Paradoxically, impossibly, “stillness is the move.” Or so says the band Dirty Projectors, in my favorite song on their album Bitte Orca. The oxymoron is, of course, a play on words–how can something be at once still and moving? (Pace physicists, I’m not talking relativity here.) It’s a common kind of bon mot, delivered with an ironic tone; it’s aware of its self-contradiction. To a wider audience, it’s the kind of pun that maybe comes across as funny, if noticed at all. Although, someone who fits the bill of Freud’s anally retentive personality might linger on this turn of phrase precisely for its paradox. Someone like a philosopher or a student of language. So that’s what I’m going to do. How can stillness be the move?
Reading 1: Stillness, the Move is.
Though things are constantly changing their appearances, not much happens. Life is left empty. In everyday language one might say, “the move is in fact still,” or, in yoda-speak, where predicates precede their subjects, “stillness, the move is.” Given the upbeat tone of the song, this nihilistic reading seems unlikely.
Reading 2: Stillness is “the-Move”
The-right-way-to-be is to be still. This reading uses post-hippie slang to substitute for “the-Move” a more abstract concept: the-right-way-to-be. This slang likely developed in the latter half of the last century, after Eastern philosophy was imported and diluted in the States. Through translation, the Taoist concept of the-Way, or Wu-Wei, becomes “the-Move.” (Depending on how surprising you find this slang etymology, you may even respond: no way, dude.) Given the laid-back attitude of the song, as well as its general indie/alt context, let’s assume that this second, Taoist Way is the correct reading. Let’s even be generous enough to assume that the reference was intentional when Yalie, David Longstreth, penned these lyrics.
“The Way” assumes that there is a natural tendency, a “flow,” to the order of events–such that joy is an ease experienced when one’s behavior is most closely aligned to that tendency. Though change occurs, it induces very little strain–it’s more like being carried by life than it is carrying one’s life. When one follows “the Move” one experiences Stillness, in much the same way that a floating body might travel along a current without moving its limbs.
The song’s lyrics offer the basics of Taoism. Basic 1: desire never achieves its end, but becomes only another beginning. “On top of every mountain there was a great longing for another even higher mountain//in each city longing for a bigger city.” Basic 2: As a result of Basic 1, one must learn to appreciate the process over one’s destination–or, as the song puts it: “I’ll see you along the way baby//The stillness is the move.” Okay, so ambition’s overrated, life’s not about what I’m able to achieve; instead, it’s about having you next to me, sweetheart.
If you are repulsed by the generic quality of the argument and its unquestioned assumptions–process over duration, companionship over ambition–then I would have to agree with you. I find that certainty is frequently permitted by forgetfulness, even though it can only be earned through experience, i.e. memory. More licenses are taken than are deserved, and hence the proliferation of platitudes. Sincerity–by which I mean the layman’s earnest promise about what life is, a promise which is tragically and uncritically the repetition of comme il faut–is loathsome to the extent that it demonstrates this naivety. I do not like this elitism, but I myself cannot avoid it. Thinking comes more quickly to me than affirmation, yet I remain uncertain whether this is a talent or a dysfunction.
To return to the matter at hand (determining how stillness could ever be “the-Move”), the opening lines of the song tell us: “When the child was just a child, it did not know what it was. Like a child it had no habits, no opinion on anything.” Okay, better to be blissfully forgetful than an enlightened neurotic. Oh, to be young and innocent again. Yada, yada, yada. Or, to give a bit more credit, let’s focus on the fact that the child had no habits. The perhaps unintentional equating of opinions with habits indicates a more sophisticated form of Taoism, one which commends flexibility of presence and of preference, akin to a child’s curious neuro-plasticity. But what precisely is this curiosity? What behaviors exhibit this quality?
When I hear, “Stillness is the Move,” I think about the following event. The philosopher Jacques Derrida, interviewed in his home by his student, is asked, upon entering his enormous library: “Have you read these books?” At first, Derrida hears an emphasis on “these books,” such that his first response is to distance himself from some dime-a-dozen fiction: “no, these were gifts.” The question is repeated, in an altered form, one that expresses greater admiration, “Have you read all these books?” He gives an ironic answer: no, he has not read all, or even most, of these books–“just three or four. But I read those four really, really well.”
The event recalls how, in works like Archive Fever, Derrida wrestled with the question of what gets preserved, what gets written down, and what–in turn–gets read. Archive Fever cites from Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, where Freud displayed a rare instance of self-doubt: “In none of my previous writings have I had so strong a feeling as now that what I am describing is common knowledge and that I am using up paper and ink and, in due course, the compositor’s and printer’s work and material in order to expound things which are, in fact, self-evident.”
Okay, we must be careful with what we read. We must choose carefully how we spend our time. We must not waste our pen and ink, nor waste the reader’s time. Or, as Nabokov put it: “My pencils outlast their erasers.” We have at hand the narcissism of writing, and the dilemma it presents to any self-aware presenter. Derrida is himself faced with that narcissism, when he becomes the object of his student’s scrutiny, when his library is caught on camera. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then how much must a picture of a library be worth?
The image of the celebrity-philologist and his all-consuming library is already a common trope. Jose Luis Borges begins his Norton Lectures with the quip: “Whenever I walk into a bookstore and find a book on one of my hobbies—for example, Old English or Old Norse poetry—I say to myself, ‘What a pity I can’t buy that book, for I already have a copy at home.'” One could also remember Borges’s short story, “The Library of Babel,” where the written word forms an endless maze. Or, another, popular video of the novelist/historian/analyst Umberto Eco surrounded by his books–so many of them that it takes him minutes to travel from one book to another!
Hence, Andrew Marvell’s indelible pick-up line To His Coy Mistress: “Had we but World enough, and Time…” Or, to stick with the Early Moderns, Polonius, Shakespeare’s mouthpiece, reminds aspiring orators that: “brevity is the soul of wit.” As always, Shakespeare is getting us somewhere: the goal is to consolidate, to collapse a wide array of experiences into a single moment. Better to read well a few good books, than to speed through a thousand tomes of lesser-quality.
Derrida’s quip echoes Montaigne, specifically his Essai on Liars:
“There is not a man living whom it would so little become to speak from memory as myself, for I have scarcely any at all, and do not think that the world has another so marvelously treacherous as mine. My other faculties are all sufficiently ordinary and mean; but in this I think myself very rare and singular, and deserving to be thought famous. Besides the natural inconvenience I suffer by it (for, certes, the necessary use of memory considered, Plato had reason when he called it a great and powerful goddess), in my country, when they would say a man has no sense, they say, such an one has no memory; and when I complain of the defect of mine, they do not believe me, and reprove me, as though I accused myself for a fool: not discerning the difference betwixt memory and understanding, which is to make matters still worse for me. But they do me wrong; for experience, rather, daily shows us, on the contrary, that a strong memory is commonly coupled with infirm judgment.”
Ah, better to understand than to remember. Better to be wise than knowledgeable. Inexplicably, all the reading of Montaigne’s life does not amount to a great unfurling scroll, nor an impenetrable library; instead, it presents itself–instantly–as his good faculty of judgment.
And here I jump again, as I am reminded of a tale from Italo Calvino’s own Norton Lecture, on the virtue of Quickness:
“Among Chuang-Tzu’s many skills, he was an expert draftsman. The king asked him to draw a crab. Chuang-Tzu replied that he needed five years, a country house, and twelve servants. Five years later the drawing was still not begun. ‘I need another five years,’ said Chuang-Tzu. The king granted them. At the end of these ten years, Chuang-Tzu took up his brush and, in an instant, with a single stroke, he drew a crab, the most perfect crab ever seen.”
The parable of Chuang-Tzu (back to Taoism!) teaches us that we have no receipts for our self-investments, no readily producible proof of our learning and growth. We do not understand Calvino’s tale unless we realize that those ten years are a part of Chuang-Tzu’s artistic process, even though he has not yet touched the brush. And such is the potato-like quality of thought, which bears its fruits beneath the soil.
But now we have travelled quite far from Derrida’s remark, and even further from Dirty Projectors’s title, “Stillness is the Move.” This leads me, precisely, to the question I wish to ask, which is: what does it mean to read a few books but read them well–what is going on when one says that one is reading, “deeply,” “closely,” or “slowly?” On the one hand, I could say that jumping from one author to another as I have just done amounts to a brash, “quick” reading. On the other, I could argue that each of these references is worthwhile, as each reference, and each in its own way, attempts to demonstrate the dilemma of whether to read many things or to read a few things well.
One might assume that reading a few things well amounts to staying with something, of lingering on a question, such that “Stillness is the Move.” But does time not move the same, whether one meditates on a single question or moves from question to question?
It is commonly argued–a la Derrida’s claim to “read well”–that the quality of reading has lessened due to post-industrial sociological pressures, such that one no longer is permitted to take one’s time, to savor or to linger. This is quite possible. The shifting images of digital advertising, the 140 characters of each Tweet, as well as the increased rate at which devices and fashions grow obsolete–these all would seem sufficient evidence for an imposed “speed” on contemporary life.
But, while sociology can document TV-watching behaviors and students’ performances on literacy tests, it cannot in answer the question of what constitutes good or close reading. Ultimately, to say that one kind of reading is better than others is to argue that some people are reading while others, truthfully, are not. Therefore, I am tempted to argue that the event of what precisely reading entails has not been sufficiently thought. The reason why, as Montaigne argues, some libraries prove useless is because some who claim to read widely are not truthfully reading when they scan through words, repeat them in their minds, and flip through pages. What I have in mind with this concept of good reading–which constitutes a process of careful thought rather than the procedural translation of words from one linguistic medium to another, such as speaking, copying, or internalizing a passage–may be closer to analyzing. We may comfortably say that we analyze behaviors, choices, events, etc., whereas it still sounds overly academic to claim that one “reads” an event or behavior. Regardless of the language used, reading or analyzing, I intend to refer to the process of dwelling-with/lingering-on a thought or question, a process which is not infrequently tiresome, such that this process offers for its users an access to in-sight.
It would be easy to claim that reading is far less fruitful than fabrication, because it has no manifest product. (Out of envy for fabrication, we call our teaching an education, an edification.) But, it remains incontrovertible to claim that there exists some event of learning, some development of intellectual maturity, even though one’s claims at understanding what this learning entails quickly prove spurious. I face this dilemma when I must assure myself that the assignments I give my students prove worthwhile as a method of acquiring literacy, even if their contents often prove far below literary. (If my students remember only the contents of their reading assignments, then in many cases they will have failed to achieve meaningful learning). The repetition of words and phrases may rightfully strike our senses as mere tedium; yet, I cannot but notice a marked difference between the communicative capacities of my younger and my older students. Surely that book learning must come in handy somewhere along the way? Surely these words and phrases must prove useful, eventually, in my students lives–as they become increasingly tasked with the job of making their own desires intelligible to others, must instruct others to enact their own imagined realms?
Again, I must assert that this interrogation of reading is not just philosophical arm-waving. The widely popular behavioral scientist and economist (and what could be less philosophical than behavioral science and economics!), Daniel Kahneman uses similar terms/concepts in his Thinking, Fast and Slow. This Nobel-prize-winning, best-selling author offers us scientific evidence for what had previously been known to us only through our own thinking. Behavioral experiments, brain scans–they all tell us the following: it is easy to make decisions quickly, but such haste risks allowing oneself to succumb to heuristics; as a result, slow/deliberative/critical thinking has a measurable impact on a thinker’s caloric burn, such that consciousness oscillates between fast/slow thinking, in order to optimize its resource-limited use of slow thinking. Finally, statistically viable data. P < .05! We can know!
Of course, what Kahneman leaves out of the story is the same question that philosophers have contemplated for some time now: “What is called thinking? [Was heißt Denken?]” Or, given current capitalist-consumerist trends, we might also say, what is the labor of thinking–especially when it has no manifest product?
Nonetheless, Kahneman’s research is fruitful, and ought not to be discounted from our present humanistic concerns simply because it prefers numeracy to literacy, graphs to depictions, tables to stanzas. Kahneman himself gripes that humans are much more fond of metaphors than they are of statistics, despite the apparent fact that statistics are more relevant for decision-making. However, I don’t buy, or at least not fully, into the humanities/STEM divide. I hear in Kahneman’s complaint a distinction between lay and professional statistics–the gambler’s fallacies and the scientist’s regressions–just as philosophers and philologists are wont to criticize the layman’s overly quick reading. In either case, the issue is still a professional discretion towards the quality of someone’s observation. We must remember that neither side of the STEM/humanities divide has monopolized professionally expressed poor judgment, nor is insight the property of any discipline.
Indeed, I find that methodologies in both the sciences and the humanities help to illustrate what occurs when “Stillness is the Move.” The similarities between statistical methods and close reading would indicate that, as is the case with any valuable study, reading closely is keeping one variable constant. Statistics are reliable only to the extent that controls are maintained. So, too, reading is reliable only to the extent that one is able to sit with a passage.
Through our everyday vernacular, we assume that the observational capacity, when at rest, is obtuse–when belabored, it becomes acute. In other words, the mental movement of reading closely/slowly/deeply is to extract a thin layer of what is otherwise a thick sheet of experience. It is to pierce that phenomenon alone of the very many that occur. I pierce the blueness of blue–such that, while the world continues to move, I have my desired object trapped and stabilized. From there, I may turn about it, or turn it about, may look at it from many angles, all the while assured that it is still it–the same and singular object, without having undergone severe alterations as a result of my observation.
When Gadamer recites Schleiermacher’s line that the goal of hermeneutics (which we can gloss as a nice term for “good reading”) is to “understand a writer better than he [sic] understood himself,” or when Koselleck argues that historical writing is always “more and less” than that about which it is writing, we find the crux of our issue. The goal of any successful analysis is to keep the object of present and past observation the same, because we can understand things better after their completion than we can ever understand them as they occur, even though knowable elements of our acts disappear when the acts themselves are done. The paradox of this more and less can never be resolved, for any resolution would require a spiritual dogma which could explain the ghostly event whereby memory makes events simultaneously past and present. By defining good reading as an improvement of the old, we denote our desire for constancy, such that our improved observations have the same objects as underwent our predecessors’ scrutiny. But here we hit another wall: again, how does one read “slowly” when the clock still moves?
The matter is somewhat more digestible, once we keep in mind Gadamer’s claim about symbolism: “the religious form of the symbol corresponds exactly to the original nature of ‘symbolon,’ the dividing of what is one and reuniting it again[,]” a symbolic form that influenced a “modern aesthetics which (since Schelling) has sought to emphasize precisely the unity of appearance and meaning in the symbolic[.]” The importance lies in that “unity of appearance and meaning,” whereby the signifier and signified are coeval. To say it differently: The tragic symbol is a great instantiation of the concept of tragedy, because its pathos is so intense that it makes the concept of tragedy visible. The great symbol or picture achieves its greatness by its capacity to make the thingness of a thing (e.g. the blueness of blue) recognizable.
Excuse me, we ought to put a hyphen there: re-cognizable. The pattern-identifying act, what makes something recognizable as an instance of a pattern, also serves to cut the event from its context, to make it a producible artifact. In a kindergarten classroom, following my teacher’s calm and helpful voice, I learn to cut blueness from the image of the cartoon bluebird before me, thereby making it re-cognizable with every instance of the word “blue.” To de-fine something is to determine its borders, its ends, its shape. It is print-making, as expressed by Warhol’s Monroe and soup-cans, which demonstrate with the repetition of shapes that the shape has (by virtue of his efforts) become a separate, reproducible entity.
With this examination, we learn that close-reading desires a kind of activity over passivity: what is desired is the capacity to make something, or to make something re-producible. Inter–pretation is literally what presses between, what separates us from the purity of the thing itself. To interpret well is to allow the thing to be held with thin gloves. To interpret is to seek what lies within things themselves. It’s isolating a phenomenon, having excavated it from its lumpy shell; it’s hammering away all that covers one’s desired prize.
So, in a letter to a friend, Kafka writes: “A book must be an axe for the frozen sea inside us.” There is a wall involved, a blockage. And this blockage is an in-sensitivity, a numbness, which must be overcome such that “we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us.” As sensitivity, reading is central to our interior nature (that “frozen sea inside us”). This interiority is further explicated by Proust’s remark that: “the only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of eternal youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, [emphasis mine] to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is.”
It’s a profound remark, but to adulate eternal youth is to risk reprising “Stillness is the Move”: “When the child was just a child, it did not know what it was.” We can idealize novelty only and always at the cost of memory. Proust’s metaphor of “new eyes” seems to carry well the dilemma of what occurs when reading. Those who read experience a miraculous change in their observational forces; their senses have been altered. We might say, with Thoreau, “the question is not what you look at, but what you see.” Though it remains an ineffable quality, we have a name for this alteration in sense: wisdom.
We ought to appreciate wisdom more than innocence, if for no other reason, because youth does not last. Despite one’s best efforts, the heart’s nature is to freeze back over its cracks; the “novelty” of one’s eyes is quick to wear out. Wisdom is felt only at the liminal moment of reading, when one is at the threshold between perspectives–when one can still feel the loss of a veil. By virtue of the fact that sight is obvious to those who are not blind, wisdom is often held by those who least realize its powers. Expressed differently, we do not know what aspects of our observational experience remain opaque or obscure for others, and it is these aspects which may accurately be called wisdom. Hence why there are many who remain poor teachers despite their knowledge. To be capable of inducing wisdom requires recognizing its presence within oneself.
It is because wisdom has a bad habit of disappearing that the most insightful comment is a good criticism. The best writing contains its opponents. We remember correctives better than rules. Insight is only ever apparent as an apt critique. The power of criticism is its ability to hold together two opposing views of the world: it contrasts a vision of how things are with the picture of how they are seen. Criticism, therefore, is valuable to the extent that it elucidates lacunae. The best teachers were rarely born prodigies; often, good teachers were once blind, and can remember their former blindness. The good teacher is one who has travelled far and can recall that journey, just as any guide must do more than remember the destination’s name; it’s not enough to know the destination or to have been there, one must remember the-Way.
However, none of this wisdom is present in a naive reading of “new eyes;” “new eyes” must always be bifocals. The problem with “new eyes” is that, within the same passage, Proust uses this term to represent both the individual who has read widely, and, at the same time, a democratic principle: each is a universe entire. The poignancy in Proust’s remark may lie in this: it is able to mollify the competing desires for compression and propagation with the promise of a shared object, i.e. these enigmatic “new eyes.” But the multiplication of perspectives gets us no closer to determining what one is; one seeks the quality of an experience, not a quantity of experiences. Proust sidesteps the issue at hand, which is to determine the quality of an event; instead, he trusts the wisdom of the crowd, “of a hundred others.” But–without their being able to become “new,” to increase in observational capacity–these hundred eyes may be oh-so-many copies of each other. Better one good eye than several poor ones: Hermes proved that hundred-eyed Argus was a bit of an idiot, didn’t he? So, we are still in the realm of hermeneutics: our goal is to “understand a writer better than he understood himself.” What we want is to see the same things but to see more in them. We must be more precise in our vision, and so it is the eye that must change–the very act/reception of sight.
If we are to assume that slow/deep/close reading comprises a precision of sight, a separation of what is utile in thinking from what is fallacious, then reading is not an event exclusive to the humanities, for trends in the physical sciences demonstrate that similar phenomena are behind its modalities of reading. If you go to an academic convention, a great deal of research posters will demonstrate the popularity of crystallography, the imaging process by which incredibly small structures are rendered static, visible. Good reading is the creation of contours; it plucks an element for careful scrutiny, just as the chemist strives to work against the bonds of naturally occurring compounds. Precision of thought and of act assumes that there is an ordering of matter, a desirable purity of being.
Insofar as it is the precise ordering of matter, close reading is a hygienic practice, thereby presuming an axiology of clean/dirty. Hygiene is matter moving in orderly lines; dirt is not eo ipso undesirable matter, but is matter that has been undesirably placed. The hierarchies of hygiene are contingent on how easily the wheat may be separated from the chaff; philosophers are valued to the extent that thinking slow is indeed difficult, to the extent that fruitful questions cling to cloying ones.
So, with this in mind, we might ask: Does the surgeon’s skill lie in proper diagnostic discernment, or in a steady hand?
This ordering of matter is at play when Hannah Arendt–in an introduction to work by Walter Benjamin, for whom she had served as an editor and translator–discusses how a good citation is like a pearl. As time flows by, the writer undergoes the slippage of thought, must sieve through that passing water, in order to find gems worth preserving.
“And this thinking, fed by the present, works with the ‘thought fragments’ it can wrest from the past and gather about itself. Like a pearl diver who descends to the bottom of the sea, not to excavate the bottom and bring it to light but to pry loose the rich and the strange, the pearls and the coral in the depths, and to carry them to the surface, this thinking delves into the depths of the past – but not in order to resuscitate it the way it was and to contribute to the renewal of extinct ages. What guides this thinking is the conviction that although the living is subject to the ruin of the time, the process of decay is at the same time a process of crystallization, that in the depth of the sea, into which sinks and is dissolved what once was alive, some things ‘suffer a sea-change’ and survive in new crystallized forms and shapes that remain immune to the elements, as though they waited only for the pearl diver who one day will come down to them and bring them up into the world of the living as ‘thought fragments,’ as something ‘rich and strange,’ and perhaps even as everlasting Urphänomene.”
If the historian reading (either a literal book, or the contents of memory) is comparable to a diver seeking pearls, then this metaphor–much like Kafka’s–assumes that there is something preventing our observational capacities from reaching their best use. Both the water and the pearls are representative of the process of thinking; therefore, the metaphor assumes that there are thoughts worth sharing, and others not. One must be patient when wading through these useless thoughts, as divers must hold their breath underwater. When this idea is applied to Arendt’s work as a reader and interpreter of classics, of philosophy, we can conclude the unfortunate and rarely expressed truth: works entire are overrated. Academics are too ready to accept that a book must be read in toto for any of its parts to be understood. But life (or, even, a life’s work) is never so cleanly integrated as one would hope. When a great lecturer presents, we readily ignore her sneezes; but, skipping over sentences, accepting that they were just poorly written, is, for the historian/litterateur, an utter blasphemy. (“20 years later, I’m still making my way through Being and Time.”)
Hence the utility of Arendt’s advice to find good citations, good “thought fragments”: What is worth sharing is the pearl, not a total oeuvre. We will all have useless thoughts, and we must accept that no genius–no great work–is free from them. Rather than accumulate our stories, we ought, rather, to stitch and concatenate them, like a delicate string of pearls. Moreover, we should feel free to steal the treasures of one another’s poetry, for poetry – like charity – does not diminish as it is shared. We should feel free to revise the works of even our heroes; perhaps such re-vision is necessary to achieve Proust’s “new eyes.”
Thus completes the first reading of “the pearl diver;” but, let us take our time. There are still (at least) two more. Arendt tells us that the metaphor of the thought-pearl is fitting also for its “process of crystallization”: an oyster forms its pearl when an irritant, usually a grain of sand, is trapped in its maw, such that its saliva (nacre) forms round it, in layer upon layer, like running one’s tongue over an aching tooth. So, it’s a long, painful journey to a finished product. We have to sit with a question, linger with it, til it arrives fully formed: a pearl. Another definition for “slow reading.”
The final reading of the metaphor, one which perhaps escapes Arendt’s intention, is to note the obvious fact that pearls are luxury items: wealth. The accumulation of pearls cannot but be associated with the accumulation of capital, which may not be fitting for an introduction to Benjamin’s Marxist theory of history. It would therefore behoove us to question who is able to produce these pearls, and how these pearls come to be identified. To use Marx’s terms, are pearls “fetishized objects?” The pearl attains its value from its beauty; but the one who reads closely is attempting to define the beautiful itself, its forms and effects. The reader wants to make a re-producible object of joy, a beautiful thought. Poetry is desired precisely because it may be constant, because it can be re-cited. So, with the metaphor of the pearl, the proletarian’s envy/anger at the wealthy is transmogrified into the Everyman’s quest to gain access to the Beautiful, to make it a possession.
(A side-note on the practice and use of side-notes: I considered, here, whether it would be better to include a repetition of Arendt’s passage cited above. My instincts were that I should arrange a proximity between the original use of the terms and my own interpretation of them. Better to let the reader’s eyes oscillate quickly between the two, then assume its continued presence in one’s mind. To have three separate readings of the same passage, with each growing farther away from that passage, seemed an inconsiderate and ill-conceived strategy. Perhaps this instinct prevents others from engaging in “close readings,” of lengthy interpretations of a singular passage.
One could argue that this instinct is at play only in certain arrangements of reading. For our close readings, we could revert to the strategies of Medieval hermeneutics. The first universities used as their mode of instruction marginalia: manuscripts with notes in their margins, such that the docent’s commentaries on a canonical text were composed with each thought located next to its referent. But if we stick with this process, we could very well end up with an overwhelming set of concentric circles. A commentary on a commentary on a commentary. To travel along any radius of the circle would be to diverge along its own series of thoughts–nested shells of understanding, each more complex than the last.
One frequently finds that precisely such a circle is used to portray the totality of human knowledge. Each discipline has laid claim to its own pole along that circle, such that to travel in the direction of 10 o’clock is to progress in one’s aptitude for Biology, 12 o’clock for Mathematics, 2 o’clock for Philosophy, etc. But this metaphor assumes that the contents of one’s research exist always within their own tangent, such that the whole contains obvious contiguities and bifurcations. The proponent of specialization therefore claims that one must study either this or that.
To contest this circular model of human knowledge, this collection of independent radii, one could very well argue, as indeed we already have, that research accomplishes a new ordering of matter, alters its flexibilities and its folds, forms associations that bind two previously disparate elements. The job of the writer, then, is always to assume that knowledge can expand in a single dimension. It is to wind back the spool such that this circular surface, like yarn pooled into a gastropod’s spiral, is turned back into a single thread. All acts of reading and writing comprise a similar, boustrophedonic process (left to right, down, right to left, and repeat), which moves as an ox-driven plough-share through the field. To have faith in writing, in wisdom, in the-Way, is to assume that there exists such a filament to life. To know is to place matter within the contours of that invisible thread. To wrestle with the shape of a page is to wrestle with the shape of knowledge, to be the mind’s wayward cartographer. The mere presence of side-notes (as well as footnotes, cf., and any other non-serial presentation of data) is an indication that a creator does not yet know, has failed to capture a phenomenon in its most fully tamed form, i.e. unbroken prose.
This side-note is a testament to my failure.)
Following Proust, we might argue that the creation of language is a democratic practice. But, there is room within Arendt’s passage to argue that thought-pearls remain inequitably distributed. At the end, Arendt cites Goethe’s concept of the Urphänomene, the ur-phenomenon. The term comes from Goethe’s Theory of Colors, and one could define it as the intensity of an experience, such as we referred to earlier with the phrase “the blueness of blue.” Goethe was not much of a democrat, and he believed that the Urphänomene was only accessible through certain objects, by certain people. (Only those at the edge of the circle representing human intelligence.) The concept of the Urphänomene also contributed to Hegel’s philosophy of history (who in turn influenced Marx), so it remains to be seen whether the pearl-diver’s mode of reading will achieve prosperity for all in an ended history, or will accumulate ever-greater pleasures in only a few hands.
But let us put emphasis, instead, on Arendt’s description of the Urphänomene–“perhaps even as everlasting Urphänomene“–where there is expressed a hope for an ultimate Poem, which could resound throughout all of time, could ease the hunger of every soul, could harmonize these lonely beings into a single resonating fiber. (Even as the form of thinking required to reach any such a thought remains itself unthinkable. We do not even know how to think!)
We should hear in this “everlasting Urphänomene” a chiastic consonance with Ariel’s song from The Tempest, which serves as the epigraph to Arendt’s essay. To ease the pains of mourning, as we search for souls lost in the water’s depths, the siren assures us that loss is but a misnomer for a far greater ‘sea-change’:
“Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.”
Strange, yes, because we have yet to think it. What is reading? What is this song I hear?
Oh, well, maybe we ought to scratch the project altogether. As Dirty Projectors tells us in another favorite of mine: “On and Ever Onward!” Another platitude. To be continued.