39 Microlectures, page 5
One might say that we face a landscape of vistas opening only onto more vistas. On the threshold of this landscape we might pause to recall the writer Isaac Babel who described his grandmother’s sobering admonition when, as a child, he told her he wanted to grow up to be a writer, and she replied, “To be a writer, you must know everything.”
Faced with the impossibility of the task of knowing everything, we sometimes feel the desire to reject intellectuality altogether in favor of passionate expression. Such expression may take the form of the urgently political, the assertion of a solidified identity, or the following of individual inspiration wherever it may lead. And yet even these roads, if sincerely followed lead back to the discourse of complexity.
We have no choice but to accept this terrain, with the hope of discovering its exhilarating creative possibilities. Such acceptance requires a softening of the dividing lines between traditional differences: artist and critic, passion and intellect, accessible and hermetic, success and failure.
The softening of dividing lines does not however imply the disintegration of difference. Take for example the problem of glass. What is glass? Until recently, glass was considered a mostly transparent solid. It behaved like a solid; if struck, it shattered. But then, in the ancient cathedrals of Europe, it was observed that the tops of windows let in more light than the bottoms. A simple measurement proved that a window of once uniform thickness had grown thicker at the bottom and thinner at the top. Only one explanation exists for this phenomenon. Glass flows in the direction of the pull of gravity, exhibiting the behavior of a liquid. Thus one cannot conclusively define glass without the inclusion of time. At any given moment, glass is a solid, but over a period of one thousand years, it is a liquid. The problem of glass forces us to accept the inaccuracy of the traditional distinctions of solid or liquid. While the qualities of solidity and liquidity retain their difference, glass in fact is both, depending on the duration of observation, thus proving that these two states inextricably coexist.
We must ask not only how to engage the critical mind, but also why. Any act of critical thought finds its value through fulfilling one or both of two interrelated purposes:
to cause a change;
to understand how to understand.
As creative and critical thinkers, we may find it rewarding to attempt works of criticism, which, over time, reveal themselves as works of art, thus following the example of glass.
2.2 THE EXAMPLE OF WINDOWS
Most critics would not contest the idea that criticism exists to cause a change. But to cause a change in what?
Rarely has a work of critical thought successfully caused a change in the artwork it addresses. If a critic sees a film one day, and writes a review the next excoriating the weakness of the lead actor’s performance, that same critic could return to the theater on the third day, and, despite the conviction of his argument, encounter the actor’s performance unchanged. The same holds true for countless examples: condemned paintings, ridiculed concertos, buildings of reviled design, all survive, oblivious. Yet critics continue to offer their views. What are they trying to change?
Perhaps they attempt to change the future by effecting audience perceptions. If they can convince enough people, they believe they will achieve critical mass, causing an elimination of the despised, and an encouragement of the admired. But is this an accurate assessment of events? A critique may influence the thoughts of many audience members, but in the end they will make up their own minds. And those few powerful individuals who function in a producing capacity have the option of following the will of the majority, the minority, whatever sells the most tickets, or the advice of the critic. In this equation, the critic’s power seems slight. If a critic believes in his or her own power to cause a change in audience thinking, that critic lives in delusion. Any changes of this kind are peripheral effects of a more central event.
Criticism only consistently changes the critic – whether further narrowing the views of the art policeman, or incrementally expanding the horizons of the open-minded thinker. If we accept this severe limitation – that in fact the first function of criticism is to cause a change in the critic – then we may begin to act accordingly.
We may agree on the premise that each work of art is at least in part perfect, while each critic is at least in part imperfect. We may then look to each work of art not for its faults and shortcomings, but for its moments of exhilaration, in an effort to bring our own imperfections into sympathetic vibration with these moments, and thus effect a creative change in ourselves. These moments will of course be somewhat subjective, and if we don’t see one immediately, we will out of respect look again, because each work contains at least one, even if it occurs by accident. We may look at the totality of the work in the light of this moment – whether it be a moment of humor or sadness, an overarching structural element, a mood, a personal association, a distraction, an honest error, anything at all that speaks to us. In this way we will treat the work of art, in the words of South African composer Kevin Volans, not as an object in this world but as a window into another world. If we can articulate one window’s particular exhilaration, we may open a way to inspire a change in ourselves, so that we may value and work from these recognitions.
What I advocate is not so unusual, because if we have been trained at all, we have probably been trained to spot the negatives, and to try to improve the work by eliminating them. Given, as we have established, that criticism always changes the critic, this approach means trouble. Whatever we fix our attention on seems to multiply before our eyes. If we look for problems, we will find them everywhere. Out of concern for ourselves and our psychic well-being, let us look instead for the aspects of wonder.
If others choose to change their own thinking as an inspired result of our critical articulations, or if they decide to dismiss us as idealists, that is their business, and we will leave it to them.
But can we recognize windows to other worlds without some formal, historical, or theoretical understanding of what we are looking at? If we deepen our understanding, might we increase our chances of locating these moments? How do we deepen our understanding?
We may think of critical thought itself as a process through which we deepen our understanding. This brings us to the second proposed function of criticism, to understand how to understand.
2.3 THE EXAMPLE OF RAIN
How do we understand something? We understand something by approaching it. How do we approach something? We approach it from any direction. We approach it using our eyes, our ears, our noses, our intellects, our imaginations. We approach it with silence. We approach it with childhood. We use pain or embarassment. We use history. We take a safe route or a dangerous one. We discover our approach and we follow it.
In his 1968 essay ‘Rain and the Rhinoceros’, the American Trappist monk Thomas Merton attempted to understand Eugene Ionesco’s play Rhinoceros by comparing it to the rain. Trappist monks take vows of silence. They almost never speak. In keeping with their silent life, they live in a silent place. The sound of the rain on the tin roof of his isolated monastic cabin in the Kentucky woods must have given Merton the only inspiration he needed to approach Ionesco’s rhinoceros. And when the rain stopped, he heard the sound of the military airplane overhead, leaving the nearby base, on its way to Vietnam. When the airplane passed, he heard the hiss of his lantern burning. The rain provided the window to the rhinoceros, and the rhinoceros the window to the rain. The essay’s analysis balances the work of art, with the work of nature, with the work of war. Merton understood critical thought as an act of contemplation, not an act of production. At the same time, he understood it to be, like all human activity, absurd. And thus he liberated his critical mind to follow whatever might cross its path. As the zen saying goes, no matter where we go, we are never far from enlightenment.
How then can we understand the rain? We can understand it as a scientist might, by studying climatic conditions and learning the Latin names for clouds. Or we may understand the rain by looking at it and how it falls – straight down, or at an angle, or lashed by the wind. Is it a light drizzly rain, or is it only a mist and hardly rain at all? Is it the kind that falls when the sun is shining just down the street? We could understand rain by examining its effects – on plants, on people, on cities. Or we may catalogue the sounds it makes on glass, on water, on stone, on metal. We could even study the moods it evokes before it has started and after it has stopped. We could not look at it directly, but rather at what it reminds us of – childhood, violence, love, tears. Who could tell us that any of these approaches to rain is not valid? And yet we would be the first to admit their absurdity.
The modernists believed that each work of art somehow outstretches interpretation, that each criticism reduces the infinite possibilities of the work, that no critique is exhaustive. I agree to the extent that the opposite is also true – each artwork reduces its critique. Only when criticism can step a little away from the artwork that fostered it will it achieve a life of its own as a way of understanding. The way a critique discovers and explores becomes as personal, intellectual, and creative as any artwork; not to offer a comprehensive analysis of the rain, but instead one singular approach to it. Thus it might return us to our first purpose, that of causing a change. If our critique of rain allows us a different rain experience, then it has caused a change, if not in the rain, at least in the critic. And as our approaches to the rain increase, so too increases our understanding of the fleeting and fragile qualities of human life. And as our ways of understanding the rain multiply, so too will we begin to see the presence of rain in even the driest of subjects. We will realize at last that our objective all along was to understand that it is always raining.
3. PEDAGOGY
3.1 The unlearnable
3.2 Anthem
3.3 The ceremony
3.1 THE UNLEARNABLE
Suppose a young person wishes to learn the alphabet.
On a favorable day, this young person journeys to the home of a chosen teacher, carrying some modest gifts along.
The student then sits respectfully in front of the teacher.
The teacher begins a three-part ritual.
First, the teacher invokes the spirit of science. Second, the teacher recites the lesson of the thirty letters of the alphabet. When this is over, before dismissing the student, the teacher requests that together they repeat a long phrase of apparently nonsense syllables, the meaning of which remains unexplained to the student. This final step is meant to cause an increase of mental ability.
As a ceremony is considered indispensable to prepare one for the study of the alphabet, it may readily be seen that higher knowledge is not imparted without serious preliminaries.
So wrote the scholarly traveller Alexandra David-Neel of learning rituals in Tibet in 1931. In many ways, we may recognize our own rituals of learning reflected in this small episode.
The first step of choosing the right day, the right teacher, and the appropriate gifts, may sound familiar to those of us who function in administrative capacities. The lesson of the alphabet itself may reflect the experience of those of us involved in the disciplines of the sciences, mathematics, and other so-called objective fields, perhaps skeptical of the ceremonial and ritualized. The ceremonial form, on the other hand, represents a kind of performance, and those of us in the arts recognize this as an aspect which we stress, in various forms and disciplines, in our classrooms. In this episode, science and art merge; science provides, as it were, the content, and art supplies the form.
But where in our Western approaches do we find a reflection of the third and final stage of the lesson, the deliberate and careful recitation of a formula with no apparent meaning or purpose? Although the author states that this phrase is meant “to cause an increase of mental ability," she does not say why or how this practice came about. She takes for granted the complexity of a phenomenon so foreign to our way of thinking that, if not for careful consideration of the passage, we might overlook it entirely.
Yet this aspect of the described learning ritual, places the meaningful in the context of the meaningless. It shows the teaching of a lesson in the light of the unteachable. It presents us with the frightening possibility that learning only takes place in the presence of the unlearnable.
3.2 ANTHEM
It is Friday, June 21, 1996. The members of Goat Island are teaching the first day of a three-day performance workshop with local theater artists in Zagreb, Croatia. In a few hours time, the participants, divided into small collaborative groups, have assembled rough performances using material generated from movement, sound, and writing exercises.
In the discussion following the performances, a conflict ensues.
A man with a serious but somewhat blank expression and large glasses, has told us to call him Fedja. It isn’t his real name, but as Americans, we would find his real name unpronouncable.
Fedja walked into the workshop room moments before the performances were to take place. We assigned him to a group and asked that they include him. Some conversation transpired among them in Croatian. Soon an agreement seemed to have been reached. Fedja then removed a drawer from an old desk which was in the room. He cleaned the drawer with paper towels, and placed it to one side of the performance space. He removed his shoes and socks, rolled his pantlegs to mid-calf, and appeared ready to begin.
The performance started. Two women had a dialogue, two men portrayed the wind, another man portrayed a car. Fedja began to hum “The Star Spangled Banner" very loudly while repeatedly climbing into and out of the desk drawer. At times his humming completely drowned out the dialogue. After about three minutes, as the performance reached its conclusion, Fedja also concluded the song by standing in the desk drawer and bellowing, “AND HOME OF THE BRAVE.”
In the discussion I ask Fedja why he had chosen to do what he did.
He explains, “I felt the performance of the two women, the wind, and the car had such a straightforward storyline, that it needed an element which did not relate at all. The audience could decide for themselves whether this element was surreal, comical, part of the story, or an absurdity.”
I say to Fedja, “Given that you felt the performance needed this kind of oppositional element, how was it exactly that you arrived at the action of singing ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ while climbing into a desk drawer?”
Fedja replies, “I tried singing Mozart’s ‘Don Giovanni,’ but my group told me to try something with more drama.”
At this point, the conflict begins.
Sinisa, another workshop participant, who observed Fedja’s performance, objects as follows: “One cannot sing an anthem in a performance of this kind, because an anthem is not a performance, but a command. An anthem commands the performer and the audience. It does not come from the inside. It comes from the outside. In fact, a performer does not sing an anthem. Instead, the anthem sings the performer.”
Fedja listens with his blank expression.
Lin addresses the objection by saying, “One works toward finding levels, and building layers of meaning. Whether material comes from the inside or the outside, it all adds up to different levels of meaning.”
On Saturday, June 22, day two of the Zagreb workshop, we assemble the participants into smaller groups, and instruct them to create new pieces drawn from yesterday’s work in combination with photographic images that we give them. Lin has clipped these photos from newspapers over the years. Sinisa’s group receives a photo of men who look like coal miners, standing, facing in one direction, each holding his left fist clenched against his left temple. Some have their mouths open.
When the pieces are presented in the afternoon, Sinisa’s group, including Goran and Gabrijela, take the position of the men in the photo, holding their fists to their heads. They begin singing “The Internationale,” the communist anthem. Various interruptions prevent them from finishing the song: Gabrijela collapses, and Goran and Sinisa must lift her up and clean her ears with small cloths to revive her; Goran gets stung by an imaginary bee; Sinisa briefly transforms into a bird and flies around the room. The singing of “The Internationale” becomes an unfinishable task.
In the discussion period, I ask Sinisa how he overcame his aversion to using an anthem in a performance.
He replies, “I thought about it longer, and I thought, ‘Why not?’”
“Let me explain,” he continues, “In psychology, this phenomenon is called reverse projection. Fedja has a very creative mind. I see him sing an anthem. I never would have thought of this. I transform my own inability into a rule, which I then impose on his behavior to try to stop him from being so creative. I project my own shortcomings onto another. When I think about it more, I think why not use it? It’s a good idea. I don’t have to be so original. I’ll try it myself. The men in the photo looked to me like they were singing. So I thought let’s try it. After all, when we collaborate like this, we have to remember our objective, which is to create a jam.”
“A jam?” I ask. “What do you mean, a jam?”
“You know,” says Sinisa. “Like a traffic jam.”
And suddenly Goran interjects, “Yes, we began working and we had no ideas at all. Nothing makes sense, but we keep working and nobody tells us we’re doing anything wrong, and then at last something good starts to happen. We discuss our possibilities, and we say, ‘What should it be? It can be anything. Should it be ball? No. Should it be car? No. Should it be Eiffel Tower? Yes!’ And then everyone knows Eiffel Tower it is, but we don’t know why, and we go on, and it is right. It is like a miracle.”
3.3 THE CEREMONY
