sublime overcoming of isolation through one’s creation, and more, creation for creations sake. But unlike Nietzsche, she hadn’t any will to power, to become superwoman, she just was, sublime existence. Or in the words of Harold Bloom, “The genius of isolation is very rare: no other poet...seems so separate from us as Dickinson...We are still in the apprentice state in learning to read (her) poetry, primarily because of her authentic difficulty. She is frequently more allusive then we tend to recognize.”139 Emily alone, embodies living in a zero space, and mastering it, soberly, without ever going mad. “No one can read Dickinson long and deeply without being confronted by her extraordinary self-reliance as a poet, woman and thinker. The expression of that self-trust is a pride in her own poetic authority, and in her highly individual spiritual autonomy.”140 This Consciousness that is aware Of Neighbors and the Sun Will be the one aware of Death And that itself alone Is traversing the interval Experience between And most profound experiment Appointed unto Men — How adequate unto itself 139 Bloom, Harold. “Din: Lustre 9.” Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds. New York: Warner, 2002. 345. Print. 140 Ibid. A Synoptic Archeology of the Poetry-Poets 137 It’s properties shall be Itself unto itself and none Shall make discovery. Adventure most unto itself The Soul condemned to be — Attended by a single Hound It’s own identity. In her “Circumference” she kept intimate friends through epistolary communication. Through her letters, Dickinson reminds her correspondents that their broken worlds are not a mere chaos of fragments. Behind the seeming fragments of her short statements lies the invitation to remember the world in which each correspondent shares a certain and rich knowledge with the other. They alone know the extent of their connections; the friendship has given them the experiences peculiar to the relation. She asks her reader to complete the connection her words only imply—to round out the context from which the allusion is taken, to take the part and imagine a whole.141 Imagination is the key to her comprehension of existence—and in it, the interconnectedness of all things unseen or spoken exist. I dwell in Possibility A fairer House than Prose More numerous of Windows Superior - for Doors Of Chambers as the Cedars Impregnable of eye And for an everlasting Roof The Gambrels of the Sky Of Visitors - the fairest “Emily Dickinson.” Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation, n.d. Web. 12 May 2014. 141 138 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part II — The Arts For Occupation - This The spreading wide my narrow Hands To gather Paradise Dickinson crafted a new type of persona for the first person. Her speakers are “sharp-sighted observers who see the inescapable limitations of their societies as well as their imagined and imaginable escapes.”142 In these imagined escapes, the notion of our Fictive World Formulae are once again evoked. As Dickinson wrote in a poem dated to 1875, “Escape is such a thankful Word.” In fact, her references to “escape” occur primarily in reference to the soul. In her scheme of redemption, salvation depended upon freedom. The poem ends with praise for the “trusty word” of escape. Contrasting a vision of “the savior” with the condition of being “saved,” Dickinson says there is clearly one choice: “And that is why I lay my Head / Opon this trusty word -” She invites the reader to compare one incarnation with another. Upending the Christian language about the “word,” Dickinson substitutes her own agency for the incarnate savior. She will choose “escape.”143 The Soul has Bandaged moments When too appalled to stir She feels some ghastly Fright come up And stop to look at her Salute her, with long fingers Caress her freezing hair Sip, Goblin, from the very lips 142 143 Ibid. Ibid. A Synoptic Archeology of the Poetry-Poets 139 The Lover - hovered - o’er Unworthy, that a thought so mean Accost a Theme - so - fair The soul has moments of escape When bursting all the doors She dances like a Bomb, abroad, And swings opon the Hours, As do the Bee - delirious borne Long Dungeoned from his Rose Touch Liberty - then know no more But Noone, and Paradi s e The Soul’s retaken moments When, Felon led along, With (irons) - shackles on the plumed feet, And (rivets) - staples, in the song, The Horror welcomes her, again, These, are not brayed of Tongue In The Undiscovered Continent Dickinson saw the mind and spirit as tangible visitable places that for much of her life she lived within; her zero spaces. Often, this intensely private place is referred to as the “undiscovered continent” and the “landscape of the spirit” and embellished with nature imagery. At other times, the imagery is darker and forbidding—castles or prisons, complete with corridors and rooms—to create a dwelling place of “oneself ” where one resides with one’s other 140 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part II — The Arts selves. “Dickinson reaches the anguish of a sublime transport through pain...a master of every negative affect: fury, erotic destitution, a very private knowledge of God’s exile from himself. Dickinson is so original a genius that she alters one’s sense of what poetic genius can be.”144 An example of these notions: “Me from Myself – to banish –/ Had I Art –/ Impregnable my Fortress/ Unto All Heart –/ But since myself—assault Me –/ How have I peace/ Except by subjugating/ Consciousness./ And since We’re mutual Monarch/ How this be/ Except by Abdication –/ Me – of Me?” Her economy of words form a new style of writing altogether, never before executed with such sublime acuity. You can feel the sound of the words – the impact of the sounds and the blank spaces in-between seem more important than the meaning itself, leaving immense various possibilities to interpret between the blanks—projecting your self into them, and understanding how you personally see life in general in the in-between. Dickinson wrote short lyrics that were precise in diction, free in form, and vivid in imagery, remarkably like the new poetic form of imagism that would come a half a century later to dominate the early twentieth century when modernism was taking over as literary movement. In that sense, she was more a modern poet than Romantic or Victorian, although writing in isolation, she herself never suspected that her unconventional poems might foreshadow a new literary epoch. “She experimented with expression in order to free it from conventional restraints. To make the abstract tangible, to define meaning without confining it, to inhabit a house that never became a prison, Dickinson created in her writing a distinctively elliptical language for expressing what was 144 Bloom, Harold. “Din: Lustre 9.” Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds. New York: Warner, 2002. 345. Print. A Synoptic Archeology of the Poetry-Poets 141 possible but not yet realized. She saw poetry as a double-edged sword. While it liberated the individual, it as readily left him ungrounded.” 145 In addition to predating the modernist literary period in style and form, Emily Dickinson’s use of difference uncannily anticipates Jacques Derrida’s idea of différance and of negative deconstructive interpretation. Using Derrida’s language, one might say of Dickinson’s poems generally that they do not acknowledge a center of meaning. “We see—Comparatively,”146 Dickinson wrote, one hundred and one years before Derrida first uses the term différance in his 1963 paper “Cogito et histoire de la folie”, and her poems demonstrate that assertion. In the world of Dickinsonian poetry, definition proceeds via comparison. One cannot say directly what is; essence remains unnamed and unnameable: “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers,” “Renunciation—is a piercing Virtue,” “Remorse—is Memory— awake,” or “Eden is that old fashioned House.” “Dickinson’s metaphors observe no firm distinction between tenor and vehicle. Defining one concept in terms of another produces a new layer of meaning in which both terms are changed. Her vocabulary circles around transformation, often ending before change is completed. The final lines of her poems might well be defined by their inconclusiveness: the “I guess” of “You’re right - ’the way is narrow’“; a direct statement of slippage— ”and then - it doesn’t stay”—in “I prayed, at first, a little Girl.” Dickinson’s endings are frequently open. In this world of comparison, extremes are powerful. There are many negative definitions and sharp contrasts. While the emphasis on the “Emily Dickinson.” Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation, n.d. Web. 12 May 2014. 146 Dickinson, Emily, 1830-1886. Poems: Packet XVI, Fascicle 25 (part). Includes 14 poems, written in ink, dated ca. 1862. 145 142 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part II — The Arts outer limits of emotion may well be the most familiar form of the Dickinsonian extreme, it is not the only one. Dickinson’s use of synecdoche is yet another version. The part that is taken for the whole functions by way of contrast. The specific detail speaks for the thing itself, but in its speaking, it reminds the reader of the difference between the minute particular and what it represents. Opposition frames the system of meaning in Dickinson’s poetry: the reader knows what is, by what is not.”147 Otherwise stated, Derridian différance, a century before deconstruction or postmodernism. As living personification of her own descriptions, Dickinson refused to be restricted by the principles expected of her. In a “rebellion” letter to her friend Leonard Humphrey, she wrote, “How lonely this world is growing, something so desolate creeps over the spirit and we don’t know it’s name, and it won’t go away, either Heaven is seeming greater, or Earth a great deal more small, or God is more “Our Father,” and we feel our need increased. Christ is calling everyone here, all my companions have answered, even my darling Vinnie believes she loves, and trusts him, and I am standing alone in rebellion, and growing very careless. Abby, Mary, Jane, and farthest of all my Vinnie have been seeking, and they all believe they have found; I can’t tell you what they have found, but they think it is something precious. I wonder if it is? —Dickinson’s question frames the époque. Within her life she determined what was irrefutably precious: not religion, not fame, legacy, nor fortune or desire, but poetry. Or rather, submerged in poiesis from breath to breath, day to day, year to year she traversed three periods of literary output: romantic, modernist, and postmodernistb— projecting us further still into the dawning of this new era. “Emily Dickinson.” Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation, n.d. Web. 12 May 2014. 147 A Synoptic Archeology of the Poetry-Poets 143 And Emily said, Yes, William, we need to find sober presence within ourselves, before we can move forward: and I did that, and it was sublime, now what? And Samuel said, Well done, Emily, perhaps now we need to describe it for everyone in such a way that they too can experience it—otherwise, what’s the point? 5.5 On the “thing-in-itself” Samuel Beckett “Joyce, who was a kind of older brother to Beckett, and Proust, upon whom Beckett wrote a remarkable early monograph, between them would seem to have completed the development of the European novel as an art form. Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, and In Search of Lost Time had taken tradition to its breaking point.. Beckett’s trilogy—Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unamable—manages an authentic step beyond, and nothing so inaccurately termed Postmodernism has caught up with Beckett. The theatre of Ibsen, Pirandello, and Brecht also comes to its finality in Beckett’s three great plays: Waiting for Godot, Endgame, and Krapp’s Last Tape. Beyond Beckett, you curve back to the literary past, whatever your intentions. He represents a perfection of what perhaps had begun in Flaubert, and which had no future beyond How It Is and Krapp’s Last Tape.”148 If Dickinson managed to find sober presence within her isolated world — poetic wisdom via intense individual meditation and reflection, than Samuel Beckett demonstrated the process one must traverse in arriving there amidst destruction, suffering and pain throughout the internal, and external world. The two poets lived two very different lifestyles, Bloom, Harold. “Binah: Lustre 5.” Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds. New York: Warner, 2002. 345. Print. 148 144 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part II — The Arts one sheltered and safe, cast away from the world alone in her room in the woods of New England, the other up front and center in the stark reality of the human situation in Europe –in one of the most violent centuries the world has ever known. In his resilience, Samuel Beckett looked straight into the horror without yielding, and created in it. In Imagination dead imagine (1965) Beckett executes a style divulging a crossing into the imagination. Commanding the mood and providing precise indications, the narrator compels the visualization of an image and then dismembers it. By describing his fantastic image: a white vault within a white rotunda housing two white beings lying within a three-footdiameter circle – Beckett gives birth to a living zero space. The setting of Imagination dead imagine, a white enclosure, has surfaced in Beckett’s fiction from Murphy to Ping, but the style of this piece marks a new shift for Beckett, covering familiar ground in an unfamiliar way. He must develop a language that embodies a paradox—a picture of a void, a zero space. Here, once again we recall Nietzsche’s comment: ..nothing can be more obvious than that the poet is only a poet because of the fact that he sees himself surrounded by shapes which live and act in front of him and into whose innermost being he gazes. Through some peculiar weakness in our modern talent, we are inclined to imagine that primitive aesthetic phenomenon in too complicated and abstract a manner.149 Clearly, “that primitive aesthetic phenomenon” was not “too complicated a manner”, for Beckett. The bodies, in a yin yang, womb-setting: sleep-like state, experiencing 149 Ibid. A Synoptic Archeology of the Poetry-Poets 145 alternations of intense temperature shifts between hot and cold, light and darkness—a mimetic re-creation of an abstract space of creation. Similarly in Molloy, he ‘was virtually bereft of feeling, not to say of consciousness, and drowned in a deep and merciful torpor shot with brief abominable gleams . . .’ (Molloy, 1951). In his following work, Malone thinks he may be ‘in a kind of vault’ (Malone dies, 1951), and talks of coming ‘back to this foul little den all dirty white and vaulted’. As Beckett proceeds through time and experience, his work approaches—and then moves directly into a zero space. The vault in Imagination Dead Imagine, when rapped, gives ‘a ring as in the imagination the ring of bone.’ Similarly, Malone wonders if ‘these six planes that enclose me are of solid bone’ (Malone dies). [Bone, and humans are made up of 93% stardust150, a universal-tangible of which humankind is created.] Echoing this, and anticipating the still figures in Imagination, The Unnamable (1953) sees himself as ‘a head, but solid, solid bone, and you imbedded in it, like a fossil in the rock’. The narrator of How It Is (1961) suggests a comparison between a white enclosure and the inside of a head: the voice quaqua on all sides then within in the little vault empty closed eight planes bone-white if there were a light a tiny flame all would be white ten words fifteen words like a fume of sighs when the panting stops then the storm the breath token of life part three and last it must be nearly ended.151 150 “How Much of the Human Body Is Made up of Stardust?” Physics Central. American Physical Society, 2014. Web. 2 May 2014. 151 Beckett, Samuel. How It Is. New York: Grove, 1964. Print. 146 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part II — The Arts The concept of Murphy’s mind, the light and dark imagery of the plays, the skull-like set of Endgame, the womb and tomb imagery in the trilogy, the obsession with white in From an Abandoned Work, and the couple from Enough intensifies in focus as Beckett precises more expressions in pre-poetic zero space. The rotunda of Imagination Dead Imagine (1965) may be classified as one of the items conceivable in the third zone of Murphy’s mind, ‘a flux of forms’ where ‘there was nothing but commotion and the pure forms of commotion’ (Murphy, 1938 ). Murphy, a character in one of Beckett’s initial works, withdraws from the real world and tries to live in his mind, which for him is a place. It is towards this place, which Beckett, whether consciously or subconsciously, seems to be drawn in his journey through the process of his creations. In this mental area of commotion, ordinary space and time are destroyed so that the two endpoints of a lifespan become one, and time is stopped. In Imagination dead imagine life and death are similarly fused: the creatures of the rotunda may be either fetuses or dying bodies or both—the creative and destructive space of the imagination. Molloy seeks mental isolation comparable to Murphy’s and his image for it seems to foreshadow the setting of Imagination: ‘I listen and the voice is of a world collapsing endlessly, a frozen world . . . .’ The rotunda emerging from nothingness is white; the characters appear frozen; and their world collapses endlessly in cycles. The Viconian cycles discussed in Beckett’s essay on Finnegans Wake may provide the model for this vibration in a world of flux. Beckett, interpreting Joyce, shows how Giambattista Vico devised his cyclic theory of history from Giordano Bruno’s ideas on opposites: A Synoptic Archeology of the Poetry-Poets 147 The maxima and minima of particular contraries are one and indifferent. Minimal heat equals minimal cold. Consequently transmutations are circular. The principle (minimum) of one contrary takes its movement from the principle (maximum) of another. Therefore not only do the minima coincide with the minima, the maxima with the maxima, but the minima with the maxima in the succession of transmutations. Maximal speed is a state of rest.152 We are quickly reminded here of Blake’s similar comment that “without contraries is no progression.”—just as opposition frames the system of meaning in Dickinson’s poems which did not acknowledge a center of meaning, “We see— Comparatively,”153 she declared. Samuel Beckett was starkly aware of Giambattista Vico’s cyclic theory of history which claims that history begins in a barbarism of sense and ends in a barbarism of reflection. The barbarism of reflection is a returned barbarism in which the common sense established by religion through poetic wisdom (chapter 3.5) holding a society together has been broken down by individual interests. The interests are spurred because individuals each think according to their own conceptual scheme without concern for the society, which makes it barbaric. Perhaps it is fair to say, at this point in his locale on the map of the literary individualism prompted by Shakespeare some four hundred years earlier, Beckett recognized the intense depth of individualism the world had effectuated in its dualistic perspectives. We had, in fact, arrived in full force in Vico’s notion of the barbarism of reflection, if such a thing were to exist. Vico describes the returned barbarism in his New Science: “such peoples [in the barbarism], like so many beasts, have 152 Beckett, Samuel. Dante ... Bruno. Vico ... Joyce. (In Transition, No. 16-17, June 1929). Paris: n.p., 1929. Print. 153 Dickinson, Emily, 1830-1886. Poems: Packet XVI, Fascicle 25 (part). Includes 14 poems, written in ink, dated ca. 1862. 148 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part II — The Arts fallen into the custom of each man thinking only of his own private interests and have reached the extreme delicacy, or better of pride, in which like wild animals they bristle and lash out at the slightest displeasure.”154 These private interests lead into a civil war in which everyone betrays everyone else. This takes humanity back to where it started — individual beasts acting solely on their own individual passions. Not unlike much of the world as we find it today, and certainly in the time of Samuel Beckett — his life was almost concurrent with the darkest and most brutalized century in recorded history: two world wars, the horrors of Stalin, the Holocaust of Hitler, the disastrous Great Leap of Mao, brutal colonial wars in Africa and the protracted threat of atomic annihilation during the Cold War. Vico does not give a clear ethical position on what to do in the face of the barbarism of reflection. He wrote a section of the New Science called a Practic but decided not to include it. While he didn’t favor established religion, he did recognize the import of poetic wisdom holding a society together, in a rhetorical sense. Clearly, Vico wanted his readers to recognize this universal truth and appreciate a rhetorical rather than literal approach to philosophy. Rhetoric |ˈretərik| noun, 1): language designed to have a persuasive or impressive effect on its audience. As discussed in chapter 3.5, Vico expanded the Renaissance interpretation of poiēsis beyond the task of imitatio natura (imitation of nature, or mimesis) and proposed “we must participate in the process whereby individuals, peoples, and entire cultures and societies figured their futures through imaginative projections of their wills.”155 As well, 154 Vico, Giambattista. The New Science. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1975. Print. Price, David W. History Made, History Imagined: Contemporary Literature, Poiesis, and the past. Urbana: University of Illinois, 1999. Print. 155 A Synoptic Archeology of the Poetry-Poets 149 Vico insisted it is the poetic, primitive mind that gives shape to events; without such arranging, experience continues as incoherent. A dreamscape. Giambattista Vico was convinced that all of civilization becomes visible from this inceptive poetic act: transcribing, organizing, adapting the irrational dreamscape of past experiences into rational, coherent form. Could it be that Beckett, whether consciously or unconsciously, recognized that in order to re-render civilization visible anew, we needed to dismember it to its most microscopic universal zero space in order that we might then further display “the fictive as the third ground between truth and fable that we properly see as being opposed to one another.”156? Beckett may have realized the resounding path he was prodding. He stripped stages and created nameless narrators shorthand for everywhere and everyone – the aged, bewildered, agonized narrators of his novels, are regarded as the proper artistic expression of a world bereft of transcendent hope, without God, morality, value or even the solace of a stable selfhood. Before writing Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett writes in a letter to an old confidant, Thomas MacGreevy, in 1948, “I see a little clearly at last what my writing is about, and feel I have perhaps 10 years courage and energy to see the job done.”157 Waiting for Godot is full of suggestion, but can not be simplified to precise metaphorical correlation. Beckett details it as ‘striving all the time to avoid definition’, “The play will not be pinned down or located, a clear meaning will not arrive for us just as Godot does not arrive for the characters, Vladimir Ibid. Beckett, Samuel, Martha Fehsenfeld, Lois More. Overbeck, George Craig, and Daniel Gunn. The Letters of Samuel Beckett. 1941-1956. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2011. Print. 156 157 150 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part II — The Arts and Estragon. They can be confused and uncertain about where they are, where they were and where they will be, and the audience, by extension, can feel bewildered by the elusive themes of a play which, while orbiting around philosophical and religious issues, tends to keep them at a distance, to keep us in a state of interpretative suspension.”158 Beckett was blurring the binaries. To chain Waiting for Godot too carefully to the religious allegorical may repress its indicative power, though there are certainly philosophical, psychological and theological dimensions to Godot’s non-arrival: “He can be seen to stand in for all striving, all hope, the tendency for us to live our lives geared towards some prospective attainment. Most human beings live in a constant state of yearning (low- or high-level) and fix onto some hope or desire for the future: the holiday just round the corner, the right job, the well-earned retirement. Once that hope is achieved or desire fulfilled, it moves on to some other object. As Beckett puts it in Proust, ‘We are disappointed at the nullity of what we are pleased to call attainment. But what is attainment? The identification of the subject with the object of his desire? The subject has died – and perhaps many times – on the way.’ According to the philosophy advanced in Beckett’s early essay (heavily influenced, as it is, by the nineteenth-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer), the self is fragmented and distended through time and is better understood as a series of selves, comparable to Bergson’s theories of multiplicities159. [Also homologous to Dickinson, through her letters, reminding her correspondents that their broken worlds are not a mere chaos of fragments. 158 McDonald, Ronan. The Cambridge Introduction to Samuel Beckett. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2006. Print. 159 Deleuze, Gilles 1966. Bergsonism. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. NY: Zone, 1991 A Synoptic Archeology of the Poetry-Poets 151 Behind the seeming fragments of her short statements lies the invitation to remember the world in which each correspondent shares a certain and rich knowledge with the other.] Once one ambition or urge is fulfilled, desire shifts promiscuously on to another prospective attainment. Ultimately it cannot be fulfilled: ‘whatever the object, our thirst for posses-sion is, by definition, insatiable’. Life then becomes about a vain, futureorientated expectation of a Godot who does not arrive. We fill our days with routines and habits in expectation of this arrival, rarely stopping to confront the desperate situation in which we live — the scarcity and provisionality of fulfillment, the terrible destructiveness of time, the inevitability of death from the very moment of birth (‘the grave-digger puts on the forceps’).”160 Preceding his trilogy in 1955, Beckett went on a visit to his mother in Dublin where he had a ‘vision’ or a ‘revelation’ of literary purpose which marks the divide between his prose – third-person, erudite, controlled work — and the dwindled, bewildered, first-person story-telling of the trilogy and beyond: “Molloy and the others came to me the day I became aware of my own folly. Only then did I begin to write the things I feel.” 161 The key Beckettian principle, which will lead to the ever greater diminution and ‘purification’ of his work as he gets older, is that expressive language is not to be trusted, that shape and silence are where artistic impact lies. (Again, homologous to Dickinson’s stress on the impact of the sounds and the blank spaces in-between as seemingly more important than the meaning itself, leaving immense various possibilities to interpret between the blanks). As early as 1937, however, long before his post-war revelation, Beckett 160 Ibid. Beckett, Samuel, Martha Fehsenfeld, Lois More. Overbeck, George Craig, and Daniel Gunn. The Letters of Samuel Beckett. 1941-1956. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2011. Print. 161 152 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part II — The Arts evidenced his disaffection with language, his impulse to encounter revelation in the spaces in between words. In a letter to Axel Kaun, he speaks of his crusade to pierce holes in language: ‘more and more my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things (or the Nothingness) behind it’. “..the most expressive moments in his plays often occur in the pauses and silences, indicating, at turns, repression, fear, anticipation or horrified in articulacy. This pressing reality of the silence is, as Beckett put it,‘pouring into this play like water into a sinking ship’. Much of what Beckett has to say in his drama lies in what is omitted, when his characters cannot muster the words or the play-acting to forestall the encroaching silence, or the ‘dead voices’ that haunt (the characters) when they stop speaking.”162 In a frequently quoted interview with Israel Shenker, Beckett announced, “The difference is that Joyce was a superb manipulator of material — perhaps the greatest. […] the kind of work I do is one in which I’m not master of my material. The more Joyce knows, the more he could. He’s tending towards omniscience and omnipotence as an artist. I’m working with impotence, ignorance. I don’t think ignorance has been exploited in the past. There seems to be a kind of aesthetic axiom that expression is achievement - must be an achievement. My little exploration is that whole zone of being which has always been set aside by artists as something unusable (a zero space?) — as something by definition incompatible with art.”163 As he proceeds with the ‘intent of undoing’: theconnections to a recognizable, biographical world become 162 McDonald, Ronan. The Cambridge Introduction to Samuel Beckett. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2006. Print. 163 Shenker, Israel ‘Moody Man of Letters’ [interview], New York Times, 6 May 1956; rep. in Lawrence Graver & Raymond Federman, eds., Critical Heritage, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1979 A Synoptic Archeology of the Poetry-Poets 153 more attenuated as the drafts proceed and Beckett works his way slowly into creating a creation space, while at the same time, attempting to bring the spectators into it with him. As if to say, (whether knowing or not): repartir à zero, (press the reset button). Though at the same time, he humbly admitted fear in doing so: after all, if history is cyclical as Vico suggested, what would be the point? In his work, Endgame, (1957) the pastoral solace of Nature has gone, but the blind destruction of natural change and decay has not. Perhaps a preemptive vision of the ecological destruction man had begun. This is why the prospect of evolution starting all over again is so galling. First, a flea or a crab louse appears in Clov’s trousers. Hamm declares, ‘But humanity might start from there all over again! Catch him, for the love of God!’ He strives to kill it with insecticide, but realizes that it may simply be ‘laying doggo’ : to remain unrecognized (for a long time). Theodore W. Adorno, German philosopher and critic declared in his essay on Endgame that it was ‘drama in opposition to ontology’, for dramatizing an incoherent situation, untranslatable into the language of rationality and conceptuality: “Understanding Endgame can only be understanding why it cannot be understood, concretely reconstructing the coherent meaning of its incoher-ence.”164 Rather than simply asserting a lack of ‘meaning’, the play actually demonstrates it: the infinity, nothingness and potentialities existing in the writer’s zero space. This is why Adorno held that the play was so much more powerful than the existentialist philosophy with which Beckett was sometimes associated. In abstract philosophy, what we understand only occurs at the level of complexity and ideas. Endgame claws at deeper and darker levels of experience, Adorno, Theodor W. Trying to Understand Endgame. New German Critique, 1961. Print. 164 154 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part II — The Arts intuition, and essentially the artists space of creation. In this space the characters are approaching in the Endgame words become more and more meaningless. Social roles and political hierarchies loosen when they are shown to be a matter of ‘play’ or performance rather than a question of naturally ordained and inescapable identity. The loftiness to which Hamm aspires makes these roles and the whole literary tradition itself seem jaded and derivative in Clov’s agressive rebuke to Hamm, ‘I use the words you taught me. If they don’t mean anything any more, teach me others. Or let me be silent’. As Beckett moves within this space he initiates the use of multiple mediums into the literary-scape. Just after Endgame he introduces the use of a tape recorder in Krapp’s Last Tape using the radio to stretch and test the form, exploiting the absence of a visual dimension and deploying the ethereality of sound to create a tension between aural presence and physical absence.” The actual substance is entirely auditory, so there is a directly mediated link between the voice of the character and the ear of the listener. The listener’s attention is solely focused on the ‘soundscape’, through which the language of the characters is necessarily foregrounded and where an other-worldly quality pervades. The radio medium, therefore, blurs the distinction between internal and external, between monologue and soliloquy.”165 Sound blurs the distinction between binaries. Emphasizing here: if there is to be sound, there isn’t necessarily need for visuals simultaneously, nor for sound when visuals appear—the imagination conceives in the absence of the other, generating the revelation within the spectator without force, unspoiled—words as indications, or distractions. Perhaps though, there necessitates random oscillations and McDonald, Ronan. The Cambridge Introduction to Samuel Beckett. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2006. Print. 165 A Synoptic Archeology of the Poetry-Poets 155 layering between the senses to comprehend the scope of infinity and nothingness. Beckett’s passion for art and music is fundamental to his execution of form, shape and symmetry in both his literary and dramatic practice. He was an accomplished pianist and a lover of the music of Schubert, Beethoven, Chopin and Mozart. The intense visual features of his later drama, in many cases strike remarkably closer to painting or sculpture than to traditional theatre, and as such, successively inspired many modern painters and visual artists. In his will to create, Samuel Beckett recognized that without a melange of all the art forms awakening and encompassing the senses, it would be near to impossible to re-create spaces of conception, of birth and death—spaces of creation encompass everything and nothing: its all in what we choose to do with it, perhaps. 5.6 Into the Zone If the modernist era sought omniscience and omnipotence in crafting words as thought to find a solution in the chaos, the postmodern writers, perhaps misinterpreted the invocation of Beckett’s genius towards minimalism and blurring distinctions of binaries into the space of creation for a fresh start, and went the direction of embracing the chaos within that space— the writers and artists of the era went wild in spaces of the unknown, lost and drowning below the surface without air. David Foster Wallace, as prime example, took to maximalism in response: proliferation and saturation of language to display the madness within, as with his Infinite Jest –only to find himself lost in the chaos without escape—suicide as sole liberation. He went beyond the edge, but couldn’t keep 156 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part II — The Arts cohesion and went too far in-for good. The semantic confusion that Baudelaire once began eventually shattered dualisms, but blurred the in-between spaces as well. The Dickinsonian and Beckettian silences turned into white noise and virtual-mediafrantic-static. “And now, entering a new era of humanity where postmodernity is slipping into alter-modernity, we find that the binaries we rejected are not only blurring but finally collapsing. Unable to say with any certainty what is real or virtual, human or animal, organic or genetically modified, some wish to resuscitate again, but this time with nostalgia, the failed anti-modern project of shattering distinctions. While the chorus – composed now of cyberpunks and activists joined by capitalists and technocrats – rejoices in the indistinguishable difference between online and offline, organic and synthetic, man and machine, the most crucial distinction of all – that between resistance and complicity – is collapsing as well. Unless we can discover a way to critique the system without furthering the system, we shall be lost...It takes courage to insist that in the coming era differences do matter – like the difference between comrade and consumer, human and glutton or the good life and consumption – and that without a return to the genocidal modernist project, we can forge a new path that gathers its strength from the difference between spiritual wealth and material greed.”166 White, Micah M. “The Birth of Altermodern | Adbusters Culturejammer Headquarters.” The Birth of Altermodern. Adbusters, 19 Feb. 2010. Web. 28 May 2014. 166 A Synoptic Archeology of the Poetry-Poets 157 5.6.1 Alessandro De Francesco These minimal spaces where gesture causes collapse the daily emptiness, that for an instant after-coffee gives us a certainty we can return to the place where something is breathing, bleeding in the grass —De Francesco, Alessandro. “Poetry, Age and Politics.” Thus begins the distinction between negative and positive de-signification that the poet/musician/artist/theoretician Alessandro De Francesco articulates in his work, Pour une théorie non-dualiste de la poésie (For a non-dualist theory of Poetry). Alessandro argues that de-signification, or signifying something by exploding it, is negative due to the lack of sense caused by the Shoah, as crime and awareness that it is impossible to represent. Poetry is a matter of perceiving not representing, so that poetry has to find other expressive paradigms than traditional figures of speech. While at the same time it is, positive due to poetic destruction of the codes imposed by the deconstruction of collective imagination and broadcasting of a normalized structure, (doxa-as opinion). Eruption of the real real and real world history involve the observation of a reoccurring paradox in modern contemporary poetry—ordinary language massively enters, (not ontological but more elevated into another kind of expressive real than ordinary language, or it wouldn’t have same cognitive impact). That is, it couldn’t respond to aesthetic and epistemological language if it didn’t take ordinary language into account—it couldn’t criticize media. “In order to destroy a language you need to take it into account. You have to put the bombs in the 158 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part II — The Arts right places.” Ordinary language massively enters the field. Deconstructing rules of language and trying to find other paradigms sets De Francesco out on his path where his poetry carries out radical criticism of ordinary language. Sometimes with extreme devices, like concrete poetry or ascemic writing (creating text around the unknown or unsayable). Aporia between use and misuse of ordinary, he believes is the core of modern contemporary poetry, or the process of designification.167 In response to this cognizance in his theory, Alessandro De Francesco conceived the innovatory notion of “augmented writing” (www.augmentedwriting.com). This idea, spanning from poetry to sound and conceptual art, describes Alessandro De Francesco’s critical use of technology and digital media within his writing and performing practice. Pushing Beckett’s fusing of language, visual and sound one step further with a sort of iconoclast double of the “augmented” and “virtual” realities, the “augmented writing” consists of sonic and visual enhancements of the text through sound treatment and graphic design software. To talk is not to see. To talk frees thought from this optical need subjecting since millennia the traditional western approach to things and driving our thought to rely on light or to feel threatened by the absence of light. — Maurice Blanchot, L’entretien infini “Augmented Writing is a writing method, a concept and a language art project. Each Augmented Writing object contains multilingual digital text and hand-written material. The text comes De Francesco, Alessandro. “For a Theory of Non-Dualist Poetry.” European Graduate School Seminar. Switzerland, Saas-Fée. 12 Aug. 2013. Lecture. 167 A Synoptic Archeology of the Poetry-Poets 159 from web news, virtual reality environments, social networks, but also poems, transcriptions of speeches and dialogues with people, etc. Augmented Writing builds up emotionally dense, multilayered narratives through a verbal material that is processed under a radically iconoclastic political and cognitive perspective. The augmented writing is a sort of new literary genre, halfway between poetry, conceptual art and storytelling. Through its complex verbal structures, Augmented Writing changes the paradigm of narration and asks the readerobserver to develop specific reading techniques. Augmented Writing can be printed out in several formats: book, folder, box, PVC panels, silk-screen sheets, plexiglas panels, walls, ceilings and other surfaces. Augmented Writing can also be exhibited within the framework of reading environments, i.e. immersive spaces with multi-channel digital voice processing.”168 In his newfound literary genre Alessandro de Francesco succeeds in engineering his words around the white-blanksilence and in-between spaces which Dickinson acknowledged and Beckett sought: White for me is semantically dense, it is a part of the text, a sort of ‘noise’ on which the poem is said. The quantity of white, in my texts, determines the length of the rests between words. I try to pay a lot of attention to this aspect while I read. In my reading environments white is often represented De Francesco, Alessandro. “Augmented Writing.” Augmented Writing. www.augmentedwriting.com N.p., n.d. Web. 29 Apr. 2014. 168 160 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part II — The Arts by low-frequency sound pads coming from my spoken voice made incomprehensible.169 In other words, by lowering the frequency, we eliminate the frantic static and slow down the pace and rhythm so as to experience the poetic. That is to say, it is not so very different from physics conceptual Zero-point energy—also called quantum vacuum zeropoint energy, discussed in the earlier chapter on Zero, reminding us that the lowest possible energy that a quantum mechanical physical system may have; (humans included), is the energy of its ground state. To reiterate, all quantum mechanical systems undergo fluctuations even in their ground state and have an associated zeropoint energy, a consequence of their wave-like nature. The uncertainty principle requires every physical system to have a zero-point energy greater than the minimum of its classical potential well. This results in motion even at absolute zero. Perhaps by lowering the frequency of the sound and visuals within the white spaces and inbetween words, we can draw the spectator into their own zero spaces with the observed creation. Through the technique he calls rarefaction: by erasing prose and creating white in order to create an alternative narration, (enigma of the real) –by erasing words like man has been psychologically and physically erased by trauma and historical events, in a sort of destruction of the voluntary memory, he redefines the relationship between language and reality. What is engrossing is what exceeds the language—by pushing language toward the limits in order to make this De Francesco, Alessandro. “For a Theory of Non-Dualist Poetry.” European Graduate School Seminar. Switzerland, Saas-Fée. 12 Aug. 2013. Lecture. 169 A Synoptic Archeology of the Poetry-Poets 161 experience of the Real in a closer way. The two advents of space and time are together in his augmented texts, questioning intermittence—cutting a line or creating a white space creates a rhythm—a spatial and temporal dialectic with intermittence and continuity, impulse and pulsation—positioning language toward the world. De Francesco’s work approaches the erasure of subjectivity in the fourth person singular : singular/plural. This explosion of subjectivity effects the poetry by creating a field of tension towards a new state/knowledge of subjectivity, that is an expanding and vulnerable self-fragilized be(Ing)coming—in a multiple state of forming and reforming. In Alessandro de Francesco’s theory170, when poetry starts to be conscious of the multiplicity of the subject-there are three effects in the text as direct consequence: 1. 2. 3. Anti-psychologism: the psychic mental space is effected by the multiplication of the identitymetaphysical is reduced in the text, creating an Echo. Multiple identities of the subject that derive from this open of the subject-Editing: the montage of unique identity in propaganda and media. Editing of the Identity of the Subject (dating websites / FB) beyond the fictional identity. Closeness: subject / object / real —when subjectivity is multiplied in language and perception, the Real enters subjectivity more. Going beyond media, editing, (pulsation), is a subjectivity that is in the real. In all dirty, layered, complex sides. In his work De Francesco questions the legibility or illegibility of the text seeking to find new paradigms of 170 Alessandro De Francesco, Pour une théorie non-dualiste de la poésie (19601989), PhD dissertation, University of Paris-Sorbonne, PhD advisor: Georges Molinié, pp. 21-22 and 380-381. 162 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part II — The Arts legibility—to understand, as Phillipe Lacoue Labarthe says, poetry as experience—a traversing of a dangerous field, in which language no longer dominates anything, but rather commemorates the voiding of concepts and the collapse of the constitutive powers of the subject. He believes there are no ontologically illegible texts—only socially considered illegible, it is a Doxa, an opinion, an abstract decision of society transformed. We need to bring back poetic as experience/ awareness. I try to conceive my books not as collections of poems but as ‘units’ where a non-linear narrative takes place into poetry and into every poem, i.e. where several series of facts are superposed and described. The non-linear logic, timing and structure of a dream are a perfect example for such a practice. Like Ignacio Matte Blanco, I think of dream as a language with a precise logic. The logic of dreams helps me in expressing a narrative that has a lot to do with the world we live in, because it is as non-linear as human relationships, history, reality, information and media.171 Ignacio Matte Blanco was a Chilean psychiatrist and psychoanalyst born in the beginning of the 20th century, who developed a rule-based structure for the unconscious which allows us to make sense of the non-logical aspects of thought. Blanco, (ironically carrying the family name “white” in Spanish) shows us that (to the unconscious) “the part can represent the whole” and that “past, present, and future are all the same.” De Francesco proposes that through his concept called redefinition, poets can engage in a multidimensional storytelling.172 Whereas Giambattista Vico was convinced the poetic act 171 De Francesco, Alessandro. “Contemporary Poetry.” European Graduate School Seminar. Switzerland, Saas-Fée. 12 Aug. 2013. Lecture. 172 De Francesco, Alessandro. Redéfinition. Mix. 2010. French edition. A Synoptic Archeology of the Poetry-Poets 163 organized the irrational dreamscape into rational, coherent form through rhetorical devices to give shape to events that hold a society together, Alessandro De Francesco, believes it is precisely this non-linear, not-rational form of the dreamscape that is a logic and narrative all unto itself in its own form and needs to be depicted literally, not rhetorically. If we consider that Vico was born in the 17th century when media and technology had yet to deliver such infinite potentialities in creative space, and that it was only through the written word that the poetic act could be transmitted, essentially, we can begin to understand that both De Francesco and Vico are not as different in their theories as one might suspect at first glance. The two polar distinctions come full circle and meet in the same place. If one were to write the dreamscape, literally—it would not need definition, nor metaphor. As De Francesco points out, many modern poets are not satisfied with metaphor, “blue of the eyes” requires subjectivity, or doxa, (opinion) hence leading to new suspicions against metaphor. As all metaphors require rhetorical definition, and as we know, rhetoric is a persuasive device, persuasion requires an opinion, an appropriation of one side or another, dualism. De Francesco gives an example from the work of the French poet, Marcelum Pleynet of nonmetaphoric poesy: “the white wash wall is a bottom wall”, in this it is impossible to detect a metaphorical hint inside of it. Alessandro de Francesco proposes three obstacles in “dealing with what can’t be said/known through a conditional attitude: a poetic possibility about how it would be:” 1. 2. A cognitive obstacle: the conformation of our brain allows us to perceive and think only a part of what could be perceived and thought. A medio-political obstacle: there are things that we 164 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part II — The Arts 3. are not allowed to say, to know, to think, and we don’t even know it. An emotional obstacle: there are memories, experiences and feelings that lost their central-ness and became non-verbal parts of the self. Spaces and gaps inside my (De Francesco’s) poetry testify to these obstacles while trying to focus on them, in order to give alternative descriptions able to avoid them.173 in the early morning looking at the room surrounding the notebook he is astonished how far necks can rotate how eyes can move this since early childhood when some needs we could not express to cry was to examine the real head rolled back hands unable to grasp now that thought has no truth to question seen from darkness much of what he says actions we could perform are celluloid in an unlit projector certain situations have occurred somewhat unidentical to the first description provided there was a time we thought of ourselves at the centre —De Francesco, Alessandro. Redefinition (first text). Translated by the author and Noura Wedell. By demonstrating the literal through the use of words, visuals, sounds and performance in the non-linear, nonnarrative dreamscape, and in the in-between blank, white and silent spaces, we shift the paradigm realized by the conversion between the illegible and unsayable. This frightening space of the real is what makes us feel, allowing oneself to arrive at the opening of the possible. Thus the unsayable becomes 173 De Francesco, Alessandro. Redéfinition. Mix. 2010. French edition, back cover. A Synoptic Archeology of the Poetry-Poets 165 something that is finally said, at least partially, and said by the text thanks to the change of the poetic coordinates. In the literalness, poetry can say what it says in saying it. Just as Beckett advocated that his own work was undefinable, he was ‘striving all the time to avoid definition’, by saying the literal in the dreamscape we eliminate the aesthetic and the epistemological, arriving in a suspension of judgement where personal interests can no longer exist and thereby taking us out of the barbarism of reflection and leading us back into the barbarism of sense that Giambattista sought. Back into the poetic, in fact, whereby society can become united through the poiesis of the literal in a zero space. It is in this space where we might arrive to create “the fictive as the third ground between truth and fable that we properly see as being opposed to one another.”174 Price, David W. History Made, History Imagined: Contemporary Literature, Poiesis, and the past. Urbana: University of Illinois, 1999. Print. 174 6. A Synoptic Archeology of Visual Poets When the soul wants to experience something she throws out an image in front of her and then steps into it. — Meister Eckhart 6.1 The Early Period Humanity discovers traces of its earliest known artistic expression in the wall paintings made in the Chauvet-Pontd’Arc Cave in the Ardèche department of southern France which date back to circa 32,000 years. One of the most curious conundrums of archaeological discoveries in this and other caves such as Lascaux, Niaux, Altamira, Font de Gaume, Les Comba relles and the Volp caves, (Trois Frères, Tuc d’Audoubert and Enlène) was the presence of art in the deepest recesses of the caves—the dark zones that lie in perpetual blackness. If followed from here that potential altered states of consciousness in such sensory deprived locales may have provoked creativity. A literal mental exploration in an abyss. David Lewis-Williams, a South African archaeologist presented an academic work in 1988 which investigated the rock paintings of the San (or Bushmen) of southern 167 168 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part II — The Arts Africa.175 In his research, Lewis-Williams examined written documentation collected by philologists from the late nineteenth century on the general religion and mythology transcribed from San rock artists who had been incarcerated in Breakwater Prison, Cape Town, South Africa.176 Meticulously assembling sources, Lewis-Williams corroborates that San rock paintings were created by shamans to portray the supernatural realm entered by medicine men or women (shamans) while under a trance. While worldwide shamanistic trances can be induced by varying methods (meditation, hallucinogenic drugs, sensory deprivation, etc.) the San painters apparently achieved their ritual altered state of consciousness by repetitive dancing, singing and clapping—(a trance dance). While these visionary images illustrate the spirits and events seen in the ‘supernatural world’, in most all cases, the archaeologists determined, the art was painted after the artist’s trance experience. In comparison to this study, in other words, the artists painted after they went into a so-called induced zero space. Pre-poiesis, followed by poiesis. Furthering their research, Lewis-Williams and Dowson went on to investigate clinical studies of the neuropathological effects of trance. As the nervous systems in humans are all hardwired alike, it followed that the altered states of consciousness that result in trance, regardless of how they are induced, are predominantly similar. A compilation of reactions specifically involving the mental images, (or visual hallucinations) of trance led to the creation 175 Lewis-Williams, J. David., and Thomas A. Dowson. Images of Power: Understanding Bushman Rock Art. Johannesburg: Southern Book, 1988. Print. 176 Bleek, D. F. “Beliefs And Customs Of The |Xam Bushmen.” Bantu Studies 9.1 (1935): 1-47. Web. A Synoptic Archeology of Visual Poets 169 of a neuropsychological model of these visual patterns appropriately labeled “entoptic (‘within the eye’) patterns”.177 In this model the archaeologists discovered three components within the neuropsychological evidence. The first component is that the mental imagery during a trance repeatedly progresses through three stages. The first stage is governed by geometrical light patterns that are generated within our optical and neural systems. The second stage of the trance leads to a group of visual patterns recognizable through normal mental processes (heavily influenced by personal and cultural expectations) where the entoptic patterns are then interpreted as meaningful iconic or figurative images. The last stage occurs with a full blown iconic hallucination in which a sense of individual participation develops within the image and the artist may imagine becoming the thing that he or she hallucinates, (i.e. the innumerable images found within all the cave paintings of human-animal conflations). The second component of the model concerns the entoptic light patterns themselves which consist of seven common patterns ranging from circles, parallel lines, square cross-line patterns, zigzags, curves, spirals and tree branch like squiggles. The third component consists of seven principles of perception, reflecting the fact that trance imagery involves more than ‘normal’ visual sight. These perception principles operate at each of the three stages and include (1) replication (2) integration (3) super-positioning (4) juxtaposition-ing (5) reduplication (6) rotation and (7) fragmentation. Next, the same archaeologists, Lewis-Williams and Dawson, established that all of the components of their model 177 Lewis-Williams, J. D., and T. A. Dowson. “The Signs of All Times: Entoptic Phenomena in Upper Palaeolithic Art.” Current Anthropology 29.2 (1988): 201. Web. 170 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part II — The Arts were illustrated in the paintings, artifacts and engravings found in Paleolithic caves. Thus, leading to the conclusion that at least some of humanity’s original visual art, like the San bushmen, proceeded from shamanistic practices. One archaeologist, David S. Whitley, describes his experience in the Lascaux caves, Standing in the middle of the Salon of the Bulls and looking down-chamber, it was impossible not to feel that I was in the midst of a large but strangely silent herd of prehistoric animals that rushed headlong deeper into the cave, carrying me with them into its recesses. And there in the Axial gallery where the cave narrows to a shoulder’s width and begins to plunge downward, David (LewisWilliams) pointed to the paintings of animals that literally swirl up and across the cave roof in a constricting spiral, as if they are spinning into a maelstrom. This, he suggested, was a massive painting of the vortex of the shaman’s trance, preserved graphically some eighteen thousand years ago, symbolizing that passage into the cave was itself a movement into the ‘supernatural’ (trance state). Perhaps this was intended to help ritual initiates understand what they would experience when they finally parted the veil between the natural and supernatural worlds.178 We may consider the implications here for the visual renderings of one of the oldest art forms in existence, as bringing the viewer into a conceptual zero space of creation. Further on in his work, Whitley goes on to describe his experience in the Chauvet Cave: My days in the Chauvet Cave were no different in this regard, as I constantly felt unbalanced by the geological versus the artistic beauties that surrounded me... A black 178 Whitley, David S. Cave Paintings and the Human Spirit: The Origin of Creativity and Belief. Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2009. p. 49-50 Print. A Synoptic Archeology of Visual Poets 171 rhinoceros was carefully drawn in anatomically correct profile, but its head wassuperimposed against a replicated series of larger and smaller heads and horns—the kind of fragmentation and duplication of mental imagery that occurs during trance. A bison was painted with eight legs, perhaps reflecting the sensation of extra appendages that occur as a bodily hallucination. The curve of the cave wall was used as the black line for an ibex and, in another spot, a horse, as if the animals were really part of the rock surfaceand the shaman had, as Jean (Clottes) and David (Lewis-William) argued, “transformed the given into the created.” Seemingly random painted geometric designs— the entoptic light patterns experienced at the beginning of trance—were scattered in and among the recognizable animal images. And while alternative explanations could be proposed for each of these paintings and features, no interpretation but shamanism can account for all of them and other features like them found at the site.179 Perhaps it is important to note in this meditation on prehistoric art, the non-significance which the artists themselves, (shamans), seemed to place on their visual artwork, as understood through more current and accessible Native American shamanistic practice. In many Native American cultures the human artistic creations are consistently dismissed because the paintings and engravings are simply considered spiritual objects. By definition, they are believed to have an origin in a ‘spiritual realm’ rather than the natural world. While humans play a role in the creations, it is a minor one compared to the forces generating the work. It is the transformation of the artist in the process or the act of creating that enfolds the most significance, or in other words, poetry as experience180. 179 Whitley, David S. Cave Paintings and the Human Spirit: The Origin of Creativity and Belief. Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2009. p. 69-71 Print. 180 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe. Poetry as Experience. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 172 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part II — The Arts Moreover, shamanistic cultures conceptualized existence as a struggle between good and evil. Existence, and specifically the shaman’s (artist’s) role within it, was to effectuate a balance between dark and light, hope and despair, success and ruin— unlike the most recent few thousand years where the objectives were predominantly for good to overcome evil. The most significant accomplishment one could hope for in shamanistic practice, was to arrive at a balance and maintain equilibrium within the chaos and destabilizing opposing forces. The only method of doing this was for the artist to enter a trance state and create the internal experience through internally perceived visuals in the dark recesses of the caves. “To the degree that Paleolithic artists sought to touch the faces of the gods, they apparently looked into themselves to find their deities, not to the world around them.”181 Though as well in shamanistic practice, it was established that the shaman him/herself could choose to harness and manifest the dominant forces of one or the other, (evil or good), rather than attain balance, and were equally responsible for both curing and creating illness, (white versus black shamans). Thus, the recurring thematic since the beginning of creative time: the poet/artist withheld the power to create or destroy. As well, one can easily liken the divine madness and demonic frenzy of the poetic trend of our western literary history to the trance state our prehistoric ancestors entered before creating their masterpiece cave paintings on cave rock walls. As noted earlier, visual art was not the only accessible expression, [the San (bushmen) painters achieved their ritual 1999. Print. 181 Whitley, David S. Cave Paintings and the Human Spirit: The Origin of Creativity and Belief. Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2009. p. 77. Print. A Synoptic Archeology of Visual Poets 173 altered state of consciousness by repetitive dancing, singing and clapping , as well, musical instruments such as the bone flute have recently been dated back 40,000 years], but more crucially, one which essentially left a trace. And while it has been determined that Native American shamanistic practice dismisses the actualization’s or artworks formed in the creative process, what is important in the broader scope is the literal reminder leftover 32,000 years later of the experience and importance our ancestors placed on finding balance within the chaos of the human internal struggle. Again, that is not to say that music, singing (words-sounds) and performance were not included in the ceremonial process of the creations, in fact, they as well apparently played an important part in the collaborative effort—but simply that within the process of creation, the visual effects were the only literal trace that was left behind for future generations to try to understand their origins. As far as we comprehend to date through archeological remnants of our prehistoric ancestors, there was no codified written language 32,000 years ago, at least not any that has been unearthed currently—as such, the literal in the dreamscape was creation. There was no symbolic. There was also, seemingly no written words. The very first artistic creation known to man demonstrated the literal through the use of visuals, and for all we are able to speculate, sounds and performance as well, in the non-linear, non-narrative, and in the in-between blank, black and silent spaces, almost uncannily similar to the proposed paradigmatic shift at the end of the last chapter on the poetry-poets, minus the (non)color shift from black to white, in De Francesco’s theory. The frightening space of the real is what makes us feel, allowing oneself to arrive at 174 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part II — The Arts the opening of the possible, according to Alessandro de Francesco’s theory on contemporary poetics. Could it be that this very notion of poiesis not only existed 32,000 years ago, but is the origin of artistic creativity? The unsayable, then, became something that was finally demonstrated. In the literalness, the visual poetry said what it said in visualizing it. Just as Beckett advocated that his own work was undefinable, he was ‘striving all the time to avoid definition’, attempting to add sound and visuals in his own work. By demonstrating the literal in the dreamscape, our prehistoric cavemen eliminated our rational notions of aesthetic and epistemological, to arrive in a suspension of judgement where personal interest no longer existed in order that they might blur the dualism between evil and good forces to arrive at a balance in the barbarism of sense that Giambattista sought. Back into the poetic, in fact, whereby their society could become united through the poiesis of the literal in a zero space, (shamans, in most all shamanistic traditions, were also the leaders of the clan). It is in that space they poetically created “the fictive as the third ground”, not, per se, between truth and fable, as Giambattista noted, but in blurring the dual forces, or dualisms that we properly see as being opposed to one another, to arrive at some third state. As discussed earlier in the literature section, man’s earliest creation of words, cuneiform, dates back some 19,000 years after the visual traces. With the invent of the written language, so it seems, simultaneously arrived the invent of the symbolic or metaphorical as represented in our two first stories, The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor and Gilgamesh, wherein we discover our first two renditions of narratives, both, uncannily metaphorical depictions of characters on a spiritual quest A Synoptic Archeology of Visual Poets 175 journeying through the cosmos, meeting primordial gods, and returning with a vision to find peace, or balance. To continue on a synoptic visual path to present day, we will now focus primarily on the shifts in visual art through the lens of the neuropsychological model of enoptic visual patterns in the seven principles of perception which reflect trance imagery or what we venture to newly nominate here ‘zero space imagery’. To recall, these perception principles operate at each of the three stages of trance and include (1) replication (2) integration (3) super-positioning (4) juxtaposition-ing (5) reduplication (6) rotation and (7) fragmentation. Note to Reader: For the remaining few chapters/ subchapters in these next sections of the visual poets, and musical poets, due to time constraints and limited word count in the project, what will proceed is a very brief overview that merely scratches the surface of depth that it could for now, but one which I would very much like to return to for further research in the future. For the visual section, the strategy was to basically to pour the history of art through the sieve of the neuropsychological model of the seven principles of perception in trance state, or in what might be a zero space, as this research nominates it. Again, it is an extremely quick examination of the passage of time through visual creations and could easily be expanded into an entire research in and of itself. 176 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part II — The Arts 6.2 Diegetic and Mimetic Forms Diegesis (Greek διήγησις “narration”) predominantly utilizes the three principles of perception: integration , superpositioning, juxtapositioning, while Mimesis (Ancient Greek μίμησις “imitation”) primarily uses the principles of replication, reduplication and rotation. These two principle concepts within art have been contrasted since Plato’s and Aristotle’s times. Mimesis (mīmēsis), from μιμεῖσθαι (mīmeisthai), “to imitate,” from μΐμοϛ (mimos), “imitator, actor”) is a critical and philosophical term that carries a wide range of meanings, which include imitation, representation, mimicry, imitatio, receptivity, non-sensuous similarity, the act of resembling, the act of expression, and the presentation of the self. 182 Self-presentation is expressive and subjective, naturally. We construct an image of ourselves to claim personal identity, and present ourselves in a manner that is consistent with that image. Diegesis is the telling of the story by a narrator. The narrator may speak as a particular character or may be the invisible narrator or even the all-knowing narrator who speaks from “outside” in the form of commenting on the action or the characters. 183 Diegesis, as well as Mimesis can be operated in the presentation of self or selves in visual form. From the Greeks onward for the next few millennia, visual art would be worked and reworked through its interaction with that of the external world, only eventually returning back to an internal exploration as our prehistoric ancestors had done. In ancient Greece Mimesis was an idea that governed the creation of works of art, in particular, with correspondence to 182 183 “Mimesis.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 06 Aug. 2013. Web. “Diegesis.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 06 July 2013. Web. A Synoptic Archeology of Visual Poets 177 the physical world understood as a model for beauty, truth, and the good. Plato, obsessed with finding the greatest good and eliminating the evil, or demonic, and therefore the instruments of poiesis that harbored such forces: the poets/artists themselves, (rather than recognizing their intuitive capacity as receptacles of worldly forces and as such potential instruments in finding the balance between these forces as his prehistoric poetic ancestors had), categorized all art in contrasted forms of Mimesis and Diegesis and set the world spinning in another direction. Moving away from the instinctive, intuitive nature of art as a healing practice, visual art takes a turn in an entirely new direction after Plato’s defined categorical distinctions. Economics, religion, political propoganda and aesthetic pomp and display would become the new driving force behind visual artistic creations. Both mimesis and diegesis in art are subjective, representative forms of the external, physical world including both aesthetic and epistemological implications in rational processing of creativity. As well, both are imposed to try and influence or persuade the viewer, reader, listener or spectator, (normally during this period), through the views of the patron of the artist. There can be no suspension of judgement in either of these forms. Neither forms are literal, and both evoke ambiguous interpretations leading to aesthetic and hermeneutic debates. Visual art, from the ancient Greeks to the late 20th century, seems to find itself in a cross-fire dialect between mimesis and diegesis and aesthetic and epistemological discourse. The only one of the seven principles of perception, perhaps, that can potentially be objective, is fragmentation, and it wont rear its visual sensibility until Cubism, almost 3000 years later. 178 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part II — The Arts Greece Ancient Greek (c. 850 BC – 323 BC) and Hellenistic art (323 BC – 30 BC) however, produced what many historians consider the finest art of the ancient world. The two predominant forms of visual renderings emerging from these two periods were sculpture and vase paintings. Greek sculpture was created in attempt to render the world in realistic or rather, idealistic beauty—and is presented in the forms of idealized versions of humans which were erected not merely as replications (mimetic) but as supreme, flawless beings in a becoming towards the primordial gods of their own mythologies. Perfection of form in three dimensional space (rotation) was depicted in their sculptures. During the Hellenistic period while the statues are still physically perfect, dramatic emotions are integrated (diegesis : integration) into the expression of the eyes and face—being imperturbably serene, angry, bitter, sorrowful or intensely afraid. Not surprisingly, these emotive and dramatic additions to the sculpture came after the invent of the drama, one art informing the other. Greek vase painting progressed from a geometric style from 10th through 8th centuries BC, (in which people and animals look like stick figures and a network of geometric patterns: chains, squares, dots, squiggly lines, similar to primitive art in the first stage of trance state), to highly realistic Early Classical style in the early 5th century B.C. As the drawings progress through the centuries clear narratives (diegesis) depicting scenes from the Greek mythologies are demonstrated. Hence, the artwork on the vases seems to move from a natural intuitive expression to a more stylized, rationally provoked aesthetic art form as time moves further A Synoptic Archeology of Visual Poets 179 away from its primitive ancestors and into the world of words, both literary and philosophical. Rome While the statue Augustus of Primaporta, modeled after Rome’s first emperor Augustus Cesear, demonstrates a similar idealism found in Greek sculptures and marks the beginning of the use of visuals for political propaganda, the majority of Roman art (300 BC – 476 AD), and in particular sculpture, unlike its idealistic Greek predecessors, demonstrates a pragmatism and unflinching realism in their mimetic form, not previously seen in sculpture. The Roman artists revealed the wrinkles, receding hairlines, sagging jowls, and paunches, realistically capturing the disposition of their models. Hence, elaborating more precisely on the integration of characterization and diegesis within the mimetic practice. As well, the Romans created temporality in visual movement in what was perhaps the longest visual story ever before told in the creativity of man: the Trajan Column (2nd century AD), a 98-foot-high commemoration of the Emperor Trajan’s conquest of Dacia, (modern Romania). The sculptor recounts the marches and battles on a scroll that winds around the column in humanity’s first film-strip-like visual narrative (diegesis). While Romans are also noted for creations of mosaics and wall paintings of portraits and characters (mimetic), this form of art, in the end, was considered more decorative and indicative of status and wealth and the control that motivated its form. 180 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part II — The Arts 6.3 Art as Symbolic Representation symbol c.1434, “creed, summary, religious belief,” from L.L. symbolum “creed, token, mark,” from Gk. symbolon “token, watchword” (applied c.250 by Cyprian of Carthage to the Apostles’ Creed, on the notion of the “mark” that distinguishes Christians from pagans), lit. “that which is thrown or cast together,” 184 A symbol, by definition, is an object that represents, stands for, or suggests an idea, visual image, belief, action, or material entity. Symbols take the form of words, sounds, gestures, or visual images and are used to convey ideas and beliefs. The Christian churches and Islamic regimes in power from the Byzatine, Islamic and Medieval periods infused their belief, action, and materialized entity, monopolizing the transmission of their ideas through the use of the written word and visual imagery to impose their power by utilizing the Romans induced conception of visuals for propaganda, from the 5th to 15th century AD, or what is otherwise known as, the dark ages. The majority of art produced during the next one thousand years (Medieval period) again used six of the seven principles of perceptions, depicted symbolically through replications, juxtapositions, integrations, super-positioning, rotation and reduplication, though utilizing them to emphasize belief systems set in place by the governing bodies throughout the Western and Middle Eastern world. The visual-poets, or artists, in other words, were used simply as tools for a means to an end in conveying a message and persuading the masses to comply through massive visual imposing exposure in stained 184 “Symbol.” Dictionary.com. Web. A Synoptic Archeology of Visual Poets 181 glassed windows, illuminated manuscripts, armors, carpets, ceramics, icon paintings, mosaics, silver and golden reliquaries, architectural reliefs, Islamic architecture and Romanesque and towering Gothic cathedrals. The majority of the art during this period is steeped in mysticism and symbolism focused on the afterlife—and moreover, the surest way of obtaining entrance to the good, rather than the evil, in that afterlife. The term “symbolism” is derived from the word “symbol” which derives from the Latin symbolum, a symbol of faith, and symbolus, a sign of recognition, in turn from classical Greek συμβόλον symbolon, an object cut in half constituting a sign of recognition when the carriers were able to reassemble the two halves. In ancient Greece, the symbolon, was a shard of pottery which was inscribed and then broken into two pieces which were given to the ambassadors from two allied city states as a record of the alliance, such as we continue this use today between married couples exchanging wedding bands. Symbol(ism), as an influence on visual artists, continued long beyond the forced religious propaganda after the Medieval period through the Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, Neoclassicist, Romantic, Impressionist, and PostImpressionists period, though in specifically different portrayals and usages in each period, and finally diverging and morphing into a slow fading usage during the Expressionist period, (significantly influenced by the Post-Impressionist painter, Paul Gauguin). Renaissance Period During the Early Renaissance 15th century patronage shifted from the church to the merchant class and wealthy patrons of the patrician class, such as the Medici family, who began 182 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part II — The Arts collecting and commissioning works of art. Humanism was emerging, and religious devotion, though still an important part of people’s lives, was being restructured to accommodate the belief that man can be master of his own fate. Yet even still, in a culture of limited literacy, symbolic imagery was integral in informing the masses and still deeply engrained in the artists work: fruit, animals and color represented the most significant symbolism used during this period, each withholding very specific meanings understood by the general public, as had been engrained in the collective consciousness for generations. For example, white was a sign of innocence: birth, youth, betrothal and marriage; the virgin Mary; virgin and child, immaculate conception, etc. While black, dark brown or grey, on the other hand was symbolic of the entombment, crosses and crucifixes. As well, the leering monkey, playful finch, scheming snake, clever crow, lustful grapes, faithful pears, harmonious strawberries and virtuous peaches were created to convey symbolically what are still to some degree today, conscious associations in the minds of some. Simultaneous to the Shakespearean effect on the Renaissance literary period, the shift in focus to the individual as observed Other, became the new standard of aesthetic beauty, which was measured by rudimentary and uncompromising representation of the individual qualities depicted in the characters within the art. This may best explain all the strange physiognomies which suddenly made their appearance in Renaissance art, “..corse men of the people with uncouth, overworked figures, peasants with bones of bronze and pointed weather beaten features, half starved old beggars with sagging flesh and tottering bodies, neglected fellows with bald heads, A Synoptic Archeology of Visual Poets 183 stubbly beards, and long muscular arms. In place of the former dainty pose, every line is now sinew. Their firm, energetic attitude reflects the entire sprit of the rugged age.”185 During the High Renaissance, artists were elevated in social standing and their art was regarded as divinely inspired creations. The highly valued synthesis of science, art, geometry and the natural world was infused into visual art as multidisciplinary exploration began to take shape and the artists began to explore their internal worlds. Still, the use of color as symbolism was prevalent in the images created, but the use of incandescent colors created with newly developed oil mediums gave a unique vividness to their paintings as not previously articulated with color. As well as symbolism, realism was prominent in the period. Both Michelangelo and Leonardo Da Vinci studied corpses of bodies to directly learn to sketch the figure of the human image in their paintings, returning back to the realism of their predecessors, the Romans and Greeks, the artists sought to perfect the first principle of visual perception in the neuropsychological model, replication. Though this time rather than the three dimensional sculpture their predecessors had all but perfected, they chose a one dimensional wall surface, as their prehistoric ancestors had done, henceforth shifting the foremost focus of art to painting and perfecting the perception of rotation to an intricate study of perspective on a one dimensional surface. It is interesting to note that Michealangelo had a very low opinion of art created in the medium of painting, (perhaps viewing it as a primitive art), though he would still be commissioned to create two of the most influential works in fresco (with the setting of the plaster, the painting becomes an 185 Richard Muther, The History of Painting, Henry and Co., London, 1896 184 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part II — The Arts integral part of the wall as had the paintings of the cavemen— using the visual perception of integration), in the history of Western art: the scenes from Genesis on the ceiling and The Last Judgement on the alter wall of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. Perhaps it is in Michaelangelo’s statues, however, where the force of the artist’s intense internal struggles are captured and liberated. In the schisms of conflict rendered within these human statues, the gaze in the eyes seems to portray a mind pulling in one direction, while the bodies tug in another. In fact, just as in the prehistoric cave paintings, opposite forces are a recurring thematic in his art: spirit and flesh, night and day, freedom and slavery, peace and violence. The energy and tension within these opposite charges is conceivably where one discovers the artist’s greatest spiritual force. After the innovative use of the human form in figurative composition had reached near perfection in the High Renaissance, a new movement influenced by Michelangelo began to emerge, called Mannerism, (1530 – 1580)—perhaps a very early precursor to experimentation in the visual perception of fragmentation. Mannerist artists elongated human figures, created contorted postures, and distorted landscapes which were often laden with symbolism and erotic or spiritual energy. Rather than an idealized version of the real world, art during this movement became an initial approach towards visuals of a conscious window into the internal imagination of artists. Working in the sixth principle of perception, reduplication, however, theirs was more of an art imitating other art, rather than an art imitating nature or an internal dreamscape which wouldn’t arrive until more than two centuries into the future. What is perhaps most interesting in Mannerism as the “last movement in the prolific Renaissance period” is the remarkable similarity between A Synoptic Archeology of Visual Poets 185 the last stage of the shamanistic trance state where full blown iconic hallucination, in which a sense of individual participation develops within the image and the artist may imagine becoming the thing that he or she hallucinates: the cave paintings of human-animal conflations, and here, a sort of morphing and metamorphosis of the art itself as visual attempts to push itself beyond its own boundaries, perhaps as well, striving to find a balance in the tensions between the dualist internal struggles previously displayed in Michaelangelo’s statues. It was as if the artist was trying to push out through the elongations, but never quite made it to the third stage of metamorphosis. Baroque and Rococo In the 100 years following the Renaissance period, Baroque, and later Rococo, (or ornamental, overindulgent Baroque), developed during the Counter Reformation, (16th century Catholic reform effort by the Church) and became a propaganda weapon in the religious wars between Catholicism and Protestantism in the 17th and 18th century. Art, and the artists, fell on their knees once again, forced to pause in the progression that the Renaissance period had awakened. The Baroque artistic style was steeped in the third principle of perception, integration, using exaggerated motion and clear, easily interpreted detail to produce drama, tension, exuberance, and grandeur in sculpture, painting, and architecture in the visual arts, (saints in ecstasy or pain, charging horses, turbulent skies) striking contrasts of light and dark, vivid colors, earthly realism. Baroque artists depicted the heroic acts of martyrs and saints to inspire the lower classes to accept their own suffering and not lose faith. The popularity and success of the Baroque style was encouraged by the Catholic Church in response to the 186 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part II — The Arts Protestant Reformation. The Church thereby decided that the arts should communicate religious themes in direct and emotional involvement. The aristocracy as well regarded the dramatic style of Baroque architecture and art as a means of dazzling visitors and demonstrating triumph, power and control. Baroque palaces are built around an entrance of courts, grand staircases and reception rooms of sequentially increasing opulence. Symbolic Shades of Light Unlike Renaissance art which inspired spirited contemplation, Baroque art reached out to the society to provoke action in the name of religious faith. There were, however, a few exceptions to the rule, and three particular artists who forged ahead nonetheless, notably: the fugitive artist Michaelangelo Merisis da Carvaggio, Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, and Johannes Vermeer. Carvaggio, who like his predecessor Michaelangelo, portrayed the intense tension within the passion of the artist, but rather than in statues, it was through his paintings which he created gritty naturalism in his gloomy and murky lighting technique called tenebrism. His paintings recount climactic events while compellingly implying the circumstances that precede and follow them. If we liken his work to the concept of “the event” in Alain Badiou’s work186, where the place of the event is seen as a rupture in Being through which the subject finds realization and reconciliation with truth, or in visual shamanistic terms, a balance between the evil and good forces, we may once again witness a visual poet subconsciously attempting the same, through the principle of perception: 186 Badiou, Alain, and Oliver Feltham. Being and Event. London: Continuum, 2006. Print A Synoptic Archeology of Visual Poets 187 juxtaposition-ing –in this case, through his portrayal of shades of light. Here the artist seems to be edging slowly away from realistic replication, penetrating a more intensified awareness of visual perception and capturing atmosphere in intensity of shades. Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, or simply Rembrandt as he is known, was also in many ways antithetical to the Baroque style. He was extremely prolific and innovative, and through him emerged an important new genre in painting, self portraiture. Rembrandt went beyond his predecessors in visually interpreting human nature, humbly using his own individual metamorphosis as his guide, he became a sort of visual psychologist. Just as Shakespeare’s demonstrated the greatest capacity to display the ever changing desires of man, Rembrandt, born ten years before the Bard’s death, visually embodied in his lifetime the line from Hamlet when he tells Gertrude he will “set you up a glass / Where you may see the inmost part of you.” His self-portraits form a unique and intimate autobiography, in which the artist surveyed himself without vanity and with the utmost sincerity tracing the progress from an uncertain young man, to a successful portrait painter, to an intensely troubled and suffering old man, plummeting the depths of his character in a life long introspective of approximately 60 self-portraits.187 The gaze of the visual artist turns inwards over one hundred years before the Romantic painters and nearly one hundred years before Goethe will do the same in his influential shift of the literary perspective. Like Carvaggio, Rembrandt uses light and shadow to symbolically suggest meaning through contrast, or juxtaposition-ing. But 187 Gombrich, E. H. The Story of Art. London: Phaidon, 1995. Print. 188 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part II — The Arts whereas Carvaggio spotlighted dramatic ‘events’ using light symbolically to intensify the moment, Rembrandt employed a softer, warmer radiance to probe his own character. In his self-portraits, he angles his face in such a way that the ridge of his nose nearly always forms the line of demarcation between brightly illuminated and shadowy areas. The partially eclipsed faces focus the viewer’s attention upon the division between a flood of light—an overwhelming clarity—and a brooding duskiness. Once again, the opposing forces within the artist. Johannes Vermeer captures moments as did Carvaggio, but in the complete opposite context of a Carvaggian expressed ‘event’ reaming with intense tension. He embraces a softer use of light as did one half of the eclipsed Rembrandt, but without probing the characters, and rather by using the light to create a diaphanous mist one can sense but not see — to arrive at an almost Dickinson like quality of subtlety. As in Dickinson’s poetry, (which would arrive 200 years later), where one can feel the sound of the words — the impact of the sounds and the blank spaces in-between, which seem more important than the meaning itself, in Vermeer’s paintings one can feel the quiet energy of the image, the impact of the almost empty space of a room when the sun filters in through a window, shimmering accents of light across objects in what seems a personal experience, in the simplest, gentlest, seemingly mundane moments when the noise of the world is momentarily silenced and imbued with a poetic tenderness. Vermeer’s pellucid integration of photographic-like use of light and image in his perceptual replication, for the first time, brings the pleasure of discrete silence into the visual. A Synoptic Archeology of Visual Poets 189 Neoclassical Period During the Enlightenment period when intellects sought to reform society using reason, to challenge ideas grounded in tradition and faith, and to advance knowledge through the scientific method, a new science of archaeology was simultaneously surfacing bringing forth remnants of a buried world and with them emerged the Neoclassical style in art, (literally “new” classics). With a concerted effort to systematically retrieve the glories of lost civilizations, and firsthand observation of these artifacts, reproduction of antique works came to dominate European visual art, and a return to the idealized perceptual principle of replication was revived. zArt once again went backwards in time with a recourse to Greek mythology. Painters defined the style with their emphasis on formal composition, historic subject matter with contemporary settings and costumes, rigidity, solidity, and monumentality in the spirit of classical revival. French painter Jacques Louis David (1748–1825), in sympathy with the French Revolution, in his paintings The Oath of the Horatii and The Death of Socrates gave expression to a new cult of civic virtues: self-sacrifice, devotion to duty, honesty, and stoic austerity. And for a little less than one hundred years there was little progression amongst the artists in visual expression. 6.4 On Conscious Liberation Romantic Period Quite simply put, during the Romantic period the visual artists reached within and acted out when for the first time in history they attempted to use their art as a type of sensational, dramatic media—endeavoring to draw the sympathy and compassion of the masses and promoting individual liberation, ending slavery, 190 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part II — The Arts and supporting democratic and independence movements. Francesco Goya (1746 – 1828), the Spanish Romantic painter, came of age during the reign of Charles III (1759 – 1788) who was known as one of the so-called “Englightenment monarchs,” who passed reforms to improve the conditions of the common people. Succeeding him was his unenlightened son, Charles IV whose disinterest in politics led his domineering queen and her lover to take over, reigniting the fires of the Spanish Inquisition’s reign of terror. Goya, in his 80 etchings in 1799 called The Caprices (Caprichos), courageously criticizes, among other things, the ignorance and inabilities of the various members of the ruling class through his visual renderings. The prints were an artistic experiment: a medium for Goya’s condemnation of the universal follies and foolishness in the Spanish society. Goya described the series as depicting “the innumerable foibles and follies to be found in any civilized society, and from the common prejudices and deceitful practices which custom, ignorance or self-interest have made usual”. The subversive imaginative element in his art, as well as his bold handling of paint, provided a model for the work of artists of later generations. Following his lead, the French Romantic painters took dramatic visual criticism of society to another level. Théodore Gericault (1791 ±1824), the first of the French Romantic painters, presented his most distinguished work painted in 1819, The Raft of the Medusa—a sensational larger than life portrayal of the aftermath of a shipwreck. On June 17, 1816 the French ship Medusa sank off the coast of Senegal. The captain and officers took the ship’s six lifeboats for themselves and strapped together a raft made of masts for the crew and passengers. The lifeboats towed the rafts for awhile, but it A Synoptic Archeology of Visual Poets 191 slowed them up so much that they cut it loose. Though the raft was only four miles offshore, a rescue ship didn’t reach it for thirteen days. By that time only fifteen of the one hundred thirty men were still alive. Some resorted to cannibalism to survive. The event deeply disturbed Gericault and before he began work on the final painting, he undertook extensive research in interviewing two of the survivors, constructing a detailed scale model of the raft, and visiting morgues and hospitals where he could view, firsthand, the color and texture of the flesh of the dying and dead. As the unsavory character of the ship’s captain was a royalist of the restored Bourbon monarchy, the public response to the visual replication of the event incited fervor as the painter had hoped and expected, adding to the growing revolutionary sentiments of the suffering lower classes. The work encapsulates the injustice of the pre-Revolution aristocracy and marks the beginning of the shift from the formal aesthetics of the Neoclassical period into the intense personal expression of the artist that will evolve throughout the modernist period. Only five years after painting The Medusa, at thirty-two years old, Gericault died in an accident, and Eugene Delacroix, a fervent disciple of his became the new leader of the French Romantic painters. Using his talent he assembled support for the Greek struggle of independence against the Turkish Empire with his painting The Massacre at Chios, originally entitled “Scènes des massacres de Scio; familles grecques attendent la mort ou l’esclavage, etc. “ (Scenes of massacres at Chios; Greek families awaiting death or slavery, etc..) In this work Delacroix used dramatic visual provocation in demonstrating the horror of the wartime destruction when a military attack on the Island of Chios resulted in the deaths of twenty thousand citizens, 192 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part II — The Arts and the forced deportation into slavery of almost all the surviving seventy thousand inhabitants. The painting depicts crushed victims with little hope amongst the ruin and despair. Their suffering is harshly presented to the viewer in an almost flat plane; slumped, disordered, and unevenly distributed. Beyond endeavoring to advance social and political conditions, many Romantic artists engaged on inward quests to locate and express a more elevated reality than the one confronted daily. William Blake (1757 – 1827), in addition to his poetry, painted images in an effort to carry the poem’s meaning beyond itself, and vice versa. Painting and poetry for him, were the two sides of each hand in prayer. In his complex mythology, like that of the shamanistic cave painters, Blake sought to reconcile the world of spirit and senses, and emotion and reason. In an attempt to combine the two art forms, his visuals portrayed a personal quest of the unified and universal human being resonating once again with the work of the shaman cave painters who sought to find a balance between the good and evil forces at work. The German painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774 – 1840) was known to stand in front of a blank canvas and wait for an image to appear in his mind before painting. Friedrich’s written commentary on aesthetics was limited to a collection of aphorisms set down in 1830, in which he explained the need for the artist to match natural observation with an introspective scrutiny of his own personality. This insight directly parallels the second state of trance in the neuropsychological model, which leads to a group of visual patterns recognizable through normal mental processes (heavily influenced by personal and cultural expectations) where the entoptic patterns are then interpreted as meaningful iconic or figurative images. His best-known remark advises the A Synoptic Archeology of Visual Poets 193 artist to “close your bodily eye so that you may see your picture first with the spiritual eye. Then bring to the light of day that which you have seen in the darkness so that it may react upon others from the outside inwards.”188 Friedrich’s landscapes are visionary bridges between the internal and external. There’s a dramatic tension between these worlds. But in spite of the drama, nothing ever happens in the paintings –there’s no physical action. In The Wanderer in the Mists, a lone figure atop a cliff takes a tentative step toward a windswept, snowy landscape below that somehow seems to mirror his inner being. It’s as if he is about to walk into his internal world, but hesitates. He’s drawn to the frigid, tameless landscape, but the attraction isn’t powerful enough to incite him to move into the fateful step. The wanderer, or the artist himself, seems to confront a frontier wherein he fails to find the courage to move into the third realm of the trance state where he might morph into the landscape itself or as stated in the earlier chapter “become a full blown iconic hallucination in which a sense of individual participation develops within the image and the artist may imagine becoming the thing that he or she hallucinates.” As if: visual art and the artists themselves, in the evolution of time, are still hesitating to move into the beyond in the third realm between truth and fable. Realist Movement Realism as a style or movement needs to be distinguished from “realism” as a term to define precise, detailed and accurate representation in art of the visual appearance of scenes and objects. Realism in this latter sense is also called naturalism, mimesis or illusionism and can be located throughout all Vaughan, William. German Romantic Painting. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1980. Print. 188 194 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part II — The Arts the periods discussed thus far. In this sense it is in large part a matter of technique and training, and the avoidance of stylization. The movement itself was based on a rejection of the Neoclassical artists who idealized forms and subjects and Romantic artists whom they felt dramatized, sensationalized or distorted the real, and is instead grounded in visual depiction of the day to day life of ordinary people, places and things, or rather, the literalness or direct replication of their externally observed worlds. Gustave Courbet (1819 – 1877) the most politically charged of the Realist artists, told a newspaper after the Revolution of 1848, “I’m not only a Socialist, but a Democrat and a Republican...a supporter of the whole Revolution!” When he exhibited his painting, The Stone Breakers, which simply captured two working-class men in the country chopping rocks with pick axes, the Parisian society in which he lived were disgusted. As the rural way of life was being displaced by the Industrial Revolution, both the upper and middle class society preferred to avert their eyes from the gritty side of everyday life. Courbet, in his visual depiction was reminding them of the working class citizens revolution and the recently published work by Karl Marx, Communist Manifesto, which called for the overthrow of capitalism and classless society. Impressionists In a way, perhaps, marrying the Romantic wanderer who visually seemed to confront a barrier in morphing into the landscape itself, with the Realists determination to keep their eyes from straying away from what lay before them, the Impressionists emphasized the ephemeral changing qualities of the ordinary subject matter by including movement as crucial A Synoptic Archeology of Visual Poets 195 element of human perception and experience. As if, moving into their emphasis of accurate depiction of the transitory light on the landscapes might create a bridge into the third realm, capturing the ephemeral visual quality of life. 6.5 On Subconscious Liberation Post Impressionist / Expressionist In the realm of aesthetics Giambattista Vico (1688 - 1744) was the first to argue that primitive man was closer to the sources of poetry and artistic inspiration than “civilized” or modern man, and all the world called him “an eccentric Italian philosopher”. It wasn’t until Paul Gauguin, one hundred and twenty years later, however, decided to remove himself from the “civilized world” he grew up in and venture into the wild islands in the south pacific where communication with the world and the cultural mecca of art he came from, was sparse. A place where humans still lived like primitives. Gauguin tried to return to a primitive state through art and find the proverbial “noble savage” or natural person. He said everything in Europe is “artificial and conventional...In order to do something new we must go back to the source, to humanity in its infancy.” Eventually his quest to shed civilization and become a noble savage took him to Tahiti and then beyond into the scattered islands surrounding. Inspired and motivated by the raw power and simplicity of the so-called Primitive art of those foreign cultures, he painted, (amongst many others) Where do we come from, What are we, Where are we going? On a remote islands across the oceans surrounding Polynesia, Gauguin traveled, assimilated and painted in poverty until his death. It was his personal and almost sacrificial experiment that would inspire Henri Matisse, 196 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part II — The Arts Paul Klee and finally Pablo Picasso to break free of the six visual perceptions of the neuropsychological model that had dominated the world since the Greeks, and finally move into the seventh perception of visual fragmentation, whereby the arts bifurcate and transform the visual world into two parts: ONE—the visual chaos of distracted, disintegrated, particle-d, dysfunctional, meaninglessness (unless one truly was educated and knew what the meaning or political provocation the artist was making), or TWO—the visual in which the technological media, or rather the dominating, aggrandizing corporations could monopolize, capitalize and impose on the masses with little effort utilizing the six perceptions of replication, integration, superimposing, juxtaposing, rotating and reduplication—with the invent of technological advance in photography, video and giant re-printed poster-boards, for the next one hundred years. The world was confused with the visual handouts. Yet the poetic visual artists still forged ahead in their search, leaving most of the world behind and lost in visual guidance, where they still remain today. 6.6 On Cutting it All to Pieces So many painters today have forgotten poetry in their paintings – and it’s the most important thing: poetry. —Pablo Picasso Pablo Picasso strutted into the third realm, cut it all up into pieces and metamorphosed himself into the hallucination of his multiple existence. Art historian John Golding stated, “perhaps more than any other work by Picasso, The Dream and Lie of Franco breaks down, as the Surrealists so passionately A Synoptic Archeology of Visual Poets 197 longed to, distinctions between thought, writing and visual imagery.”189 In his early works, labeled now as the Blue Period, blindness is a recurrent theme. As though he subconsciously understood that it was only through the internal visual eye he might find what he was seeking, or reach the third stage of trance that had not been met in the visual arts since the cave paintings 32,000 years earlier. The motif that follows in his work after is not surprisingly, a minotaur, or humanconflation, (man-bull). The eighteen images in The Dream and Lie of Franco form a non-narrative literal visual sequence in a dream-like scape. The abstract, and sometimes grotesque forms of Franco change from panel to panel, are negative in content and include multiple juxtaposition-ing with animals: 1. Franco riding a horse waving a sword and a flag 2. Franco, with a ridiculously large penis, waving a sword and a flag 3. Franco attacking a classical sculpture with a pick 4. Franco dressed as a courtesan with a flower and a fan 5. Franco being gored by a bull 6. Franco at prayer surrounded by barbed wire 7. Franco on top of a dead creature 8. Franco chasing a winged horse 9. Franco riding on a pig carrying a spear 10. Franco eating a dead horse 11. The aftermath of a battle with a corpse 12. The aftermath of a battle with a dead horse 13. Franco and a bull 14. Franco and the bull fighting Additions to the second plate which were added during studies for his next work, Guernica, represent the positive force and include: 189 Golding, John. Visions of the Modern. Berkeley: U of California, 1994. Print. 198 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part II — The Arts 1. 2. 3. 4. A woman crying and reaching up A woman fleeing a burning house carrying a child A woman cradling a child A woman shot with an arrow and reaching up amid devastation Prose poetry which was included with the sketches and written in an attempt to “break down the distinctions between thought and visual imagery”, or in another words, move beyond thinking into a zero space or total trance state, carries a chantlike musicality as the author/painter moves deeper inwards: silver bells & cockle shells & guts braided in a row a pinky in erection not a grape & not a fig. casket on shoulders crammed with sausages & mouths rage that contorts the drawing of a shadow that lashes teeth nailed into sand the horse ripped open top to bottom in the sun. cries of children cries of women cries of birds cries of flowers cries of wood and stone cries of bricks cries of furniture of beds of chairs of curtains of casseroles of cats and papers cries of smells that claw themselves of smoke that gnaws the neck of cries that boil in cauldron and the rain of birds that floods the sea that eats into the bone and breaks the teeth biting the cotton that the sun wipes on its plate that bourse and bank hide in the footprint left imbedded in the rock. —Excerpts from Dream and Lie of Franco (1937) At the same time Picasso was finishing The Dream and Lie of Franco (June 1937), he began and finished work on Guernica, (June 1937). In this next work we discover within the painting an image of a human-conflation –as if Picasso had reached the third realm and was now morphing into the work itself. In the midst of the scattered explosion, war, destruction, and combined light and hope within Guernica, is the minotaur. A Synoptic Archeology of Visual Poets 199 Intense(d) energy incising its way to the center, his poiesis did not correspond to a river, or any water. He was on earth, solid ground, awl-ing his way to the center. When he transformed into the landscape of his internal vision, he placed his human-conflation in the midst of multiple opposing forces, and observed. When he painted an Other with whom he interspersed his own force, his visuals merge with the Other. A prototype visual Poetist, he could both observe and become one with the others in his images and sought balance in his creations. He painted the literal in his internal dreamscapes and broke them into pieces to dissect; in doing so he paradigmatically shifted the visual arts in a new direction. Along with the sensational force in the visual fragmentations, creations in the world of poetic art began to fragment into infinite pieces, and mimesis and diegesis were left to technological visual media. 6.7 On Elimination Abstract Expressionism There are many artists in the past fifty years who have used art as their personal toilet bowl—to release the internal excess, sometimes dissect remains, sometimes flush, sometimes display, even literally, though there are other kinds of elimination as well. From Mondrian’s bold geometric forms to Kandinsky’s use of symbols to Pollock’s “dripped paintings,” the richly diverse movement of abstract painting re-creates the journey undertaken by each painter in his move from representational art to the abstract—a journey that in most cases began with cubism but led variously to symbolism, futurism, surrealism, theosophy, anthropology, Jungian analysis, and beyond. For each artist, spiritual quest and 200 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part II — The Arts artistic experimentation became inseparable. And despite their different techniques and philosophies, these artists shared one goal: to break a path to a new, ultimate pictorial truth. And the image was erased and replaced by color and blank spaces. The tension within the works became a magnetic pull between color fields. Barnette Newman hoped viewers would experience an, “awareness of being alive in the sensation of complete space.” Mark Rothko wanted his boxes to fight and be friends at the same time. Clyfford Still announced, “I never wanted color to be color. I never wanted texture to be texture, or images to become shapes. I wanted them all to fuse together into a living spirit...I am not interested in illustrating my time. A man’s “time” limits him, it does not truly liberate him. Our age — it is one of science, of mechanism, of power and death. I see no point in adding to its mechanism of power and death. I see no point in adding to its mammoth arrogance the compliment of a graphic homage.” The abstract-expressionists, painting during the same period as Samuel Beckett, were attempting to blur the distinctions between not just the dualisms, but quite literally the seven principles of perception in the enoptic model. Everything became a blur until Pierre Soulages also known as “the painter of black” completely shut the lights out and went into the cave. Because of his interest in color, he believed black was “...both a colour and a non-colour. When light is reflected on black, it transforms and transmutes it. It opens up a mental field all of its own”. A Synoptic Archeology of Visual Poets 201 6.8 Back Into the Empty Space In the 1960’s Fluxus performance artists preferred active art that challenged traditional views of life and art. In their work they attempted to re-create an atmosphere similar to primitive ritual, involving audiences as much as the artist in the transformative experience. The seven principles of perception had finally been mastered by the art world and the only thing left, so it seemed, was the ritual act of creating itself—and back into the caves from 32,000 years ago. Joseph Beuys, a German performance artist, activist, sculptor, and teacher, believed the world was in a spiritual crisis and art was the cure. He was convinced that all the arts should be merged into a single ritualistic force. In 1972 he founded the Free International University for Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research. “Beuys believed that economics is not only a money making principle but could be a way of production to fulfill the demands of people all over the world. Capital is human kind’s ability in work, not just money, thought Beuys. Thus, economics included the creativity of people. “Creativity equals Capital”. One of the most pressing issues for the Free International University for Creativity and Interdisciplinary Research was how to help realize the capacity of each person to be a creative being; how to formulate the concept of individual freedom as the ability to shape social forms, through the transformation of resources.”190 Beuys felt there was a breakdown between scientific and spiritual thinking and attempted to close the gap through shamanistic or ritual performances. He was convinced there was a universal power of creativity and through a kind of resonance one person’s creativity can awaken another. “FIUWAC Statement.” Free International University World Art Collection, n.d. Web. 190 202 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part II — The Arts Joseph Beuys developed the concept “social sculpture” to inspire consciousness and positive shaping. Social sculpture was the interplay between spiritual, material and social spheres, where, thanks to the principles of freedom and equality, economics would create bonds of community, cooperation, and creative flows of energy. “For Beuys constant change and permanent dialogue was the source and process for social sculpture. His belief was that such a work of transformation had the power to release the binding patterns of history and the potential to bring forward in society the energies that emerge in creativity, in any realm in which it manifests itself. Such a social sculpture requires a free flow of information, democratic initiatives, production-sites that could overcome barriers between structures, between knowledge and instinct, to become a genuine practice of interdisciplinary research where the organic and the technological, intuition and intellect would melt and reconfigure into new social wholes in which creativity can flourish.” Not surprisingly, Joseph Beuys saw his role of an artist as a teacher or shaman who could guide society in a new direction (Sotheby’s catalog, 1992). Beuys left the Fluxus movement in 1965 to further test the boundaries of art and rationality, and founded the Conceptual Art movement of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, pointing out some of the contradictions in how words and images communicate. Art and science began merging into one another with conceptual installations use of bio-technology, such as in the Critical Art Ensemble’s Germs of Infection, (2005). Multimedia, communications and biological artist Edoardo Kac used trans-genetic engineering to create a glow-in-the-dark bunny (2000), and performance artists Benoît Mangin and Marion Laval-Jeantet’s decided to literally become the human- conflation in their piece called “Que le cheval vive en moi” (2011) (May the horse live in me). A Synoptic Archeology of Visual Poets 203 In Laval-Jeantet’s work, rather than replicate the humanconflation in hallucination and imagination, she literally becomes it by transfusing horse blood into her own body. To perform this piece successfully Marion Laval-Jeantet had to slowly build up her tolerance to foreign animal bodies so that she not go into anaphylactic shock when the transfusion occurred. The duo describe the event, “as a radical experiment whose long-term effects cannot be calculated, Que le cheval vive en moi questions the anthropocentric attitude inherent to our technological understanding. Instead of trying to attain “homeostasis,” a state of physiological balance, with this performance, the artists sought to initiate a process of “synthetic transi-stasis,” in which the only constant is continual transformation and adaptation. The performance represents a continuation of the centaur myth, that human-horse hybrid which, as “animal in human,” symbolizes the antithesis of the rider, who as human dominates the animal.” But not everyone was willing to surrender art and its materials to the altar of performance, social activism and conceptual art. In addition to the seven principles of perceptions in the enoptic model, a new one had been born: simulation. The art world again had split in two directions: the social discourse and the artistic discourse. “The current moment is defined by a complex and contradictory mixture of cultural and geopolitical forces. The last two decades have witnessed the rise of a powerful neoliberal economic order dedicated to eliminating all forms of collective or public resistance (institutional, ideological, and organizational) to the primacy of capital.”191 “Such crisis,” argues curator Okwui Enwezor, “force reappraisals of conditions of production, reevaluation of the nature of the 191 Kester, Grant H., The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2011. 204 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part II — The Arts artistic work, and reconfiguration of the position of the artist in relation to economic, social and political institutions.”192 From the worker-run factories of Tahrir Square to Argentina, to the Occupy wall street protests that spread around the world, from campaigns for tribal rights in Africa, to Avaaz.org, we encounter new forms of social organization, resistance and identity. Perhaps a time of both peril and opportunity, as dominant political narratives used to explain and justify social and economic inequality, the distribution of resources and opportunities within society, and the relative responsibility of the state to the public at large, are being contested and destabilized. Art critic Grant H. Kester note, “As these narratives lose their legitimacy, space is opened for new stories and new visions of the future...It is this sense of possibility and imminent threat, that animates the remarkable profusion of contemporary art practices concerned with collective action and civic engagement...Thus we might view the recent proliferation of collaborative practices as part of a cyclical paradigm shift within the field of art, even as the nature of this shift involves an increasing permeability between ‘art’ and other zones of symbolic production (urbanism, environmental activism, social work, etc).”193 Kester, is a firm believer in the social discourse, or rather, as using the creative force for collaborative social art projects that join communities together in the process of the creations themselves, as the new way forward for art. Perhaps Kester is right about the need to create an open space “for new stories and new visions of the future”, as well as the need for collaboration amongst the artists to draw communities together via the project. But what about the “art” itself? If their aren’t any visuals and the art is simply 192 Enwezor, Okwui “The Production of Social Space as Artwork,” 225 Kester, Grant H., The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context, Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2011. 193 A Synoptic Archeology of Visual Poets 205 the process of joining community together, how exactly can we call it visual art? Art critic Claire Bishop, in her book Artificial Hells,194 discusses the tension between the social and artistic judgements as ones that “do no easily merge; indeed they seem to demand different criteria.” This criteria within that tension, she points out, falls between the binary divides of equality and quality, and participation and spectatorship: For one sector of artists, curators and critics, (social camp) a good project appeases super-egoic injunction to ameliorate society; if social agencies have failed, then art is obliged to step in. In this schema, judgements are based on a humanist ethics, often inspired by Christianity. What counts is to offer ameliorative solutions, however short term, rather than the exposure of contradictory social truths. For another sector of artists, curators and critics, (artistic camp) judgments are based on a sensible response to the artists work, both in and beyond its original context. In this schema, ethics are nugatory, because art is understood continually to throw established systems of value into question, including questions of morality; devising new languages with which to represent and question social contradiction is more important. The social discourse accuses the artistic discourse of amorality and inefficacy, because it is insufficient merely to reveal, reduplicate, or reflect upon the world; what matters is social change. The artistic discourse accuses the social discourse of remaining stubbornly attached to existing categories, and focusing on micro-political gestures at the expense of sensuous immediacy as a potential locus of desalination. Either social conscience dominates, or the rights of the individual to question social conscience. Art’s relationship to the social is either underpinned by morality or it is underpinned by freedom.”195 194 Bishop, Claire. Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London: Verso, 2012. Print. 195 Bishop, Claire. Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of 206 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part II — The Arts It seems, perhaps both are somewhat correct in their assessments, but as we revealed early on in the chapter on William Blake in comparing his work to Nietzsche, can we really go beyond good and evil as Nietzsche proposed, without leading to an absolute? Or is the third ground rather maintaining a balance in-between the two intense forces through art, as Blake, our prehistoric ancestor-cave-painters, and all the visuals artists before the postmodern period maintained? Should the artists consider no ethical ground in mutating animals into glow in the dark creatures and their own bodies into animal half-breeds? Does this constitute a literal blurring of the binary distinctions, is there value in this type of art? Are these our new genius visual poets? Indeed, are these artists “bringing back the poetic as experience/awareness,” as Alessandro de Francesco proposes in his theory? Is this type of art helping to guide society into to a more poetic sensibility in their daily awareness of themselves and Others? The repeated search for the third ground between truth and fable as a way forward in Vico’s theory continues, as does the discourse between poiesis and demiourgia discussed amongst the Greeks over 2000 years ago. Felix Guattari and Jacques Rancière maintain that the tension between these two camps must remain. Guattari’s paradigm of transversality offers one way of thinking through these artistic operations: he leaves art as a category in its place, but insists upon its constant flight into and across other disciplines, (collaboration), putting both art and the social into question, even while simultaneously reaffirming art as a universe of value. Jaques Rancière proposes that in art, theatre, and education alike, there needs to be a mediating object that Spectatorship. London: Verso, 2012. Print. A Synoptic Archeology of Visual Poets 207 stands between the idea of the artist and the feeling and interpretation of the spectator: “The spectacle is a third term, to which the other two can refer, but which prevents any kind of ‘equal’ or ‘undistorted’ transmission. It is a mediation between them, and that mediation of a third term is crucial in the process of intellectual emancipation...The same thing that links them must also separate them.”196 Claire Bishop argues, that at a certain point, “art has to hand over to other institutions if social change is to be achieved: it is not enough to keep producing activist art...Since the 1990’s, participatory art has often asserted a connection between user generated content and democracy, but the frequent predictability of its results seem to be the consequence of lacking both a social and an artistic target..participatory art today stands without a relation to an existing political project (only to a loosely defined anti-capitalism) and presents itself as oppositional to visual art by trying to side-step the question of visuality.”197 She has a point: if there are no visuals, how exactly can we call it visual art? She proposes, as well as Guattari and Rancière, mediating a third term—an object, image, story, film, even a spectacle—that permits this experience to have a purchase on the public imagery. But if story, or sound are that mediated third term, than wouldn’t it follow that the poetry-poets and sound poets who create in those Other arts, be involved in collaboration with the visual poets to reach that distance in-between and thereby achieve a sense of community amongst themselves and in bringing forth the spectators that gather to experience the new poetic art? 196 Rancière, Jacques, and Gregory Elliott. The Emancipated Spectator. London: Verso, 2009. Print. 197 Bishop, Claire. Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London: Verso, 2012. Print. 7. A Synoptic Archeology of Sound Poets The composer who writes a major work, literally reflecting the whole world, is himself only an instrument being played by the whole universe. —Gustav Mahler, 3rd Symphony Starting out from inert matter –rocks and inanimate Nature –he (Mahler) could already glimpse how the vast epic would proceed, one by one, through the stages of evolution: to flowers, animals and mankind itself, before ascending to universal love, which he imagined as a supremely transcendental force. —Henry-Louis de la Grange 7.1 The Early Period198 Echoes MUSICOLOGIST IÉGOR REZNIKOFF, moved slowly and steadily in total darkness into the cave Arcy-sur-Cure 198 Hendy, David, Noise: A Human History of Sound and Listening, Profile Books, London, 2013. Most of the facts and figures found for the Early Period section of the Synoptic Archaeology of Sound Poets, was taken from David Handy’s extensive research on the topic. 209 210 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part II — The Arts in Burgundy. Using his voice as a sonar, he sent out a pulse of sound, then listened for any unique response. When the resonance throughout alternated, he lit his torch. At each precise point of mutating sound, he saw on the wall or ceiling a small dot of red ochre, a painted pattern of lines, a negative handprint, sometimes even an animal was visualized. At one place in Arcy-sur-Cure, in the bottom of the main hall where each sound provokes up to seven echos, there are paintings of several mammoths, some bears, a rhinoceros, a salmon, some sort of cat, and an ibex. In the mezzanine area near the so-called Salle des Vagues (Hall of Waves), just where the resonance is most striking there is a ceiling densely packed with animals of all kinds and on the floor, the delicate outline of a bird. In the darkest recesses of the caves, when one speaks, or sings or hums or whispers, a cacophony of echos is created, each one lasting long enough to merge with the next and creating a sort of en-trancing wall of sound. In the spaces where trance states took place, as established in the chapter on visual art, it is easily conceivable that 32,000 years ago our prehistoric ancestors believed that the cave was responding back to them with precisely the same sound, or rather as if the cave itself were alive. The notion that animal spirits can be brought to life from sound would have made sense back in a world with no scientific understanding of sound waves and reverberation. In a prehistoric cave a clap bounces back in a series of overlapping echoes as if the animals painted on the walls start galloping. In the illusionistic feeling of this surroundsound-like cinema, the spellbinding and beguiling effect of sound, perhaps, inspired the visual artist, or rather, enabled them to enter into their trance states, (or zero space), and create visuals. The one art spurring the next. A Synoptic Archeology of Sound Poets 211 Reznikoff is the first person to make the connection between the visual art and the resonant feature of the cave in which eighty percent of the cave paintings are located specifically where the acoustics are particularly unusual. The musicologist discovered that at other caves the same pattern recurred: in Niaux cave in the Pyrenees all the animal paintings are in the Salon Noir, which Reznikoff describes as sounding like “a richly resonant Romanesque chapel”; at Le Portel, a whole series of red dots are strung along a ten meter tunnel precisely where, Reznikoff reports “a living sound point lies”. Reznikoff went on in his research to discover that in prehistoric art found outside of caves, often the paintings are pinpointed in locations that are exceptionally difficult to access. Once again, his experimental recordings revealed that rock paintings of people and animals are in exactly the same places where echoes are strongest, or more, where sound travels furthest. The revealing connection between sound and image in acoustically interesting spaces has led researchers to conclude that perhaps it was the mesmerizing power of traveling sound, or echoes, that first first provoked our ancestors to create. In caves at Roucador, Cougnac and Pech-Merle in France, at Nerja in Spain, and at Escoural in Portugal, rock pillars are laden with red dots bearing marks of being repeatedly hit. When struck, the walls give off differently pitched sounds. These particular caves have left behind some of the worlds oldest surviving musical instruments, bone pipes or flutes. Some of the very oldest bone flutes discovered at Isturitz in the Pyrenees were found next to a decorated pillar, in the one chamber that amplified sound more than any other part of the cave. With the flickering half light of their lamps, the atmosphere would have been ideal for rituals or celebrations 212 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part II — The Arts for music, singing and summoning of the shamans trance state. In the midst of all the sounds and noise, our prehistoric ancestors made music. Over time through continuous feedforward loop, new sounds, tonal effects, notes and rhythms were discovered. They were tried out, they echoed back, they were copied, altered, replayed, thousands of times, over and over again—eventually, from the chaos of the noise, emerged order within the sounds, and with it, rhythm and musical performance. Naturally, chanting and playing music wasn’t only about communicating with a spirit world —oftentimes, it was about communication between living people in this world –about men and women and children doing something together in time, about bonding, sharing, quite simply, about collaboration and community. Rhythm In Ghana and throughout West Africa—in the dark rain forest where light is sparse, communication has been made for thousands of years through the sound of drums—using mixtures of high and low tones to send messages like a telegraph into the air from village to village. For thousands of years no one in the world could communicate as far and as fast as the Africans with their talking drums. Sound was more than just music, it was a form of tele-like-communication. The rhythm of the drums provided a means for our ancestors to reach each other even at a great distance. These musical qualities offer us a strong insight about the past – perhaps even several million years ago before we had language or music we might find that the very first protohumans to leave Africa had something else instead—a kind of singsong utterance that was a curious mix between language and music. Sharing the A Synoptic Archeology of Sound Poets 213 energy, rhythm and song of the Other was our first form of communication and collaboration. Information in communicative sounds demonstrate mutual trust amongst a group. When different rhythms start to interact and synchronize with each other, bodily rhythms are assimilated into a collective rhythm. With every participant constantly re-calibrating to keep in unison, it is impossible to tell the difference between the performer and listener because the distinction doesn’t really exist. The rhythms across the continents are universal: the beats of a heart, in and out of breathing, steady gait of walking, biorhythms that continue to shape the undulating patterns of music and language—of human expression, communication and creation. Those most skilled in conveying their own feelings and in reading the feelings of others, or in other words, the musical Poetist, would have been the most useful members of a community engaged in synchronizing rhythms and sounds— predicting and manipulating the behavior of others gives one a big evolutionary advantage. Something with the quality of music might well have been a safer evolutionary bet than using words. Words have always been closest to specificity in meaning. Those listening to words, might agree, equally, they might disagree, and so quickly fall out. Music is different, its meaning is helpfully vague – if an argument is brewing its often better not to say anything199 and just lose ones differences in singing or dancing—these musical sounds would also have been a potent symbol of the groups togetherness in the face of any external enemies. Rhythm endures and is profoundly rooted as a universal feature of human made sound. We recognize repeated similarities in music from different parts of the world Schirmacher, Wolfgang, “PARALLEL ETHICS” European Graduate School, Saas-Fée. Aug. 2011. Lecture. “No action is the best action”. 199 214 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part II — The Arts with the same underlying melodies at work in completely different languages. Over the past million years or so we spread further across the world and as our cultures inevitably drifted apart, we adapted to the varying habitats in which we lived—the natural soundscape embedded in our immediate environments, influenced the aggrandizing variables in sound and in the humans who were inspired to mimic or recreate them, (mimesis). Nature can be very noisy. The world has often been described as macrocosmic musical instrument. The creatures in both the wild and the human cities create their own animal orchestra, singing with an exceptional range of voices from hour to hour, season to season and place to place. In fact, each square mile of the world has its own acoustic signature, and it is the poetic sound artists themselves who have the capacity to become the musical genius loci of place in capturing the essence of the the musical rhythm and sounds in any-placewhatsoever. But what about silence? Silence Just off the north coast of Scotland, lies an archipelago of around 70 islands where five thousand years ago on the smaller islands of Orkney we discover the remains of an ancient Neolithic civilization, and within it, the first known man made creation where silence resides—a zero space. Close by the prehistoric village of Skara Brae are are two stone megalith circles, The Stones of Stenness and the Ring of Brodgar, and further in the distance, The Maeshowe Chambered Cairn—a massive chambered tomb where at sunset during the three weeks before and after the winter solstice the setting sun sends A Synoptic Archeology of Sound Poets 215 a beam of light along a tiny passageway to illuminate its central chamber. It is here we can appreciate a fundamental shift in human history. Neolithic ancestors from this period are no longer making do with caves, canyons or forests for there spiritual activities or for shelter. They began creating their own architectural structures. Archeologists have determined that these megaliths were the center of the society’s ritual life, and in addition, had their own human made acoustic identity. While researchers aren’t certain the monuments were built specifically in order to create sound effects – they are certain no one was living in them, and that they were more likely where some type of rituals or social event took place. Ethnographers have discovered that in most cultures rituals are multi-sensual affairs. And when you enter these neolithic sites, it’s as though one is entering a theatre stage. If the people who built them noticed specific sound effects within the circle, they must have been tempted to benefit from them. In the Ring of Brodgar—there is a perfectly formed circle about one-hundred meters across with twenty-seven standing stones around, approximately twelve feet tall, all surrounded by a big circular ditch cut out of solid rock. Originally, researchers suspect there were maybe 60 or so standing stones, enough to create an enclosed effect. In the center—echoes can be detected around the inside of the circle. Clapping or shouting intensifies the effects, as do drums. Echoes come back around from all around the inside of the circle. When one moves away from the center, the effects lessens and once outside the circle, the echo effect is lost completely. Speculation is that the theatrical shift in sound as you entered the circle was intentional. As the megalith is located just near to the sea, the standing stones seem to close out the natural outside sound of wind and waves 216 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part II — The Arts to contain more ambient, ceremonial sounds within the circle. The chambered tomb nearby called Maeshowe, is made of dry stone walling, with mounds of clay and grass growing around—in other words, an ideal sound proofing space. In this space, high frequency sounds are trapped inside and low frequency sounds escape. If one was to drum inside, someone standing outside could hear something deeper – but this distorted rumble would probably be second rate as an experience compared to what might be heard inside the chambers hidden center. To enter the tomb, one must first traverse a passageway— which consists of a long tunnel in which intense stillness takes over as sounds from outside begin to disappear. Once one arrives in the center, the sound of the outside world entirely vanishes. This is the first known handcrafted space of silence in human history. In this artificial blank canvas of silence, one has the capacity to create completely new soundscapes, or what’s known in musical language as a standing wave of sound— where sounds falls back upon itself and builds up in complex layers. “When beating a single drum in this space—researchers noticed that the tonal frequency is a lot like the one that can send the human brain into a state about halfway between wakefulness and sleep±a state that prompts our strongest moments of vivid mental imagery, even hallucinations. Something else being generated that we cant actually notice which is called ultra low frequency infrasound –something that can make us feel, peculiar.”200 In other words, our ancestors created a physical platform for entering a soundscape zero space. A few years ago in a burial chamber nearby, volunteers were exposed to short bursts of infrasound created by Hendy, David, Noise: A Human History of Sound and Listening, Profile Books, London, 2013. 200 A Synoptic Archeology of Sound Poets 217 drumming. What they reported was dizziness and in some cases a strange feeling of rising physically. Researchers are uncertain whether this was intentional in the original builders designs –but they suspect that those in charge of the rituals would have delighted in these other-worldly qualities. Stories from the same area refer to a ritual practice of incubation, which has lead researchers to believe that the tomb of Maeshowe may have been used as a place of silence, where members of the society came to be alone on a sort of spiritual retreat or quest. Similar sanctuaries are discovered across continental Europe where remains of ancient sanctuaries from classical times were used as places where the ill who were seeking a quiet refuge in order to hibernate and perhaps be renewed, would come to rest. These places are quite similar to the sanatoriums scattered across the imposing, sublime landscapes of the Alps in Europe, in which a laundry list of renowned poets, writers, composers and artists came to ‘heal’ throughout the 19th and early 20th century. Philological findings in many European languages offer evidence through the usages of the word itself, cave: coming from a common root meaning: to hide. Later in Latin it becomes: cell; in Old Irish: hiding place, and silence; in Old Welsh: dream. Various meanings weave together to hint at a place sealed off from the outside world. A place of peace and recovery—evoking the primordial functions of the earth mother as both tomb and womb—where creation, gestation and birth take place. Researchers believe it is highly likely whoever were the gatekeepers of the silent tomb of Maeshowe had a great deal of power—as those that were allowed to access the tomb would have selected and reinforced social hierarchies. They believe that perhaps these gatekeepers were more like priests, or what 218 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part II — The Arts had thirty thousand years before them, been the shamans. The Poetists, or the gatekeepers of silence, the balancers or the good and evil forces through the removal of all noise, the ones who could both express themselves and feel the Others, observe and engage, or back then—the professional gatekeepers of the spirit world, were perhaps people learning to manipulate sound in all kinds of unique ways in their zero space sanctuaries— unknowingly to shape what would eventually be inherited by the imposing architecture in the cathedrals of the Romans and throughout the Middle Ages, when Gregorian chants echoed through the grandiose and awe-striking infrastructure, and the Christian disciples composing them would lead us into another realm of music and sound where participants would no longer be re-calibrating to keep in unison. It would henceforth become distinctly possible to tell the difference between the performer and listener, because the distinction really did come to exist. Sound as a Controlling Spectacle An account from Russian exiled to Siberia by the Czar— participating in a seance in a carefully closed room, noticed how skillfully the shaman could deploy sound to create a ritually suggestive atmosphere, especially at night. The Russian described it as if the room became alive with spirits flying through the air. The effects this shaman admit-tingly achieves with the help of some basic acoustical principles and by creating a suggestive atmosphere in that tiny, overheated space, are noteworthy. Sound as means to create the illusion of reaching a spiritual world, has been a remarkably pervasive feature of human culture for thousands of years. An example of acoustic trickery which bears and uncanny similarity to the shamans practice of throwing A Synoptic Archeology of Sound Poets 219 voices can be witnessed today in an 800 year old medieval cathedral in an English city, where once a year, on Palm Sunday, they continue to perform the spectacle for the spectator through the carefully constructed architecture created for the specific purpose of acoustic trickery. The congregation are assembled as a procession of the choir and clergy march into the entrance singing. The next lines come from a disembodied voice floating down from the facade above –up atop the giant cathedral are three hidden holes in which clergymen hiding behind them sing into the holes to create a projected echo-like sound positioned from the height of the angels to create the illusion of an angel in full voice singing from above. “The charm of this performance, is not blinding to the politics behind it—setting out to create a spectacular performance of the churches power to make things happen not through the power of suggestion, but as though the experience itself had actually taken place, the illusion in the 13th century, as if the angels were singing to the masses below.” Thus, it was through the application of their stories (words), visual art and perhaps most impressively, sound (music), that the Churches were able to manipulate power and control and impose their belief system, for one thousand years during the Medieval Period. 7.1 The Art of Melody and Harmony In the 13th century, arcane music and gregorian chants of the celestial spheres was being questioned. Playing music and whispering comforting words to lift spirits was now being used in a compassionate way—not as a supernatural force, but in the flesh and blood realm of living people. The musician rather than physician was newly deemed as having the capacity to offer the best relief—having a musician play at bedside was seen as the best response to any sickness 220 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part II — The Arts With the change in design from the Romanesque churches to the Gothic architecture—while the visuals were more spectacular, sonically the resonant within the space changed, and with it the music. For the first time polyphony was introduced: with more than one note being sung and played at a time, this infinitely adaptable style created just the right mix of overlapping tones and prolonged notes instead of acoustic chaos of echoes—thus this soaring celestial harmony was created matching the buildings soaring architecture. During the Renaissance period, along with the literary and visual arts, music, for the first time became selfsufficient, existing for its own benefit. Many familiar modern instruments, including the violin, the guitar, and keyboard instruments, were born. Increasingly freed from medieval constraints, range, rhythm, harmony, form, and notation, became a vehicle for personal expression. Composers found ways to make music as expressive as the texts they worked with. Secular music assimilated techniques from sacred music, and vice versa. Courts hired virtuoso performers, both singers and instrumentalists. During the 15th century the sound of full triads became common, and towards the end of the 16th century the system of church modes began to break down entirely, giving way to the functional tonality which was to dominate western art music for the next three centuries. 7.2 The Art of Discord In the Occident, leading up to and through the Enlightenment period, the people listened to pomp and ceremony in the courts display and soon realized that the churches no longer had a monopoly on the music in the use of spectacle. The new secular rulers, however, had something to be concerned with as the peasants began making a great deal of noise outside A Synoptic Archeology of Sound Poets 221 while using their “musical” celebrations to upend the whole social order. The School of Theology at the Sorbonne in Paris admitted in 1444 that there was a real social need for foolishness amongst the plebeians—they announced that the “wine barrels burst if from time to time we do not open them and let in some air.” It was decided that the normal burdens of hard labor and poor diet could be forgotten when carnival provided food, drink and sociable frivolity. Thus, the carnival was created. While in the other forms of creation, at this point in history, the lower classes made little use of creating visual art during their spare time, and perhaps some, if they were literate, read ballads and theatre—music, on the other hand, was always prominent. It had no socio-economic boundaries—it was the one creative outlet that could immediately change an atmosphere, lift spirits and provoke sentiments closer to sublime blissfulness, no matter what the quality. As cheap instruments could be easily obtained, (including pots and pans), it was easy to make sound in the streets. Eventually, however, carnival became a cover for rebellion. The uncontrolled noise spoke not just of pleasure and abandonment but also of underlying discontent, anxiety over plague and price rises for bread, or just crushing poverty. The people were only able to express their discontent in the coded words of songs in festivals—oaths, toasts, riddles, ballads, airs whistled in the streets. While there is no universal model for what carnival should be, what these organized precessions share is the participants desire to step aside from the normal routine of work and let themselves go for a moment, so its no surprise that the poorest were the most enthusiastic, and the carnival was often a cue for the rich to leave the city for the quiet country side. Carnivals 222 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part II — The Arts were vulgar popular culture teetering on the edge of violence –mostly paranoia but in one respect the rich had the right to be weary. The carnival had been the dispossessed way of saying “I’m here, I exist, I wont be ignored” which is why perhaps, in 16th and 17th centuries, so many of the great and good— would reclaim more loudly then ever the virtues of emotional restraint and sealed lips.201 The sounds of the carnival, however, or the “carnival in classical music” would go on to inspire musicians throughout the ages ranging from Mozart to Khatchaturian: Schumann, Satie, Svendsen, Prokofiev, Richard Strauss, Johann Strauss II, Mendelssohn, Saint-Saëns, Debussy, Berlioz, Verdi, Leoncavallo, Raymond, Liszt, Nielsen, Gustav Mahler and Leonard Bernstein. 7.3 The Art of Dissonance Despite the fact that words like unpleasant and grating are often used to explain the sound of dissonance, all music with a harmonic or tonal basis—even music perceived as generally harmonious—incorporates some degree of dissonance. The buildup and release of tension (dissonance and resolution), which can occur on every level from the subtle to the crass, is partially responsible for what listeners perceive as beauty, emotion, and expressiveness in music.202 In the 18th century different sound worlds were forming between those with power, and those without. As it would have been impossible to punish every breach of the law, 201 Hendy, David, Noise: A Human History of Sound and Listening, Profile Books, London, 2013. 202 “Consonance and Dissonance.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 07 Jan. 2014. Web. A Synoptic Archeology of Sound Poets 223 there remained a deeply religious morality about sound and visuals. Hearing or seeing something inappropriate was still not allowed –as if visuals and sound could corrupt the soul. And yet, certain forms of music could still be a form of experiencing the divine. When listening to music it was culturally taboo to not withhold self restraint and keep silent while listening to a performance. A social hierarchy grew between the elite, the cult culture of upper and middle class, and the unrestrained poor, dependent on how they listened— which can still be witnessed and experienced in symphony halls and opera houses to this day. Music and sound was divided between opera and balls versus fairs and revels, and those who listened to either were scarce to regard each other of the same species.203 As the stoic and closed Enlightenment period came to an end and the age of Romanticism emerged, the new power of sound found in the roar of the industrial revolution and new machines grinding through the daily life, planted the seeds of a darker and more authoritarian attitude toward music amongst the composers. Before, the musical concerts in restaurants and stately homes were more of a background noise amongst the gossiping at parties and social events—no one was really listening. The German composer Richard Wagner declared “our art is religion” and set out to change the way people received the musical performance; to create, rather, poetic performance for everyone across all socio-economic levels. In the complexity of infusing all the arts into one performance, he hoped to arrive at conducting a more universal audience. With the birth of Wagner, public collaborative creativity was created. Karl Friedrcih Trahndorff (1782-1863) a German philosopher and theologian who “belonged to the 203 Hendy, David, Noise: A Human History of Sound and Listening, Profile Books, London, 2013. 224 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part II — The Arts supernaturalist camp, opposed to theological rationalism and emphasized the in-deducible, supernatural and mystical nature of religious revelation, by implication minimizing the ability of human reason to grasp the content of faith.”204 In other words, Trahndorff believed, a zero space could not be recognized by the reason of his “englightened forefathers”, and as such, in an essay in 1827 introduced for the first time the term Gesamtkunstwerk, (a german word translated as 1) total work of art, 2) ideal work of art, 3) universal artwork, 4) synthesis of the arts, 5) comprehensive artwork, 6) all-embracing art form or 7) total artwork), meaning a work of art that makes use of all or many art forms or strives to do so for the sake of arriving at a divine revelation or sublime space for the audience and listeners. In 1849, the practicing German opera composer, theatre director, polemicist and conductor, Wagner used the term in an essay entitled “The Artwork of the Future”, where he described his revolutionized vision of opera as a Gesamtkunstwerk, in which the various arts such as music, song, dance, poetry, visual arts and stagecraft were unified. In his original essay, Wagner placed music as subsidiary to drama, until in 1854 he was introduced to the philosophy of Arthur Shopenhauer and more specifically his work, The World as Will and Idea. One of Schopenhauer’s doctrines was that music held a supreme role in the arts as a direct expression of the world’s essence, namely, blind, impulsive will.205 This doctrine contradicted Wagner’s view, expressed in “Opera and Drama”, that the music in opera had to be subservient to the drama. Wagner scholars have argued that Schopenhauer’s influence caused Wagner to assign a more commanding role to music in his later operas, including the latter half of his most famous 204 “Karl Friedrich Eusebius Trahndorff.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 07 Jan. 2014. Web. 205 Magee, Bryan (1988), Aspects of Wagner, Oxford: Oxford University Press. A Synoptic Archeology of Sound Poets 225 work, Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring Cycle), and his last work Parsifal, which he had yet to compose.206 Wagner took twenty-six years from writing the first draft of a libretto in 1848 until he completed Götterdämmerung in 1874. The Ring takes about fifteen hours to perform and is the only undertaking of such size to be regularly presented on the world’s stages.207 In the end, he recognized that sound came first. Notably from Tristan und Isolde onwards, Wagner explored the limits of the traditional tonal system, which gave keys and chords their identity, pointing the way to atonality in the 20th century. Some music historians date the beginning of modern classical music to the first notes of Tristan, which include the so-called Tristan chord. Not only would Wagner influence an an entire century of musicians that followed in his wake, his influence on literature, philosophy and even modern day cinema, left a significant footprint: “[Wagner’s] protean abundance meant that he could inspire the use of literary motif in many a novel employing interior monologue;... the Symbolists (visual artists and poets) saw him as a mystic hierophant; the Decadents found many a frisson in his work.”208 Composer Gustav Mahler extended Wagner’s “maximalization” of “the temporal and the sonorous” in music to the world of symphony. The critic Theodor Adorno has noted that the Wagnerian leitmotif “leads directly to cinema music where the sole function of the leitmotif is to announce heroes or situations so as to allow the audience to orient 206 Dahlhaus, Carl (tr. Mary Whittal) (1979), Richard Wagner’s Music Dramas, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 207 Millington, Barry (ed.) (2001), The Wagner Compendium: A Guide to Wagner’s Life and Music (revised edition), London: Thames and Hudson Ltd. 208 Ibid. 226 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part II — The Arts itself more easily”209 Among film scores as recent as three years ago, we can hear the sounds of Wagnerian themes in award winning films made by contemporary directors such as David Cronenberg, Lars von Trier and Francis Ford Coppola. Acclaimed record producer from the 1960’s, Phil Spector’s original “wall of sound” recording technique was heavily influenced by Wagner. The technique typified sound by having a number of electric and acoustic guitarists perform the same parts in unison, adding musical arrangements for large groups of musicians up to the size of orchestras, then recording the sound using an echo chamber, not unlike the caves 32,000 years ago. The technique is also described as “utilizing instruments, combining, say, pianos with guitars to form a unique instrument. In other words, if you combine them electronically well enough, you’re not going to have a guitar or piano, you’re going to have piano/guitar: a new instrument… in the ‘40s and ‘50s, arrangements were considered: “OK here, listen to that French horn”—or—”listen to this string section now.” It was all a definite sound. There weren’t combinations of sound, and with the advent of Phil Spector, we find sound combinations, which—scientifically speaking—is a brilliant aspect of sound production.”210 Finally, Friedrich Nietzsche in his Birth of Tradgedy, originally considered Wagner’s music as the Dyonisian “rebirth” of European culture in opposition to Apollonian rationalist “decadence”. In the end, Richard Wagner inspired all the arts, still even today, with his birth of collaborative creativity. Adorno, Theodor (tr. Rodney Livingstone) (2009), In Search of Wagner, London: Verso Books. 210 Harris, Bob. “Rare Brian Wilson interview 1976” YouTube. 209 A Synoptic Archeology of Sound Poets 227 7.4 The Art of Noise At first the art of music sought purity, limpidity and sweetness of sound. Then different sounds were amalgamated, care being taken, however, to caress the ear with gentle harmonies. Today music, as it becomes continually more complicated, strives to amalgamate the most dissonant, strange and harsh sounds. In this way we come ever closer to noise-sound.211 In 1857, Édouard-Leon Scott de Martinville invented the phonautograph, the first device that could record sound waves as they passed through the air, though it was intended only for visual study of the recording and could not actually play back sound. Perfected by Thomas Edison, the phonograph expanded on the principles of the phonautograph in 1878, but it wasn’t until the advent of electrical recording in 1925, which did not become common until the late 1930’s, when recorded sound became a permanent fixture in the masses homes. “Listening to radio, at first, was far more uncanny than gramophone—it was as if disembodied voices came out of thin air, or somewhere perhaps thousands of miles away, across oceans at the speed of light, but by 1930’s the magic ebbed away, and the radio became a normal part of life.”212 Recorded sound enabled captured sounds to become freed, portable, and permanent. It was the decline of classical music. Just as art had bifurcated into mass visual productions and the intellectual artistic elite creations, music followed suit. The majority of people stopped listening, and only began hearing, background music and noise. Russolo, Luigi from The Art of Noises, March 1913. Hendy, David, Noise: A Human History of Sound and Listening, Profile Books, London, 2013. 211 212 228 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part II — The Arts But for the artists, the ability to manipulate music through recording, could release harmonic order. The Futurists in 1909 declared the roar of the motor car to be more beautiful than anything by Michaelangelo, “noise arriving confused irregular, from the irregular flow of life—renew mankind—the art of noise should not limit itself to imitative reproduction”, said Futurist Luigi Russolo who believed through the use of recorded music the world was opened up to an infinite range of sounds. Some other new musicians used new technology to draw them back not forward. Hungarian composer, Béla Bartók went into country side to capture sounds of Hungarian folk music. Through the new ability to play tunes over and over again, he was able to discover features previously unnoticed— “subtle alterations could now be pinned down—fusion of classic, folk, modernists sounds could only be composed in this new modernist age of recorded machines”213. Consequently, through his collection and analytical study of folk music, he was one of the founders of comparative musicology, which later became ethnomusicology. “It seemed with all the recorded noise, music could go in any directions—repertoires exploded in volume and variety even in Harlem where the iconic crucible of African American life was able to records colorblind eclectic music—treatments between old religious, gospel with classical, organic creative human sound which survived in style—recording didn’t freeze sound in its tracks, it allowed it to evolve.”214 213 214 Ibid. Ibid. A Synoptic Archeology of Sound Poets 229 7.5 The Beginning of Silence With the onset of WWI writers seemed to be recording not so much the sights of the war, but instead the furious blasts and deafening sounds. It was the sound, more than the sights, that would prove most traumatizing to all involved. In 1918 the British neurologist Edwin Ash warned that sounds of war may have caused the most loss of morale amongst the soldiers as the cumulative effect of the horror and fear which would eventually led to shell shock. As such, “sensitivity to noise grew after the war as the ominous roar of battlefields were compared to cities and the mechanistic modern world. Mental disorder was no longer a disease of soldiers, but had rather become a national aliment from the noise of the cities. The 20th century eventually would be labeled a war of nerves.”215 On the radio, the BBC hired educated “sounding” announcers. They recognized as equally as Goebbels in Germany that the use of the radio could bind a nation together through sound. “Democratic ends was being pursued through undemocratic means as the national radio sought to create social unity amounting to single way of thinking—uniform middle brow British mentality to create common interests, tastes, attitudes—as the nature of radio was used to encourage people to think and feel alike. Mass delusion through hypnotic radio.”216 Scholars at Harvard university decided to test the influence of the device. In one experiment—volunteers listened to voices and described their reactions: strong, mental impressions of the strangers they heard—they described mood, politics, appearance, both hit and miss descriptions of the disembodied voices were invested with personality by the 215 216 Ibid. Ibid. 230 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part II — The Arts volunteers. In the second experiment, volunteers were asked to read a text, another group, to listen to a text read. As it turned out, the group which had read were much more critical and questioning than the group that was simply listening. The listening group was more inclined to believe everything they heard. “The human voice for them was more interesting, persuasive and compelling then the written word.”217 It was as if the disembodied voice wasn’t speaking to a national audience, but individually to them and was treated like a trusted friend. Artfully constructed speeches swayed most listeners as people felt closer to the voices, even if they were on the other side of the ocean. In 1920 the composer Eric Satie felt “a need to create ‘furniture music’, music as a part of the surrounding noises, to take them (surrounding noises) into account in creating the music, a music that was melodious without imposing itself to fill up awkward silences between guests, banalities, and forced street noises.” Taking his idea into account, the invent of pop music happened. Fragments of pop melodies, remixed and played over and over, like gregorian chants, became hypnotic sounds in the background of stores, homes, eventually cars, malls, everywhere one went/goes. Everyone stopped talking. Given the amount of real noise, it became more important than ever to preserve music as something with meaning and let one be taken away out of their mundane world, just as the carnival had been used centuries before. Now it was broadcast live to make drones of the mass population. Sounds were to be “heard” but not “listened to”, simply as background music. And the majority of the world closed their ears and truly stopped listening. 217 Ibid. A Synoptic Archeology of Sound Poets 231 On January 1st, 1952, American composer John Cage wrote his most famous work: 4’33” The piece was composed of four minutes and 33 seconds of “silence”, split into three movements. The piece was designed to encourage the audience to appreciate the incidental sounds that occurred during this period of listening - chairs scraping, coughs, the sound of traffic outside - and consider them to be musical. In fact, what John Cage really wanted to do was encourage people to simply start using their ears again, to start listening—through attention to silence, or the fact that what was established thousand of years earlier, there never really is silence, even in the middle of nature, especially in the middle of the dark. 7.6 The Art of Resonance Tod Dockstader — Quatermass 1 Jan 1964 Tod Dockstader releases an album comprised of various “sound objects” (recordings of anything in which Dockstader took interest), cut together into compositions. Dockstader claimed to have sourced 125 hours worth of recorded material during the Quatermass recording sessions. Maryanne Amacher — City Links 1 Jan 1967 Sound artist Maryanne Amacher begins a series of sound art works that transmit the sounds of an urban environment (in this first instance, various spots within the town of Buffalo) to an exhibition space elsewhere, via the use of dedicated, high- 232 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part II — The Arts quality telephone lines. This first “City Links” piece was 28 hours long. These works (dubbed with the term “telematic”) still run to this day, despite Amacher’s death in 2009. Alvin Lucier - I Am Sitting In A Room 1 Jan 1969 American Composer Alvin Lucier records himself narrating a text in a room, and then feeds the recording back into the room to be recorded again. He repeats this process until only the resonant frequencies of the room can be heard. Danish sound artist Jacob Kirkegaard used Lucier’s piece as the basis for his “4 Rooms” release in 2006, in which he recorded the resonance and tones resulting from excess radiation in various spaces in Chernobyl. Lou Reed - Metal Machine Music 1 Jan 1975 American rock musician Lou Reed releases what is considered to be an early example of noise music, as well as often being classified as a work of contemporary sound art. The album revolves entirely around guitar feedback and effects, set at different speeds. It received a scathing critical response upon its release, from an audience accustomed to hearing Reed’s rock-orientated material. A Synoptic Archeology of Sound Poets 233 7.7 Sonic Boom Stuart Dempster, Pauline Oliveros, Panatois — Deep Listening 1 Jan 1989 Three musicians are lowered into Fort Warden water cistern and record “Deep Listening” - four music pieces that utilize the cistern’s 45 second reverberation. The instruments used include vocal, accordion, trombone, didgeridoo, conch shell, pipes and garden hose. David Toop’s Sonic Boom 27 Apr 2000 “Sonic Boom” becomes the first major sound art exhibition in the UK, bringing together 23 sound artists to exhibit their work at the Hayward Gallery in London. The exhibition was curated by British sound artist David Toop. Featured artists included Brian Eno, Ryoji Ikeda and Max Eastley. SoundFjord Opens 1 May 2010 The UK’s first sound art gallery opens. The gallery is focused on creating a dialogue within sound art, encouraging the growth of the sound art community via performances, lectures, workshops and sound walks. Susan Phillipsz wins the Turner Prize 6 Dec 2010 Susan Phillipsz becomes the first sound artist to win the Turner Prize for her “Lowlands” piece, in which Susan recorded herself singing the Scottish lament “Lowlands 234 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part II — The Arts Away” and played the recordings under three bridges on the banks of the River Clyde in Glasgow. Philipsz predominantly creates sound installations using recordings of her own voice that are played in specific geographical sites to “heighten the visitor’s engagement with their surroundings while inspiring thoughtful introspection.” Perhaps, just as the cave people did with their voice before they turned the light on to paint. The Birth of the Art of Collaboration 7.8 Silence 235 PART III : Conclusion 237 8. D’où Venons Nous / Que Sommes Nous / Où Allons Nous: The Birth of the Art of Collaboration: Creating Fictive World Formulae SO IT SEEMS, IN CONCLUSION, there is never really any real conclusion, only infinite observations and equally infinite creations. It sounds as though, from the very beginning, sound arrives first: breathing, echoes, rhythms, listening, silence. If we open our ears and shut our eyes, we can enter. Suspension of judgement lies within, inside the zero space, visuals arrive. In the visuals we progress through seven perceptions in all stages until we transform into the thing we see in the dreamscape. We come out of the zero space into poiesis and use rational thinking to blend literal words which announce without subjective metaphor, (or ambiguity) that which has revealed itself. Words come last. Suspension of judgement meets rationale, then repeat. While some poets may be adept at multiple arts, there is normally one artistic capacity of the four, more acute than the others, sometimes two, rarely all. This work proposes at 239 240 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part III — Conclusion the behest of the poets worldwide, we bring the individual poets together, perhaps thirty per year. There are currently 210 countries demarcated on the map in the year 2014. In order for every country to be explored by the four poets collaborative creations of hypostasis of place using visuals, sound, words and movement in performances, the project proposed would essentially be complete every seven years, at which time, the non-narrative creations would merge into the totality of the whole overarching narrative and arrive at a Fictive World Formulae, creating a global archipelago of community awareness. An Experiment: ≤ ¿ birth {creations ∞ (hypostasis of place) ∞ destructions} death ? ≥ In-between something else happens. In blank spaces: z(e)ro spaces, the void—nothing, and the infinity of infinity. A subjective universality only in the pre-poiesis, perhaps. (e): the mathematical constant of the repeated z(e)ro spaces throughout the anthropomorphic history of the arts. It is only an experiment: an opening. In the overlapping and superpositioning of the multiple Being engaging with multiple Being(s) for the sake of collaborative creation. For the sake of the experiment: to understand, to discover if small pockets of poets can arrive in their zero spaces, in suspension of judgement, both alone, and with others and then move into the rational with equal collective force. Our shamanistic ancestors were often considered mad, emotionally volatile, hyper-sexual, imbalanced. And yet it was only through their ability to find balance, as leaders of the The Birth of the Art of Collaboration 241 tribes, that the rest of the tribe could be awarded peace and stability in the community, as the leader withheld the capacity to embody both forces within and manipulate them into form. Poïesis. The only way for them to arrive in such a state, however, was through a collaborative community effort. All our ancestral poetry-poets, visual-poets and sound-poets, as discovered in this work, as well, created to balance the tensions of the forces within. Goethe, Dickinson, Beckett all sought to find the balance. Alessandro de Francesco, in his work, and in his Being, found that balance. As Poetist, he can both go in and come out engaging Others without the slightest demonstration of judgement. That is not to say, we should try to eliminate or even ignore our judgment in some moral or ethical Christianlike closed state of Being, only that perhaps, through silence and economy of words, we should not demonstrate it in the immediate encounters through aggressive actions or words. Or as Wolfgang Schirmacher says, “no action is the best action”. We are no longer prehistoric Beings. Through it seems we have come back to a similar place, we have come there with thousands of years of experience behind us to guide us into guiding not a small tribe in a cave into that balance, but a global community. Poetic creations should no longer be diffused only to the small elite educated classes. What we need now is to use the technology and media we have created to offer a Gesamtkunstwerk, as Wagner sought to do, for everyone, and in doing so, blur the dualisms and the class divisions, and offer everyone the ability to experience poiesis, and in doing so, participate. To avoid the capitalistic encounter with the poetic creations, this research was made with the underlying objective 242 Z(e)ro Spaces: Part III — Conclusion to create a foundation where tax deductible donations can be received to support the poets in their collaborative work each year in a location where fresh air, water, earth and spirit can allow for optimal concentration without any economic disruption—as the poets themselves, especially outside of the Occidental world, are most often the ones without sufficient means to truly engage in such a stimulating learning environment for the betterment of themselves and the world around them. 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Klemm Scratch & Sniff, Peter van de Kamp Shamanism + Cyberspace, Mina Cheon Sonic Soma: Sound, Body and the Origins of the Alphabet, Elise Kermani Sovereignty in Singularity: Aporias in Ethics and Aesthetics, Gregory Bray The Art of the Transpersonal Self: Transformation as Aesthetic and Energetic Practice, Norbert Koppensteiner The Ethics of Uncertainty: Aporetic Openings, Michael Anker The Image That Doesn’t Want to be Seen, Kenneth Feinstein The Infinite City: Politics of Speed, Asli Telli Aydemir The Media Poet, Michelle Cartier The Novel Imagery: Aesthetic Response as Feral Laboratory, Dawan Stanford The Organic Organisation: freedom, creativity and the search for fulfilment, Nicholas Ind The Suicide Bomber; and her gift of death, Jeremy Fernando The Transreal Political Aesthetics of Crossing Realities, Micha Cárdenas Theodore, Sofia Fasos Trans Desire/Affective Cyborgs, Micha Cárdenas Trans/actions: art, film and death, Bruce Barber Transience: A poiesis, of dis/appearance, Julia Hölzl Trauma, Hysteria, Philosophy, Hannes Charen Upward Crashes Fracture’s Topoi: Musil, Kiefer, Darger, Paola Piglia-Veronese Other books available from Atropos Press 5 Milton Stories (For the Witty, Wise and Worldly Child), Sofia Fasos Korahais Che Guevara and the Economic Debate in Cuba, Luiz Bernardo Pericás Grey Ecology, Paul Virilio heart, speech, this, Gina Rae Foster Follow Us or Die, Vincent W.J., van Gerven Oei Just Living: Philosophy in Artificial Life. Collected Works Volume 1, Wolfgang Schirmacher Laughter, Henri Bergson Pessoa, The Meaphysical Courier, Judith Balso Philosophical Essays: from Ancient Creed to Technological Man, Hans Jonas Philosophy of Culture, Schopenhauer and Tradition, Wolfgang Schirmacher Talking Cheddo: Teaching Hard Kushitic Truths Liberating PanAfrikanism, Menkowra Manga Clem Marshall Teletheory, Gregory L. Ulmer The Tupperware Blitzkrieg, Anthony Metivier Vilém Flusser’s Brazilian Vampyroteuthis Infernalis, Vilém Flusser