Here I talk about a figure that runs through Deleuze: affect, a notion
that changed how I think, assess, and live. This is my definition of it,
not Deleuze's per se.
* Affect is the invisible state of things. Things have spatial extension
but they also have affective extension which is no less real for being
invisible.
* We sense affect with senses other than the five we know so well. Just
as light makes an impression on the eye, affect makes an impression on
our affective faculties.
* Affect is objective, not subjective. It is "out there," not inside us.
Like all things, affect is perspectival: we experience affect from our
perspectives (a glass on pavement shatters; on a pillow, no; so it is
with affect, objective but relational in terms of effect).
* Affect is not emotion; it is a-human and interspecial. Affect exceeds
the limits of things; it runs through the ether.
* The world is filled to the brim with stuff including affect. The world
is a plenum. We live in a kind of affective plasma that surrounds
everything including planets, suns, thoughts, events, staplers, cars.
* This affective plasma functions as a communication layer. That's how
we communicate with animals, trees, as well as with each other. We are
all in this affective gunk so of course we feel what others feel — not
one-to-one but we feel with them because we are in the same gunk.
* Once we reckon affect, our knowledge, epistemology, and way of going change.
While I
hesitate to begin a post with Wittgenstein, he opens Philosophical
Investigations with a fantastic critique of St. Augustine's account of
learning how to speak. The Saint suggests that his elders would point to
something — say, a pencil — and say, "Pencil." Little Augustine would
repeat it and, voilà, the future Saint learned to speak.
Wittgenstein keenly notes the failure of such a method of learning language.
When the elder points to the pencil and utters those sounds, how would little
Augustine know said sounds referred to the pencil and not, for instance,
yellow, thin stick (or any stick), or writing utensil in general? Wittgenstein
suggests that this method of pointing and uttering might work for learning a second
language but not for learning language per se.
It doesn't take much to realize that language is not just a set of words
designating things in the world. Some words — such as one of my favorites, this
— don't actually signify anything. They are functions within the act of
communicating. Push at this and you'll quickly see that language is much odder
than vocabulary and grammar (which is itself different than the way it's
taught; grammar is not just subject-verb agreement — I am, you are,
she is — or inflection: Throw the ball to me(I becomes me
when it's an object; linguists call this inflection. But more on this later).
Linguists study something called language. They break it down in different
ways. The structural linguists, for instance, considered two aspects of
language: langue, which is a system of references; and parole,
which is the act of communicating — words spoken or written. For the most part,
these structural linguists found parole so complex and unsystematic that
they preferred to focus on langue, this thing they could dissect like a
dead frog.
But where, exactly, does this langue — this system of communication —
exist? Isn't language always and necessarily used? Give me an instance of
language that is not parole, which is to say, a moment of language that
is not somebody saying or writing something. There's no such thing. We make dictionaries seem
like they weren't written but we all know some writer was not paid enough to
write those entries. Language is always and already being used. The dead frog
on the table — langue, a system of language — is dissecting itself with
itself.
This insight is the beginning of what we call poststructuralism and is how the
French philosopher, Jacques Derrida, made a splash with
his form of deconstruction: every structure — in
this case, langue — has a moment situated outside itself (parole)
that undoes the structure. See his great essay, "Structure, Sign, and
Play," not to mention his epic, if pedantic, Of Grammatology.
For Derrida, communication always involves this double gesture in which meaning
is proffered and infinitely deferred. He refers to this function as différance
(the "mis-spelling" is intentional, emphasizing the gap between
written and spoken language, between langue and parole, a gap that at once
makes meaning possible and impossible). This is to say that Derrida begins with
the assumption that language tries to mean something, to signify something, but
fails as the gap between structure (langue) and performance (parole) can never
be closed. But what if we begin from another place all together, a place in which there
will never have been this dubious distinction between structure and action,
between the static (langue) and the in motion (parole)? What if we begin by
viewing all of life as in flux, even structures?
When my son was quite young, he started doing this funny thing. He'd speak
about something as though it were a science documentary. Mind you, he wasn't
offering actual knowledge. He'd use words that he didn't understand and offer
facts that might or might not be related or true. But his tone was spot on. He
knew the gestures of knowing.
And such is language: a series of gestures that distribute the world — facts,
bodies, events, moods. Wittgenstein referred to these as language games. Learning a first
language, he claimed, is not learning referents and grammar (as St. Augustine
suggested) but learning which words delivered just so create a reaction. A baby
crying, for instance, inaugurates a set of reactions — a mobilization of
interactions. Every culture has different modes of games. Every household,
indeed every person, is a player in this game and manipulates the players and
action as they will. As we all know, the rules of the language game of
parenting have changed dramatically since we were kids. No cry when I was a kid
demanded the set of responses which, today, are de rigueur — unless,
like me, you're interested in playing a different game. When two co-parents
want to play two different games, we get discontent and divorce.
A word, I am suggesting, can't be reduced to its referential function. That is
a misleading architecture of sense. A word is a gesture, an action, that aligns
and distributes bodies in such and such a way. This gesture is at once meaning
and movement, a meaning in motion, a way of taking on inherited terms and
moving them about. In this model, rather than spoken language being a present
tense example of an established structure of language, it is an event
that distributes time, distributes structure, recreating it in the very act of
using it. A word is not a tool taken from the tool set of language. A word, any
utterance in fact, is a repetition of all meaning and structures. Every
time I use a word, I am using it again, using it anew, forging nuance and
inflection, changing the very mode of that word — what it can be, what it can
mean. In the words of R.P. Blackmur, "gesture is that meaningfulness which is
moving".
To quote 27
year old me invoking Merleau-Ponty: This gesture-event is at once meaning and
movement; rather than pure immediacy, the event is itself the distributing of
past, present, and future: "henceforth the immediate is no longer the
impression, the object which is one with the subject, but the meaning, the
structure, the spontaneous arrangement of parts." Now, "past
time is wholly collected up and grasped in the present."
Some people, of course, prefer to copy word use — rather than repeat —
to ensure that their utterances are in line with some notion of accepted
meaning. They want to be in the game, "in the true," not changing the rules of the game. And
some relish using words in ways that change the very terms of the game. These
are poets and philosophers — although many of both in title are actually neither.
What happens
when we begin with the assumption that there is no language, only rhetoric?
What happens when we assume that the basic unit of communication is the gesture? In other
words, why am I saying any of this?
By beginning with the gesture rather than the word, we shift the very terms of literacy. Now, rather than a learner mastering a definition, she is nudged to consider the operations of that word — its sense, its affect, how it moves people this way or that. We see some of this kind of critique coming from identity politics. Unfortunately, such so-called critics reduce a word to a fixed sense, to a univocal performance, so that any utterance of that word only means one thing: You're bad!
If we're to consider gestures, then we are considering all different modes of that word, all the ways it can be expressed. Memorizing meaning, even if this meaning is now dictated by a cohort of identity-driven critics, reduces the play of words, reduces us to mere users of a system. A gesture lives in its execution, in its delivery, in its performance. And this is what literacy should embrace: a living through, an embodiment of meaning that conjures and arranges sense, history, and structure and, in the very act of speaking, recasts the very rules and modes of communication. To live in language with its structures is to reduce life to referencing a world that is predetermined. If all my speaking and writing is just an example of an abstract structure with a set of rules, then how can I ever be free? I'm trapped in a prison house of language! How can we ever recast our dynamics if we're all taught to use a system that exists nowhere and whose rules are set in place?
By shifting from language to rhetoric, from words to gestures, we infuse the past with the present and vice versa. We fold time. In the act of speaking and writing, each of us takes up the history of this thing we used to call language and rewrites the rules. No doubt, many seek stricter rules; to wit, today's internet. But these word police understand that language is, indeed, a living agent that we mold, even if they wish it to be more constraining.
We can take up this logic of words as gestures to inhabit discourse, to make it weird, to make new senses of the world, of what's possible, using play, humor, seriousness, affect, and irony to break the shackles of inherited meanings: to recreate the world in every gesture.
There are few things I love as much as standing before a bar. All those options! All those opportunities! What does my body yearn for? What do I desire? What do I need? What inflection of spirit goes well with me at this juncture? What o what shall I order?
Despite appearances, I am not a creature of habit. No, every time I pour myself a drink, I consider it — "it," mind you, is not the booze but the meeting of me at this moment and that booze. "It" is an event, a meeting of different ways of going: me in this moment (not me in general as there is no me in general) and that tequila (all tequilas are different), or that gin, with or without soda, with or without a beer back, with or without lemon, and so on. All these elements are constitutive of this ever elusive formula for the right thing right now for me.
The Greeks had a word for such a moment: kairos. Kairos is emergent opportunity, a particular inflection within temporality, a kind of seam — a word and concept I borrow from Lohren Green's Atmospherics. It's a seam in that multiple bodies run up against each other without any claiming absolute dominance. It's an in-between moment where bodies and events may go this way or that. Kairos is a juncture of reckoning.
Now, kairos to the ancients was a divine, hence rarer, event. They'd never cast kairos as the event of me choosing my booze. But this is the difference between ancient and modern rhetoric. If for the ancients, kairos was monumental, for the moderns it emerges as part of the everyday — what to make dinner, when to lean in for that kiss, when to finish eating, when to say what to whom, and so on and so on. It's not just for generals and politicians; it is the purview of all, anytime, anywhere. If ancient rhetoric is Fred Astaire, always on stage and dressed for the occasion, modern rhetoric is Gene Kelly, dancing alone on the street, in the rain, in a tenement with a newspaper: anywhere, any time.
Gene Kelly is modern rhetoric, any moment anywhere an occasion, a juncture. Kairos abounds.
When I'm at home rather than the bar, this kairotic moment begins with the flicker of a desire as my whole body registers it's cocktail hour. This rarely comes from looking at a clock. No, it's a moment that announces itself in me, as me, with me. And while I do have a drink almost every evening come 5:00, give or take, it's not habit that drives me. Which is to say, I don't move to the liquor cabinet blindly. No, I always — always — consider my desires, needs, and moods.
This is important: my movement towards the liquor cabinet is repetition, not habit. By which I mean that each visit, each pour, is a distinct event, a reckoning — and never a blind reach for the hooch. It's new every time, an inauguration.
This is not say that I don't have habits, those things I do unthinkingly by rote. Oh, but my cocktail is never such a blind event. I enjoy it too much to treat it so disrespectfully. On the contrary, my pleasure derives from the fact that my eyes — and mind, loins, nostrils — are wide open, that this is a decision I'm making right here, right now.
O, that moment! Kairos, sweet complex kairos! When I'm choosing my drink for that night, for that moment, it's when I am wide awake and the plethora of options and opportunities yawns before me in all their idiosyncratic glory as I seek my place within these flows that exceed me — things like weather and obligations, like health and the vicissitudes of desire, like the sun drenched tequila of that region. When I reach for a bottle, I am as much following as leading: I am in the middle voice, at once choosing and being chosen. As I scan my bar, the El Tesoro Reposado may wink at me, an undeniable come hither. Or that wink may be a false seduction and the secrets of that night lay in my Occitan Gin. Or even in nothing at all. (I find that when I'm getting sick, I don't want a drink. That is not a negative decision, a saying no. In kairos, it's all Yes-saying, a creative turn of events.)
The moment — kairos — is the arbiter of what's right. Not me, not the bottle. It's an emergent propriety. It's not the abandonment of all propriety, a wily nilly consumption. That'd be unseemly! Just because there's no exterior "right" doesn't mean anything and everything is right. On the contrary, the right thing emerges, is particular to these bodies in this moment.
What makes it right? Will there ever be certainty? No. What's right is multiple, perspectival, and ever changing. How could it be otherwise? All these bodies, all these moments, all these needs and desires, all these ways of going: there is no "right" that stands outside them all. What's right for this body in this moment is inevitably different than it is for that body, that moment, that situation. And even what's right for this body may very well be multiple, opening up different trajectories — of that evening, of desire, of existential possibilities. There are standards but they're protean (pace Lohren Green's Poetical Dictionary).
Of course, what makes this difficult for some people is that there is no fixed standard, no sure way of assessing, not to mention knowing, the right thing. If there's a standard, decision making is easy: It says here to drink 1.5 ounces of Fortealeza Blanco, neat, with six ounces of Modelo Especial back. Ok! (If only all such dicta were so wise!) But, no, we have to make decisions on our own — as this body with these experiences, these desires, these needs. At some point, we all stand before the bar of life, decisions and opportunities before us, reckoning ourselves in the world.
This is the way of all decisions. We stand not as much before the bar of the world as amid the bar of the world as all these forces, factors, and desires swarm and seduce. We are in the middle of it, constitutive of it. Which is to say, the world does not offer itself to us as we luxuriously decide from afar. No, we're in the mix. We are bodies of this or that sort aswirl in a teem of other bodies all making their way. Some bodies recoil at each other; some blend into a new form, black and brown becoming yellow; some come together but maintain their identity, marbling.
So there I am at the bar, surveying my options. It is a moment; it is now. But this now is itself a temporal fold. My decision is not strictly speaking immediate. No, all our decisions are mediated by all sorts of things, most notably, our past experience which itself opens on our understanding of the future. For instance, as I'm surveying the bar and thinking Maybe I'll have four double shots of Jack! some part of me remembers that I've done that before and, well, it didn't end well. As we make our decisions, our memory inflects the now as it projects ourselves into the future. (A great Stoic exercise to reckon the now is to imagine yourself in the future: How do you fare in that image?)
Mind you, these are not external criteria. It's not as if I really want those four double shots of Jack but know I'll feel lousy later. It's not a battle between two selves, the desiring-self and the knowing-self. That's a specious construct we see in movies and such. No, my memory is not outside the now, outside this juncture. On the contrary, it is present as part of this moment, that past shaping this now from the inside out, not as an external term.
Of course, sometimes we let our past experiences dictate our now. This is how our actions become habits. This is how we ignore kairos, ignore the now as emergent opportunity. We shut it down before it even happens. Oh, I got sick on gin in high school so never touch the stuff. This may be a memory presenting itself to the juncture of now; but it may be the elevating of a past experience to a rule that is exterior to the juncture. This is something we reckon as we reckon: when I reach for that tequila, am I relying on an external rule such as a bad memory? Or am I open to this emergent possibility? It's a meta factor that's folded into the mix.
This decision has no one right answer. Each decision opens up different selves — forwards and backwards! The now I become in my actions shifts the self I was. When someone does something totally "out of character," it makes us wonder if we ever really knew that character in the first place. What we do today changes what we did yesterday — perhaps not in "fact" but in significance.
Suddenly, the decision of what to order at the bar takes on this almost unspeakable complexity. So many factors, bodies, weights, moods, possibilities, experiences,
desires all commingling, ricocheting, harmonizing in an impossible
calculus that, we hope, ends in an order — unless you're in a Beckett novel.
Every decision is made amid a teem of factors, bodily and temporal. Every decision is an embodies inflection point within the becoming of you and the becoming of the world.
Writers know kairos well. As you begin every sentence, you are inaugurating a certain flow of sense. Such is the way of grammar: begin as such and you end up here; begin like that, and you end up there. Every adjective, every tense shift, every paragraph break, every mark of punctuation shapes the whole in such radically different ways. Mood and meaning are on the line with every inscription. As writers and non-writers alike know, this can be maddening: how do I write this?! ? As we write, we seek a secret sense that reveals itself, moving us to write this, then this, then that before deleting that whole chapter and beginning again. In writing, these kairotic junctures are so apparent. In life, it's less so: I choose tequila, I choose gin, so what? Maybe I'm a bit hungover the next day. But writing, once inscribed, persists to infinity. You can't just shake off a bad page with some hair of the dog. No, writers — like painters — see their decisions writ before them at every turn, a now carved into eternity.
The declaration of this — the ordering of a drink, the writing of a sentence, leaning in for that kiss, ordering the Mu Shu Pork, voting for Bernie — is a teeming multiplicity. It is a nexus in which so many factors come together and are inflected, each factor changed, each trajectory sent this way or that. Tequila leads me one way; gin, another, bourbon, another; no drink, another; and so on. Each decision reorients me towards myself, past and present, forging a new trajectory (even if of an ilk with existing trajectories; radical discontinuity happens but is rare — and may be undetectable from the outside, anyway).
Of course, most people make most decisions absent kairos. They live out of habit, doing the same things day in and day out because they've done them before, because their parents or a book or a guru told them to. No action is in and of itself right, healthy, good, or true. Having that smoothie, doing that yoga, going to that therapist: none of them are in and of themselves right.
Kairos, then, may emerge at every turn but only if you beckon it and, in turn, let it beckon you. You may wear gloriously chic blinders — this job, lover, apartment, shoes — but you're still wearing blinders. Which may very well be working for you! Sometimes, I wish I could succumb to a current that carried me along. Sigh. Kairos, while available for the asking, doesn't rear its head without your participation, without a summoning — and willingness to be summoned. We come to kairos not as masters but as participants, as much ingredients as the tequila, ice, or cabbage in the Mu Shu Pork.
Of course, we all get carried along to greater or less degrees with our blinders gladly on. Not every moment is kairotic for anybody. Many, if not most, of the things we do are rote as I plop in front of the TV to watch "30 Rock" for the 53rd time. Which, thankfully, rarely disappoints! I could watch Liz Lemon all day and be happy! Some habit, then, is necessary and can even be good, carrying us along when we lack the wherewithal to reckon the emergent now. This is what we mean by good habits: those behaviors that don't hurt us when we're not heeding kairos due to sickness or weakness, physical or otherwise. Sometimes, you just need to put your head down.
But to treat the moment as kairos is to beckon divinity, to enter the becoming of you-in-as-world. It reveals the seams that open onto new possibilities of living. It turns the mundane into the epic as each decision reverberates throughout the cosmos, at once stretching backwards and forwards in time. It's to lead a lively life in which every moment is a reckoning, every decision an opportunity, every action an inauguration. El Tesoro Reposado neat, please, with a Pilsner back. Thank you.
Preface A former girlfriend — who I hope is reading this: Hi! — always seemed so put off when I'd say this
or that song scared me, as if I were so meek that a mere song could
instill fear in me! From that perspective, my fear does indeed seem
unseemly. But meanwhile, I was put off by her put offness! How could she
not ever be afraid of a song?
This essay, then, is a post facto explanation
that opens onto the kinds of sense-making, the perceptive and
interpretive architectures, that have always interested me. That is to
say, how am I standing towards music that it can scare me while not only
doesn't she share my reaction, it confounds and irritates her? How are
we standing towards music, with what posture and what assumptions, that
we have such different modes of reaction?
***
I clearly remember the first time I heard Ween. Sitting on a living room floor in San Francisco, my good friend put on his CD of "Guava" and the opening track, "Little Birdy," started playing. I can still feel the fear that pervaded me that day.
My mind yelled, muttered, queried: What is that? What is happening? That distorted drag on the rhythm as if the song itself is on codeine or mentally bereft — or living in a world with a fundamentally different sense of time and physical movement. And those baritone vocals: whoever is singing doesn't seem well at all. And then the vocals dramatically shift registers. Is that a different person? Or the same person in a different mood? In any case, the vocals are suddenly a kind of demented, childlike giddy that begins to give way, as if this new person can't go on singing this simple melody. And yet he's laughing! Meanwhile, the lyrics are so sweet — perhaps too sweet: I saw the little birdy sing / He sang with glee and everything / He sang for spring, and sang for me / And everything was so happy.... Rather than this tempering my fear of this drug addled drawl of shifting, collapsing identity, it only magnified my anxiety.
This was not weird people singing a crazy song. No, the song was normal, too normal, while the delivery was all slurry and askew. It's a Lynchian affect, and effect, as everyday signifiers are suddenly imbued with the weird — as your most benign signs circulate in an utterly distinct, alien economy of meaning.
David Lynch makes the most terrifying films — not because they're strange but because they promise an entirely new world order lurking within our own. And this world order will always be unknowable and menacing to our way of going.
At first, it might seem as though my fear is of the monstrous, in my inability to categorize this music — its genre, I suppose. It eluded my ability to label it. Oh, that's just trip hop! That's folky prog rock! That's burner techno dance trance! Kant claims that such is the nature of anything beautiful: it can't be categorized, can't be known per se. And, sure, that could make me afraid as this thing comes to the fore, belying categorization: a monster.
But that wasn't the source of my angst (and I suddenly realize that I'm conflating fear, anxiety, and angst which are three different experiences, if at times overlapping; listening to this Ween song triggered all three in me). No, there was something else going on: this song proffered a world in which its way of going is the norm. This was so different from, say, punk which is clearly confrontational with an existing world order. Ween offered no such thing. There is nothing confrontational about it. On the contrary, it has a self contentment which is all the more disconcerting for being so, well, odd and seemingly ill, distressed, or loaded.
And yet this Ween was not so far off that I could just say: Oh, that's some foreign genre that I'll learn more about (or not). Complete otherness is reassuring in its way in as much as it's clearly not me.But
"Little Birdy" is awful close to the music I know and love —
rock-folk-pop-arty-indie — and yet so far from being something I can
place.
Freud called this experience uncanny, unheimlich or
unhomelike. It simultaneously sounds familiar and foreign. And this is
disturbing: I reach for a foothold only to have it give way. Ghosts are
uncanny: they're people yet not. If they were so different from us, we
wouldn't give them a second thought. But because they seem kind of like
us — only, you know, without blood and such — they're disorienting, disconcerting: uncanny.
Hence my fear: it's not that I couldn't place this music, that my own
faculties failed. No, it was that this music was indeed knowable, even
pedestrian — but in a thoroughly different world whose rules I had to learn and — and! — I couldn't tell if that was a world I wanted to be part of — or if I even could! Were I to participate in that world, in its set of values and aesthetics, what would become of me? How would I, how could I, operate there? Which me? What is my value, my meaning, my place in such a world?
But such is the way, and the power, of all art. It doesn't re-present the world; it's not a drawing, recording, or facsimili of the real. Art is the creation and projection of a world, a logic and science, a mode of ethics and identity, an entire economy of significance and meaning. There is not first the real world and then art: all there are are projections, mutations, repetitions, revisions, versions, edits, rewrites, mixes and remixes — all the way down.
Art can be more or less aggressive in its proffering of a different world. Most romcoms give us a world that we already know, a world in which our identities may not always be confirmed but the conceptions of our identities are. Mind you, I tend to feel more alienated and afraid watching such things as I think to myself: Do I have to participate in that world's values and meaning? I am, at best, a monster in any Jennifer Aniston movie; at worst, exiled all together, excluded from its line of sight: I become invisible, Arthur Fleck.
Most of what we call great art is indeed aggressive in forging a new world with an immanent logic. Consider Picasso's cubism: it operates with a different sense of dimensions in which the hidden is always revealed, splayed, and in which faces and bodies hence rarely align. His world is not the everyday world we operate in. I mean just look at that! We can say the same of Van Gogh for whom the ether is viscous; of Francis Bacon for whom flesh falls from the bone in a ghastly spotlight, over and over; of Warhol who removed the artist from the equation and put images themselves into circulation, transforming all of us from human beings into image beings.
Of course, we can stand sure and proud in our known world and let art come to us as we decide if it pleases us or doesn't, that egregious thumb up or thumbs down. This is art as confirmation of the known. And it's often how I do in fact interact with media as I am too tired, too bored, too distracted to care to give myself over to the new, the alien, the wondrous. And so I sit on my soiled couch in my pajamas and watch "Curb Your Enthusiasm" for the millionth time as it confirms my identity in the most comforting way. There is nothing wrong with that; it is part of survival. But it seems to me it is only one way — and a rather limited way — to stand towards art.
Rather than having art enter our world, we can enter its. We can give ourselves up to the art, become discoverers of new lands, laws, and logics. This no doubt puts us in the position of perhaps evacuating ourselves or transforming ourselves so that we are no longer who we once were. This certainly happened to me when I read Nietzsche: he didn't confirm me and my world. On the contrary, he remade me as I moved into his world, made sense according to his revaluation of all values, his criteria of judgement. I stopped asking if things were right and true and began asking: what does this do to me? To those around me? Does it serve my health, my vitality, my peace, my well being? I was a new me.
I am, however, not suggesting we become disciples or obedient citizens of these new lands. While I abandoned much of my old self to move into Nietzsche's world, I was also operating in the worlds of Derrida, Foucault, Kierkegaard, LSD. After all, we are multiple. And as a generous reader, I like to travel across different lands, sometimes — often — pilfering as I make my own world gathered from these other worlds.
In any case, I am interested in an architecture of sense-making that seeks difference and the strange, one in which subjects no longer simply view objects on the wall of their homes. I am interested in something else entirely, an architecture in which our very identity as viewers is up for grabs as we participate in these strange, unknown lands with their different ways of going. Art, then, as emergent propriety, proffering different laws of operation which we need to learn. Which is to say, I don't want to live
in a world which I decorate with art. I want to live in a world in which art invites me
into its new, strange domain and decorates its world with me.
Art is an education. It asks us to learn its way of going, its mode of operation, its values and physics, its desires and mechanics. It is our job, our delight, to learn this or that art's way of going — and see what happens to us, to the world around us: to risk becoming other — which may, now and again, make me tremble with fear.
