As a kid, I was a bad painter.
While painting, whenever a brush stroke offered me something interesting or beautiful to me, I would be slightly offended, because I hadn’t envisioned and ordered it myself, and then I’d go in and try to make it my own, snuff out whatever had been coming to life with my explicating brush. In Gen-X playground parlance, “If I wanted your opinion, I’d beat it out of you.”
And that, precisely, was what made my paintings bad and boring and dead to the eye. Good painting is precisely collaboration with the paint’s own ideas. It is a dance of activity and receptivity and reciprocity.
Each medium has its own optimal center of gravity, which is the heart of its own craft — what draws an artist to work in that medium, rather than in another.
So, I was much better suited to pen and ink. I listened better to what ink images suggested to me — maybe because those images emerged from materials more obedient to my hand’s will. These suggestions came from something that felt under my control. Paint defied control, and I was too materially misogynist to accept that kind of resistance. I wanted a nice submissive material, not a raging mood-swinging lunatic with a headful of intuitions of who-knows-what ambushing (ambrushing) me with her visions.
(Damn. Maybe I should try painting again!)
But all this is preface to another idea.
The same thing can happen with ideas — especially symbolic ideas with visual origins.
It is entirely possible to “have” thoughts with their own agency — ideas who can collaborate with you, or who might refuse to collaborate — or who can haunt, mock or reject you. Visually inspired ideas can sit, silently watching, waiting for you to wake up.
There is still the bad painter’s impulse in me. Something intellectually misogynistic in me wants to control my more autonomous ideas with explication — to hold them until they are clearly, explicitly understood — to not stop short at poetic opacity.
But is poetry really opaque? Maybe poetry is unclear because instead of transmitting ideas, or reflecting them, they emit living light of their their own. Poetic speech is autonomous speech.
I feel that this strange dialectic Sefirot I drew is trying to tell me all this.
She started out with someone else, but with me, she started intimating new truths.
I think I will print this new Sefirot.
The plate arrives today.
Some quotes I’ve quoted before:
Bob Dylan:
At dawn my lover comes to me
And tells me of her dreams
With no attempt to shovel the glimpse
Into the ditch of what each one means
At times I think there are no words
But these to tell what’s true
But there are no truths outside
The gates of Eden
Nietzsche:
Supposing truth is a woman — what then? Are there not grounds for the suspicion that all philosophers, insofar as they were dogmatists, have been very inexpert about women? that the gruesome seriousness, the clumsy obtrusiveness with which they have usually approached truth so far have been awkward and very improper methods for winning a woman’s heart? What is certain is that she has not allowed herself to be won: — and today every kind of dogmatism is left standing dispirited and discouraged. If it is left standing at all! For there are scoffers who claim that it has fallen, that all dogmatism lies on the ground, even more, that all dogmatism is dying. Speaking seriously, there are good reasons why all philosophical dogmatizing, however solemn and definitive its airs used to be, may nevertheless have been no more than a noble childishness and tyronism; and perhaps the time is at hand when it will be comprehended again and again what actually was sufficient to furnish the cornerstone for such sublime and unconditional philosophers’ edifices as the dogmatists have built so far — any old popular superstition from time immemorial (like the soul superstition which, in the form of the subject and ego superstition, has not even yet ceased to do mischief), some play on words perhaps, a seduction by grammar, or an audacious generalization of very narrow, very personal, very human, all too human facts.
Latour, a good Mary-adoring Catholic boy:
We should not decide apriori what the state of forces will be beforehand or what will count as a force. If the word “force” appears too mechanical or too bellicose, then we can talk of weakness. It is because we ignore what will resist and what will not resist that we have to touch and crumble, grope, caress, and bend, without knowing when what we touch will yield, strengthen, weaken, or uncoil like a spring. But since we all play with different fields of force and weakness, we do not know the state of force, and this ignorance may be the only thing we have in common.
One person, for instance, likes to play with wounds. He excels in following lacerations to the point where they resist and uses catgut under the microscope with all the skill at his command to sew the edges together. Another person likes the ordeal of battle. He never knows beforehand if the front will weaken or give way. He likes to reinforce it at a stroke by dispatching fresh troops. He likes to see his troops melt away before the guns and then see how they regroup in the shelter of a ditch to change their weakness into strength and turn the enemy column into a scattering rabble. This woman likes to study the feelings that she sees on the faces of the children whom she treats. She likes to use a word to soothe worries, a cuddle to settle fears that have gripped a mind. Sometimes the fear is so great that it overwhelms her and sets her pulse racing. She does not know whether she will get angry or hit the child. Then she says a few words that dispel the anguish and turn it into fits of laughter. This is how she gives sense to the words “resist” or “give way.” This is the material from which she learns the meaning of the word “reality.” Someone else might like to manipulate sentences: mounting words, assembling them, holding them together, watching them acquire meaning from their order or lose meaning because of a misplaced word. This is the material to which she attaches herself, and she likes nothing more than when the words start to knit themselves together so that it is no longer possible to add a word without resistance from all the others. Are words forces? Are they capable of fighting, revolting, betraying, playing, or killing?
Yes indeed, like all materials, they may resist or give way. It is materials that divide us, not what we do with them. If you tell me what you feel when you wrestle with them, I will recognize you as an alter ego even if your interests are totally foreign to me.
One person, for example, likes white sauce in the way that the other loves sentences. He likes to watch the mixture of flour and butter changing as milk is carefully added to it. A satisfyingly smooth paste results, which flows in strips and can be poured onto grated cheese to make a sauce. He loves the excitement of judging whether the quantities are just right, whether the time of cooking is correct, whether the gas is properly adjusted. These forces are just as slippery, risky, and important as any others. The next person does not like cooking, which he finds uninteresting. More than anything else he loves to watch the resistance and the fate of cells in Agar gels. He likes the rapid movement when he sows invisible traces with a pipette in the Petri dishes. All his emotions are invested in the future of his colonies of cells. Will they grow? Will they perish? Everything depends on dishes 35 and 12, and his whole career is attached to the few mutants able to resist the dreadful ordeal to which they have been subjected. For him this is “matter,” this is where Jacob wrestles with the Angel. Everything else is unreal, since he sees others manipulate matter that he does not feel himself. Another researcher feels happy only when he can transform a perfect machine that seems immutable to everyone else into a disorderly association of forces with which he can play around. The wing of the aircraft is always in front of the aileron, but he renegotiates the obvious and moves the wing to the back. He spends years testing the solidity of the alliances that make his dreams impossible, dissociating allies from each other, one by one, in patience or anger. Another person enjoys only the gentle fear of trying to seduce a woman, the passionate instant between losing face, being slapped, finding himself trapped, or succeeding. He may waste weeks mapping the contours of a way to attain each woman. He prefers not to know what will happen, whether he will come unstuck, climb gently, fall back in good order, or reach the temple of his wishes.
So we do not value the same materials, but we like to do the same things with them — that is, to learn the meaning of strong and weak, real and unreal, associated or dissociated. We argue constantly with one another about the relative importance of these materials, their significance and their order of precedence, but we forget that they are the same size and that nothing is more complex, multiple, real, palpable, or interesting than anything else. This materialism will cause the pretty materialisms of the past to fade. With their layers of homogeneous matter and force, those past materialisms were so pure that they became almost immaterial.
No, we do not know what forces there are, nor their balance. We do not want to reduce anything to anything else. …
Nietzsche, again:
Alas, what are you after all, my written and painted thoughts! It was not long ago that you were still so colorful, young, and malicious, full of thorns and secret spices — you made me sneeze and laugh — and now? You have already taken off your novelty, and some of you are ready, I fear, to become truths: they already look so immortal, so pathetically decent, so dull! And has it ever been different? What things do we copy, writing and painting, we mandarins with Chinese brushes, we immortalizers of things that can be written — what are the only things we are able to paint? Alas, always only what is on the verge of withering and losing its fragrance! Alas, always only storms that are passing, exhausted, and feelings that are autumnal and yellow! Alas, always only birds that grew weary of flying and flew astray and now can be caught by hand — by our hand! We immortalize what cannot live and fly much longer — only weary and mellow things! And it is only your afternoon, you, my written and painted thoughts, for which alone I have colors, many colors perhaps, many motley caresses and fifty yellows and browns and greens and reds: but nobody will guess from that how you looked in your morning, you sudden sparks and wonders of my solitude, you my old beloved — wicked thoughts!
A last sad reflection on the professional work I am trying to do.
I too love to play with materials, and they are some very strange materials.
The materials I love are perplexities — that soul-wracking migraine liminality, hovering like a heat mirage on the outer edges of intelligibility.
Organizational conflict, chaos, anomie, dysfunction generate collective perplexity. So this is where I go.
My job — though nobody knows it, or even knows how to know it — is to air-drop into perplexed organizations, figure out the lay of the land, waters, forests, and navigate my way out by finding new ways to understand — all the while mapping what I find.
Meanwhile, I am dodging both hostile and friendly fire. I am shouted at: “Show us where you are going! You are supposed to be an expert, so where is your map? What is your route? Show your turn by turn directions!”
Some clients figure it out, and become travel companions.
Some refuse to come along until you’ve shown them what can only be shown when the work has been done.
Some frag you in some muddy ditch somewhere on the edge of a frozen forest. “You are drawing a map as you navigate in places you don’t even know. Not only do you not have the answers, or a solution — you don’t even have questions. You don’t even know the problem!”
ack ack ack ack
One last quote, perhaps my most overquoted quote of all, Wittgenstein’s definition of a philosophical problem:
A philosophical problem has the form: “I don’t know my way about.”
You cannot say this, so I do say it to anyone with ears that hear.
My life sucks, and it is glorious.