TECH WEEK TIME WITH MARK

WEDNESDAY 4/10

10am     SHIREEN
10:30     SHIREEN
11
11:30
12     CAMILLA
--
5pm      GRAHAM
5:30     KRISTIN

THURSDAY 4/11

9:30
10am
10:30
11
11:30
12
--
1:15    MARK has a meeting with tech staff.
1:30     MARK has a meeting with tech staff.
2  
2:30
3
3:30
4
4:30

FRIDAY 4/12 (TBA, but I'll be around)

Tilda Swinton is a hermit.

This article talks about Tilda Swinton's latest installation of her performance art piece on random days at the MOMA. It's called "The Maybe", and Swinton sleeps in a glass box. Public solitude, indeed! Check it out!

James Castle

Here are some links to resources on James Castle, the artist I was talking about this afternoon. Here is a trailer for the documentary about him. Here is a page devoted to his story. Here is info on the documentary.

The show I saw is at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. You should check it out, in your copious free time.

Young hermits

Children photographed with their prize possessions.

"Film" and Rilke

At Mark's suggestion, I've been watching "Film" by our good friend Beckett for inspiration for my hermit work indoors:

I think it's truly compelling and resonates with my work and with our work as a whole. While Rilke-reading, the first part of his "To Lou Andreas-Salomé" (translation Edward Snow, 2009) reminded me of the themes in "Film".  I've recently been using it in my indoor work (as some of you already know).

To Lou Andreas-Salomé

I.
I held myself too open, I forgot
that outside not just things exist and animals
fully at ease in themselves, whose eyes
reach from their lives' roundness no differently
than portraits do from frames; forgot that I
with all I did incessantly crammed
looks into myself: looks, opinion, curiosity.
     Who knows: perhaps eyes take shape in space
and watch intently. Ah, only as it plunges down to you
does my face cease being on display - grows
into you and twines on darkly,
endlessly, into your sheltered heart.

My life is not this steeply dipping hour
through which you see me hasten down;
I am a tree, I stand against a ground,
only one mouth of many that are mine,
the mouth due to fall silent soon.

I am the pause between a pair of notes
that sound in imperfect resolution:
for death's note drifts up against their fusion--

Yet in the interval of dark the notes, unsure,
trembling, reconcile.
                                  And the song is still pure.

--Book of Hours: The Book of Monastic Life. Trans. Susan Ranson, 2008.

Circuit Appreciation - The Inner Via the Sensuous & Vice Versa

From Acting: The First Six Lessons by Richard Boleslavsky

"The Aunt: (Caustically) And what, if I may ask,
has the gift of observation to do with acting, if you
please?

I: A great deal. It helps a student of the theatre to notice everything unusual and out of the ordinary in every-day life.  It builds his memory, his storage memory, with all visible manifestations of the human spirit. It makes him sensitive to sincerity and to make-believe.  It develops his sensory and muscular memory, and facilitates his adjustment to any business he may be required to do in a part. It opens his eyes to the full extent in appreciation of different personalities and values in people and works of art. And lastly, Madame, it enriches his inner life by full and extensive consumption of everything in outward life."


Much love,

-Jo

Between The Sensuous and The "Ness"

[[  The Sensuous ]]

[I find you, Lord in all Things and in all]

I find you, Lord, in all Things and in all
my fellow creatures, pulsing with your life;
as a tiny seed you sleep in what is small
and in the vast you vastly yield yourself.

The wondrous game that power plays with Things
is to move in such submission through the world:
groping in roots and growing thick in trunks
and in treetops like rising from the dead.


-Rilke
From The Book of Hours
translated by Stephen Mitchell

[[  The Essential[ness] ]]

Buddha in Glory

Center of all centers, core of cores,
almond self-enclosed and growing sweet-
all this universe, to the furthest stars
and beyond them, is your flesh, your fruit.

Now you feel how nothing clings to you;
your vast shell reaches into endless space,
and there the rich, thick fluids rise and flow.
Illuminated by your infinite peace,

a billion stars go spinning through the night,
blazing high above your head.
But in you is the presence that
will be, when all the stars are dead.

-Rilke
From New Poems
translated by Stephen Mitchell


I reckon ostensible moments of contradiction between these poems speak to a Truth about the connection between the Inner World (even innerer than the thinking world) and the World of Things - the Sensuous World.

The Quietest Room on Earth Will Drive You Crazy!

This is an anechoic chamber. It absorbs 99.9% of all sounds. Apparently after about 45 minutes visitors begin to experience auditory hallucinations similar to a sensory deprivation chamber.

I love the look and feel of the fiberglass panels and pattern on the walls, but also like the concept of 'hermiting our senses'.

http://hyperallergic.com/49918/the-quietest-room-on-earth-will-drive-you-crazy/

Freedom = Death / Dishonor

This is what I think about our post-Wings of Desire documentary discussion yesterday.

We can forget that in going off the "social script", we're not just achieving some sort of transcendent freedom that allows us to be artistically and emotionally self-fulfilled.  We're also making it so that we can no longer have productive conversations like the one we had yesterday.  Imagine if I had suddenly busted out some serious prana in the middle of the circle while you folks were talking about reclaiming public spaces.  I would have disrupted the conversation, and we would not have accomplished what we accomplished.

There's a reason that when hermits reject society, society rejects hermits.  They're outcasts, pariahs, non-people.  We can't even say that hermitage is a good or bad thing, because when you're rejecting social structures, you're rejecting morality and any ability to make value judgments.  You're not just morally ambiguous, you're morally devoid.  You're doing a dark thing.

When you decide to be a hermit, you're embracing subversion and rebellion, but also total impotence and incompetence.  You could become the pioneering visionary (in which case your experience would be reappropriated by society anyway), or you could be the sludge, the dregs weighing down the boots of wider society, which keeps trucking along in your absent presence.  Not to mention the fact that you can never completely shrug off social structures, which allows you enough social consciousness to understand just how much you've sacrificed and how little you've gained (and/or vice versa...?).

The reason I'm pointing out that the hermit life is not all just happy self-discovery and freedom isn't just to be a debbie downer.  I think it's really important that not only are the stakes the lowest they've ever been for your life, because the pressure to perform for others is off, but they're also the highest you can possibly imagine, because your very humanity is at stake in a big way.

As always, if you think I'm being silly or super, you should say so.

Here are some quotations (that aren't Rilke, sorry).

"There are no accidents in life; a community event which suddenly bursts forth and involves me in it does not come from the outside.  If I am mobilized in a war, this war is my war; it is in my image and I deserve it.  I deserve it first because I could always get out of it…. For lack of getting out of it, I have chosen it…. If therefore I have preferred war to death or to dishonor, everything takes place as if I bore the entire responsibility for this war…. There was no compulsion here, for the compulsion could have not got hold on a freedom.  I did not have any excuse; for…the peculiar character of human-reality is that it is without excuse.”

-Sartre

Sartre is invigorated by the possibility of freedom, but he also recognizes an equivalence between "freedom" and "death or dishonor"...

“You may have noticed that people in bus stations, if they know you also are alone, will glance at you sidelong, with a look that is both piercing and intimate, and if you let them sit beside you, they will tell you long lies about numerous children who are all gone now, and mothers who were beautiful and cruel, and in every case they will tell you that they were abandoned, disappointed, or betrayed—that they should not be alone, that only remarkable events, of the kind one reads in books, could have made their condition so extreme.  And that is why, even if the things they say are true, they have the quick eyes and active hands and the passion for meticulous elaboration of people who know they are lying.  Because, once alone, it is impossible to believe that one could ever have been otherwise.  Loneliness is an absolute discovery.  When one looks from inside at a lighted window, or looks from above at the lake, one sees the image of oneself in a lighted room, the image of oneself among trees and sky—the deception is obvious, but flattering all the same.  When one looks from the darkness into the light, however, one sees all the difference between here and there, this and that.  Perhaps all unsheltered people are angry in their hearts, and would like to break the roof, spine, and ribs, and smash the windows and flood the floor and spindle the curtains and bloat the couch.”

-Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson

The relationship between these lonely people and society (abandonment, disappointment, betrayal) is very interesting to me.  There's a self-imposed victimization that can go along with the hermit life.  Also, the juxtaposition of the deception of being "inside" and the anger that comes from being "outside".  Incidentally, this is a fantastic book, especially if you're thinking about ways in which hermits can be hermits together.  The main character of this book shares many extreme hermit-like experiences with her aunt.

"You do not need to leave your room.  Remain sitting at your table and listen.  Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet still and solitary.  The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet."

-Franz Kafka

Kafka echoes the Sartre quotation here when he says, "You do not need to leave your room."  Even a man like Kafka, who often felt the crushing loneliness and the terrifying void of hermit-ness, can still recognize the potential in such a choice.  It's pretty cool when the world rolls in ecstasy at your feet.

A Year with Rilke

Hello all,
In my searches for an online copy of The Book of Hours, I found this blog, A Year with Rilke. In it, the bloggers post excerpts, snippets, poetry, and writings by Rilke, and an image, painting, or picture from an artist with some connection to Rilke, and they tie the image in to the reading. There is one post every day for the year of 2011. They explain the connections to each artist through the link in the upper right, About the Images: The Artists Connected With Rilke.

Josh

Free hermits. Free artists.

It won't let me/I can't figure out how to comment on existing posts... So this was meant to add to a post by Maiko about pollen artist Wolfgang Laib...

This is a video of an artist who creates his work with pollen.   It resonates with the sensation of solitary experience in so many ways.  The sensation of "smallness" is so poignant in Laib's process and work, and the beauty that is revealed only because of its smallness is profound to me...

  http://www.moma.org/explore/multimedia/videos/253/1216 " 

This is awesome. Something I often think about is freedom, and specifically freedom in relation to being an artist and what is means to make art just for yourself. what it would mean to be truly free of expectation, critique, praise, and how a type of hermitage might afford this. I think this is possible on a whole spectrum of levels- we were talking about Patti Smith as a type of 'free hermit’- and I think it is what most resonates with me about Laib. There is a British landscape artist, Andy Goldsworthy, who I also get this from. He creates installations or sculptures in nature using only materials and tools found in the site he is working. For him, the destruction of his work by the environment is part of the artwork itself. He has permanent works, but many of his pieces 'live' anywhere between 10 seconds and several hours. Most of the time he is the only one who gets to see them. This is the link to a documentary about his work: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-kYugLLHww. Today we were also talking about how you claim your space as your own, but how the changing seasons and environment will continually affect the space beyond your control. His work/process seemed an interesting example of this sort of conversation between dweller and dwelling. Listening to the space, making it your own, then giving it back. 

Jesse Dunahoo is another artist whose work and life I feel might fit in here somewhere.. He was born deaf and lost his sight in his early teens. He has a translator help him communicate using a hybrid language of touch, mime, gesture and some ASL. “Living on a farm in the 1930’s- 40’s allowed Mr. Dunahoo an opportunity to manipulate outdoor space and in so doing to created environments which he composed by moving earth and brush often by hand and also by finding and assembling objects/debris which were then placed in an ordered way throughout the manipulated area. Sometimes objects were places in significant places on the ground but most often they were placed in trees and bushes. Jessie used various fences and trees to hang intersecting strings, ropes, wires, etc. – which could be grasped and threaded- in reality following a 3-d road map which he used (uses) in finding his way around outdoor space.” (from http://latitudeartistprofiles.blogspot.com/) He creates these tactile environments/installations from found fabric or materials like plastic bags, twine and old clothing. Some of his works can be seen here: http://freemanproject.wordpress.com/2010/08/20/jessie-dunahoo/ . I then read an awesome story about Harpo Marx, who was not actually mute, who was once sent a harp by his mother. But no one in the town knew how to play the harp and so he had to approximate the tuning. He taught himself how to play and only years later was informed that his tuning had been off. He did learn the “right” way of playing, but his teachers were amazed by how he played and the way he essentially claimed the harp work to for him. I’ve been thinking about both of these things in application to our work in finding new ways of experiencing and occupying space, and the found objects in it, and making it our own. I wonder about... If we were somehow denied example of how to be in space, nothing is known, everything is new, how would we figure out a way of living/moving/being/using that is, by all our accounts,'right.' For example, what would you do with a chair if you had never seen one before? or a lamp? or a book? 

Below are poems by Rilke that spoke to me as possibly useful for our work from my first read-through of The Poetry of Rilke, translation Edward Snow, 2009:

The Poetry of Rilke, translation Edward Snow, 2009. : From The Book of Hours

Now the hour bends down and touches me

with its clear, metallic ring:

my senses tremble. The feeling forms: I can - 

and I grasp the malleable day.

Nothing was complete before I saw it,

all becoming stood still.

My eyes are ripe, and whatever they desire

approaches like a bride.

Nothing is too small: against a gold background

I paint it large and lovingly

and hold it high, and I will never know

whose soul it may release...

I am, you anxious one. Don’t you hear me

surging against you with all my senses?

My feelings, which have found wings, circle

like white birds around your face.

And my soul - can’t you see it there

standing before you in a robe of silence?

Doesn’t my springtime prayer

ripen in your eyes as on a tree?

If you are a dreamer, I am your dream.

But if you choose to be awake, I am your will

and become the master of all majesty

and round to perfect stillness like a star

over the far-off city of time.

God talks to each of us as he creates us,

then walks with us silently out of night.

But the words, spoken to us before we start,

those cloudy words are these:

Sent forth by your senses, 

go to the very edge of your desire;

invest me.

Back behind the things grow as fire,

so that their shadows, lengthened,

will always and completely cover me.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.

Only press on: no feeling is final.

Don’t let yourself be cut off from me.

Nearby is that country

known as Life.

You will recognize it

by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

The Poetry of Rilke, translation Edward Snow, 2009. :  From The Book of Images

Solitude

Solitude is like a rain.

Toward evening it rises from the sea;

from plains that are distant and remote

it migrates to the sky, where it always is.

And only then it falls from the sky on the city.

It rains down in the in-between hours,

when toward dawn all the streets turn around again, 

and when those bodies that found nothing

leave each other sad and disappointed;

and when those people who detest each other

have to sleep together in one bed:

then solitude runs with the rivers...

The Poetry of Rilke, translation Edward Snow, 2009. : From New Poems

The Panther (Probably not as relevant, but I’m particularly drawn to the first stanza)

His gaze has from the passing of the bars

become so tired that it holds nothing anymore.

It seems to him there are a thousand bars

and behind a thousand bars no world.

The supple pace of powerful soft strides,

turning in the very smallest circle,

is like a dance of strength around a center

in which a mighty will stands numbed.

Only at times the curtain of the pupils

soundlessly slides open -. Then an image enters,

glides through the limbs’ taut stillness - 

dives into the heart and dies.

The Poetry of Rilke, translation Edward Snow, 2009. : From New Poems: The Other Part

The Solitary 

No: my heart shall be a tower,

and I myself set at its highest rim:

where nothing else exists, once again pain

and the unsayable, once again world.

Still one thing alone in immensity,

growing dark then light again,

still one last face full of longing

thrust out into the unappeasable,

still one uttermost face made of stone

heeding only its own inner gravity,

while the distances that silently destroy it

drive it on to an even deeper bliss.

The Poetry of Rilke, translation Edward Snow, 2009. :  From Uncollected Poems

Forget, forget, and let us live now

only this how the stars pierce the cleared

nocturnal sky; how the moon’s full disk

surmounts the gardens. We’ve sensed so long

how the darkness breeds many mirrors; how a gleam

takes shape, a white shadow in the radiance

of night. But now let us cross over

and invest this world where

everything is lunar - 

Unknowing before the heavens of my life

I stand in wonder. O the great stars.

The rising and going down. How quiet.

As if I didn’t exist. Am I a part? Did I abjure

the pure influence? Do high and low tide

alternate in my blood according to this order?

I’ll cast off all wished, all other links,

accustom my heart to its remotest space. Better

it live in terror of its stars than

in a dream of refuge, soothed by something near.

For Hans Carossa

Losing is also ours; and even forgetting

has its shape in the permanent realm of change.

things we’ve let go of circle; and though we’re rarely at the center

of these circles: they trace around us the unbroken figure.

Ah, not to be cut off

not by such slight partition

to be excluded from the stars’ measure.

What is inwardness?

What if not sky intensified,

flung through with birds and deep

with winds of homecoming.

Maybe these translations are a little too "from the proper German," but I think they fit nicely with our work, particularly "Initiation" and "Lament."
(all translated by C.F. MacIntyre, 1940)

Initiation
Whoever you are, go out into the evening,
leaving your room, of which you know each bit;
your house is the last before the infinite,
whoever you are.
Then with your eyes that wearily
scarce lift themselves from the worn-out door-stone
slowly you raise a shadowy black tree
and fix it on the sky: slender, alone.
And you have made the world (and it shall grow
and ripen as a word, unspoken, still).
When you have grasped its meaning with your will,
then tenderly your eyes will let it go...


The Solitary
As one who has sailed across an unknown sea,
among this rooted folk I am alone;
the full days on their tables are their own,
to me the distant is reality.

A new world reaches to my very eyes,
a place perhaps unpeopled as the moon;
their slightest feelings they must analyze,
and all their words have got the common tune.

The things I brought with me from far away,
compared with theirs, look strangely not the same:
in their great country they were living things,
but here they hold their breath, as if for shame.


Lament
Oh, everything is far
and long ago.
I believe that star
these thousand years is dead,
though I still see its light.
I believe, in that boat
passing through the night
something fearful was said.
In the house a clock
struck...
Where did it strike?...
I would like to walk
out of my heart
under the wide sky.
I would like to pray.
One of all these stars
must still exist.
I believe I know
which one
still lasts
and stands like a city, white
in the sky at the end of the beam of light...


Evening
Slowly now the evening changes his garments
held for him by a rim of ancient trees;
you gaze: and the landscape divides and leaves you,
one sinking and one rising toward the sky.

And you are left, to none belonging wholly,
not so dark as a silent house, nor quite
so surely pledged unto eternity
as that which grows to star and climbs the night.

To you is left (unspeakably confused)
your life, gigantic, ripening, full of fears,
so that it, now hemmed in, now grasping all,
is changed in you by turns to stone and stars.

Slow and Steady - Of Monsters and Men

A song (a current obsession of mine) that I feel resonates with the themes of our work:

Lyrics:

The lights go out, I am all alone

All the trees outside are buried in the snow
I spend my night dancing with my own shadow
And it holds me and it never lets me go

I move slow and steady
But I feel like a waterfall
Yeah, I move slow and steady
Past the ones that I used to know

My dear old friend, take me for a spin
Two wolves in the dark running in the wind
I'm letting go but I've never felt better
Passing by all the monsters in my head

And I move slow and steady
But I feel like a waterfall
Yeah, I move slow and steady
Past the ones that I used to know

And I'm never ready
'Cause I know, I know, I know
That time won't let me
Show what I want to show

Visual Research and Rilke's "Letters to a Young Poet"

As Maria said in an earlier post, we've been reading Rilke and using it as a base for visual research. I haven't looked at Maria's research in much detail, so as to have two different takes on the letters. My Pinterest board is here. I'm also including a few quotes that jumped out to me.

"...But perhaps those are the very hours when solitude grows; for its growing is painful as the growing of boys and sad as the beginning of sprintimes."

"He can remember that all beauty in animals and plants is a quiet enduring form of lovea nd longing, and he can see animals, as he sees plants, patiently and willingly uniting and increasing and growing, not out of physical delight, not out of physical suffering, but bowing to necessities that are greater than pleasure and pain and more powerful than will and withstanding."

"Most events are inexpressible, taking place in a realm which no word has ever entered, and more inexpressible than all else ware works of art, mysterious existences, the life of which, while ours passes away, endures."

"...for at bottom, and just in the deepest and most important, we are unutterably alone..."

"No experience has been too slight, and the least incident unfolds like a destiny, and fate itself is like a wonderful, wide web in which each thread is guided by an infinitely tender hand and laid alongside another and held and borne up by a hundred others."

"Works of art are of an infinite loneliness..."

"...stairs that are built after the pattern of downward gliding waters--broadly bringing forth step out of step in their descent like wave out of wave."

Edit: The video on the Pinterest board is from this photographer. He has lots of great images here, some related to this project, some just beautiful to look at.

Wordsworth, Rilke, Kaczynski

A Wordsworth poem that resonates with Rilke and Kaczynski:

"THE WORLD IS TOO MUCH WITH US; LATE AND SOON"

          THE world is too much with us; late and soon,
          Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
          Little we see in Nature that is ours;
          We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
          The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
          The winds that will be howling at all hours,
          And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
          For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
          It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be
          A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;                         
          So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
          Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
          Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
          Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
                                                              1806. 

From http://www.bartleby.com/145/ww317.html 

Seeing and separation

In a conversation with Maiko yesterday, we were discussing the ways that we might help the audience to have a sense of its own work perceiving the performances. One technique (not rare in the theater) is framing the "stage" with curtains. Another is to ask the audience to look through something. These photos of views from windows give a clear feeling of separation from the landscape seen. Many of them also give a strong sense of the vantage point. They tend to create a stirring sense of mystery (or at least real estate envy) for both the near and far landscapes...and a strong sense of the division between the viewer and what's seen.

Am I too alone? Am I too tiny?

This is a video of an artist who creates his work with pollen.   It resonates with the sensation of solitary experience in so many ways.  The sensation of "smallness" is so poignant in Laib's process and work, and the beauty that is revealed only because of its smallness is profound to me...
  http://www.moma.org/explore/multimedia/videos/253/1216

Monday rehearsal recap

We spent much of our rehearsal today discussing the miniature space explorations each of us made on Sunday. A few things came up in our discussion:

Many people commented on the awkwardness of having people watch them be "alone" in the space, and of being aware that they were no longer "alone." Mark described this awkwardness as a means to accessing your own consciousness: you become aware of our own consciousnesses by realizing how they are affected by the presence of someone else's consciousness. We also talked about the audience as a component of performance and of theater; in making these individual pieces, we're straddling the desire to show people our work with the desire to keep our work something private, something unseen. The audience is a "second set of eyes" for our work, a set of eyes whose presence changes our work but may ultimately improve it. It's okay to let your private thing be observed.

Some things we do just for ourselves as performers, and the audience just happens to be there. Some things we do for us and our scene partners, and the audience still happens to be there. And some things we do for the audience, and for ourselves, and for everyone on stage.

We also talked about the pressure of drawing the audience in/making the audience feel included. Our solitary pieces are potentially very insular by nature, so would an audience feel alienated or intrusive by entering our space? Mark said that the proximity to the performances will draw the audience in and make them feel connected; because we are occupying the space and allowing them so close to us in that space, we don't have to strive to connect with them.

We also talked about the process of choosing spaces. Some people felt that they chose quickly so that they could get more time to work, instead of letting the space call to them. We talked a bit about how we want our pieces to work with space. We want to make complete pieces: some pieces of architecture/space are so "complete" that a human body feels like it clutters it; some piece of architecture/space feel unrealized and need a human body to complete them. One of our goals, I think, in creating these pieces is to have a conversation with the space and to use our bodies in conversation with the space to transform that space, accenting its lines and its shape.

Mark asked us to consider: what are the ways that we occupy spaces? How can you take a space and contextualize it for yourself? Think about riding the subway or SEPTA and occupying a seat. How do you own that seat and make it your own private space? How do you dissuade people from entering your space?

We also talked about the text we'll be working with for these pieces. We'll be working with poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, the poet who wrote the poem we've been working with through the process so far (I am too alone in this world, and not alone enough / to make every minute holy). Mark read to us from Letters to a Young Poet, a collection of letters Rilke wrote to a young man who graduated from his same high school, a man who wrote to him asking for advice on how to be a poet. Rilke emphasizes carving out a space inside yourself and just worrying about you, rather than placing your sense of worth outside yourself. You should all take a look, and you can find them here.

Hi All,
Josh and i read Letters To A Young Poet this week- we gave ourselves an assignment to read it and search for images which illustrated some of the themes and ideas that jumped out at us. I have created a pinterest page where i will be placing my visual research for the show. CHECK IT OUT.  Below are some of the passages from the letters which resonated with me... i love the idea that our brains, when deprived, or rather withdrawn from external sensory input, human contact, the drama of public life.. will create these complex fantasies, additional realities... we will experience these extreme highs and lows.. For me some of the most intense feeling of love for someone, or shame for that matter, are only accessed when you have the time to parse it all out and extract it from the white noise of everyday life..  anyhoo- these are my thoughts for now- hopefully the images in the pinterest get at these ideas- that the scale of our internal conflicts has the ability change dramatically... aloneness facilitates epiphany and creativity...... that sort of thing. anyway- enjoy!

"It is also good to love: because love is difficult...With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered around their solitary, anxious, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love. But learning-time is always a long, secluded time, and therefore loving, for a long time ahead and far on into life, is: solitude, a heightened and deepened kind of aloneness for the person who loves."

"..perhaps somewhere, someplace deep inside your being, you have undergone important changes while you were sad. The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise; like diseases that are treated superficially and foolishly, they just withdraw and after a short interval break out again all the more terribly;.." 

"That is how all distances, all measures, change for the person who becomes solitary; many of these changes occur suddenly and then, as with the man on the mountaintop, unusual fantasies and strange feelings arise, which seem to grow out beyond all that is bearable."

"We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors; if it has abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are dangers, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience."

Isolation on the Taiga

I pretty much stumbled over this article on my travels through the internet. At first I wanted to post it as an alternative to those examples we already have, of hermits who choose to absent themselves from their communities, and to stand in potential opposition to those solitary hermits, like the ones featured in Bevilacqua's photos, as a family of hermits. Or would it be a hermit family? Either way, I am now not so convinced that this family is a viable alternative, after reading this blog post from blogfromahermit.com.

The blog post discusses the difference between hermits who choose to isolate themselves, and those who hide. I don't know that one approach is more valid than the other, or that one choice/action makes a real hermit, and the other a refugee, but I wanted to put the question out there.

Does being a hermit require conscious choice? Are all hermits, recluses, or all recluses, hermits? Or does it fall somewhere in between?

Invisible Man - Text and Photo

The book Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison has long been one of my favorites. The prologue is particularly eloquent- and also happens to be extremely resonant with our hermitage project.

There is a photo done by a photographer named Mark Hall that is a staged recreation of the main character's "hideout" that he describes in the prologue. Ellison describes in rich detail the sense of place, the lighting, the sound, the items in the room. The photo recreates some of that, but the effect would be most immersive if the viewer could also hear Louis Arrmstrong's "What did I do to be so black and Blue?" playing in the background, as Ellison describes.

Here's the photo:

The whole prologue is too long to cut and past, but here's a link to the full text:
Invisible Man Text

But this is the very opening, which will hopefully be tantalizing enough to get you to read some more:


I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted
Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a
man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids -- and I might even be
said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people
refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus
sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard,
distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings,
themselves, or figments of their imagination -- indeed, everything and
anything except me.

Nor is my invisibility exactly a matter of a bio-chemical accident to
my epidermis. That invisibility to which I refer occurs because of a peculiar
disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come in contact. A matter of
the construction of their inner eyes, those eyes with which they look through
their physical eyes upon reality. I am not complaining, nor am I protesting
either. It is sometimes advantageous to be unseen, although it is most often
rather wearing on the nerves. Then too, you're constantly being bumped
against by those of poor vision. Or again, you often doubt if you really exist.
You wonder whether you aren't simply a phantom in other people's minds.
Say, a figure in a nightmare which the sleeper tries with all his strength to
destroy. It's when you feel like this that, out of resentment, you begin to
bump people back. And, let me confess, you feel that way most of the time.
You ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real
world, that you're a part of all the sound and anguish, and you strike outwith your fists, you curse and you swear to make them recognize you. And,
alas, it's seldom successful.

Yesterday, Karl and I spent some time taking pictures of giant foam core letters in various positions across the field and hillside behind Goodhart. (An experiment for the field of words Mark's envisioning for this piece.) Our goal was to see whether the letters would be clearly visible from various vantage points around the building, and which size worked best. 

The photos below are in pairs--one of each pair was taken with the lens all the way out, and one with the lens zoomed in for a close-up. Be aware that the close-up photos are actually a more accurate representation of how visible the letters are from where I was standing (on the balcony off the teaching theater; at the window in the music room; and at the top of the hill, on the path between Goodhart and Rhoads). But even at a greater distance the letters are all quite visible. (Do make sure to enlarge the pictures in order to see what's really visible.)

from the balcony (far view)

from the balcony (close-up)

from the top of the hill, on the path between Goodhart and Rhoads(far view)

from the top of the hill, on the path between Goodhart and Rhoads  (close-up)

from the music room (far view)

from the music room (close-up)

from the balcony (far view)

from the balcony (close-up)

from the balcony (far view)

from the balcony (close-up)

from the music room (far view)

from the music room (close-up)

 

from the music room (far view)

from the music room (close-up)

from the music room (far view)

from the music room (close-up)

Suitcases of the insane

This is worth looking at. Not because "hermits" = "insane". I'm not even sure if I think that "the hospitalized" = "insane". But it is a wonderful exercise in the power of detail.

And, as a stray thought, it's also an interesting essay in the way that containers work. Hypothesis (really a wildly speculative one, which distinguishes it from a proposal): every hermit has a Kit which must contain her/his hermitage. Every Kit expands out to occupy the hermit's hermitting space. By analogy: Each of us contains some set of somethings...characteristics, experiences, opinions, electro-chemical events...and those open out into the larger world when we choose for them to. As a house contains its denizens. Containers contain AND there is an inevitable relationship between the two. Which means, I suppose, that the container is not only a container, but also a part of the inside of itself...as we are, willing or no, always in some kind of relationship to the world.

This has a relationship to the unabomber idea...and the house in which he lived.

I include a second view of this domicile to demonstrate the role of context in how we experience objects.

Kafka's Diaries

Sometimes Kafka deliberately shut himself off from the world, but he was always a hermit inside his own head.  A letter, then excerpts from his diaries:

My Max

I am in such a bad way that I think I can only get over it by not speaking to anyone for a week, or as long as may be necessary. From the fact that you won’t try to answer this postcard in any way, I shall see that you are fond of me.

Your Franz

March 17 1914

Sat in the room with my parents, leafed through magazines for two hours, on and off simply stared before me; in general simply waited for ten o'clock to arrive and for me to be able to go to bed.

June 6 1914

'Don't you want to join us?' I was recently asked by an acquaintance when he ran across me alone after midnight in a coffee-house that was already almost deserted. 'No, I don't,' I said.

August 3 1914

Alone in my sister's apartment. It is lower down than my room, it is also on a side street, hence the neighbours' loud talking below, in front of their doors. Whistling too. Otherwise complete solitude. No longed-for wife to open the door. In one month I was to have been married. The saying hurts: you've made your bed, now lie in it. You find yourself painfully pushed against the wall, apprehensively lower your eyes to see whose hand it is that pushes you, and, with a new pain in which the old is forgotten, recognize your own contorted hand holding you with a strength it never had for good work. You raise your head, again feel the first pain, again lower your gaze; this up-and-down motion of your head goes on without pause.

Kafka's fiction reflects the sentiments in these diary entries.  His protagonists are loners who are ostracized from a society they do not understand.  Outcasts.  Unwilling misfits.

Rilke: Letter to A Young Poet

"You ask whether your verses are good. You ask me. You have already asked others. You send them to journals. You compare them with other poems, and are upset when certain editorial offices reject your efforts. Now (since you’ve permitted me to give you advice) I ask you to abandon all this. You look outside yourself, and that above all else is something you should not do just now. Nobody can advise you and help you, nobody. There’s only one way to proceed. Go inside yourself."

I have been reading and thinking about Rilke's poems and have just found the time to wander back to this. It's a book of 10 letter Rainer Maria Rilke wrote to a young (I would say, for the benefit of the NINA crew, Treplovian) poet who wrote asking him for advice. This will be, I think, an important foundational document for us, mostly because it helps to articulate the value of SOLITUDE as a practice and pursuit, which is the essence of hermitish behavior. I am not sure if it is popular to believe in the self anymore, at least not with the fervor that Rilke believes in it, but our project wants to hypothesize the existence of a self that we can access through the exercise of solitude. There may be contexts in which this self is elusive--and maybe only an undiscovered hypothesis. But there are, the piece posits, things to find within us if we look for them. (Just to play this out: there are times when I am sure that there is money in one of my pants pockets and I search for it with a vengeance...and just because it's never in either of the two pockets I can be looking in at a given moment, that doesn't mean the money isn't in another of my pockets. Or was shaken out and is in the vicinity.)

I recommend that, if you are interested in this project, you check into these letters. The quote above is from a relatively new translation. Early on, I suspect we may occupy ourselves in rehearsal by reading some of these out loud. And sections of them may find their way into the piece. Indeed, I am imagining that Rilke may be the writer whose texts unify the "hermit" sequence of short pieces that we will be making.

more soon.

Alone/Lonely vs caring about being missed

As long as we're posting poetry, I ran across this by Auden that resonated with me about the distance we perceive between ourselves versus what may actually exist. Some hermits want to be alone and they aren't seen, other hermits want to be alone but feel the need to share their lives the world.

W.H. Auden 

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

Alone vs. Lonely.

Some people who are by themselves may be lonely. And indeed, all of us experience loneliness from time to time (whether we are alone or in a group, I think). But...is the solitary aspect of being a hermit necessarily predicated on loneliness? I don't think so.

One question that we will ask as we begin to develop characters is: why is this hermit here? What is attractive about this space? What does s/he hope to find here? What is s/he with in this space. Just because we are absent human company doesn't mean we are alone--we may be alone with our thoughts, we may be waiting for something/someone, we may be very busy occupying the space that we are in and/or maintaining full residence in our bodies. We may be working something out, remembering something so tender and profound that it trumps the present tense...or we may be so alive in our sensory lives that the company of another human would be too much. True, we may also feel lonely...but one of the building blocks for strong hermiting is sensing the value of the hermitish life.

I think about the first few lines of this Rilke poem (I have been thinking about Rilke a lot, FYI).

I am too alone in the world, and not alone enough 
to make every minute holy.
I am too tiny in this world, and not tiny enough 
just to lie before you like a thing,
shrewd and secretive.
I want my own will, and I want simply to be with my will, 
as it goes toward action, 
and in the silent, sometimes hardly moving times 
when something is coming near,
I want to be with those who know secret things 
or else alone.
I want to be a mirror for your whole body,
and I never want to be blind, or to be too old
to hold up your old and swaying picture.
I want to unfold.
I don’t want to stay folded anywhere, 
because where I am folded, there I am a lie.
And I want my grasp of things 
true before you.  I want to describe myself 
like a painting that I looked at
closely for a long time,
like a saying that I finally understood,
like the pitcher I use every day, like the face of my mother,
like a ship that took me safely
through the wildest storm of all.

~ from Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, 
translated by Robert Bly (Harper & Row, 1981)

Poems about loneliness

Song by Adrienne Rich

You're wondering if I'm lonely:
OK then, yes, I'm lonely
as a plane rides lonely and level
on its radio beam, aiming
across the Rockies
for the blue-strung aisles
of an airfield on the ocean.

You want to ask, am I lonely?
Well, of course, lonely
as a woman driving across country
day after day, leaving behind
mile after mile
little towns she might have stopped
and lived and died in, lonely

If I'm lonely
it must be the loneliness
of waking first, of breathing
dawns' first cold breath on the city
of being the one awake
in a house wrapped in sleep

If I'm lonely
it's with the rowboat ice-fast on the shore
in the last red light of the year

that knows what it is, that knows it's neither
ice nor mud nor winter light
but wood, with a gift for burning

Daffodils, by William Wordsworth

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine

And twinkle on the milky way,

They stretched in never-ending line

Along the margin of a bay:

Ten thousand saw I at a glance,

Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they

Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:

A poet could not be but gay,

In such jocund company:

I gazed--and gazed--but little thought

What wealth the show to me had brought.

For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,

And dances with the daffodils.

Some brain droppings:

Loneliness connected to potential? 

Rich's loneliness manifests itself in moments on the cusp of transformation: sleeping --> waking, ice --> thaw, traveling --> arriving. 

Wordworth's loneliness/solitude aligns itself along tropes of solace in nature and simplicity; also of finding significance from within ("that inward eye / which is the bliss of solitude"). But Wordsworth's solitary delight is also located in a group, ten thousand daffodils instead of one. His recollection of those flowers is a connection to their communal activity, their dancing. 

Loneliness still involves a community? You leave your own group but find acceptance/joy in another?