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Filling This Empty Chair: On Genius and
Repose
David W. Jardine
University of Calgary
Jennifer Batycky
Calgary Board of Education
I
The Chair & the Pipe (December 1888-January 1889)
I listened to many classes about hermeneutics, and after
each class I seemed to be filled with the same feeling of
confusion. It was not so much a confusion about what hermeneutics
was, but more a perplexed feeling about how this style of
inquiry was going to impact my life as a teacher. From what
I initially gathered, in some sort of “magical”
way, something remarkable from the life world of the classroom
would simply present itself to me. It seemed that my role
would be to take up this particular event and care for its
message, so that the beauty of its dailiness was gently
uncovered and honoured. Well, I certainly had no intention
of holding my breath and waiting for the hand of the curriculum
god to tap me on the shoulder, delivering a profound message!
As a teacher, I felt so tangled up in the everydayness of
the classroom, I wondered if I could ever step far enough
out of the situation to see and hear the possibilities presented
daily. By the middle of October, I had resigned myself to
the fact that every one in my graduate course had received
a special message from Mercury, except for me.
Wednesday, October 28th, 1998. My plan for the
morning was to provide the children with an opportunity
to apply their imagination and skills to a descriptive writing
passage. Rather than simply “teaching” all about
what descriptive writing entails, I decided to select an
art reproduction and share my own writing about it. My intention
was to draw upon our collective background experience with
art and use that as a springboard to create beautiful writing.
Since the beginning of the year, the walls of the classroom
had been filled with reproductions of the works of van Gogh,
Gauguin, Monet, Manet, Matisse and several others. Available,
too, was a large pile of smaller, 8" x 10" reproductions
that children could take to their work areas and ponder.
Daily, we would sit in front of large reproductions and
talk about them, how they made us feel, made us think, and
we learned of the lives of these artists, their troubles
and successes. As I read my own paragraph based on Van Gogh’s
painting of a bedroom, I could instantly sense a connection
between myself and the children. I remember thinking “This
is going to be a great lesson.”
One of the first student books I picked up to read was Nathan’s.
He had written two pages on the image of Van Gogh’s
chair:
The sad and lonely chair sits alone in a cold and empty
room. The only warmth is a little smokeless pipe. So as
the chair sits alone with still only a little warmth, the
chair waits for something. But what is it? It still waits
for the moment, that moment that the chair thinks will never
come. The brick floor gives a chill in the air. The chair
still sits by the door, waiting for the moment. But the
door doesn’t budge. Days pass, but everything is still.
Still as a rock. So everything goes like this day after
day after day. This goes on and nobody sits on the chair.
Nobody even notices the chair and that’s how it will
stay.
When I read Nathan’s passage, I felt a chill up my
spine, knowing that the chair was waiting for Van Gogh to
return from the field in which he shot himself. During the
weeks that followed, I shared Nathan’s writing with
colleagues both at my own school and in the system. I also
shared it with friends and family members because I didn’t
want this event to simply be held under an awful educational
gaze. Each time I shared his writing, I was met with a stunned
look, followed by always well-meant comments which always
seemed to dismiss this gift Nathan had given us:
“Nathan is so thoughtful. He always says the most amazing
things.”
“What grade did you say you teach?”
“You are so lucky. I could never do that with the children
in my class. They just aren’t capable.”
“Nathan is really gifted. He really ought to be tested.”
“Well, how are you going to extend this child’s
learning now? Perhaps he should have an opportunity to take
his own writing and create his own picture.”
How should I extend Nathan’s learning? How absurd!
The real question that Nathan’s writing presented me
with was about my own learning being extended. For
days I carried his book and picture around with me; to my
home, to meetings, around the school...just wondering what
to do next. I found myself tempted to sit Nathan down and
drill him about why he wrote what he did about Van Gogh’s
work and what it meant. Thank goodness I refrained because,
upon reflection, I realized that asking Nathan about his
own work in this way was not going to give me the answer
or the questions I was looking for.
In almost all of the responses to Nathan’s writing
no one could find a way to speak of the work he produced:
what does this writing tell us about this painting and what
we ourselves may have failed to see, to feel, to understand?
about the loneliness and sadness and isolation and emptiness
that van Gogh often hides under such colourful images? about
our beliefs as teachers about children’s ability to
even express such things?
What also became troublesome were questions like these:
would Nathan’s writing have been this rich if he had
no images to build from, to rely on, if we had not pursued
and practised, with the whole class, how to respond to such
works with care and thoughtfulness, if we had not deeply
explored the worlds that these painters evoked and how they
offered us a new vision of our own world, if we had not
listened to what each other said about the paintings we
were looking at? Most responses to Nathan’s work failed
to respond to his work. The reason for this is that
many people tried to start with Nathan himself. I realized
that the only way that I could take care of Nathan’s
writing was to start with the world opened up by van Gogh’s
work, because that is what his writing is about.
When David [Jardine] came into the class later that week,
I asked Nathan to read his work to him. Nathan had been
reading passages from Van Gogh’s letters to his brother,
and we had watched portion’s of Sister Wendy’s
Story of Painting, a charming and moving video series
on the history of art. They went out into a quiet spot in
the hall, and after reading his work to David, Nathan said:
“He’s buried next to his brother,
you know.”
II
Empty chairs had been a feature of van Gogh’s thinking
since childhood. The memories that crowd behind this single
image are connected with deep mournfulness, with thoughts
of the omnipresence of death.
. . . .
His own chair, simple and none too comfortable, with his
dearly-loved pipe lying on it, stands for the artist himself.
We may well be tempted to recall the pictorial tradition
that provided van Gogh with his earliest artistic impressions.
Dutch Calvinism sternly insisted on an iconographic ban
that prohibited all images of the Holy Family except symbolic
ones: the danger that the faithful might be distracted by
the beauty of the human form had to be avoided at all costs.
Thus Christ could be represented by a ‘vacant throne.’
(Walther & Metzger 1997, 8)
Thus, too, van Gogh himself, not just his death but aspects
of his living, can be represented by his room, by the place
he has inhabited—the pipe, the chair, the modesty of
the surroundings, the colours that speak of Arles (unlike,
say, the dark muddiness of The Potato Eaters [1885],
which places its inhabitants so differently, in hues and
colours that seem to place them right into the ground out
of which their meal has come):
The Potato Eaters [1885] by van Gogh
Jennifer had her Grade One students doing “self-portraits”
this same year as Nathan arrived, not by literally drawing
pictures “of themselves,” but by drawing pictures
of their rooms, the spaces they live within. She also introduced
me to a wonderful, disorienting book called Room Behaviour
(1997) by Rob Kovitz. From the back cover:
Room Behaviour is a book about rooms. Composed of
texts and images from the most varied sources, including
crime novels, decorating manuals, anthropological studies,
performance art, crime scene photos, literature and the
Bible, Kovitz shapes the material…to create an original,
fascinating and darkly funny rumination about the behaviour
of rooms and the people they keep.
Those room portraits that the children did, like van Gogh’s
painting, were akin to portraits of “vacant thrones”—portraits
of spaces that a non-portrayed “subject” (for
lack of a better term) inhabits. But this is not quite correct—“the
subject” is portrayed, but the portrait is of
a particular sort of subject. These are not portraits
of an isolated, autonomous, egocentric “I myself”
that somehow sits at the centre of any inhabitation, but
of a “self” that issues up out of and leaves traces
within an inhabitation, a “keep,” up out of and
in to a world of voices and relations and ancestries and
kin, of colours and palettes and hues, images and tales,
up out of places, memories and topographies (Gadamer 1989;
Jardine, Clifford and Friesen 2002, 2002a) and even up out
of the most ordinary, everyday objects that we find ourselves
surrounded by (Jardine et al. 2000). The “self”
that these “room-portraits” portray is, so to
speak, an ecological, embodied, worldly, inter-related (non-substantial,
unable to exist by its self) “self,” not an isolated
“I.”
So the vacant throne, the empty “room portrait”
somehow is the self, but now treated as empty of
a self-existence independent of its Earthly relations. (This
interpretive thread is, of course, not at all in
line with the Dutch Calvinist idea of “the vacant throne.”
On the contrary, what we are pointing to here is a way of
loving the world and its places and loving our own straggly
emergence into being who we are.)
These Grade One room portraits thus provide a simple critique
of Cartesianism and its belief in the logical precedence
of an abstract, empty, worldless “I am,” in favour,
instead, of an inhabitation that is the Earthly self’s
keep and an “I” that grows up out of its sojourns
within the world.
This Grade One venture highlights the oddness of many curriculum
guides which go through a sequence like this: me, me and
my family, maps of our classroom, our neighbourhood, our
city, our city past and present, the province etc. These
sequences presume that what is somehow most immediate in
the life of the child is his—or herself and that curriculum
should radiate, so to speak, “outwards” from there.
This, of course, is totally unsupported, both by developmental
theory (see Piaget 1952; Jardine 2002, 2002a) and by the
common sense we develop by living around children and carefully
listening to what they are saying to us about these matters.
As Kieran Egan (1986, 1992) shows so well, the worlds of
imagination and mythology and great stories of places and
people far away are much more immediate, compelling,
and understandable than is the abstraction “my
self.” Children are much more drawn to, capable within,
and articulate about large, troublesome, ancient, venturous,
living, imaginal “spaces” of Impressionist painting
(e.g. Jardine et al. 2000), the allure of old geometries
(e.g. Friesen 2000) or Pythagorean cults (e.g. Jardine,
Clifford and Friesen 2002a), the spell of trickster tales
(e.g. Clifford, Friesen and Jardine 2002; Lensmire 2000),
or the age-old troubles of time and its telling (Clifford
and Friesen 2002) (to name a few, clearly limited examples),
than they are within the cramped and literal-minded enclosure
of “myself.”
“Myself” doesn’t simply disappear in ventures
into such alluring, difficult places, only its metaphysical
(i.e., non-experiential, dis-embodied, uninhabiting, hallucinatory,
ideational, logically consistent but ecologically insane
[Bordo 1988]) sense of enclosure. This “myself”
is experienced as issuing up out of the course of the experiences,
not that I have (Erlebnisse [see Gadamer 1989,
60-70]) but that I undergo (Erfahrung [see
Gadamer 1989, 240-262]) in and through the world. This world
in which I undergo experiences, is not just inhabited and
formed and fashioned by myself and by and within by own(ed)
experiences, but is always and already experienced, articulated,
and inhabited. It has always and already been formed and
fashioned by shared and contested inheritances, voices,
and ancestries, up out of which I must slowly and continually
“find” myself becoming who I am. I am surrounded
by a “multifariousness of voices” (Gadamer 1989,
295)—and not just up out of the human inheritance but
all Earthly calls and keeps.
Even these late autumn birds locate, form, and fashion this
worldly “I am” (Jardine 2000) in ways far “beyond
my wanting and doing” [Gadamer 1989, xxxviii])—
here, spotted by these Pine Grosbeaks “before I know
it” and whether I have a “lived experience”
of it or not (differently put, this is a way to distinguish
between phenomenology and hermeneutics).
In just this way, this “world” of Impressionist
paintings is already long-since inhabited before
Jennifer, her Grade One class, or I arrive. Therefore, because
this world is not simply “our experiences” or
“our constructs,” our “our meanings”
or “our perspectives,” entering this world requires
some measure of giving ourselves over to its “wantings
and doings”(Gadamer 1989, xxxviii)—its measure
of what it wants of us. It helps form and fashion
who we each become in venturing through it. That is to simply
say, we learn from it. But now, learning does not
just mean that there is a subjectivity who now has, as some
interior possession, new information. Rather, it means that
each one of us who ventures to, for example, the world of
Impressionist paintings, becomes someone who, in different
and multiple ways, has come to know her or his way around
(ex-peri) this place—someone “experienced”
in it. The experiences undergone are experiences of the
place and not simply and only and obviously experiences
somehow “of” the experiencer. Simply put, Nathan’s
words are about van Gogh and self-portraits and rooms
and loneliness and dying. They are of Arles and Theo.
They invoke the muddiness of The Potato Eaters (even
if Nathan never meant to refer to it or to the Dutch
Calvinists portrayed in it).When we take his words to be
only about Nathan (which, as teachers, we surely
must do as part of our obligation to him), we have changed
topics. We have, so to speak, “switched rooms”
by now taking these words out of the worlds they invoke
and re-placing them into Nathan’s life and biography
and psychology. Certainly we experience Nathan’s deep
love and enchantment and sense of affinity and connection
with this place he has explored. But we don’t come
upon Nathan as an isolated psychological subject. Rather,
we come upon him “in place”—here, in Arles,
in the presence of death and bright palettes.
This frail, contingent, finite, emergent, dependent “self,”
then, slowly finds and forms itself in and through its inhabitations,
through the “rooms” that surround and care for
this emerging self. Each individual self (whatever this
exactly now means) does not simply possess its surroundings
but is also kept by them. The character (Bildung
[see Gadamer 1989, 9 and following) of this emerging self
is dependent, at least in part, at least to some terrible
extent, upon the company it keeps.
It is frightening to consider that I become what I surround
myself with. If I surround myself with trivial, cheap, repetitive,
disconnected, meaningless things, my life is in jeopardy
of becoming trivial, cheap, boring, disconnected, and meaningless.
If we surround students with rich, generous, thoughtful,
challenging, enchanting worlds (e.g., the world of Impressionist
paintings) the “self” that each one is cultivating
now has the chance of becoming generous, thoughtful, and
enchanted. However, when I think of the intellectually and
spiritually empty surroundings of many classrooms, the prospects
of the students that inhabit such surroundings is almost
unbearable.
III
Consider, then, another take on something oddly both akin
and radically different than “the vacant throne.”
Jacques Derrida (& Ferraris 2001, 30-1) is speaking
to the question of the difficulty of his own writing and
an image arrives:
one does not always write with a desire to be understood—that
there is a paradoxical desire not to be understood. It’s
not simple, but there is a certain “I hope that not
everyone understands everything about this text,” because
if such a transparency of intelligibility were ensured it
would destroy the text, it would show that the text has
no future [avenir], that it does not overflow the
present, that it is consumed immediately. Thus there is
the desire, which may appear a bit perverse, to write things
that not everyone will be able to appropriate through immediate
understanding. There is a demand in my writing for this
excess…a sort of opening, play, indetermination be
left, signifying hospitality for what is to come [avenir].
As the Bible puts it—the place left vacant for who
is to come [pour qui va venir].
Here, the place left vacant with bread and wine at the Seder
table, waiting for Elijah to arrive, does not bespeak someone
who has left but someone who is coming. As
with “the vacant throne,” it represents someone
who is not here, who is not a given, not present, but this
absence is now not a once-present and now vacated Self which
is elsewhere and still governing, like some Cartesian “I
am” or some Husserlian “transcendental subjectivity”
which experiences itself as “above this world”
(Husserl 1970, 50). This empty chair now stands for a
future which has yet to come (avenir). The futurity
represented by the empty chair is not a given, not “frozen”
(Smith 2000; Loy 1999), not “foreclosed” (Smith
1999) but “yet to be decided.” What will become
of me, what will become of this work I am producing—all
this is still coming, is not yet settled, and no amount
of hurry or anxiety or effort will outrun this eventuality.
This is what is “given”: this empty chair.
In this light, the empty chair, like the Grade One room-portraits,
portray an inhabitant who has a future, who is always
yet-to-be-itself, yet to fully and finally arrive. So even
Nathan’s lamentations over van Gogh’s empty chair
and the impending sense of loss and death it portends points
to the fact that here we are—who would have thought?—over
a century later and half a world away, experiencing van
Gogh’s suicide and the work-signs he left of his life,
and the room portrait trace of his leaving. Van Gogh has
died and has no future. But imaginally speaking, here we
are, still living out the work he left. Not unlike Nathan
himself, what van Gogh’s work will turn out to be is
still yet-to-be-decided and it is being decided anew right
here, right now, in this Grade One classroom.
Just to complicate matters further, not just this “self”
but these “keeps” are themselves not frozen
or foreclosed or finished. They are not givens but are “open
for the future” (Gadamer 1989, p. 340). The places
we venture with (or without) children in (and out of) school—spelling,
reading, mathematics, poetry, art, biology, chemistry, philosophy,
Dutch Calvinism, Impressionism, writing, hermeneutics, ecology,
and so on—are continuously becoming constituted and
understood and inhabited differently. They are, so to speak,
living places or spaces or rooms, (or, if you will,
“living disciplines”) that form part of our living
Earthly inheritance, and as such—as living,
i.e., as susceptible to the future—we “must accept
the fact that future generations will understand differently”
(Gadamer,1989, 340). When Jennifer surrounded her classroom
with prints of van Gogh, Monet, Matisse, Picasso, she was
providing her class with a “roomy,” generous topic/topography
(see Gadamer 1989, 32; Jardine 2002b) whose full meaning
is, in its very temporal, finite, contingent nature, still
being decided. There is not yet any final word on this place
of Impressionism and van Gogh, even though much has been
said. Our only option, then, is finding ways to get in
on this conversation and to speak in ways that keeps
the conversation open to being taken up anew (Smith1999).
To paraphrase a phrase of Derrida’s (& Ferraris
2001, 32), this topic still has an empty chair at its table
of contents. It is still “open” to question, to
debate, to transformation, to being understood differently,
becoming ignored or forgotten, or to perhaps even becoming
despised again as van Gogh and his works once were.
IV
The Austrian art historian Hans Sedlmayr gives the title
“The vacant throne” to the final chapter of his
essay in cultural criticism, The Loss of the Centre [Verlust
der Mitte]. Sedlmayr writes: “In the 19th
century there was an altogether new type of suffering artist:
the lonely, lost, despairing artist on the brink of insanity.”
Van Gogh’s chairs constitute a metaphor of the crisis
of the entire century. (Walther & Metzger 1997, 9)
This line of argument is also found in Gadamer’s (1989)
concern over the image of the artist as a mad or tortured
genius who has no place in the world and whose works thus
became like “vacant thrones.” Under such an image:
Whenever one “comes upon” something that cannot
be found through learning and methodical work alone–i.e.,
whenever there is inventio where something is due
to inspiration and not methodical calculation–the important
thing is ingenium, genius. (Gadamer 1989, 54)
Under such a logic, we don’t look to the works and
what they have to say to us, but to the creator, the one
who has generated this work, its “genius” and
what the work has to say about this creator-genius (“Nathan
is really gifted. He ought to be tested”). We look
for the “origin of the work of art” (Heidegger
1971, 1972) in a subjectivity, some great, off-stage “I
am” that has uttered the work into existence, sometimes
seemingly ex nihilo. In this light, van Gogh’s
paintings are all “vacant thrones” that
point to the off-stage creative, gifted, genius from whom
they have issued and who is, somehow, their “reason”
for being.
One of the greatest and most troublesome gifts that Hans-Georg
Gadamer’s work Truth and Method (1989) offers
us as educators, a gift in part inherited from his teacher
Martin Heidegger, is a disruption of this discourse of “the
genius.” Much of the early part of this work is dedicated
to unearthing how, through what he calls the “subjectivization
of aesthetics” (Gadamer 1989, 42-81), any sort of human
production (the work of an artist like van Gogh,
or the work of a burgeoning author and art connoisseur
such as Nathan) had become reduced to a sort of “subjective
production” that is available only through the equally
subjective reactions or responses of a viewer, reader, listener,
and so on. (This tendency is what Edmund Husserl identified
in his Logical Investigations [1902/1972] as “psychologism”
and to which his phenomenology—which greatly influenced
Gadamer’s work—was a response). Nathan’s
description of van Gogh’s work and van Gogh’s
work itself are both understood, under such a logic, as
subjective creations which point, most immediately and fundamentally,
to the subjectivity who produced them. Worldly works
are therefore understood as “creations” which
are comprehensible only insofar as we unearth or recreate
the “creator” of the work (this was, according
to Gadamer [1989, 187 and following] a central desire of
Schliermacher’s [1768-1834] version of hermeneutics,
where understanding the work of a creator-genius, in fact,
understanding any historical inheritance, becomes a matter
of “congeniality”—a matter, one might say,
of “like-mindedness”).
In Nathan’s case, rather than approaching his work
and the worlds it opens up, and thus encountering him becoming
himself in the midst of and in the keep of
and in relation to these worlds, we pursue a type
of subjective, psychologistic attribution of talents, backgrounds,
skills, proclivities, likes, dislikes, or gifts. We want
to fill the empty chair by metaphysically positing a presentable,
knowable, assessable, given, self-identical generator of
the work from whom the work gets its original/originary
(Jardine 2002), authoritative/authorial (Jardine 1992) bestowal
of meaning, its mens auctoris. Thus, under the metaphysics
of genius, we call out to the author to save us from the
task of interpreting the questions that the work itself
places us under.
Likewise, our responses to this painting or these words
have themselves become subjectivized. Just think of how
epistemologically timid we have become and how our teacher
education practices have taught teachers precisely this
discourse of subjectivity. I might suggest that Nathan’s
description of van Gogh’s work is wonderful, but, under
the metaphysics of genius, all I am actually reporting about
is myself—my responses, my thoughts, my perspectives,
my opinions, my experiences. Under the metaphysics of genius,
we are not drawn out of ourselves into a worldly meditation
with each other about a world that is already full of a
“multifariousness of voices.” Rather—and
not disingenuously meant and not exactly false either—we
get a commonplace educational adage, “Nathan is so
thoughtful.” The next most commonplace adage is “you
are a really experienced teacher who loves art. I could
never do that.” In this later case, the metaphysics
of genius is attributed to the teacher instead of the child,
thus keeping in place the inability to explore—or to
see the worthwhileness or even, sometimes, the possibility
of exploring—the work itself and the worlds it might
portend.
Under the metaphysics of genius, to understand the work,
then, is, to some extent, to turn away from the work
itself towards its creator through a de-coding of the
author’s intent or meaning or desire or experience
or background circumstances or “knowledge, skills,
and attitudes” (all versions of the mens auctoris).
This, of course, recapitulates a much older metaphysic:
that the world itself, in all its rich array, is understandable,
venerable, worthy of our attention, only insofar as it is
understood as a sign of God’s creative beneficence.
All things are only ens creata, and, under this gaze,
becoming enamoured of any worldly thing in and for itself
or in terms of its mundane, Earthly inhabitations is a form
of fallenness and a source of potential deceit, deception,
seduction, or betrayal. Hence an old argument that the Church
has long-since had with the advent of modern science: figuring
out the worldly causes of worldly things is a vacuous and
pretentious enterprise. Why? Because, in their deepest reality,
all worldly things are “vacant thrones” pointing
to the One great off-stage Creator (which becomes recapitulated
in the Enlightenment’s capitalization of Reason). And,
to the extent that humanity is made in God’s image,
we, too, although in much more contingent and mundane ways,
are both the crown of the ens creata and
are ourselves creators of works (see Jardine in press).
Even though it appears that we have arrived in a place that
is quite arcane, traces of this phenomenon are rampant in
education. To understand this gift that Nathan has handed
us requires handing it back to him. It’s his.
Doing anything else, under the metaphysics of genius, would
simply involve imposing our own views on his, robbing him
of his voice and replacing his ingenium with ours.
But then here comes the constructivist horror hidden in
the metaphysics of genius—“the old mythology of
an intellect which glues and rigs together the world's matter
with its own forms” (Heidegger, 1985, 70). This pernicious
phenomenon is at work for many “qualitative researchers”
who tie themselves in knots taking transcripts back to their
“authors” for checks on what the words mean to
the author, all in a valiant effort to not “impose”
on the transcripts their own “forms” (see, for
example, the classic work by Lincoln and Guba [1985] or
Miles and Huberman [1994]). It is at work, therefore, in
the desire of many “qualitative researchers’ to
report to us what their participants mean (somehow imagining
themselves as the “representatives” or “stand
ins” for their absent participants [another appearance
of a “vacant throne” in a transcript that now
the qualitative researcher attempts to fill?]). Under this
same metaphysics of genius, researchers become perpetually
caught in the epistemological dead-end: “I can only
tell you what I thought the participant meant when I took
their transcript back to them with my interpretation
of what it means and heard them say this about what I said
they said.” Even the sad and impossible question that
some will ask (“How many times should I take it back?”)
bespeaks the spell of the metaphysics of genius.
And it is clearly at work in the profound silence Jennifer
encountered from those who read Nathan’s words. All
in all, we hide a deep desire for the author to come fill
this chair that has been left empty before us.
We can’t believe, perhaps, that this chair has been
left empty for us.
V
Martin Heidegger shows that the work of art [and, in his
later work, Earthly things and even words themselves] [are]
not merely the product of an ingenious creative process,
but that [they can be] works that [have their] own
brightness in [themselves]; [they are] there [da],
“so true, so fully existing.” (Gadamer 1994, 23-4)
The chair waits for something
The brick floor gives a chill in the air
Days pass, but everything is still
nobody sits on the chair
Nobody even notices
These two works have been recited because returning to them
helps dislodge a final feature of the metaphysics of genius
by introducing a phenomenon which does not make an appearance
under the metaphysics of genius: the worldly repose of things.
Having been through the twists and turns of this paper,
I now experience how both van Gogh’s painting and Nathan’s
writing have each become much more fulsome and troublesome
and provocative and substantial than they initially were.
Each of them has become, so to speak, “stronger”
and more robust than either would have been without the
appearance of the other. This is a version of the “art
of strengthening” that Gadamer [1989, 367] suggests
defines a true conversation:
[It] consists not in trying to discover the weakness of
what is said, but in bringing out its real strength. It
is not the art of arguing (which can make a strong case
out of a weak one), but the art of thinking (which can strengthen…by
referring to the subject matter).
In fact, unexpectedly venturing into this world of Impressionist
painting once again in this Grade One classroom, having
been in this place many times before, facing Nathan’s
words and the reappearance of van Gogh and this cascade
of empty chairs and vacant thrones and dreams of rooms and
habitations, I’m struck again by how incommensurate
to this Earthly place is my knowledge and experience of
it (a first beginning of an ecological humiliation of “constructivism,”
wherein the limits of my own experience are experienced).
In fact, the more I experience of this place, the more often
I find my way around it, the more threads of referentiality
and ancestry and dependence and kin that I can muster, the
more incommensurate my knowledge and experience become.
Put the other way around, the more often I venture to this
place, the more experiences I have of it, the better it
gets.
This is, in fact, a rather ordinary thing: the more we learn
and experience about a particular artist or composer, or
about a painting or piece of music, the more often we return
to a piece of wilderness in all its various seasons, the
more we pay attention to the cycles of Pine Grosbeaks and
their tethers to weather and sun, the more often we arc
together circle-segment cross-hatches in the bisecting of
angles (see Jardine, Friesen and Clifford, P. 2002a), the
more deeply do we experience the fact that these things
have lives of their own, “beyond my wanting and doing”
(Gadamer 1989, xxxviii), beyond my “rigging and gluing”
(Heidegger, 1985, 70).
Therefore, as my experience-of-this-place grows, I come
to realize more and more deeply a profound ecological point:
this place is not just here for me. It does not just
“face this way,” so to speak. It “stands-in-itself.”
It has its own “repose”:
The existing thing does not simply offer us a recognizable
and familiar surface contour; it also has an inner depth
of self-sufficiency that Heidegger calls “standing-in-itself.”
The complete unhiddenness of all beings, their total objectification
(by means of a representation that conceives things in their
perfect state [fully given, fully present, fully presented,
finished]) would negate this standing-in-itself of beings
and lead to a total levelling of them. A complete objectification
of this kind would no longer represent beings that stand
in their own being. Rather, it would represent nothing more
than our opportunity for using beings, and what would be
manifest would be the will that seizes upon and dominates
things. [In the face of van Gogh’s work, or Nathan’s]
we experience an absolute opposition to this will-to-control,
not in the sense of a rigid resistance to the presumption
of our will, which is bent on utilizing things, but in the
sense of the superior and intrusive power of a being reposing
in itself. (Gadamer 1977, 226-7).
There is an empty chair, not just facing here, inviting,
welcoming, waiting, but also on this table’s hither
side.
This is where the notion of the metaphysics of genius really
begins to hit home pedagogically. When Jennifer chose to
surround her Grade One children with works of the Impressionists,
she understood that this world, this space, this place,
this “room” has its own repose and part of the
work of the classroom adorned with these works became to
introduce her students to their repose. This is the great
and necessary pretense of an experienced teacher: even though
these children may not at the outset experience the repose
of this place, their teacher is experienced in this place.
They have come to know their way around which means that
they have experienced for themselves that this place stands-in-itself
and has a repose that is worthy of children’s (and
teachers’) attention. An odd and pedagogically familiar
faith follows here: as a teacher, I know that, if the right
work can be done here, with these students,
within all the frailties of this classroom, this
year, that repose just might come forward and show itself
in all its myriadness and generousity and openness and undecidedness:
All things show faces, the world not only a coded signature
to be read for meaning, but a physiognomy to be faced. As
expressive forms, things speak; they show the shape they
are in. They announce themselves, bear witness to their
presence: “Look, here we are.” They regard us
beyond how we may regard them, our perspectives, what we
intend with them, and how we dispose of them. (Hillman 1982,
77)
This strikes another ecological blow to the metaphysics
of genius and the confidences of constructivism: that things
might regard us beyond how we may regard them. That even
in those times in which we force the witness to give answer
to questions of our own determining, we are being witnessed
as well, beyond our own determination.
As the above cited passage from Gadamer suggests, this experience
of repose is not simple, familiar and easily had. Repose
is not a “surface feature” that is simply lying
there, somehow out in the open and immediate and obvious.
The appearance of the living repose of things requires
something of us. An experience of repose has to be cultivated.
Jennifer, simply put, had to teach the children in
her class how to take good care of the world of Impressionist
paintings.
Ecologically, this is such a simple point. It takes no time,
patience, effort, learning, work, or love to simply use
this place for our own ends or to experience this place
only in light of our own “wanting and doing,”(Gadamer
1989, xxxviii) our own ingenious “rigging and gluing”
(Heidegger 1985, 70), our own effortful “seizing and
dominating”(Gadamer 1977, 226-7). It does, however,
take time and effort and work and love and patience and
learning to come to experience this place in its repose.
Experiencing this place in its repose—say, this place
of Impressionist paintings—is experiencing that it
stands there in ways that no amount of our experiencing,
however ingenious, can fill.
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Reprinted by permission.
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