Close Your Eyes, Open Your Ears, Mark C. Taylor on Silence

 

Silence is no weakness of language.
 
It is, on the contrary, its strength.
 
It is the weakness of language not to know this.
 
—Edmond Jabès
 
Close your eyes, open your ears. Close your eyes, open your ears and listen. Listen attentively, listen patiently. What do you hear? Now imagine . . . try to imagine the impossibility of imagining Now. Imagine, try to imagine not being—not being here, not being now. Not being here, not being now, not being elsewhere, not being anywhere. Imagine being before being. Imagine being after being. Imagine being Not. Imagine not imagining. Imagine not being. What do you hear? Keep listening, listening attentively, listening patiently. Whom do you hear? Whom do you not hear? What do you hear? What do you not hear? Nothing perhaps? Perhaps nothing? What is the sound of Nothing? Silence, perhaps? Perhaps silence? What does hearing silence sound like? What does hearing silence mean? Does hearing silence mute silence? What does not hearing or not being able to hear silence mean? Keep listening, keep thinking, keep asking until you hear, if not silence itself, echoes of silence by seeing nothing.
 
Pause. Pause to ponder. Pause to ponder a lingering question: What color is silence? Perhaps white? Perhaps black? Perhaps something in between—something approximating infinite shades of gray? Through a strange synesthesia, to see the invisible is to hear silence, and to hear silence is to see the invisible.
 
Silence is stillness—stillness is silent. Not merely the absence of noise, silence is the stillness that sounds and resounds in all sounds and echoes in every word. There is no Word without silence, and no silence without Word. Silence is the ever-receding horizon of words. Words allow silence to speak by unsaying itself. To hear silence is to betray silence—to hear by not hearing, to tell by not telling, to reveal by not revealing. Telling Not. Hearing Not. Revealing Not. The lapse of language is the stillness that stirs in the rustling of words.
 
Silence. The impossibility of silence. Gods, like mortals, sometimes speak, sometimes do not; they sometimes remain silent by speaking, sometimes speak by remaining silent. “Whither is God?” screamed Nietzsche’s madman. “I will tell you. We have killed him, you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this?” We have killed God by having forgotten how to hear silence. If, however, 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.
 
Religion is the apprehension of the Unspeakable, Unnamable, Unknowable, Unfigurable once named “God” or “God beyond God.” “God” is one of the pseudonyms of “the Real”—there are others, many others. Neither here nor there, neither now nor then, the Real is always near, yet forever distant. It (the gender is insistently neutral) approaches by withdrawing, and withdraws by approaching. The pulsating rhythm of the Real marks and remarks the ebb and flow of life and death. Unspeakable, Unnameable as such, the Real remains shrouded in silence, or, perhaps, silence is the Real itself. Silence is the whence and whither of all that is and everything that is not. We come from and return to silence, and in-between, silence is the in-between, endlessly murmuring to still the noise created to avoid it. A plenitude that is a lack, and a void that is a fullness, the ligare of re-ligare binds and rebinds us to the silence that haunts all that once seemed real. To hear silence is to find stillness in the midst of the restlessness that makes creative life possible and the inescapability of death acceptable.
 
 
Without. Before. From. Beyond. Against. Within. Around. Between. Toward. With. In. . . . Silence. Not present without being absent, not absent without being present, and, thus, never a position or pro-position, but always a pre-position. Thirteen plus one stations along an errant path that no longer has to be merely the Via Dolorosa. The silence that punctuates the stages along life’s way allows saying to be said and the Unsayable to be heard. If we listen to silence perhaps gods, and with them mortals, will be reborn. Perhaps.
 
Close Your Eyes, Open Your Ears: Read an Excerpt from “Seeing Silence” by Mark C. Taylor.
 
Universityof Chicago Press, May  26, 2020.

University of Chicago Press

The world of the present  is characterized not so much by the omnipresence of noise as by the impossibility of silence. It’s not that we can’t hear the signal, but that the multitude of signals leave us no time to take stock, to reflect, to experience. The news, for example, used to come daily to your door in a little bundle, or set out on a rack at the café, or in measured doses on TV at certain hours of the day. Now it is an incessant stream: noisy chatter — yes — but as heavy and concerning as the world itself, and which draws us in whenever we, inevitably, reach for our smartphones.
 
Mark C. Taylor’s Seeing Silence is, among many things, a response to this condition, which is connected with, though not the same as, the “postmodern condition.” The postmodern, Taylor suggests, is the “desert of the real,” borrowing the phrase from French philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s writings on simulacra and simulations. And the noise of the present is what must happen when the real comes crashing back in through the facade. Baudrillard, Taylor explains, “knew this virtual reality could not last and tried to warn us about the looming disaster.” And so:
 
     ‘’In an effort to recover the real, he drove into the desert — not the fake desert of the Strip with its “Sands,” “Dunes,” and “Luxor” hotels, which are nothing more than a “Mirage,” but the real desert with real sand, dunes, and rock art much older than the hieroglyphs etched on Egyptian pyramids. Here Baudrillard discovered an ecstasy that was no longer human, an ecstasy that carries you to the elsewhere that is always near.’’
 
This sentence reveals the artfulness of Seeing Silence; a sober writerly craftsmanship that, while a far cry from the sparkly Gallic virtuosity of Baudrillard’s America, is no less extraordinary. Baudrillard, the enfant terrible of postmodernism, is mentioned only a few times in the book, just as the concept of the postmodern itself appears only sporadically. And yet, answering to the “culture war” jeremiads that have become deafening in an age of YouTube philosophes, Taylor responds not with polemics but by pointing elsewhere: toward an ecstasy found in the silence of rocks. Against those who, judging philosophy from the outside, force it to choose again and again between various rocks and hard places — between Cartesian foundationalism and barren empiricism, science and poetry, idealism and realism, impartiality and direct political engagement — Taylor offers a different prospect: philosophy as a way of living, and above all a way of experiencing things that resist experience. Silent things, or, in a word, silence.
 
As hard to pigeonhole as Taylor’s prolific and wide-ranging career, Seeing Silence is not exactly philosophy, or spiritual autobiography, or art theory. It is a textual antechamber leading into — or perhaps a frame surrounding — the sculpture in which the life-work of the philosopher-turned-artist lies exposed. A demanding book, Seeing Silence asks of the reader not only patience and attentiveness, but a certain commitment. It is also surprisingly accessible, written in an elegant but plain English, free of technical jargon and of names and concepts dropped without introduction. This demanding accessibility is achieved above all by a strategy marked out in the title: the seeing before silence must be taken very seriously. As John Cage has shown us, silence cannot be heard, it may even be impossible, since the act of hearing entails the negation, even the betrayal, of silence. Listening to silence just by listening is a futile exercise. Capitalism is prodigious in its capacity to appropriate every form of resistance; a silence that can be “heard” is a silence that can be commodified. But silence can, somehow, be seen. It is as if the disjunction between sound and vision (each a different immediacy) makes possible an encounter between being and nothingness, the finite and the absolute, without forcing us down the path of the Hegelian dialectic — the path of mediation, reconciliation, and universality.

 
In a quest to see silence that is neither Odyssean nor Quixotic but the taciturn homecoming of the crusader in the Ingmar Bergman film The Seventh Seal, Taylor leads us on a pilgrimage of revelatory encounters with the works of more or less contemporary visual artists, from the cross Ad Reinhardt painted for Thomas Merton’s monk cell to Michael Heizer’s massive Double Negative etched into Mormon Mesa, from Rothko’s somber Houston chapel to Ellsworth Kelly’s white chapel to Tadao Ando’s Church of the Light and Church on the Water. He ends with his own sculpture garden in the Berkshires.
 
While his narrative seems at times to fall too easily into the conformable rhythms of travel narration, there is a precise strategy at work. Neither proclaiming the enigmatic “meaning” of the artwork, reducing it to concepts, nor retreating into the merely empirical, Taylor combines the conceptual, perceptual, and affective with the concretely historical and factual, while offering something more than, and irreducible to, these aspects: a sense for the work as a moment, in each case unique, of silence becoming visible, and visible growing silent. This is not a substitute for the actual experience of these sites, but rather the schema of an experience that may or may not ever take place.
 
An important guide in this is Heidegger, whose essay “The Origin of the Work of Art” uses the Greek temple to reveal the play of the alētheia, truth as the play between concealment and unconcealment. Taylor escapes the greatest flaw of Heidegger’s philosophy: the provinciality that rarely allows the German philosopher to see beyond the fantastical cultural dyad Greece-Germany. Heidegger’s reading of the Greek temple is based on abstractions and polarities, with no basis in the rich aesthetic experience of an artifice built into an actual site. By taking the reader to a range of real temples — high-art temples at the edge of the present rather than kitsch resurrections — Seeing Silence avoids this trap. Seeing silence means seeing the play of absence and presence, concealment and unconcealment. This play is never simply monochrome. Along the stations of a pilgrimage that begins black against white, with the crusader playing chess against death — against himself — something unexpected happens: color. In the polychromatic space of the lifelong atheist Ellsworth Kelly’s Austin Chapel, “a riot of light and color,” “the Via Dolorosa becomes the Via Jubilosa”: “Neither beyond nor within, neither above nor below, neither circumscribed nor limited to a place set apart, the sacred is all around us.”

 

 Seeing Silence is divided into 15 chapters, including the introduction numbered zero. Three are almost blank: three dots, an ellipsis. The rest, save the first and the last, are titled, in order, “Without,” “Before,” “From,” “Beyond,” “Against,” “Within,” “Between,” “Toward,” “Around,” “With,” and “In.” The last chapter, titled “In,” consists only in the titles of all the chapters, and the ellipses, repeated once more though slightly rearranged. Just as the “real desert” is not a territory to be occupied and defended but a place into which one flees, existing only in this flight, seeing silence is prepositional, concrete, relative rather than propositional, abstract, absolute. It is not a question of stating “what” silence is, but of putting oneself in a certain gestural relation to it. Each titled chapter exemplifies one of these attitudes, each of which constitutes a mode of access to the inaccessible, exemplified through the lifework of a different artist. And the pauses ask us to take a breath in between.
 
Seeing Silence begins with the haunting discovery of a box of photographs, unlabeled and unnamed, as the author sorts through the attic of his old house after his father’s death. As the book arcs toward its end, one realizes that his meandering path through these new wonders of a new world — a path taking us from the modern, to the post-modern, to the post-post-modern — brings Taylor back to himself, to his sculpture garden: a symbol for his lifework. If, as a child, black-and-white photography had already taught him the most essential lesson of the philosophical tradition running from Kant to Heidegger’s clearing and Derrida’s khora, now, an old man already soberly aware of the flesh’s frailty, he is again learning something new — and immeasurably old: to build a stone wall dry with no mortar to fill the gaps.
 
The art of stonewalling, of splitting and joining and filling out an empty space, serves as a perfect image for the craft of his writing, which, free from posturing or polemics, achieves a kind of levity and joy from so many grave, serious fragments. But the work of life — in its very joy — is also the work of death. The bright-lit chamber of childhood becomes a silent stony crypt. The womb is a tomb, as Taylor reminds us. Not the abdication of the thinking life, this stonewalling is the moment when it fulfills and passes beyond itself. The child’s monochrome world of right and wrong, whose sadomasochistic play carried over into adulthood can only yield a thousand shades of gray, becomes the colors found in what is oldest and heaviest, like the Crowsfoot Schist, split mysteriously between the Berkshires and Venezuela, from which he will take his wall’s keystone:
 
  “The colors are from a palette than seems infinite — black, white, gray, blue, yellow, orange, burnt umber, and pink. As I placed the stone in the middle of the enclosure of the elliptical wall, I knew the work was done. Looking at the Crowsfoot Schist, there can be no doubt that the world is, indeed, a work of art.”
 
 
Stonewalling Philosophy: Envisioning Silence in an Age of Noise. Los Angeles Review of Books, January  31, 2021.
 

 From a certain point of view, the realist mood is quite peculiar. Why would one wish to reproduce what is already immediately present to one’s senses? Is there something the painted mountain bestows that the real mountain withholds? Or is the reproduction a form of genuflection? — does its significance lie there in the act, not in the created thing, which might just as well be destroyed upon completion? On the other hand, realism is supremely natural, springing from perhaps one of our most basic impulses. As Aristotle taught, “Representation comes naturally to human beings from childhood, and so does the universal pleasure in representations” — the most realistic representation being, on the face of it, the best and most pleasurable. Aristotle’s uncontroversial claim, while obviously largely correct, is nevertheless unsettling, and it is no simple task to pursue this source of disquietude to any kind of satisfying resolution.

 It is just such a task that Mark Taylor, professor of religion at Columbia University and author of some two dozen scholarly and not-so-scholarly books, sets himself in Seeing Silence, a glowing melange of philosophy, theology, and art criticism. Taylor, however, poses the question differently. He does not so much throw suspicion on the realist motive as he pulls the rug of the Real from under realism, thus forcing us to ask: “How does one see what cannot be seen, speak what cannot be said, hear what remains silent? How is it possible to figure the void?” For Taylor then, the reality of the realist is secondary to the unconceptualizable, unrepresentable void that underlies and makes it possible: “Far from a mere lack, this void, like the silence between words, is what makes the articulation of all forms and appearances possible.”

 Seeing Silence is ostensibly a lively meditation on silence — our vexed relation to it and our vexed attempts to figure, master, and humble ourselves before it. Yet, as one reads on, faced with the soft torrent of materials and Taylor’s mantra-like interjections — “Does black consume red, or does red overcome black?”, “How do you listen to light listening?”, “Pause. Pause once again to ponder. Ponder a lingering question: What color is silence? Perhaps white? Perhaps black?” — one finds oneself somewhat vertiginously at sea. Taylor’s koanlike “silence” is not merely the familiar quiet, the quiet of negation, when no one is speaking and nothing is making a sound, and so it is not clear how or to what purpose we are to ponder it.

 Our minds are rigorously engaged, yet despite Taylor’s imposing (never forbidding) learnedness, we are obviously not being asked merely to learn or think. Intellection is persistently qualified and set against a more primitive or primal contact with the world: “Education does not begin and end with ideas, but requires something deeper, something more profound that can be taught only through physical labor and bodily discipline.” As though introducing us to a friend about whom we have heard many charming things, Taylor plays the role of spiritual-aesthetic matchmaker, saying just enough to kindle the relation — yet the lover we are provided is, as Taylor quotes from the doomed knight in Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, like “someone who is out there in the darkness but never appears, no matter how loudly you call.”

 Of course, the works — the beads of fascination strung together on the incandescent thread of the author’s own life and peregrinating passion — do appear one after another, conjuring a kind of postmodern performance piece in our minds: John Cage on a stage playing nothing, while a retro slide projector flings before us black-and-white images of abstract expressionist and minimalist masterpieces and a man dressed as Heidegger intones, “If the holding is done by the jug’s void, then the potter who forms the sides and bottom on his wheel does not, strictly speaking, make the jug. He only shapes the clay. No — he shapes the void.” I do not tease lightheartedly, for Taylor’s book is a trenchant and perspicuous effort to probe what matters in unabashedly indeterminate terms, refusing to reduce the aesthetic and spiritual dimensions of human experience to politics, history, morality, or unequivocally statable truths. In this, Taylor rises fully to the occasion of the negative half of the Nietzschean ultimatum he sets himself: to engage with life not as one seeking to correct or render it transparently knowable.

 The positive, however, is more elusive — both for Nietzsche himself and Taylor — and it is here that we run up against the temptation to satirize, for the pursuit to lay bare life’s imperiled seriousness necessarily risks a kind of comic self-seriousness or mawkish affectation. Taylor concludes his introductory Chapter Zero with a question that recurs throughout, providing a single flame to entrance, to meditatively congeal, the otherwise amorphous array of artists and thinkers: “The question that lingers after (the) all has been said is: can the Via Dolorosa also be a Via Jubilosa?” In plain terms, we might put it thus: how to be properly serious — to hold oneself existentially accountable — without becoming pathologically glum? Can one engage in rigorous self-scrutiny without lapsing into self-laceration, viewing oneself always with a certain levity and creative freedom? In religious terms, the question is: how to believe in God, to protect what is sacred, after the death of God and Truth and just about every norm-governed institution of meaning? How then to believe in God without, as it were, believing in God? — what to do when unbelief is as unattainable as belief? Taylor’s response is to turn to the cryptic origin of the work of art, cryptic in the sense also of “crypt,” a concept-image that Taylor borrows from Derrida to conjure that which surpasses the logic of both either/or and neither/nor: “The crypt within the self is the silence tolling in every word and the fertile matrix of the most profound works of art.”

 Taylor’s philosophical venture begins among the ruins of Hegel’s dream of absolute knowledge, a perfectly rational synthesis (overcoming) of subject and object. The Hegelian system signaled the zenith of Western thought’s suppression of silence. For Kant, the refractory “thing-in-itself” forced reason to redound critically upon itself, curtailing its metaphysical presumptions and appreciating the limits not merely of the knowable but of what knowledge is and the satisfaction it can ultimately afford us. Hegel, by contrast, made it his “philosophical mission … to break this silence by allowing the world to speak. Toward this end, he translates Kant’s subjective idealism into absolute idealism in which mind and world are isomorphic … in which everything and everyone become completely comprehensible.”

 Though Taylor fundamentally objects to Hegel’s totalizing rationalism, it nevertheless plays a rather crucial negativerole in his account. For when Taylor asserts that “there is always an overlooked, exceeded, repressed remainder that cannot be articulated and, thus, forever remains silent,” he reinforces the Hegelian picture of the known world even as he qualifies it. Thus, “the unsayable, unnameable, unfigurable” which Taylor treasures is in fact dependent on the articulable rationality it spurns. In other words, what is namable — the world continuously present to our senses — is largely ceded to reason, while the devout artist sets up camp elsewhere, where “the Real [is] a distant Beyond that can be approached, if at all, only negatively.” Taylor sums it up thus: “Phenomenology is the study of the appearance of phenomena, but how does one study, ponder, reflect on what does not appear?” My complaint is that Taylor is a bit hasty in presuming to draw the line between what does and does not appear. Phenomenology, after all, is not the study of appearance in the sense of appearance as opposed to hidden reality; it pursues a level of experience that is deeper than (and prior to) the rational recasting of the experiential relation in terms of, on the one hand, a perceptual mechanism and, on the other, the data with which the objective world furnishes it.

 Let us return now to the realist predicament with which we began. Although Taylor does not grapple directly with questions of genre, his fascination with (the impossibility of) figuring silence persistently nips at the heels of the age-old problematic of representation and its discontents (Taylor confines himself to just the discontents). The artists with which Taylor concerns himself, in a sense, are realists of the direst mold; they chase a pure realism, one that punctures and ultimately wishes to bypass aesthetic artifice in the hope of turning perception back on itself. As the book traces its “infinite conversation” from John Cage’s provocative 4’33”, a work that forces one to attend to the “ambient noise that usually is repressed,” through James Turrell’s sensory deprivation installations in which we discover “how the absenceof sound and light make hearing and seeing possible,” to Michael Heizer’s Double Negative, a 240,000-ton incision made on Mormon Mesa that suggests “a haunting anonymity, a terrifying impersonality, an inhuman intelligence,” one arrives at a somewhat inverted sense of creation. The task of the artist is not so much to add as to strip away, revealing a world that is already a work of art — shattering the petrified opulence that hijacks perception and drives subject and object irreparably apart. Such, I take it, is the danger Taylor sees in the contemporary world’s feverish need for ever more noise, speed, and virtuality.

 Thus, the abandonment of representation, the splintering of literal realism into a shepherdless flock of avant-garde black sheep, need not signify mere fatigue, a generation of Solomonic disciples for whom there is nothing new under the sun to do or see and thus nothing worth representing. Rather, “the Real” has revealed itself as interstitial, just beyond the pale of visible forms and hearable words, predicated on a lacuna. Of Barnett Newman’s Vir Heroicus Sublimis, Taylor writes:

          “When viewed at close range, the painting engulfs you in a red glow where all distinctions and differences dissolve … Subject and object disappear to create a sense of at-onement. In this way, Vir Heroicus Sublimis becomes, impossibly, the experience of what I, or more precisely the I, cannot experience. Rather than the attempted representation of the sublime as in a Turner seascape, for Newman, the ‘experience’ of the sublime occurs in the painting itself. The painting, in other words, is an event, a happening.”

 Although such descriptions give the reader a pleasantly impressionistic sense of the majesty of such works, one begins to wonder how Taylor conceives of the relation between his words and what he describes. If, as he says, “the pure black or white surface cannot be translated without leaving an inexpressible remainder,” then the philosopher or critic is somewhat distastefully positioned against what is meaningful, bringing to light the sacred remainder only by partaking verbally in the limited whole from which it is excluded. And so, it is not quite clear just what Taylor’s many suggestive aporias — absence that is presence, withdrawal that is approach, silence that is seeable, silence deeper than silence, voids that make plenitude possible — ultimately are meant to mean, what role they are to play in our lives, intellectual or otherwise.

 Of Ellsworth Kelly’s chapel “Austin,” Taylor dramatically concludes: “In this space, the Via Dolorosa becomes the Via Jubilosa. Neither beyond nor within, neither above nor below, neither circumscribed nor limited to a place set apart, the sacred is all around us. To follow the stages on life’s way Kelly charts is to come through the dark night of the soul and to discover gaiety, gladness, joy — perhaps even hope.”

 This may be true of the world suspended within Kelly’s chapel of light, but in what manner does this omnipresent sacredness persist elsewhere and otherwise? Taylor’s insistence on the experiential, his vehement sense of art’s capacity not merely to shed light greedily on itself but to generously purify “experience itself,” risks the sacrifice of specific experience — the unassimilable particularity of the work of art — to a disappointingly generic mystical whole. That is to say, there is a danger of absolutizing the work of the artist, until little remains to distinguish art from any other human activity, and so the figure of the supremely meaningful, the sacred, becomes diffuse, lacking the necessary contrast with ordinary, profane life.

 Or perhaps I am the fly who simply will not leave the bottle, one of the disparagers of contentment to whom Taylor puts his question: “Why is despair profound but joy superficial?”

  On Seeing Silence by Mark C. Taylor. By Daniel Schwartz.  On the Seawall, January 5, 2021.