[ Music ]
This is KZSU Stanford.
[ Music ]
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison, and we're coming to you
from the Stanford campus.
[ Music ]
I quote, "To see the invisible is to hear silence,
and to hear silence is to see the invisible."
Keep listening, listening attentively, listening patiently.
What do you hear?
What do you not hear?
Nothing perhaps.
Silence perhaps.
What does hearing silence sound like?
Does hearing silence mute silence?
We have killed God by having forgotten how to hear silence,
but if to hear silence is to silence silence,
then the death of God is unavoidable.
The question that remains is whether there is another silence,
a deeper silence, a silence beyond silence yet to be heard
in the stillness that surpasses understanding.
So say it's the guest who joins me today on entitled opinions.
[ Music ]
We haven't heard that one in a while.
Silence must be heard.
The theme song of this radio program in its earlier years,
and how appropriate that it comes from a band named Enigma.
There is something deeply enigmatic about silence,
and also at times terrifying as in the eternal silence
of these infinite spaces.
Compared to what we know today, Pascal had only an inkling
of just how infinite cosmic spaces are,
and just how absolute their silence is.
Chet Ramo, one of the great science writers of our time, reminds us,
I quote, "There are no voices in the burning bush of the galaxy.
The Milky Way flows across the dark shores of the summer sky
without an audible ripple.
Stars blow themselves to smithereens.
We hear nothing.
Millions of solar systems are sucked into black holes
at the center of galaxies.
They fall like feathers.
The universe fattens and swells in a big bang,
a fireball of creation exploding from a pin prick
of infinite energy.
There is no soundtrack.
Human kind cannot bear very much silence of this sort.
That's probably why we flood our nature and outer space shows
with unrelenting music.
Silence is a kind of death for us,
yet being and with it music as well as human language
originate in the depths of that silence
to which notes and words must constantly return
for their articulation.
As the French composer, Madame Maret put it,
"Tout not dwaffinir or muhr"
every note must end dying.
Only by dying into silence
and only by coming forth from it
do notes sound at all
and likewise with our words
which are born from and die into silence.
If death is the mother of beauty
and if from her alone,
she'll come fulfillment to our dreams,
Wallace Stevens.
Then silence is the mother of meaning
and from her alone,
she'll come the saying power of words
to quote "remo" once again.
The silence of the stars is the silence of creation and recreation.
It is the silence of that which cannot be named.
Maybe it cannot be named, but silence can be heard
and in his new book,
my guest, Mark Taylor suggests that silence can be seen.
Mark Taylor joined me recently for a show on his book,
"Intervalution" and he returns to entitled opinions today
to talk with me about silence
and what he calls "seeing silence".
That's the title of another book of his published in 2020,
"Seeing Silence".
Mark Taylor, welcome back to entitled opinions.
I'm delighted to be here Robert.
So I want to say to start with that we live in a world
that seems to abhor silence.
Our airport stores, restaurants, supermarkets,
hospitals are all drowned out by music.
Our videos, televisions and movies also.
And if God forbid you wander into a pocket of silence somewhere,
then outcome the earbuds to deliver noise into your ear
from the immense standing reserve of music news and podcasts
that we carry around with us in our smartphones.
It almost seems that the odyssey of world spirit culminates not
in absolute knowledge but in the great din of a world
that no longer tolerates silence.
And in your book, Mark, you mentioned, you actually quote,
"Aldis Huxley" on this phenomenon where Huxley writes,
quote him, "The 20th century is the age of noise,
"physical noise, mental noise and noise of desire.
"We hold history's record for all of them
"and no wonder for all the resources of our own
"almost miraculous technology have been thrown into the current
"assault against silence".
That most popular and influential of all recent inventions,
"The radio", if you only knew, is nothing but a conduit
through which pre-fabricated din can flow into our homes
and this din goes far deeper than the ear drums.
It penetrates the mind filling it with a babble of distractions,
news items, mutually irrelevant bits of information,
blasts of coriabantic or sentimental music,
continually repeated doses of drama that bring no catharsis,
but merely create a craving for daily and even hourly emotional
enemas.
The noise of advertisement is carried from the ears,
through the realms of fantasy, knowledge and feeling,
to the ego's central core of wish and desire.
Spoken or printed, broadcast over the ether or on wood pulp,
all advertising copy has about one purpose to prevent the will
from ever achieving silence.
End quote.
So my first question to you, Mark, today is,
"Do you agree with me that we still belong to what Huxley call
"the age of noise and that with the rise of digital technologies
"and social media and other more recent inventions,
"our age is far noisier today than when he wrote those words
"in 1945."
Absolutely.
This becomes much, the noise has become much more intense,
as the technologies have become much more extensive
and intensive.
It's important to remember when Huxley was writing,
it was 1945, he wrote that text,
and it's extraordinarily prescient.
The first half of the 20th century was a period during
which noise increased considerably.
Three of the main tendencies, obviously two world wars,
but also industrialization and modernization,
both carried with a great increase in noise
as it was a move from an agrarian to an industrial society.
And for many, and among them some of the artists,
like "Citalian" Futures, like "Marion Eddie" and the like,
noise became a sign or a signal of modernization and
modernization and modernity.
So there is a veneration of noise.
With the proliferation of some of the technologies developed
during the second world war like radio and television,
as the text suggests, there's a spread of noise and interference
as advertising again as Huxley sites becomes much more pervasive.
And in the years, since he wrote that text,
new technologies have made this kind of use of noise
for advertising much, much more extensive.
So there's been a commercialization of noise
that has led in some instances to a concern about
about silence or the lack of silence.
Now I'm not a big mystic of silence.
I have, I understand to a certain extent my marinette
is logic by which noise is a sign of vitality.
I mean, we know that most of humanity's history
are forebears lived in a kind of silence
which is unimaginable to us.
In moments of the flourishing of civilizations,
like an ancient Rome apparently, you know,
with the cobblestones and so forth and the carts and the horses
and the chariots, apparently there was a kind of clatter
and din that was really quite substantial day and night.
But nevertheless, that's really the exception.
And you speak about a silence that may be beneath the kind
of silence of the ear drums and that you suggest that there is a source
of sorts, if I can use that word,
a silent source from which are human words, language,
and meaningful verbalizations arise.
And that somehow this deeper layer of silence,
which is under threat through the age of noise,
is something that we have to make very deliberate efforts
to reconnect with.
Yes, so I agree there is an element or dimension
that is regarded in various religious and even philosophical
traditions as having a mystical component to that.
And we can come back to that.
Indeed, one of the most memorable and often cited quotations
on silence was from Wittgenstein, where he wrote in Trich Potice,
"Where often cannot speak thereof one must remain silent."
What's often overlooked and rarely cited is a sentence
that follows shortly thereafter, where he writes,
"There is indeed the inexpressible.
It shows itself. It is the mystical."
Now Wittgenstein is an interesting figure in countless ways,
but his concerns were not only with writing,
which were writings which were extraordinary influential,
but also with art, particularly with architecture,
and he withdrew for many years to a hut in Norway,
where he lived in absolute solitude and absolute silence
in search of all this.
So there is this religious or mystical dimension
to silence, to which we refer,
to which we can come back.
But the more you ponder silence, the more complicated
and multifaceted it becomes.
It's not only religious and philosophical issue,
it's a social issue, it's a political issue,
it's a psychological issue.
And when we look at the world of today,
the noise is not simply a function of the technology,
though it is that to a large degree, it's political.
It's political.
And dictators after all dictate.
I mean, the use of media and the constant bombardment
through the media is a way of controlling and repressing,
as well.
But there are also different modalities of society.
Okay, so can I make a point about the political?
Yeah, sure.
Just to intervene for a moment,
because what you say also reminds me of Hannah Arendt
and her theory of propaganda,
where she was speaking about totalitarian regimes,
where the primary objective of all totalitarian regimes,
especially when they take power initially,
is to drown out the silence,
which is a medium in which thinking takes place.
And therefore, the propaganda is constant,
it's 24/7, and it's broadcast everywhere.
And in North Korea today, still, you will hear this going on.
You can't even withdraw physically speaking into your own house
and not hear the constant of the propaganda,
in order to precisely militate against thinking,
because thinking is a political threat.
So yes, but now when you mentioned that we're in a nature,
this noise has a political substrate,
which is true. In our democracies,
are you equating that kind of noise with things like nonsense
or over an overdrive of news
and a cacophony of voices that just...
Yes, that's okay.
...just chaotic.
And that noise in a company can, again,
it is enacted for different reasons,
some commercials are political in the light.
But, again, silence can be used as your suggestion,
as a mode of repression.
It's used in torture.
But silence can also be used as a mode of resistance.
It's more of a faceted.
Silence can be used as a form of punishment
or a form of thinking and contemplation, as you suggest.
There's a difference between the cell of a prisoner
in the cell of a monk.
Silence works in both places.
If you think about the rule,
we talked about you mentioned God
and we can come back to the theological, we like,
but thinking through all the silence and psychotherapy.
It's precisely through not speaking,
allowing another to speak that a certain kind of disclosure
and revelation comes about.
The most important issue, it seems to me,
and this part of what you were talking about
with this extra-dimensional silence.
Silence in language are not opposites.
They're implicated in each other.
They're folded into each other.
And there's a linguistic dimension to that,
but there's also, as you suggested,
and as your opening site quotations suggested,
there's a cosmological and an ontological dimension
of this, if you will.
I mean, we come from and return to silence.
It is that from which we come and toward which we are all moving
and in between, silences in between.
That is to say silences is interstitial.
It's liminal.
It's the articulation that allows differentiation to occur
and therefore that allows language.
So there is no language without silence.
Right.
Well, that's certainly a case that you make strongly
and other people have done so a number of them.
I mean, Heidegger comes to mind.
Also, Max Picard, he has a book called "The World of Silence,"
which insists maybe a little bit too much on that point
that silence is originary.
It's from the place from which things originate.
But let's talk a bit about your title
because we talked about hearing silence
and that could be interpreted as a certain kind of attentiveness
or listening, an active listening.
But the title of your book, published by Chicago,
"University Press" came out last year.
It's called "Seeing Silence"
and a lot of it has to do with visual art.
And in your first or second chapter,
you also recount uncovering with your brother
the death of your parents and then adding a whole crate of old pictures
and black and white of people who neither you nor your brother
had any idea who they were.
And most everyone who would have been alive at the time
is already dead.
And these pictures are looking at you with a kind of eloquent silence
that I think that you even suggested
that the primary motive for your book came from these pictures.
- Right. Yes.
So let me address the photographs first
and then the broader question of visual arts
are obviously related.
My brother and I were cleaning out the house,
the only house my parents ever owned in the house
in which we had grown up after the death of my father.
My mother had died four years earlier.
And we worked away sort of from the summer to the attic
and we were in the attic, which stores many secrets, of course.
And my father was quite an accomplished amateur photographer
and indeed taught me photographs of photography
when I was young and I worked several summers as a photographer.
And we came across in addition to boxes of slides
from family trips and alike.
This collection of older photographs, half of them black and white,
half of them sepia.
And neither my brother nor I knew any of the people.
And yet they were all people for one reason
or another was obvious had been important to my parents.
And by this time, most of their siblings were dead.
And we had no idea who these people were.
We had no one to ask about them.
I mean, one of the things that I write in the book is that nothing
seals death more than questions you can no longer ask.
There is nobody to ask these questions.
And yet they were friends.
They were obviously from many of them from my mother's hometown,
which is called Mighty Town in Pennsylvania.
And they were pictures of some miners
who were pictures of my great-grandparents.
We were able to identify them.
But you just became aware of how recent these deaths were really
and how nothing is known about these.
Alvin, in my class as I'll ask my students,
if they knew the names of their four great-grandparents.
And many of them do not.
And then it will ask them, if they know their names,
do they know what their great-grandparents did
or anything about them?
And they don't.
So two generations, they're silent.
It's not just a matter of forgetting,
but in Marie's splonchos,
wonderful text, full of blivian, it's a matter of oblivion.
And oblivion, as distinguished from forgetting,
as I understand it, is forgetting that you've forgotten.
It's a complete obliteration, which is an absolute silence
that brings, and the photograph in a certain way captures
that unspeakable absence.
And of course, the classic text on that is Roland Barse,
Timothy Cida, which is really a prolonged meditation
on a photograph of his mother that he had found.
But those are multiple photographs in the book.
There is that photograph is missing.
So that the photograph and death,
and of course, as long as you're death masks,
that the photograph is tied to death,
which is also central to this old meditation on the side.
And looking at the photos that are reproduced in the book,
I understood what you meant by seeing silence,
which is an oxymoron, or oxymoron, is synesthesia.
But there's something about, especially,
human figures as opposed to landscapes,
which were accustomed to seeing as silent places.
There's something about, bygone human beings,
in their images, which makes the silence of the photograph resound
with a nigma.
And it's a sensor.
Which is a name of the band, that you--
That's right.
And of course, these photographs are mirrors,
in which we see our own cells, the anticipation of our own cells,
in that way.
Well, it's also a revelation that silence is what death,
the correlation between silence and death is made evident.
It's shown in these photographs,
because that's what death leads us to, as to a kind of silence.
This oblivion, and that sound,
what we hear takes place in time,
in the very finite, mortal time that we live in,
but those photographs and other artwork,
you know, are reminders that there's a penumbra that surrounds the moments of presence that we--
Right.
So to go back to the other aspect of the question you ask,
I mean, why frame is meditation on silence in terms of visual artists?
As you say, it's ophthalmuronic.
And there are multiple reasons for that.
I actually structured the book in terms of stations of the cross.
They're 14, 13, before, one chapter zero.
And look, it looked at 12 or 13 different artists.
It was because the visual work of artists after Oceania,
the painting or a sculpture or whatever.
But it's part of a larger problematic that I've wrestled with over the years.
In that second phrase of a big insider,
he says, there is indeed the inexpressible.
This shows itself.
I mean, how-- so this notion of a certain kind of performative.
I mean, how can you say silence?
How can you make silence?
It's the same as in the text that you read.
He said, you hear nothing.
How do you hear nothing?
How do you see absence?
And there are ways in which in order to do that,
one must make language performative.
I mean, Heidegger to whom you've referred talks about places.
I mean, this whole notion in Heidegger,
of Alita, it's a showing by Heidegger.
I mean, the interrelationship be shut between revealing and concealing
is inseparable between language and that which is inarticulate.
How do you represent what cannot be represented?
This is Beckett's problem.
I mean, one of the greatest meditations on silence I know is the
Unaimable.
You know, how does one name the Unaimable?
Now, part of what is done in literary texts like Beckett,
that is to make language performative of that which language cannot say.
Say or say directly.
But that, after all, is a theological problem.
So would it also apply to visual arts?
We'll talk more about that, but I want to make sure that John Cage gets into the discussion.
Because he was trying to make music.
It's even more paradoxical in his case because music is definitely,
you know, a sonorous medium.
And he was trying to make connect music to, you know, silence and to incorporate silence into music.
Do you see that strong link between Beckett and John Cage in their aesthetic?
Absolutely.
And not only Beckett and John Cage, but you know, Cage was deeply deeply involved with other artists at the time,
in particular, particularly Robert Roushenberg.
And Roushenberg had done a whole series of white monocratic chromatic paintings.
I mean, this issue of monochromatic paedtiness is one that recurs throughout the book.
And we talked about that more and people like Ed Reinhardt, who was a close close friend and associate of Thomas Merton.
Or in Mark Rothko and Rothko's Chapel, and in the use of monochromatic painting.
But at the time that he was working on this issue of silentries eventually became his famous,
what should we call it, performance of 4.33, which was basically a performance of, in which person comes out since the one at the end,
does nothing for four minutes and 33 seconds.
Now, what was Cage trying to do there? Was he trying to make you hear silence?
Or was he trying to get you to realize the impossibility of hearing silence?
Because once there is that complete silence.
And of course, initially when this was done, people didn't know, people were, this is the last thing they expected.
So there's restlessness and you'd be, and then you'd begin to hear ambient noise at this time.
So, but Cage was preoccupied with this.
And he also spent time in Japan and was quite taken with Zen Rock Gardens.
And there's done a whole series of drawings.
Indeed, I use one of those drawings in the cover of, of seeing silence.
So there is an intersection of this visual and, in the verbal or the lack of the verbal that was going on with Cage.
She then did a book entitled Silence.
And one half has gone on being one half has gone on nothing.
I lecture on, on nothing. Which of course is the first chapter of Hegel's logic?
Right. And speaking of nothing, there is also his famous saying that I have nothing to say and I'm saying it.
And that is poetry.
There is a kind of poetry that can actually bring silence out in through the word.
And I think that's right.
And, but, and there's, I mean, there's often an interesting interrelationship between the verbal and the visual in some of these texts.
One of the, one of the writers, I was fortunate enough to know pretty well and I greatly am I was Edmund Jabbaez, who was a poet.
He was from Egypt, but spent most of his life in, in Paris.
And, it was an exile there. And he wrote eloquently on silence. He says it, he has one book of, the book of questions.
And the last volume of that is, is really a meditation on silence. He says in that text, silence is not the weakness of language.
It is on the contrary, it's strength.
It is the weakness of language, not to know this.
And what's interesting about Jabbaez's text is in its printed form, it uses the black and white of the page and the spatial layout as a wave of trying to express speech and silence.
So it's an interplay of white space and black space.
If you take some black ad rhinoid and Mark Rothko, the, the, the, the monochromatic painting that seeks to, allows you to see silence is, is black or complicated shades of the, you know, the key.
If you look at, um, Roush and bird, Agnes Martin, others, you have the blank, the blank, this being white.
But where what's interesting to me really happens isn't in either the black or the white, but their interplay. It's their interconnection because silence is liminal.
It, it takes you to the edge.
It is, it is that within language that allows language to be articulated, but can never be expressed linguistically.
And it's, all this seems to have a Malar Meyian inspiration where Malar Meyov was definitely looking for the, the black and white and where the silence where, where he could bring his poem to the edge of that silence at liminal silence at that.
Yeah, for sure.
And the other figure in this was, it was been important for me. I mean, it's where my work began as Kierkegaard.
And, you know, certainly his most, what is best known and I think his best book is fair and trembling, which is in a factor meditation on silence.
And if you come back to your theological question that that you raise, I mean, and Kierkegaard says quite explicitly, and this is, this is intriguing in terms of the political that you started with silence can either be the mark of the deity can either be
here to Monica. And, you know, for Kierkegaard, God is in his terms, infinitely and qualitatively different radically other.
Now, how can that which is radically other speak? How can you hear that which is radically other? I mean, Freud's version of that is the unconscious.
How can you hear that which language cannot express, contain or represent?
Well, the radical transcendence and on the opposite end, a radical imminence that which is completely within the world. That kind of undifferentiation, but that can't be articulated either.
So, that silence can be either figured and the notion of figuring is interesting here.
That can be figured either as void or as polis, as emptiness or punitude, and is precisely either of those, but it's the inner point of those that is the silence beyond silence or the silence beyond that which is simply the opposite of language.
Well, you know, it's interesting because when you think about the notion of the divine or God and God's that I've mentioned this a few times before in entitled opinions, but there is a profound difference between the Judaic and the Greek notions of the divine where
The Hebrew God is the God of the voice. He's the God who speaks and it takes place therefore in time and the commandments and the role that speaking plays in terms of the first thing there's the prohibition against the representate visual representation of the divine in Judaism.
As opposed to the Greek religions which you have all these theophanes, the gods have a habit of showing themselves some often in human forms and all the artworks that depict the gods and even Plato's metaphysics, which is a metaphysics of vision.
And of Teodia theory which is a word that has to do with seeing something, the forms, the idols, all that heavy primacy on the visual which sees things simultaneously, it doesn't need time for its unfolding.
Whereas in the Hebrew scriptures you have a historical God precisely because of the God who reveals himself through language in time and in history.
So, I'm going to laugh something out.
Yeah, go ahead.
Christian.
Well, the Christians, I think that the Christian historically Christianity takes both traditions.
But they're in their lives of certain kind of difference.
And the other aspect of all of this, because there's an incarnation in the Christian where there's an actual showing in the historical but also in the visual sense if you want to use a visual field.
But there is also within the Christian tradition and not only within the Christian tradition, this very important strand of what's called negative theology.
That the only way in which you can talk about that which is only other is negatively.
And there is in that whole tradition of course a strong mystical event, you know, you look in Nicholas of Clusa or pseudo-dianisus, I mean the cloud of unknowing, I mean the darkness that is the light paradoxically.
I mean, where you say it's completely true, but if you look at Kierkegaard, for example, he is closer to the Judaism that you're correctly describing, then many within the Christian tradition.
The other place in the Jewish tradition that has to say a little bit to think about this.
And I'll start about Buddhism is the whole coupleistic tradition where you have this whole kind of interplay between withdrawal and revealing that the God shows himself, let's use that metaphor, by withdrawing into a point, right, the zitsub, which is very, very close to the kind of thing that hydroces go on with his notion of truth.
Yeah, for sure.
So we could go down this path for the rest of the show, but I think that a lot of our listeners will be particularly interested in your treatment of the modern artists that you are going on about.
There's one I would like to say more about which is James Terrell, if I'm pronouncing it last name correctly. James Terrell who in a strange way kind of is related to the theme we were just discussing because he is an artist of light and what he does with light, which is light is interesting because it's not the image, it's not the representative thing, it's a medium by which things can be revealed.
What role does that mean to rel plays?
It is an absolutely fascinating artist.
One important thing to note in this context about Terrell is that he was raised quicker.
And that quakerism remains very, very important to him.
Now of course, silence within the silence of light are the substances that were of quakerism.
He also, he went to put him on when I got involved with the art and technology movement in Southern California at the time.
And really has made, as you suggest, light his medium.
He's best known for what he calls "skyscapes" in which he basically opens in a building various kinds of buildings.
He creates an opening to the sky and then creates ambient light around that building.
And these structures are extraordinary.
I've been fortunate enough to see several of his life's work is really a volcano called "Ruddan Creator" which is located 40 miles in the desert and the desert's important and all this.
If you go back to some of the mystics as a place of withdrawal of silence of meditation, right?
In the high desert in Arizona in which he is carving out of this volcano what becomes one of these skyscrapes.
So you enter and there's a 935 foot tunnel at a 7 degree angle up to an opening in the volcano that he's crafted this room where you go and sit and look at the sky.
And Don and dusk are the best times and it's extraordinary what happens there.
I guarantee you that in looking at the sky through the skyscrapes you see colors you've never seen.
And the astonishing thing is that you go outside it's not for to do and look at a totally different color.
So basically what is he trying to do?
He's trying to get a one of these trying to allow you to see seeing that is to say the world itself is not colored.
Right?
Colors and interaction kind of kind of event and the range in which the range of colors that we see of course is very very small.
But it's this absence of opening this clearing that allows seeing to occur.
So there are ways in which that open and again opening clearing those are how to gear in categories that opening or clearing is an articulation if you go back to your notion of time.
When I said it in between silences in between it's the spacing and the spacing is a timing.
If there isn't silence there is no articulation of language everything's blurred, blurred together.
The condition of the possibility of articulation and the word is important is this kind of spacing of time it allows that boy that emptiness that silence that pause.
I cannot say that too fast.
And I go that quote from Maramare about every note in music should finish by dying.
Right.
That it's by drawing attention to it's fading away or it's drawing attention to the source out of which the note is able to sound at all and to resound.
And I want to circle back to that point because there was there was an issue in our last conversation that we never got to address adequately as we're talking about technology as a way of.
And that is mortality and and corollively finitude I mean clearly in my own life and in my own thinking the experience of of illness of death.
You know at this very moment we're living through a person very very close to us who's been messing with a brain tumor for 12 years and for the last three weeks for weeks has been completely wrapped in silence but can't die.
You know as someone who like you as in blonde shows phrase died without dying you can front songs and as we age and you know I'm moving toward the end of my career and the end of my life there's a silence there.
And I think when you go back to the questions with which you began the ways in which noise all of these technologies allow for distraction.
I mean that's what we that's what we are afraid of facing of hearing silence.
Well right exactly exactly because that what you're saying is that silence.
The silence that comes from dying doesn't just come at the end of a lifetime is something that you can be in relation with throughout your throughout your life as a mortal and that you learn how to be immortal by relating to that silence and realize that.
That's what that French phrase you've quoted says. Yeah, every note every note should end dying and it's something like Emerson that says that you find the journeys end in every step of the way.
So as long as you remain related to the liminal silence then when the time comes for the actual physical dying you have you have already cultivated a kind of friendship.
I don't know friendship is friendship in the expansive sense of having created a an intimacy with that which is in any case going to be you know the the phones that already go the the the actual source and an origin of what life is and then you can experience a death not as a termination but as a culmination of a life.
It's also the case and there's another way of saying this I mean death is not an event that comes at the end of the life as you suggested it's a moment.
It's part of every moment of life but it's also the case you know that silence is not only fatal it's also generative that is to say that it's what I said we emerge from and return to.
That that silence and part of what it seems to me this notion of detachment which is another way of talking about where we're letting go.
It's in that very experience of of letting go or detachment that you are in a certain sense free.
It mean in my own experience a experience of dying without dying was extraordinary to live in a strange sort of a way because it allows you to let go of the noise of the distraction, the business.
And and do you believe that all these artists that you deal with an artist in general have to have that space of retreat and detachment and in order to in order to produce the kind of eloquent silence in the visual realm.
I do and I'm you know that may I split my time between New York City and the burxers and I can't write in the city.
I can read in the city but I can't write in the city because I think that the the cultivation of a certain kind of reflection that we what you started by talking about is absolutely correct that thinking is threatening.
And the kind of self reflection that that requires silence that requires meditation.
It is it is from that kind of reflection that I think creativity occurs not all writing is really writing.
I mean writing in the broad sense that I use involves this kind of creativity because what you're trying to make language slip and slide are you're trying to use.
I mean figures to figure what can't be figured to allow a certain kind of experience to occur.
I mean I try to do that in some of the art that I create here in the burxers.
How can you write differently again in a broad sense of that term to enact that which cannot be represented and create the occasion for the possibility of the viewer or reader to hear what can't be said.
Right.
And so you've written that this could be considered like a reversal of Hegel that rather than translating voice telling into be griff or representation to concept it's translating be griffed into voice telling.
And what cannot be represented must be performed and this is with constines.
The difference between showing and telling and how much more compelling is the act of showing than telling and how much we live in also an era if we're still in that age of noise that Huxley talked about.
One of its manifestations is certainly the way in which all we try to drown out any kind of showing through excessive telling.
That's right. We're always being told what to think while he's being told what happened we're drowning in explanations as opposed to revelations.
Exactly. And you know as I said in our previous show my soul is starting between Hegel and Kierkerel.
I finally think that I finally believe that there are things that we apprehend that we cannot comprehend.
And apprehension is an interesting word.
It's multiple nuances. So part of the question becomes how do we communicate the apprehensive?
How do we communicate what is conceptually elusive?
Now you have to use language against language to let to show what language cannot say.
That's what Beckett's trying to do.
It is it is place. That's what Giggard Bergmann is trying to do. The great Swedish filmmaker who did this wonderful trilogy.
One of the films is silence. It's not that tactic. It draws you in. And the artworks, whether it's literature or visual, I want an artwork to take me elsewhere.
One of the things that I wrote in another book was once you've been elsewhere you can never come back the same because elsewhere always comes back with you.
I mean there's a haunting. There are those figures in that in those photographs. They're silent.
But somehow they still speak through you because you're haunted by those others. And in that haunting at one of the same time, it enables you to be who you are to say what you say and yet realize that you're words in every room.
There's always something other, something different, something that cannot be articulated speaking through you.
It's from face and teaching and how do you communicate, how do you communicate the in communicable.
And all this, you know, to conclude, reminds me of a line of niches if I'm going to quote it correctly, where he says it is my favorite malice and art that my silence has learned not to be tray itself through reticence.
And I love the word be tray because it means multiple things. I think to go against but also to show like when you show it be tray is secret and.
And it's perfect that you conclude with nature because what more poignant example of what we've been talking about the nature who at age 44 slips into madness and falls silent.
And the greatest philosopher, one of the greatest if not the greatest philosopher in late 19th 20th century.
Spence is last years wrapped in silent.
Right. Well, Mark Taylor, we've been speaking with Professor Mark Taylor from Columbia University here on entitled opinions. This is our second show, our first one aired a little while ago on inter pollution and ask our listeners to check that show out as well if you haven't already.
And it's an ongoing conversation mark on trutya and Phinee as you said before and we're going to thank you for joining us. We're going to leave you with a song by Madeline Bhutan called a sword in hand, which is about an angel on the three steps of purgatory and dent is purgatory who's going to induct him into, you know, along the way to the to the ultimate experience of the the silence of lime.
So thanks again for coming on. These conversations have been the light extraordinary level you you maintain in this program. Thank you. Well, to be continued.
Thank you. Bye bye.
[Music]
[BLANK_AUDIO]