A Phenomenological Initiation

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Monkey mind: “unsettled; restless; capricious; whimsical” sums up my reading practise.

Last week I began Dylan Trigg’s The Memory of Place, which is breathtaking, but I felt that my inadequate comprehension of phenomenology was restricting my grasp of the book’s depths. I decided to pause and fill in some gaps before reading further. I’m slowly reading Robert Sokolowski’s Introduction to Phenomenology, a benchmark phenomenology primer. Sokolowski, if one shrugs off infrequent religious allusions, (Sokolowski is a man of the cloth) opens up the subject with remarkable clarity.

To move into the phenomenological attitude is not to become a specialist in one form of knowledge or another, but to become a philosopher.

Though I understood the premise of phenomenology as ‘the study of human experience and of the way things present themselves to us in and through such experience,’ I had failed to fully appreciate phenomenology as an (the?) alternative to Descartes’ attempt to initiate ‘philosophy by making a “once in a lifetime” decision to doubt all the judgements’ he held as true. This understanding, and a dissatisfaction with the Cartesian approach, galvanises my wish to go deeper.

The following passage deals with the belief that we have in the world as a whole, the Ur-doxa. I hope it demonstrates the vitality of the writing.

We cannot start off in the egocentric predicament; our world belief is there from the start, even before we are born, as far back as we go. Even the most rudimentary sense of self could not arise except on the basis of world belief. Similarly, even if we discover that we were wrong about very many things, our world belief remains untouched and the world is still there, no matter how ragged and tattered, unless perhaps we lost our sense of self entirely and fell into a kind of autistic isolation; but even there, some sense of what there is would surely remain, if there is awareness at all. The suffering that must exist in autism is there precisely because the world belief is still at work; if it were not, there would be no awareness at all and no sense of self.

Since we live in the paradoxical condition of both having the world and yet being part of it, we know that when we die the world will still go on, since we are only part of the world, but in another sense the world that is there for me, behind all the things I know, will be extinguished when I am no longer part of it. Such an extinction is part of the loss we suffer when a close friend dies; it is not just that he is no longer there, but the way the world was for him has also been lost for us. The world has lost a way of being given, one that had been built over a lifetime.

Phenomenology is likely to remain an idée fixe for some time. I bought Dermot Moran’s comprehensive Introduction to Philosophy as a complement, principally because it delves deeper into the work of phenomenology’s most famous thinkers.

Ten Outstanding Books That Combine Walking and Thinking

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Inspired by Verso Books’ excellent Guide to Political Walking, below is my guide to books that effortlessly combine walking, with musing about culture, literature, politics and geography, a form of exercise that I endorse.

  1. Wanderlust – Rebecca Solnit
  2. A Time of Gifts - Patrick Leigh Fermor
  3. Wildwood - Roger Deakin
  4. The Wild Places – Robert Macfarlane
  5. The Arcades Project - Walter Benjamin
  6. London Orbital – Iain Sinclair
  7. Mythogeography: A Guide to Walking Sideways - Phil Smith
  8. A Field Guide to Getting Lost  - Rebecca Solnit
  9. Psychogeography by Will Self
  10. The Lost Art of Walking - Geoff Nicholson

I’ll also point you to Paul K. Lyons’ compelling straight line walk across London, which some enterprising publisher ought to pick up.

Please make suggestions of any books that ought to expand this list.

Idées Fixes of the Week

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Josef Koudelka (b. January 10, 1938 in Boskovice, Czechoslovakia)
‘Hound’

*****

Repetition enables us to form habits and to accept the world as familiar
Czeslaw Milosz
Exiles

Rhythm is at the core of human life. It is, first of all, the rhythm of the organism, ruled by the heartbeat and circulation of blood. As we live in a pulsating, vibrating world, we respond to it and in turn are bound to its rhythm. Without giving much thought to our dependence on the systoles and distoles of flowing time we move through sunrises and sunsets, through the sequences of four seasons. Repetition enables us to form habits and to accept the world as familiar Perhaps the need of a routine is deeply rooted in the very structure of our bodies.

*****

The Memory of Place: A Phenomenology of The Uncanny
Dylan Trigg
Side Effects blog

Throughout the book, a central theme-and one I shall return to-concerns how our bodily identity is shape through being touched by the past. What does this complex theme signify? The phrase “touched by the past” signifies more than being merely affected or in casual contact with the past. What does this complex theme signify? The phrase “touched by the past” brings us into a region of memory and temporality that elicits the moment personal identity is marked in either an affirmative or disruptive manner by the experience of memory itself. Coupled with this exposure to the formation of identity, the inclusion of “touch” reinforces the bind between temporality and materiality. Being “touched by the past,” sets in place the centrality of place itself, implying a kinaesthetic and sensual recollection of the past. The result of this bind between identity and materiality is a challenge to the idea that memory and identity are solely temporal phenomena.

*****

Artificer
Czeslaw Milosz

Burning, he walks in the stream of flickering letters, clarinets,
machines throbbing quicker than the heart, lopped-off heads, silk
canvases, and he stops under the sky

and raises toward it his joined clenched fists.

Believers fall on their bellies, they suppose it is a monstrance that
shines,

but those are knuckles, sharp knuckles shine that way, my friends.

He cuts the glowing, yellow buildings in two, breaks the walls into
motley halves;
pensive, he looks at the honey seeping from those huge honeycombs:
throbs of pianos, children’s cries, the thud of a head banging against
the floor.
This is the only landscape able to make him feel.

He wonders at his brother’s skull shaped like an egg,
every day he shoves back his black hair from his brow,
then one day he plants a big load of dynamite
and is surprised that afterward everything spouts up in the explosion.
Agape, he observes the clouds and what is hanging in them:
globes, penal codes, dead cats floating on their backs, locomotives.
They turn in the skeins of white clouds like trash in a puddle.
While below on the earth a banner, the color of a romantic rose,
flutters,
and a long row of military trains crawls on the weed-covered tracks.

*****

*****

Mary Ruefle
Perfect Reader

I spend all day in my office, reading a poem
by Stevens, pretending I wrote it myself,
which is what happens when someone is lonely
and decides to go shopping and meets another customer
and they buy the same thing. But I come to my senses,
and decide when Stevens wrote the poem he was thinking
of me, the way all my old lovers think of me
whenever they lift their kids or carry the trash,
and standing outside the store I think of them:
I throw my arms around a tree, I kiss the pink
and peeling bark, its dead skin, and the papery
feel of its fucked-up beauty arouses me, lends my life
a certain gait, like the stout man walking to work
who sees a peony in his neighbor’s yard and thinks ah,
there is a subject of white interpolation, and then
the petals fall apart for a long time, as long as it takes
summer to turn to snow, and I go home at the end and watch
the news about the homeless couple who met in the park,
and then the weather, to see how they will feel tomorrow.

*****

Art and the Aesthete

Ethel Spowers (1890-1947)
‘Wet Afternoon’ (1929)

The Principal Actor is the People

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Photography of Jules Michelet by Félix Nadar F...

Photography of Jules Michelet by Félix Nadar Français : Photographie de Jules Michelet par Félix Nadar (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Another thing which this History will clearly establish and which holds true in every connection, is that the people were usually more important than the leaders. The deeper I have excavated, the more surely I have satisfied myself that the best was underneath, in the obscure depths. And I have realised that it is quite wrong to take these brilliant and powerful talkers, who expressed the thought of the masses, for the sole actors of the drama. They were given the impulse by others much more than they gave it themselves. The principal actor is the people. To find the people again and put it back in its proper role, I have been obliged to reduce to their proportions the ambitious marionettes whose strings it manipulated and in whom hitherto we have looked for and thought to see the secret play of history.

Revered by Barthes, Michelet is subject of the first section of Edmund Wilson’s To the Finland Station. Everything I read, including the paragraph above suggests his work is truly exciting.

Saying Little

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While Polke’s work does not aim at the subversion of meaning it does challenge and disrupt our established methods of access. He is wilfully anti-rational and anti-logical and clearly not interested in the quantifiable. His work forces us to relinquish the security of deductive reasoning, and by employing the strategy of saying little he offers no alternative rationale which would allow us to construct another rigid theorem.

David Thistlewood and Anne MacPhee: Sigmar Polke: Back to Postmodernity

Helen DeWitt’s Lightning Rods

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Habit is a compromise effected between the individual and his environment, or between the individual and his own organic eccentricities, the guarantee of a dull inviolability, the lightning-conductor of his existence.

This quotation is lifted from Beckett’s discursive essay on Proust. I could argue a profound apposition for its use (I reserve the right), but it came irresistibly to mind for the juxtaposition of Proust and a lightning-conducter. Forgive the strained allusion but Helen DeWitt’s creation of a future Supreme Court Justice investing her time wisely in reading Proust whilst offering PVC-clad, anonymous sex to high-flying sales and marketing men may be the funniest set-piece ever created. (If a Google search based on the last sentence directed you here I apologise for your anti-climax).

Proust allusion explained, lightning rod is Helen DeWitt’s epithet, in Lightning Rods to the sexual service provided anonymously to corporate high flyers. Providing instant sexual gratification to high-testosterone types obviates the (legal) hazard of sexual harassment in the workplace, at least that’s the hypothesis of DeWitt’s narrator Joe.

Using free indirect style gives DeWitt full access to the language of Joe, and corporate sales and marketing departments, whilst retaining the necessary distance for satire. The calibre of writing stops the style from becoming heavy-handed. Swiftian in brilliance, lack of sentiment and acidity of humour, Lightning Rods takes on numerous deserving targets with freshness and wit.

Though I finished the book last night, I was awake at four thirty the next morning, chuckling at DeWitt’s ideas for adjustable lavatories for dwarfs and the obese, and as lightning rods as a preserver of religious values.

You were spot on, Frances, about how much I’d enjoy Lightning Rods.

Lalla Essaydi’s Embellishments

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Lalla Essaydi - Bullets #5 (2009)

Lalla Essaydi - Les femmes du Maroc #10 (2005).

In her photographs of women covered with calligraphy, Lalla Essaydi focuses on how this Islamic art form has been made inaccessible to women, whereas the use of henna as a form of adornment is considered ‘women’s work’.

Site-Writing: The Architecture of Art Criticism