| property | value |
|---|---|
| created | $=dv.current().file.ctime |
| modified | =this.modified |
The story comes from China, and tells of an old painter who invited friends to see his newest picture. This picture showed a narrow footpath that ran along a stream and through a grove of trees, culminating at the door of a little cottage in the background. When the painter’s friends, however, looked around for the painter, they saw that he was gone — that he was in the picture. There, he followed the little path that lead to the door, paused before it quite still, smiled and disappeared through the narrow opening.
Essencing and Absencing - Living Nowhere
A good wanderer leaves no trace - Laozi, Daodejing
Monadology, Leibniz rigorously draws out the ultimate consequences of the concept of substance. The monad represents this rigorous coming to head and completion of essence. The monad dwells wholly in itself. There is no exchange with the outside. Thus monads have no windows through with something can enter or leave.
Etymologically the Chinese sign for being (You), represents a hand that holds a piece of meat. You also meanings having or possessing. In order to exist, it seems to say, all that is needed is a piece of meat.
A wise man wanders where there is nothing at all. A good wanderer leaves no trace. A trace points to a particular direction and points to an actor and his intentions. Laozi’s wanderer does not pursue any intention. He does no go to any place. He completely fuses with the way which does not lead to anywhere.
The mirror.. remains as it is: empty in itself J’s piece - only a clear mirror that is empty in itself, only someone who has realized the nullity of the world and of himself, also sees the eternal beauty in it.
Fichte scorns the empty heart: “To stand, cold and unmoved amid the current of events, a passive mirror of fugitive and passing phenomena, this existence is unsupportable to me; I score and I detest it. I will love: I will lose myself in sympathy; I will know the joy and grief of my life. I myself am the highest object of this sympathy.”
Kant: the abundance of objects seen… produces in our memory… the conclusion that a vast amount of space has been covered. Thus subjectively emptiness shortens life. In order to become satiated with life, no period of life should be empty.
Laozi and Zhuangzi: Absence of sense and goal is not a deprivation, it means greater freedom - a more coming from less. Only by dropping the walking-towards does walking become possible. Someone who is not tied to a particular thing or place, who wanders or dwells nowhere is beyond the possibility of loss. Someone who does not possess anything specific cannot lose anything.
NOTE
On one level, you cannot lose what you do not possess. This caters to your emotions toward the object (I will not feel this particular kind of sorrow from loss - having something in the standard sense we feel we can have something, and then no longer having it.)
But the potential loss is true, for not engaging.
Still I think of things like this. I might wander. If I choose to engage in a completely arbitrary task, even of nonsense of my own doing say, “I must quest to rouse myself in the middle of the night, and go to this milk jug in the only open store, and knock on it with my knuckles four times” - life happens and all consequence of this wander are because of the wander. (I might find something along my way, that is not expected from the outset - like appreciation of a view of the moon few will see, or stumbling on another semi-somnambulist.)
Compare this to a goal of “today I need to get milk” which I will get.
I’ve gone out of my way, for nonsense, and all that comes with it.
Derrida’s ‘differance’ and Deleuze’s ‘rhizome’ radically question substantive closure and closedness, exposing them as imagined constructions
Closed and Open - Spaces of Absencing
The verticality of the light that enters a cathedral is strengthened by the arrangement of the windows. The upper windows of the nave and the choir are so massive that they cannot be taken in one glance, so the gaze is pulled upwards. Other elements such as pillars and pointed arches, also generate a feeling of striving or rising.
Straight lines cannot reflect inwardness. Inwardness is a form of return to oneself. It is bent. Thus, it prefers to dwell in curves and and turns. Squares spaces are also unsuitable for Romantic, infinite inwardness.
NOTE
Constant turning of movement, or negotiation of terrain might require some conscious thought - compared to simply following a straight line and accepting what comes. The passage and rhythms of left foot, right foot of a straight line can also be meditative. This generates a kind of inward thought. But I would prefer the variety of a woodland stride and the mind that sort of travel produces, to laps along a road or track.
Asymmetry (fukinsei) introduces a rupture in space. It symmetrical regularity stresses presence. Asymmetry breaks up presence into absencing.
Buddhist monks who vowed never to stay in closed rooms. Walter Benjamin: I was struct by the number of doors in the corridors that were left ajar. What had first seemed accidental began to be disturbing. I found out that in these rooms lived members of a sect who had sworn never to occupy closed rooms.
Proust - cathedral of inwardness. In deciding to dedicate a life to writing, he sealed off his room with three layers of curtains. The walls were plastered with corkboard. No daylight, streetlight or noise was allowed to enter.
Light and Shadow - The Aesthetics of Abscening
A kabuki actor explains that he particularly loves peonies because they lose their petals in an instant. What is beautiful is not only the fully blooming peony but the painful charm of its transience.
Kant: we play a trick on a lover of flowers, and place beautiful artificial ones in the ground. If the deceit is discovered, the direct interest he previously took in these things would promptly vanish.
Things that persist, subsist or insist are neither beautiful nor noble. Beautiful things carry traces of nothingness.
NOTE
Insistence, gross - that artificial nudge. Subsist - hmm. Persist - please, stay with me, I know I’ll not grow tired of you forever.
Wabi-Sabi section
What is beautiful is a silver bowl that has lost its sheen and begun to darken.
Satori (illumination) has nothing to do with shining or light. Light multiplies presence. Buddhism, however is a religion of absence. Thus, nirvana, the Sanskrit expression for illumination originally meant ‘fading out.’ Light and darkness cling to each other. Light in the pictures is directionless. It suffused into the landscape in a mood of absence. Earth and sky have the same brightness. It is not clear where the earth ends and the sky begins, where light ends and darkness begins.
In European painting: divine light falls down from above or emanates from a divine body, for instance has a blinding effect. Presence, intensified into the divine, blinds.
Some segments from Tanizaki’s “In Praise of Shadows”
The little sunlight from the garden that manages to make its way beneath the eaves and through corridors has by then lost its power to illuminate, seems drained of the complexion of life. It can do nothing more than accentuate the whiteness of the paper.
A cloudy translucence, like that of jade; the faint, dreamlike glow that suffuses it, as if it had drunk into its very depths the light of the sun… And when yokan is served a lacquer dish within those dark recesses its color is scarcely distinguishable, then it is most certainly an object for meditation. You take its cool, smooth substance into your mouth, and it is as if the very darkness of the room is melting on your tongue.
Western eating and thinking is disassembling, that is analytical. Far Eastern followed syndetic order, meaning connected even lined up by way of conjunction, an ongoing “and”. It is rather determined by connecting commas, and “ands” by detours, and sidetracks or by concealed paths.
In Ikebana, meaning ‘invigoration of the flower’ however is an unusual type of invigoration for the flower is cut off from its root, the natural organ of life, even of appetitus. The flower is invigorated by dealing it a moral blow.
Japanese rock gardens are gardens of absence and emptiness. No flower, no tree, no trace of human can be seen in them. Despite this they radiate an intense vitality that is owed to multiple counter movements. The flow of waves lines raked into the gravel contrasts with the rocks. The darkness of the rocks forms a contrast with the whiteness of gravel.
Dogen: It is due to poorness of their scant experience that they are astonished by the words ‘flowing mountains’
Doing and Happening - Beyond active and passive
In Korea you do not say “I think that…” this formulation is grammatically possible but it would sound unusual. What you say is “seng-gak-i-dunda” which a rough approximation would be “the thought has established itself in me.” Strictly speaking this translation is wrong however, since the Korean expression lacks subjectivity.
The English passive construction ‘she is loved’ expresses something completely different from the Chinese passive construction which would literally mean “she sees loving.”
Yoshida Kenko: ‘What a strange, demented feeling it gives me when I realize I have spent whole days before this inkstone, with nothing better to do, jotting down at random whatever nonsensical thoughts have entered my head.
Friendliness
You greet to meet on the same level.
By bowing deeply one negates oneself. Those who bow from a level plane between one another. It is unlike Western mythology of the submissive bow.