Gertrude Stein said, “And then there is using everything.” I have long held to this aspirational strategy, taking completion as a basic measure of the world as I would have it, and wanting to depict it at total scale. I long to pull all that is, was, and might one day be into concentric shapes around me.
Recently, in the course of doing research on the poet Charles Olson, about whom I’m supposed to be writing per a fellowship proposal, I decided to write about Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, whose intra-referential proportions are meant to extend to everything—perfect man as basic measure of the universe. I thought I might also write about Vesuvian man—the heat-blasted, ash-buried bodies left at Pompeii—mostly for the wordplay. But I do have a knack for making things mean, and there’s something concentric about a spread-eagled man representing the proportionality of the universe and the bodies curled up under a deadly blanket of ash, although I’m not sure which shape contains the other. Everything might already be here, in some form or another, but you can’t have it all—per the uncertainty principle, say, you can know a moving object’s speed or position but not both at once. I mean to toggle between.
Olson tried to include everything in his poems (with the exception of women). But on this livid March morning—raw cough, wet snow patches on ugly asphalt roofs—I am thinking about excision as another way toward completion. Not Wite-Out, but Vantablack, the blackest black material, which absorbs 99.965% of light. If you shine a flashlight on it, the beam disappears. It betrays no contours or third dimension of whatever it’s applied to. If I wore a dress of it, for instance, my head and hands would appear to jut from a 2-D, dress-shaped void. I would find this garment more useful than an invisibility cloak, I think—to look down at my blacked-out torso and lap, and know a more palpable absence.
Lumped into my preoccupation with scale is equivalence: I just learned that the kilogram is a physical object stored under two bell jars and whose mass has been changing over time. Thus, since the late eighteenth century, a good deal of the human world’s physical reality has rested on a basic unit of measurement that’s unstable. A team of scientists has just created a stable version made of a silicon isotope and the new definition of a kilogram might soon be the number of atoms contained in its reflective, nearly perfect sphere.[1] If the softball-sized object were scaled up to the size of the earth, its greatest deviation from sea level would be five meters, making it the roundest man-made object. Sea level is a measure of roundness.
There’s a sample of Vantablack at the Forbes Pigment Collection in the Harvard Art Museums. (Harvard is where I go to not write about Olson.) The small patch of it on a crinkled aluminum sheet looks like the space where a slice has been taken from the perceptible world. It looks like the sensation of there being nothing to see. Vantablack is made from vertical carbon nanotubes, like a fine velvet pile of filaments, each with the thickness of one atom. It even looks velvety, which is strange, since velvet looks the way it does because of its sheen. In spite of its inclusion in the Forbes collection, Vantablack is not a pigment and isn’t even black—it’s a nearly complete absence of color, which we perceive as black, like a black hole, which no one’s ever seen and can’t be seen, but which isn’t black either. Either is the opposite of seeing, i.e., not seeing, but with eyes.
In thinking about Olson, I realized that one thing that drew me to his work in the first place was my sense that he too was trying to render infinity and abstraction in language, albeit by being exhaustive, while lately I’ve been going at it with a scalpel. Here’s the niggling thing about pigment: it might be a basic unit of color, but color isn’t in it—color doesn’t belong to a thing, it’s an effect of how light is reflected back into our eyes. So, the difference between viridian and Vantablack is complete, but only due to the fact and/or presence of a seeing body. Maybe humans are here to perceive.
Noun or verb, what’s the fullest form of “being”?
Ludwig Wittgenstein: “Grounds for doubt are lacking.” (Emphasis mine—his was on “doubt.”)
In any case, I have no use for the void, only for its depiction.
The sculptor Anish Kapoor, best known for his reflective bean-shaped Cloud Gate, holds exclusive rights to Vantablack in artistic applications. This has inspired much ire in the art world, but I think it’s a blessing. How many times can you apply a material evoking the void to an object and have it mean something? Certainly not many, so it’s better to keep it unattainable, leaving everyone to slaver over all the things they’d love to apply it to. Thinking about it is much more interesting than seeing a field of Vantablack headstones. Or Vantablack stained glass windows. Or Vantablack eyeglasses or swimming pool or gazing ball or phone screen or skylight or rearview mirror or bunch of overripe bananas or whatnot. No matter what you applied it to, a Vantablack coating would suggest death, futility, and infinity, and while I’m interested in the infinite ways of saying those things, how often do I care to see them?
The eyes have no memory.
Charles Olson: “How, by form, to get the content instant?”
I can’t know the void, and so this Vantablack mask / how I want my form torn from me.
At the Forbes there’s a pigment made from ground-up Egyptian mummies. Learning of its origins, one pre-Raphaelite buried his tube of it in the yard.
I only learned recently that the bodies at Pompeii are actually plaster casts of the hollows the decomposed corpses left in the ash that buried them. I thought the bodies had been preserved under there, like famous prehistoric remains in ice, but no. They are their own shapes of their terror-stricken forms. And this is also how I think of Olson—he tried to draw everything there is in around him like mythopoetic ash that revealed his anticipatory death mask. He made a space the negative shape of himself. You can now have diamonds made of your loved ones’ ashes and I think that’s where I’d like to spend eternity—a lapidary singularity.
Vantablack potholes, portholes,
a light bulb, a urinal, stars
on the ceiling of Grand Central,
a shroud, cash, subway rat, ash
diamond or therapy couch,
The White House
In response to Kapoor’s hogging of Vantablack, the artist Stuart Semple created the fluorescent “Stuart Semple Pink,” for which he is now best known, and which is forbidden to Anish Kapoor. To purchase the pigment on Semple’s website, you must first agree to the following statement:
By adding this product to your cart you confirm that you are not
Anish Kapoor, you are in no way affiliated to Anish Kapoor, you are
not purchasing this item on behalf of Anish Kapoor or an associate
of Anish Kapoor. To the best of your knowledge, information and
belief this paint will not make its way into the hands of Anish Kapoor.
#ShareTheBlack
This game of proprietary color harkens back to International Klein Blue, patented in 1960 by Yves Klein, best known for his attempts to render the void in it. Klein’s blue is a run-of-the-mill ultramarine, but the binding medium is a matte synthetic resin with a textured materiality, reportedly resulting in a vertiginous depthlessness when the paint is apprehended in person, something like a cloudless sky on a low-humidity day. It seems that the essence of a color can belong to either the pigment or the medium.
Is Klein’s exclusive blue more form or content of his paintings?
One wants a pure thing mostly just to own it.
Synthetic diamonds are chemically identical to natural ones and both are the opposite of Vantablack. All are made of pure carbon, but a diamond gives the light back.
There are countless books and theories pertaining to color but I’m not interested in pure, as in exhaustive, knowledge (which might be an opposite of “truth”). I was planning to paint pigment as the smallest unit or measure of a painting—the most basic pictorial tool—but that is a conceit. The point and the line and other geometric considerations are just as basic, if not more so, in that they are imaginary, conceptual, or theoretical. Geometry is the shape and essence of the universe, and yet, perhaps, not in it. Vitruvian Man and Vesuvian man have exactly everything and nothing to do with one another: their most basic relation is either man’s recapitulation of the universe or the precepts of Italian.
Color falls into the “explanatory gap” or the category of what are known in philosophy as “qualia”—subjective experiences that can’t be explained by physics and physiology. Seeing the color red, for instance, comes down to the dynamics of light and the mechanics of the eye. But the sensation of seeing red cannot be induced in a computer or Platonic cave dweller. And I think this is where Olson was at odds with himself—the point of poetry, to a large degree, if not entirely, is to write into the gap, and he did that, but I get the sense that he thought he could bridge it by filling it in. His collective works read to me like shoveling dirt into his own grave—not to complete it but to eradicate it.
Using the city of Gloucester metonymically, Olson tried to hold in the whole world with the binding medium of his embodied mind: “…any of us / the center of a circle / our fingers / and our toes describe.” At the same time, he wanted to make his mind manifest. Sometimes he called the manifestation “breath.” Vitruvian Man is named for the Roman architect Vitruvius, whose ideas about the proportionality of the human body it illustrates with an ideal man in an ideal stance to all appearances ideally contained by both a circle and a square. Such seemingly perfect geometry seems to extend concentrically to the universe’s edges. But circles and squares have no inherent relationship, as the ancient and insoluble “squaring the circle” problem shows—you can’t use a ruler and compass to create a square with the same area as a given circle. There’s no equation. As with the fundamentals of the quantum and cosmic, these most basic units of reading the world are incompatible: Da Vinci’s square and circle and the man pushing back at them are not proportionate—he fudged it.
“Phenomena” is a word for everything between us and the world, including the word.
By “word” I mean both language and the word “phenomena.”
When the word for a problem is the word for the problem.
Saying is a way of seeing without eyes.
Since I read it in French my junior year of college, I’ve been carrying around a space containing something I didn’t yet know how to say about Joris-Karl Huysmans’s high-decadent classic À rebours. The protagonist Jean des Esseintes holes up and tries to boil his world down to the purely aesthetic. It’s totally demented and now I get it, even if I can’t condone it, even if I’m trying to do it. In chapter four he has the shell of a living tortoise gilded and set with gemstones in order to offset the colors of his carpet. There’s a long passage explaining his choice of stones for each part of the design on the animal’s shell, the choices determined by the stones’ colors and effects, as well as their obscurity and relative unattainability. The amethyst, while beautiful, is ruled out because the stone “has been debased on the blood-red earlobes and tubulous fingers of butchers’ wives who seek to adorn themselves, for a modest outlay, with genuine, weighty jewels.” After opening a window and receiving a chill, followed by a graphic memory of a tooth extraction, he notices that the tortoise has died, unable to bear its burden of beauty.
If I could hole myself up thus, it would be with a bad photo of a dress that consumed the internet for a few weeks in 2015. Some saw it as white and gold, others as blue and black. It seems the discrepancy has to do with the photo’s lack of visual cues as to time of day and whether the dress is lit by natural or artificial light. Our brains color correct what we see in different lighting conditions in order to read the world as stable.[2] If you see the dress as naturally lit, then it appears to be in shadow and reads as white and gold. If you understand the light as artificial, then the photo seems washed out and the colors read blue and black. What bothers me isn’t the variable appearance of the dress, nor the question of its actual color, but that the color I see either is or isn’t actually in or on my computer screen. I don’t know how color is digitally rendered, but it’s in there somewhere, just as if I were to print the photo a printer would have to choose its pigments. Would it use blue and black or white and gold ink?
What is the difference between the apparent and the seen? (By “apparent” I mean “seeable” not “seeming,” although I’m not sure of that difference either.) One concerns what a thing gives off, and the other how it’s received, neither essential to the thing itself.
If there’s a difference between wanting to know and wanting to own, what is it?
Which is as close as we can get to it.
Des Esseintes “had long been an expert at distinguishing between genuine and deceptive shades of color.”[3] Given his consistent stated object of substituting simulacra for reality (his dining room contains a porthole looking in on fake fish, for instance), of the genuine and deceptive, I’m not sure which he considers the lesser. Further complicating either the matter or my understanding of it, he prefers colors that “increased in intensity by lamplight; little did he care if they appeared insipid or harsh by daylight.” Studies found a correlation between how self-identified morning people and night owls viewed the shifty-colored dress, and it seems des Esseintes would fall into the blue-and-black camp. He trusts both his senses and his sensibilities, even though they are symbiotically suspect. He shuts himself into a self-made cave, free of context, where things only have the value he accords them, but which he believes is innate. Similarly and conversely, Olson tried to engage and appraise the entire inter-referential world completely, but was effete. Both were would-be Vitruvian men, seeing themselves at the center of that which is universal, essential, and scalable to their self-experience.
Appearances are all that is real.
“Creation” is the act of creating as well as what’s been created.
Vantablack compass rose,
tortoise shell,
painted inside
different kinds
of lids,
a periscope
I have a particular terror of being buried alive, particularly at the bottom of the sea. In 2000, after an explosion during a naval training exercise, twenty-three Russian sailors were stranded far beneath the ocean’s surface in the Kursk submarine. In the days that followed there were reports that audio equipment had picked up tapping sounds from the vessel’s interior. They were later discredited, but it’s still not known how long the sailors lived before they likely suffocated. I remember my horror at this news of communication from the soon-to-be tomb of a metal tube. Is it worse to be locked out of or into the world and how can you tell when you’re which? Perhaps it’s a word problem: some science upholds that language developed as a tool of communication, and other science believes it developed to enable thought. This is a complete difference.
(Δ signifies difference.)
Brain stem damage from stroke or injury can result in a condition known as locked-in syndrome, where a person is completely paralyzed except, in some cases, for the eyes. This sounds like pure hell, being buried alive in a shallow grave of one’s own body, but developments in communication with locked-in people have revealed that, by and large, they value their lives and are content, even. After being locked in by a stroke in 1995, the French writer and editor Jean-Dominique Bauby laboriously dictated his memoir, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, by blinking his left eye. A diving bell is a pressurized metal chamber used to lower divers deep beneath the ocean, and Bauby likened his locked-in experience to being, and hearing oneself breathe, in a metal diving helmet at the bottom of the sea.
Ultramarine pigment, whose name means “beyond the sea,” was once precious and used sparingly by medieval and Renaissance painters, usually for holy raiment. The lapis lazuli from which it was painstakingly ground is found only in Afghanistan and was thus costly and hard to come by in Europe. An inexpensive synthetic version was introduced in the nineteenth century, and while it was chemically identical to natural pure ultramarine, it was completely free of the trace minerals that make natural ultramarine slightly variable. How much and when does purity have to do with authenticity? We accord authenticity to what’s “natural” (who wants a synthetic diamond, unless it’s made of beloved ashes?) but everything’s already here in some form or another—all that’s left is combinatorial potential. And color doesn’t even belong to a thing (the Pompeii body casts, though, do have bones in them).
If you stand with feet together and arms stretched up and away from your head, you constitute a triangle.
Is the picture in the painting in the mirror of the dress white and gold or blue and black?
Vantablack is backlight on the gap. (They should license it to poets just to look at.)
The Forbes collection was created to aid in determining artworks’ authenticity: a Dutch Master wouldn’t have used synthetic ultramarine, for instance. But some pigments have remained the same for centuries, and so, in many cases the tip-off to a painting’s provenance and the measure of its genuineness are the age and contemporaneous availability of the binding medium, whether egg, oil, glue, or resin.[4] What the world is made of might already all be here, but not what holds it together and asunder; space is still being made for it. All parallels are false, imaginary, conceptual, or theoretical, but if you consider everything on the largest scale, and infinity’s your binding medium, then pigment’s a place to begin with.
Which is more important to me: irreducibility or utter relativity?
Δ=save your breath
(Utter meaning “speak” and “complete.”)
The earliest extant use of pigments is in prehistoric cave paintings rendered with earth, charcoal, and lime and a binding medium of spit, fat, or blood. Stone Age ochre mines have been linked to pre-homosapiens species of hominids, suggesting that aesthetic and symbolic behavior might date back nearly a million years. A common motif of cave paintings worldwide is the human hand, both positive and negative, i.e., printed or stenciled. Negative hands were created by dabbing ink or blowing it through hollow bones. In the Gargas Cave in the Pyrenees many of the negative hands are missing fingers. Potential reasons include frostbite, ritual mutilation, and disease, but the most widely accepted theory seems to be that the fingers are bent or hands contorted to mean something. Either the body is lost to the world or its meaning is, and content’s an effect of the contemporary light.
If the earth were scaled down to the size of a softball, would we perceive the imperfections of Everest?
(An imperfection in a diamond is known as an “inclusion.”)
I am a slight woman. My compressed remains might fit a missing digit.
Vantablack cave
painting
of a cave,
point-
illist painting
in empty
gold frame
Even if you could have it all—full-scale, complete content—you can’t have it both ways. Speed or position, white and gold or blue and black. Invisibility or Vantablack. Gertrude Stein said, “Act so that there is no use in a centre,” but sue me. I love a center, even a fake or synthetic one, and the unknown degree to which those things are opposites or isotopes or both, and especially when the unknown of the center is the center, which is the case herein, where I am only/just writing about Charles Olson.
Form is what we want the world with.
When I undertook writing about Olson, I proposed to examine the gendered underpinnings of his ideas about proprioception, which he used as a conceptual framework for the wide-angled, intricately counterbalanced writing he espoused. Neither a sense nor a faculty, proprioception is “one’s own -ception,” an innate sense of the body parts’ relative location and motion—the body’s perceptual binding medium. Olson outlined and enacted a tension-based poetics, positioning the body as scale model of the world as he would have it—dynamic and teetering, tipping and correcting like a dancer, pushing out against the circle. Olson scholar Eireene Nealand proposes pointillist painting as both analog and demonstration of proprioceptive gestalt, where tiny dots of pure color are blended by the eye to produce colors and effects that are not actually on the canvas, a phenomenon which is either not at all like or not unlike a badly lit photo of a dress.
You can’t misperceive a color—the color of a thing is how you see it.
Proprioception is the body’s certainty of its own speed and position.
There’s something in a juxtapositional sensibility that’s a wrench in the works of authenticity—a numinousness or quale or form that’s torn from me.
Seurat began painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte in 1884, the same year Huysmans published À rebours. How des Esseintes would have hated La Grande Jatte—its additive, nongenuine, irreducible colors representing the world as unknowable with and thanks to a cognitive smearing.[5] The noumenal and our senses in a feedback loop that to an unknown degree excludes actuality, including the degree of the world’s stability.
To be buried at sea in a hyperbaric chamber of oneself—
Jean-Dominique Bauby: “Does the cosmos contain keys for opening up my diving bell?”
In many ways a mine is the opposite of a cave—and/or it’s a synthetic cave, made by removing a seam that binds the earth together and asunder. It’s an absence of use (I mean both a lack with, and of, utility). In 2010 a rockfall inside Chile’s Copiapó copper mine buried thirty-three men alive. Rescuers weren’t sure any had survived until they heard tapping on the drill that bore down to them. The miners taped notes to the bit. After many months they were rescued one by one in a metal chamber created for this purpose. These men are outliers in the history of mining disasters—others’ bodies remain deep in the earth and will one day be a new seam, their bones turned to gems by heat and compression. Will those stones be natural or synthetic? What has the conscious intent of humans to do with authenticity?
Δ=negative capability
The eyes have no memory.
“Mine” denotes ownership and a hole in the ground where precious metals and minerals are found.
Lack is grounds for doubt.
Oliver Sacks: “[Proprioception is] that vital sixth sense without which a body must remain unreal, unpossessed.”
There are only eyes in all Vantablack heads.
There is a recent tradition of referring to the work you’re supposed to be writing—in and in lieu of the work at hand—when the two things turn out to be the same. Both my contribution to and failure to meet the requirements of the genre are both deliberate and accidental. I am, in fact, trying to use everything, even forever-former absences and imagined presences; my brain forever circling its square, on what by now is a sticky day in July.[6]
ΔT=1 season[7]
There’s a word for the fear of, but not for being, buried alive.
I have a sixth sense of not seeing with my eyes.
Susan Howe: “…indeterminacy involves all of life….”
Olson called for a verse in which the poet “manages to register both the acquisitions of his ear AND the pressures of his breath.” He wanted not to record, but to be made/of the world: interior and prior to, outside and in anticipation of, each and every thing. What would the form of having gotten around and inside of, looking in and out from every angle look like? A perfect sphere, the roundest object, sea level to the core.
An isotope is either a complete or the slightest difference between things.
Are there different kinds of irreducibility?
At the Forbes there’s a ball of yellow pigment made from urine of cows fed mango leaves.
It’s not possible to create a color with optical mixing that can’t be created physically. The pointillists were wrong about this. At the Forbes they also have a tube of the new YinMn Blue—an accidentally discovered synthetic pigment. Is it possible there are colors not yet found or made that we might discover with our combinatory vision?
How, by form, to get the content instant when form is in the world we have to begin with?
(“Have” meaning both “are required” and “possess.”)
Rosmarie Waldrop on “Projective Verse”: “Its mere influence makes it an important document.”
Des Esseintes finally fine-tunes his senses to a degree where he becomes pure sensation. Opening a window (again) for some air, he’s assaulted by a panoply of spring scents his brain can’t contain. His seclusion has become not just a choice, but necessary, since every bit of sensory data induces a plexus of associations and memories whose insistence and relentlessness make him sweat and suffer. After trying to take the edge off his pain with a swig from a bottle of liqueur his mind is led into rampant and involuntary meditations on the aesthetics, history, and connotative data contained by the shape and color of the bottle, its label, the scent of the booze, the monks who produced it, until “he felt as though he was under a bell-jar in which the vacuum of every moment was becoming more powerful.” At last, any little thing to which he’s exposed induces a Borgesian cataract of information and suggestions, visions, phantom scents, and songs.
By “cataract” I mean “waterfall,” not optical impediment.
The eyes have no memory.
(Funes the Memorious dies of lung congestion.)
Vantablack dark
matter binding
medium
prosthetic finger,
black lung
Consider proprioception as certainty principle bringing together body and world—at once intero- and extero-ceiving, neither locking out nor in, but opening the lid. Not bridge, but seam. One use or field/theory of everything.
There are different kinds of tombs and reasons for being in them. One is made of words.
Vantablack dancer
in Vanta-
black
box theater
I mean to use the limits of the brain—by which I mean both its prison and furthest reaches—as a writing constraint. The longest distance between as “being” (shut up).
Take this form to fill in/with.
There’s an optical illusion called the Frasier Spiral—you’ve seen it—in which a black-and-white pattern laid under concentric circles makes them appear to coil in. It can be explained away, but the spiral remains and to that I will hitch my head.
Stein: “Let me recite what history teaches. History teaches.”
History’s a habit of thinking.
Notes
[1]That a basic measure of weight can’t be defined by another measure of weight is a no-brainer but I can’t get my head around its definition as a number of something else.
[2]The vestibulo-ocular reflex is what causes our eyes to move when we turn our heads, stabilizing the world as imprinted on our retinas. My neuroscientist friend is researching the aural equivalent—since our ears are affixed to our heads, why doesn’t the audible world seem to swirl around us when we move? He thinks he knows the answer. All I know is that the most you can see or hear is in a circle.
[3]This was supposed to be the epigraph of my third book, but it appears I misquoted it.
[4]…calling forth the previously called-back-to Klein International Blue, but what binds the qualities of a proprietary color to the authenticity of a painting is beyond me (by which I mean somewhere in an outer circle of everything I can’t access).
[5]Huysmans did hate it, for different stated reasons. In 1887 he wrote in La Revue indépendante, “Strip [Seurat’s] figures of the colored fleas with which they are covered, and underneath there is nothing, no soul, no thought, nothing. Nothingness in a body of which only the contour exists.”
[6]As I write this, there are twelve children trapped in a flooded cave in Thailand.
[7]Markers of time are always contrived in a personal essay, but perhaps mirror the phenomenon (i.e., appearance and/or conceit) of time at large. {Just this morning [which is in May (at the time of the draft in which I’m writing this) (Later I will add the previous footnote.)] my husband played me a recording of a computerized voice saying the word “yanny,” which, it seems, many people, including my husband, hear as “laurel.” It’s the aural equivalent of the dress (the white-and-gold one, not the Vantablack number) and I presume it will take over the internet. (August: It did.)} [In November more than sixty nations will (did) vote to base the kilogram on the Planck constant, which has something to do with quantum energy, rather than the silicone sphere. I should go back and edit out that nearly perfect sphere bit, but it’s already been assimilated.]