On being both near and far: in honour of L. Peter Kollar
2000
interlude
“However, for thinking, there is never anything familiar.”[1]
We begin where we happen to be – there, where the matter of beginnings happens. The title begs questions: both near to and far from what? From whom? From him, in whose honour we gather, in whose honour we gather together, and in whose honour we maybe gather together a thinking. From him, as if these three presentations arrived to us from him – arrived so that they may be returned, in turn, to him. And from nothing, from no-one – no-one in particular, no one person, no person whatsoever. This is because we are just always already both near and far. We are always already just in this state, or in this disposition - that is not just both, separately or severally, and not just neither, either: as if there were some third state, `neither near nor far.’ Rather, we are always already somehow in the midst of this experience of one in the other, of one as becoming-other - as if near would be this `becoming-far,’ in which would be this `becoming-near,’ in which one is apriori the other of the other. We are always in this reflux, in this interminably returning gesture through which both both advance and withdraw, both present and absent themselves. We are always already both home and away, at home in homelessness – as Heidegger might have said; or always already in the midst of strangers – as Levinas might have said.
We are both near and far – near him and far from him, that is, we are both with and against him, because he has both gathered and dispersed – and not just us (though we are, tonight, both gathered in that we come to be together, and dispersed in that our being takes place in partition), but a thinking, a practice: a thinking in us, and the thinking that we happen to practice.
I had put this title to myself. It had come to me in the momentary immediacy of the occasion put to me - put to us - by Stanislaus Fung, to whom we owe the impulse, the gesture of this gathering together in his honour.
And so we begin from where we are, each together and severally, at once both near and far, in the midst of what we do, in the interlude of this precious moment, by which we honour him who is both with and against us, who is always already both here and away.
far-fetched word play
phusis kruptesthai philei[2]
Playing with words is a serious game – playing one off against the other, so that each word is also for the other and makes room for the other in the midst of a thinking. The contours of thought, whereby thoughts turn together and return to surround and locate a disposition towards being, and towards being in common.
What is near is nigh, imminent, about to happen, to arrive, to take place. Something on the verge of appearing, of showing itself there at the border and the edge – at the limit of thought. Something nearly there, something almost said, as if on the tip of a tongue. What is nigh is not this passage into occurrence, appearance, thought or speech. What is nigh is precisely what has not yet occurred, appeared, been thought or spoken. In the near we experience the unsettling presence of something imminent, yet withdrawn - a not yet which yet cannot-not take place. He is near means he is about, and about to arrive – that is, he is still far, but destined for arrival.
What is far is for something – for this arrival that is about to take place. Far literally means: what-is-through-beyond, what fords-across, a fare, a farewell. In far is the etymological root *PER.[3] We have it in periphery, perimeter, perception, performance and experience. Always this sense of a border that is broached, breached, transgressed, exceeded. For means before, in front, away-from, forth; what advances, what is forthcoming – like a city (Sanscrit: puras), whose prominence fronts onto a surrounding country-side; or a like word that promotes a thinking, a text, a doctrine – a belief, that through-which we live (Sanscrit: purana); or like something that exceeds in being beside, about, next to, and at the same time radically other – parabole: what is cast beside, and throws beyond; or like a paralogism: what is beside a discourse, and beyond reckoning - `a conclusion unwarranted by the premises’[4]; or like a paradigm: what is shown beside, and points beyond; or like paradise: a walled-in garden, a place in our midst, and beyond the limits of the world.
Beside and beyond, here and away, near and far. As in: one day he will leave us, we will lose him, he will be with us, away... he will (re)lieve us. In that way, he is for us. In advancing, he leads us. In leaving us, he leavens, and leaves us to live. Being for something, something far is also something from – it is something produced, made. It bears (forth) and is borne or carried in advance, beforehand, arriving. Something both foregone and far fetched, and something at the same time fore-gotten: gotten-before and forgotten - which is to say forsaken, abandoned. Again – what is forgotten is both there and not there, present and absent, inconspicuously near and irredeemably far. Memory hinges on this – that what is forgotten is there for remembrance, and available to be gathered in the midst of abandonment.
We say near to, and far from. What if we said it differently? What if we said near from and far for: that is, one’s being near is from something, one’s being far is for something. One who is near is produced, and appears as if from elsewhere; one who is far is destined for production, for some kind of futural making. I am near from you, I am far for you – that is, in being far, I am there for you; in being near, I am there from you. I am from you and for you. You are the departure I am destined for.
four moves
"To admire a representation is to admire the original upon which it was made."[5]
Four moves, four moments, four opportunities – four defining moments in a vocation. These happen to be four of mine. Four voices, four vocalisations - vicariously, as it happens, four vacillations:
first move: plato’s cave
I expect everyone has a story about the time they first heard Plato’s parable of the cave - a striking and banal narrative, a familiar story. The narrative set-up - `as above, so below’ - is seamless and hermetic, hermetically sealed, closed. Four dimensions hierarchically joined: the Intellectual Sun, the Archetypes, Prototypes and Stereotypes. Four domains irretrievably connected by three causal relationships. A neat cosmology. Naturally, a pedagogy of initiation and transformation, death and rebirth. A play between origin and end, freedom and liberation. Who can track the extent of its embeddedness in every facet of what and how we think, of what and how we produce ourselves, our artefacts and our world, of who and how we are in the world we think into existence: homo sapian, homo faber, homo ludens.
And yet the narrative is haunted and haunting. It has haunted me, and still does. A cosmology presenting the appearance of commensurability, concord and correspondence, in fact conceals something unsettling: four domains connected by three disjunctions; a cosmogony of deception; a poietics of absence.
Here is the familiar story. An existent – that is, a world, a being, a thing - re-presents its archetype, the idea (Greek: eidos, Latin: forma), by translation or imitation (Greek: mimesis). The closer the imitation, the greater its participation (methexis) in that idea, the more it discloses it (aletheia), and the more perfect, beautiful and true it is. This mimetic correctness[6] is a technology (techne) of similitude and identity between original and copy, which is a matter of adequacy (isotes), accuracy (orthotes; Latin: integritas) and proportional transposition (analogia) - rather than one of reproduction or visual resemblance (homoiotes).[7] Plato said it himself, in these familiar words we have all heard in one way or another, from one era or another:
“a really skilled craftsman or guardian in any field must be able not merely to see the many individual instances... [but] the single central concept... [and] put the various details in their proper place in the overall picture.”[8]
And here is the problem - the ghost in the machine. The cosmology installs - in every mode of existentiation, and in every representation - a practice of deception. The eidos is original, the representation is an inferior and inauthentic simulation. The metaphysical discontinuity between these two states, and the counterfeit status of the copy, haunts and consigns mimesis simultaneously to craftiness and imperfection.[9] In mimetic representation, the idea is presented again. It is presented as a reiteration of itself, as other than itself, by a stand in, an extra. Something comes to stand there in its stead, instead of it. In a curious way, then, in standing in for the idea, the existent says that the idea is not there - that the idea is absent - that it has been replaced, displaced, or forgotten. The real sense of mimesis is that, at the moment of representation and installation, the idea withdraws. Representation is the presentation of absence in which, and as which, the eidos withdraws and conceals itself. Or else, representation is this double gesture: the forwarding-retreat of the eidos in its simultaneously both presenting and absenting itself, in its being both here and away, both near and far.[10] The experience of this is the uncanny – the unhomely (Unheimlichkeit) – but also what might be called the terror of the limit: an encounter with the stranger,[11] with oneself as one’s other self, or with death.
I carried this story with me until it exhausted me, until it was exhausted in me, until it no longer spoke, until it had nothing more to say, until it became strange to me – a stranger to me, and a stranger to itself, until its carriage became no longer viable, no longer sustainable, until it delivered nothing to me except the desire for deliverance from it, until it abandoned and withdrew from me, until it abandoned me to the deception in it, to my own deception, until it began to make room for something utterly strange in it, and yet utterly familiar: the abject, the uncanny. And this is what I suspect - that the whole point of the story is that at the same time as it presents a seamless cosmology, that cosmology, becoming unsustainable, withdraws, and presents its other and errant face. I suspect this is what Plato meant to show in the last paragraph of the Parmenides:
“thus it will be correct to condense our results in the single statement that if there is no one, there is nothing at all. Absolutely correct. Thus it seems we may make that statement, and may further add that whether there is one or is not, both that one and the others’ alike are and appear to be, are not and do not appear to be, all manner of things, relatively at once to themselves and to one another. Perfectly true.”[12]
second move: the floor of chartres cathedral
I visited Chartres Cathedral for the first and only time in 1989. I had had the building systematically encrypted for me, in great detail. I knew John James’ work, Jon Haskell had taken us through it in slides and music, Harry Stevens had mused about the mysterious alchemical blue of the glass, Peter Kollar had spoken of its layout and symbolism. Chartres loomed large, and it seemed I had always already been there, even before I came to confront the dull resistance of its silent geological face. But the building proved to be resistant to other things too – for example, it resisted its mediated arrival to me through generations of generalisations and clichés - about painting with light, about sacred geometry, about spatial symbolism.
What surprised me - in the etymological sense of being grasped up from above – was not its iconography, its massing, its scale, its geometry, its layout, its labyrinth: not even its windows. It was the floor that struck me most. Made of large, roughly scaled stone, worn smooth, the floor slopes up from the entrance to the crossing. Either side of the entrance are long steps up to each aisle. The slope seems to be in two directions – so that, walking in, and being aware of the floor changing underfoot, I felt as if I was following a ridge, sloping up before me, and away on either side. I reasoned the slope to be slight – but felt it to be steep. Chartres straddles a ridge through an ingeniously simple and very beautiful cross-section, that seemed to hold me to the ground, and to lead me on. Without geometrically centering, the space nevertheless centres. That is, it grounds and stabilises, and it does so in a remarkably strong way, while being extremely elongated both vertically and along its axis. This grounding answers something I noticed in the windows. Not the way they dematerialise the walls of the building – another cliché - rather, the way the windows and the walls work to gather and envelop a space that turns both inwards and outwards at the same time. Years later I wrote an indigestible text on this, which in part says:
“... the envelope is far from dematerialised... Its transparency is not to an outside that lies beyond its boundaries, but wholly to an inside that surpasses its limits.... To stand at Chartres is to stand inside an outside.... In this arresting experience, the outside is changed and transformed. Not that the outside, as profane, is dissolved for the sake of the sacred, or that an altered state of relationship to the world is brought about. Rather, the inside transfigures an outside by bringing us to the horizon of its radiance, by bringing us to face an encounter with its gaze towards us. The radiance of this embrace is the face that turns towards and looks. What surrounds is a seeing: the seeing of our being seen. The building sees. The radiance of its skin looks. In the shadow - in the shelter of this gaze, in the room it makes for our own beholding - we exist. We don’t leave the world - rather, the world comes to present itself to us for the first time.”[13]
What I meant to say was that, while prepared for the encounter, I had not been prepared for what I actually encountered – or maybe that I had been well prepared for an encounter with the unexpected. The building exceeded the framework that had been prepared for me – not in the sense of delivering more than I expected, but in the sense of bringing me to touch something wholly other. It was at the same time the most profound underwater space, the lightest forested clearing, the most telluric experience of earth. It was all these things in the most luminous and gleaming way, at the same time as being the deepest gloom. The dense and diaphanous atmosphere given to the space by the blue of those windows is exactly that: the deepest gloomiest shimmering gloaming. It both drowns and lifts – not one after the other, in the manner of some alternation, rhythm, or transformation - but both simultaneously, so that one is in the other, so that one is the other of the other, so that each is the trace of the other’s advancing withdrawal.
In this way, I came to understand that Chartres Cathedral is not a representation of Paradise. It represents nothing. What I was led to look for, to anticipate - the arcane, the hidden, the cryptic, the symbolic, whatever - was returned to me very simply as a surrounding encompassing.[14] Not an intellectual or disembodied experience, but a visceral and palpable one. The difficult experience of a kind of shuddering, shivering and shimmering of matter – a kind of withholding occlusion in which we find the measure of our being in the world, of our being both near and far: Mater Dei, the one who suffered, withholding (dieterei, suneterei) all these things in her heart.[15]
third move: prambanan
At Prambanan - not far from Borobodur, where I learned what siting a building really means - there are three temples to the trimurti. A triangular layout within a quadrangular enclosure: Brahma at the head, Siva and Visnu at the other corners, on either side. Each temple opposed by a smaller shrine to the god’s consort, its shakti. Viewed from the air, in plan – in any case, at a distance - the layout appears symmetrical, centred, hierarchical, rigorous. Each structure answering another by symmetrical rhythms which traverse the space between them. The three shrines surround a central space. Each deity confronts its shakti. There are major and minor spaces between the temples and shrines, interconnected and overlayed one in the other. Likwise the three shrines are scaled hierarchically – with Brahma the largest, Siva and Visnu more or less equivalent. Its a neat arrangement, easy to turn into symbolic diagrams of great significance and correspondence. But the plan, and the geometries it articulates, are a complete abstraction. They are not palpable on the ground, in the kinesthetic experience of moving about, between and around the temples.
In this moving around, it became clear to me that Prambanan was not about hierarchy, cosmic order or the representation of metyphysical realities. The spatial arrangement was entirely devoted to the experience of a kind of community, a being-with others, and a being-with the gods. A being-with which was fundamentally and intensely intimate. It was about nearness, about coming into neighbourhood – into near-dwelling with the being-together of the three gods in the trimurti. Three who are far come into a gathering proximity of care. Three come to be near one another in such a way as to envelop and make room for this being-with-others that characterises community.
fourth move: if it is a fragment
He wrote: “On the margin. Dear Michael, If it is a fragment, what is it a fragment of?”[16] This note, from one who has always valued whole over part, unity over multiplicity, came to me in the midst of a thinking, itself in the midst of a teaching, in the midst of which I was finding myself both indebted and in doubt. A few words with multiple implications. I was working through several issues with myself, performing this work in front of my students from week to week. A few timely words which moved my thinking, and prompted me to return these words to him, and to them:
“We normally think of the fragment as a fragment-of something - a residue, a vestige of what was once whole and complete and perfect. A bit without value. Dregs. Something fallen, something lesser. Trash. Fragment, fracture, fracas. Abject. Abandoned. But what if we instead thought of the fragment not as a fragment-of, but as a fragment-for. For what? For whatever it implies. For whatever comes. For whatever happens. For the advent convened by an event of thinking for the fragment, and of re-thinking this -for as destiny, as future, as the for-the-sake-of what might be gathered by and as its own fractal production. In existing for-the-sake-of, the fragment has a comportment, an ethical bearing, a duty of care. It is sacrificial. It saves. It attends the advent of a futural promise.”[17]
All of this brought me, recently, to write about this word for – about this for-the-sake-of which put into question every metaphysics of transcendence and immanence:
“Making for the sake of means making for the advent of the other in the midst of what is made, and for the sake of which what is made has been made. Made for the other. Made to gather the other. Made for the sake of the other. I am made for your sake. I am not made for you. Rather, I am made for this for, through which you also will come to be for my sake. You will come to be for my sake, and you will come to be my sake. In this for the sake of, we are called to account. We are called to account for, and to be for another. In the room made for this call, we are called to speak, and we cannot-not speak. For the sake of means: `in-that-one-there.' We must speak for the sake of that one there, of that other one, there.
To make for: a contradiction. Making for is always, and at once, both for and against. One made for the other is made-against itself: it unmakes itself. Something made is done for, lost - oblivious to the perdition which it carries. It undoes and defeats itself. Yet in this very defection, the one comes to (be) itself as such. The one presents itself - to itself and as such - in its defeat for the sake of the other. To welcome the other, to make for the other. This means: `to care for the other’ - to have the other always before one in moving near... This also means: `to forget.’ Not to mention the other. Not: `to forget to mention the other,’ but to announce the other without speaking, without naming.”[18]
This is how Emmanuel Levinas put it:
“To approach the Other in discourse, is to welcome his expression, in which at each instant he overflows the idea a thought would carry away from it. It is therefore to receive from the Other beyond the capacity of the I, which means exactly: to have the idea of infinity. But this also means: to be taught.”[19]
prelude
`A boundary is not that at which something stops but, … that from which something begins its presencing.’[20]
We end where we begin, and in order to begin – like Plato’s Hymn of Dialectics – with a `prelude to the song itself.’[21] These four moments have marked a closure for me, and they have initiated a thinking: filiation and defoliation of thought. They have taken me into proximity with the unfamiliar and the uncanny, places around which I continue to loiter, as if thought was about this very loitering, this very tarrying and deferral, this very waiting on and watching (out) for what it is that both unsettles thought and keeps it moving.
With these four moments I had wanted to say something about an errant affiliation, about having been prepared for a kind of divergence, about a kind of teaching which in spite of what it teaches and gives to teach, teaches teaching itself; in spite of what it thinks and gives to thought, thinks thinking itself; in spite of what it says and gives to speech, speaks speaking itself; and in spite of what it sees and gives to sight, sees seeing itself. A teaching, in other words, that takes one both near and far, and gives one an enduring practice.
In this way one prepares for another – that is to say, one teaches another, one makes a place for-the-sake-of the other, for the other to take up their own place, for the other to become a place for their own becoming. In this way one leaves the other, and leaves them life.
One always thinks for the possibility of what will unsettle thought, of what, in thought, thought will never think. That is to say, one always thinks for the possibility of thinking itself, for an opening to thought. One always thinks for the interminable production of thought, for its poietic potential.
One thinks for another – that is to say, one makes thinking possible for-the-sake-of the other, for the other to take up their own thinking, for the other’s thinking to be directed elsewhere, towards another, far away.
One always speaks for the possibility of what will unsettle speech, of what, in speech, speech will never say. That is to say, one always speaks for the possibility of speech itself, for an opening to speech. One always speaks for the interminable production of speech, for its poietic potential.
Again, one speaks for another – that is to say, one makes speaking possible for-the-sake-of the other, for the other to take up their own speaking, for the other’s speech to be directed elsewhere, towards another, far away.
One always sees for the possibility of what will unsettle sight, of what, in sight, sight will never see. That is to say, one always speaks for the possibility of sight itself, for an opening to sight. One always sees for the interminable production of sight, for its poietic potential.
Finally, one sees for another – that is to say, one makes seeing possible for-the-sake-of the other, for the other to take up their own seeing, for the other’s seeing to be directed elsewhere, towards another, far away.
I will close now, with words left by one to another - by Maurice Blanchot, in friendship, to Georges Bataille: words I would have liked to have written myself, which I leave you with, and which I leave here, in this strange space, for you, and for our dear friend and teacher:
“We must give up trying to know those to whom we are linked by something essential; by this I mean we must greet them in the relation with the unknown in which they greet us as well, in our estrangement. Friendship, this relation without dependence, without episode, yet into which all of the simplicity of life enters, passes by way of the recognition of the common strangeness that does not allow us to speak of our friends but only to speak to them, not to make them a topic of conversation (or essays), but the movement of understanding in which, speaking to us, they reserve, even on the most familiar terms, an infinite distance, the fundamental separation on the basis of which what separates becomes relation. Here discretion lies not in the simple refusal to put forward confidences (how vulgar this would be, even to think of it), but it is the interval, the pure interval that, from me to this other who is a friend, measures all that is between us, the interruption of being that never authorises me to use him, or my knowledge of him (were it to praise him), and that, far from preventing all communication, brings us together in the difference and sometimes the silence of speech.”[22]
Notes
[1] Martin Heidegger, ‘Hegel and the Greeks,’ in Pathways. Edited by William McNeill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, p 325.
[2] Heraclitus, Fragment 123: phusis kruptesthai philei - `being loves to hide itself.’ See Martin Heidegger, `On the essence and concept of phusis in Aristotle’s Physics B, 1 (1939), in Pathways, pp 229-30: “self-hiding belongs to the predilection of being... the essence of being is to conceal itself, to emerge, to come out into the unhidden - phusis. Only what in its very essence unconceals and must unconceal itself, can love to conceal itself. Only what is unconcealing can be concealing. And the kruptesthai (concealing) of phusis (nature) is not to be overcome, not to be stripped from phusis. Rather, the task is the much more difficult one of allowing to phusis, in all the purity of its essence, the kruptesthai that belongs to it. Being is the self-concealing revealing - phusis in the original sense.”
[3] *PER = go through, experience, travel, fare (port as demeanour, carriage of the body, behaviour; Latin: portare = carry; cf. fare, portable); Sanskrit: paraya = to conduct across; paras = beyond, further; para = away; Greek: peras = press through, pass through; poros = a ford, way; peira = an attempt; peran = beyond; Latin: peritus = experienced, experiri = to try, periculum = peril, danger; porta = gate; portus = harbour (ford); Anglo Saxon: faran = to go, fare (cf. pirate, peril, fare, fear, ford); faer = panic, fear; German: verenden = to die, to succumb, to perish – from per- = passage to the limit, traversal + enden = end; Latin: pereo, perire = to leave, disappear, perish, pass); see Jacques Derrida, J. Aporias, p. 30-1; and my `Pass,’ at http://ensemble.va.com.au/lux/pass_1.html. *PER also means to produce, afford, allot; see Latin parere = to produce, bring forth; ferre = to bear; fors = that which is produced; French: faire = to make, do; from the etymological root *BHERS = to carry, bear; cf. fores = door; portus = harbour; foris = forest – in being `out of doors,’ or `abroad,’ and foreign = (from) outside, abroad, strange; reperire = to find (part, portion, parent); French: perdu = lost and hidden - abandoned to absence (Latin: perdere), in (partition) perdition, utter (uttmost) loss, loosened (abandoned) - destitute: that is pollulating - politeia. Latin: per = through; perdurable = to last through, endure; *DHE = to place; *DHER = to hold, maintain, support; cf. Latin: forma: for- (cf. fores; forest) = outside/beyond (causally) + ma = measure; fretus = relying on; firmus = secure, firmare = confirm (firmament); ferman = mandate, order; Sanscrit: pramanam = measure, scale, authority - from pra- = before and ma = measure: ie. prescribed measured configuration, determination or boundary; cf. French: fermer = close, terminate.
[4] Greek: para = beside + logizomai = reckoning; logos = discourse, account, reason – therefore, what is beside the discourse.
[5] Plotinus, The Enneads. Translated by Stephen MacKenna. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991, p. 429.
[6] See Ananda Coomaraswamy, Selected Papers. Edited by Roger Lipsey. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977, volume 2, p. 277ff.
[7] Plato, Phaedrus: 74s; Cratylus: 432b; Laws: 667s; and see my “Poesis and Praxis: Craft Modernity and the Techne of Architecture,” in Craft in Society. An Anthology of Perspective. Edited by Norris Ioannou. Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1992, pp. 269-284.
[8] Plato, Laws: 965.
[9] Philipe Lacoue-Labarthe, Typographies. Translated by Christopher Fynsk. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998, pp. 43-138.
[10] See Martin Heidegger, `On the essence and concept of phusis,’ pp 226-7: “In this `sensed something’ that is present, something else is likewise absent, indeed in such a way that we sense what is present in a special way precisely because of this absencing... as absencing, steresis (absentness, Abwesenheit) is precisely steresis for presencing... steresis as absencing is not simply absentness; rather, it is a presencing, namely, that kind in which the absencing (but not the absent thing) is present,” and in this, there is something astonishing.”
[11] Middle English: strange; Old French: estrange; Latin: extraneum, extraneus = foreign, odd - literally `that which is without’; from extra = beyond what is necessary, without, outside; extera parte = on the outside, exterior; cf. extract - Latin: ex-trahere = to draw out; exterus = outward; cf. strangle = choke, throttle; Greek: straggale = halter; straggos = twisted, compressed; straggax = that which oozes out, a drop; Middle English: strecchen, Anglo Saxon: streht = stretch (straight, strain, strict); Latin: stringere = tighten, draw together; Anglo Saxon: streht, streccan = to stretch; see Middle English: streit; Old French: estroict = strait, narrow, close, strict; Latin: strictum, strictus = straight, strict; cf. Middle English: streen; Anglo Saxon: streon = strain, lineage, progeny; strienan, strynan = to beget; Old High German: striunan = to acquire; Middle English: streinen; Latin: stringere = stretch tight, draw with force, constrain, filter (restrain, stringent); cf. strand - Middle English: strond; Anglo Saxon: strand = margin, edge, sea or lake shore; and strand as one of a rope’s strings; Old High German: streno = cord, string; strimo = stripe; Dutch: streen = skain; Latin: stria = furrow, channel, groove (striated); from *TRE = twist, and *TER = turn; distringere, distrahere = to pull asunder, to pull in separate ways - from dis- = apart, and trahere = to draw, to betray, to punish; tradere = to deliver - *TREUD = push, crowd, urge; Latin: trudere = push, urge; Anglo Saxon: treotan = twist, throw (intrude, protrude, threaten, thrust; distribute, distract, distrain, distress).
[12] Parmenides, 166b, in A. E. Taylor, The Parmenides of Plato. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1934.
[13] Michael Tawa, `The face that turns towards and looks. Chartres Cathedral, 1989,’ in Insite at http://www.fbe.unsw.edu.au/units/pgvo/insite/tawa.htm.
[14] Environment – Old French: environner = to surround, make place for, contextualise; environ = round about - from en- = in + virer = turn around, change direction, wind; Latin: virola = ring to bind something - from *WEI = twist about (ferrule), bind, plait; Sanskrit: vaya = weave; Latin: uitis = vine, uiere = bind; Anglo Saxon: wir - wire (wind, winding). Cf. Latin: gyrare = gyrate, whirl about; *WER = surround, protect; *WERT = turn, become.
[15] Luke, 2: 51, mater autou dieterei panta ta rhematatauta en te kardia autes: his mother kept all these sayings in her heart; and Luke 2: 19, where the word is suneterei. In both cases, the root word is tereo = to guard, watch, keep (an eye on), withhold, detain; from the *TER = pass-through, reach; go through, rub, turn; Sanscrit: taras = passage, ferry, penetrating (cf. avatar - an incarnation as penetrating here from elsewhere); Greek: terma = goal, end; Latin: intrare = pass into; trans = go through; terere = bore, rub; tornare = turn. The idea of the term is associated with the action of turning, boring through, piercing; *TERQ = twist; Greek: atraktos = spindle; Latin: torquere = twist (torque, torsion, torture, track, attraction). Cf. tarry = linger, loiter, delay; Latin: tardare = to delay, hold (back); French: tarder = be late.
[16] L. Peter Kollar, note to me, 1997.
[17] See Martin Heidegger, `On the essence of ground’ (1929), in Pathways, p. 121ff.
[18] Michael Tawa, `Making-for,’ in Warm Filters. Paintings for Buildings. Adelaide: Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia, 2000, pp. 4 – 9.
[19] Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburg: Duquesne University Press, 1969, p. 51.
[20] Martin Heidegger, `Building dwelling thinking,’ (1956) in Poetry, Language and Thought. Translated by Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1975, p. 154.
[21] The Republic, 525b-532b. For Plato, the object of an education wrought within the quadrivium and completed by the "hymn of dialectic" was to lead the soul from darkness to the intellectual sun: arithmetic "compels the soul to reason" (525e), geometry "aims at knowledge of eternal being" (527b), astronomy "compels the soul to look upwards and leads us from this world to another" (529a), and music deals with "harmonious motions" (530d-531c). These 4 are "preludes to the song itself" (532d) which is "of the intellect only" (532a). Thus dialectics, "the chief strain" (532d) "alone, goes directly to the first principle" (533c), and is "the coping stone of the sciences" (534e).
[22] Maurice Blanchot, `Friendship,’ in Friendship. Translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997, p. 291.