Thomas Lowe Taylor -- Seeing

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Words distance acts to the time of reading, there is the episode. We give our attending, too, to things seen, and where we come to it, finally, there are no objects anywhere, world is made into seeing, and we, too, are given out of our acts to the life to which we are returned; what is personal is not diminished, we are proven by these acts and not made simply but gestured through the body and time to a spaciousness of action and being wherein the mysteries reside; and so as we come through a language to its properties, in themselves, so too do we come to the proper immediacies of the visual in its realm, and where there are no distinctions, finally, we come out. For while the cosmic is immeasurable, it is registered in its oppositions & claims for what is specifically absent through any seeing, and just as events are made-things, so too is our participation among the various stages of perception registered by consciousness and intelligence as things-which-are-not-there, though where an age is made transparent in its styles and heroes, so to does it come to individual talents to remember. But seeing without remembering is a seldom achievement, and momentary, just as thinking without seeing is a terror to the eye, as one is lost to his thoughts in the particulars of his sensations. We make the structures of our saying out of these contradictions of intent and will to claim our lives.
And where the levels of attainment are not proscribed but lived, so too does a more random and social consciousness cling to the things of life, and what we come to as object-consciousness bears the reflection of our longing after life itself and not the objects with which it is strewn. Suddenly, the sky protrudes itself upon us just as the light we have assumed begins to die away; colors are made new in their gradual absences toward dark, and it is the natural and mental landscapes which collide in our dream of being the same. Where we might hear love’s name among us, we are told, too, that to come from our solitude is to find a welcome of similitudes between act & its uttering.
So seeing, then, derives from the will to speech, just as our solitudes themselves are driven from us by their purities. There are no footnotes. Style, then, is some lesser determinant of contact, and we look for a vocabulary, spoken-thing, to attract the phenomena we pursue. Abstraction lessens to medium, for instance, and those combinations where dream and view cohabit are made in the absence of conscious will. We might, for instance, claim tradition to be all that has preceded us in our seeing, but the vision of life precedes its actual existence. The paradoxical finds us willing to speak for our own vernacular and ‘making,’ for instance, charges us toward an unknown, always, exchanging ourselves freely.
But to make a vision together, first we must come to ourselves, and willfully. There is that historicity to be determined, where and how did we come to this seeing, where previous to image there was only some energy inherent in our longing after time, even, in the mundane, ‘the time to do it,’ where the cosmic was, then, registered by its shadow or absence. And it is in having some impossibility of achievement, self, for instance, made real, that we offer some substance to the composition, and where medium is perceived, it is the reversal that is final, first to perceive via medium to the composed energy which is always some image-time out of which an unknown is made transparent. This is the cosmos.
But of course, we settle for less, we are made so by our gathering together, we are made smaller by our time, and the true heroes are imagined to have lived, after all, in some other time: the present is hardly the body’s life, and the past, or what is sometimes, vulgarly, made traditional, ‘was’ inhabited by others. The future is indistinct, hardly our children, for they are ‘ours.’ We encompass, perhaps three or four generations, and time is both year cycle and body state, a perceived interaction of the ceremonies of the eye, for notice: we climb into ourselves and drag everything we can under the cover of some definition: property or love, act or will, art or life, we do define.
So to come to the language of seeing is not to inherit the visual and not to invent an aesthetic, but simply to know where the limits of the perceptual event declare themselves in episode, for that is our ‘time,’ our vernacular of series and sequence, the cosmos is, we hold, unalterable and unutterable: we make its place in us for these ‘others’ and invite them into the commonplace so simply that we accept them, finally, in us. No, seeing is neither visual nor consensual: it is what we do quickest, the eye’s space is total: the eye’s mind is fluid, the brain is the body’s radiator, as Aristotle holds, and to confuse mind with consciousness is like mixing the visual with the visionary. It is all dream.
In some making, then, we would understand each other as speech, and have the body die away to feeling. The fallacy of sensation, that ‘it’ exists is our commonplace, for just as we seek after sensation, or ecstasy, and find it, do we admit to the existence in us of the unitive impulse, that which is satisfied only by some specific centering and survival of love’s naming of us as one: those are the specific revolutions, frame by frame, to which seeing submits itself in us to our attending, for the ecstatic is finally a blindness and the solitary uncommunicable to our dreaming; we must dream together to dream at all, and we must dream in order to think. But the logic of such assertiveness is also new and strange. We can combine ourselves at will and imagine entire transformations and conversations without fantasy. It is in the absence of the fantastic that we begin to dream our life into existence, and the contradiction of experience which makes our fancies outer is only a deprivation of our own, a censorship. And it is there that image gives way to its absence, for when presented with images we tend to read them, that is our cultural language speaking: when in fact there are no images just as there are no things, there are lives and acts and ceremonies, though that is the older view.
It is in time that we are borne out. We have time against our continuing, for we know that we do not edit, that we are whole and continuous in even our grief. It is who we are, timeless. Attention seems to structure the event of seeing at first, for our aesthetic is incomplete, it has not yet learned of the reductions of the field inherent in any focusing or the abstraction inherent in any softening of the thing in a field. The pursuit of detail seems to reduce the world to a screen and that is where photography ceases to be real and enters the decorative. We find that if we pursue the field to its intentions, we discover a center of emptiness in ourselves: detail and its vertigo.
And so we question, or make lists, or consult ‘others,’ authorities even. We embrace each other, embark on projections of the real into the realm of the social or the actual. It is doubt that pushes us forward to some truth, even if it is solitary, and if it really is particular, then we are obliged to it, for it is our own thing that we have come to. Even as we come to love we come to it within ourselves, and even if we do not, we know that is its location in us. What we see in others is the world, and what we find in this world of our own perceiving is not things but acts, and acts seem to generate compositions. “Seem,’ that is, because there is the perceptual ghost of the unseen, the evasive, the unspoken, the particular instance in which hesitation or reflection submits us to a truer scrutiny.
What will it take, we ask, to make it new? For when we come to this seeing of which we dream, it is all too real, the wind blows us before ourselves, and when we examine more closely this thing we are gazing at, entranced with, hypnotized by, we find only some slight connective texture which gives way atom by atom to lesser densities until only some heroic and muscular and absolute exertion of the spirit, that which is always awake and asleep, will push us through to the particular realm of action where our art finally becomes a way. So it is in this following that we come to the first and most radical proposition, films without images, and it is in the solid emptiness which is entailed there that we are forced, and practically, to divorce ourselves from our acts: the eye which sees is not our own. It is an entirely and particularly Islamic notion to prohibit the representation of the human, of our ‘same,’ in the contemplation of our being at one with our seeing. And why, we ask, are we not the progenitors of the code, or are we to admit that the code prohibits us from our acts, and that action itself is an illusive energy of will to which we must submit if we are to gain the information which is yielded to us first in the dream and finally in its absence? How are we to make these judgments unless they are forced upon consciousness from within. The social and the cultural view cohabit in tradition and tradition is memory.
We are that exact.
Seeing without remembering is no simple stylistic doctrine: it involves, first, the proposition that there are no images and second that we come to love not through the human sensation we so pursue but in its absenting us, finally, from this nervous ecstasy we seem to practice to formally and with such seriousness. How are we to proceed without history? How are we to respond without language? The dance submits us not to music but first to our hearing, a body state, and finally to our responding. Make something out of that, we say, a few dollars: we come upon these signs of existing information along the way, some treading-after is made whereby food enlarges us to energy and energy transmutes us into death, and the transformations of our art are made personal.
And the new is so self serving, how can it result to absence, and how can this pursuit of emptiness yield power at all, and if it does, yield, how can it be power that is achieved, it is all so contrary. But there we are, going back on it, and remembering. Where we are ‘in episode’ we are not remembering, we are being, and we are being invaded ourselves, and that is the cultural artifact, where we find medium. Now medium can be camera and it can be self, it depends on who you are and what you are doing, but there is there perceptual progress, nonetheless, from the preliminaries of attraction, hesitation and the attentive alertness of contact through the polarities of subject and discourse to the spasms of completion and the emptiness of the transition to some other attending, and that is the body’s imaging of itself, its imprint on the cosmos, where the yielding first takes place, for there is pleasure in it, and more energy is gained in the momentum of life than is expended, we are never at a loss, even at our dying and expending of ourselves in these fictions and spaces we seem to fill. So a seeing reduces to episode that which is already there and returns us emptied of our vision and yet filled with some information. It is all trance and drum, mask and dance, and where even the social contract insists on us as unwilling correspondents, it is never so, we are all of us engaged in our simplicities.
We are embarrassed by our absolutes, they have been so peculiar and reductive in our cultural memory that we have hidden them in some conceptualizing about role or given them over to others for some safe-keeping. Seeing, however, implies to absolute outside self, and this is no evasion of responsibility from person to person for the whole, it is exactly what we are, implanted, seeded in our earth of being, grounded, stabilized & fermented, processed and yielded to our pressures toward person and song, place and name, it is our peculiar insistence on a vernacular which is not national but which is individual and specific and which removes from Europe and allows us our China and our India, for as we are neither so too are we both, and that is no rhetorical premise but the example of our seeing where we inhabit neither the subjective nor the objective, neither a cosmic nor a dogmatic, but where we have made ourselves the globe’s transition from the possibilities of life to these most recent likelihoods of death. As we find survival to be a personal achievement, we inhabit the world of our own seeing with some gratitude for having come to these episodes where the personal and the impersonal collide with specific regularity toward the vocabulary of which we are sum and part, where event and its registration are not so much phenomenal, for that is a name, but simply who we are in the world’s collapse of systems. Just as there no images or things, so too are there no systems: only individual lives and survivals into language & vision.
So a simplicity of absolutes would yield the personal into some new beginning, and it would be less than chance which comes to inhabit us and something more than change, for we are more than changed in the world’s dying-off, we are simultaneized, synchronized, made one and similar in the simplicities of seeing that there is nothing to do but what we are doing and nowhere to go but where we are. The dreaming to which our others are given so meaningfully is their business, and it is a busy time where some consistency and passion are to be seen among the scatterings of the cultural personality. We would continue without heroes, there have been enough testaments to the specific events of transformation for us to assume that it is real and likely in each of us personally.
And so what we come to in our art-without-footnotes is the phenomenal world where each vocabulary is useful, and as it has become a more recent proposal to ‘let them speak,’ we might see this enterprising freeing of the tongue to be some urgency toward the vocal and local which discovers the particulars of the world’s histories present in each of our personal events, even in our momentary episodes, for it is those pressures to speech which make us whole and these emptyings of fancy which seem to become purifying. What are we to do but survive? And how else to achieve that insistence on being than to persevere not with some raging and authoritarian external but from within the dreaming of our eyes which is not visual and is not personal, it is that paradox which concludes us. And more to be simple than right, more to become particular than proper, more to yield ourselves to our place than impose our will with such hysterical and anxious exertion into the errors of our bodies which are such particular things and which die into pain so easily. It si not in some suffering that we unite ourselves with the scatterings of the historical enterprise, it is not with the vocal other that we find speech and it is not with the eye that we find seeing: what submits to information is that it is already there, and it is in no patience or singularity that it coheres to us, for that is how it comes; no, we are pressed into being, as if it were a destiny, and there is the error of our nationalizing destiny where we lose the personal will to achieve self.
Life’s objects are simple and ceremonial utterances, and they are come to us from the depths of our encompassing our time from within. There is no other and there is no way, but as we meet this other do we make our way into that which is already there in us, where our personal clichés divulge their light, finally and what we read into landscape then is light and dark, the illuminated view which is defined only by its minute and particular shadings, where bodies give out darkness onto the places they inhabit. A man stands on the ground and the sun makes his shadow, there is no other way for him to see that he is there at all, and what he sees is his own knowing that he is there.
First, we inquire after what we know already, and that is the document or the journal, a substantiation of the real. Only then do we inquire after its particular existence, its story. Finally, though, we come to its composition and its changes. And we must follow ourselves all the way through or there has been no jumping but only a death. And if this seems obscure it is only because no one has ever spoken of it to us before; and finally, we ask, what are these pronouns for, these denominatives of energy which delimit the whole into some specialization of purpose. What is seeing but the conjunction of the real and its polarities? Not its opposites, negatives & shadows, but its extremes, for apparently the real which becomes transparently itself, how can it be other than its changes, how can it be collated.
And it is here that we edit ourselves toward the event of this beginning which is not so absurdly cosmic nor narrowly particular, but simply what is there after we have made our gesture in the registrations we have made. And there is an aesthetic and doctrine of this way of emptiness and it is new and unforgiving, it is complete in its utterance and song, it is the metabolic trance-dance in which attention is given its way to make some choosing over what there is to see in the colors and shapes and times of one’s beginnings. It is neither archaic nor simple, it is neither tradition nor modern this seeing of which we would speak, it is dream and in it we are driven not to the teachings of others but to vocabulary. The vocabulary of seeing would submit to the events of one’s choosing and would build from resemblances, redundancies and alterations of form into some music of reverberation, and a centering of attributes descends from the way in which the choices have been made. It is no new language, but the manner, the way the style out of which lives are made into acts and persons. as a style is also a behavior, so too is it a choice, and whatever uncertainties are made to follow from us, so too are we discovered in them; it is the process by which even these words have come to be uttered, and who has made them after all into understanding but the recognition and apprehension of the reader.

Missoula, 1974, by Tom Eagle