From the ground up

What is Magritte’s faux pipe an enlightenment of? What do we learn from it? We learn the lesson, the great lesson, the only truly important and significant lesson we are likely to learn from works of art, the lesson of our position vis-à-vis Being. And here I am again, incapable of distancing myself from the problem of Being, bound to it, my feet immobilized, my mind defeated. Being is always there, always present. In saying this, I am stating my ontological confidence in things immutable. God is always there, in everything there is: this is religious certitude at its most fundamental. (Can you see how religion becomes philosophical? Can you see how philosophy becomes religious? Haven’t they always been?)

Above and beyond the things of the flesh and of the mud there are the things of Aether and Ideas: this is the Platonic configuration of the beings-vs-Being problem. The Aether is the region that refuses us. It’s where signs grow towards, in the hope of reaching that impossible-to-reach state of total signification.

Source: Extra Mile Academy

The (re)turn of the artist

What must have been really terrifying to the Lascaux man was the realization that Being could be imitated. To have the world out there and the work of art here, literally at your fingertips (not even in the open anymore, but enclosed in the viscera of a dark, underground space, the cave), that must have caused the frissons of terror in the first man of the arts.

Every true artist misreads the predecessor not because they find them insufficient, but because they know the predecessor is a bunch of signs, of mere approximations. And signs, because they’re made, they can be un-made as well; undone, to use the proper English word. Cathedrals have been destroyed and rebuilt, books have been burnt and rewritten, and so, the capacity of the human race to do and undo has flourished. This is an awful generalisation (an unacceptable excuse for genocides and cultural eradications), but it’s how we can state the nature of signs: the fact of their mutability. And since we’re at this, let’s say that what needs to be added to this realization is the other fact of our existence: the eternity of Being. Compared to it, we are nothing. This too sounds miserable, horrible, atrocious, depressing. And that’s the reason religions promise happiness elsewhere. That’s why there’s happiness promised in philosophical reflection (the happiness of understanding at the end of toilsome reflection). That’s why, among other things, Aristotle found catharsis necessary: the aesthetic relief for a pre-aesthetic terror.

Back to Being

When things are, as said by Vilém Flusser, in that state of primordial terror that precedes and precludes aesthetic pleasure (when our eyes are too weak to resist the explosive brilliance of the new), we are situated so close to Being we can feel the Boom. We are thrown back by the blast, in full astonishment. But then, cautiously or downright irresponsibly (whether we’re cowards or heroes it matters not so far as we have an answer, an attempt at deciphering what’s blown us away), we come back upon Being. We come back upon Being the way criminals are said to return to the place of their crime. Why do they do it? Maybe in order to clarify the terror of the moment when the crime was committed, the shock of its newness.

This return is exactly what transforms us into artistic beings; this insufficiency, this I-want-more, I-want-it-again kind of philosophy. And now, from the distance to which the blast has thrown us, we take a second look and things look less brilliant, less dazzling. Now, with the distance that affords us the courage (heroes always need distance, don’t they?; even if it’s distance from themselves, from their own security, their own instinct of survival), we can finally see the blast as beautiful.
What I think is important to an artist is this awareness of the moment of the blast: the second when Being materialized itself as a terrible event, as a manifestation of a force that pushes forth. Once the artist knows this, they also know that everything that followed (everything that became Man after the fall from Paradise) is an empire of signs. And if there’s anything that can be replicated, it’s this: the process of signification. Not Being. Being is forever unrepresentable, forever humiliatingly greater, embarrassingly more complex, painfully more laden with potential than we can even start to comprehend. So Being aside, let’s get back to the earliest moment when we have discovered ourselves as capable of doing things; when we have discovered ourselves to be capable, tout court.

An epiphany of the ground

Source: China Daily

When visiting the tombs of Emperor Qin, with its life-size soldiers made of terracotta, Annie Dillard had this wonderful revelation of the development of signs. She saw the excavations and the big picture of history being unearthed. But, most prominently, she saw these figures of terracotta men, half-unearthed, half still buried, telluric creatures about to emerge:

“The earth was yielding these bodies, these clay people: it erupted them forth, it pressed them out. The same tan soil that embedded these people also made them; it grew and bore them. The clay people were earth itself, only shaped. The hazards of time had suspended their bodies in the act of pressing out into the air.”

The terracotta men are, obviously, replicas. Ceci n’est pas une pipe applies to them perfectly (not least, because they’re made of clay too). Ceci n’est pas un soldat, Annie Dillard would have said about the men of clay she contemplated, had she been asked to give those objects a definition.

Dillard’s is a very fortunate association, because it employs things of the earth. Signs growing out of the ground to inhabit the sublunary landscapes of humanity, that’s what the terracotta army is about. Terra cotta, cooked earth, earth transformed from its brute state into a work of art, earth pressing art out. This is what all arts are about, really and truly: about growing from the ground up, about pushing signs out of a primordial foundation, about making something out of Being.

Earthen objects, telluric symbols. Earth is easier for us to understand, and that’s why all forms of art have to grow from the ground up. Earth has given us a proper location for Paradise: not in the skies where improbable mythologies often locate it, but laid upon the very earth from which everything grows. The Christian paradise is a place of gardens and trees and flowers, all of which are things that grow from the ground up. The skies, however, are harder to understand, harder to cope with. From the skies fall complex birds with wings that we’ve strived to replicate and managed only partially. From the skies fall stars and angels. They fall, and that’s the key to their understanding: the gravitational force of signification, which pulls everything towards the ground, whence they can grow then freely, smoothly, into works of art, works of the human hand. The skies have given us vague and powerful divinities, forever out of reach, in whose proximity signs are approximate at best.

I want to finish with another quote from Annie Dillard, just because it’s an excellent way of describing the groundness of arts. This time, she speaks of one particular terracotta soldier on the excavation site:

“The earth bound his abdomen. His hips and legs were still soil. The untouched ground far above him, above where his legs must be, looked like any ground: trampled dirt, a few dry grasses. I looked down into his face. His astonishment was formal.”

Source: Xinhuanet

The terrors we've learnt to tame

All is good and worthy in the land of beauty. Dealing with the terrible truth of Being is something we've grown used to after so many millennia of representation, since Lascaux and well before it, as it may be presumed.

Source: Wikipedia

The nerve to do

Painting something on the wall of a cave, writing down a story that wouldn't settle otherwise, turning the noises of nature into harmony, all this is humans’ meddling with Being. Calling this great Being anything at all, giving it the name God (for instance) is in itself a form of human presence. What makes it human is the courage to use the meager tools at our disposal to face, interpret, and often cheat on what goes by the name of Being.

The courage to face the unknown is exactly what human creativity is about. Had we stopped at the threshold of existence for fear of the terror of all things beautiful, we would have missed a lot of literature to-come, a lot of would-be painting, of music, of sculpture, and so on.

Even when it’s pure terror, the presence of Being is capable of causing an aesthetic tickle in us. Call it the Romantic Awe, the Astonishment, the Horror of the Great Sublime, there should be no shortage of phrases to put it into words – all that’s needed is a little imagination; the courage of imagination. And that’s it, isn't it? That’s the ingredient that makes the soup boil. Imagination. In the absence of certitude, which would have made the world boringly similar, awfully foreknown, we get to employ this little function of our mind (not even the only one, not even the greatest one): imagination. Imagining means recognition (if only poetically at times) of the immensity and frightfulness of Being; but recognition that’s not a paralysis. We don’t stop being and acting just because there’s no way we could know everything there is to know. It does come, indeed, as a frustration, as an anxiety, as an internal revolt – but in the end we don’t turn dumb and do nothing.
So this recognition of Being appears in a way that already promises to deliver the representations  that we are capable of (okay: truncated, as they may be, fragmentary, incomplete, mere shards).

I may have just summarized here the major point of Existentialism: that the shake we receive from the encounter with Being is the thing that puts us in motion. We need a shock, like a car battery that requires a jumpstart. That’s us, humans, simply put.

An aside on humankind

In any case, courageous or not, it seems to be the job of the entire species to tame this cruel Nature, this terrible Being, this frightful God, this immense Grand Signifier, this whatever-it-is that’s incommensurable to us, yet representable. It’s amazing how we can mobilize our kind to fight this battle, when we are so little attuned to other major commonalities of our species (see politics, economy, philosophy etc.).

Looking from a different angle, there must be something in the way myths spring up at huge distances from one another, how the very need for religion, for narratives, for arts in various shapes and forms, coincides across the Globe. Evolutionary theories have attempted to explain this by reference to the way our species has evolved as a species; as a conglomerate, that is: like all languages prior to the Babel split.

Evolutionarily or otherwise, what we seem to be coming back to again and again is our ability to represent. And also the representability of the world as well, the fact that it is always already prepared to be disturbed and distorted by voracious subjectivity, to be dethroned from the kingdom of pure objectivity.

Representations

This forces us into wondering what representation means. Ceci n’est pas une pipe comes to mind again, because it offers the surest shortcut to the understanding of the concept. Whenever, due to our courage and the victories made possible by it, we grow so bold as to veer into arrogance, we need to be reminded of this: of the fact of the incompleteness that reigns over the empire of our representations. No pipe is the pipe, no matter how hard we try. We may fool a viewer into believing we’re Nature itself, as in the case of the ancient painter whose painted curtain fooled the viewer into believing it was the real thing. (And we laughed!) But sooner or later the true face of our exercise (The Treachery of Images) will become apparent. The problem migrates even into the more contemporary issue of serialization. See Walter Benjamin on the fate of the Original in the age of endless Reproduction, when every single copy claims to be an original in itself. But even there, even in the region of unbroken identicalness, there is – there must be – a beginning, a point of origin. Nothing is a copy unless it is a copy of something. And that’s, to Benjamin, the aura of the original. This aura cannot be removed, forgotten, ignored, hidden behind an unaccountable mass of copies. The Pipe Itself is the pipe itself!

The First

This Original, with its warming, comforting aura, is, if you like, the reminder of the glory of our first encounter. That’s what we are always followed by, that’s what we always follow, as in a continuous Möbius strip: the re-enactment of the taste of the first victory, of the first successful representation. And that’s, I believe, when discussing the issue of Being in relation to creation and creativity becomes necessary: when we, for one reason or another, forget. When our vision is cluttered by the signs we have created. Signification, if we take it at its most fundamental (without really turning everything into a professional, jargon-ridden, semiotic-laden discussion), is the production of signs that stand between us and the thing we are trying to represent. Us and the Thing. Here’s where the tension lies: in between. The pipe we paint is not the pipe.

Source: Wikipedia

This one here, Magritte’s pipe, the one we know is not the pipe, is truly a shorthand version of the thing-in-itself (the big problem of all Western philosophy, the awful barrier to our plenitude as things in an ocean of other things). The pipe in the painting is a copy of the actual pipe (if that thing really existed, in fact, since the very act of representation requires a premeditation, a thinking of the thing, i.e. a translation of it into human terms); a version of the actual pipe that is created not in order to be lit but in order to enlighten.