Knowing who you are is good for one generation only. You haven’t the foggiest idea where you stand now or who you are.
The girl had taken the Ph.D. in philosophy and this left Mrs. Hopewell at a complete loss. You could say, “My daughter is a nurse,” or “My daughter is a schoolteacher,” or even, “My daughter is a chemical engineer.” You could not say, “My daughter is a philosopher.” That was something that had ended with the Greeks and Romans. All day Joy sat on her neck in a deep chair, reading. Sometimes she went for walks but she didn’t like dogs or cats or birds or flowers or nature or nice young men. She looked at nice young men as if she could smell their stupidity.
Flannery O’Connor, “Good Country People,” 1955
What we’re talking about is changing the whole visual structure of how you look at the world.
Robert Irwin in Ken Johnson, “ Robert Irwin at Dia:Beacon,” 2015
The location where we will engage the enemy must not become known to them. If it is not known, then the positions they must prepare to defend will be numerous. If the positions the enemy prepares to defend are numerous, then the forces we will engage there will be few.
Sun Tzu, The Art of War, c. 450 BCE
The victorious army first realizes the conditions for victory, then seeks to engage in battle. The vanquished army fights first, then seeks victory.
Sun Tzu, The Art of War, c. 450 BCE
One who knows the enemy and knows himself will not be endangered in a hundred engagements. One who does not know the enemy but knows himself will sometimes be victorious, sometimes meet with defeat. One who knows neither the enemy nor himself will invariably be defeated in every engagement.
Sun Tzu, The Art of War, c. 450 BCE
The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn’t the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness.
Albert Camus, The Plague, 1947
Nightfall, with its deep, remote baying of unseen ships, the rumor rising from the sea, and the happy tumult of the crowd—that first hour of darkness which in the past had always had a special charm for Rieux—seemed today charged with menace, because of all he knew.
Albert Camus, The Plague, 1947
What I really want to say
is about poetry (always)
is about architecture I mean music,
yes. How can I tell them
apart? I’ll try.
How they use us
to make us become ourselves.
What I really wanted to say
is about poiesis
the Greek verb poiein means to make
so anybody who makes anything
has to be a poet
so when we were evicted by spirit from the caves
we moved into houses
structures built by the first poets,
the architects
isn’t the house the first thing they, we, really made?
So poetry and music make time pass
and architecture makes space pass
into meaningful form.
No.
I mean architecture makes music stand still.
That’s more like it:
here time turns into space
Space and place, can they be the same?
Place happens to space,
is architecture in a place
or does it make the place
itself happen to space.
The way music happens to time.
So there is usually a street and sometimes a fountain
—a thing that moves up and glistens while the eye reaches out and out—
and there’s a girl walking by and another eating lunch on a bench
because a place is a plaza.
But what I really wanted to say
is that the poem stretches on and on
like an avenue of mysterious buildings
who on earth lives in all those houses
apartments single rooms
who climbs down the stairs or stumbles at midnight,
who opens the brass letter boxes o my god
who are all these people
eating their lunch in the middle of the poem
and looking at each other and wondering what it all means
and then they come to the end of a line and decide
well enough of this it’s time to go home
home to their room
home to their own place.
What I really wanted to say
was that the word ‘room’ really means ‘space’—
like German Lebensraum, space to live in—
is there room for living
in this poem you’re writing
o poet and o composer
are you leaving space in your music
for someone to live in, really and truly
be alive inside your music,
not just some background noise,
not just some sad background-life while you drone on?
I know it’s not polite to ask
but we sort of know what architecture does
rough and ready we inhabit it
and when we’re lucky it changes us,
guides our footsteps and the way
we feel about doing
whatever we’re doing that brings us there,
swinking or swiving, a building holds all.
So what I really wanted to say
was that these arts do something to time as it goes by
not just make it pass
as Beckett had his losers say, the time will pass by itself all right,
it knows how to do that,
or that is all time knows.
And do we know more
than what music tells us as it flows past?
We sit in the plaza on a marble bench and read poems to one another
whispering or waving our arms and why not,
somebody has to make things move,
make the shadows dance in and out
of the shadows of great buildings.
But does time ever really pass?
Isn’t time just a superstition,
a flaw in our attention to the permanent?
And if time passes
can we learn how to stop it
and make it pool out around us
so that we stand or sit
in the shallow water of moveless time,
this static stream
or time might be a fountain
springing up and falling down
a salmon-leap of time out into space,
into room,
so that when we see a building we know that time is safe there,
an artist’s hour hammered into place
and we can be, just be.
Has he turned time into space?
What I really wanted to say
was there and back again,
the swell of music
held in the mouth of the poem
spoken to the girl eating her lunch
in the great nest of plazas
of many levels Steven Holl
built in China, a city in a city,
a poem someone is reciting,
annoying the poor girl eating her lunch,
my god how can I look at that plaza
and not start writing a poem,
a poem with musics and levels and fountains and food,
it’s hard work to eat
chewing and swallowing
all the inward mysteries thereafter,
hard work
the poem and the song,
Hegel infamously remarked a building is a frozen song,
well yes, but everything is,
what I really wanted to say
was that everything approximates music
but a building is exact,
demands space move its hips and shoulders
this way not that way,
or is architecture also a chanceful music,
turning space into space
so that we can get lost for a long time,
in a long song
of corridors and pentagons and Moorish geometries,
the way John Cage’s 4’33” turns time into time,
our dear Christless fundamentalist,
our sweet raw Pythagoras,
daring to turn common time into pure time-
time transmuted by attention—
he’ll never let us be sure
if he was the great Alchemist or the Wizard of Oz,
but the time changed. And stays changed,
he moved on to the next town
and left us with an empty room full of pure time.
We shake our heads and say Next time we’ll do better,
we’ll be ready for him, and dance to his tune.
But what does “next time” mean?
Can there be another time
after this time?
That’s where poetry comes in,
and if quoting myself I should say again
time transmuted by attention
a measured, noticed time
is as much music as Heinrich Biber’s,
the glorious whine of whose archaic strings
won’t leave you alone for a second,
she looks up from her paper plate
and hears the time singing round her ears
spoken by the shapes and shades of great buildings
and now she knows, and now she’s only now.
Can a poem, though,
such as I’m trying to make
or bend your way now,
can a man outlast time?
Can it get where it’s going before I get there?
When I was a child the greatest thrill
was riding on the escalator
Macy’s Gimbel’s Wanamaker’s
floor to floor and always rising
and no one to stop
even a child from going up
and watching the people
on the way down, clutching bags
neat brown packages, content,
descending into ordinary space
while I rose up, finally reaching
the dim cool floor where furs were sold
and I turned back from the fear of dead animals,
what could it mean to live in a world
where animals die and their skins
rest on lovely women of a certain age,
that’s why we hurry down again
to the ordinary floors, the street,
the paper plates littering the gutter,
she’s closed her book and gone back to work,
the half-eaten sandwich, the poem
read halfway through and never finished.
But something was always going up,
even if we didn’t have the wit or will to endure its beauty,
like James Tenney’s electronic For Anne, Rising,
where the sound goes up and up and never stops that climb
but is always present, or Joan Tower’s wonderful Platinum Spirals,
violin conquering time by rising always in one place,
or when the thunder walks through the valley
and everybody and everything knows itself
suddenly walked into by that sound,
invaded, persuaded, frightened, spared—
What I really wanted to say
was that I’m tired of poetry being a blueprint not a house
I’m tired of music being something that comes and goes
I want the word to be a house
and the tune to be something you climb on and travel
but how can I say that?
What I really wanted to say
is how can words make you hear
how can words make—
a poem is something made
can it make a place you can actually walk
around in, stretch out in,
reach a wall you can lean against
warm in sunlight and close your eyes?
What I really wanted to say
was that poetry wants to close your eyes
so you open them suddenly in a new space,
the way doors and windows do
o these architects these poets
who can build an opening
anywhere they choose
can open space and let us in
but can I break open even a single
word to make you see?
Robert Kelly, “What I Really Want to Say,” 2013
Beauty is the highest integrative level of understanding and the most comprehensive capacity for effective action. It enables us to go with, rather than against, the deepest tendency or theme of the universe.
Frederick Jackson Turner in David Brooks, “When Beauty Strikes,” 2016
Artists have their biggest social impact when they achieve it obliquely. If true racial reconciliation is achieved in this country, it will be through the kind of deep spiritual and emotional understanding that art can foster. You change the world by changing peoples’ hearts and imaginations.
David Brooks, “When Beauty Strikes,” 2016
I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
Isaac Newton, “On Perception,” c. 1700 (via tyson)
God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance.
An artist everyday takes a chance of going mad because you find yourself in situations that are past the point of logic you understand. You have to re-adapt your own logic just to be able to communicate with somebody else. And I think that communication is the major point of art. The point of the operation is that each individual that can make art has something to communicate.
Lawrence Weiner, “On Art,” c. 2016
What you don’t know about something is also a form of knowledge, though much harder to understand. In many ways, making art is like blindly trying to see the shape of what you don’t yet know. Whenever you catch a little a glimpse of that blind spot, of your ignorance, of your vulnerability, of that unknown, don’t be afraid or embarrassed to stare at it. Instead, try to relish in its profound mystery. Art is about taking the risk of engaging in something somewhat ridiculous and irrational simply because you need to get a closer look at it, you simply need to break it open to see what’s inside.
Teresita Fernandez, “Commencement Address at VCU,” 2013
Being an artist is not just about what happens when you are in the studio. The way you live, the people you choose to love and the way you love them, the way you vote, the words that come out of your mouth … will also become the raw material for the art you make.
Teresita Fernandez, “Commencement Address at VCU,” 2013
It is not always easy to be confronted with situations that invalidate entrenched patterns of understanding. The value of this confrontation is directly proportionate to our ability to convert the crisis of insecurity into the fertile potential of change.
Dietrich Karner in Anthony Huberman, “I (Not Love) Information,” 2007