Being Here: Graul Chair Installation Address

Graul Endowed Chair in Arts and Languages
Installation Address
Sean Wilkinson
6 March 2009

NOTE:
As people entered the hall in which this address was delivered, they were invited to take a small stone from a bowl, and the sound of birdsong played through speakers.

Being Here: Reflections on Place and Things
Place, Things, Being, Awareness, Knowing, Arts,

Insanity, Dialogue, Language, Photography

Introduction
I would like to share some thoughts on the concatenation of topics you see on the screen. I will suggest some relationships amongst these topics, not in the form of a logical and tightly structured argument, but rather more in the manner of implication and juxtaposition. You are welcome to glean anything that might be of interest and leave the rest behind with a clear conscience. Please feel free to discern or create your own meaning from what you hear and see, just as you would from wandering the streets of an unfamiliar city.

For when the traveler returns from the mountain-slopes into the valley,he brings, not a handful of earth, unsayable to others, but instead some word he has gained, some pure word, the yellow and blue gentian. Perhaps we are here in order to say: house, bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher,fruit-tree, window…

–Rainer Maria Rilke, from “The Ninth Elegy,” Duino Elegies, translated from the German by Stephen Mitchell

Place, Things, and Being
“The world” is what we call the place in which we have been placed and in which we have a place. It is a place to be. It is the only place we have.

We appear from nothing and nowhere and we disappear into nowhere and nothing. And the brief flash in between, of light and pain and hunger and joy, all of it, every bit of it, occurs here, in this place, which was here before we arrived and which will remain implacably here when we depart.

And what is this place? It is a constellation of things. It is not so much space itself as the things that give shape and order to space. And it is only through our bodies that we apprehend the things that define space and place.

Light, sound, gesture, scent. Stimulus, response. The body in dialogue with its surroundings, negotiating, adapting, learning, responding. The language of things is translated into the language of the body. And the things to which the body responds, the things it uses and makes: these are the things that define this world. And the essence of this world is a place in which our awareness of things becomes the conscious experience of being.

Being is grounded in a place in which we belong, and in relationship with things that speak to us and through us, and through which we recognize ourselves. We may know such a place and such Things almost from birth, or we may look for them in vain all our lives. If we are compelled to search, most of us give it up eventually. We content ourselves with wherever it is that we find ourselves when we have grown weary from our quest. We decide that our time is better spent on coming to terms with where we are, which may be the higher form of wisdom after all.

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And to know the place for the first time.

–T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding” (Number 4 of Four Quartets)

Place and Awareness
We experience books word-by-word, page-by-page. They begin and end within the confines of their covers. They inform and explain. Sometimes they reveal and illuminate. They may include a table of contents and an index, and be divided into chapters. We tend to be confident that their authors know a good deal more than we do about their subjects, and that they will serve as reliable guides.

Place can be fully experienced only by moving through it. Place has no single, fixed starting point or conclusion, and our awareness of it alters depending on where we are within it, on the time of day, the weather, the quality of light, the feel of the ground beneath our feet, whether we are alone or in company. Place cannot explain itself; it provides no obvious or definitive key to its understanding. Place has no singular creator; it is the product and reflection of time and change, and an infinite variety of forces, both intentional and accidental.

To experience place is to experience our own perceptions. It is to participate in a dialogue between Things and the body. The path we discover, the invisible trail of our footsteps and our glances, is more meaningful to us than an objective inventory of facts, and every bit as real as history, analysis, or ideas. All of these things, however, are important if they contribute to our awareness. But only then.

A Sort of a Song

Let the snake wait under

his weed

and the writing

be of words, slow and quick, sharp

to strike, quiet to wait,

sleepless.

—through metaphor to reconcile

the people and the stones.

Compose. (No ideas

but in things) Invent!

Saxifrage is my flower that splits

the rocks.

–William Carlos Williams

Excerpt from the film, L’Eclisse, Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni

Position and occupier build structure and content.

Structure and content together constitute form.

Elegance of form is the product of elegance of choice

within specific limitations.

–Frederick Sommer, in collaboration with Stephen Aldrich, The Poetic Logic of Art and Aesthetics

Johann Sebastian Bach, Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1, Number 1, C major, Prelude

Till Fellner, piano

Knowing and Awareness
I am less interested in whether I know something than I am in being aware that I do not know how much I don’t know, and knowing (even though I cannot really know) that the realm of the unknown is infinitely larger than the realm of the known.

It does not know it glitters.

It does not know it flies.

It does not know it is this not that.

–Czeslaw Milosz, “What does it mean?”

Somewhere along the spectrum between the known and the unknown are the things we think we know, even when they are nothing more than biases, illusions, and assumptions. Laziness and carelessness cause us to mistake decoys of knowledge for the real thing. Instead of recognizing them as the needs and projections that we impose on the world, we imagine that they are the world.

We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.

–Anais Nin

For academics especially, we are what we know. We acknowledge one another’s existence as members of the categories to which we have devoted ourselves. We build a culture around this narrowing, the central ritual of which is to inflict the same constraints on future generations.

We have a stake in ignoring or dismissing what we do not know, for we think that to acknowledge that we do not know something appears to diminish us instead of revealing our capacity to grow. We tend to value knowledge more as an implement for manipulation rather than, for instance, as a gift and a delight.

If it is knowledge that originally separated us from everything else in this world, it follows that, as we strive ever more skillfully and desperately to use knowledge to save ourselves, that separation must grow along with our knowing. I think that we have greater need for an understanding of the limits and consequences of knowing than we do for still more information. And I would suggest that knowledge that fails to contribute to awareness and humility might well be more dangerous than ignorance.

I believe that some avenues of enquiry, some ways of interacting with and responding to the places and Things of this world and with one another, tend to yield more awareness than knowledge. This is why they are so little valued, or found to be threatening.

Knowing and the Arts
The arts are always under suspicion, as they should be, especially within the academy. They are not, after all, primarily about knowing or ideas. You can learn about them in a decent curriculum, but such learning is not the same as direct experience, and in the arts, direct experience counts above all else. Actually doing them is the best form of learning them, and one of the best forms of learning, period. But by direct experience I also mean being fully present with them, receptive and attentive, engaged in dialogue, not just in words about them, but more pointedly, with them in themselves. The arts enable us to apprehend the places and Things of this world and ourselves, by making new not only what we know but how we know, and by transcending what we ordinarily mean by knowing.

I do not know an image or a poem or the prelude you will hear in a moment, not as I might know a fact or a data point or the dictionary definition of a word. I may nevertheless take it into myself. If I can manage to restrain my judgment, if I can limit my dependence upon intellect, if I can resist deferring to someone else’s expertise, if I can permit it to approach me, I might not just listen to it; it might actually become a part of me.

Johann Sebastian Bach, Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1, Number 22, B flat minor, Prelude

Till Fellner, piano

The Insanity Plea
If we, as human beings, are capable of such grace as that prelude suggests, how is it that we are also capable, at the same time, of so much horror? Are such things merely beautiful distractions from our depravity, or do they indicate the possibility of redemption?

Not that I believe we are innately sinful, but I am inclined to believe we have lost our sense of integration with the greater world that existed before we were here and that continues to exist despite our depredations. It seems that we have failed to understand that our very existence is dependent on the Things and places of this world.

Of course we must consume in order to survive. But must we damage and destroy so much in the process? The fact that our consumption vastly surpasses our actual needs would seem to violate a law of nature. And it is not a law that may be broken with impunity. It is difficult not to conclude that we have lost our senses. But an insanity plea will not let us off the hook.

Excerpt from the film, Satantango, Directed by Bela Tarr

Excerpt from the film, Stroszek, Directed by Werner Herzog

Which returns me to the question of our relationship with things. Is it primarily a matter of market value, where every thing may be assigned a price and bought and sold? Or is it primarily a matter of stewardship and kinship rather than of ownership, of intrinsic value instead of commoditization?

The cowboy, the outlaw, and the open road figure prominently in our American psyche. We thus declare our preference for isolation versus community and for self-sufficiency over collaboration. I value as much as anyone the opportunities we have to reinvent ourselves, to change our circumstances, and to indulge the illusion of being unfettered. I believe, however, that these apparent assets come at an enormous cost. The ultimate perfection of freedom from attachment, from relationship, from shared responsibility is the ultimate perfection of detachment, of alienation, of estrangement. We buy such freedom at the expense of love.

Perhaps we recognize this. Perhaps we need the open road because our denial of this reality makes it urgent that we flee from confronting it. Whatever the cause, it is hard not to notice that we seem always to be anxiously on the move. I don’t know for certain what we are running away from, but our urgency and our sense of futility suggest it might be ourselves.

Excerpt from the film, 400 Blows, Directed by Francois Truffaut

Dialogue
If there is any possibility of a resolution to this dilemma, however tentative and provisional it might be, I think it would have to be constructed from dialogue. Dialogue with things, through which we might come to recognize the reality of that which is other than ourselves, and upon which our life depends. Dialogue with place, through which we might understand that where we are and who we are cannot be entirely separated without damaging both. Dialogue amongst the different parts within us, through which we would discover that it is unwise to deal in absolutes, simplicities, and finalities. And dialogue with one another, which is, I think, the only way through which we have any chance to redeem one another.

Excerpt from a film of Waiting for Godot, by Samuel Beckett

We know we are alive through call and response, through the antiphony of all things to all other Things, animate and inanimate. We exist in relationship with the world around us, and I believe that this world responds. I also believe that the ultimate form of dialogue, the impossible goal toward which we should nevertheless strive, is to be, with everything, in a state of awareness and respect.

Language
Language does not exist outside of dialogue. Why would we have language at all if we did not have one another and something to say? Even if it is to say that we are at a loss for anything to say. Speaker and listener: neither is complete without the other. The word, the mind, and the body hold on to one another, sustain one another, exist for one another. The slender, indestructible thread of language holds all together.

Yet nothing, it would seem, is more ephemeral or elusive than language. Spoken words die on the air in the same instant they are made audible, tiny marks of ink on fragile paper, mysterious phosphors glowing on a screen. Language seems the very embodiment of faith in the most slender of means.

But perhaps we are too enamored of language, as we ordinarily understand the term, to wonder about what it leaves out. Like conventional knowing, it might insulate us from other ways of being in touch with the world around us. Is it possible that this kind of language, the kind I am speaking now, has made us unable to understand, to hear and to speak to, the Things of this world directly? A traditional belief amongst the Koyukon Indians of northwestern Alaska makes deep, intuitive sense to me, the belief that, in what they call the “Distant Time,” human beings shared a common language with all animals and plants.

Which leads me to ask: Is there vocabulary, grammar, and syntax in the flight of birds, the flow of water, the shape of a tree, the streets of a city, or in taking a walk? In other words, is there language without words? I believe there is. But how does one learn it? Without having understood any of this at the time, I can see in retrospect that it was the desire to learn such a language that drew me to look intently at things, to immerse myself in place, and to seek to respond in the form of images.

Photography
The advent of the photographic image, new, strange, mute, and without the cultural accoutrements of painting, an image for which neither a language nor a history had been constructed, seemed, because of these peculiar deficits, beyond the realm of reasoned discourse, of critique and discrimination, of debate about meaning or merit. On the face of it, one machine-produced and infinitely reproducible image is much the same and just as good as the next. What is there to distinguish one from another, apart from subject matter that existed without any help from the image? Anonymity and ubiquity made them appear to be both uniform and low in value. Anyone could and did and does make these things. They proliferate unceasingly, created as they most often are with a bare minimum of thoughtful agency, and even that is more than is actually required. Yet precisely because they are mundane, there remains about them a compelling sense of connection with real Things.

A famous philosopher was asked what would evoke most vividly for him the reality of Paris. He replied: “A sign on the highway that said ‘Paris.’”

My penchant for going straight to the heart of the matter is counterbalanced by my fondness for obliquity, for evocation rather than description, for inflection and innuendo as much as for plain speaking. It is the counter-intuitive potential for these qualities of clarity and ambiguity to merge that has kept me engaged with a medium that seems to promise the former above all else, but that is so richly endowed with the capacity for the latter.

I do not know which to prefer,

The beauty of inflections

Or the beauty of innuendoes,

The blackbird whistling

Or just after.

–Wallace Stevens, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

A sequence of 50 photographs by Sean Wilkinson, shown in conjunction with the following text.

It is a curious medium, with its illusory relationship with truth and its peculiar relationship with time, its contingent relationship with reality, its singular relationship with Things, and its essential, elemental relationship with light. There is in photographs an odd conflation of intimacy and distance, the real and the surreal, and of revelation and deception. I am drawn to each of these qualities in their own right as well as their contradictions and the impossibility of reconciling them completely.

Although it is used primarily as a tool for knowing about things, it can also be a way of knowing. The best paintings, photographs, and poems are not good merely or even primarily because they are about something. They are good in themselves.

At its best, photography is both a process and a product through which we can become more aware. It enables us to discover what we would not have seen, even had we stood directly in front of the things it depicts. It is a medium of transformation as much as it is one of information.

Like language, photography is most often used for purely quotidian purposes. Both are expended primarily on banalities. Both appear quite simple, although these appearances belie subtleties and complexities of infinite scope and gradation.

Making photographs is one of the ways in which I learn best, not so much about what I photograph, but about being alert to possibility, about being receptive, and about perceiving correspondences between the Things of this world and my own state of mind, the presence of my body, and the condition of my heart.

Physicality is essential to the way in which I work. Making photographs for me is inseparable from movement, from walking around, and shifting my point of view by traveling inches or miles. The ideal condition, as far as I am concerned, is to lose myself so completely in my work that time disappears and I am alive to everything around me. It becomes a kind of ecstatic meditation on the possible.

Photography is a matter of making choices. It is not about anything other than making choices. But the choices you make have more to do with feeling your way forward, alert and instinctive as an animal navigating unfamiliar terrain, than with rational decision. This is also true when dealing with the images that result from such foraging and gathering. You have to pay attention to what they tell you. They are nearly always smarter, more subtle, and more aware than you are. You also have to accept the inevitability of abundant failure. This in turn means constant vigilance and mistrusting illusions of success, which the medium supplies so readily. And you have to do this not so much as an intellectual process, but more as a matter of faith that is being perpetually put to the test.

“Poetry must resist the intelligence almost successfully.”

–Wallace Stevens

Conclusion

We have wandered far from the liberating voices of birds to explore some questionable ideas about place and things and being, about knowing and awareness, art, insanity, dialogue, language, and photography. But before I draw this to a close, I will disclaim responsibility for everything I have offered.

Secretaries

I am no more than a secretary of the invisible thing

That is dictated to me and a few others.

Secretaries, mutually unknown, we walk the earth

Without much comprehension. Beginning a phrase in the middle

Or ending it with a comma. And how it all looks when completed

Is not up to us to inquire, we won’t read it anyway.

–Czeslaw Milosz

Quotations and Fragments
But because truly being here is so much; because everything here

apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way

keeps calling us. Us, the most fleeting of all.

Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too,

just once. And never again. But to have been

this once, completely, even if only once:

to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.

–Rainer Maria Rilke, from “The Ninth Elegy,” Duino Elegies, translated from the German by Stephen Mitchell

The acquisition of knowledge, the accumulation of fact, is noble only in those few who have the alchemy which transmutes such clay to heavenly eternal gold. … It is only the wonderful traveller who sees a wonder…

–John Masefield, from his Introduction to The Travels of Marco Polo

What one seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration.

–Elizabeth Bishop

The object of painting a picture is not to make a picture — however unreasonable this may sound. The picture, if a picture results, is a by-product and may be useful, valuable, interesting as a sign of what has passed. The object, which is back of every true work of art, is the attainment of a state of being, a state of high functioning, a more than ordinary moment of existence.

–Robert Henri, The Art Spirit

I could not give an adequate definition of reality, but I do know that I feel most real, most in the world, when I can achieve double vision. When I am able, in other words, to compound involvement and detachment.

–Sven Birkerts

The most important aspects of things are hidden from us by virtue of their simplicity and familiarity.

–Erich Heller, Wittgenstein and Nietzsche

We’re never single-minded, unperplexed, like migratory birds.

–Rainer Maria Rilke, from “The Fourth Elegy,’ Duino Elegies, translated from the German by Stephen Spender

I am a part of all that I have met;

Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’

Gleams that untravell’d world, whose margin fades

For ever and for ever when I move.

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,

To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!

–Alfred Lord Tennyson, Ulysses

I have a commonplace book for facts and another for poetry, but I find it difficult always to preserve the vague distinction which I had in mind, for the most interesting and beautiful facts are so much the more poetry and that is their success.

–Henry David Thoreau, from “Journal” 18 Feb 1852

There was a child went forth every day,

And the first object he looked upon and received with

wonder or pity or love or dread, that object he became,

And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of the day . . . .

or for many years or stretching cycles of years.

–Walt Whitman, from “A Child Went Forth,” Leaves of Grass (1855)

Don’t be bored, don’t be lazy, don’t be trivial, and don’t be proud. The slightest loss of attention leads to death.

–Frank O’Hara

I learn by going where I have to go.

–Theodore Roethke

On s’engage et puis on voit.

–Napoleon

Photography is a system of picture making in which subject and form are identical and indistinguishable, in which the subject and the picture are beyond argument the same thing. But what interests me most about this would be a corollary which states that the function of the photographer is to decide what his subject is. I mean that is his only function.

–John Szarkowski

The hard-pressed natural man will not indulge his imagination unless it poses for truth; and being half aware of this imposition, he is more troubled at the thought of being deceived than at the fact of being mechanized or being bored; and he would wish to escape imagination altogether.

–George Santayana

The average business man would be in every way a more admirable, more respected being if his imaginative life were not so squalid and incoherent.

–Roger Fry, Vision and Design

One is taught to oppose the real and the imaginary, as though the first were always at hand and the second distant, far away. This opposition is false. Events are always to hand. But the coherence of these events — which is what one means by reality — is an imaginative construction.

–John Berger, And our faces, my heart, brief as photos

I have never bitten into a chunk of army bread without marveling that this coarse and heavy concoction can transform itself into blood and warmth, and perhaps into courage. Alas, why does my mind, even in its best days, never possess but a particle of the assimilative powers of the body?

–Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian

There is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves.

–Richard Rorty

First you learn your instrument. Then you learn music. Then you forget both of those and just blow.

–Dizzy Gillespie

The ordinary is the proper domain of the artist, the extraordinary can safely be left to journalists.

–James Joyce

When I’m painting and I start to think, everything collapses.

–Paul Cézanne

[Cézanne] was the first who dared assert that the purpose of art was not to express an ideal, whether religious or moral or humanistic, but simply to be humble before nature, and to render the forms which close observation could disentangle from vague visual impressions.

–Herbert Read, The Redemption of the Robot

Stare. It is the way to educate your eye, and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.

–Walker Evans

For the sake of a single poem you must see many cities, many people and Things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and know the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning. You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighborhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you had long seen coming; to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained, … to days in quiet, restrained rooms and to mornings by the sea…

–Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

We must not seek to be anything but to become everything.

–Johann Wolgang von Goethe

Love

Love means to learn to look at yourself

The way one looks at distant things

For you are only one thing among many.

And whoever sees that way heals his heart,

Without knowing it, from various ills—

A bird and a tree say to him: Friend.

Then he wants to use himself and things

So that they stand in the glow of ripeness.

It doesn’t matter whether he knows what he serves:

Who serves best doesn’t always understand.

–Czeslaw Milosz