Negative Capability

Bronzed Earthenware by Anne-Bridget Gary

I am here, where I have always been … in this space which has the appearance of whiteness but is in fact a darkness. The darkness of reading and writing is like the first space we inhabit, a space before space or time, before day and night, a space of isolation and comfort in which the Other, who sustains me, is (in)visible. Think about it. Close your eyes.

Imagine a space distanced from routine and proximity, in which it is possible to consider space, and in particular, architecture, which is courtyard, atrium and abode. It has been the subject or theme of many poems, from Eliot’s “The Four Quartets,” from “Kubla Khan” to the poems of Hardy and Larkin. “Anecdote of the Jar”, by the American modernist Wallace Stevens, though not ostensibly about architecture, evokes a colonising consciousness which attempts to order the chaos of the “slovenly” land; to bring “territoire” to “terre.”

Here’s the poem, followed by some scribbles of mine from an essay I’ve been writing on spatial language and poetry.

Anecdote of The Jar

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion every where.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

As a ready-made object, Stevens’ jar lacks decoration. Despite this it has aesthetic intent, removed from its function, remote from obvious use, it is a form of anti-art, much like Duchamp’s Fountain, a urinal placed on its side and mounted on a pedestal. Both objects, fountain and jar, throw into question what art is. Both follow the priorities of a metaphysical discourse in privileging a concept over aesthetic or material concerns. They resist the modernist preoccupation with function over form. Stevens’ jar and Duchamp’s Fountain both occupy a heterotopic space, which makes visible the act of perception, and throws light on the interdependence between reality and how it is imagined. The jar is an article of everyday domestic use. Being placed, framed or positioned outside of its conventional use creates a new thought for the object, a new perception for the reader to encounter.

Stevens’ choice of object is perfectly enigmatic. As a jar it is both an enclosure, and an open space, obeying Derrida’s claim that “in every closed space there are things called ‘exits,’ and that’s what defines it as a closed space.” Although it takes dominion, it is not entirely self-referential, and being made from glass it is suggestive of the mirror and the frame. Moreover, there is a distinct if invisible interface between the inner and outer surfaces of its boundary. Malcom Andrews describes it as a “teasing allegorical dramatisation…, one in which Argument organises wilderness.” This Argument might be a poem, it might be a building, or a discourse about art, about its function and its form. As an abstracted piece of anti-art, the jar derives from a modernist tradition, yet it anticipates the fluid, unstable, interrupted gestures of post-structuralism. This is particularly echoed in the final couplet, with its teasing double negative “It did not give or bird or bush/Like nothing else in Tennessee.” The jar is an interrupted presence, in dominion of the Other and yet open to it, framing and reflecting the Other. Its metaphorical docks and windows are a passageway to the Other. This is consistent with the many varied interpretations of the poem. The jar speaks of, if not for, the wilderness.

If we think about the jar as abstract object, we should consider the wilderness. Maybe the wilderness is heterotropic, representing the spaces of darkness, of transgression and deviance. Maybe the wilderness is exotic or gothic, an emotional, an imaginary, a fantasy or a psychic space. Perhaps it invites us to consider the watershed between nature and individuality, between colonial and precolonial space. Or it might be the relativity of all such spaces, a volatile infusion of different spaces across which our collective consciousness flows.

Jaques Derrida, The Ear of the Other, Otobiography,Transference, Translation, Texts and Discussions with Jacques Derrida, (London: University of Nebraska Press, 129)
Malcolm Andrews, Landscape And Western Art (New York: OUP, 1999)

www.annebridgetgary.30art.com

Image by Linda Armstrong

Shadow Portraits, Sanskriti Kendra by Linda Armstrong

Here are two shadow portraits of the trees at Sanskriti Kendra. They are taken by Linda Armstrong, from Emory college in Atlanta, whose process of art making begins as a response to the natural world. Linda and I were residents at Kendra in December and January: read more about her work here http://visualarts.emory.edu/faculty/index.html#armstrong

Winter mornings in New Delhi are misty and chill. Outside the studios where we slept, the gardeners and potters were wrapped in shawls, their breath turning to vapour. Peacocks scratched about in the gardens, pecking at windows, roofs, disturbing our morning dreams, the peahens always the most elusive. They left their feathers scattered like souvenirs, which I collected. Floating petals in clay bowls were an offering to the birds and to the wanton gods, who might, by accident, bless or curse my words. By eleven, the sun was at its warmest; by noon, the fields of mustard were coloured in a golden hue. The sweeper and the washer would arrive to clean our rooms. We’d  sit outside to read or write or to draw, falling into the shadows and the silence as squirrels skipped across the lawns, climbing the neem trees, the cassias and jacarandas.

The shadow is what Foucault might call a heterotopia, a mirror image that captures dispersal and juxtapostion, the near and the far, when our experience of the world is not unlike a network, that connects, points, and intersects with its own skein.

The shadow is a space where light can’t reach because of obstruction by someone or something; it’s the space behind the subject or object, and in front of which there is light; the reverse projection of a person or thing. For the shadow gives visibility to the self, or to the thing beyond the surface of the same, while exerting a counteraction to the space it reflects. In our own shadow we discover an absence from the place where we are. And it is from our shadow that we direct our gaze back towards our self, almost as if we were made new.

I’ve been reading about heterotopias for an essay that I’m writing about Poetry and Space. Though sometimes shocked, I’m also inspired by Vito Acconci’s aesthetics, his transgressive approaches to space. And I’ve been reading again The Natural House, by Frank Lloyd Wright, in which he writes so beautifully about plasticity and simplicity, about form and function. He writes,

“In any final result there can be no separation between our architecture and our culture. Nor any separation of either from our happiness. Nor any separation from our work.” (44)

I should get back to my work, though it’s much nicer, right now, to draft this here, in the white space.

see Foucault essay: “Of Other Spaces” 1967

Tegan designed and coloured-in this picture for me, the day I came home from India. It was lovely to watch her concentration. She says it was inspired by an elephant mousepad I brought back for her, but it reminds me of one of the Jataka stories, The Four Friends, retold by Gonsar Rinpoche. Tegan and I used to read this story before her bedtime. It tells of the mutual friendship and cooperation of an elephant, a bird, a monkey and a hare, who live in the forest. The bird, being a carrier of fruits and seeds is a reincarnation of the Buddha, the wisest and the oldest of the friends; the elephant being the youngest and the largest, carries the others on his back.  The Jataka tales are stories from the former lives of the Buddha, in which, while being a bodhisattva, he took the form of animals. His disciples and close friends existed also as animals.  

Jataka tales are folklore written in Sanskrit, but they are found, apparently, in various languages such as Malay, Burmese, Lao, Khmer, Bhutanese and Tibetan. They are derived from the Pali canon, the Sutta Pitaka, which includes a collection of more than 500 poems, some of which narrate details of the jāti, or previous births of the Buddha. Many are translations of the Pali, while some are hybridised with vernacular cultural traditions that predate the sacred texts. There’s epigraphic and archeological evidence to confirm that the official Jataka tales date from around thte 5th century, but many apocryphal versions exist.

Some apocryphal versions show direct appropriation from Hindu sources. The ancient Indians were ardent students of zoology, as evidenced by the Upanishads and in particular the Garudapuranas, which contain the life histories of fishes and turtles. It’s interesting to note that these ancient scriptures anticipate scientifically modern concepts of organic evolution, environmental science and heredity. In one of the Upanishads, Virdjan tired of his solitude replicates by binary divison, as did the first amoeba. He becomes two beings, two individuals behaving and appearing heterogeneously as different sexes. In time, these individuals were able to metamorphose into animals becoming pigs, cattle, ants. The incarnations of Vishnu himself, as fish and turtle suggest the aquatic origins of animals, which Darwinian evolutionary science has since established.

This mythic encounter with biological diversity differs from one found in Plato’s Symposium. In speaking of Love, Aristophanes describes how the god Zeus weakened the original human race by eliminating the versatile and potentially chaotic third species of androgynous humans and reducing ’man’ to two halves of the same.

From what I can ascertain, out of respect for animals, ancient Sanskrit scholars did not practise vivisection, their knowledge being acquired from empirical sources. One collection of aural storytelling, the third century Panchatantra, or five principles, are a sequence of animal fables, with moral and sociopolitical themes that resonate in teaching about human conduct. Similar versions of this seminal work have been found in Syrian, Arabic, Persian, Syriac and English. The Panchatantra may be described as an early multicultural discourse; its origins are complex and contentious, the original Sanskrit text, attributed to the legendary Vishnu Sarma, being lost. Some historians suggest similarities and correspondences to Aesops fables. 

At Borobudur in Central Java, a temple which dates from the eighth century, the bas reliefs depict scenes from both the Jataka tales and from the Panchatantra. We visited this astonishingly beautiful and serene monument last year. Among the 2670 panels of volcanic stone, our ever-charismatic guide Toni Tack from Perumahan University, chanced upon this infamous depiction of erotic simpatico between a cow and a monkey:)

I think the monkey is smiling.