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 i love the idea that our brains, when deprived, or rather withdrawn from external sensory input, human contact, the drama of public life..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?

Some Links

Also, this is sort of an interesting list of hermitty resources and blogs online: Dwelling Alone (list of resources)

And THIS is just all kinds of weird and fascinating and funny and disturbing: The Hermit in the Garden

Online presence/finding the real self

(I started to comment on Karl's post below about the post by Paul Miller, the offline blogger for The Verge, and it got long enough that I figured I'd just post it here. It's meandery. You've been warned.)

I have a fair number of thoughts about the concept of "online presence," born of several years of my own  blogging and Flickr-ing, and several years prior to that of avid blog reading. There are plenty of arguments out there that one's online presence is more presentation than presence--rehearsed, performed. As if there's a mask that one dons when one logs on.

Of course I have both experiential and anecdotal evidence that people's online personalities are not always entirely in line with their offline personalities, but this argument has still always struck me as a bit odd. I mean, aren't we all always performing our own presence to some extent? Is what we present to the world ever fully aligned with who we perceive ourselves to be in our private, internal experience? Sure, the Internet changes the nature of the performance, but is the way we shift into some other version of ourselves online really that different from how we shift our performance of self in any other situation?

It seems to me that really, our online presence is just one more facet of our "real" selves--maybe this is what Miller means by looking at the whole buffalo, seeing all the facets? (Though that's not really the impression I got from his post.) I know for me, my online self is, in some really significant ways, more me--more my own experience of myself--than any other self I present to the world. It's a kernel self--a deeper part of me than the ones that tend to get space in the real world, and the part of me that's most important to me in many ways.

Along with the "we're all just performing ourselves on the Internet" argument, there have begun to be other people arguing that we need to stop making a distinction between our lives on the Internet and our lives in the real world. This makes enormous sense to me given the level of community and deep friendship I've found through my online interactions. Not to mention that deeper expression of self.

But--and this is, I think, where it comes back to hermits--maybe there’s something to be said (for some of us, anyway) for disconnecting from all forms of community and interaction, in the interest of finding our purest, least "performed" self. What do we find in the quiet of a space where we're really and truly alone? And for our project here: What does it mean to construct a performance around the idea of people trying to be really and truly alone, perhaps to find out who they are when they’re not performing?