POG Talk: Part1

Tumamoc: Tak­ing a Place Apart, and Putting It Back Together from Paul Mirocha on Vimeo.

POG Poetry in Action hosted an evening soirée on the sub­ject of cre­at­ing a sense of place with art and writ­ing on Sat­ur­day, Octo­ber 20, 2012. at the Draw­ing Stu­dio, down­town Tuc­son. Eric Magrane read some of his place-​based poems, includ­ing two writ­ten on Tumamoc. Paul Mirocha gave a slide pre­sen­ta­tion about his work as Tumamoc artist in residence.

At this event, POG also announced its Tumamoc Hill Writ­ing Project, which inspired 16 local writ­ers to explore Tumamoc through their writ­ing this fall and win­ter. There will be a read­ing event to be announced for this work done on Tumamoc.

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I’m pub­lish­ing my slide talk and notes from this event in this post. I for­got to men­tion many of these ideas at the pre­sen­ta­tion or skipped over them because this was more like an 3-​hour long talk con­densed into 25 min­utes. So it may flow a lit­tle bet­ter here, but I left its some­what non-​linear for­mat. Explo­ration does not usu­ally go in a straight line.

This is part one of two posts. Split­ting it into two posts makes for an eas­ier read. The sound wasn’t work­ing for the POG event, so here is the full movie I showed as an intro­duc­tion. It fea­tures some images from this blog.

I’m going to talk about cre­at­ing a rich, mul­ti­di­men­sional por­trait for a place, as a painter would would for a per­son. It’s would be a descrip­tion that allows all facets of that land­scape to be con­sid­ered, both human­is­tic and sci­en­tific, inter­nal and exter­nal, so requires both art and sci­ence. Clearly it could not be done on one can­vas or piece of paper. Not even by one per­son. It would have to include many peo­ple from dif­fer­ent dis­ci­plines and out­looks, and would have to go on over mul­ti­ple gen­er­a­tions. Actu­ally it would be ongo­ing and never com­plete by def­i­n­i­tion. Even a small place can seem almost infi­nite in scope, and the same kind of think­ing extends to any larger scale. There is never any one final expla­na­tion for the uni­verse, not even our own cosmology.

As a cul­ture, we usu­ally allow sci­ence to cre­ate the images for us describ­ing what the world is like. Yet the sci­en­tific view­point leaves a lot out of the pic­ture. These are areas that can be explored by artists and writ­ers. A vision of the whole might have to be part sci­en­tific the­ory and part poetic metaphor.

When I first started com­ing up to Tumamoc as artist in res­i­dence in the Spring of 2011, my mind was almost blank, except that I came with an affec­tion for the Sono­ran Desert and knew that Tumamoc was a local icon. It was like being dropped into unknown ter­ri­tory. Not just to me. The Hill is rel­a­tively unknown to the gen­eral pub­lic because of its sta­tus as a highly pro­tected research area for over a cen­tury. The only direc­tive I was given was to draw near the road so I could engage the walkers.

As I fol­lowed the threads lead­ing into the dif­fer­ent lay­ers of Tumamoc Hill, I found myself study­ing some of the first Euro­pean explor­ers, sci­en­tists, artists, and writ­ers explor­ing the then-​unknown Amer­i­cas begin­ning in the 19^th cen­tury. From these exam­ples I began to craft an approach to place-​centered cre­ative work that I will out­line here. So first a lit­tle phi­los­o­phiz­ing as an intro­duc­tion, then I’ll go over a few sub­jects I have been explor­ing on Tumamoc Hill.

Explor­ing a place is not a lin­ear track. There is no map, but there is a method. It’s more like a web to bor­row an image from Eric. It’s a whole piece, each node con­nected to each other node in a spi­ral path. There are many ways to get from one spot to another as you fol­low the path.

I already had a his­tor­i­cal explorer to start with: Goethe, the poet, play­wright, philoso­pher, and artist who died in 1832. In 2003 I had the priv­i­lege of illus­trat­ing a children’s book, Mr. Goethe’s Gar­den, by Diana Cohn. It is really an adap­ta­tion of Goethe’s poem, won­der­fully titled, The Meta­mor­pho­sis of Plants. He pub­lished his the­ory of botany in a poem because he felt that a dry tech­ni­cal paper would not do the sub­ject justice.

Mr. Goethe’s Gar­den is a pic­ture book based on Goethe’s poem, “The Meta­mor­pho­sis of Plants,” which lays out his the­ory of botany. The children’s book is a fic­tion­al­ized account of a young girl, Anna, who befriends the great man dur­ing the last year of his life and draws with him in his gar­den. I vis­ited Goethe’s gar­den house with Diana Cohn while research­ing the book and we both did some draw­ing there.

I’ll read a few lines…

“I put down my draw­ing pad and asked, “Mr. Goethe, how did you ever learn to paint these plants so they look so alive?” Mr Goethe turned his kind face to m. “First,” he said, “I lis­ten with my eyes. I giver each plant my full atten­tion, as I do you. Like friends, plants tell you their secrets only when they know you care.”

Goethe con­sid­ered the senses, pri­mar­ily the unaided eye, as the most impor­tant instru­ments for sci­en­tific knowl­edge. The “reveal­ing gaze” or just the patient con­tem­pla­tion of beauty would even­tu­ally uncover nature’s open secrets. In this sense, the works both of art and sci­ence help illu­mi­nate the laws of nature. It was not so much about uncov­er­ing new facts, as it was con­struct­ing a view­point or way of see­ing. Not so much a new way of see­ing, rather rein­vent­ing some ancient ways.

Lis­ten­ing to the big chunk of rock that it Tumamoc took a lot of time. A moun­tain speaks even slower than plants. So the first part of the method I was learn­ing was: spend time. I went up the Hill almost every day and was there at dif­fer­ent times and seasons.

I put together the movie trailer for this talk as a way to show cer­tain aspects of the Hill that inter­ested me, but were not of direct inter­est to sci­en­tists work­ing there: the aes­thetic com­po­si­tions, the over­all impres­sions, the emo­tional tone of a land­scape. These data of the senses, so prized by Goethe, are con­sid­ered too sub­jec­tive to reveal true knowl­edge from the point of view of mod­ern science.

Sci­en­tists are trained to pick and choose only cer­tain details from the whole – those some­times called “Pri­mary Qual­i­ties,” to dis­tin­guish them from the “Sec­ondary Qual­i­ties” of sight, sound, taste, smell, feel­ing, etc. Pri­mary qual­i­ties are con­sid­ered objec­tive, not depen­dent on any observer, like num­ber, time, shape, mate­r­ial, motion, atoms and mol­e­cules. Accord­ing to this view, pri­mary qual­i­ties can give true knowl­edge of things as they are in them­selves, while sec­ondary qual­i­ties are ephemeral and illu­sory impres­sions cre­ated by our minds.

Yet, if you con­sider these sub­jec­tive qual­i­ties as also part of a place, sci­en­tists have left a lot of ter­ri­tory unex­am­ined that may be explored by artists and writ­ers to com­plete the picture.

I would say this applies to women as well. When I was talk­ing to Cyn­thia Miller about this talk, she men­tioned Charles Olson. I didn’t know of him, but I looked him up and he seemed a per­fect place to start. I real­ized that I might be right in the mod­ern train of thought advo­cat­ing object-​oriented poetry. Writ­ing about the so-​called objec­tive world of things. This world that begins at the out­er­most layer of our skin, may be the ulti­mate unknown ter­ri­tory. Explor­ing it may require us to get to know our own inner world in a deeper way, as one world often mir­rors the other.

No one I asked gave me the same def­i­n­i­tion of what POG stood for, so here is my nomination.

From Olson, the spi­der web brought me to Alfred White­head, a math­e­mati­cian and thinker who greatly influ­enced Olson. In the 1920s and 30s, White­head argued against the grow­ing mech­a­nis­tic and mate­ri­al­is­tic views of nature as given by sci­ence. He said that although mod­ern sci­ence and tech­nol­ogy had vastly increased our knowl­edge of facts and pro­duces fab­u­lous inven­tions, it is frag­mented and incom­plete as a pic­ture or account of the world.

View­ing nature with the cool eye of rea­son and logic alone gave a one-​dimensional view, like when we lose depth per­cep­tion when we close one eye. With both eyes open, maybe one is purely objec­tive and the other see­ing things more as a whole, we have a richer pic­ture that includes more depth. White­head focused less on the world as full of objects and things, inter­act­ing mechan­i­cally, and empha­sized instead, process and becom­ing as the essen­tial nature of the world. He influ­enced many ecol­o­gists to imag­ine nature as like an organ­ism, an infi­nitely com­plex arrange­ment of inter­ac­tions that defied sim­ple cause and effect.

I have always used sci­ence as a sub­ject and inspi­ra­tion for my artis­tic work. It saves me from too much intro­spec­tion. It’s ground­ing and pro­vides an infi­nite resource of images and ideas. I feel like I run dry if I go too far into art or sci­ence while neglect­ing the other.

Goethe’s poem called Gingko biloba (He even spelled the bino­mial species name cor­rectly) uses the lobed leaves of this ancient tree as a sym­bol for some­thing like this. As the poem ends, “Das ich eins und dop­pelt bin.” … that I am both sin­gle and dou­ble. He used this metaphor for the arts and sci­ences, the sci­ence of the objec­tive as well as the dis­ci­pline of the sub­jec­tive view, blend­ing both view­points as one, but keep­ing them distinct.

In a poem writ­ten to honor early cloud researcher Luke Howard, Goethe wrote the lines:

Dich im Unendlichen zu finden,
Musst unter­schei­den und dann verbinden;

(To find the eter­nal, you must first take apart and then put together. My translation.)

For Goethe, the scientist’s job was to dis­sect things into smaller and smaller parts and the poet or artist was to syn­the­size or unify. Both work together to make a rich por­trait of the world.

This is my ver­sion of Goethe’s sym­bol, of being dou­bled and sin­gle, using a Desert plant: the cre­osote leaf, the most com­mon Sono­ran Desert plant. This is part of my gigan­tic scan and print project.

Goethe, like White­head a hun­dred years after him, railed against the increas­ingly math­e­mat­i­cal and mate­ri­al­is­tic descrip­tion of nature cre­ated by sci­en­tists of his day. It’s not the use of ratio­nal think­ing that Goethe objected to – only its exclu­sive use.

Usu­ally a nice guy and everyone’s friend, Goethe sin­gled out Isaac New­ton for spe­cial vent­ing of his spleen, stat­ing that Newton’s 1687 book, “Math­e­mat­i­cal Prin­ci­ples of Nat­ural Phi­los­o­phy”, called the most impor­tant book in sci­ence up to that time by his­to­ri­ans, would make a “good nest for rats and owls.” Maybe Goethe will have the last word. Other his­to­ri­ans have gone back and cal­cu­lated the intel­li­gence quo­tient of famous sci­en­tists of the past. You can see here that Goethe topped New­ton, who had an IQ of only 200. I’d have to give New­ton the vote for best hair, however.

Sev­eral threads of the web led me in a sat­is­fy­ing way to Alexan­der von Hum­boldt. I came to him in fol­low­ing the devel­op­ment of eco­log­i­cal sci­ence through early Desert Lab sci­en­tists. Hum­boldt then led back to Goethe again, his friend and men­tor. Many his­to­ri­ans con­sider Hum­boldt to be the per­son who tried to carry Goethe’s ideas into action in the main-​stream phys­i­cal sciences.

If any­thing, Hum­boldt was a main­stream sci­en­tist, the super-​scientist of the 1800s, help­ing to form what we call the mod­ern sci­en­tific method. Humboldt’s name-​recognition has been com­pared to Einstein’s for the 20^th cen­tury. It was often said that Hum­boldt was the sec­ond best known man in the world, sec­ond to Napoleon. He was that good at com­mu­ni­cat­ing sci­ence to both a pop­u­lar and sci­en­tific audience.

The defin­ing event of his life was a five-​year trip to the new world with botanist Aimé Bon­pland, in 1799. They explored the Ama­zon, climbed the high­est peak of the Andes, and made their way through Mex­ico to Cuba, end­ing in Philadel­phia where they dined with Thomas Jefferson.

Hum­boldt was also a trained artist. One can see from this self por­trait that he passed “Draw­ing Fun­da­men­tals 1, 2, and 3.”

Humboldt’s life work was Kos­mos, a five vol­ume book that became a world-​wide best­seller. And it was a sci­ence book. It was said that Hum­boldt was sec­ond only to Napoleon in name recog­ni­tion. Napoleon even tried to humil­i­ate him for col­lect­ing plants when the two men met.

Humboldt’s writ­ings had a major influ­ence on the young Charles Dar­win, the writ­ings and world view of Ralph Emer­son, Henry Thoreau, and Walt Whit­man, and later John Muir and Aldo Leopold. Hum­boldt inspired land­scape painter Fred­er­ick Church and the so-​called Hud­son River painters. In this series, Hum­boldt wanted to coör­di­nate from all the var­i­ous dis­ci­plines of sci­ence all that was known about the phys­i­cal uni­verse, from the out­er­most neb­u­lae to the geol­ogy of the Earth, to the lichens grow­ing on those rocks.

The title Kos­mos, was care­fully selected. Hum­boldt noted the dual mean­ings in Greek of the ancient term coined by Pythago­ras. Kos­mos had the mean­ing of “the sum and order­ing of all parts” as well as “an orderly arrange­ment, or adorn­ment.” The sec­ond def­i­n­i­tion is where our word “cos­met­ics” comes from. A beau­ti­ful arrange­ment, as in a piece of jewelry.

This work was more than an ency­clopae­dia, it was a vision of the uni­verse as a uni­fied whole, yet the sum of infi­nitely many parts. His idea was remark­able in that the Kos­mos included humans and their con­cep­tions of it. Side by side with sci­en­tific the­o­ries, Hum­boldt dis­cussed the views of nature in ancient and mod­ern poetry, myths and reli­gions, and art. Even as con­cep­tions change, ancient astron­omy is just as much a part of the Cos­mos as Big Bang theory.

This fusion of sci­ence and the arts was not just an old-​fashioned holdover from a roman­tic era before rig­or­ous sci­ence was invented. Hum­boldt had a bust of Immanuel Kant on his desk where he wrote his travel nar­ra­tives and his Kos­mos, and it was not just because of the hand­some fea­tures of that philoso­pher. Kant’s ideas were as much a guid­ing light as was Goethe. I’ll try to give an idea of how I under­stand his con­cept of what can be known about nature, as given in the Cri­tique of Pure Rea­son, and why it is important.

Kant cast a rea­son­able doubt on the objec­tiv­ity of the “pri­mary qual­i­ties” the aspects of nature con­sid­ered to be inde­pen­dent of the observer which sci­ence selects as the only sources of true knowl­edge. Since every­thing we can know about the world comes in through our senses and is heav­ily processed by our minds (as mod­ern brain sci­ence would con­firm), it may be that solid­ity, space, time, and num­ber are our own con­structs, and there­fore also sub­jec­tive in a way. Things “in them­selves” were ulti­mately unknowable.

So, to the thinkers and explor­ers our per­cep­tions are part of the real world, as much a part of the descrip­tion of the cos­mos as are atoms and stars. It’s a sub­tle point, but changes every­thing. And Kant has not yet been refuted. Intel­lec­tu­ally, I can often under­stand his con­septs for only a few min­utes, then I loose hold of it. But I can still feel it work­ing through the pho­tographs I take and the draw­ings I make.

I’ll read an excerpt from Humboldt’s descrip­tion of Taque­n­dema Falls in Colum­bia. A good exam­ple of his method of describ­ing a place, keep­ing with these ideas of uni­fy­ing the sub­jec­tive and objective.

The trav­eler, who views the tremen­dous scenery of the cataract of Tequen­dama, will not be sur­prised, that native tribes should have attrib­uted a mirac­u­lous ori­gin to rocks which seem to have been cut by the hand of man; to that nar­row gulf into which falls head­long the mass of waters that issue from the val­ley of Bogota; to those rain­bows reflect­ing the most vivid colours, and of which the forms vary every instant; to that col­umn of vapour, ris­ing like a thick cloud, and seen at five leagues dis­tance, from the walks around Santa Fé. The sixth plate can give but a very fee­ble idea of the majes­tic spec­ta­cle. If it be dif­fi­cult to describe the beau­ties of cataracts, it is still more dif­fi­cult to make them felt. by the aid of the pen­cil. The impres­sion they leave on the mind of the observer depends on the con­cur­rence of a vari­ety of cir­cum­stances. The vol­ume of water must be pro­por­tioned to the height of the fall, and the scenery around must wear a wild and roman­tic aspect.

I suc­ceeded, but not with­out dan­ger, in car­ry­ing instru­ments into the crevice itself, at the foot of the cataract. It takes three hours to reach the bot­tom by a nar­row path, which leads to the ravine of La Povasa. Although the river loses in falling a great part of its water, which is reduced into vapours, the rapid­ity of the lower cur­rent forces the observer to keep at the dis­tance of nearly one hun­dred and forty metres from the basin dug out by the fall. A few fee­ble rays at noon fall on the bot­tom of the crevice. The soli­tude of the place, the rich­ness of the veg­e­ta­tion, and the dread­ful roar that strikes the ear, con­tribute to ren­der the foot of the cataract of Tequen­dama one of the wildest scenes that can be found in the Cordilleras.

Other than enjoy­ing this mix­ture of sci­en­tific obser­va­tions and poetic descrip­tions, I’d like to point out the top­ics he typ­i­cally covers.

• The local sto­ries and oral tra­di­tions about the place, includ­ing a study of native lan­guages in which they occur.
• Descrip­tions of the sense impres­sions of the place, as accu­rately as pos­si­ble, with­out being overly sub­jec­tive or about him­self.
• Mea­sure­ments with the most advanced instru­ments avail­able and the com­pil­ing of vast amounts of data by many dif­fer­ent work­ers in dif­fer­ent fields, col­lab­o­rat­ing over many gen­er­a­tions to form a coher­ent pic­ture where every­thing is inter­re­lated, like putting together a puz­zle.
• A keen aware­ness of the con­text and observer’s point of view, even when tak­ing measurements.

A recent arti­cle in Smith­son­ian Mag­a­zine caught my eye as proof that there is still a ker­nal of Goethe and Hum­boldt in mod­ern science.

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Many of Alexan­der von Humboldt’s books are online and down­load­able for free here: http://www.avhumboldt.net/humboldt/publications/

A good biog­ra­phy of Hum­boldt came out last year: The Pas­sage to Cos­mos: Alexan­der von Hum­boldt and the Shap­ing of Amer­ica, by Laura Das­sow Walls