George Saunders, Life in the Bardo, and the state of our Union

 

 

  Prof. Saunders’s most recent book starts with interrupted intimacy and structured incompatibility, and ends with possessed intimacy and forward-moving communion:

Opening: “On our wedding day I was forty-six, she was eighteen. Now I know what you’re thinking…But that is false. That is exactly what I refused to do, you see.” (3)

Ending: “And then I roused myself, and sat up straight, and fully rejoined the gentleman. And we rode forward into the night, past the sleeping houses of our countrymen” (343).

The stage and problem of the entire story arise from the impasses generated by selfishness, or better put, from the understandable but self-directed desires that prevent us—mortal and ghost alike—from an honest assessment of our situations and ethical engagement with those most proximate to us. The novel’s conceit is that the souls of the dead are trapped in the bubble of their situation at death. Take Hans Vollman, with whom the novel opens. He was a middle-aged man whose new eighteen-year-old wife married him to escape a life of poverty. On account of this structured incompatibility, Vollman offers his young wife a platonic marriage of companionship and mutual respect; she accepts. Tragically, his death-day arrives just after this sexless co-dwelling had begun to turn hesitatingly to the erotic pursuits salient to conjugal relationships. His ghost thus registers this death-situation and presents as, “Quite naked     Member swollen to the size of …It bounced as he   Body like a dumpling   Broad flat nose like a sheep’s   Quite naked indeed” (28).

When or if the ghosts release their hold on this death-moment, they transition—with “the matterlightblooming phenomenon and its familiar, but always bone-chilling, firesound” (300)—to the seat of Judgment, a quite different stage and problem that remains mostly offstage in this novel except for one scene and one character (who is not inconsequently a Protestant Christian minister). If they cannot release their hold, then these ghosts are stuck in between life and eternity—in the “bardo” of a D.C. cemetery—telling and retelling their story to anyone who will (or can be imposed upon to) listen, and referring to their coffins as “sickbeds.” In other words they are stuck in selfish repetition of their self-centeredness, mired in their absorption by care, in that Heideggerian sense of Sorge that designates the structure of Dasein as human interconnection and temporal anticipation.

The exception seems to be children, souls who simply are not supposed to be so narrowly focused on their lives, desires or/and situations that they would have any reason to linger in the bardo. Or perhaps children do not have the strong sense of self that is woven from years of egoic desire, trauma, and pleasure, and so they should not have Sorge magnetic enough to anchor them in their death-situation. If for some terribly erroneous reason a child does linger in the bardo, tortuous vines and visions invade their spirits, literally cementing them to the cemetery. For children, the bardo is hell.

Thus when young Willie Lincoln shows up in the bardo and does not rapidly transition, the spirits are thrown into a tizzy. Suddenly their attention is wrenched away from their own stories; suddenly their Sorge throws them into Willie’s death-situation and Willie’s story. The vast civic diversity of the bardo—bankers, businessmen, slaves, a preacher, a mother worried for her daughters, a gay man, a poetess, three rapscallion college boys, etc—all becomes laser focused, like the reverse action of a prism, e Pluribus Unum, in acting to prevent Willie’s torment, in trying to convince him to let go and move on from the bardo.

Well, their shift in attention is not completely unmotivated. What sharply draws the ghosts’s attention is the shocking fact that President Lincoln comes to the cemetery, opens his son’s crypt and holds the body of his son. “It would be difficult to overstate the vivifying effect this visitation had on our community,” Hans Vollman narrates. “Individuals we had not seen in years walked out, crawled out, stood shyly wringing their hands in delighted incredulity,” adds the Reverend Everly Thomas (66), explaining that, “It was the touching that was unusual” (67).

The dead ache for touch, for intimacy, for the connection that surpasses voice and eye with the connection of the heart that is expressed in loving touch.

But, then, so do the living. The President’s difficult grief endangers his son’s soul, but also the soul of the nation. Only as he finds a way to say goodbye to Willie does he find the will to wage a ruthless war for the sake of democracy:

“His [Pres. Lincoln’s] heart dropped at the thought of the killing” (307). His own climb to the Presidency stood as claim “against this: the king-types who would snatch the apple from your hand and claim to have grown it, even though what they had, had come to them intact, or been gained unfairly…, and who, having seized the apple, would eat it so proudly, they seemed to think that not only had they grown it, but had invented the very idea of fruit, too, and the cost of this lie fell on the hearts of the low….

Across the sea fat kings watched and were gleeful, that something begun so well had now gone off the rails (as down South similar kings watched), and if it went off the rails, …it would be said (and said truly): The rabble cannot manage itself.            Well, the rabble could. The rabble would” (308).

To me, the story and conditions of the bardo clearly evoke a complicated metaphor for our contemporary civil society. We are divided by our selfish absorption in self-centeredness and we speak over and against each other, screaming our stories to any who will (be coerced to) listen. White folks, especially, our petty desires distract us from collective endeavors, and our profound longing for the touch of love ironically leads us to isolate ourselves, to hole up and turn away from those who need us, to silo ourselves in echo chambers and wish destruction on those who differ from us.

This reading of the novel was really brought home to me by the racial apartheid that Saunders underscores and then overcomes. When the spirits chase Willie’s ghost into the cemetery church (a sacred space that protects from the vine and torments threatening the child-ghost), Mrs. Francis Hodge, the ghost of a slave says,

“We black folks had not gone into the church with the others. Our experience having been that white people are not especially fond of having us in their churches. Unless it is to hold a baby, or prop up or hand-fan some old one” (310).

But the ghost of Thomas Havens does what other “black folk” do not. He passes into the President as quickly and unremarkably as when a shadow from a cloud passes over a party and lingers there. He mind-melds with the thoughts and feelings of the President and he responds to his grief and worry, to his Sorge:

“We are ready, sir; are angry, are capable, our hopes are coiled up so tight as to be deadly, or holy: turn us loose, sir, let us at it, let us show what we can do” (312).

It is no surprise, then, that Saunders gives Mr. Havens the last word of this novel. His spirit fully possesses the President, making a “we” out of the beating heart of a white man who grew up poor and the dead spirit of an old slave. Then the spirit of Mr. Havens claims the “our” of “our countrymen” and we-the-readers are left with the momentum of their riding “forward into the night” (342).

The Total Eclipse is not about Seeing

  I did see it, the totality. The weather being what it is, we decided to build the trip around location instead of event. We headed to a national forest in the NC mountains that we’d long wished to visit and we hiked its trails to huge, old-growth trees. We took pictures and lingered, but still, long before 2:10 p.m. we’d finished with the location. We considered hiking back up to a bridge on one of the trails. We considered simply walking to the nearest highway and planting ourselves on its shoulder. We wondered about heading back toward the Parkway. But in the end, we decided to take a “no outlet” road that angled up the mountain, just to see what we could see. What we saw was a small gaggle of humans milling on the edge of a lookout over a distant mountain lake. We stayed.

Much of the chit-chat between us strangers was about sight: watch for the cars, look at the clouds, don’t look at the sun until the totality, look at the light, I’ve never seen anything like this! Does your telescope work, may I see that picture, can you see the moon shadow?  We eclipse-viewers are an educated bunch, I guess, and like all modern students, we have been trained over a lifetime to correlate and connect sight with knowledge.

Consider the tired assumptions of James Frazer’s 1922 account of an eclipse:

“To us, familiar as we are with the conception of the uniformity and regularity with which the great cosmic phenomena succeed each other, there seems little ground for apprehension that the causes which produce these effects will cease to operate, at least within the near future. But this confidence in the stability of nature is bred only by the experience which comes of wide observation and long tradition; and the savage, with his narrow sphere of observation and his short-lived tradition, lacks the very elements of that experience which alone could set his mind at rest in face of the ever-changing and often menacing aspects of nature. No wonder, therefore, that he is thrown into a panic by an eclipse, and thinks that the sun or the moon would surely perish, if he did not raise a clamour and shoot his puny shafts into the air to defend the luminaries from the monster who threatens to devour them” (The Golden Bough, 288a).

Frazer loops his reader into the universal “we” of modern man [sic]. “Our” cool, controlled rationality is born of wide observation and long tradition, and Frazer opposes this rationality to the savage’s [sic] panic, churned up by the latter’s narrow sphere of observation and short-lived tradition. The lethal race and gender dynamics that support(ed) British (white) political and intellectual supremacy are on full display here. I want to press against these dynamics by pointing to the particular way Frazer names affect as denigration (“panic”) and how he offers this denigrated affect as the explanation for the “savage’s” kooky responses. “No wonder” the “savage” resorts to such inane responses, Frazer posits, when his mind is fevered with the runaway rollercoaster of panic and confusion.

But if Frazer’s reader recalls (with his cool rationality?) earlier descriptions of those indigenous responses to an eclipse, they hardly seem panicked or confused:

“At an eclipse the Ojebways used to imagine that the sun was being extinguished. So they shot fire-tipped arrows in the air, hoping thus to rekindle his expiring light. The Sencis of Peru also shot burning arrows at the sun during an eclipse, but apparently they did this not so much to relight his lamp as to drive away a savage beast with which they supposed him to be struggling. Conversely during an eclipse of the moon some tribes of the Orinoco used to bury lighted brands in the ground; because, said they, if the moon were to be extinguished, all fire on earth would be extinguished with her, except such as was hidden from her sight. During an eclipse of the sun the Kamtchatkans were wont to bring out fire from their huts and pray the great luminary to shine as before. But the prayer addressed to the sun shows that this ceremony was religious rather than magical. Purely magical, on the other hand, was the ceremony observed on similar occasions by the Chilcotin Indians. Men and women tucked up their robes, as they do in travelling, and then leaning on staves, as if they were heavy laden, they continued to walk in a circle till the eclipse was over. Apparently they thought thus to support the failing steps of the sun as he trod his weary round in the sky. Similarly in ancient Egypt the king, as the representative of the sun, walked solemnly round the walls of a temple in order to ensure that the sun should perform his daily journey round the sky without the interruption of an eclipse or other mishap” (The Golden Bough, 77b).

These indigenous responses seem quite logical and practical, actually, and they seem to arise from discernable affective orientations of empathy, compassion, military bravery, and mimetic identification (perhaps all of these are simply different modalities of empathy). The difference is striking. Indigenous knowledge as presented by Frazer comes in the form of actions arising out of a story, but the point is not the action or story (or some Aesopian moral) so much as the threading of story and communal action as a way of acknowledging, channeling, and reorienting affective responses to the world. Far from indicating a narrow sphere of observation or short-lived tradition, Frazer’s summary words suggest a communal, affective interconnection. The indigenous here are acutely, minutely aware of the natural and cosmological worlds surrounding them, and they care so deeply about those worlds that they act arduously to enact an appropriate (ethical) response.

This is what a friend of mine, Randall Johnson, might call an aesthesiological knowledge, or an aesthesiological ethic, because it is instituted and sustained by aesthesis, or sensation/ feeling.

On that mountain overlook last Monday, the eclipse was not, for me, simply what I saw, but what I felt. I felt the temperature drop about ten degrees. I felt the light dim so that it seemed like I had filters between my eyes and the world. I felt a stillness drop down over the mountainside as the moon shadowed the sun and the birds and bees and no-see-ums disappeared. The light became eerie, surreal, and I felt eerie, surreal, along with it. I felt stunned by the beauty and oddity of the two-minute totality, and I stared at the black-covered sun like it was an alien spaceship or a god or a portal to another galaxy. Most inexplicably, it felt good being with this group of strangers, better (so I said to my partner) than if we’d watched the eclipse alone on that trail-bridge. The collective experience was not at all about knowledge–or at any rate not the knowledge of cool rationality. It was the felt knowledge, the epistemaesthesis, of shared excitement, shared attunement, and shared attention, even if we–this motley “we” of humans and canines from NY, PA, VA, NC, and TN–never see each other again.

The eclipse, an eclipse, is not about seeing. Or at least: it is not about seeing and knowing, but about seeing and feeling. It’s about turning our hearts and bodies away from the daily obligations that demand attention, sap energy, and divide us into ideologically-driven isolation cells and turning toward events that remind us–no, that make us feel– how ridiculously small and finite and trivial, how shockingly joyful and connected and compassionate and capable, we all are. And by “we”, I mean every single living thing.

Charlottesville and our Public Sphere

 

  It’s the shoes. Do you see them? Amid the crowd chaos and red stop signs and cameras and flying bodies there are four empty shoes–three mid-screen and one bottom left. When I came to this picture, I had already seen the tweets and FB posts and Yahoo trending news. I knew a car had plowed through counter-protesters in Charlottesville, even though the driver and death and the number of injured were as yet unreported. The picture was not “news”, then, but something more like evidence. It slotted into my jazzed-up affective state like an amplifier and transmitter, boosting my affective signal and catalyzing my body to post and repost my feelings and reactions. Somehow those four shoes were corpses to me. They stood for death real and intended. They stood for the shock of a violence so unexpected that at least two people ran out of their shoes.

The blood pouring from civil society Saturday challenges the echo chambers of identity politics–or it can if we let it. Bigotry and fascist white supremacy are woven into the fabric of civil society and those of us shocked by it all (white folks, that is) need to own our complicity in it. This post is an attempt to see the “public sphere” that formed around the events of Saturday as a wounding that can reorient white Americans to see ourselves and what we take for granted about “the public” differently, differently enough that we orient ourselves, our discourse, and our practices to antiracist, anti-misogynist, anti-homophobic, anti-antiSemitic, and anti-Islamophobic labor.

For some years now I have wanted religion scholars to rethink the public sphere—to attend to the ways that our sense of being a self, and our sense of being a polis and of being a demos arise today through media, particularly that broad canopy we condense into the moniker, “social media.” These social technologies of public co-existence work in ways to produce publicness, but they depart from familiar narratives of the public written by Rawls and Habermas, and also stray from Anderson’s “imagined communities” driven by print media.

Instead, our public is threaded and bolstered by what I call “affective technologies of mediation in a digitally global world.”

By this phrase I want to evoke how subjects—citizens and noncitizens—construct, enter into, and react against temporary interconnections with each other on a minute-by-minute and hourly basis. These temporary interconnections are conjoined and sustained by web-based media platforms that compress time and space more profoundly than newspapers or television, and that circulate affects in ways that position subjects not as knowers but as feelers, as the clickers of click bait, the posters of repostings that keep affective response moving, flowing until the moment dissolves into other constellations of mediated interconnections.

This mediated flow of affects operates as a network in Latour’s double sense of the term, both as the material infrastructure (servers, software, cell phones, apps) and as that which flows through the infrastructure (affective). This mediated flow of affects also operates as a technology in Foucault’s sense of a matrix of practical reason. In my still-new theorizations, our public today, quite contrary to that articulated by Habermas or Rawls, is a multiply mediated, affective technology; that is, it is a matrix of practical reason dispersed through multiple material networks that enable and accelerate the circulation of affects.

  Chances are, any one reading this posting experienced this affective matrix of practical reason last Saturday as the events in Charlottesville unfolded. But, see, our language needs to change. The events in Charlottesville are materially tied to the media events responding to Charlottesville. An event and its reactions are no longer separable enough to allow for “commentary.” Even this blog posting is not a commentary on the events in Charlottesville but on the event of the events in Charlottesville, on what “Saturday, August 12” was, at least for some of us.

Our Facebook and Twitter and Instagram and Reddit scenes delimit public address as the kind of affecognitive discourse Foucault calls “dramatic”; it is the discourse of theater and spectacle. Indeed, Foucault’s entire point about the importance of Kant’s odd sense of Publikum in “What is Enlightenment” is that “public” means for Kant quite precisely the stage or platform on which a certain kind of drama can be staged or performed, where a certain kind of scene can be seen. This staged drama is a kind of normative punctum, an event that functions as a gauntlet thrown down within the boundaries of the Publikum and for the sake of its continued maintenance. Kant’s Publikum establishes and legitimates the infrastructural means by which certain statements can be deployed freely, and it is the very free deployment of these particular (normative) statements that establishes and legitimates the Publikum’s infrastructure.

Making a scene in public may enact the freedom that feeds autonomy, but it is not for Kant itself a representation of Enlightenment. This distinction is important because unlike the pointillistic quality of public interventions, enlightenment is a slow process with an oscillating rhythm that conjoins the systole of sociality to the diastole of historical development. To draw out this rhythm, Foucault distinguishes pedagogical discourse from the dramatics of autonomous action. The drama of autonomy is both preceded by pedagogy and followed by self-reflection, thereby showing inextricable developmental and historical links between the government of others (by teaching them) and the government of self (daring to know for oneself). These two pedagogical moments—being taught and teaching oneself—are hinged by the interruption of public, dramatic discourse as we saw in Charlottesville, or like any event that rips the fabric of everyday life and, by claiming or debating the proper face of universality, exposes the bloody wounds of particularity on the skin of public tissue.[i]

It also is important that for Kant, the significance of the Revolution does not lie in the bloody events of the Revolution itself. “What is significant and constitutes the event with demonstrative, prognostic, and rememorative value,” Foucault writes, “is not the exploits and gesticulations of the revolutionary drama itself.” Rather, “[w]hat is significant is the way in which the Revolution exists as spectacle, the way in which it is greeted everywhere by spectators who are not participants, but observers, witnesses, and who, for better or worse, let themselves be caught up in it” (17).

Today, under the technological aegis of social media, we could restate this “significance of the Revolution” as the material dynamic that constitutes our very publicness: not the bloody action on the streets, but the entranced witness of the spectacle; not activism, but absorption. Foucault foregrounds a specific phrase used by Kant to describe the affective register of witnessing, a register that Kant associates with the sign of real human progress. The phrase is: “a sympathy of aspiration which borders on enthusiasm” (18).

As we saw with the event of the events of Charlottesville, what matters for our sense of publicness and our sense of the possibilities of social transformation–what matters, that is, in the sense of what holds the bodies and actions of the persons involved and what holds and disperses the significance of their material presence and actions–lies not with the punctum of any particular action (not even that one man driving that one car through a crowd), but rather within the crucible of splayed, saturated, relayed, and defensively diverging affective reception that unfurled multiply and nonlinearly in graduated and unpredictable ways.

From Foucault’s reading of Kant it is clear that the material and institutional factors that generate the circulating ground or ‘stage’ of the Publikum are necessary but not sufficient conditions for sustaining a viable ‘public sphere.’ The license to demonstrate, the police and national guard presence, the Constitutional guarantees of the right to assemble and the right to free speech are thus necessary but not sufficient conditions for a viable “public.” The tissue of publicness also requires that readers and spectators “sympathetically,” that is, affectively, absorb and rearticulate the “aspirations” of the dramatic discourses unfolding before their witness.

What Foucault sees (through Kant) as acts of autonomy, truth telling, and revolution, I would rewrite as the rapid threading of publicness through affective technologies of mediation. Through social media, the affecognitive lineaments of our enfleshed social life are dramatized in a flash. The spectator-bodies may refuse this public moment; they may ignore it, seek to kill it, refuse it, counter it, or redeploy it; but for publicness to thrive, its witnesses must absorb events with the tingling affective sympathy that the events are making claims (however contestable) about our shared human conditions of flesh, life, and precarity. To me, this relationship between the image, sound, word or body of the public event, and the body of the spectator positions the flesh of the citizen as a crucial node or switch-point in the circuits of affect and discourse that, through their circulation, constitute the tissue of public sensibility.

On 8/12/17 I saw and participated in just this relationship between the images, sounds, words, norms, and bodies in Charlottesville, and the words and images of the witnessing spectator-bodies. I felt palpably how the flesh of citizens function as crucial nodes and switch-points in the circuits of affect and discourse that, through their circulation, constitute the tissue of public sensibility.

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[i] I worked through Foucault’s lectures on Government of Self and Other a year before reading Katrin Pahl’s lovely book, Tropes of Transport: Hegel and Emotion (Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 2012), but her argument about the Phenomenology resonates strongly with my reading of Foucault’s Kant. Especially in her Chapter 2, “Pathos,” Pahl argues that Hegel offers a theatrical ‘staging’ of ethical life that requires the presence of both an audience of others and the agony of self-reflection after the passionate public display.

Consciousness, Perception, Body

  Though I do not find the reading pleasant, something about delving into Husserl’s Ideas 1 is akin to a religious investigation. For many of us, such religious investigation begins with a feeling, like that we have when we look up at the summer night sky and track Cygnus arcing down the Milky Way. It is a feeling of trying to stretch beyond our cognitive limits and really grasp that we live and breathe on a tiny planet hurdling around our sun in a backwater corner of one of billions of galaxies, a feeling of trying to match the perceptual data of small bright dots to what we ‘know’ about the universe from physics and astronomy. “What’s it all about?” we might ask, despondently or wonderingly (or both), as the stretch fails and we feel ourselves slough back into crude and infinitesimal finitude.

The question is massive and sublime, but here I’m mainly focused on the feeling. What does it feel like to try to think beyond perception, to think beyond the body? How does it feel to stretch toward God? How does the body feel the limits of its own thinking?

Reading Husserl’s Ideas 1 is unpleasant to me because it involves warping my head into a prolonged, cirque-du-soleil caliber stretch of this sort, and one that continually sloughs into glaring but unacknowledged, Marx-brothers caliber failings. Husserl doesn’t give a whiff about God, but he is trying to get to the unthought conditions of consciousness:

“consciousness considered in its ‘purity’ must be held to be a self-contained complex of being, a complex of absolute being into which nothing can penetrate and out of which nothing can slip, to which nothing is spatiotemporally external and which cannot be within any spatiotemporal complex, which cannot be affected by any physical thing….” (section 49; Kersten transl. p. 112)

The spatiotemporal world of human experience is posited by consciousness as “something identical belonging to motivated multiplicities of appearances,” Husserl maintains: “beyond that it is nothing.” (Ibid.)  Such is the stretch toward purity, toward a pure consciousness detached from (not merely bracketed from) the somatic dimensions that dictate psychology.

Husserl’s failure lies in the fact that the body keeps showing up in Ideas 1, reminding me of that taunt aimed at elementary school children who don’t know the technical word for skin: “Your epidermis is showing!”  I am not setting out to take down Husserlian phenomenology in 1000 words, but wish only to hold focus on what Ideas 1 presents so well, almost against itself: the vibrating edge of flesh desiring to escape fleshed finitude. Another way of animating his question, I think, is to bracket (ha!) his frustrating acrobatics and remain modestly on this side of purity and infinity. How does the body feel consciousness? How does the body feel itself sentient, that is, how does consciousness feel as it is in (and it always is in) a body? How does sentience evidence its own embodied matrix?

I visited Mass MoCA’s James Turrell and Sol LeWitt exhibits last weekend and it seemed to me that both artists were immersed in questions somewhat like these.

 

LeWitt’s large wall installations reduce you to vectors of affective exclamation. Each turn of the gallery leads to another squeak of pleasure. These large works are studies in color, in color juxtaposition, in pattern, in pattern juxtaposition, and in color and pattern juxtaposition. They stand over you and overwhelm you as you walk through the gallery. They draw your body in to see how these massive pieces have been constructed and they push you back to try to ‘take in’ the entire pattern or color spectrum. I would say the wall art is spectacle but it really is the opposite of spectacle; it is superbly logical and measured, pleasing in its symmetries and hues, pleasing by the way those hues and symmetries flood the body with a kind of rhythmic intensity. The intensity slows you down and stops you. It’s mesmerizing, not in a manner that yields hypnotism or loss of self, but in a manner that materializes the power of form and tone to shape bodily comfort, task and concentration; the power of form and tone to catalyze feeling and to reduce thought to the felt pulse of consciousness. This consciousness hovers somewhere between LeWitt’s art and my body, and is dependent on both.

 James Turrell’s art is about light. Color is used, it seems to me, merely to call attention to the materiality and character of light. I saw this purple artwork (above), called “Wedgework”, I believe, and this green one (below).

I also joined about eight other bodies in a nine-minute exhibit called “Perfectly Clear”, which included two periods of strobing light and otherwise a series of changing colors in what felt like a dimensionless room. I felt an irrepressible attraction to these lit spaces, and also a profound disorientation. In the “Wedgework” room, I began to feel nauseated. Turrell’s presentation of the materiality of light is so unlike my own corporeal materiality that I lost cognitive orientation. I sat down and closed my eyes. I tried to shut out this enveloping ‘experience’ that refused my attempts to situate it around the axis of my body. The world went black.The weight of my joints and muscles was oddly noticeable after the weightlessness of light. After-images bounced on my retinas. I felt my breathing in my nose, esophagus and lungs. I felt my heartbeat in my chest. I felt the nausea subside.

LeWitt demonstrates that consciousness can feel like a spooling out from my body and an entangling in form and color. I am not “in” my body when I look at LeWitt, but I am not “beyond” it, either; I am somewhere in between. Turrell, on the other hand, uses the ethereal materiality of light to demonstrate the entanglement of consciousness with the minute particularities of physiology: the weight and jointedness and awkwardness of bodies, their greedy clamor for color to resolve into (with) form, their incessant dependence on the flows of air and blood. I feel the weight of finitude with Turrell, but also the desire for, the beauty of, depthless eternity.