back to the land of snows

laura mcphee (daughter, incidentally, of john) was at the ranch a few weeks back. for her guest lecture, she showed her quite beautiful photographs of idaho (part of the series river of no return).

she also mentioned, quite offhand, that her epiphanic photographic expedition, the one that made her a landscape photographer, was to iceland.

i sat down with her at breakfast the last day she was here and discovered that she went to iceland with her father in the '90s as he was writing the heimaey story in the control of nature, about the vestmann islanders arresting the flow of lava from surtsey by continuous application of cold seawater. she also saw the deeply surreal and fantastic nature of iceland -- broad expanses of snow and rock, heights that warp perspective, clear light, and (in her case), the birth of a new island.

when i went to iceland in march, our last night in the field was at myvatn, a geothermal area in north-central iceland. it was the fifth consecutive day of rising with the sun, cutting ice, snow, and rock deep into the night, and of meals hastily made and eaten. the day after, we went to the myvatn hot pools to wash off the week's accumulated dirt, then hit the ring road westbound for reykjavik. for hours, we drove on empty roads through mountains covered in ice. one truck, a sixteen-wheeler, passed in the opposite direction. the stereo in the car would not relinquish the tape of chopin's nocturnes we'd put in. we stopped several times to take leaks in freshly-blown snowdrifts and into gravelly rivers. lunch was a salami, gouda, and cucumber sandwich eaten in the parking lot of the graduate dorm of the university of bifrost. a bright pink and orange playset took two spots in the parking lot, and was separated from an enormous field of lichen-covered volcanic rocks by an icy rivulet. several hours later, as we drove into reykjavik, we passed into a tunnel that dove under the hvalfjörður -- 5.7km long, and 165m deep, there was a noticeable declination. in our work-mazed state, listening to vladimir ashkenazy on repeat, it all made us wonder a little what kind of visual sense a child growing up in iceland develops, surrounded by such scale and landscape.

seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees

i've been trying to get a copy of lawrence weschler's wanderer in a perfect city for at least a year; the san francisco library had one copy (always on loan), and the pitkin county library is sadly deficient. i took out a copy of weschler's biography of robert irwin, the west coast avant garde painter and engulfed it in just a few nights of reading. much of weschler's description of irwin's work over the last half-century reminded me of bench scientists and their relentless pursuit of resolutions to hypotheses (a psychotherapist in one of the painting workshops agreed with me) -- a sort of a research and development undertaking applied to art. not coincidentally, there is a fine art research and development program at the swedish royal academy of art.

Had one asked Irwin in 1965 how he viewed the relationship between his activity and that of a scientist, he might well have replied that he saw none whatsoever, or that he saw the two enterprises as diametrical opposites. By 1970 .. he had developed a rich sense of the interpenetration of the two endeavors. "Take a chemist, for example, he starts out with a hypothesis about what might be created if he combined a few chemicals, and he begins by simply doing trial and error ... What the artist does is essentially the same. In other words, what you do when you start to do a painting is that you begin with a basic idea, a hypothesis of what you're setting out to do ... It's just a million yes-no decisions. You try something in the painting, you look at it, and you say, 'N-n-no.' You sort of erase it out, and you move it around a little bit, put in a new line; you go through a million weighings. It's the same thing, the only difference is the character of the product. Let's say at a particular point the scientists gets what he set out to get, he arrives at what he projected might happen if he mixed the particular right combination of chemicals in the right way. But the same thing is true of the artist: when he finally gets the right combination, he stops, he knows he's finished.

most rewarding were the many accounts of the extensive process underlying the final objects irwin produced (the line and dot canvases, the discs, the glass and acrylic monoliths, etc) -- it validates the need to tool about in the shop or studio concentrating on process rather than product and figuring out what questions to ask and how to frame them. (production furniture is nearly, but not quite, the antithesis of a question-orientation).

There is a strain in the Jewish mystical tradition that asserts that there exist questions larger than the sum of their answers, questions all of whose possible answers would never exhaust them ... "The thing that really struck me the most as I got into developing my interest in the area of questions is the degree to which as a culture we are geared for just the opposite. We are past-minded, in the sense that all of our systems of measure are developed and in a sense dependent upon a kind of physical resolution. We tag our renaissances at the highest level of performance, whereas it's really fairly clear to me that once the question is raised, the performance is somewhat inevitable, almost just a mopping-up operation, merely a matter of time. Now, I'm not antiperformance, but I find it very precarious for a culture only to be able to measure performance and never to be able to credit the questions themselves."

the constant pursuit of a goal which cannot be realised in the coarse stuff of the world is heroic, like trying to capture the meaning of a Dreaming without the right song, or trying to produce a 3D version of a 4D shape.

frank stella: "I always get into arguments with people who want to retain the old values in painting -- the humanistic values they always find on the canvas. If you pin them down, they always end up asserting that there is something besides the paint on the canvas. My painting is based on the fact that only what can be seen there is there ... If the painting were lean enough, accurate enough, or right enough, you would be able to just look at it ..." karsten harries, commenting on stella: "No matter how radical the pursuit of presence, the work of art will always fall short of that purer art that is its telos. It points beyond itself and lacks the plenitude it demands."

the nice thing is, sometimes the heroic endeavor is rewarded, though not because but in spite of the trying.

Grace: you work and you work and you work at something that then happens of its own accord. It would not have happened without all that work, but the result cannot be accounted for as the product of the work in the sense that an effect is said to be the product of its causes. There is all that preparation -- preparation for receptivity -- and then there is something else beyond that, which is gratis, for free.

last week, paul bowen took a pencil and drew a smiley face on a sheet of butcher paper and it had the most perfect line. he tried to replicate it and was unable to; we ended up tracing over it to produce a pale shadow of the original. but perfect lines are the result of this kind of beginner mind or state of grace, where consciousness recedes in the act of creation.

so, true seeing is to penetrate through to the meaning-essence of the thing seen, to enter a state where the name of the thing becomes irrelevant, where the sign is replaced by the signified; forgetting the name of the thing one sees.

new from colorado

cloud 1, white ash. approx. 39" x 27" x 30"

this is the first of the clouds.

for the time being

after reading her autobiography, i picked up annie dillard's for the time being. it's a multiply-threaded wonder, an extended reflection on theodicy and the ways humans are evil to each other. the book ranges considerably, into the realm of cultural evolutionary biology, which i've been thinking about of late. she writes:

Cultural evolution happens fast; it accelerates exponentially and, to put it less precisely, explodes. Biological evolution takes time, because it requires biological generations; the unit of reproduction is the mortal and replicating creature. Once the naked ape starts talking, however, "the unit of reproduction becomes" -- in the words of anthropologist Gary Clevidence -- "the mouth."

more from chardin:

Geologists have considered every concentric layer forming the Earth except one: the layer of human thought. [chardin might also have said, and of human history and its impact on the land.] However far we look into the past, we see the waves of the multiple breaking into foam.

a recurrent theme: the disparity between religion (which abrogates to itself the experience of holiness) and the experience of holiness itself.

Throughout my whole life, during ever minute of it, the world has been gradually lighting up and blazing before my eyes until it has come to surround me, entirely lit up from within. (chardin)

The more I work, the more I see things differently, that is, everything gains in grandeur every day, becomes more and more unknown, more and more beautiful. The closer I come, the grander it is, the more remote it is. (giacometti)

freeman dyson's infinite in all directions (his gifford lectures) captures this same sense of holiness, of sensing the flame behind the form. there is also an element, as the shakers understood, of doing something for the sake of doing it. mother ann lee said "Do all your work as though you had a thousand years to live, and as though you were going to die to-morrow." dillard finds an example from one of the layers of our shared history:

Solutrean artisans knapped astonishing yellow blades in the shape of long, narrow pointed leaves. The longest Solutrean blade is fourteen inches long, four inches at its beam, and only one-quarter inch thick. Their intricate technique is overshot flaking; it is, according to Douglas Preston, "primarily an intellectual process." ... Hold one of these chert knives to the sky. It passes light. It shines dull, waxy gold -- brown in the center, and yelow toward the edges as it clears. At each conchoidal fractured edge all the way around the double-ogive form, at each cove in the continental stone, the blade thins from translucency to transparency. You see your skin, and the sky. At its very edge the blade dissolves into the universe at large. It ends imperceptibly at an atom. Eachof these delicate, absurd objects takes hundreds of separate blows to fashion. At each stroke and at each pressure flake, the brittle chert might -- and, by the record, very often did -- snap. The maker knew he was likely to lose many hours breath-holding work at a tap. The maker worked in extreme cold. He knew no one would ever use the virtuoso blades. He protected them, and his decendants saved them intact, for their perfection. To any human on earth, the signt of one of them means: someone thought of making, and made, this difficult, impossible, beautiful thing.

looking beyond trappings and outward signs is the key. chardin is also (i suspect) the originator of the virtual sacrament, first as a soldier in the second world war, and then later as an archaeologist in china:

Since once more, my Lord, not now in the forest of the Aisne but in the steppes of Asia, I have neither bread, nor wine, nor altar, I shall rise beyond symbols to the pure majesty of the real, and I shall offer you, I your priest, on the altar of the whole earth, the toil and sorrow of the world.

it comes back to a kind of love for the world (the greeks recognized four types, i think, of love):

We love in all we seek. The hidden shows up in too-plain sight. It lives captive on the face of the obvious -- the people, events, and things of the day -- to which we as sophisticated children have long since become oblivious. What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like colour. What to do? There is only matter, Teilhard said; there is only spirit, the Kabbalists and Gnostics said. These are essentially identical views. Each impels and individual soul to undertake to divinze, transform, and complete the world, to -- as these thinkers say quite as if there were both matter and spirit -- "subject a little more matter to spirit," to "lift up the fallen and to free the imprisoned," to"work for the redemption of the world," to "extract spiritual power without letting any of it be lost," to "help the holy spiritual substance to accomplish itself in that section of creation in which we are living," to "mend the shattered unity of the divine worlds," to "force the gates of the spirit, and cry, 'Let me come by.'" When one of his Hasids complained of God's hiddenness, Rabbi Pinhas said, "It ceases to be a hiding if you know it is hiding." But it does not cease to hide, not ever, not under any circumstance, for anyone.