Escapism

After a bit of a hiatus, I’m working my way back into blog posting. For now, a lengthy quotation from the very end of Yi-Fu Tuan’s remarkable book, Escapism (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). In posts to follow, I will come back to consider particular passages in more detail.

What is the real and the good? What makes for happiness? One answer is the one that Creon gives to his niece Antigone in Jean Anouilh’s play by that name: ‘Life is a child playing around your feet, a tool you hold firmly in your grip, a bench you sit on in the evening, in the garden…. Believe me, the only poor consolation that we have in our old age is to discover that what what I have said to you is true.’ Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? What else is there other than these solidly real, endearing particulars? Pass them by and chase the wind, and one will end up with–well, the wind. Yet Antigone’s response to her uncle is one of outrage: ‘I spit on your happiness! I spit on your idea of life.’

Missing from Creon’s picture are two elements that he would surely have wanted to add if his thoughts had moved in that direction: charity to neighbors and respect for nature. Thus completed, this picture of the good life–so human and humane, practical and realizable–has exerted consistent appeal to people past and present, including modern man and woman in a sober mood. It is what one expects in our time from wise tribal elders, sensitive secular humanists, and concerned environmentalists. Yet not only the little spitfire Antigone but also thinkers both Eastern and Western, steeped in their highly developed religious/philosophical traditions, would have nothing to do with it. Or rather, they would see it as secondary to other longings.

Earlier I noted as strange the fact that humans exist who make the world they live in far more frightful than it is by populating it with a host of malicious but nonexistent beings–this strangeness lingering even when we can see that such feverish turns perform a service by objectifying deep personal anxieties and fears, locating them outside the self and so making them seem more manageable. But from the viewpoint of common sense, isn’t it even stranger that, historically and today, some of the world’s best and most serious minds have concluded that the concrete particulars–the sensory delights and joys of everyday life, all the things that obviously matter, including sustainable agriculture and the care of the earth–are provisional, are shadows and illusions, or, at best, hints and intimations; and that the really real, the ultimate goal of all attempts at escape, is the One, the Void (or Nirvana), the Good the Beatific Vision, the Sun that blinds, or even Steven Weinberg’s final unifying theory of nature, which is expected to be of incomparable beauty?

Wanting to reach that goal can seem selfish. The ascetic hermit-monk of early Buddhism, bent on accumulating merits so as to escape another embodied existence in this world, is not a sympathetic figure. Nor is the utterly dedicated scientist who neglects not only his own personal needs but also those of his family and friends, absent-mindedly telling them to wait as he reaches for the greater beauty behind yet another veil. What about charity, helping those in material need, and human fellowship? Aren’t these the greater values, the greater deeds? Eastern religions and philosophies, in essence, say no. Their ultimate sights are set elsewhere and do not include community service. Indeed, Taoism is explicitly amoral. Since transcendent Tao considers all distinctions of right and wrong, true and false, as irrelevant, what ground is there for virtuous, self-sacrificing conduct? In this regard, Buddhism appears to be the outstanding exception among Eastern philosophies. But is it? The famous compassion for all living things in Buddhism derives not from the ability to put oneself in the position of another, or from an all-encompassing nature philosophy of interdependence, but from a system of metaphysics at the center of which is transmigration. It is not only that the chicken one eats for dinner may be one’s grandma, but also that all living things strive and so needlessly suffer; in compassion, then, one seeks to relieve the suffering born of desire by becoming oneself an example of desirelessness. The Bodhisattvas who choose not to enter Nirvana do not become social workers; rather, they sit, their eyes closed and turned inward, images of perfect peace, models of non striving–the only way out of the endless operations of karma. In the West, the ancient Greeks and Romans had no conception of any moral duty to help those less fortunate. Christianity did and does emphasize such service, but, as I have just noted, even there the contemplative life has always ranker higher than the active one.

In the great religious and philosophical traditions, compassionate voices can be heard condemning individuals who ignore the neighbors they can see for a God they cannot see. Such a path is condemned out of genuine sympathy for those in need who are thus sidetracked, but also because it is all too easy to follow and involves, moreover, the contradiction of seeking spiritual values selfishly. So the well-off and competent are called upon to feed and care for the poor and the feeble, the wounded and the sick, and enjoined to remember that they themselves are, in one sense or another, to varying degree, poor, feeble, wounded, and sick. Nevertheless, from the viewpoint of the great traditions, these duties are more like chores of housekeeping than ultimate ends. On earth, everything has to be maintained and periodically repaired, whether this be a house, the human body, or the social body with its egregious imbalances. It comes as a jolt to realize that this cannot be true of heaven. By definition heaven has no poor and sick, no exploited class, and so no housekeeping, no material caring, no revolutionary fervor to right wrong, none of those things that make up the bulk of ethical life on earth and that, furthermore, give individual human beings their sense of belonging, virtue, and importance. In heaven, helping others remains central and is more devotedly practiced than ever, but it can only be of a spiritual-intellectual kind, as senior angels show their juniors the further delights of knowing God.

What is heaven like? Given our earthbound nature, we are likely to envisage it in terms of particulars. Particulars may be excellent in themselves, but we with our feeble and needy imagination are too liable to turn them into idols. So it may be the better part of wisdom to envisage God and heaven in terms of great abstractions and negativities, which, while they may have a powerful aesthetic/emotional appeal–the restfulness of the Void, the beauty of mathematical equations–discourage idol-worshiping and the incurable human yearning to possess.

What, in the end, is the great escape? One of my favorite stories is that concerning Thales of Miletus. He fell into a well while gazing upward doing astronomy. A clever Thracian serving-girl is said to have made fun of him–a man so eager to know the things in heaven that he failed to notice what was right next to his feet. Thales tasted both the heights and the depths, while the Thracian girl moved along the safe, horizontal plane. Who had the better part? Can anyone have the better part, the ultimate escape of Thales and Mary? I think so, for it is not a matter of talent, or even of socioeconomic circumstance, but of a willingness to look in the right direction.

Wisdom of Craft / Craft of Wisdom

I have been thinking for a long time about the relationship between wisdom and craft. This is not a new idea. It’s in the Bible, for example. And in Plato. And all over the place, really. The question is this: is there a special kind of wisdom that leads to excellence in making? Or is it vice-versa, that excellent crafting is a way of achieving a certain kind of wisdom? There is no doubt a reciprocal dynamic here which makes it difficult to say what comes first. If wisdom is a set of virtues, or a way of seeing, then what are its characteristics? And how do they derive from or contribute to craft?

In his ridiculously wonderful book The Lost Carving: A Journey to the Heart of Making, carver David Esterly writes about his time restoring a Grinling Gibbons masterpiece (pardon the long quote):

Now that I think back upon it, carving began to color me during those first months in Sussex. No sign of moral radiance. But I noticed that I was growing closer to Marietta, for almost professional reasons. She was replacing missing hands on eighteenth-century Derby figures, or repainting the delicate designs on Chinese bowls. I was trying to make a flower that looked like a flower. We were both struggling to create graceful forms of one sort or other.

I began to be able to recognize where she was succeeding and where she was falling short. She, the same with me. We could give each other advice that struck deep, that wasn’t obvious. We were players in the same game. Before us was the same luminous thing, always beckoning and always just out of reach. There was much to talk about. Dinners lasted late in to the night. When it wasn’t undrinkable, the beer I’d brewed was smooth as oil on the tongue, and fresh as springwater.

I grew closer to the writers and painters in our acquaintance. Our conversations had a new zest to them. And I grew closer to writers and painters long dead. I seemed to be perceiving all the arts in a more inward way. I started hearing music with more than my ears. Even movies seemed more interesting.

The same was happening with things that weren’t made by man. Glistening moss, a smudge of sunlight on a faraway hill, leaves streaming in the wind, the thousand little things that give passing pleasure to everyone now stopped me in my tracks. Carving had pressed some celestial Enhance button. Now that I was trying to add to it, I was haunted by the beauty of the world. I thought back to my academic days, when I’d stood on the hill overlooking the Fens and felt the world receding from me. Now it was rushing back, with colors and shapes that had a new savor to them. Rushing back, reenchanted.

It was as if the old dream were true, that some single Platonic form of beauty flowed through the human and natural world. And gave a camaraderie to those who chase after it, whose hands produce it and eyes are attuned to it. You didn’t need to be doing it for a living, either. It’s one of the best reasons for taking up the arts as an amateur: to hone your senses. Make their bevels finer, so that you can get a better angle on the beauty of the world.

Before us was the same luminous thing … reenchanted … the thousand little things … as if the old dream were true … a better angle on the beauty of the world. What if the relationship between wisdom and craft is to be found here, in the interstitial space between perceiving and making, between “honing the senses” and the creation of forms? Any philosopher will tell you that this is the heart of aesthetics, which is a set of theories and propositions and variations as old as the hills – or at least as old as the human effort to relate cultural production to nature.

It seems to me there are a couple of options here. Either one embraces the possibility that Plato and Aristotle (and others) were right that the excellent production of forms manifests a kind of wisdom, or one sees all such production – at least in the contemporary world – as so many (futile) protests against the inauthenticity of modern/postmodern life. In the case of the latter, the suspicion that any authenticity is tempered by the demands of capital never allows for real reenchantment, “as if the old dream were true.” This seems true enough to me, and yet I wish at least to pretend as if it were not.

I am aware that when I make a piece of furniture there are all kinds of ways in which my experience of that making is “inauthentic.” And yet, I am also aware that building furniture has taught me things that contemporary mainstream life has not: there is virtue in patience; beauty is enjoyable even if it is culturally conditioned and difficult to define; some forms are more pleasurable (which is not to say instructive) than others; attention to one thing (wood) can attune one to others (human beings); it is important to be aware of the ways in which we project our demands upon reality.

The Practice of Beauty

I used to begin so many of my furniture projects with a need for speed. I couldn’t wait to get to the cutting – let the saws rip! Just to feel the wood and push it through the machines… It felt like progress. I would start cutting and planing even before I had a solid plan, because I was in a hurry to get the thing made. There was very little that was deliberate or intentional about it. I made sure I wasn’t cutting off any body parts, but that was the limit of my attention.

I have come to see that one of the most important moments in building a piece of furniture is the “foreplay” – the time deliberately laying out the boards and walking around and inspecting the grain and color. How will the boards go together to make the most out of every natural detail in the wood? How can I do this in a way that maximizes the use of each board – each piece of a tree that was once a living being? Like with foreplay, there is an erotic element to this process, if eros is a kind of desire rooted in beauty and the “life force” of a thing. As Plato taught, eros does not have to be about physical desire–is “ideally” not about physical desire–but instead is about the appreciation of beauty-beyond-the-aesthetic, or in other words, truth. Whitehead agreed with Plato that the universe itself manifests a certain “eros” that is its being-toward-perfection.

All this reminds me of the woodworking philosophy of George Nakashima, the famous mid-twentieth-century designer and craftsman. Nakashima said that the tree has an inner life that the woodworker seeks to uncover. The maker tries to help the tree become what it “wants” to become in its “second life.” (My father says the tree probably “wants” to remain a tree, which is also a sound argument.) The Nakashima philosophy and style continues under the direction of his daughter Mira, and the company puts this forward as their philosophy:

“Trees have a yearning to live again, perhaps to provide the beauty, strength and utility to serve man, even to become an object of great artistic worth. Each tree, every part of each tree, has only one perfect use. How to acquire logs and what to do with them calls for creative skill. There is need always to select and to search, even to look underground where the most fantastic grains can often be found…. There is drama in the opening of a log: to uncover for the first time the beauty in the bole of a tree hidden for centuries, waiting to be given this second life. Cutting logs entails a great responsibility, for we are dealing with a fallen majesty. There are no formulas, no guidelines, but only experience, instinct and a contact with the divine.”

Nakashima Conoid Table

Now this is the proper orientation to the practice of craft: to see that the beginning of a work requires patience and careful attention, as it will shape not only the outcome but the entire experience of the process.

The Way to Rainy Mountain

In his book The Way to Rainy Mountain, N. Scott Momaday writes that “Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth, I believe. He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience, to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder about it, to dwell upon it. He ought to imagine that he touches it with his hands at every season and listens to the sounds that are made upon it. He ought to imagine the creatures there and all the faintest motions of the wind. He ought to recollect the glare of noon and all the colors of the dawn and dusk.”

Why ought a person to do these things? Momaday is writing here not so much about going out and experiencing a landscape as fully as possible–though he might also recommend doing that–but about the work of imagination in how we relate to places. What is the value for the imagination of turning a place around in one’s mind in this way? I suspect that Momaday would say that it is imagination that really connects and grounds us, even as it guides our actions and daily navigation of the built world. If we haven’t taken the time to imagine a “remembered earth,” we can’t tell stories about it. But if we can tell stories about a remembered earth, perhaps we are a little more likely to pay attention also to the one before our eyes and ask, “What is happening here? What marvels abound around me in this moment? What am I part of? What would it mean to care for this landscape?” Another way to put this is to ask the question of naturalist Robert Michael Pyle: “[What is the] extinction of a condor to a child who has never seen a wren?”

Richard Louv has written extensively about what he calls “nature deficit disorder” and the increasing disconnection between nature and communities–and especially the impact this has on childhood development. He documents the ways in which successive generations of young people have had (or taken) fewer and fewer opportunities to encounter nature as part of childhood play–or to make nature the theater in which imaginative play takes shape. He asks, “As the care of nature increasingly becomes an intellectual concept severed from the joyful experience of the outdoors, you have to wonder: Where will the future environmentalists come from?”(Last Child in the Woods) What happens when young people grow up without memories to retrieve in the way Momaday imagines–and to turn those remembrances to imagining and understanding the present?

To Love a Place

Tonight I stood and watched from my back doorway as the sun set over the western edge of the Santa Monica mountains, as if it simply dribbled over the edge and down the hill and into the ocean just beyond it. I wanted to be up on that mountain at that moment, and in the way of memory and desire I was there, because I have been to that place and I know it well. I know that white sage grows there, and coreopsis and yellow monkeyflower, yerba santa and lemonberry. And that every spring the yuccas send up their tall stalks and sprout whole crowns of white flowers that look from a distance like so many heads populating the mountainside. Every April I experience a deep and strange pleasure when I wave to them and imagine that they are my friends. I also know that coyotes roam there, and that the red-tailed and cooper’s hawks circling the thermals and updrafts are spotting for shrews.

What does it mean to love a place? And when we can begin to answer that question, what is then required of us? Is it enough to know the names of the flowers and shrubs and trees? Or is love – as the old saying goes – a more active verb?

My good friend Brad (author of The Sespe Wild) once came to speak to my environmental ethics students about his work on behalf of the Los Padres Mountains. One of the students asked him (or perhaps it was I who asked, channeling what I hoped would be a student’s question), “What is the way to begin environmental activism? How does one get started in this kind of work?” Brad replied that it starts with concern, with coming to know and love a place. The work will then reveal itself in time.

This kind of love is not merely aesthetic – it does not derive from the experience of beauty or the sublime. In this way it is not a free-floating kind of love that can be attached to whatever scene or spot moves us for the moment. It is a love made of the daily practice of knowing and orienting oneself in situ. To love in this way is to value a place first for its own sake, for the way in which it exists as its ever-evolving self, and only secondarily for how it meets our desires.

Practice Makes Perfect

This blog is dedicated to inquiring into place and practice – how we (how I) inhabit and what we (I) do in place. I’m not interested here in simply recording my day to day movements or commenting on what I happen to see around me. I’m interested in noticing, in new ways, how we make connections between place and practice – how we (I) live deliberately, with intention and attention. What might it mean to align the things that I do with the place in which I am?

Postmodern geographers (or critical spatial theorists) have helped us begin to see new insights into what it means to inhabit places in all their social, political, economic, and psychological complexity. “Nature” writers or literary environmentalists and poets have given their imaginations and voices to places they care about. Practitioners of religious traditions have had much to say about both place and practice – most especially those writing out of Eastern meditative traditions or Western contemplative/mystical/monastic ones.

Smatterings of all these sources will make their way into this blog as I continue to read, to move about, to encounter any and all things that help me to make sense out of the place where I am and the things I am doing. So thanks, in advance, to all those who have put something out into the world to make it more sensible, more beautiful, more navigable.

Practice, then. Classical Greek and early Christian writers understood well that practice – askesis in Greek – was crucial to mastery of skill as well as the perfection of moral virtue. While philosophers may continue to debate the nature of virtue and how exactly to define or to cultivate it (a worthy pursuit in its own right), the insight about practice is a good one. Outside of its Christian settings, askesis was primarily understood as the kind of training an athlete needed to undertake in order to compete at a high level. Within the early Christian monastic literature, askesis (the root of “ascetic” or “asceticism”) was applied to the pursuit of spiritual perfection, most often by way of self-deprivation and the curtailment of fleshly desires. While most of us today are not ready to relinquish many of the comforts and satisfactions we enjoy (asceticism is so, like, yesterday!), perhaps these old monks (and new ones) have something to teach those of us living in the fast-paced, consumer-driven, global society of the technogene.

In his wonderful book The Blue Sapphire of the Mind: Notes Toward a Contemplative Ecology, Douglas Christie guides the reader through the Christian contemplative tradition, much of which revolves around the question: how do we inhabit places and how do our practices either contribute to or detract from the good life? What must we do to “come to our senses” in a new way? Practice, say the contemplatives: practice attention, interrogate your own desires, and live into the place where you are. There a paradise awaits.

You Are Here

This picture was taken at Dough Flats near the Sespe Wilderness up the road from Fillmore, California. It declares, like a good kiosk map, “you are here.” But like my sense of place, the map is riddled through with shots. I can believe, for a moment I suppose, what the map tells me: I am here. But in what manner am I “here”? Do I understand where I am and how it is that I got to be here and all that has come before me in this place? All these names, some never recorded, some partially effaced, and others yet to come, point to the meanings of “here.” But they do not, cannot, fully orient one to what is the case at this spot in the world. Or even to my experience of it.

Tim Lindgren has written many interesting things about place blogging. He says, “Whether the material is nature or culture, place blogging finds its roots in part in those genres whose goal is to collect fragments of observations and information that the writer gathers over time, without necessarily crafting them into a finished whole or crafting meaningful connections between these fragments.”

As I walk past the kiosk and into the Sespe Wilderness, I continue to be where I am. I have left the kiosk map for others, the one I hold in my hand, and the one that I am struggling to assemble in my imagination out of the fragments of my attention.