THE FLOATING BEAR no. 2
Where is the Li
A PROJECT BY BRIAN PRUGH
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THE FLOATING BEAR no. 2
fe we have lost in living? in Miami, Florida
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JUNE 20, 2014
When I was in high school I was assigned an essay on the subject of two lines by T. S. Eliot:
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
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I did not encounter these lines in context until many years later—they come from a play called The Rock, which Eliot co-wrote with a number of collaborators and which was performed at a benefit for the Dioceses of London in 1934. Eliot claimed only the choruses from the play, and published them as the “Choruses from The Rock” in his Complete Poems and Plays: 1909-1950. The line that precedes the two which formed the subject of my essay is this: “Where is the Life we have lost in living?” But the essay I wrote when I was eighteen had nothing to do with that. I set out systematically to articulate what is lost when wisdom is reduced to knowledge and when knowledge is reduced to information. My analysis proceeded along roughly these lines: I claimed that information is internalized in knowledge and that knowledge is put to use in wisdom. Each step up in the chain, from information to knowledge and from knowledge to wisdom, involved the addition of some faculty: Information + [Understanding] = Knowledge Knowledge + [Right use] = Wisdom no. 2
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I was therefore able to identify, with algebraic specificity, exactly what was lost in each case. Of course, this was not the point of those questions in the poem. And the line about Life, and all of the lines that follow, make this incredibly clear. But within the world circumscribed by those two little lines I could spin a theoretical web. Held in suspension and out of context, these lines afforded me the chance to use all of the philosophical muscle I had to concoct a theory of knowledge that has absolutely nothing to do with the thing those lines are trying to say. The problem with my youthful analysis of Eliot’s suggestive questions probably stems from an overactive mathematical imagination. The idea of a function is quite attractive: it can take a set of numbers like the real numbers, just lined up in a row, and transform them into a shape. It’s a powerful idea, allowing mathematicians to take a thing as complicated as the line formed by the intersection of a plane with the surface of a cone parallel to the cone’s axis and transform it into a simple relationship: f(x) = x2
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In this case, the function of multiplying a number by itself transforms the humdrum series of real numbers into a basic parabolic curve. But the mechanism is the important thing here: some relatively inert material (the real numbers, in this case) is gathered together, and something is done to it so that it becomes something else (a parabola). I had the same idea about information and knowledge. The thought was like this: take a bunch of information and perform the function of understanding on it, and, voilà, knowledge! Find a great store of knowledge and put it to right use, and voilà, wisdom! The flaws in the argument are, of course, substantial. Knowledge is not simply information churned through a mill, and neither is wisdom just mobilized knowledge. If Socrates was wise, or, better still, if he loved wisdom, it certainly was not for any accumulation of knowledge (his wisdom was more likely to put knowledge into disuse than to use). There are vast gulfs between the realms of wisdom, knowledge and information—and when one of them passes away whole worlds are lost. To say that they are lost is not to say that they no longer exist—but it is to say that we can no longer see them.
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A couple of weeks ago, my five-year-old son came down with a nasty case of croup, an inflammation of the airways caused by any one of a number of viruses (hence the best treatment is just to wait it out). He’s had it before, and it typically lasts only a few days. But in the throes of an attack, it’s scary. The larynx gets swollen so his breathing becomes strained. (In rare cases, a sick child’s nostrils will start flaring and their skin will start turning blue, both of which are clues that you should get to a hospital, where they will treat the cough by giving the sick child oxygen or, when necessary, medication to reduce the swelling. One of croup’s most annoying symptoms is that it almost always starts at night, when medical help seems farthest away.) Christopher woke up in the V-berth (a double bed at the bow of the boat, shaped like a ‘V’) with the telltale barking cough and difficulty breathing. Kristin, my wife, carried him outside of the boat to the cockpit to get him some cooler, fresh air and to distract his attention from his cough. They sat together in the cockpit on the most glorious, calm night we have seen since arriving in Miami two weeks ago. A dolphin surfaced near the boat.
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Christopher was scared. Of course he was scared—he was struggling to breathe—and as he curled up next to his mom and they watched the water roll by like smooth, satin sheets, lit by the city with its familiar orange glow, he gave her a hug and said, “I love you, mama.” Twice. I was watching them from the cabin, keeping an ear out for our other son and getting clear on the quickest route to the hospital should his breathing get worse (which, thankfully, it didn’t). His words gave me a start. He was scared and unable to see anything beyond that moment, and so when he said, “I love you, mama,” he was putting his whole Life into those words. Now, the next day he was climbing trees and only occasionally breathing harder than normal. But he said those words like they were his dying words and I could not help but think to myself, “What a beautiful way to die.” He was so scared, and so happy to be with his mama, and intoxicated by the beauty of the water and the wind. Moments like this are a kind of death—a moment of total surrender—and I think they are the most perfect moments in any life. I think dying is the most beautiful thing we do.
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A boat is made up of many parts. There is the hull, which is, in essence, a shape. It keeps the boat afloat by keeping water outside of that shape. Now, in order for the boat to be useful we have to put holes in that shape —hatches and ports, for us to enter and to let air and light into the cabin, as well as holes for the sink to drain into and the engine to draw water to cool itself through, and one for the prop to leave the hull and one for the rudder, too. The anxieties about living on a boat really begin with these holes, and making sure that the water stays on the appropriate side of them. On a sailboat there is the rigging and there are sails— two things that I am a long way from understanding— and on ours there is also a motor, a 13 horsepower Volvo diesel engine. There are batteries that start the engine and power our lights and—perhaps more importantly— the bilge pump, which pumps any water that has leaked into our boat out of it again. There is a water tank that supplies fresh water to the galley and the head, and drains that empty the waste back into the sea (sewage is retained and dealt with separately). These systems are
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all interconnected, and maintaining them, with the knowledge that a failure in any one of them might result in a problem with one of the holes, is another source of anxiety. And then, of course, there is the apartment inside of the hull, which is our home. And there are many things to be done here, too—as with every new dwelling, there are adjustments necessary to get the shape of the place in line with our life. In this case, there are a few more factors to take into consideration than usual. (How will everything feel when the floor is tilted fifteen degrees to one side or another? How can we manage to keep out the bugs, the rain and the direct sun without blocking our much-needed airflow?) And this is, of course, yet another source for anxiety. The natural manifestations of these anxieties are what we call “projects.� Getting the engine running is a project. Covering the deck with non-stick paint is a project. Installing life netting to keep the kids from falling off the boat is a project. Fixing the plumbing is a project. Projects are endless.
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When I began writing this I went looking for a line in the “Choruses from The Rock” about projects. I thought I might find something that said, approximately, “To what end all this doing?” I know the poem well enough and recalled this line: “A thousand policemen directing traffic / Cannot tell you why you come or where you go,” but that wasn’t quite it. Like many of my recollections of artworks, the feeling I got from the work wasn’t so easily locatable in it, and when I went looking, I found something else. “Where is the Life we have lost in living?” is not far into the poem. I stopped there. I realized that my gripe about projects is that they are living, and that that other thing I am beginning to sense out here is closer to Life. I’ve deleted lots of pithy remarks about what is Life and what is living. About the importance of Life and our obsession with living. But I’ve deleted them because they are too easy—the relationship between these things is so strange: The living is necessary for the Life but when you get those moments of Life all of the living seems like so
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much wasted time. I can’t get out of these boat projects but when we’re out there Living the weather they don’t seem to matter. Until it rains and there’s water in the cabin. Where is the joint here? Where do Life and living come together? Surely Life doesn’t happen without the living. There’s no getting around living. It surely isn’t wasted time—the living—perhaps it is more like preparation, if done in the right way. Maybe it is like Wittgenstein’s ladder in the Tractatus—it must be kicked away. I don’t know what that point is—the point of intersection of Life and living. It’s not doing those projects but it’s important that they have been done. It is neither forgetting them nor reminiscing about them. Aristotle maintained that no one ought to be counted happy before death. Maybe death is the only distance between Life and living that matters. Perhaps that is why images of death have been so strong for me in working this through.
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There is a search taking place in the bay tonight: police boats trawled back and forth along the horizon for I don’t know how long. The helicopters are out now, hovering over the water shining their lights below, searching for a human form.
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Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know, Why, when the singing ended and we turned Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights, The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there, As night descended, tilting in the air, Mastered the night and portioned out the sea, Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles, Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.
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I would like to think for a moment about Ramon.
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I had a discussion the other night with a gentleman who claimed to read only non-fiction. He said he was interested only in what is true. I remember attending a philosophy conference once where I met a philosopher who made the same claim—he boasted that he had read no fiction in more than ten years. So what is Ramon doing in there, anyway? Why does Wallace need Ramon? I expect that, apart from rhythm or the possibility of an actual personage, Stevens needed Fernandez because he needed a fiction. And he needed a fiction because he had something to say that he couldn’t say directly. The problem with living is that there isn’t any room for fictions. We need facts for living. And when you’re living, the only thing that matters is to continue living. In fiction, the facts don’t matter. In fiction, something else matters, and in good fiction you can begin to see how little the specific facts of life bear on the something else that matters. (They make the something else visible, and, well, once you see it, how you got around to seeing it seems of little importance). As an art critic I take my task to be, first and foremost, understanding what the thing I’m looking at is. And the 24
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obvious answer (it’s a painting, it’s a sculpture, it’s an installation), in the best work, has nothing to do with it. I’ve long been convinced that the most important thing about a painting is not the pigment, medium or ground (or objecthood or materiality or commodity status) but the space between the thing and the viewer where the magic happens. The painting sits on the wall. It has something to show me. I look at the painting, and I look at the painting. It has something to show me. And then I see it, and all of the parts of the painting suddenly make sense (or they don’t make sense, and that is what I see). I see it. I see it. I am interested in articulating it—if I were to describe my art criticism I would say that it is ontic, that it asks ontological questions of particular things. There is no difference in fiction. The fact that it’s fiction tells me nothing whatever about what it is. It tells me only that whatever it is, that thing could not be stated as fact—a realization no different from the recognition that whatever it is the painting has to show me, it cannot appear without paint. The fact that we need fiction testifies against the tyranny of living. We need fiction to suspend living and to make room for Life. no. 2
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If I were to try to paint the water tonight, I would divide it into two colors. A deep midnight blue would be a good beginning for the shadows of the waves. It is most nearly Prussian blue, which I would darken and muddy with a mixture of viridian green and alizarin crimson (two colors that, taken together without the blue, admirably form the deep black-green of shadows in the forest). And for the reflected light from the city sky, I would say it is most nearly the color of Brice Marden’s For Helen—a sort of pinkish mud color. Would I begin with terra rosa and buff? But what would I do for the flecks of moonlight popping off the water (light chop) like flashbulbs in a stadium? Maybe I would write over the painting, “LIKE FLASHBULBS IN A STADIUM.” And maybe that would be the right beginning of the painting. Maybe that’s all that matters. And how would I explain this ridiculous baseball cap I’m wearing, with two LEDs in the visor that do a remarkably good job of illuminating the page I write on?
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No. 2 Where is the Life we have lost in living?
A PROJECT BY BRIAN PRUGH
June 26, 2014