The question asked by a character in Sartre’s play Morts Sans Sépulture, ‘Is there any meaning in life when men exist who beat people until the bones break in their bodies?’, is also the question whether any art now has a right to exist; whether intellectual regression is not inherent in the concept of committed literature because of the regression of society. But Enzensberger’s retort also remains true, that literature must resist this verdict, in other words, be such that its mere existence after Auschwitz is not a surrender to cynicism. Its own situation is one of paradox, not merely the problem of how to react to it. For these are used to create something, works of art, that are thrown to the consumption of a world which destroyed them. The so-called artistic representation of the sheer physical pain of people beaten to the ground by rifle-butts contains, however remotely, the power to elicit enjoyment out of it. the moral of this art, not to forget for a single instant, slithers into the abyss of its opposite. The aesthetic principle of stylization, and even the solemn prayer of the chorus, make an unthinkable fate appear to have had some meaning; it is transfigured, something of its horror is removed. This alone does an injustice to the victims; yet no art which tried to evade them could stand upright before justice. Even the sound of despair pays its tribute to a hideous affirmation. When genocide becomes part of the cultural heritage in the themes of committed literature, it becomes easier to continue to play along with the culture which gave birth to murder. there is one nearly invariable characteristic of such literature. It is that it implies, purposely or not, that even in the so-called extreme situations, indeed in them most of all, humanity flourishes. Sometimes this develops into a dismal metaphysic which does its best to work up atrocities into ‘limiting situations’ which it then accepts to the extent that they reveal authenticity in men. In such a homely existential atmosphere the distinction between executioners and victims becomes blurred; both, after all, are equally suspended above the possibility of nothingness, which of course is generally not quite so uncomfortable for the executioners. Committed works all to readily credit themselves with every noble value, and then manipulate them at their ease. Under fascism too, no atrocity was perpetrated without a moral veneer. Those who trumpet their ethics and humanity in Germany today are merely waiting for a chance to persecute those whom their rules condemn, and to exercise the same inhumanity in practice of which they accuse modern art in theory. In Germany, commitment often means bleating what everyone is already saying or at least secretly wants to hear. The notion of a ‘message’ in art, even when political radical, already contains an accommodation to the world: the stance of the lecturer conceals a clandestine entente with the listeners, who could only be truly rescued from illusions by refusal of it. “That invisible, intangible and artificial being, that mere legal entity” the best medieval legal scholars had spent hundreds of years struggling with the notion of the legal nature of those great public “corporate bodies,” the Church and the State. Throughout legal history, each successive extension of rights to some new entity has been, theretofore, a bit unthinkable. Consider, for example, that the claim of the United States to the naval station at Guantanamo Bay, at $2000-a-year rental, is based upon a treaty signed in 1903 by José Montes for the President of Cuba and a minister representing Theodore Roosevelt; it was subsequently ratified by two-thirds of a Senate no member of which is living today. The popular conception of the Jew in the 13th Century contributed to a law which treated them as “men ferae naturae, protected by a quasi-forest law. Like the roe and the deer, they form an order apart. the fact is, that each time there is a movement to confer rights onto some new “entity,” the proposal is bound to sound odd or frightening or laughable. This is partly because until the rightless thing receives its rights, we cannot see it as anything but a thing for the use of “us”—those who are holding rights at the time. The relationship between our attitudes toward women, on the one hand, and, on the other, the more central concern of this article—land—is captured in an unguarded aside from our colleague, Curt Berger: “. . . after all, land, like woman, was meant to be possessed. . . .” Recently, a group of prison inmates in Suffolk County tamed a mouse that they discovered, giving him the name Morris. Discovering Morris, a jailer flushed him down the toilet. The prisoners brought a proceeding against the Warden complaining, inter alia, that Morris was subjected to discriminatory discharge and was otherwise unequally treated. The action was unsuccessful, on grounds that the inmates themselves were “guilty of imprisoning Morris without a charge, without a trial, and without bail,” and that other mice at the prison were not treated more favorably. “As to the true victim the Court can only offer again the sympathy first proffered to his ancestors by Robert Burns. . . .” The Judge proceeded to quote from Burns’ “To a Mouse.” The whole matter seems humorous, of course. But what we need to know more of is the function of humor in the unfolding of a culture, and the ways in which it is involved with the social growing paints to which it is testimony. Why do people make jokes about the Women’s Liberation Movement? Is it not on account of—rather than in spite of—the underlying validity of the protests, and the uneasy awareness that a recognition of them is inevitable? A. Koestler rightly begins his study of the human mind, ACT OF CREATION (1964), with an analysis of humor, entitled “The Logic of Laughter.” And cf. Freud, Jokes and the Unconscious, 8 STANDARD EDITION OF THE COMPLETE PSYCHOLOGICAL WORKS OF SIGMUND FREUD (J. Strachey transl. 1905). (Query too: what is the relationship between conferring of proper names, e.g., Morris, and the conferring of social and legal rights?) Thus it was that the Founding Fathers could speak of the inalienable rights of all men, and yet maintain a society that was, by modern standards, without the most basic rights for Blacks, Indians, children and women. There was no hypocrisy; emotionally, no one felt that these other things were men. The reason for this little discourse on the unthinkable, the reader must know by know, if only from the title of the paper. I am quite seriously proposing that we give legal rights to forests, oceans, rivers and other so-called “natural objects” in the environment—indeed, to the natural environment as a whole. As the reader will discover, there are large problems involved in defining the boundaries of the “natural object.” For example, from time to time one will wish to speak of that portion of a river that runs through a recognize jurisdiction; at other times, one may be concerned with the entire river, or the hydrologic cycle—or the whole of nature. One’s ontological choices will have a strong influence on the shape of the legal system, and the choices involved are not easy. On the other hand, the problem of selecting an appropriate ontology are problems of all language—not merely of the language of legal concepts, but of ordinary language as well. consider, for example, the concept of a “person” in legal or in everyday speech. Is each person a fixed bundle of relationships, persisting unaltered through time? Do our molecules and cells not change at every moment? Our hypostatizations always have a pragmatic quality to them. See D. HUME, Of Personal Identity, in TREATISE OF HUMAN NATURE bk. 1, pt. IV, § VI, in THE PHILOSOPHICAL WORKS OF DAVID HUME 310-18, 324 (1854); T. MURTI, THE CENTRAL PHILOSOPHY OF BUDDHISM 70-73 (1955). In LOVES BODY 146-47 (1966) Norman O. Brown observes: The existence of the “let’s pretend” boundary does not prevent the continuance of the real traffic across it. Projection and introjection, the process whereby the self as distinct from the other is constituted, is not past history, an event in childhood, but a present process of continuous creation. The dualism of self and external world is built up by a constant process of reciprocal exchange between the two. The self as a stable substance enduring through time, an identity, is maintained by constantly absorbing good parts (or people) from the outside world and expelling bad parts from the inner world. “There is a continual ‘unconscious’ wandering of other personalities into ourselves.” Every person, then, is many persons; a multitude made into one person; a corporate body; incorporated, a corporation. A “corporation sole”; every man a parson-person. The unity of the person is as real, or unreal, as the unity of the corporation. In different legal systems at different times, there have been many shifts in the entity deemed “responsible” for harmful acts: an entire clan was held responsible for a crime before the notion of individual responsibility emerged; in some societies the offending hand, rather than an entire body, may be “responsible.” Even today, we treat father and son as separate jural entities for some purposes, but as a single jural entity for others. I do not see why, in principle, the task of working out a legal ontology of natural objects (and “qualities,” e.g., climatic warmth) should be any more unmanageable. Perhaps someday all mankind shall be, for some purposes, one jurally recognized “natural object.” Even where special measures have been taken to conserve them, as by seasons on game and limits on timber cutting, the dominant motive has been to conserve them for us—for the greatest good of the greatest number of human beings. Conservationists, so far as I am aware, are generally reluctant to maintain otherwise. As the name implies, they want to conserve and guarantee our consumption and our enjoyment of these other living things. In their own right, natural objects have counted for little, in law as in popular movements. As for the first objection, natural objects can communicate their wants (needs) to us, and in ways that are not terribly ambiguous. I am sure I can judge with more certainty and meaningfulness whether and when my lawn wants (needs) water, than the Attorney General can judge whether and when the United States wants (needs) to take an appeal from an adverse judgement by a lower court. The lawn tells me that it wants water by a certain dryness of the blades and soil—immediately obvious to the touch—the appearance of bald spots, yellowing, and a lack of springiness after being walked on; how does “the United States” communicate to the Attorney General? For similar reasons, the guardian-attorney for a smog-endangered stand of pines could venture with more confidence that his client wants the smog stopped, than the directors of a corporation can assert that “the corporation” wants dividends declared. We make decisions on behalf of, and inn the purported interests of, others every day; these “others” are often creatures whose wants are far less verifiable, and even far more metaphysical in conception, than the wants of rivers, trees, and land. Here, too, we are dogged by the ontological problem discussed in note 26 supra. It is easier to say that the smog-endangered stand of pines “wants” the smog stopped (assuming that to be a jurally significant entity) then it is to venture that the mountain, or the planet earth, or the cosmos, is concerned about whether the pines stand or fall. The more encompassing the entity of concern, the less certain we can be in venturing judgements as to the “wants” of any particular substance, quality, or species within the universe. Does the cosmos care if we humans persist or not? “Heaven and earth . . . regard all things as insignificant, as though they were playthings made of straw.” LAO-TZU, TAO TEH KING Why should the environment be of importance only indirectly, as lost profits to someone else? Why not throw into the balance the cost to the environment? I propose going beyond gathering up the loose ends of what most people would presently recognize as economically valid damages. The guardian would urge before the court injuries not presently cognizable—the death of eagles and inedible carbs, the suffering of sea lions, the loss from the face of the earth of species of commercially valueless birds, the disappearance of a wilderness area. One might, of course, speak of the damages involved as “damages” to us humans, and indeed, the widespread growth of environmental groups shows that human beings do feel these losses. But they are not, at present, economically measurable losses: how can they have monetary value for the guardian to prove in court? The answer for me is simple. Wherever it carves out “property” rights, the legal system is engaged in the process of creating monetary worth. One’s literary works would have minimal monetary value if anyone could copy them at will. Their economic value to the author is a product of the law of copyright; the person who copies a copyrighted book has to bear a cost to the copyright-holder because the law says he must. Similarly, it is through the law of torts that we have made a “right” of—and guaranteed an economically meaningful value to—privacy. (The value we place on gold—a yellow inanimate dirt—is not simply a function of supply and demand—wilderness areas are scarce and pretty too—, but results from the actions of the legal systems of the world, which have institutionalized that value; they have even done a remarkable job of stabilizing the price). I am proposing we do the same with eagles and wilderness areas as we do with copyrighted works, patented inventions, and privacy: make the violation of rights in them to be a cost by declaring the “pirating” of them to be the invasion of a property interest. If we do so, the net social costs the polluter would be confronted with would include not only the extended homocentric costs of his pollution (explained above) but also costs to the environment per se. How, though, would these costs be calculated? When we protect an invention, we can at least speak of a fair market value for it, by reference to which damages can be computed. But the lost environmental “values” of which we are not speaking are by definition over and above those that the market is prepared to bid for: they are priceless. But even if damage calculations have to be made, one ought to recognize that the measurement of damages is rarely a simple report of economic facts about “the market,” whether we are valuing the loss of a foot, a foetus, or a work of fine art. Decisions of this sort are always hard, but not impossible. We have increasingly taken( Human_ pain and suffering into account in reckoning damages, not because we think we can ascertain them as objective “facts” about the universe, but because, even in view of all the room for disagreement, we come up with a better society by making rude estimates of them than by ignoring them. Nature is a continuous theatre in which things and species (eventually man) are destined to enter and exist. The ontological problem would be troublesome here, however; when the Nile overflows, is it the “responsibility” of the river? the mountains? the snow? the hydrologic cycle? Alfred’s Laws (A.D. 871-901) provided, for example, that a tree by which a man was killed should “be given to the kindred, and let them have it off the land within 30 nights.” Id. at 19. In Edward I’s time, if a man fell from a tree the tree was deodand. Id. at 24. Perhaps the liability of non-human matter is, in the history of things, part of a paranoid, defensive phase in man’s development; as humans become more abundant, both from the point of material wealth and internally, they may be willing to allow an advance to the stage where non-human matter has rights. For my part, I would prefer a frank avowal that even making adjustments for esthetic improvemens, that I am proposing is going to cost “us,” i.e., reduce our standard of living as measured in terms of our present values. Yet, this frankness breeds a frank response—one which I hear from my colleagues and which must occur to many a reader. Insofar as the proposal is not just an elaborate legal fiction, but really comes down in the last analysis to a compromise of our interests for theirs, why should we adopt it? “What is in it for ‘us’?” Many of our so-called “material comforts” are not only in excess of, but are probably in opposition to, basic biological needs. Whatever the origins, the text is quite clear in Judaism, was absorbed all but unchanged into Christianity, and was inflated in humanism to become the implicit attitude of Western man to Nature and the environment. Man is exclusively divine, all other creatures and things occupy lower and generally inconsequential stature; man is given dominion over all creatures and things; he is enjoined to subdue the earth. . . . This environment was created by the man who believes that the cosmos is a pyramid erected to support man on its pinnacle, that reality exists only because man can perceive it, that God is made in the image of man, and that the world consists solely of a dialogue between men. Surely this is an infantilism which is unendurable. It is a residue from a past of inconsequence when a few puny men cried of their supremacy to an unhearing and uncaring world. One longs for a psychiatrist who can assure man that his deep seated cultural inferiority is no longer necessary or appropriate. . . . It is not really necessary to destroy nature in order to gain God’s favor or even his undivided attention. Furthermore, societies have long since passed the point where a change in human consciousness on any matter will rescue us from our problems. More than ever before we are in the hands of institutions. These institutions are not “mere legal fictions” moreover—they have wills, minds, purposes, and inertias that are in very important ways their own, i.e., that can transcend and survive changes in the consciousnesses of the individual humans who supposedly comprise them, and whom they supposedly serve. (It is more and more the individual human being, with his consciousness, that is the legal fiction.) The legal system does the best it can to maintain the illusion of the reality of the individual human being. Consider, for example, how many constitutional cases, brought in the name of some handy individual, represent a power struggle between institutions—the NAACP and a school board, the Catholic Church and a school board, the ACLU and the Army, and so forth. Are the individual human plaintiffs the real moving causes of these cases—or an afterthought? When we recognize that our problems are increasingly institutional, we would see that the solution, if there is one, must involve coming to grips with how the “corporate” (in the broadest sense) entity is directed, and we must alter our views of “property” in the fashion that is needed to regulate organizations successfully. For example, instead of ineffectual, after-the-fact criminal fines we should have more preventive in-plant inspections, notwithstanding the protests of “invasion of [corporate] privacy.” A radical new conception of man’s relationship to the rest of nature would not only be a step towards solving the material planetary problems; there are strong reasons for such a changed consciousness from the point of making us far better humans. If we only stop for a moment and look at the underlying human qualities that our present attitudes toward property and nature draw upon and reinforce, we have to be struck by how stultifying of our own personal growth and satisfaction they can become when they take rein of us. What is it within us that gives us this need not just to satisfy basic biological wants, but to extend our wills over things, to object-ify them, to make them ours, to manipulate them, to keep them at a psychic distance? Can it all be explained on “rational” bases? Should we not be suspect of such needs within us, cautious as to why we wish to gratify them? "A tree. A rock. A cloud." . . . "The weather was like this in Portland," he said. "At the time my science was begun. I meditated and I started very cautious. I would pick up something from the street and take it home with me. I bought a goldfish and I concentrated on the goldfish and I loved it. I graduated from one thing to another. Day by day I was getting this technique. . . . . . . . . . "For six years now I have gone around by myself and built up my science. And now I am a master. Son. I can love anything. No longer do I have to think about it even. I see a street full of people and a beautiful light comes in me. I watch a bird in the sky. Or I meet a traveler on the road. Everything, Son. And anybody. All stranger and all loved! Do you realize what a science like mine can mean?" To be able to get away from the view that Nature is a collection of useful senseless objects is, as McCullers' "madman" suggests, deeply involved in the development of our abilities to love-or, if that is putting it too strongly, to be able to reach a heightened awareness of our own, and others' capacities in their mutual interplay. To do so, we have to give up some psychic investment in our sense of separateness and specialness in the universe. And this, in turn, is hard giving indeed, because it involves us in a flight backwards, into earlier stages of civilization and childhood in which we had to trust (and perhaps fear) our environment, for we had not then the power to master it. Yet, in doing so, we-as persons-gradually free ourselves of needs for supportive illusions. Is not this one of the triumphs for "us" of our giving legal rights to (or acknowledging the legal rights of) the Blacks and women? The Vietnam war has contributed to this movement, as it has to others. Five years ago a Los Angeles mother turned out a poster which read "War is not Healthy for children and other living things." It caught on tremendously—at first, I suspect, because it sounded like another clever protest against the war, i.e., another angle. But as people say such things, and think about them, the possibilities of what they have stumbled upon become manifest—in its suit against the Secretary of Agriculture to cancel the registration of D.D.T., Environmental Defense Fund alleged "biological injury to man and other living things." A few years ago the pollution of streams was thought of only as a problem of smelly, unsightly, unpotable water i.e., to us. Now we are beginning to discover that pollution is a process that destroys wondrously subtle balances of life within the water, and as between the water and its banks. This heightened awareness enlarges our sense of the dangers to us. But it also enlarges our empathy. We are not only developing the scientific capacity, but we are cultivating the personal capacities within us to recognize more and more the ways in which nature—like the woman, the Black, the Indian and the Alien—is like us (and we will also become more able realistically to define, confront, live with and admire the ways in which we are all different). The time may be on hand when these sentiments, and the early stirrings of the law, can be coalesced into a radical new theory or myth—felt as well as intellectualized—of man's relationships to the rest of nature. I do not mean "myth" in a demeaning sense of the term, but in the sense in which, at different times in history, our social "facts" and relationships have been comprehended and integrated by reference to the "myths" that we are co-signers of a social contract, that the Pope is God's agent, and that all men are created equal. Ever since the first Geophysical Year, international scientific studies have shown irrefutably that the Earth as a whole is an organized system of most closely interrelated and indeed interdependent activities. It is, in the broadest sense of the term, an "organism." The so-called life-kingdoms and the many vegetable and animal species are dependent upon each other for survival in a balanced condition of planet-wide existence; and they depend on their environment,. conditioned by oceanic and atmospheric cur- rents, and even more by the protective action of the ionosphere and many other factors which have definite rhythms of operation. Mankind is part of this organic planetary whole; and there can be no truly new global society, and perhaps in the present state of affairs no society at all, as long as man will not recognize, accept and enjoy the fact that mankind has a definite function to perform within this planetary organism of which it is an active part. In order to give a constructive meaning to the activities of human societies all over the globe, these activities—physical and mental—should be understood and given basic value with reference to the wholesome functioning of the entire Earth, and we may add of the entire solar system. This cannot be done (1) if man insists on considering himself an alien Soul compelled to incarnate on this sorrowful planet, and (2) if we can see in the planet, Earth, nothing but a mass of material substances moved by mechanical laws, and in "life" nothing but a chance combination of molecular aggregations. . . . As I see it, the Earth is only one organized "field" of activities—and so is the human person—but these activities take place at various levels, in different "spheres" of being and realms of consciousness. The lithosphere is not the biosphere, and the latter not the . . . ionosphere. The Earth is not only a material mass. Consciousness is not only "human"; it exists at animal and vegetable levels, and most likely must be latent, or operating in some form, in the molecule and the atom; and all these diverse and in a sense hierarchical modes of activity and consciousness should be seen integrated in and perhaps transcended by an all-encompassing and "eonic" planetary Consciousness. . . . . Mankind's function within the Earth-organism is to extract from the activities of all other operative systems within this organism the type of consciousness which we call "reflective" or "self"-consciousness—or, we may also say to mentalize and give meaning, value, and "name" to all that takes place anywhere within the Earth-field. . . . This "mentalization" process operates through what we call culture. To each region of, and living condition in the total field of the Earth-organism a definite type of culture inherently corresponds. Each region is the "womb" out of which a specific type of human mentality and culture can and sooner or later will emerge. All these cultures—past, present and future—and their complex interrelationships and interactions are the collective builders of the Mind of humanity; and this means of the conscious Mind of the Earth. Increasingly, the death that occupies each human’s imagination is not his own, but that of the entire life cycle of the planet earth, to which each of us is as but a cell to a body. How far we are from such a state of affairs, where the law treats “environmental objects” as holders of legal rights, I cannot say. But there is certainly intriguing language in one of Justice Black’s last dissents, regarding the Texas Highway Department’s plan to run a six-lane expressway through a San Antonio Park. Complaining of the Court’s refusal to stay the plan, Black observed that “after today’s decision, the people of San Antonio and the birds and animals that make their home in the park will share their quiet retreat with an ugly, smelly stream of traffic. . . . Trees, shrubs, and flowers will be mown down.” Elsewhere he speaks of the “burial of public parks,” of segments of a highway which “Devour parkland,” and of the park’s heartland. Was he, at the end of his great career, on the verge of saying—just saying—that “nature has ‘rights’ on its own account”? Would it be so hard to do? how one person enables the work of the next THE PROBABILITY THAT ONE PERSON COULD ARRIVE BY CHANCE AT A SITE OF A PORT CITY — MEANS THAT THE ARRIVING PERSON IS UNLIMITED IN CULTURE OF ORIGIN — ARRIVING FROM ANY PLACE AT ANY TIME MAKING ANY PERSON THE COLLEAGUE OF THE NEXT PERSON — i.e. in a port city — Geo-philosophy states in concert with Geo-aesthetics — that a work for one person arriving by chance — is a work for the terrestrial population; & being potentially in concert with presences of any terrain. THE SUN IS A CONSTANT OF THIS WORK BEING WELL AS WELL IN ONE PLACE AS ANOTHER WITH THE AIR THE WATER THE EARTH IN THE GEO-AESTHETICAL PROCESS OF PRESENCING; I.E. CHOICE-MAKING FROM SECOND TO SECOND — CHOOSING ONLY WHAT IS NECESSARY FOR ANY PARTICULAR CONDITION — AS IS THE CASE IN COMPOSING MUSIC & SCULPTURE — THE QUALITY OF EVOLUTION IS AN AESTHETICAL INTERCHANGE THAT TAKES THE WHOLE OF ANCESTRY INTO CONSIDERATION — & THE ADVENTURE OF CONSCIOUSNESS AS A CONSTANT HERE’S TO THE TALKING AIRS >> THE WINDS >> THE ATMOS FERA HERSELF >> WITH EACH CO-INHABITANT TAKING PART IN THE EXCHANGE OF BREATHING & GIVING ATTENTION THAT INCLUDES MEMBERS OF THE ANIMAL & PLANT WORLD — NONE OF WHOM ARE OBJECTS OR SUBJECTS; BEING PRESENT STATES BEING SENTIENT— KNOWING PAIN & PLEASURE & MOST CERTAINLY BEING ACTIVE IN INTER-CONVIVIALITY — WITH THE MEDIATION OF THE DANCE OF THE DOLPHINS THE MEDIATION OF THE DANCING EVENING GULLS THE GNATS’ DUSK-DANCE — THE SQUARE DANCE OF THE MOUNTAINEERS OF THE VIRGINIAS — THE DANCES OF THE HOPIS THE TEWA SUNUP TO SUNDOWN DANCE — THE NAVAJO HOMES MADE OF THE EARTH — THE GREAT AMERICAN PROTO-SCULPTURE OF THE ANASAZI — CHACO CANYON BEING A CULTURAL CENTER OF THE AMERICAS THAT TOUCHES THE OTHER PROTO-CULTURES IF HAVING MEMORY IS PART OF HAVING CONSCIOUSNESS & WHAT OF THE AIR GIVING DIRECT BODILY CONTACT TO ANY ANCESTOR FROM ANY PERIOD — HAVING TAKEN IN THE SAME AIR — WITH THE NITROUS OXCIDE USED BY ANY BREATHER TENDING TO STAY STABLE OVER UNCOUNTED TIME — THERE IS NO ONE FAMOUS FOR ONLY 15 MINUTES — EACH PERSON / PERSONAGE IS FAMOUS FOR THE MILKY WAY’S TIME IN REGARD — WORKS OF ART ARE NOT COUNTABLE NOR ARE PERSONS — EACH EXHALATION WHETHER TRANSPARENT OR FILLED WITH A SOUND COULD BECOME PART OF THE MAINLY YET UNNAMED EXCHANGE OF GEO-PHILOSOPHY IN ITS PRESENCING bringing with it time of time — then with the humorous saying that the sun does not go back — neither does the earth or a person a single word is a sculpture already— with each letter being an exhalation. ( does philosophy reside in the hands or medium— ) the sun enters from the street as a living body unpredictable in intensity or coloration. This work continues to be connected to the improvisation of music — of being a student of dance & much later filmmaking. It concertizes as well with the filmic process of the Chumash Indians — who implicitly state in their great masterpiece cave paintings — that the entire surface of the earth PARA DEISOS is the image-in motion being played by the sun — & is for being traversed with the honor of inter-presencing.    A person may have a profession or employment. Nevertheless, so much is patterning of domesticity — linoleum, leaf shadow, book spine. Most citizens wash cups. We’re dumped into these sketched spaces by whatever. Psychology pours from our objects. The lovely splash of blue-white water on sculptured stoned makes the whole city sparkle. Aquatic architectures alleviate our cares so that we may begin to annotate what our bodies can do with time. Why are our fountains not truly bombastic Why shouldn’t we seek to describe happiness? After initial excursions among the office buildings and little parks and squares, we are delighted to discover that the modest water features of our city are not planned civic expenditures but mostly private or corporate gifts. It is the unique fate of the gift to be consistently misinterpreted by the receiver. We enjoy thinking of our peninsula as a sort of liquid-filled decorative paperweight. The archive abounds in such ritual niceties. Documents there represent a dreamily democratic polis where citizens walk about and freely linger at the cafés along the commercial streets, where neighbours meet and chat over drinking fountains at lunchtime or coffee break, where ‘unconventional’ lifestyles add vitality to the streets, where the day is a tissue of little social relaxations and enhancements. In this archival city, to sit, to relax, to walk, to find relief, are public actions. In a mood of such civic insouciance we open the file called ‘Flags, Forest fires, Fountains, Gifts, Gold, Inaccuracies, Indian place names, Monuments, and Memorials.’ Corporate fountains drooling goofily. Public fools. Some fountains are wigs and some are crinolines. There are fountains that imitate the pure physiology of laughter and fountains that want us to act like knowledge. There are fountains that play between standards so deeply seductive and there are fountains of rawness, fountains of spit, fountains of dictionaries. We have set out to sketch the terrain of a future analysis. It is not yet the time to present findings. Our method will compile the synthesis of bodily intuitions, historical research, friendship and chance. Music and food will also play a part. We intend to eat in the restaurant called Rain. We do expect that each of these economies will find its antithesis in a fountain somewhere, that inquiry will erupt from its own methodological grid like syllables from our teeth and lips. We expect to be deliriously misinterpreted. We fountain, always astonished by the political physiology of laughter. How should we adorn mortality now? This is a serious political question.    Irene Díaz in DAR A LUZ Improvised castañuela accompaniment for the travel of one sunray leaving the sun’s surface & arriving on her hand’s surface; wearing the daily dress of M.N; This performance takes place one week before giving birth to her son. DAR A LUZ can be the name of the cave Los Casares Riba de Saelices — in concert with this personification of the first moment. t h e s y m p h o n y o f t h e c h a p a r r a l s i t e s c i t e s i t s e v e r y t o n e t h r o u g h w i n d s t o u c h i n g e a c h l e a f “— oh really — this work at this museum is sponsored by another museum—“            the pedestrian walkway is the surface of the painting the plane of interpersonal attention is the surface of the painting the growing — transmuting earth is the surface of the painting Another work proposed at that time is still unrealized in Berkeley: the museum is emptied of all artworks & is opened to the passage of the sun & any persons - during 7 terrestrial rotations: continuously for 168 hours That work could not be realized as the Hans Hoffmann bequest stipulates that his paintings may never be taken off the walls. Yet the 24 hour open work is continuous & is realized in other sites One such work is realized at the Kunstmuseum Luzern in 1993 in which the museum is emptied of my drawing exhibition for 24 hours & is open to the sun & the full moon & any person arriving. Emissaries of the sun: 4 candles in 4 rooms. This work is exactly timed & prepared over three years with the Kunstmuseum Lucerne team. What interests me in any discussion is first of all — the inter-rooted words that enable sculpture — as colleagueship — the quality of being a colleague also carries — the cousin if a presence has memory does it have a form of consciousness? at times I build conditions for people which they could find directly between themselves also without my being there — instruments of sculpture. Other times — I’m there in an open place to meet anyone who arrives by chance or by choice who may wish to give some time for realizing a project. In a park of other open place. I consider that as sculpture as well. “Those things that came across as revolutions — came across as light.” Here light with its double meaning — the quality of illumination & of being weightless. M. N. Is light also referring to the earth — with the changing rotations of the earth – constantly enabling shifting points of view — with the dynamics of different luminosities — L. W. Before we talked about the Hopis — you said that at one point they found it to be an insult to say thanks for something. Is thanking a kind of recognition? M. N. Yes. I’d originally interpreted it as — thanking would set what’s done apart from the processes of nature. L. W. But then you said that recently — a past chief of the Hopis had told you — that now instead everything is being thanked for? M. N. Does it seem to have the same meaning? Meret Oppenheim — walks through the Park Lullin with me & brings me to the site of her work — under trees & bushes: what at first might seem to be nearly made by nature itself becomes potentially a representative of a lake with introduced plants — the oldest being a horsetail referring to the time of the dinosaurs — yet she gives no definitions to the work — even now unanswered is — could this be the present Geneva’s LAC LEMAN — or is this its origin — does this water carry a floating form — if it is not a boat — what meanings would it have — M. N. “an ongoing fire” always in the present tense the sun will not go back there is no “historical sunlight” or repetition. It would be out of context for this work to be named “an installation:” the sun & the person cannot & will not be “installed.” I. W. Light is primary language is derived from it language is the form that we give to light. M. N. Light is also atmosphere — the air produced by the light could be used to form a word or a sound — I. W. (The red flower you are holding seems to be attached to you — like a child.) M. N. (It’s a one-day flower — a way to look at the sun.) WOULD READERS & WRITERS MEET AS COLLEAGUES WOULD A BOOK SUPPORT THE BUILDING OF A COMMUNITY WOULD A BOOK ENGENDER MEETINGS BETWEEN A LISTENER A READER A SPEAKER A WRITER A SINGER A DRUMMER A DANCER WOULD EACH TO EACH SEARCH SUCH A MEETING OR WOULD IT OCCUR BY CHANCE FOR WHO IS THE TEACHER OF THIS WORK — IS SEEN THE PRESENCE OF THESE TWO TREES IN THEIR ROLES AS PRO-TECTORS — THE SEQUOIAS OR PROTO-BUILDERS LIVING IN A CIRCLE WITH EACH OTHER CAN SEND NOURISHMENT & WATER FROM THE ROOTS OF ONE TREE TO ANOTHER — WHEN NEEDED; WITHIN THE DECADES OF MY WORKS IN DIFFERENT PLACES TO FIND THE BEGINNING OF MEANING — THE SOCIAL STRUCTURE OF THESE TREES ARE A CONSTANT THAT CAN BE RECONSIDERED AT ANY TIME IN THE CONJUNCT CONSTRUCTIONS OF LANGUAGE— IN WHICH THE TERMS COLLEAGUE & COUSIN HAVE COINCIDING ROOTS. In your process - an unsigned work could be situated directly on the sidewalk of a busy street — where anyone could pass by; it stays where it starts — with no signs attached — & this could become a work of art — right in its original context where it is if a person arriving by accident chooses to give it personal time & attention; You’re not signing your work on the street — instead — it could be found & identified by an unknown person — going further — you take the risk of its not becoming a work of art at all. given is a book as a museum-in-hand & as a de-chronologization of the so-called RETRO-spective which in the case of this work is an inoperative misnomer — neither the sun & the person can be going backwards — here is a PROTO-SPECTIVE for the works’ presences in place & in place of memory The medley-in-me—call it the MM, or the MiM Nudity is always an exam. The mind is examining the body. One breast is examining the other breast. The lamplight is examining the eyebrow. The buttocks are joined together to grade the exam. Is there such a thing as a non-sexy omniscience? No. It’s always sexy to know, always sexy to spy, always sexy to partake of someone else’s consciousness, especially if that person thinks that her consciousness is ringed round by impenetrable fences. I was the queen of wall removal. You insisted on a transparency that often worked as an anti-aphrodisiac. You weren’t turned on by my see-through consciousness. Sometimes I needed a pebble, as it were, to stand in the way of perfect viewing. I did not stint on pebbles. But you insisted that I ask for the pebble. You never offered a pebble of your own accord. A gratis pebble is not perfectly a pebble. You wanted me to pay for my pebble by begging for it. Yes, I wanted a plea, from your mouth, in your own words, to substantiate the pebble, and make it froth. A pebble can’t froth. Disagree. The obstructions to perfect visibility are often in a frothing state. The fences froth? Yes. The walls, separating my mind from yours, are capable of perpetual foam. And so the foam abets the obstruction? the foam decreases transparency? Yes, the foam impinges on our omniscience. Did the foam make you feel more nude, or less nude? She observed me while I slept. “Do you take mustard?” she asked. “Take mustard where, take mustard how?” I replied, in my sleep, but half-awake already, eager to begin the day. Darling, I’m trying to reproduce, in words, the time we pressed our groins together on the beach. You were attempting to console me; I’d been fired from Vogue. I later, when we returned to the city, I went back to Vogue’s office and discovered that I’d been granted a stay of execution. But, do you remember, you came with me, to Vogue, and stood near me in the hallway outside the editor’s office; and when she offered me a chance to write a profile on Jacqueline du Pré, and I tried to explain to her that the unparalleled cellist had died long ago, you quickly intervened? You and I leaned against the vitrine of trophies that Vogue had won in the journalism wars; once more, as on the beach, we pressed our groins together. This frottage—this out0of-place friction—partook of the journalism war’s amorality; we, like fourth-estate warriors, had lost touch with Hannah Arendt’s belief that anti-Semitism catalyzed totalitarianism. We were not bigots; we were not readers of political theory. we were gossips, flirts, hacks—unemployed tricksters, trying to cop a feel in the corridors of power. Would we succeed in hijacking power, or would it kick us in the gallbladder? Now came the moment when you brought out your camera. Many times before, you’d photographed me—nude, clothed, unweeping, driving, carousing, on divans, on trampolines, in cabooses, near verandas. You’d photographed me in every variation suggested by Josef Albers in his guide to posing—his vanished treatise on how bodies, when placed athwart each other, leak chiaroscuro, like a trickle of motor oil beginning to form a milky skin in the Texas light. Here, in the Vogue hallway, you took my picture. I tell people only a certain amount of our sexual history. By omitting details, I become a mistress of parts, a segmenter, whose actions of cropping have a sombreness to be found in the Book of Daniel, if Nina Simone were to sing it. Outside the editor’s office, I leaned against a mirror. My right nipple, reflected in the opaque glass, rebuked every totalitarian tenets of the media’s war against my sovereign desire. My desire retained sovereignty by pretending to ignore your camera. I revealed too much of myself, by feigning indifference to your Leica. Health, as Arendt knew, came from a mirror-like integration between soul and body; because my soul was tainted not only by frottage in a Vogue hallway but by my aggressive distortions, my weal would disintegrate. I’m trying to reproduce this disintegration for you, today, because at heart I am a character in a collage by Jess, and I can’t exit the collage, except by fervent, exacting speech. If you would put down your camera, look me in the eye, break your fast, and say “I recognize you,” I could continue my subtle acts of warfare against stillness and ossification. Later that afternoon, we returned to the beach, one hundred miles outside the city. I drank a milkshake, purchased on the boardwalk; and you found, in the milkshake—or so you would tell me, in the future—an echo of the solicitude I’d long ago shown you, in an early bedroom scene, when I’d kissed your flanks. How the residue of lost solicitude—a memory of flank-kissing—can surface again in a milkshake sipped on a winter beach is a puzzle that only Jacqueline du Pré’s unreleased recording of Kol Nidrei can solve.