Immanence:
Reconsidering the Spiritual in Art
Christina Conklin
Introduction
I go to the sea.
The sea is a clock, keeping time with the moon. It is a measuring stick, tracing a line that is fractal and
impermanent, material and immaterial.The sea converses with the land, continually forming an arbitrary border that is as fleeting and illusory as it is real.
Saltwater runs through my veins.
We come from the sea; we are fish out of water. On its eternal way to the sea, water has carved and
formed every surface of the earth, in dialogue with the molten core, meeting at the porous, constantly
braiding surface.Water knows what it is doing, as does the rock it carves.
Our tiny island of knowledge swims in an ocean of mystery.1We learn, albeit very little and very slowly,
over generations and centuries.We are new here.
I want to dive deep and engage in the world as it is, beyond easy definitions of natural, rational, mystical, romantic. I do not want to critique the world. I want to immerse myself in it, a grain of sand being
washed and tossed at the water’s edge.
• • •
1 Chet Raymo, When God is Gone, Everything
is Holy:The Making of a Religious Naturalist,
(Notre Dame, IN: Sorin Books, 2008), 30.
Facing page: Salt block at ocean’s edge,
Fitzgerald Marine Reserve, Moss Beach,
CA, August 2013.
When my daughter was born, a Catholic friend gave me a book of interfaith blessings. She
wanted to honor my child, even though we had different religious views. The Christian
blessings made me uncomfortable, but my daughter loved the illustrations. On nights when I
was so tired I could barely form words, I often chose the shortest one:
I see the moon and the moon sees me. God bless the moon and God bless me.
I always choked on the word God, a word I had ceased saying twenty years earlier, when I
had decided that no personal or creator God existed. One night, after hearing this blessing
many times, my daughter recited the couplet for me: “I see the moon and the moon sees me.
Gla bless the moon and Gla bless me.”
My heart sank as I realized that my rejection of this word meant my daughter could not even
pronounce it. She has to live in this world for a long time, I thought, and I don’t want any of
the doors to be closed to her, at least not by me. I want her to have all the words available,
so that when the time comes, she can speak any language and choose the one that works for
her.
So I set out, a decade ago, to find a genuine access point to this troublesome, loaded, impossible word, so that she could have access to it too. It became a pilgrimage of sorts. All
anthropology is personal.
• • •
In his book, On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art, James Elkins defines a religion as “a named, noncultic, major system of belief,” including all the rituals, holy days,
sacraments, obligations, creeds, and texts that have developed over its history. It is a public,
social practice of the family, congregation, and community. Spirituality, on the other hand, is
defined as “any system of belief that is private, subjective, largely or wholly incommunicable,
often wordless, and sometimes even unrecognized. Spirituality in this sense can be part of
religion, but is not its whole.”2
Though all religions were born of spiritual experience, these days the terms are often set
against each other: “I’m not religious, but I’m spiritual.” This is often means something
like, “I have rejected the Catholic church of my upbringing but I still believe in something
greater than myself.” Or perhaps, “I can’t accept the doctrines of Christianity, but I like to
think about questions of meaning and purpose.” Or possibly, “I grew up with no religious
background, but nature really speaks to me in a way beyond the purely scientific.” These are
common expressions in contemporary culture, where religion is ever less relevant to public, intellectual discourse, and where spirituality is seen as a purely personal matter. A third
of American adults do not consider themselves a “religious person,” and two-thirds say that
religion is losing influence in the culture.3
It is also true that, when polled about their belief in God, 88% of Americans are fairly or
absolutely certain of God’s existence, while just 5% do not believe in God. Nearly 4 in 5
people identify with a particular religious group: 18% identify as mainline Protestant, 24%
as Catholic, and 36% as evangelical Protestant. Just .7% are “Unitarian or other liberal religion,” Reform Jews, Buddhists, and Muslims.4
The US is both a very religious and an increasingly secular country. American civil religion,
the complex mash-up of Puritanical values and Jeffersonian republicanism that pervades
public debates to this day, plays a large and complex role in our national identity.5 The “culture wars” of recent decades have codified the divide between religious and secular people,
so that many people no longer feel able to talk openly about their religious identities, experiences, or ideas. The art world, which mistrusts institutions of all sorts, not least religious
institutions, has rejected religion as being antiquated, superstitious, and closed-minded. No
2 James Elkins, On the Strange Place of
Religion in Contemporary Art, (New York:
Routledge, 2004), 1.
3 Pew Research Religion and Public Life
Project, “Growth of the Nonreligious,”
www.pewforum.org, (July 2, 2013).
4 Pew Research Religion and Public Life
Project, “U.S. Religious Landscape Survey,”
www.pewforum.org, (February 1, 2008).
This survey had a .6% margin of error,
which potentially narrows the margins of
diversity considerably.
5 American civil religion was the topic of
my undergraduate thesis, “One Nation Under God,” which demonstrated how intertwined this particular version of religiosity
is with American culture and history.
wonder religion and spirituality in art are difficult to talk about.
Yet religious experience and identity are fascinating windows through which to view the
world. Religion is a living, breathing dimension of every culture and every time; it is as social as it is spiritual, as political as it is personal. Religion shapes the cultural assumptions of
every human society; as other anthropological identifiers such as tool-making and language
have fallen away, many social scientists have taken to calling us “the religious animal.” The rejection of religion is the same as the embrace of it, a means of creating structure and context
in the midst of a chaotic and confusing life.
I grew up in that small percentage of “Unitarians or other liberal religions” that has no creed,
no preferred book, little hierarchy, and few rituals. What began in 17th century Europe as a
small collection of heretics and free thinkers has evolved in the U.S. into a democratic association of autonomous congregations. We are not joiners, yet the importance of community
in our spiritual searching overrides our stubborn individualism.
Having always been an idealist and a seeker, in college I found myself drawn to the religion
department, a place where I could simultaneously study the history, sociology, psychology,
philosophy, literature, and art of people in many times and cultures. In religious studies, the
intellectual met the personal and became my lens of inquiry.
My own experience is that religion is the plural of spiritual, that is, the communal practice
of the individual’s search for truth and purpose. Shared seeking—that experience of knowing that you don’t know the answers but wanting to ask the questions with and of each
other—is the feeling the word “religion” evokes for me. Of course, because other people
are involved, things can get messy and complicated. People disagree and sometimes behave
badly. Rules, structures, and codes enter the mix. It mostly works.
What religion brings to the table that spirituality lacks, then, is relationship. When I listen to
you, I have to consider your thoughts and how they might influence my own. Religion forces
me to think, while spirituality asks me to feel; together they form the Moebius strip of human religious identity and experience.
Myself, I am neither particularly faithful nor especially skeptical. My tradition embraces
both doubt and reason, so I find it difficult to understand both devotion and cynicism. I
stand on the sidelines, watching and wondering.
• • •
Written a century ago, Wassily Kandinsky’s Geist in der Kunst remains one of the most important reflections on the place of spirituality in art. Kandinsky found an inevitable reciprocity
between the artistic and religious impulses; he experienced churches as paintings within
which he could stroll and paintings as sacred spaces in which to visually wander. For him,
the Stimmung, or mood, of a painting stood like a brave solider against the nightmare of
materialism, technology, and disbelief. He sought to stir in viewers something hidden and to
awaken them into a state of self-awareness, so that their minds and hearts would open more
fully. He wanted to make work that resisted measurement and scientific analysis, seeking
instead an emotional connection of spontaneous spiritual harmony. For Kandinsky, only art
that could transform the viewer was worth creating.6
I want the same thing. I want someone who experiences my work to stop dead in his or
her tracks, slack-jawed and speechless. Not out of shock or awe, but because the work has
struck a deep chord, a chord at the bottom of the auditory range, below speech and words.
A low hum or maybe a vibration. I don’t want viewers to think about my work, to
consider it or analyze it. I want them to feel it, to feel part of it, to feel known by it. I want a
fluency and transparency to develop between the work and the viewer so that they are com-
6 Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual
in Art, Trans. Michael Sadleir, (New York:
Dover Publications, 1977).
municating directly at the level of sensation.
In a 2003 speech, Donald Kuspit argued that Kandinsky developed his artistic approach
after a crisis of faith led him to doubt both his own creative capacity and his belief in art’s
overarching purpose. Kandinsky believed that spirituality is that inner freedom that escapes
instinct, culture, and nature. By making work that reminded people of their essential natures
as free, spiritual beings, he was staking a claim to the necessity of art and waging a holy war
against materialism. He revered the “divine martyrs and servants of humanity” who lived
and died in the pursuit of spiritual integrity, for he thought this pursuit was the only path
that could heal oneself and the world.
A hundred years on, the veil of materialism is far thicker. Kuspit laments that, influenced by
radical materialists from Greenberg to Warhol, no new spiritual forces have come to light in
art in recent decades; “avant-garde art has become habitual, a dead letter with little spiritual
consequence, however materially refined.” He notes how difficult it is to make meaning in
a world where every attempt to transcend determinism simply becomes another critical
theory.Yet, he concludes, artwork can become transcendent “when it is made out of internal
necessity not simply out of intellectual curiosity, as Spinoza argued.” Indeed, this “heroic”
stance is the only position that makes sense in contemporary culture. Despite the vagaries of
the 20th century, it is more valuable than ever to consider the spiritual in art.7
7 Donald Kuspit, “Reconsidering the
Spiritual in Art,” Blackbird: An Online Journal
of Literature and the Arts, www.blackbird.vcu.
edu, (Spring 2003, Vol. 2, No. 1).
Few artists have been willing to speak openly about art’s relationship with spirituality, much
less religion, since Duchamp and his fellow modernizers consolidated art’s stance of rejection.Yet at a time when the doctrines of art history have so clearly defined these topics as
out of bounds, is it not the more radical gesture to look directly into the hole in the middle
of the room and say its name?
Can I talk about religion in contemporary art? Can I not? Since both art and religion are
essentially about communicating—about human relationship—can I find a way of talking
about them that draws threads across the chasm, perhaps just enough to weave a narrow
footbridge?
Huston Smith, the anthropologist of religion (who is also a religious anthropologist, having
practiced each of the five major world religions as a believer over the course of his long life),
suggests there are four approaches to God: none, many, one, and only. All are valid, none
are correct. Rebecca Goldstein, professor of philosophy at Princeton University, outlines
no fewer than 36 arguments for the existence of God that people have developed over time,
the last one being that if so many people have put so much effort into the former 35, surely
there is something to the idea.8
I don’t know if I can go this far. I’m glad to have moved past hard definitions to soft metaphorical understandings. But the word God still feels unnatural in my mouth; it comes out
more like Gahd or Gawd, and I feel self-conscious saying it. It is not resident in me, but
rather an awkward guest that I wish I wanted to stay in my house. But really, if I’m honest,
I’d rather be left alone.
Few things have been with me always. Art. Religion. That’s it. Exploring how these things
can relate to each other in a contemporary context, both within my own work and in wider
cultural conversations, is the topic of this thesis and my art practice. It is my vocation, a
journey in call and response with others and the world.
8 Rebecca Goldstein, 36 Arguments for the
Existence of God: A Novel, (New York: Pantheon, 2010). Goldstein points out that “if one
rigorously eschews the Fallacy of Invoking
One Mystery to Explain Another, one ends
up with the universe and nothing but the
universe…. This is why Spinoza, although
he offered a proof of what he called “God,”
is often regarded as the most effective of all
atheists.”
Part I:
Process as Practice
Part I:
Process as Practice
I: On Time
Fifteen free minutes. I grab the jug of latex and my coat and walk out the door. I’ve been wanting to
cast the cracks in the coastal trail down along the bluff tops. I don’t know why, which seems like a good
reason to do it.
The path was just re-skimmed with tar last winter, but already it is full of cracks. I walk along for a
minute, scanning for a good place to start.The clock is ticking so I squat down by a line at the edge of
the trail, out of the way. I have no plan. Pouring directly from the jug will just make a mess, so I fill
the cap and line it out, which works OK. Joggers and cyclists pass. No one stops to ask why I’m pouring
white goo onto the path. I’m relieved to be left alone.
In some places the latex sits on the surface, at others it just keeps on going down, deeper and deeper. It
makes my heart quicken, and I feel suddenly nervous.What path is it tracing? I keep pouring in capfuls,
imagining the tunnels and burrows they are filling.When will it end?Will I be able to extract it tomorrow?
Time’s up. Four cracks filled, I snap a few photos. Considering the white lines for a moment, I notice that
they are all at the western edge of the path. I thought I was just staying off to one side, but in fact this
is where the cracks are most dense and deep. Also, all the cracks run the length of the path, none perpendicular to it. My reasons for mapping this line come more clear: this path is the western edge of an
entire continent, and it is slipping toward the sea. I’m here to witness the slippage.
• • •
Previous page: “Sand #1,” digital photograph of dead pelican, Half Moon Bay,
CA, March 2013.
Facing page: Decaying hay bale plastic
found in ditch and hung out to dry,
Lysuholl, Iceland, May 2013.
When my son was three years old, dinosaurs roamed the halls of my home. Apatosaurs
lolled in the bathtub, Zunisaurs lined the walls of his bedroom and his dreams. He studied
the illustrated encyclopedia while I read aloud. Repetitive recitation of the eras and epochs,
from the Pre-Cambrian to the Cretaceous, became a meditation on time for me. As I absorbed the scale of Eoraptor and Triceratops, deeper awareness of how long time really is
flashed along my neural pathways, resisting contemplation yet burning holes into my sense
of history.
This evolutionary timeline is long and linear, characterized by change over eons and something we call progress, as the inanimate becomes animate and life moved toward greater
complexity and intelligence. “You take hydrogen gas, and you leave it alone,” said mathematician Brian Swimme, “and it will become giraffes, rose bushes, and humans.”9
With my daughter, I had revisited all my childhood favorites: D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths,
the creation stories of Chief Lalooska, and The Tales of the Arabian Nights. I recalled my early
fascination with the stories people have always told to make sense of a capricious world,
where weather was omnipotent and human presence tenuous. This mythical time is longer
still, and less linear. It overflows with tales of beginnings and endings, death and renewal.
9 “Excerpts: Brian Swimme interview withWhat
is Enlightenment? Magazine,” www.storyoftheuniverse.org, (March 4, 2014).
10 Jennifer Morgan, From Lava to Life, (Nevada City, CA: Dawn Publications, 2003)
8, 41.
Myth and fact get all mixed up in the far recesses of time, but I want to see clearly, as Blake
wrote, that everything is infinite. So I walk my kids to the ocean and tell them about how it
formed 4.4 billion years ago in a great rain that lasted millions of years.10 Before, there had
been no water, only roiling clouds and rock and fire, and then there was. For a long time it
was all fresh water, until the rain eroded enough rock to create first brackish and then salt
water. The tide—the very one we’re watching at the moment—has been doing just this
every day since.
Time is as cyclical as it is long, as present as it is historical. Stephen Jay Gould writes of
genealogical time—the time of life—as time’s arrow. It began, it will end, and life will
constantly evolve along its path. Geology—the epic tale of fire and water—is churning and
unchanging in Gould’s taxonomy; it is time’s cycle.11 Yet of course, genealogical and geological time flow seamlessly into each other. We live in the middle of both.
• • •
I have no time. I live in Mother Time, with its job titles of chauffeur, emotional coach, cook,
math tutor, sports fan, laundress, guidance counselor, and media manager. So these days my
art takes the form of gestures: pouring salt water onto glass; turning on a slow-dripping buret and the walking away; gathering pockets full of found objects; rolling inked stones across
paper. Laborious craftsmanship and grand visions are not for me, not right now. My work
has to be quick to exist at all. It finds its way in at the edges: during the 4 a.m. insomnia, in
the minutes while one is at swim practice and the other is playing a video game. It’s catchas-catch-can and make-do every day.
Chance, experiment, and impulse have become my tools. If it’s raining, I throw ink on paper
and put it under the overflowing gutters so that the rain’s hand will interact with my own.
I bury things and then forget about them for months because I can barely remember what
month it is. I pick up seaweed and lichen, rocks and bones, not knowing why but trusting
the instinct. Mother Time is all about seizing small moments and noticing when the shimmering world speaks.
Time is so short. It turns out that every cliché they say about children growing up so fast is
true (even though their young years were their own special time-out-of-time torture, when
an hour felt like a year and when my own anxiety and exhaustion felt like they would end
me). I long to be a monk, spending inordinate, ordained amounts of time sweeping the forest floor, illuminating texts, meditating in silence for days, for years. So I go to the sea and
11 Stephen Jay Gould, Time’s Arrow,Time’s
Cycle, (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard, 1987),
197-8.
sit with the bones of dead animals, I watch salt blocks dissolve in rivers for an hour or three.
Close observation feels like meditation, like Monk Time. If I weren’t a mother, I could be
Wolfgang Laib.
Laib’s hermetic gathering of pollen, burnishing of marble, and molding of wax revel in the
time taken: taken from the cacophonous busy-ness of our efficient, modern world. Laib
knows he has nowhere better to go and nothing better to do. He lives right in the middle of
his life, which also happens to be a field of flowers. It seems that he has chosen wisdom and
delight as the parallel paths he walks.
He has also chosen materials that are ripe with meaning and metaphor and, more importantly, that emanate their own power. The pollen is the work, not because Laib has sifted
it into a minimalist square, but even when it sits in a jar on a shelf. The pollen is complete,
whether he is present or not. The person who pours the milk into the marble each day is
not the artist; the milk and the marble are. Laib knows that pollen and stone have as much
essence—in both matter and spirit—as do you or I. They are not tools or materials, but
beings.
Laib’s great skill is in sidestepping much of contemporary art dialogue about context and
content. One could talk about his work in phenomenological terms, and some do, but this
largely misses the mark. By drawing on pre-Renaissance and Eastern philosophical sources,
he absents himself from the art critical dialogue that references rather than reflects, criticizes rather than contemplates.12 Yet Laib still finds an audience for his work, because most
people are thirsty for art that affirms simplicity, purity, and spirituality. These are not fashionable words.
12 Klaus Ottoman, “The Solid and the
Fluid: Perceiving Laib,” Wolfgang Laib: A
Retrospective, (New York: American Federation of Arts, 2000), 11-22.
• • •
The shells and stones, small though they are, are different at the high tide line than they are at the low
tide line, six feet away.The distance is short on this steep, crescent Hawaiian beach, yet I find mostly
delicate white shells at the top of the beach, while red and gray volcanic pebbles dominate just below the
water line.
The air is ever mild and breezy here, though the skies are mostly overcast today. I scoop my colander
along the footfall of newlyweds, Canadian retirees, and parents.Their children’s footsteps all run perpendicular to the water—straight into the waves—and are erased every few seconds. Adults plod along
the waters’ edge, digging into the soft sand, just allowing the ocean to lap at their ankles. Ease is what
people have come here to seek, perhaps to find.
When I’ve washed my colander of sand in the waves, rinsing away the tiny, unsortable grains, I return to
the lanai. Hawaiian is a language with only five vowels and seven consonants, and every word sounds
like a long cool drink with fruit floating in it: lanai. I pour out a third of my haul and spread it around
on the plastic patio table. It looks and sounds like it feels, course yet smooth, dense and diverse.
I can already see types. I start picking out the red stones, which vary from the size of a grape nut to a
lima bean, but most are like squished peas.They range from slightly orange-brick to somewhat blueblack-red in color, but these distinctions are only apparent when the pile has grown to more than three
dozen pieces.
I continue to sort, now moving to shells, which are much more exciting in their individuality, complexity, and beauty. My fingers tickle the sand, moving it left and right, as I look for more homes of creatures past. Many of the shells are creamy white limpets, each a tiny full moon no larger than a baby’s
fingerprint.There are small black snails, rubbed white on one side by the surf; bits of cowry, and others
that look like they have been printed with a chromosomal profile of dots and dashes; sea urchin spines of
varying lengths, both the green and the purple kind; and best of all, the miniscule swirly snail shells the
size and shape of a pen nib. Perhaps they are most wondrous because my middle-aged eyes can’t quite
make out their spiraling symmetry.
I sort some more. Coral chunks, some porous and rough, others worn down to a nub, come in many shades
of white, from mascarpone to crème café. Black volcanic rock seems to be a close cousin of red, equally
porous and similarly shaped. It can be hard to distinguish them. Should I start another category? I put
the non-conformists to one side; I’ll deal with them later.The grey rocks are boring, too divergent in size,
color, and form to provide any compelling narrative. I put them aside with less care and interest. But
these others, these beigey-golden-brown bits, are confounding.They are not obviously coral (though they
must be), and I don’t think they’re stone. I avoid them until there are too many in the sort pile to ignore.
It goes this way: one type consumes my attention so that I can see little else, and then there is a moment
when the balance changes and another category advances to the fore. I could do this all day, and on this
rare day of solitude, I do.
• • •
The story goes that Alexander the Great came upon a gymnosophist (a naked Indian sage)
sitting on a stone. Alexander asked the man what he was doing; the man replied, “I am thinking about nothingness.” The gymnosophist asked Alexander the same thing, to which he replied, “I’m conquering the world!” Each looked at the other in confusion and astonishment,
unable to comprehend the mental landscape of the other. The distance between these men
was the distance between linear and cyclical time, between one life and many lives, between
finitude and forever. It is not a distance I can bridge in my mind, so I stand between the two,
looking this way and that.13
13 Devdutt Pattanaik, “Are There Any Universal Beliefs and Truths?,” TED Radio Hour,
www.npr.org, (November 22, 2013).
• • •
To get through the day, we divide time into then, now, and next, living in short snippets of
hours, weeks, and years. Time presses in on us, ever more urgently demanding our attention, management, and obedience. The evening news replays the litany of recent disasters,
and future decades forecast more crises than we can name. Time is the enemy. We don armor for daily battle, because what comes next is the end of days, whether it takes the form
of ecological catastrophe, the second coming, or both.
In this mindset, time ceases to be continuous, but becomes a breaking clock with gears that
are jolting and jamming. We read the signs of impending doom in the clouds and in the sea,
as the ancients did. Anxiety skyrockets while time ticks down. The pitch and fever of the
apocalyptic stories of both the political left and religious right reinforce and repeat each
other.
And yet. We are just one point on a long line. The only certainty is that our systems and
societies will be different in a thousand years than they are now. Time is immanent, time is
abundant.
There are the certain catastrophes, of course. The great Yellowstone volcano will implode,
dwarfing all previous explosions in human history and casting the world into winter for
many decades. A major meteor will hit the earth in due course, to similar effect. Sea level is
on the move, as is the climate. These things are known.14 But once one lets go of any attempt
to control or limit the nature of nature, it becomes much easier to get out of bed in the
morning.
There were fourteen questions on which the Buddha refused to speak because he deemed
them unfathomable: too deep to measure. Eight of these concern whether the world is eternal and/or finite. To speak on these questions would affirm either a nihilism or an eternalism
of the self, which would fail to grasp the illusory nature of being. So the Buddha remained
14 Michael Dowd and Connie Barlow, lecture, Unitarian Universalists of San Mateo,
(March 30, 2008). Dowd and Barlow refer
to themselves as “evolutionary evangelists” who travel the country as itinerant
preachers telling stories of the origin of the
universe.
silent, and spoke instead on how we might live in this dangerous, painful world.
On the topic of time, Baruch Spinoza, the first Enlightenment philosopher to develop an
argument against the existence of a creator god, posited that God and the universe are coeternal, that “every substance is necessarily infinite.”15 In this equation, which drifts in the
direction of Buddha’s prohibition, there is nothing to debate or discuss. The present moment
is a necessary expression of eternity. There was no beginning and there is no end to come.
As we’ve become better at measuring, we’ve lost the poetry of counting. In order to better
understand the length of time hell would last, James Joyce was told to “imagine a mountain
of grains of sand a million miles high, a million miles wide and a million miles thick, from
which every million years a little bird carried away one grain of sand; and when the mountain was removed, not a single instance of eternity would have ended.”16 For all the flaws
and failures of the Catholic Church, it has a profound understanding of the granular and the
global.
Even here in the Anthropocene Era, time is long. We are on the same timeline as both
Arachne and Allosaurus, and we are not going anywhere. The sky often looked then as it
does out my window right now: crisp blue with rolling clouds. The world was different
then, but not much.
15 Baruch Spinoza, The Essential Spinoza:
Ethics and OtherWritings, edited by Michael
L. Morgan, (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett,
2006), 6.
16 “Hell: Into Everlasting Fire,” The Economist, (London: Economist, December 22,
2012).
My timeline is a Slinky, a line that cycles around and around endlessly, so that it’s quite impossible to know where on the line we are at any moment. This line moves forward, ever so
slightly, but given the oscillation of the near-time cycle, it can feel retrograde. It’s a matter
of scale and patience. Maybe we’re in the peaceful lull at the bottom of the loop right now,
just before the ride gets wild. It’s too soon to tell and there’s no point in guessing. Movement is the only constant, not knowing is the only certainty.
For me, too, it is difficult to place my mind in the thought-less space where time becomes
fluid rather than concrete, looping rather than linear. My daily life resists it. But by thinking and working in ways that are both awake to the moment and aware of eternity, I find my
right relationship with time. There is nothing that needs to be done and all the time in the
world to do it. Every moment is my last, the only one that matters.
II: On(e) Substance
In my youth Spinoza was a hobgoblin; now he is a saint.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journal (1868)
The religious feeling engendered by experiencing the logical comprehensibility of
profound interrelations is of a somewhat different sort from the feeling that one usually calls religious. It is more a feeling of awe at the scheme that is manifested in the
material universe. It does not lead us to take the step of fashioning a god-like being in
our own image—a personage who makes demands of us and who takes an interest in
us as individuals. There is in this neither a will nor a goal, not a must, but only sheer
being.
Albert Einstein, in a letter to a Chicago
rabbi, December 1939
On July 27, 1656, Baruch Spinoza was called before his congregation to answer charges of
heresy: his questions regarding the authorship of the Torah, the existence of an afterlife, and
the authority of the rabbis had become too persistent for the leadership to ignore. When he
refused to recant his views, he was excommunicated, and the Jewish community in Amsterdam was forbidden “to be within four cubits of him, nor read anything composed or written
by him.”17
17 Roger Scruton, Spinoza: AVery Short Introduction, (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002), 10.
Facing page: “Sand #4,” digital photograph
of dead seal, Moss Beach, CA, August 2013.
Spinoza responded with a shrug. “Very well; this does not force me to do anything that I
would not have done of my own accord, had I not been afraid of a scandal.”18 He had not
wanted to be inflammatory or to cause strife within his community, but he had to pursue his
ideas where they led and to share them, modestly and without drama, with others who were
interested in challenging received wisdom.
Spinoza believed that the world is intelligible by reason–causa sui–and that therefore he
could discern truth through logic. The ontology he deduced surpassed the Cartesian dualism
that codified an essential conflict between good and evil, mind and matter, this and that. On
the contrary, Spinoza posited that only one thing exists: substance, or “that which is in itself
and conceived through itself.”19 Everything, both the visible and invisible, is merely an “attribute” of substance,that is, an aspect of the whole that our human intellect can perceive. Substance has infinite attributes, although we can perceive just two of these attributes, thought
and extension (ideas and matter). We can call this substance Nature, or we can call it God,
but these words are a distinction without a difference. Substance, the only eternally existing
reality that encompasses everything seen and unseen, past, present, and future, doesn’t care
what you call it. Substance Is.
The simplest synthesis of this philosophy is the equation, God=Nature. When everything is
an aspect of substance, then everything is part of a singular reality, co-eternal and equivalent. The physical world suddenly becomes theological as it becomes embedded with intention, meaning, and purpose.
18 Ibid.
19 Baruch Spinoza, The Essential Spinoza:
Ethics and OtherWritings, 4.
What should we call this? Is this monism? Pantheism? Atheism? All these -isms have been
applied to Spinoza, but they all slide off. The internal logic of his argument creates an everexpanding and self-reinforcing system, and the result is an atheology, the study of the world
as it is. This atheology is Spinoza’s legacy to us.
In Spinozaland, I am significant, because I am the thinker (an attribute of substance), while
also being an infinitesimally small aspect of the whole. I am both creator and created, and
though I am part of substance, I have no elevated status over others, whether animate or
inanimate, visible or invisible. My notion of reality flattens as everything, including my self,
takes on equal weight and lightness. In this horizontal world, where the boundary between
self and other begins to dissolve, I feel porous and at ease as I consider that every other thing
and thought is connected with—and in some way identical to—my own.
It’s crazy talk. How can this be? These are ideas that lend themselves to ascetic wanderings
in the wilderness rather than engagement in the complexities and demands of contemporary life. How does pure logic arrive at a similar weltanschauung to Buddhist lamas, Christian
mystics, Sufi poets, and Unitarian writers growing beans by small ponds in New England?
They, too, often had difficulty with the prevailing culture. Sometimes they withdrew into a
contemplative and isolated life (as Spinoza was forced to do). Sometimes they were able to
carve out a space for themselves in the world.
• • •
A salt, as first defined by Guillaume Francois Rouelle in 1744, is any compound formed by the reaction
of an acid and a base. In two polarized forces—a molecule with one too many electrons, and a molecule
with one too few—each finds its complement, creating a balanced yet brittle substance.
Sodium chloride (table salt) is the stable combination of a highly flammable soft metal and a volatile
gas. Sodium chloride crystals form a perfect cube, the ionic bonds between the sodium and chloride being
equal in number. Salt is “a small but perfect thing.”20
In early Egyptian culture, natron, a locally mined salt of sodium bicarbonate, sodium carbonate, and
a little sodium chloride, was called “the divine salt.” Mummification included immersing gutted and
20 Mark Kurlansky, Salt: AWorld History,
(London: Vintage, 2003), 8.
washed bodies in natron for 70 days to fully dehydrate the flesh. Salt is a key part of both the human
diet and most religious traditions.
• • •
“Saltwater makes me think immediately about the body. I think about tears, sweat,
semen, blood. All of those things come immediately to mind. Fluids. Even just salt
alone would make me think of those things.” (Diedrick Brackens)21
“Salt water? Well, I grew up on an island in the Carribean, Dominican Republic, so
when you take a salt bath you are freeing yourself from the bad things, the bad luck,
the bad past. So whenever I go to Santo Domingo I go to the beach by myself, and I
think about the things that I want to leave behind, and I submerge myself. It’s not the
way everybody does it, but people always talk about taking a salt bath so I’ve made
that small ritual. I’m an immigrant, so it’s not like I can do this all the time. It’s like
a turquoise salt bath. I do this when I really want to focus my energy. It’s always for
big, important things.” (Laura Kingsley)
• • •
The Dutch Republic was riven with religious and political strife during Spinoza’s lifetime;
his own excommunication was followed shortly by the mob murder of his good friend and
benefactor Johan de Witt, who was advocating for republicanism. Spinoza’s own Jewish
community, which had been exiled by the Spanish Inquisition, had, in turn, forced him into
exile. Dogmatism plagued every system and every mind.
21 The quotations in this chapter are
excerpted from conversations with fellow
MFA students as part of The Belief Project,
described in Chapter VI.
Spinoza saw the suffering and knew his culture needed to wake up from the night of righteousness and persecution. He believed he could show a path toward freedom and peace by
setting out a logical explanation of the universe, clearly and irrefutably. People could then
see a different view of reality and freely choose new ideas that would better serve them. His
main goal was the describe a good that would so fill the mind that all uncertainty would end.
He risked and sacrificed everything—including nearly his own life—to share his philosophy,
even though most of his works were so radical that they were only published posthumously.
While he believed his ideas were correct, Spinoza was a pragmatist not a polemicist. Later
in his life, when a dying woman asked him if, according to his philosophy, she would be
saved, he replied, “Your religion is good, and you need not search for another one in order
to be saved, as long as you apply yourself to a peaceful and pious life.”22 Truth was real, and it
could be known, he believed, but it was not to be used as a bludgeon or a judgment, merely
as a useful tool. He sought not to convert but to enlighten.
It’s a change of consciousness I’m after, too, a change in the scale of change.
Also, I mostly don’t care how effective I am, because I have no control over the reception,
only the message. Mostly, it’s just how I want to spend my time.
It’s strange to have a utopian vision, while at the same believing in the unimportance of its
pursuit or realization. The world doesn’t care what we do or fail to do.Yet I persist.
• • •
Sea water is, on average, 3.5% salt, or 35 grams per liter of water.This level increases during periods of
glaciation, and decreases during periods of global warming. Based on the fossil record, scientists correlate changes in salinity to changes in sea life, including past mass extinctions.23
Half of carbon dioxide emissions are absorbed into the atmosphere causing global warming, and half are
22 Rebecca Goldstein, Betraying Spinoza:The
Renegade JewWho Gave Us Modernity, (New
York: Schocken, 2010), 254.
23 Gwyneth Dickey, “Scientists Link Ocean
Acidification to Prehistoric Mass Extinction,” www.phys.org, (April 27, 2010).
absorbed into the ocean, causing acidification. Ocean acidity has increased 30% since the beginning
of the Industrial Revolution and by the end of this century is predicted to reach acidity levels last seen
20 million years ago. Many crustaceans species are already unable to form strong shells, as acidic water
inhibits the formation of calcium carbonate and erodes existing shells.24
• • •
Life is neither easy nor kind, and there are many things I want to call different, ugly, other.
But I choose not to, in solidarity with every single thing. If there is only one substance, then
I must open myself to the incongruities, the discomfort, and the deep strangeness that follow from realizing most of our assumptions and definitions are wrong.
If everything is natural, in the Spinozan sense of the word, where does that leave the refugee
camp, the Superfund site, and the mass grave? On this I must answer with silence, a painful
absence of knowledge. It is a question within which I must wander: are we humans indeed
part of creation? I believe we are, even though we often seem like marauders from another
land. So I spend time, not at the far end of the bell curve where things are strange and disturbing, but closer to home, where an array of creatures, objects, and systems might shed
light on the way things really are.
24 “What is Ocean Acidification?,” www.
pmel.noaa.gov/, March 13, 2014.
25 Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, (San Francisco: City Lights, 1988),
122-130.
26 Tim Ingold, Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description, (Abingdon:
Routhledge, 2011) 27.
Gilles Deleuze equates Spinoza’s ideas with latitude and longitude. Since a body can be anything, “an animal, a body of sounds, a mind or an idea,” that body is formed in each moment
by an intersection of unformed elements and anonymous forces. Together these constitute
Nature, “the plane of immanence or consistency, which is always variable and is constantly
being altered, composed and recomposed, by individuals and collectivities.” Subjects and
forms yield to relations and movements.25 Anthropologist Tim Ingold describes one of David
Nash’s ladders in these vivacious terms: “The wood appears to body forth from the thing
made from it.”26
In this way Deleuze proposes that Spinozan thought is an access point for deep ecology. Everything is alive and on the move. In this flattening of relations between different aspects of
a single substance, we must, at last, see ourselves as interdependent.
And so I have taught myself to resist the urge to panic and run screaming for the bomb shelter every time I read the morning paper. I breathe and reassure myself, quite genuinely, that
the world will be OK whether I take the plastic out of the river or leave it, whether I choose
to see it as beauty or as garbage.
• • •
The Dead Sea, called the Salt Sea in Hebrew, is 25% salt, the maximum concentration possible before
crystals settle out of a solution.The briny water feels slippery, and it bobs you up like a cork. Five million years ago the Dead Sea was connected to the Mediterranean, but the hills of Galilee pushed up over
time, breaking the connection.The sea has been condensing ever since, losing 3 feet of depth a year. Mt.
Sodom, at the southern edge of the lake, is made entirely of halite, or rock salt. Periodically, pillars of
the mountain erode and stand apart.They are called Lot’s wife.27
• • •
“There are two references to salt in the Bible that I can think of. One is in the Old
Testament when God destroys Sodom and Gomorrah. Do you know that story?
Well, God spares Lot – who is part of the holy family that’s being protected by
God – so they leave the city. But Lot’s wife is a total bitch; they’ve already told
you about how terrible she is earlier in the Bible. She just nags him all the time or
something; I forget what it is, but you already don’t like her. As they’re leaving she’s
sad, like “all my friends are dying and our house is going up in flames,” and Lot says,
“don’t even worry, it was a terrible place anyway. Don’t look back, because God
27 “Dead Sea,” www.wikipedia.com/wiki/
Dead_Sea, March 1, 2014.
told us not to look back.” And then she looks back, and she turns into a pillar of
salt. The more significant reference to salt is in the New Testament. I don’t know if
it was Jesus who says it, or Paul, that the Christians are to be the salt and the light
of the world. And I know I’ve heard sermons preached on the significance of salt
back then, that it was a valuable thing that added both flavor and preservation. So
you can bring light into darkness, and the salt is the idea of keeping up the traditions; you should both go forth and shine light while at the same time you’re taking
care of yourself and your tradition and where you came from.” (Heather Murphy)
• • •
As we step away from the long-held Western belief in human dominion, the world becomes
an evolving, spinning wheel of increasingly complex processes; systems that at first seem unrelated can find relationships through emergence theory. Emergence is the idea that novel,
coherent structures, patterns, and properties arise during the process of self-organization
within complex systems. The result is systems that are greater than the sum of their parts
and therefore not reducible to just their parts. Emergent systems are defined as synergistic,
coherent, and dynamic, and they take place in states of disequilibrium, where the mathematical laws of entropy and thermodynamics do not apply.
Flocks of birds have emergent properties, because there is no “boss bird” that tells the flock
to change directions; rather each bird is an autonomous agent paying close attention to its
immediate local environment, moving as its neighbors move. The overall effect is cohesive
and highly organized. Ant colonies are well-studied emergent communities, in which billions of interactions together create an intricate system that is more structured than its
parts. Human cities are emergent in this same way, co-evolving systems of collective behavior. Water has emergent properties that become apparent when random motion forms
vortices (i.e. whirlpools) that are both highly ordered and mathematically irreducible. The
World Wide Web is an emergent system, formed not by any one component but by the collaboration of millions to create an evolving, integrated whole. Sand dunes are crafted by the
wind, here on earth and also on Mars. Symmetrical patterns of salt on glass, created by the
vibration of a cello bow string, are also defined by emergence.28
• • •
“Salt water? I immediately think of the ocean. It has always been to the west. It has
a strong hold for me. It’s always there. I went to Chicago, and I was so baffled. I’ve
been to New York and it wasn’t so shocking that the water was on the east, but for
some reason it struck me and I felt weirdly claustrophobic that there was this body
of water that looked like an ocean but did not feel like my ocean. It’s very grounding and comforting. I’m so used to seeing not just water, but the ocean, every day. I
don’t enjoy being in the ocean; I’m kind of terrified of it and it’s power. But I think
that’s also comforting. There’s something there, it’s captivating, replenishing. It’s
always there and it’s kind of scary and we don’t know really much about it. We don’t
know anything about the depths of it.” (Sofia Gonzalez)
• • •
What does it mean when the pragmatic merges with the mystical? Where does that leave us?
Does philosophy become a verb? Does everything become a verb?
When everything is equally meaningless and meaningful, we dangle, weightless, in the space
between. Vibrating, decaying, shimmering, crumbling.
Tat tvam asi.
Thou art that.
28 Steven Johnson, Emergence:The Connected
Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software, (New
York: Scribner, 2001).
III: On Sincerity
I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything
unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were
locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the
answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to
live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then,
someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way
into the answers.
Rainer Marie Rilke, Letters to aYoung Poet
A young woman stood up and asked Cage why he didn’t take on tougher issues like
murder or political chaos in Third World countries. Cage was speechless, as was
the audience. After what felt like an eternity, he finally responded, hesitantly, saying
quietly as he rose to leave the stage, that he’d just wanted to put something positive
forward.
Jeremy Millar, John Cage: Every Day is a Good Day
The trees are calling, so I drive up the canyon and over the hill where I once saw a bobcat with big feet
and a black-tipped tail.The temperature drops dramatically as I enter the dampness of the redwood
preserve. I scout a location, some place nearby where I can carry a 50-pound salt block without ruining
my back. Just down the slope behind the parking lot looks perfect actually, so I grab my bag, blanket, and
Facing page: “Sand #2,” digital photograph
of dead pelican, Half Moon Bay, CA, March
2013.
block, and head out.The salt is too heavy to get down the river bank, so I heave it over the edge into the
stream. A satisfying splash and crash puts it mostly into place; I tweak the angle just a little, then settle
in to watch.
Nothing much happens.The cubeness of the salt is very stubborn.The water is running fast through this
narrowing of the channel and it splashes back from the white wall of salt, eddying on one side, rushing
past on the other. I look for a minute, then settle in on the bank to read Walden (which, dumb as it
sounds, I find I can only read in the woods).
And I read:“I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his
life by a conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue,
and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere
and medium through which we look, which morally we can do.To affect the quality of the day, that is
the highest of arts.” 29 Ten-four, good buddy.
I check back several minutes later. A ledge has become etched in the salt at the water line.The underwater part is going its way, as it will. I know it’s changing in the same way and at the same rate as it was
when I first arrived, but it seems more real now that I can see the evidence.
I resist the urge to check what is happening under the water, because to do so would change the outcome.
What will be will be.
29 Henry David Thoreau, Walden, and Other
Writings, Ed. Joseph Wood Krutch, (Toronto: Bantam, 1962), 348.
It’s taking a long time, and I’m feeling restless. I wonder if the top half will ever be submerged at this
rate. I go back to reading my book. I eat a sandwich. I sketch the opposite bank in walnut ink on an old
linen napkin. I am not only here to watch the salt block, but also to spend a determined amount of time
being present to this place, to my place in this place. I am here to bear witness to salt, water, and self.
It feels like companionship, sitting here with this salt block, it doing its thing, me doing mine. A quiet
friendship that becomes altogether pleasant once I settle in. It would be weird if I were just sitting here
alone, by the river, painting and reading.
After an hour and a half, the change is real. Only a corner of the block remains above water, its jagged
edge undercut, water cresting and surging over the altered form. Now it’s fun to watch, like a nature
movie in which there’s a battle to the finish between starfish and clam. Slowly, slowly, the water takes
over the salt, covering it, eating it. I’m not rooting for one or the other, because in this moment they’re
becoming the same thing.
I imagine hopping a ride on a saltwater molecule as it goes to the sea.That would be the best thing ever,
to be saltwater.
Three hours spent. I retrieve the block, which now looks like the tooth of a mega-sea monster, rippling
and sharp. It is marvelous and I love it, mostly because it made itself.
• • •
Gilles Deleuze notes how appealing Spinoza’s dynamic plane of immanence can be when he
says that “non-philosophers, or even someone without a formal education, can receive a sudden illumination from him, a ‘flash.’ Then it is as if one discovers that one is a Spinozist; one
arrives in the middle of Spinoza, one is sucked up, drawn into the system or the composition.” Encountering Spinoza becomes a passion, a “kinetic determination.”30
So it was for me when I first read Spinoza in an anthology of writings by great poets, mystics, and philosophers.Yet, going back to this book to relocate that initial sense of wonder,
I fail to find the flash. Spinoza’s prose, even in his letters, is dense and wooden: “Existence
pertains to its essence; that is solely from its essence and definition it follows that Substance
exists.”31 Huh? Somehow the veil must have been thin that day, perhaps prepared by Rumi,
30 Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, (San Francisco: City Lights, 1988),
122-130.
31 Stepehn Mitchell, Editor. The Enlightened
Mind, (New York: HarperCollins, 1991),
143-4.
Rilke, and others. Somehow, I found that I was a Spinozist.
• • •
The Dutch artist, herman de vries found his philosophical touchstone in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, a logic as comprehensive and abstract as Spinoza’s.Yet in the abstraction of propositions like “what is mystical is not how the world is, but that it is,” and “the unspeakable does
exist, it shows itself, it is the mystical,” de vries found a basis for his work and a way to make
natural materials at once concrete and transcendent.32
For de vries, art is not conceptual but rather a document of the world itself. It starts with an
initial revelation, which is a necessary deconditioning through which art (and by extension
life) becomes a document of itself. For him, knowing begins in this revelation, develops further through explanation, and completes itself in wonder and joy. De vries had formed this
basic relationship with nature in childhood and during his first career as a soil scientist. The
world showed itself to him daily, and he chose to listen. Philosophical underpinnings came
later, as an intellectual explanation of his existing knowledge.
32 Mel Gooding, herman de vriest: chance
and change, (London: Thames and Hudson,
2006), 10-41.
33 Ibid.
De vries’ works, from his collections of shells and grasses to his photographic projects that
capture random moments in time and place, embrace the “wise passiveness” of William
Wordsworth as well as the “neti, neti” (not this, not that) of the Upanishads.33 In this frame,
nothing is sacred – set above and apart – and everything is holy. Form and emptiness become expressions of the same unnamable essence, leaving one with mostly questions and
silence. The work is quiet; there is no need to shout, except possibly out of joy at the opportunity to be alive in this world. To my mind, de vries is a devout man. Devoted to the world
as it is, living as awake a life as he can. His life is his art, with some sketches and sculptures
around the edges. It’s the best kind of an art/work/life I can imagine.
Yet de vries captures the dissolving leaf, the multitude of shells, the different-yet-the-same
rocks, and encases them in frames and vitrines for our contemplation. They are lovely but
lonely, fixed objects that have stepped out of time. My goal is to work with these same materials, but not to stop the clock, not to arrest the decay and the change. This makes it quite
challenging to know where the work begins or ends, and where I begin or end.
Non-object art, as Robert Irwin calls it, gets closer still. How lightly can I touch the world
before I disappear altogether?
• • •
Embedded in the stream bank, I find huge sheets of plastic, splattered with peeling white paint, that
appear to have been washed downstream in last years’ storms. At first I feel revolted by the pollution, the
incursion of the “cultural” into the “natural.” But then I notice that the plastic’s rippling folds are lovely,
like a child’s bedding after a good night’s sleep. I take a photo.
I pull the plastic out of the mud. It is strong in places, brittle in others. I try not to rip it, but to allow
it its wholeness. I take each section to the stream and wash it lightly in the narrow river channel, just
enough to get the loose dirt off. I feel kinship with 5,000 generations of women, rinsing fabric in running water with care and effort.
Tiny flakes of paint come off the plastic and the water turns slightly milky. Guilt and ecological anxiety
well up in my chest, so I breathe deep; I did not put the plastic here, and all of this would have been
released over time anyway, right?Whether slowly or all at once in next year’s rains, these sheets were on
their way downstream. And besides, this plastic is part of things too. It was created from earthen materials, albeit highly processed, and over time it will return to source. It won’t break down as quickly as the
leaf litter under my feet, but the brittleness and staining on it tell me that it is also, at this very moment,
going home.
Home is not a place. It is a state of becoming, a perpetual state of flux that only feels like home if you
allow change to be the nature of being.
I take the plastic out of the woods. Am I cleaning up? Or just moving the puzzle pieces around? I spread
the sheets in my yard to dry.They are reticulated like sea kelp, they branch like lichen. Each hole looks
like an aerial photograph of an island, and the folds and valleys are miniature mountainscapes.The
stains of rust and rot are like shibori-dyed fabric. I cannot see this as ugly, as other.
• • •
British land artists have had a more integrated, even sympathetic relationship with the land
than their American counterparts. Instead of scraping at the desert in service of some grand
vision, Richard Long, Hamish Fulton, David Nash, and Chris Drury place themselves in and
on the land, in performative, if solitary, relationship with it. The hours spent in conversation
with the landscape reminds viewers that time is our most precious asset, the only thing we
really have. As Nash writes, “a journey completed can never be destroyed.”34
Some of their works are made in situ and recorded, others are made with local materials
transported to and transformed in a different space. The results often don’t look like much:
a photograph of a line of stones in a field or a wooden yardstick cut and pieced to recall a
mountain range. Time is implicit in the objects gathered, arranged, and photographed. The
artists’ commitment to being present calls our attention to the fleeting nature of our own
lives, as well as of the lives of the rocks and the trees.
34 David Nash, davidnash.com, (March
1, 2014).
What can I add to such an accomplished body of work? Perhaps my determination to encounter and address these ideas in spiritual and religious terms, against all good advice, is
the contribution I make. In When God is Gone, Everything is Holy, Chet Raymo describes himself as a religious naturalist, that is, someone who scratches his “itch for the transcendent”
outdoors.He claims the word religion, not because he rejects science, but because he wants
to build a future in which religions are ecumenical, ecological, and scientifically sound.35
Bringing religious imagination and language to the ordinary and the mundane (from mundus,
meaning world) shines a light on the world. In this way, I weave a fine thread between art,
religion, and science that one day may grow into a web.
• • •
The time before we supposed we knew so much is most intriguing to me, the time when we
were still finding out. Back when people stood under the night sky and were humbled and
awestruck. Before believing was called “religion” and knowing was called “science.”
Saying this may diagnose me as romantic, naïve, uncritical, and simplistic. In recent decades,
emotion has been expunged from intellectual discourse, as though thought were different
from (and superior to) feeling. But we know better now. It is not romantic to affirm the
existence of mystery. It is not naïve to believe in something, despite the evidence. It is not
uncritical to ask unanswerable questions, and it is not simplistic to seek simplicity. We need
art that chooses to move toward the perceived other, not away from it. Relationship and
engagement are, in fact, the critical stance that matters most.
In fact, in a world that appears too broken to save and too compromised to call beautiful,
negation is the simplistic and naïve option. In fact, the world is too worn out and too precious to abandon to cynicism and rejection.
And though there is ultimately no point in any of it, I can think of no other way to be happy
than to make a small mark on the side of the hopeful. Showing up is my offering.
• • •
35 Chet Raymo, When God is Gone,
Everything is Holy, 90, 114.
I go to church.
It feels like confession to say this, or heresy.
I am supposed to feel ashamed, and I do. In certain circles, it is assumed that educated, cultured, liberal people don’t go to church anymore, or that people who do go to church will
try to sell you something. I feel I have to excuse it or explain it away.
Then I feel ashamed for feeling ashamed, because church is at the core of who I am. The
politics of identity extends into the pew.
I go to church because I feel better when I walk out than when I walked in. My weariness
lifts in the company of others, and my heart softens ever so slightly in reply to the music,
words, and silence. I become less sclerotic, less judgmental. I can breathe again.
And while I’m in that receptive state, I can sit with big questions and listen for whispers of
insight that feel more like reminders of what I already know. It’s so easy to forget. The more
I listen, the louder the whispers become, and the more often I quiet my own incessant mental chatter and ceaseless attempts to control the future, the less dis-ease I feel. Just as mental
illness is sometimes a sane response to an insane world, going to church is my rational response to the madness of 21st century America. My reasons for going are entirely pragmatic.
I go especially when I don’t want to.
I think most of the hundred other people in the room are here for the same reason. They
seem to come in order to ponder hard questions and to feel connected to a community.
Plus, there is so little singing in daily life.
I go to church to experience the holy, what Rudolph Otto termed the “numinous,” that
mysterious Something that is neither superior nor supernatural, but rather the ineffable
experience that caused the birth of and remains at the heart of every religion. It cannot be
described or taught, “it can only be evoked, awakened in the mind.”36 You can’t talk about it,
not really. But those who know, know.
I go because I feel kinship with my intellectual forebears, who were some of the most radical
opponents of dogma and power in Western history: Arius, Michael Servetus, Joseph Priestley, Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Olympia Brown, Margaret Sanger, and others.
“Reason, freedom, and tolerance” are the core principles of the Unitarian Church, and they
are worth standing up for as a religious community.
In an age when people stand for so little and risk nothing real, the fact that people came before who fought and died for the right to think freely strikes me as immensely noble. I don’t
stand for much, just for the knowledge that a religion can be open-minded, constructive,
and consistent with the values of a democratic society. It can be modern.
I go because in 1961 the Unitarian and the Universalist churches merged, bringing the idea
of universalism, i.e. God’s universal love of all, to my table. What does that even mean?
What God? What love? Universalism asks me to look for something deeper than the purely
intellectual and rational. It makes me take seriously other ways of knowing: the sensory, the
emotional, the instinctive, the subliminal. My head must recede to make room for my heart.
I go because it is a place where I am asked to be as humble as I am smart, as kind as I am
free. In the space between, in the movement back and forth, like a pendulum finding its
rhythm, lies the growth and the joy.
36 Rudolph Otto, The Idea of the Holy,
(London: Oxford UP, 1923), 8.
IV: On Process
I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process–an integral function of the universe.
R. Buckminster Fuller, I Seem to Be aVerb
Eyes and mind open, waiting, watching.Watching the world tick and move, keeping its rhythm as I keep
mine.
Finding a new material – seeing the world fresh in matter – requires getting in sync with my self and
my surroundings. After some time just being present in a new place, days or weeks, I notice a new way in
which the world is becoming – or rather, a new way in which I am sensing that which was always there.
Usually water is involved, eroding something, growing something, decaying something. Flow is at the
center.
Then the excitement.The quickening of pulse and neurons, the leap of my heart at discovering a new
truth: for instance, that lichen animates into a curling, breathing organism when it gets wet, or that
cardboard, so plain and ubiquitous, becomes cloth when sodden.
This week it is ditch plastic. Farm detritus, blown from hay bales and dumpsters into the ever-flowing
culverts that run from the mountain behind me, past the barn to the sea, one kilometer hence. (Fence
Facing page: “Salt Portrait #2,” salt, water,
copper, Day 45, April 2013.
plastic is its close cousin, coiled around and woven through the barbed wire that runs between horse
pastures.) The excitement of a new material feels like a crush, a first love that fills the mind and body.
Oh, this.This could really be something.
Then the obsession, the hunt.The new material must be pursued, located, understood, known.Tromping
through puddles along the roadside, I peer into the ditch, looking for hints and glints.White is easy, and
mostly what I see at first.The tatters and pleats caused by wind and water are as sophisticated as any
Japanese master craftsman could make. Aqua green is the other color used here on the farm; it tatters
well too, and seems to take on algae and bacteria more readily in the ditch, creating a more nuanced
pattern.
Discernment settles in.This piece has more depth and character than that piece; it expresses more essence.
That piece over there is just not special, so I leave it where it is. Like selecting favorite beach stones, or
discerning friends from acquaintances, it is a process of finding both some maturity and a good fit. Discernment is the satisfying phase of choosing.This one, not that one.
It can last a good while and is a very creative period in which I immerse myself in a narrow slice of the
world with few distractions, as possibilities unfold.
Eventually, saturation creeps in. Rejecting a new addition to the collection more often than accepting it,
getting frustrated with the material’s misbehavior, feeling exhausted by it. Hours spent in idyll, talking to the new material and bonding with it as I gather, process, and work it, become less desirable.The
flame flickers.
But it doesn’t go out.The experiences, the knowledge, the places, are printed on me.The new material is
changed by me, and I by it.
• • •
Pilgrims undertake journeys, enduring discomfort and the anxiety of anticipation to arrive
in places that holds their hope. Transformation is the goal. Buddhists who make the pilgrimage to Mt. Kailash sometimes circle the entire 32 mile perimeter of the mountain by prostrating their bodies: moving from the vertical axis, where their minds rise, to the horizontal
axis, where their bodies touch the ground of being. They do not ascend the mountain to get
closer to truth or god, but rather circumnavigate it, arriving back where they started, but
different.
I have always felt great respect for the devout, for to be devoted to something, anything,
in a lifetime of disappointment and difficulty, requires courage and humility. To bow down
before a mountain, to fast for weeks or pray for years, demands a level of commitment
to which I aspire. I try to walk the pilgrim’s path, curious about the world and its places,
though my practice falls short, and I’m unsure of my destination. But I seek out new locations in order to awaken my mind and senses, like an animal in a new habitat. I compare the
new to the familiar and recalibrate my knowledge, learning more about the world as I go.
Staying put is a journey, too, a way of penetrating, burrowing, and becoming enmingled
with a place until its dirt runs through my veins. Wendell Berry calls it “sticking.” It is a decision not to pass through but to grow roots and take nourishment, in the slow way of trees,
from the soil on which one stands.
• • •
First it was Pelican. He looked like a pterodactyl at the moment of excavation, just emerging from the
stone.Wings spread, neck gracefully bowed in exhale. Pelican had me from hello, and I have visited him
every few days or weeks now for more than six months, as wind and rain and gulls and people have each
taken their toll.
Pelican was on a piece of beach I don’t normally walk because the sand is dry and soft. I found him and
sat with him and went home for my camera and took photos of him. He seemed so thoroughly empty and
at rest. On different days, sand would cover more or less of him, depending on the winds, and his beak
was the most beautiful dagger, with a hint of salmon colored bone toward the hooked tip. Lethal. His
toes and peeling skin were so dry and brittle after a lifetime spent swimming, and his feathers, disarranged, were like sea grass emerging from the dunes.
The day the sailboat wrecked just in front of Pelican was exciting.The owner had been high and drunk
and had survived even as his home foundered on the sand. Splintered and torn, large chunks of mast
and deck and hull covered the shore, along with small chunks of wood and wire and insulating foam. A
salvage company was brought into clear the mess; I was sure Pelican would not survive all that, would
get crushed or buried or both. But a few days later, though the beach was raw with truck tracks and deep
backhoe gouges, someone had carefully moved Pelican 20 yards further south, away from harm.
Then there was the day someone took Pelican’s head.That beak was a trophy, and so they carried it home
and put it on a shelf, I imagine.To be honest, I had thought of doing the same thing, so I can’t completely blame the person, even though it made me mourn all over again.
Next it was Seal. After waving innocently to the ranger, I had carried a fifty-pound block of salt into the
marine reserve to place it at the intersection of the creek and the ocean, where the water could work on
it from both angles. For an hour of I watched and photographed the salt block and talked to a Russian
woman who wondered what I was doing.Then I clambered around the boulders lining the creek, and
there, among the golden lumps of sandstone, lay Seal. Dead maybe a day or two, her body was the same
warm color and firm form as the weathered rock. I explored her with my eyes and camera and found that
under her body, tucked almost out of sight, her dark brown flipper was tangled in green fishing rope. It
pulled at her thick wrinkled shoulder. She had not wanted to die. Her body was gone the next day.
Porpoise came on a day I was visiting Pelican.The little voice I listen for told me to walk the long way
home and there she was, at the high tide line. I thought Porpoise was a baby orca for at least a week because of her black and white patched skin, which glistened like patent leather in the sun. I photographed
her as I did the others, not looking through the lens, but rather holding the camera down low and up
close, where my eye could not go. From those angles I found the landscape of her body, rather than simply
seeing her as an object.
The following day Porpoise was so different, eaten by flies so that her smooth, perfect skin was a cratered
surface of mesas and ravines. Porpoise must have been stillborn or separated from her mother in the first
hours of life: she was only twenty-six inches long. I thought of my friends who had lost children. Lost.
Where did they go? I spoke to Porpoise about her place in the family of things, perhaps hoping to comfort her mother.
The only remedy for death is truth.
This is what Spinoza seems to be saying in his life’s work: I cannot avoid the end, so I must live in the
Truth so that death will not be for nothing. Even at the cost of losing my community and what’s left of
my family,Truth trumps Death.
Last week, I took a child’s wagon-load of salt bricks down to the river. I filled in the missing section of
the driftwood crossing some kids had made, and then I watched as the river took the blocks away, drop
by drop. After setting up, I wandered downstream; it was then I found Doe? I call her Doe? because this
creature was too far gone to identify. It took me some time and a hundred photos to even be certain she
was Animalia. I touched her to be sure.There’s nothing else like a hide, the specific way it pushes back.
This was a creature. Probably a land mammal, since this seasonal creek was not running all the way to
the ocean right now, but grounding out fifty yards hence. I think the fur had been tawny. It was hard to
tell. I spent some time with Doe? too, though the smell eventually pushed me back upwind.Three days
later Doe? was barely visible, the streambed dry and sand covering her small lumpen mass. So it goes.
Today it is Sheep. On my way down the road, that voice said,“Stop at Montara Beach and go down that
staircase.” It’s not a place I usually go. At the base of the steep stairs, just east of the log bridge over the
creek, there she is. She has been here a few days at least; some of her bones are clean and disjointed, but
her entrails are still intact. How did she get here, at the base of these cliffs, between the highway and
the beach? It must be that the rains we had last weekend surprised her and washed her from an upland
farm, down the gully and through the culvert.There are lots of footprints around the shore of Sheep.
Most people walk past unnoticing, but clearly some have had a closer look, too. Sheep has no smell, or
not much. I predict she’ll be here for six weeks more, until the next big rain takes her body the final
hundred yards home.
• • •
Kairos, the indeterminate, non-chronological time when the ancient Greeks believed something new could come into being, does not just happen; one must be awake in mind and
spirit to experience it. For the early animists in Japan, too, the vivid nature of nature, in
which spirits inhabited the rocks, trees, and rivers, meant that an artist’s role was to listen
to the material world and partner with it as a channel that gives birth to something greater
than one’s own vision. Poesis, this nurturing practice of the craftsman, discerns and draws
out the inherent meaning in things, rather than deciding meaning and imposing it.
37 Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly, All
Things Shining, (New York: Free Press,
2011), 202-211.
38 Walter Truett Anderson, The Next Enlightenment, (New York: St. Martin’s Press,
2003).
Similarly, physis, meaning nature in Greek, does not describe the mechanistic parts of the
world, but rather the true essence of things as they present themselves at certain moments.
Physis tends to well up and take over for a short while, before letting go, as in the power of
Achilles in the midst of battle or the consuming energy of a storm at sea. Physis is the essence of nature, and it moves.37 Cultivating awareness of this spirit in things (spirit, meaning
breath) means reaching beyond literal understandings of both religious texts and scientific
theories to touch the threads that unite both. Eastern and Western traditions both have
schools of thought that open this dialogue wide.38
Mono no aware, a Japanese phrase that speaks of one’s awareness of the transience of things—
“this too shall pass”—again speaks poetically of something that is scientifically true. Can
we invite more poetry into our experience of the world? In so doing, we might be able to
replace the sense of coming catastrophe (which is the oldest story of all) with a sense of kinship and, perhaps, stewardship.
Changing one letter—from imminence to immanence—might be all we need to do.
Holes are not empty. They are full of what used to be there (a rotting tree stump), what is
implied by the space (Heidegger’s empty pitcher), what is already there (the vivacity of air
itself), or what comes next (a womb or a pause). A lacuna in a piece of music, that pregnant
gap that is fulfilled in the eventual release of the next phrase, speaks in its silence.Yet there is
no such thing as silence, as John Cage demonstrated in 4:33. We fill it all in with the rustling
candy wrappers in the theater of our minds.
Cage played in this space between thought and void, matter and spirit. He sought to step
back to the very edges of his work in order to see how many other voices could be heard.
Consulting the I Ching to determine which stone to choose next and which color to paint
around it (thereby noting its absence), he asked the question: how little can I do? how light
can my touch be? When paint was too much, flame became his tool, again within parameters
set by chance. Stains and remnants were all that remained of his hand. One can only understand this in the context of his Zen practice, which centers around they journey into emptiness, into non-self.
Cage could, and did, rejoice in the results of his labors, because they were, in a very real
sense, not of his making. He was the midwife, and he loved the children he brought into the
world. Hear, hear.
Part II:
Contemporary
Conversations
V: On Modernity
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
Modernity is a theological invention.
Wittgenstein, Tractatus
Mark C. Taylor, After God
Gravity requires pendulums to swing to the opposite apex. And so it makes sense that over
the past 350 years we have totally rejected the totalism of the medieval church. This rejection implied that we were making progress, that we could know the world and bend it to
our will. Individual autonomy and scientific discovery increasingly became the metrics of
modernity against which other social orders were measured.
However, this narrative is actually a product of the very Christian understandings of time
and duality that formed it. “Indeed,” writes Mark C. Taylor, “it is no exaggeration to insist
that not only the modern but the postmodern world effectively began with the Protestant
Revolution of the sixteenth century.” More old ideas were brought forward than we think.
Less has changed than we imagine.
When leaving the church behind, Enlightenment thinkers still carried with them an implicit
Christian understanding of the world as a pyramid, a Great Chain of Being with humans at
the right hand of God. Even after God was dismissed from the picture, our belief in domin-
Previous page: Copper inscribed with site’s
former Native American village name,
Ssatumnumo, and nailed to pier post at the
lowest tide of the year, Princeton, CA, 4:32
pm, January 1, 2014.
Facing page: “Pilarcitos #3,” salt, copper,
water, leaf detritus, Day 4, Purisima Creek
Redwoods, Half Moon Bay, CA, February
2014.
ion has thrived over recent centuries. In displacing the supreme judge of yore, we made ourselves judge and jury. Though Western culture has become a bit more tolerant and self-aware
in recent decades, we still operate from this same vision of sovereignty, which has served the
modern project very well.
We also brought forward a belief in binaries: good/evil, mind/body, self/other, before/
after, subject/object. These, too, are Biblical and Aristotelian ideas that Enlightenment
philosophers reworked into a rational frame that could be digested in 17th century Europe.
Other than monism of Spinoza, Hegel, Tillich, and a few others, most Western thought still
holds that dichotomies are real and useful. They allow us discern good from evil, to see our
position clearly, and to feel that we have rejected the archaic past.
Michel Serres, the French philosopher, notes that the Western habit of believing in revolution and rupture is an unusual mode of thought, a “self-promoting mania” that always puts
the current moment at the apex of creation.39 If we are always at the end of time, then the
culminating battle is near at hand. Who will win?
It’s an uncomfortable worldview we have built for ourselves. It is as comprehensive and
intolerant as the Catholic Church in 1500.Yet the restoring force of the pendulum contains
so much potential energy. Perhaps we are now reaching the top of the oscillation and can
pause to look around. Can we see some wisdom from up here? Can we understand that if
we relax into the counter-swing it does not mean we are not backsliding toward irrationality
and barbarism (we need not tighten our grip!), but rather moving ahead in a different way?
After all, the movement of a pendulum is forward in time, and eventually, after many cycles,
it finds its balance point.
39 Michel Serres and Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan, 1995), 143.
• • •
The anthropologist of science, Bruno Latour, argues that we have never been modern, that
the dichotomies and hierarchies were never valid, even though they were convenient to furthering human ambition for several centuries. Rather, things that seem definitively modern
to us—“frozen embryos, expert systems, digital machines, sensor-equipped robots, hybrid
corn, data banks, psychotropic drugs, whales fitted with radar sounding devices, gene synthesizers, audience analyzers”—are actually hybrids and networks of nature and culture that
demonstrate how interwoven reality actually is.40
Latour is not the first to challenge the nature/culture binary. But he posits that post-modernism is simply a sub-set of modernism that inverts and rejects the same set of assumptions
regarding time and progress. This strikes me as useful. It allows us to step out of the water
in which we swim, so we can see clearly that we haven’t really changed the discussion or
paradigm for a very long time. If we consider that we are nonmodern, we can leave the rejectionist stance of modern/postmodern at the door; we can begin to converse rather than
denounce, and we can figure out where to go next.
Latour suggests we conceive a “Parliament of Things” that will allow natural and social
phenomena to exist on an equal plane, where the discourse can become broad and public,
rather than specialized and scientific. Toward this end, his current project is a collaborative
philosophy website, modesofexistence.org, that invites comment on and participation in a
thorough review of modernity, in elaboration of and response to his recent book, An Inquiry
into the Modes of Existence. This is a complex, complete epistemology that re-conceives human
culture in terms that are relational, networked, and active. Input is being gathered now,
and the final report is due in the coming year. We must “change our way of changing,” says
Latour. “There are times when new words are needed to convene an assembly.”41
40 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been
Modern, (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993)
49-50.
This affirmative, additive approach acknowledges that we are within history, part of a spiraling polytemporality that repeats itself endlessly. As Latour notes, we use electric drills,
41 Bruno Latour, An Inquiry into the Modes
of Existence, (Cambridge: Harvard UP,
2013) 142-5.
but we also use hammers; some of our genes are 500 million years old, some are 3 million
years old, and some are just 100,000 years old. We are hybrid, and everything that happens,
happens in the middle, between nature and culture, which are the same thing. In proposing
a more open-source approach to philosophy, Latour opens a conversation that allows for a
past and a future, both of which are required for a healthy society.
• • •
Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey make their work at the boundary between nature and
culture. They intentionally cross the line, whether synthesizing a diamond from a polar bear
femur, installing giant grass portraits on the sides of buildings, or coating whale skeletons
in alum salt crystals. Their work always speaks to a tension between the human and natural
worlds, namely an intrusion upon the natural by humans. It is a call to arms, a cry for awareness of pressing issues from ocean acidification to melting ice caps to “ecocide.” They believe
art can and must make a difference, if we are to survive as a planet.
Visually, their work is understated and elegant, presenting thoughtful collaborations between art and science in singular gestures. It is everything to which I aspire with my own
work, except this: it is grounded in crisis, a sense of urgency, complicity, and conflict that
reinforces the message of man’s destructive nature. I don’t accept the apocalyptic implications that leave everyone feeling scared, guilty, and alone, and I suspect the escalating sense
of alarmism is counterproductive.
42 Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey,
www.ackroydandharvey.com, March
51, 2014.
A quieter project of Ackroyd and Harvey’s is Host, a series of small, house-shaped sculptures
made of something solid (cement? plaster?) and placed in the canals of Venice to be eroded
by the waters. What emerged later (was it days, or was it months?) was a series of curious forms that are both growing and decaying. The duo described them as “simultaneously
wholesome, noxious, edible, toxic, valuable and worthless.”42 They are ambiguous and poetic
objects, and they were part of my inspiration for putting salt blocks in streams. I wanted to
approach the same ideas from a less anthropocentric viewpoint. The form didn’t need to be
a house. What if a rock were eroded into ... a rock?
Their Storm Drawings, made on a hellish nine-day boat trip across the North Atlantic from
Svalbard to Greenland (it was supposed to take five days), also partner with nature in a less
than conclusive way. They cast the inside of a ship’s light bulb with plaster, then allowed
the inked sphere to roll around on paper in a shallow tray. This simple gesture captured the
tumultuous experience of their voyage better than they could have with more directed mark
making. One can feel the North Atlantic surging in the stark, chaotic lines, bringing to mind
journeys, histories, and processes that are both within and far beyond the present moment.
As in these works, which concentrate on process and time, it seems that the most radical
thing an artist can do is change the conversation, walking away from the doomsday discourse. The new path walks a line that includes both knowledge and ignorance, wisdom and
emptiness.
• • •
Dichotomy and contention have been the driving forces in Western art for so long that we
hardly know how to write a different story. These days, if somebody is right, somebody else
is wrong; winners and losers abound. We develop answers and opinions and philosophies,
in order to hone ever finer distinctions between what’s old and what’s new. Fashion trumps
tradition, as if novelty created knowledge.
Critic Caroline Picard writes of enjoying making comparisons between various art works,
while also noting that this “often leads to judgment, whereupon it is decided that this is good
vs. that which is bad—a kind of map making which would discount certain efforts while cel-
ebrating others. A preferential hierarchy emerges from such a discussion. The value of one
project is ensured as another is devalued.” This self-reinforcing system is ultimately complicit with markets and institutions, she continues. “Suddenly, thinking of critical dialogue in
this way, it seems to produce an exponentially convinced scaffold of aesthetic lineage.”
In privileging judgment over all other modes of thought, criticism becomes the foundation
from which markets and hierarchies follow, even though it is these very outcomes that criticism critiques. The modern revolutionary stance may not be so radical after all.
Can one be critical of criticality without playing a broken game? Does rejecting rejection
even make sense? Picard continues, “Perhaps a non-critical openness is the most unconventional, iconoclastic position. Perhaps it provides an interesting upturning of what has so far
been taken for granted.”
It is indeed possible, even important, to pursue a much more open-ended, open-minded,
inconclusive, and inclusive conversation about art. This might not even require a large move,
but rather a subtle shift, from judgment to interpretation, from reflexivity to reflection,
from discrimination to discernment. From talk to listen. The latter words, which imply insight, thought, and experience, can sound soft and naïve to contemporary ears, but they are
not. They are, in fact, the only way out of this paradox.
Picard concludes, “I’m only not sure of this: then what? And it is really possible to let criticality go? How do we create a common ground (a shared mythology) without it?” 43
43 Caroline Picard, “The Position of Criticality,” http://artandreciprocity.wordpress.
com, August 10, 2011.
Here she names a central dilemma, especially for people from the post-Enlightenment West:
not knowing the answers and holding judgment at bay requires discomfort, which is something most of us assiduously avoid. Ever since science banished ignorance as an acceptable
option, we have been using inquiry to nail down the world, rather than open it up.
Yet art asks bigger questions—Rilke questions—the kinds one must live within, possibly
for a long time without expectation of resolution, pregnant with anticipation, but comfortable with the discomfort of not knowing. The only way to find out what Picard’s new world
might look like is to build it.
• • •
Michel Serres likens human thought to plate tectonics. Ruptures do indeed happen on the
surface, and they seem important when you live in an active fault zone like the modern
world.Yet in reality these are small, incremental movements relative to the deeper layers,
where things are hot, slow, continuous, and eternal. Of these lower regions, “religion is the
deepest, the most buried, almost invisible, and surely the slowest moving.” Deeper yet lies
the core.
Serres suggests that we invent a theory of “obscure, confused, dark, non-evident knowledge
—a theory of adelo-knowledge,” from the Greek meaning “hidden.” Rather than relentlessly
separating, distinguishing, and shedding light, which has defined the modern project, Serres
asks us to see both light and shadow. When we choose to stop shining an ever brighter light
on objects, we have a chance of seeing them entire.
As the hard sciences and social sciences learn to mingle and dance with each other, Serres
believes “the wide and deep schism will give way to a suture” and bring a nuanced, subtle
light to human understanding.45
In recognizing that modernity has brought us, not rejection as a mode of thought, but inquiry as a plane of existence, we become able to live within the questions, within the essential mystery at the heart of everything.
44 Michel Serres, Conversations on Science,
Culture, and Time, 137-180.
Plotinus knew that language about this mystery was an impossibility. “If the one is to be taken
as a positing, name, and referent, we would express ourselves more clearly if we did not
speak its name at all. We speak it so that we can begin our search with that which signifies
the most simple, ending with the apophasis of even that.”45
Apophasis—the unsaying of all the words—is what we are left with. Mystery is not just
another set of ideas and doctrines, whether religious or secular, but a “referential openness
onto the depths of a particular tradition, and into conversation with other traditions.”46 Accepting the openness—“the way of ignorance” as Wendell Berry would term it—is the key
to the inquiry. Spinoza’s God walks down this path but still falls short. Spinoza’s God is the
referent, rather than the openness that signifies the inquiry. In the end, Spinoza’s God is not
the answer, only the question.
And so I muddle along toward the truth, which is simply my own construction of something
reliable in this shimmering, simmering world.
45 Michael Anthony Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying, (Chicago: University of
Chicago, 1994), 8.
46 Ibid, 17.
Facing page: “Salton Sea,” 12 pounds salt, 20
gallons water, 4 days evaporation, 16’ x 16’.
VI: On Belief
belief: n,
I. mental conviction
1. Theol. a) the trust that the believer places in God; the Christian virtue of
faith
b) outside the Christian faith, unbelieving
2. The mental action, condition, or habit of trusting to or having confidence in
a person or thing; trust, dependence, reliance, confidence, faith.
3. Theol. A formal statement of doctrines believed, a creed.
4. a) Something believed; a proposition or set of propositions held to be true.
b) Philos. A basic or ultimate principle or presupposition of knowledge;
something innately believed, a primary intuition.
II. expectation, confident anticipation
Oxford English Dictionary
Belief is a tricky word. Before Spinoza, Descartes, and Leibnitz, it meant unquestioned assent to church doctrine, often in direct opposition to reason. But these thinker and others
reworked the meaning of belief to include a process of individual inquiry that involved both
trust and rational thought; they didn’t discard or disregard belief, they reformed it. In the
18th century, David Hume defined belief as a more vivid and intense conception of any idea.
This further expansion of the meaning—that belief is thought that resides in the bones of
your bones—remains with us today, too.
Facing page: “Deliquescence #1,” (detail),
conch shell, white vinegar, linoleum
base, Day 14, 12” x 12” x 2”, September
2013.
Belief now means many things: religious doctrine, philosophical opinion, the social contract,
fabricated fancy. “I believe that if I work hard, life will turn out OK.” “I believe it’s time for
a cup of tea.” “I believe in fairies.” It’s hard for a word to bear such conflicting histories and
their implications, and it’s easy to project one’s own history and assumptions onto such a
word.
Like Hume, I understand belief to mean those principles I hold most dear, those core ideas
that inform my life and my actions. My beliefs are an evolving set of ideas that fall somewhere on a continuum between my assumptions (the cultural norms and subtexts of which
I am only sometimes aware) and my values (the conscious choices I make to affirm certain
ideas and deny others).
I contend that we all have beliefs, either theological or atheological, secular or spiritual, that
guide and undergird our lives. Some come from our upbringing and have been rejected,
some we retain. Some are clear and easy to articulate; others are hazy instincts that live only
in a deep wordless place. Beliefs are not static because life is not static, so we continually
evaluate and change our beliefs to meet our needs over time. Beliefs are essentially pragmatic, our individual response to our relationship with the world. As such, nihilism and cynicism are two points on the spectrum of belief, just as as idealism and optimism are different
points on spectrum. Beliefs are a symptom of a time and place as much as a cause.
• • •
What does belief mean in contemporary culture, at a time when religion and science are
seen to be at odds, when the “religious right” and the “new atheists” shout at each other
across a chasm that appears unbridgeable? Where does this leave people who find room for
both faith and fact in their lives, who think that both science and religion can help answer
the questions how and why?
Science leads every news cycle with discoveries of sub-atomic particles and gene therapies,
but the public conversation around religion has retreated from view, as the extremists have
grown more polarized, vocal, and entrenched. One’s beliefs are now considered too personal, too incendiary to talk about. What happens if we disagree? As a result, reasonable people
have put belief in the closet, along with the other things not talked about in polite company.
This suits the extremists just fine.
Bruno Latour laments the loss of language available for expression of the religious imagination. He blames the Church. Having failed to allow the language of belief to evolve over
time in response to rationalism, Latour says the Church has created a dichotomous relationship: God and not-God. Belief becomes a matter of choosing sides. If, however, the word
‘God’ had been allowed to evolve a more open definition as the “indisputable framework
of ordinary existence,” the tired dichotomy of faith and reason could have been avoided.47
Instead, we get stuck on words and definitions, which always fail to describe anything real.
Latour harkens back to Spinoza’s ideas as he seeks to revive our access to the language of
belief. For Latour, “atheism forms just as perfect a point of departure as belief ‘in God’”
and allows us to proceed to discussions of meaning that religion once facilitated rather than
blocked. Coming from the French Catholic tradition, Latour despairs of the message he
hears at Mass, yet he feels deeply compelled to attend. “It’s my heritage, I’ve come to claim
it.”
Latour points out the importance of reclaiming and reforming the language of religion in
conversation with 20th century secular culture. This is indeed happening within, between,
and outside of traditional religious institutions, such as Alain de Botton’s School of Life and
A. A. Bronson’s Institute for Religion, Art, and Social Justice at Union Theological Seminary.
The societal and spiritual purposes of religion are as real today as ever, even as the specific
landscape continues to change under our feet. The open question is whether the contempo-
47 Bruno Latour, Rejoicing, or The Torments
of Religious Speech, (Cambridge, UK: Polity,
2013), 8-9.
48 Ibid,15.
rary art world will choose to participate in the formation of the conversation or not. Belief,
in the context of inquiry—an insistent openness to questions, wonder, and new experiences—is something artists can help to bring out of the shadows.
• • •
In his essay, “The Over-Soul,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that “sincere conversation” is a
form of worship, that is, a genuine connection with a small part of the larger whole. Defining worship in this wide sense seems to me an idea that ties together the diverse aspects
of my own art practice and links my work to artists I admire like de vries, Laib, and Long.
Conversation bridges the singularity of the artistic and spiritual quest with the plurality of
religious community. It also puts inquiry at the center of the Venn diagram between art,
science, and religion. Asking and answering questions of each other, we can find shared
ground.
In order to better understand the changing place of belief in contemporary culture, I have
begun The Belief Project, a series of sincere conversations with people in the arts, sciences,
education, and social services, about the place of belief in their lives and work. At a time
when religion is both omnipresent and mute, it seems an important artistic practice to ask,
as Rev. Richard Gilbert says, “the questions that empty the room”—as well as the church,
synagogue, and lab.
In The Belief Project, I have worked with two groups so far: members of the Unitarian
Universalists of San Mateo and MFA students at California College of the Arts. The overall
response rate to my request for interviews was about the same at both places—8-10% of
the total population—though the church-goers (who have known me longer) were quicker
to sign up. Anecdotally, I heard that the project made some of the art students very uncomfortable (“Is Christina really religious?” one student asked).
My questions to participants were few:
What belief system were you raised in?
Were there experiences that caused you to question those beliefs?
If so, what did you do in response?
Do your beliefs show up in your work and, if so, how?
Do you have any unresolved areas of belief that trouble you?
Following are excerpts from my conversations with several of the art students, regarding
their belief systems and how their spiritual lives relate to their art practices.
• • •
You referred to yourself as a “recovering conservative Christian.” How have you found
it being here at CCA?
“It’s totally different and weird. I’ve found that I’ve unfortunately sort of ignored my faith here. And
I’m a little bit petrified to deal with it. In undergrad there was this lovely sensation of safety, and I
didn’t necessarily feel like I had to address it because it was a Christian college, and people had various
opinions and it was good, and some people were addressing it in their work. But there was also this sense
of “it’s OK, you don’t have to talk about it either” because most of us were on the same page or that was
part of our shared experience was around faith. So I didn’t necessarily do a lot of work in undergrad
that was about my faith practices. It was subtext and it didn’t seem all that radical or interesting to me
in that context. But here it’s this foreign thing that terrifies me a bit to address, whereas there it would
have felt a bit more boring to address, since we’re all talking about these things. Here it’s totally different. I’m sure that I’m going to do it eventually, but I don’t know how, I really don’t know how. I have
this deep sinking feeling that it’s going to come around to that eventually, and I’m nervous about that
because I haven’t grappled with it that much in my art. In undergrad my faith informed a lot of things,
but it wasn’t a primary concern. Here it informs me, but you don’t have to know that.Yet if you try to
really bring it into the dialogue….
I tend to like things that are not obscure. I tend to make work that’s very 21st century, youtube clip generation.That’s so me. I can’t do work that’s too subtle. So then how do I talk about it without it becoming…? I don’t want people here to assume anything because of the beliefs that I ascribe to. But they
will. I’m not not talking about it, but I’m also not bringing it up. I think there’s something also about
being in the Bay Area. People joke all the time that you can be anything you want to be in San Francisco as long as you’re not a Christian or a Republican.They’re accepting, to a certain point.The assumption is that the more educated you are the less faith you have.That faith is the opiate of the masses, for
simple folk.” (Heather Murphy)
• • •
Do you feel like your beliefs show up in your work at all?
“Yeah. 100%. Growing up Catholic, you have a constructed, very clear set of symbols that are so ritualized and made very important that they become part of your subconscious, they become part of how you
look at people. Like if I see somebody and their feet are in a certain way, I see the feet of Jesus. Or if I
see a heart or a crown of thorns; all these symbols are super heavy. Even back when I was younger and
even less comfortable with my Catholic background, I was still having dreams that involved the symbology.There was one sculpture I made that used Michelangelo’s Pieta as a physical reference. I’m basically
grabbing this man that I was carrying out of my life – my right arm is coming under his shoulder and
my right hand is grabbing his penis. It’s like the Pieta but passed through my mind, and then after I
made the sculpture, it looked to me like a crucifix. It’s not like every idea I have is loaded with Catholic
symbols, but those symbols are there to stay. And there are very particular associations with the candlelight and the architecture of the Catholic Church. It’s like a language; you don’t forget it, even if you
don’t use it. And also now I’m making crosses.
“As a child I remember seeing crosses, knotted with fabric, in front of the houses of people in the countryside near my dad’s farm. I didn’t have a way to know exactly what they were but only being able to
speculate because growing up in Catholic school, I was not really in contact with the more hybrid, more
attuned-to-the-time-and-place religions that are local to Dominican Republic. So I was looking at the
symbol and identifying with the hybridness, and the displacement of the symbol when I present it in
a gallery setting. So I made some sculptures that are based on that notion of knotting and tying these
things together. I appropriated the symbol, but also the cross is a very personal thing for me. It is an object of crossing, that action of mixing two things together into one. I’m using it as a metaphor; I’m just
embracing the fact that my mind goes there all the time.
“In a lot if the works that I’m doing now, people read religiosity right off, even the things that are not
the cross, because there is this act of repetition which echoes religiosity or this act of praying or doing
something all the time, every day, that you’re supposed to do in Catholicism. So religiosity comes up,
and colonialism comes up, and all the things that I’m thinking about come up because I’ve finally have
owned up to the fact that it is all in there, and the colonialism and the Catholicism are tightly linked in
the context in which my family has lived for many generations now.” (Laura Kingley)
• • •
Do you feel like art has a spiritual purpose?
“I think it’s important…. I think a lot of my practice has been about—even unconsciously, before I
knew what it was about—not being incendiary or being a flash just to be a flash. But living a life as a
black gay man, I feel like there are all these statistics…. I read many articles that say,‘this is happening
to gay people, this is happening to black men, blah, blah, blah.’To be able to sit in my studio and release
just one other voice about this experience that is positive and uplifting makes me feel so good.Those are
the stories I look to read, those are the stories I look to make. I don’t always want to point the light at
all the bad things that are happening. So maybe that’s what my spiritual aim is with the work.”
(Diedrick Brackens)
“With painting there’s such a burden; I felt like to be a painter you had to critique all the painting
while you were painting. But that’s not why I make art. I didn’t start painting because of the paint or
because of the conversation around painting; it’s just what I did as an undergrad. For me, it’s the making
that is interesting, not the painting and the art world. I grew up with art being in the realm of service
to others and how it could heal others; I want that to continue, not just “I’m going to make this picture.”
You’d think that people in art would understand this more because the moment we feel religion or something outside of ourselves is a similar moment in the art making process. Or at least it is for me. It can
get you, in a way that you can’t explain. It’s very similar.” (Sofia Gonzalez)
• • •
Among these artists, people who either attend church or who have a fairly resolved relationship with their religious identity seemed quite comfortable talking about their ideas and said
they enjoyed the conversations. I suspect people who were not interested in talking either
have little formal religious background (and so feel they have nothing to say) or perhaps
have had experiences they do not wish to revisit. These are people I would be especially
interested in speaking with in the future, even though (especially because) they are skeptical
of my intent.
It is difficult for me to ask for the conversation. I don’t want to confront people or make
them uncomfortable, and I feel like it’s asking people to take a risk to talk with me, as
though it will cost them cultural capital to converse about this particular topic. Perhaps in
confirmation of this fear, several of my requests have been ignored, I think due to unease.Yet
isn’t this part of art’s purpose, to shine light into dark corners?
Interestingly, of all the non-art-world people I have spoken with, not one was aware that
there is a contemporary conflict between art and spirituality. Most were surprised and
shocked to learn of the skepticism, even distrust, that art feels toward religion. Many
explicitly pointed to the long history of religion’s relationship with art, and to their shared
purposes. To my mind, this points, not to these people’s ignorance of contemporary culture,
for they are all educated and informed people. Rather, it speaks to something missing in the
contemporary visual arts (though, in my observation, not in the performing or literary arts).
Reflecting on my own ideas in conversation, as well as listening closely to others, feels like
an important practice, both spiritually and artistically. It has also been meaningful to get
to know people better at a level beyond the intellectual or social. I do no know where this
project is going yet, but I plan to continue these conversations, especially within the arts and
sciences communities, as a way of bringing back a conversation that has been too long silent,
as a way of reconsidering the spiritual in art.
VII: The Path Ahead
We read that the traveler asked the boy if the swamp before him had a hard bottom.
The boy replied that it had. But presently the traveler’s horse sank in up to his girths,
and he observed to the boy, “I thought you said that this bog had a hard bottom.”
“So it has,” answered the latter, “but you have not got half way to it yet.”
Henry David Thoreau, Walden
There are so many languages we use, such as Art, that we regard as legitimate. If
there is a commonality of language, it will be necessary for all to attempt where
relevant to accommodate their understanding of ‘established knowledge’ in other
domains, not least science, without making science a controlling discourse in the
variegated human endeavour.
CERN conference report,
“The Big Bang and the Interfaces of Knowledge:Towards a Common Language”
From art’s point of view, religion has never been more strange and estranged than it is now.
It is true that religion can be problematic in art, as James Elkins points out. Faithful, proselytizing art and reactionary, condemnatory art are simply not very interesting. But if questioning is the very essence of what it means to be a believer, then the problem disappears
like a mirage.
Facing page: “Edge of the Sea,” (process
view), latex, roots, dirt, asphalt, Half Moon
Bay, CA, January 2014.
To believe in questions and to seek to deepen one’s query into them, knowing that answers
may never come, is art’s basic premise, as well as the basic premise of religious inquiry. It is
why the trialogue between art, religion, and science—the three seeking structures of society—is the most interesting field in which to roam.
As each scientific revolution has shown us to be less central to the universe’s function than
we previously thought,we see clearly now how truly tangential we are. Biologically, we have
learned that our bodies are an accumulation of organisms rather than beings with minds;
without billions of bacteria, we vanish. Physically, we know that we consist of energy rather
than matter, that we are uncertain and impermanent in the most evanescent sense of those
words. Systemically, we know that our place on the skin of Earth is relational and dependent—and far more vulnerable than we would like to admit. We do not live at the center
anymore, we live at the edge, trying to describe, understand, and control our world, for
better and worse.
In this ever more contingent reality, imagination is needed to move the human project forward. Perhaps art can begin, ever so carefully, to engage with religion as a field of inquiry.
Perhaps we are at the apex of the pendulum swing and it is time to move.
Witnessing natural processes in order to investigate and reveal the shared space between science and spirit is the place where I begin.
• • •
We have, according to Juergen Habermas, entered a post-secular age, in which society has
acknowledged the place of religion alongside secular culture and no longer simply wishes
for religion’s demise. Now each domain must yield in part to the other: religion must allow
that science is the method of record for describing the world and running society, and secu-
lar culture must permit religion its role in the search for meaning. Within this framework of
mutual understanding, an open-ended, open-minded discussion can proceed.
Habermas proposes that all religions should take positions of: tolerance for other religions,
acceptance of the neutrality of the state, and the independence of the sciences. In effect, he
proposes that religions become modern. Equally, the secular state must not treat religious
expression as irrational, lest the polarization and radicalization of both sides increase. For
some, these seem like radical propositions that go against the very nature of the institutions
described. Others, however, already know that religion can be tolerant and rational, making
Habermas’s ideas as obvious as the light streaming through the cracks of a bolted door.48
In the middle of our culture is a place where intelligent, reasonable people live and work.
By and large, they live ethically, do right by their communities, and try to leave the world
a little better than they found it (while at the same time struggling, failing, and making
mistakes large and small. No one said this would be easy.) They may even go to church or
temple or mosque or the woods to ask for strength and renew themselves, time and again.
In my experience, these people also look to art to be one kind of sustenance in their lives,
something that will both challenge and comfort them, that will generate new insights and
resonate deeply. The life of the spirit, and the questions that lie therein, matters to people,
which is reason enough to make thought-provoking art about it.
Religious imagination, identity, and experience bear comparison with racial and sexual
identity as social categories for artistic exploration. The latter have, in recent decades, been
claimed and explored by artists in ways that are socially and intellectually relevant. Inquiry
into the histories, language, and assumptions of religious identity could follow much the
same path, especially since so many artists feel dispossessed by organized religion and could
therefore explore their own sense of religious identity in a nuanced and interesting way.
48 Juergen Habermas et al., An Awareness
ofWhat is Missing (Cambridge, UK, Polity,
2010), 15-23.
To deny the place of religion and spirituality in art is to comply with the power of dogmatic
institutions to dictate the conversation. The fact that fundamentalists don’t want the conversation to occur is all the more reason to pursue it.
• • •
Science and religion have long been jealous of each others’ successes: science laments that
churches can use community and emotion to draw people together, and religion rails against
science’s social dominance and claims to empirical truth. They are also hypercritical of each
others’ failings: religion is dogmatic and responsible for all those wars! Science lacks conscience and created all those weapons! Squabbling siblings, each fails to see the human quest
that bind them in common purpose. They fail to see how much they share, how far we have
come, and how far we have yet to go.
49 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions, (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2012),148-157.
50 Mark C. Taylor, After God, xviii.
It’s a hopeless project, really. Most people don’t want to change their minds, regardless of
any new information. The weight of cultural and individual opinion bears heavily against
movement. However, when enough anomalies occur within established lines of thought, it
can sometimes be the case that a few thinkers move to the edge of what is known, and then
step across the chasm, into a different way of thinking. Thomas Kuhn speaks of this in terms
of conversion; once the chasm has been crossed there is no going back. Nor is it possible
for the people on the first side to converse fully with those who have stepped into the new
paradigm, for they reside in different worlds. And yet change is possible, just barely, because
one person makes the journey, then another and another, until the trickle becomes a tide.
Paradigms can, very occasionally, shift.49
In Mark Taylor’s words, “To affirm possibility while confessing impossibility requires risking
a faith that embraces uncertainty and insecurity as conditions of creative emergence.”50
Change is impossible. Change is inevitable.
• • •
A conversation among scientists and theologians is already taking place to see if common
language can be found: if there is a way to make religion modern and science tolerant. At
CERN in 2012, scholars in both fields gathered to discuss what is known and not known
about the origin of the universe, with some surprising areas of convergence.
The conference report notes that “belief in things you cannot see is deeply entrenched in
physics,” and that mystery, awe, and wonder reside at the heart of both quantum mechanics
and religious knowledge. The report also acknowledges that a culture’s religious context can
and often does frame the questions asked in science, as with Georges Lemaitre, the Belgian
priest and physicist who first proposed the Big Bang Theory (which he called “the hypothesis
of the primeval atom.”)
The report points out the difficulty of terminology and language when speaking with other
disciplines and states the importance of reason and humility as a basis for communication
within and between fields. It also notes as helpful Iain Barbour’s four relational possibilities
for science and religion: conflict, independence, integration, and dialogue. “The final one
has a ‘messniess’ about it, but fits best the aims of this conference,” it concludes.51
It’s an uphill climb to bring together of long-alienated fields. Many more urgent topics clamor for attention. But perhaps there are none more important. Bringing science and religion
into conversation as different lenses on reality may not solve any pressing problems. Or it
may be the only thing that can.
51 Conference Report, “The Big Bang and
the Interfaces of Knowledge: Towards a
Common Language?”, CERN, Switzerland,
(October 15-17, 2012), www.wiltonpark.
co.uk.
Can artists make this into a trialogue?
It depends. Artists are good at translation and metaphor, but can art grant equal footing to
religious and secular points of view in contemporary conversation? Can art consider religious language and content much the way it would political, scientific, or social language?
There is a chasm to bridge. I take my place in the middle, looking this way and that, in order
to become both a translator and participant in the conversation.
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With love and thanks to my family
All text and images © Christina Conklin 2014
ChristinaConklin.com