Geometry of the Rhizome: Models for Art

A new geometry for the rhizomatic, the impossible figure. The reversible perspective cube or the Necker cube and the Penrose cube both of which are impossible figures. Louis Albert Necker, the inventor of this optical illusion was also a crystallographer. Is it more than just coincidence that Gilles Deleuze uses the metaphor of the crystal to discuss the temporality of cinema in The Time Image? There is no way to know with certainty but there does seem to be a strong affinity toward his collective assemblages of enunciation, the body without organs and the “impossible picture” (p. 7)[i]. In the Penrose cube the informative regions are apparently coherent yet are revealed to be invalid in three dimensions. Glanced at one corner at a time the figure maintains somewhat of a semi-stable identity. The artist Maurits Cornelis Escher was intrigued by these types of visual paradoxes and made them the study of many of his own works (see below).

We tolerate the inconsistency of the impossible figure because of the way our perception constructs predicative assumptions about outlying visual information. As Hochberg shows detail falls off as a function of the distance from the center of the fovea where our gaze is focused so that toward the periphery of our gaze things are not very detailed (click on figure below to enlarge) (p. 241)[ii]. Let us take the example of the Penrose cube (second from top). The illusion depends in part on the distance over which integration proceeds between one set of intersecting lines, one dihedral corner, and another. In other words our ideas about the figure require us to move our eyes from one point to the next and adjust accordingly. Thus it has a lot to do with the measurable relation between things: that state of transition, which separates one view from the next. This is what I believe Deleuze is essentially talking about when he states that, “the units of measure are what is essential” even though he is not speaking directly about perception here (p.4)[iii]. The figure is continually changing between one configuration and another depending on the movement of our eyes. There are more than two cubes present at once, their inner dynamic constituted by a centrifugal or de-centering force. Hence the method of the rhizomatic, which de-centers things onto other dimensions and registers.

Even when we are told in advance that the figure is impossible we persist in seeing the Penrose cube and the Necker cube as three-dimensional objects. Why is this? Hochberg conjectures that “our perceptual systems seem more tolerant of inconsistency than thy would if they mirrored faithfully the couplings found in the real world” (p. 244)[iv]. It shows that our understanding of the world is a generative act and not merely the passive state of recognizing forms in nature. This idea of perception works well with the description of the rhizomatic, “a semiotic chain-like tuber agglomerating very diverse acts, not only linguistic, but also perceptive, mimetic, gestural and cognitive.” In short we can comprehend and make sense of varying versions of reality, a testament to the flexibility of our minds and the fabric of space-time. Try to grasp the blade of grass in the middle and it is all but impossible. The impossible cubes are in a state of perpetual flux and this is how they can maintain their own inner logic (n-1) in spite of their apparent and rational impossibility. If we enumerate the traits of the rhizomatic, such as the principles of connection and heterogeneity, multiplicity, asygnifying rupture, cartography and decalcomania we find them analogous with those that constitute the perceptual illusion of the Necker and Penrose cubes, which are made possible in turn by the expanding connection between the picture and our neural apparatus, which co-exist on the plane of immanence. It constructs the unconscious and does not just trace or illustrate a representational figure or concept. What further implications might the Necker/Deleuze models have for practicing artists? Can we observe these structures in any currently existing works of art? The question remains open to investigation.

caldwell l.

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[i] Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari Felix. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. University of Minnesota, 1987.

[ii] Hochberg, Julian E. In the mind's eye Julian Hochberg on the perception of pictures, films, and the world. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. Print.

[iii] Deleuze

[iv] Hochberg

Snow Day Lectures (III): Spinoza, God and Immanence

In What Is Philosophy, Deleuze and Guattari refer to Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) as “prince of philosophers.” Spinoza, they write, “is the only philosopher never to have compromised with transcendence and to have hunted it down everywhere […] He discovered that freedom exists only within immanence” (1994, 48). Spinoza’s philosophy of immanence is the consequence of his rejection of the Judeo-Christian conception of God as a transcendent creator; a supernatural being who is cause of a world distinct from himself, created out of nothing and through an act of free will. Spinoza argues that God is not prior to or outside the world – transcendent to creation – but wholly immanent within it. God is “an extended substance composed of an infinity of attributes that is purely immanent throughout nature” (Daniel Smith 2003, 18). Divinity is fully expressed in the world and without reserve. This leads Spinoza to his scandalous formulation “God, or Nature” (Deus sive natura), which both divinizes nature and naturalizes divinity (and explains descriptions of Spinoza as both pantheist and atheist).

By rejecting the notion of God as transcendent cause, Spinoza also undermines the link between God and moral absolutes or laws. Moral judgments have no corollary in the natural world and therefore cannot be attributed to God, since what cannot be said to belong to nature cannot be said to belong to God. Moral judgments must be understood as “human creations made for our convenience and utility.” Morality as “the product of social agreement” can only be deemed legitimate or illegitimate in terms of its beneficial or harmful effects on the society that agrees to live under its rules and regulations (Smith 2003, 52 and 126). For Spinoza, there is no “imaginary supernatural realm” and no external authority to which we can refer or reference in order to determine morality, and if there is no God who pre-exists the world, then there can be no source that can be said to stand outside or beyond the world to approve or condemn it. Life cannot be explained by what transcends life.

Spinoza’s philosophy of immanence thus requires a new kind of ethics, addressed to the here and now, immersed in the sensible world, without recourse to absolute or divine authority. Spinoza goes further. He rejects the anthropomorphic fallacy that conceives God in the image of man, albeit raised to the power of infinity. “People attribute to God features borrowed from human consciousness […] and, in order, to provide for God’s essence, they merely raise those features to infinity, or say that God possess them in an infinitely perfect form” (Deleuze 1988, 63). What Spinoza makes clear is the extent to which this notion of God functions as a mirror image of the attributes man perceives or idealizes in himself: man as an intending agent, who supposedly creates, like God, through a spontaneous act of free will; man as outside, or transcendent to, nature.

Here, Spinoza’s critique can be directed not only against the philosophy of transcendence found in Plato and in Christian theology, but the modern variant found in Descartes. Thus, in opposition to the latter’s dualist ontology, Spinoza asserts the conjugation of mind and body. Both mind and body are modes of substance (i.e., God or nature). Spinoza: “Mind and body are one and the same thing, conceived now under the attribute of thought, now under the attribute of extension” (qt. in Montag 1999, 42). Spinoza renders problematic the notion that that body is controlled by “the will of the mind and the exercise of thought” (Spinoza qt. in Montag 1999, 38). Spinoza doesn’t simply reject Descartes’s dualist thought, but challenges the hierarchy that subordinates the body to the mind, which subordinates the power to be affected to the power to think, which separates the power to be affected from the power to think. Spinoza’s immanent philosophy does not allow us to set apart “mind from body, thought from action,” or man from nature: each coincides with the other (Montag 1999, xvii). Just as God is expressed in world (as world) so too is the artist, for example, expressed in their work. There is not an individual who acts but an act that individuates. And this individuation is ongoing.

S I-G

References
Deleuze, Gilles. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Trans. Robert Hurley. San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 1988.
––––– and Félix Guattari. What is Philosophy? New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
Montag, Warren. Bodies, Masses, Power: Spinoza and His Contemporaries. London: Verso, 1999.
Smith, Daniel W. “Deleuze and Derrida, Immanence and Transcendence: Two Directions in Recent French Thought.” In Paul Patton and John Protevi (eds.), Between Deleuze and Derrida. London and New York: Continuum, 2003.

Snow Day Lectures (II): Nietzsche and the Over-man

As some of you already know, Nietzsche is considered an influence not only on “post-structural” philosophers, like Foucault and Deleuze, but also on the movement that came to be known as “existentialism” that precedes post-structuralism by a couple of decades. (The most recognized face of existentialism at the time was, of course, Jean-Paul Sartre.) Deleuze, for his part, would argue that existentialism does not live up to the challenge of Nietzsche’s thought, since it presumes a transcendent subject with a power to choose this or that action. In other words, existentialism remains a philosophy of transcendence. Indeed both existentialism and phenomenology can be understood as the latest developments in a legacy that begins when Descartes utters the formula cogito ergo sum. As Todd May notes, in his explication of Deleuze’s philosophy, “It is not simply a question of how we human beings might go about creating our lives, of what we might decide to make ourselves into” (2005, 23). This is Sartre's question. It is still insufficient or inadequate because it prioritizes being over becoming, identity over difference. It presupposes that there is an identity, a self, who chooses their existence. Deleuze rejects the emphasis placed in Sartre on agency, on self, and, more importantly, the emphasis placed on the human. “Deleuze,” May writes, “tries to pry us away from humanism by focusing on a difference that need not be human difference and a one that need not be a person.” Humanism is to be understood here as a form of anthropomorphism. Humanism commits the "error of believing that the proper perspective for understanding the world is centered on the viewpoint of the human subject" (2005, 24).

Humanism places man at the center of the universe, since man is its principle or exclusive concern. Deleuze places his emphasis on life; on the becoming of the entities that populate our world. These entities are not pre-determined; nor is their future known once and for all. To stop at the human would be to presume that the goal of life were the creation of man. (Which, of course, is what Christian theology says.) It would be a mistake to argue (and some have done so) that this “anti-humanism” is an expression of contempt for mankind. How could this be so since mankind is part of world? At the same time, we cannot fall into the trap of thinking too highly of ourselves. Since everything is becoming – everything is in process – so too is man. Man is becoming, in and with the world. This, Deleuze will claim, is what Nietzsche means when he coins the term übermensch (the “over-man” or “super-man”). We are in the process of overcoming ourselves, and there is no certainty that our evolution will not take us elsewhere, even beyond man. At least, man as it is known today.

As Deleuze says to his interviewer, in “On Nietzsche and the Image of Thought,” the goal of contemporary philosophy is to attempt to rethink the questions of existence without the constraints of either God or Man – which is to say, without the constraints of transcendent being. And the value of Nietzsche is that he “was trying to uncover something that was neither God nor Human…” which he called Dionysos or the over-man (2004, 139).

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What does it mean though to say that there is no identity or self who chooses this or that existence? And how might this be squared, for example, with the thought-experiment known as the Eternal Return? (Does not the Eternal Return seem to presuppose choice?) This is where Nietzsche gets tricky. Consider here his concept of Will-to-Power, which he views as the “noblest” of values. Will-to-Power is misunderstood if we imagine an individual who exerts his or her will on another entity or thing. For Nietzsche, there is no separation between a will and what is willed. They are one and the same. There is no pre-constituted subject who wills this or that act. No, the act (what is willed) and the subject (who wills) are constituted at the same time. (The error of separating out one from the other is precisely what we find in Descartes: Descartes assumes that a thought, the act of thinking, requires a subject who performs this action. Nietzsche would deny this hierarchy or priority: the subject doesn’t precede thought but is constituted in the act of thinking.)

Put more simply, we can say that the subject is immanent to its expression. The challenge then is not to fall back on a notion of substance or install an agency at the origin of an activity or an expression of Will-to-Power. The use of terms like “object” or “thing” or “entity” is an example of how language misleads us into seeing solids (autonomous, pre-constituted beings) when there are only fluidities, only relations. The artist’s relation to their artwork is a good demonstration of this: the challenge from a Nietzschean perspective is not to be misled into seeing the artwork as an expression of the artist’s will. There is not an entity we call an “artist” who decides to will a painting into existence. Rather, the activity of painting itself is the expression of a will to power that produces both the painting and painter at the same time: the painter as such emerges through the activity of painting, and not once and for all, not through the painting of this or that painting, but over the course of years or decades and in conjunction with a body of work. What then is the difference between an artist and an oeuvre? There is none in terms of Will-to-Power: they are an expression of the same force, the same will. The artist accumulates an oeuvre and, in the process, a self.

S I-G

Snow Day Lectures (I): Transcendent Subjectivity (Cogito, Ergo Sum)

We already traced, in class, the way Plato’s philosophy of transcendent Ideas and Forms is transformed and extended in Christian theology. In both cases, as we saw, the sensible, sensual world is considered inferior, is considered secondary, to another world that exists beyond or above it. Life – life in this world – is what we are taught to distrust or devalue in the name of something else, something that transcends the immanent world. In the seventeenth century another type of transcendent philosophy will emerge, and it is this one that has perhaps had the most influence on contemporary Western thought. This new brand of transcendent philosophy finds its origins in the works of the French philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650). Descartes’ goal – in attempting to outline a new methodology for philosophy – was to remove all external (i.e., transcendent) sources of knowledge from the realm of truth and reason. Thus he claims, for example, that he will refrain from making assertions such as “man is a rational animal” since this statement presumes prior knowledge of “man” and “animal” (not to mention what it means to be “rational”). He also casts doubts on the objective world, since he says we can be mistaken at times in believing we are seeing external objects when in fact all that is occurring is that we are having a dream or hallucinating (or being led astray by a mischievous demon). After this exercise of removal, the casting aside of philosophical presumptions, there is only one thing – according to Descartes – that he can be certain of: cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am). The only thing he can be certain of is that he has had these thoughts and that this “having” is an affirmation of his existence as a conscious being. Note that what is foregrounded here is not thinking itself but the I who thinks; the I who has a thought; the I who recognizes the first certainty in the utterance “I think.” The assumption here is that "thinking" only occurs because there is an entity to whom this action belongs, an entity to whom we can attribute thought.

In Descartes, we no longer have a transcendence of the Idea or Form (as in Plato) or the transcendence of Being (as in Christianity) but the transcendence of a thinking subject. Now it is the I, as an expression of consciousness, which is privileged in relation to experience. This leads Descartes to assert a dualist ontology, claiming a fundamental distinction between mind and body. It takes little guesswork to figure out which of the two attributes – mind and body – will be placed on the side of transcendence and which will be placed on the side of immanence. It takes little guesswork too to figure out which of the two substances is considered superior, is giving priority over the other. Mind is superior, is transcendent, precisely because it is “immaterial”, precisely because it is not-body. If this form of transcendence continues to be dominant in contemporary society (even as we become more secular, and more suspicious of the notion of universal truths and moral absolutes), it is because it conforms to our common-sense perception of the world; each of us perceives the world as though we are at its center, with the freedom to remove ourselves from the world when we feel the necessity to reflect, to cogitate, and so on. We feel as though we are transcendent to the world, no more so than when we are thinking.

Needless to say, this mode of transcendence is no more acceptable to Deleuze than the other two we considered. There is, for Deleuze, no "mind" or "consciousness" or "self" or "I", or whatever you want to call it, which exists outside of life (or outside of time). There is only mind or consciousness or self or I, or whatever you want to call it, that exists within life, that exists on an immanent plane along with all the other entities that make up the world, all the other entities that make up our world – the only one we have.

S I-G

Gabriel Orozco

(This post is a reminder that the Orozco retrospective at MoMA will end on March 1, 2010.)

Gabriel Orozco: "One thing that I’ve had to learn as an artist – considering how everything that I had learned about what art should be and what art was, and what an artist should be like (disciplined, following the love of the craft) – was that this didn’t work for me. Suddenly I had to take all of these notions apart, because they weren’t mine, they weren’t enough for me; they bored me and threw me into despair. It was a system that really didn’t work for me. Realizing this gave me a very different vision; I think it has repercussions in the way in which my pieces started to turn out, because I understood at last that my urgent struggle was to find something that was not art. In that sense, I’m not sure if people who consider themselves 'educated' understand what art is; I think not. I saw that 'educated' people as well as 'ignorant' ones immediately viewed my work with disapproval: the yogurt lids, the balls of Play-Doh. With ignorant people, it’s obvious that you have to try to destroy their prejudices, but with educated people it’s the same thing, you also have to destroy their prejudices – and their judgment. In their case, it’s a prejudice regarding what they ask of and from art. But as Borges said, we don’t know what art should be, and we don’t need to find out, either; what we seek is to understand the reason why art exists."

Kino-Brain

Deleuzian critique in partnership with new cognitive science may help us achieve a more expansive understanding of what the cinema is about. As Deleuze himself states in his interview, "On Philosophy," “There’s a special relation between philosophy and neurology […] our current inspiration doesn’t come from computers but from the microbiology of the brain.” I therefore will address the cinema as an ontological question, borrowing particular ideas from the philosophy of Deleuze and as a representational one, bringing into focus recent studies in perceptual theory. All kinds of arts, cinema included, can be divided into 3 distinct phases(190)[i]: conception, execution, and appreciation. For the sake of this essay I differentiate between these 3 phases and focus my discussion on the actual viewing of the film, when the viewer is in front of the screen. Let me further explain what I mean by this phenomena of the screen. According to Julian Hochberg there are two categories of events in film: discontinuous shots that don't necessarily have motion in them but create a kind of rhythm via their sequence, and/or ‘motion based information,’ or what I like to call the classic synthetic motion image. Both work in tandem or singularly to make up part of the perceptual experience of the film. At its most basic level movies are comprised of these two kinds of images, no matter how sophisticated a filmmaker’s approach is to the representational material he or she is working with. I will relate back to these elements while talking about cinema in relation to perceptual theory and show how an individual’s experience of the film event is the ultimate expression of the cinematic.

Let us first examine the concept or rather the idea of the ‘cinematic’ by looking at some history. There are two kinds of ideas we encounter; the first centers on the physicality of cinema from the actors to the medium or even the units of space-time upon which our perceptual experience is based. Conversely the second focuses on abstract ideas, such as the narrative structure, genre, type and what kind of movie it is. These two trends make up the bulk of film studies. What they share in common is that they defer looking directly at the cinematic event as its own unique moment, which unfolds in time during the appreciation of a film.

Robert Stam writes, in Film Theory: An Introduction, “Truth is contingent, mediated, collectively forged in the “in-between” of a polyvocal conversation” (xv)[ii]. As long as people dream about, make and watch movies, the process of creating meaning is never complete, a notion that is echoed in Deleuze’s commentary on Nietzsche: “The secret of the word is no more on the side of the one who hears than the secret of the will is on the side of the one who obeys or the secret of force on the side of the one who reacts” (74)[iii]. One discovers many unusual names for the early synthetic motion image before it became cinema: zoopraxiscope, phenakistiscope, stereoscope, and thaumatrope. People forget perhaps the many modes in which the early synthetic motion image made its appearance and the extent to which divergent technological minutiae had considerable impact on its look, feel and affects. Cinema-like arts are often mediums in themselves and deserve their own kind of appreciation. We may conclude that the plurality of cinematic forms and experiences is nothing new; in fact it was present from the start. Once film settled into succinct formats (16 and 35mm celluloid) and industrialized thanks to the pioneering force of Edison and Eastman, much of the dialogue and technological experimentation of this exciting and fruitful period ended. At the same time cinema was laying the foundation for ever-tighter conventions that would emphasize scriptwriting and narrative.

When talking about the experience of cinema it is sometimes better to leave behind certain assumptions, whether we are critics, theorists, fans or makers. Besides, it is often the maker of films that are guilty of imposing an overarching and transcendent narrative structure to their work. Therefore they are not to be trusted. Likewise critics, when they write about a film can only think about what they saw subsequently, rather than online when they are watching the film. The nature of online experience, or what psychologists call the ‘local context’, is ephemeral, transitory and much harder to pin down and summarize. If we are to look specifically at the experience of a film, the appreciatory phase, then cinema does not find its home in one theory or another but rather the total perceptual and psychological field (the relational matrix between time-space, image and brain) or event arising from individual experience. “Essence, being, is a perspectival reality and presupposes plurality” (Deleuze, 77). For every viewer there is a different screen, and therefore a different quality of experience.

While we have yet to see a single comprehensive study of the experience of the viewer we do have many cognitive studies that have tested for specific task based perceptual operations. In the last few decades images have had an increasingly important role in studies on perception (577)[iv]. Cognitive science attempts to examine how it is we can make sense of both primitive and complex visual cues when for example viewing framework-relative paths of induced motion or perhaps more sophisticated relations between overlapping and non-overlapping cuts. How do we intuit for example or make the connection with an eye-line match or connect disparate shots with little or no relation other than their sequential order? According to Hochberg there are two theoretical subsets that examine this problem, mentalist and physicalist or “behaviorist”. When we think of the cool and detached technician in the lab, hunched over figures and statistics we are likely considering the behaviorist. The behaviorist looks at nothing more than the crude information from the real world, the physical stimulus that appears in front of the viewer. “In this class of theory, it may be thought that we as scientists […] need only to know the relevant principles of physics to know what people will perceive” (Hochberg, 381). As is shown by various tests, however, subjects who view an image or a film do a poor job at recalling metric details or exact spatial-temporal dimensions. Working memory constructs mental schemas with gist like and fragmentary material, which is what allows it to be such a powerful and versatile system (S. Rosenbaum)[v]. Working memory is the basis for human ability to remember past experiences and construct future events, and in this manner is essentially the faculty of the active imagination. As Hochberg shows in his reproduction of the Heider and Simmel film test, subjects better respond to and recall emotional and purposeful actions over apparently random or abstract geometric gestures. Besides, the images represented in film can hardly be said to correlate to the physical motion of things in the real world, which is the case that the mentalists make. Again to quote from "On Philosophy," "Cinema doesn't just operate by linking things through rational cuts, but by linking them through irrational cuts too." The mentalists claim that perception is mostly a construction of mental representation. Anyone who has seen Dziga Vertov’s Man With the Movie Camera will remember the inspiring yet highly improbable camera angles that are offered by the filmmaker as a way of destabilizing and refreshing our view of the world. Vertov’s manifesto could have just as easily coined itself the kino-brain. Furthermore, “movements as we remember or anticipate them do not continue to run off in time… or extend in space” (Hochberg, 387) as they do in actuality. The mentalists approach the question of perception from the other side of the eye, sometimes going to the other extreme, yet their conjectures have so far been successful in accounting for the comprehension of higher order visual layouts in film.

The theoretical subsets of perceptual theory are not totally unlike the division we find in philosophy between substance and process ontology, the former privileging transcendent entities and the latter creation (Ishii-Gonzales)[vi]. In this case the behaviorists are like those proponents of Platonic form attempting to discover the properties or laws that form perception as they exist out there in the world. On the other hand the mentalists are interested in how viewers are able to form, fabricate, and create elaborate mental schemas from a limited visual field. The viewer is made the co-creator of the film, for it is through the online viewing of a film that we undergo the cinematic experience, rather than through some idea, a script, a physical law or particular biological organ. The reductive method of the behaviorists, only serves to limit the possibilities made available by cinema. Cinema is the connection we make at the very depth of our emotional and psychological being. The act of watching a film, even recalling a memorable film, is enough to transform the being of the affected individual. It is toward this creative and limitless potential that Deleuzian philosophers set their gaze. God may be dead, but the cinema far from it.

caldwell lever

P.S. more about cinema and the brain on my site kino-brain.

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[i] Onians, John. Neuroarthistory From Aristotle and Pliny to Baxandall and Zeki. New York: Yale UP, 2008. Print.

[ii] Stam, Robert ‘Film and Theory’ . Malden, Mass: Blackwell, 2000.

[iii] Gilles, Deleuze. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Columbia UP, 2006. Print.

[iv] Hochberg, Julian E. In the mind's eye Julian Hochberg on the perception of pictures, films, and the world. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. Print.

[v] "Ars Memoræ III." Telephone interview. 18 Nov. 2009.

[vi] Ishii-Gonzales, Sam. "Deleuzian Precursors." The New School. 3 Feb. 2010. Lecture.

Preface to Nietzsche's "On the Genealogy of Morals" (A Reading)

A scene from Arnaud Desplechin's Un Conte de Noël (A Christmas Tale, 2008), in which the family patriarch reads a passage from Nietzsche to his perpetually unhappy/unsatisfied daughter (the reading begins at 1.26). The citation is completely unexpected and all the more wonderful for being so, and there is a lovely coda that follows: Henri, the black sheep member of the family, sitting on a swing, his back to the camera, saying these words (but to whom?): "You don't know me. I'm not like that."

For those who might like to compare, here is an English translation of the first two paragraphs from Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals (1887): "We don't know ourselves, we knowledgeable people – we are personally ignorant about ourselves. And there's good reason for that. We've never tried to find out who we are. How could it ever happen that one day we'd discover our own selves? With justice it's been said that 'Where your treasure is, there shall your heart be also.' Our treasure lies where the beehives of our knowledge stand. We are always busy with our knowledge, as if we were born winged creatures – collectors of intellectual honey. In our hearts we are basically concerned with one thing, to 'bring something home.' As far as the rest of life is concerned, what people call 'experience' – which of us is serious enough for that? Who has enough time? In these matters, I fear, we've been 'missing the point.'

Our hearts have not even been engaged – nor, for that matter, have our ears! We've been much more like someone divinely distracted and self-absorbed into whose ear the clock has just pealed the twelve strokes of noon with all its force and who all at once wakes up and asks himself 'What exactly did that clock strike?' – so we rub ourselves behind the ears afterwards and ask, totally surprised and embarrassed, 'What have we really just experienced?' And more: 'Who are we really?' Then, as I've mentioned, we count – after the fact – all the twelve trembling strokes of the clock of our experience, our lives, our being – alas! in the process we keep losing the count. So we remain necessarily strangers to ourselves, we do not understand ourselves, we have to keep ourselves confused. For us this law holds for all eternity: 'Each man is furthest from himself.' Where we ourselves are concerned, we are not 'knowledgeable people.'"

It's a marvelous scene. It's a marvelous text.

S I-G