How to Do Nothing
Page 13
But I had never experienced a live performance of a Cage piece, much less in a traditional symphony setting with the usual crowd. Instead of the customary rows of musicians dressed in all black, the people onstage were dressed in plain clothes, moving about various props and devices like a typewriter, a set of cards, or a blender. Three vocalists made strange and haunting sounds while someone shuffled cards into a microphone and another walked into the audience to give someone a present—all, in some way, part of the score. As I imagine is the case at many Cage performances, the audience seemed to be shifting in their seats, trying very hard not to laugh, which would be inappropriate in a symphony hall. But the breaking point came when Michael Tilson Thomas, the conductor of the San Francisco Symphony, used the blender to make a smoothie. He took a sip and appeared satisfied. After that, all bets were off, with laughter tumbling down from the seats toward the stage and integrating itself into the piece.
More than just the conventions of the symphony hall were broken open that night. I walked out of the symphony hall down Grove Street to catch the MUNI, and heard every sound with a new clarity—the cars, the footsteps, the wind, the electric buses. Actually, it wasn’t so much that I heard these clearly as that I heard them at all. How was it, I wondered, that I could have lived in a city for four years already—even having walked down this street after a symphony performance so many times—and never have actually heard anything?
For months after this, I was a different person. At times, it was enough to make me laugh out loud. I started to act a lot like the protagonist of a movie I had seen on accident a year earlier. The film is called The Exchange, by Eran Kolirin, and to be honest, it doesn’t have much of a plot. A PhD student forgets something at home, goes back to get it, and finds that his apartment looks unfamiliar at that particular time of the day. (I’m convinced that many of us have had this experience as a child, coming home sick from school in the middle of the day and finding that our home feels strange.) Critically unmoored from the familiar, the man spends the rest of the film doing things like pushing a paperweight matter-of-factly off a coffee table, throwing a stapler out a window, standing in bushes, or lying on the floor of his apartment’s basement level. In place of a man going about his business, he becomes like an alien who encounters people, objects, and the laws of physics for the first time.
I have always prized this film for its deceptive quietness; it shows how even the smallest disjuncture can suddenly throw everything into relief. Like the visitors to the Hockney piece who reported “seeing things” afterward—or like myself walking down Grove Street transfixed by sound—the film’s turning point is entirely perceptual. It has to do with how endlessly strange reality is when we look at it rather than through it.
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ANYONE WHO HAS experienced this unmooring knows that it can be equally exhilarating and disorienting. There is more than a touch of delirium in William Blake’s description when he invites us “[to] see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour.” This way of looking, in which we are Alice and everything is a potential rabbit hole, is potentially immobilizing; at the very least, it brings us out of step with the everyday. Indeed, the only real drama of The Exchange happens between the protagonist and everyone else, especially his girlfriend, to whom his actions appear insane.
So why go down the rabbit hole? First and most basically, it is enjoyable. Curiosity, something we know most of all from childhood, is a forward-driving force that derives from the differential between what is known and not known. Even morbid curiosity assumes there is something you haven’t seen that you’d like to see, creating a kind of pleasant sensation of unfinished-ness and of something just around the corner. Although it’s never seemed like a choice to me, I live for this feeling. Curiosity is what gets me so involved in something that I forget myself.
This leads into a second reason to leave behind the coordinates of what we habitually notice: doing so allows one to transcend the self. Practices of attention and curiosity are inherently open-ended, oriented toward something outside of ourselves. Through attention and curiosity, we can suspend our tendency toward instrumental understanding—seeing things or people one-dimensionally as the products of their functions—and instead sit with the unfathomable fact of their existence, which opens up toward us but can never be fully grasped or known.
In his 1923 book I and Thou, the philosopher Martin Buber draws a distinction between what he calls I-It and I-Thou ways of seeing. In I-It, the other (a thing or a person) is an “it” that exists only as an instrument or means to an end, something to be appropriated by the “I.” A person who only knows I-It will never encounter anything outside himself because he does not truly “encounter.” Buber writes that such a person “only knows the feverish world out there and his feverish desire to use it…When he says You, he means: You, my ability to use!”9
In contrast to I-it, I-Thou recognizes the irreducibility and absolute equality of the other. In this configuration, I meet you “thou” in your fullness by giving you my total attention; because I neither project nor “interpret” you, the world contracts into a moment of a magical exclusivity between you and me. In I-Thou, the “thou” does not need to be a person; famously, Buber gives the example of different ways of looking at a tree, all but one of which he classifies as I-It. He can “accept it as a picture,” describing its visual elements; he can consider an instance of a species, an expression of natural law, or a pure relation of numbers. “Throughout all of this the tree remains my object and has its place and its time span, its kind and condition,” he says. But then there is the I-Thou option: “it can also happen, if will and grace are joined, that as I contemplate the tree I am drawn into a relation, and the tree ceases to be an It. The power of exclusiveness has seized me.”10
Here, we encounter the tree in all its otherness, a recognition that draws us out of ourselves and out of a worldview in which everything exists for us. The tree exists out there: “The tree is no impression, no play of my imagination, no aspect of a mood; it confronts me bodily and has to deal with me as I deal with it—only differently. One should not try to dilute the meaning of the relation: relation is reciprocity.” (In his translation from the German, Walter Kaufmann notes that “it confronts me bodily” uses a highly unusual verb—leibt, where leib means body—so that a more precise translation would be “it bodies across from me.”) Does this then mean that the tree has consciousness in the way that we would understand it? For Buber, the question is misguided because it relapses into I-It thinking: “must you again divide the indivisible? What I encounter is neither the soul of a tree nor a dryad, but the tree itself.”11
One of my favorite examples of an I-Thou encounter is Emily Dickinson’s poem “A Bird came down the walk.” The poet and Dickinson scholar John Shoptaw, who also happened to be my undergraduate thesis adviser at Berkeley, showed it to me recently, and it became one of my favorites of her poems:
A Bird came down the Walk -
He did not know I saw -
He bit an Angleworm in halves
And ate the fellow, raw,
And then he drank a Dew
From a Convenient Grass -
And then hopped sidewise to the Wall
To let a Beetle pass -
He glanced with rapid eyes
That hurried all around -
They looked like frightened Beads, I thought -
He stirred his Velvet Head
Like One in danger, Cautious,
I offered him a Crumb,
And he unrolled his feathers
And rowed him softer home -
Than Oars divide the Ocean,
Too silver for a seam -
Or Butterflies, off Banks of Noon
Leap, plashless as they swim.12
Knowing my habit of feeding birds, Shoptaw pointed out that the line “Like one in danger, Cautious” is placed so
that it could refer either to the bird or the speaker who offers it a crumb. To explain this, he asked me to think about how I must look when I’m approaching a skittish Crow or Crowson on my balcony with a peanut. It wasn’t something I had ever thought about, but when I did, I realized that both the crow and I acted “like one in danger, Cautious,” each almost frozen, completely focused on the other, affected by and adjusting to the other’s tiniest movements.
What’s more, even after years of observing the same crows, their behavior—like the seemingly haphazard procedure of Dickinson’s bird—is ultimately inscrutable to me (as much as mine must be to them). Just as Dickinson’s bird “row[s] him softer” to some unknown “home,” nothing indicates that something exists beyond you as much as its departure into the sky, as sudden and unceremonious as its arrival. All of this makes for a being that cannot be “understood” or “interpreted” (I-It), only “perceived” (I-Thou). And that which cannot be understood—a once-and-for-all matter—demands constant and unmixed attention, an ongoing state of encounter.
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IN THE MID-TWENTIETH century, responding to a long history of representational art, many abstract and minimalist painters sought to induce an “I-Thou” kind of encounter between viewer and painting. One example is Barnett Newman’s 1953 painting Onement VI, an eight-and-a-half-by-ten-foot field of deep blue divided by a rough white line. When the critic and philosopher Arthur C. Danto wrote about the piece, he called it Newman’s first “real” painting. The earlier works, though they were technically paintings, were for Danto “merely pictures.” He gives the example of Renaissance scenes where the picture functions as a window that the viewer looks through and sees events happening in some other space we don’t occupy (Hockney wouldn’t have liked this kind of painting either). But an actual painting, as opposed to a picture, confronts us in physical space:
[Newman’s new] paintings are objects in their own right. A picture represented something other than itself; a painting represents itself. A picture mediates between a viewer and an object in pictorial space; a painting is an object to which the viewer relates without mediation…It is on the surface and in the same space as we are. Painting and viewer coexist in the same reality.13
Incidentally, this points to another way in which attention brings us outside the self: it’s not just the other that becomes real to us, but our attention itself that becomes palpable. Thrown back on ourselves by a “wall” and not a window, we can also begin to see ourselves seeing.
Recently this sort of encounter actually stopped me in my tracks. Killing time before a meeting with someone at SFMOMA, I was wandering through the different floors and ended up in the exhibition Approaching American Abstraction. At some point I turned a corner and saw Ellsworth Kelly’s Blue Green Black Red, which is exactly what it sounds like: four separate panels of one color each, about the size of myself. At first, I wrote this off as quickly as anyone might, not thinking it was “about” anything other than abstraction (whatever that might mean). But when I got closer to the first panel, I was completely caught off guard by a physical sensation. Although the covering was consistent and flat, the color blue was not stable: it vibrated and seemed to push and pull my vision in different directions. For lack of a better description, the painting seemed active.
I can’t stress enough that this was a bodily feeling—like Buber’s tree, the painting “bodied” across from me. I realized I needed to look at every single panel, spending the same amount of time on each one, since each color vibrated differently, or rather, my perception of the color did. Strange as it sounds to call a flat, monochromatic painting a “time-based medium,” there was actually something to find out in each one—or rather, between me and each one—and the longer time I spent, the more I found out. Somewhat sheepishly, I thought about how someone across the room, too far away to understand, would see me: a person matter-of-factly staring at one after another of panels with “nothing” on them.
These paintings taught me about attention and duration, and that what I’ll see depends on how I look, and for how long. It’s a lot like breathing. Some kind of attention will always be present, but when we take hold of it, we have the ability to consciously direct, expand, and contract it. I’m often surprised at how shallow both my attention and my breathing are by default. As much as breathing deeply and well requires training and reminders, all of the artworks I’ve described so far could be thought of as training apparatuses for attention. By inviting us to perceive at different scales and tempos than we’re used to, they teach us not only how to sustain attention but how to move it back and forth between different registers. As always, this is enjoyable in and of itself. But if we allow that what we see forms the basis of how we can act, then the importance of directing our attention becomes all too clear.
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IT’S PERHAPS HELPFUL here to look at some less artistic and more functional examples of training attention. In 2014, Dr. Aaron Seitz, a neuroscientist at University of California, Riverside, developed a visual training app called ULTIMEYES and tested it on university baseball players. The app, which specifically addressed dynamic visual acuity—the ability to make out the fine details of moving objects—seemed to have a positive overall effect on players’ performance. In a Q&A on Reddit, Seitz noted that poor vision comes from a mix of two things: actual ocular impairments and brain-based impairments. Clearly, the former would require medical intervention; it was the latter that the program aimed to improve.14
Incidentally, the app might be good for training other kinds of attention. One review on the App Store, titled “The Dumbest,” reports that the user was only able to use it for ten minutes before getting bored and deleting it.15 I will say that the experience is rather spare. When I decided to give it a try, I was faced over and over again with a gray screen onto which a sneaky group of Gabors (a kind of soft-edged striped spot) would appear, waiting to be tapped. If I didn’t see one, which was often, it would start to wiggle insistently until I did.
Every three sessions, I had my visual acuity evaluated with a different kind of exercise. Sure enough, my score improved each time I was evaluated. But more than improvement, using the app became a rigorous reminder for me of the many ways it’s possible not to see something. I became fixated on the moments where I would know (intellectually) that there was something on the screen and that I couldn’t for the life of me see it, either because it was too faint or I was looking in the wrong place.
In some ways, this was a firsthand experience of some research I had read about on “inattentional blindness.” Berkeley researchers Arien Mack and Irvin Rock coined the term in the 1990s while studying the drastic difference in our ability to perceive something if it lies outside our field of visual attention. In a simple experiment, they asked subjects to look at a cross on the screen and try to determine whether any of the lines were longer than the other. But this was a made-up task to distract subjects from the actual experiment. While the subjects were staring at the cross, a small stimulus would flash somewhere on the screen. When the stimulus fell inside the circular area circumscribing the cross lines, the subjects were much more likely to see it. “In short, when the inattention stimulus falls outside the area to which attention is paid, it is much less likely to capture attention and be seen,” the researchers write.16
That’s intuitive enough, but it gets more complicated. If the briefly flashing stimulus was outside the area of visual attention, but was something distinct like a smiley face or the person’s name, the subject would notice it after all. This effect depended on how recognizable it was; for example, it didn’t work with a sad or scrambled face, or with a word similar to the person’s name. (If they flashed in the very same spot, I’d see “Jenny,” but “Janny” would go unnoticed.) From this, Mack and Rock concluded that all of the information—noticed and not noticed—must actually be getting processed, and that it was only some at a late stage of processing tha
t the brain determined whether the stimulus would be perceived or not. “If this were not the case,” they write, “it becomes difficult to explain why ‘Jack’ is seen but ‘Jeck’ goes undetected, or why a happy face is seen and a sad or scrambled one is detected so much less frequently.” The researchers suggest that attention is “a key that unlocks the gate dividing unconscious perception…from conscious perception. Without this attentional key, there simply is no awareness of the stimulus.”17
As an artist interested in using art to influence and widen attention, I couldn’t help extrapolating the implications from visual attention to attention at large. It’s a commonplace that we only see what we’re looking for, but this idea of information that makes it into our brains without being admitted into consciousness seemed to explain the eeriness of suddenly seeing something that has been there all along. For instance, the many times I had walked down Grove Street after a symphony performance, noises had presumably been making it into my ears and were being processed; after all, I wasn’t physiologically hard of hearing. It was the performance of the John Cage piece, or rather its attunement of my attention, that provided the “key” for those sounds to pass through the “gate” toward conscious perception. When I moved the focus of my attention, those signals that had been traveling into my head were finally granted admission into conscious perception.