Proposing Perfection

The perfect, as Byars constantly tells us, is always a proposition. It is pure idea about which we can only speculate. Art is, thus, itself a form of speculation whereby material reality becomes active and dialogic. Its function is to propose what it cannot achieve. Its inevitable failure provides it with the energy to begin again. The perfect is something held in the mind, always on the fringe of becoming but impossible to realise. We see it in our mind's eye, or, more precisely, we see it in our mind's eye if our mind is willing and capable of considering the perfect. Our language determines our view of reality because we see things through it. As we phrase our world we come into the limits through which we can know ourselves. Byars readily admits: 'I have never done a perfect thing and I am aware of the questionability of the notion of perfection of an idea that I perceive or of the idea of pure ideas.' Yet, at the same time, he wishes us to consider the word 'perfect' as a serious philosophical text.

His works are, therefore, vehicles for articulating propositions about the perfect as well as material struggles to represent it. They remain philosophical in essence. He uses forms that accumulate meanings and that are charged with multicultural symbolism: the sphere, the circle, the cube, the square. These are the elements that allow him to build, amidst an aesthetics of paradox, his splendrous pleasure dome.

The sphere is a question - hermetic, self-contained, and apparently unperturbable. Flawless, it has always fascinated mathematicians and philosophers. Greg Dropkin when asked what would happen if a sphere were removed from a four-dimensional plane answered that when a circle is removed from the plane, it breaks it up into two pieces, one of which is the disc inside, the other of which is unbounded; that when a sphere is removed from three-dimensional space, it breaks it up into two pieces, one of which is a bounded ball, the other, the rest of it; that when a three-dimensional sphere is removed from a four-dimensional space, it breaks it up into a four-dimensional disc inside and an unbounded piece outside. 'The thing', he continues, 'makes more sense if you take the plane and at one point compactify it by soaking up the boundaries until you have a sphere (you can see how if you have a sphere and you take a point out, you can unfold it to a plane; well, just do it in reverse and change the plane back into a sphere); and if you take a circle out you have two discs, one the original disc you had inside; the other, the unbounded piece, has become a disc because it's been filled in up in infinity. Okay, so having made the one point compactification, you have a symmetry there.' These are, of course, the answers of a mathematician. Yet the language fringes upon the mystical. Byars similarly acknowledges that the idea of the perfect inevitably leads him towards the transcendental.

The sphere is an image of the mystery of the world. It questions. Byars has acknowledged his sympathy for Wittgenstein's thought and we think here of the Notebooks where Wittgenstein affirms that God is the world. In other words, the object of philosophical inquiry is also the object of religious feelings. It is a conclusion that seems to provide Byars with a major point of departure for all of his work, including the most ephemeral pieces. The sphere, of course, has always been infused with spiritual connotations. St Benedict saw God Himself as a fiery sphere; others have seen the sphere as the counterpart of the divine Trinity. When Thales was asked by the Seven Sages what it is that has neither beginning nor end, he answered in the first place the divine. His second answer, however, was no less interesting in that it dealt directly with the qualities of the sphere, the mathematical definition of which does not include its lack of a beginning nor its infinitude for these are not required for the primary description, although they are directly dependant upon it. This quality is immediately appreciated should we ask ourselves where a spherical body begins. Its surface is determined by the equal distance from the centre of all its points so that no distinction exists between them. We have here what amounts to a central philosophical question and for the Greeks a problem of one origin of their epistemology of the world.1

The sphere, it has been argued, is the most perfect body and the purest conceivable beauty, owing to the uninterrupted uniformity of the parts comprised from its totality. It should be remembered that the Pythagorean cosmic sphere contains all: omnia continet. When, for example, Mechtheld Von Maydeburg, the German mystic, rhetorically asks us in what shape the Lord appeared while in the act of creation, he answers that it was in the form of a globe where all things were within God. In much the same way, Johanes Lydias draws our attention to the relation between mythical sphere and the earth. He recollects them as belonging to the myths of Hades and as being carried to the underworld by the nymphs. On another level, the simple figure of the girls with the sphere and the sundial that we all know, stand for the very idea of the common fate of mankind.

The sphere is a place of origin, both a return to and a setting out from. It knows not of separation. Its condition is song. It is present in those Greek stories from the 6th and 7th centuries that were integral to the teaching of Pythagoras - stories that were collected by ancient writers such as Galen who observes:

out of the cube

earth

out of the pyramid

fire

out of the octahedron

water

out of the dodecahedron

the Sphere of all

or by Philolaus:

there are five of Sphere

earth fire water air inside

Sphere the barge makes five

or by Parmenides:

at the centre of Sphere

Fire

Byars' propositions are poetic in their essence. Poetry provides a language for the 'siting' and 'sighting' of the perfect. We all remember Shelley's famous phrase that 'poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world' and George Oppen's subtle rectification that they are the legislators of the unacknowledged world. Sartre provided an instance of what Shelley meant when he noted that Flaubert was responsible for the Commune of 1870 because he never wrote about it! Byars clearly situates himself with Oppen and wants no institutionalised function such as Shelley's words suggest. He is reaching after the unattainable and after the hidden meanings that reveal the inner nature of What Is. If Byars has glimpsed a plan for living he never forgets or loses sight of the chaos against which that pattern had been conceived. He makes all things into a occasion, an occasus or, as the etymology of the word suggests, into a falling, into a setting sun.

Byars writes in The Palace of Good Luck that the sphere is the most perfect of all structures because it comprises within itself all other shapes, that is, all regular bodies. It holds within itself many permissions. The world is itself a sphere and we lead our lives within it. It is, as Heidegger so neatly defined it, literally 'this in which'. Byars' objects partake of its possibilities for perfection at the same time as they aspire for a condition 'beyond it'. The Fire Ball, The Rose Table of Perfect (a globe of 3,333 roses), The Door of Innocence, The Figure of Question, all aspire to perfection both as aesthetic condition and as ideological project. They tremble before the dark forest and yearn to extend the field of understanding. Robert Walswer reminds us in one of his essays, Some Thoughts on Cézanne that 'the things he contemplated became eloquent, and the things to which he gave shape looked back at him as if they had been pleased, and that is how they look at us.'

The sphere in Granada becomes an echo-chamber for the voice. The sounds of Maria de la O pour forth. Byars came across these words accidentally during his first stay in Granada, thus reminding us that everything in this world is accident and that an accident is never necessarily over! Maria de la O is a Virgin, a symbol of perfection. She is represented through a perfect sound that is both closed and open to itself. Her purity is, as it were, reinforced through the vowel, through the inexplicable power of language and through the mysteries of a letter of the alphabet (think, for example, of the theories of Mallarmé or the experiments of Khlebinikov). The 'O' moves out like ripples across the water, or like a pebble dropped into infinity. Perfection pervades, persists, permeates, even as it fades and dies away. Yet, as if evidencing Byars' aesthetic of paradox, Maria de la O has accumulated, unknown to Byars, her own contradictions - contradictions that dovetail into Byars' own world: the evidence of passion and the 'false' sheen of gold. Maria de la O is also a popular song set to the rhythms of the 40s that tells the story of a gypsy girl who fell passionately in love with a wealthy landowner, abandoning her own people and the gypsy who so desperately loved her. It is not so much the meaning of the words of the songs but the sounds themselves that matter to Byars. Through repetition they assume a tantric force and superimpose themselves one upon the other as they leave the inside of the sphere, from where they emerge without the singer ever being seen. (The seen and the unseen is an important metaphor for this work both in terms of the voice and of the fact that initially Byars intended the inside of the sphere also to be gold.) The sounds contain the purity of pain and the beauty of recognition. Byars tells us in another context: 'I see the word on the breath that is poetic and romantic, but in a physical sense - that the heat of the syllable formulates a particular path through the air and it remains in some sense my breath.' The sound then, that emanates from the sphere, 'Maria de la O', is pure sound and as such a philosophical proposition. It induces us to think about nothing, as Mantra does. Byars notes: 'To think about nothing is extremely romantic. I don't know what nothing is, but to me that is an extreme romance... or to forget to think but even to say the word forget implies that you have thought and how would you identify a person in that state... Is there ever such a state?... And people say that you can think without words, but I wonder... I like a thought without words, but I say that with suspicion.'

His works are 'lived' experiences - lived in the imagining and lived in the making. I am thinking here of a quote he uses from Lyndall Gordon's Eliot's Early Years: 'by lived experience Eliot meant something wholly mental. He found that if he cast his mind into the flux between different viewpoints, and held them momentarily together he could sometimes envision a strange 'half-object', a composite of the viewpoints which yet transcend them. When he made the necessary intuitive 'leap' he discovered his power to see 'the real future of an imaginary present'. Byars, in other words, has one foot in the camp of Modernist utopias, upholding the belief in the power of the imagination to conceive the perfect. He may, on occasion, demythify it with a light smile but he finds no better function to believe in. Yet, at the same time he dismisses idealism as a negative philosophy because it is subject to logic which is the 'negation of existence' - logic and ontology can only constitute in his mind formal sciences, theories about the form of what is and what can be thought, incapable of becoming reality. Reality can never be reduced to that which can be conceptually explained.

Byars sees himself as intensely responsible in the sense of having to find an answer, one response, to the world. He would, I suspect, agree with Jabes when he writes: 'I believe a writer is responsible even for what he does not write. To write means to answer to all the insistent voices of the past and to one's own profound voice, intimate, calling to the future. What I believe, hear, feel is in my texts which say it, without sometimes altogether saying it. But what do we not altogether say in what we say? Is it what we try to keep silent... what we cannot or will not say or precisely what we do not want to say and what all we say hides, saying it differently?' For those unsaid things we are, in fact, gravely responsible. Byars' works are glimpses, intuitions, instants of the perfect when potentially we become at one with What Is. They offer themselves to the interpretative act.

His pieces show us that even things can be made to divulge the form of their desires if only we can read them. Byars' materials are often 'precious' since the precious aspires to the perfect - basalt, African granite, marble from a Greek island. He dreams of the polished surface of a glacier that may never have existed and of colours as intense as thought. He is attracted to amber and the stories that accrue to it. For the Greeks it was the solidified urine of a lynx, for the Chinese a tiger's soul or the congealing glance of a dying tiger, and for the T'ang the result of dragon's blood penetrating the ground (although for many T'ang pharmacologists it was the result of the sap of a tree that had gone into the ground and been transformed after thousands of years). Poets have always known these things. It is a matter of entering the music that lies at the heart of Nature.

Thomas Messer perceptively notes in an essay on Byars that 'more than anyone I know (he) has come to prescribe the Keatsian dictum about the identity of truth and beauty - beauty and truth. Ever in search of valid inspired insights he appears to consider the connection and relatively unfettered expression of these a self-sufficient medium for his work and art. I say, relatively unfettered since, of course, the truth-fragments collected by Byars reappear in his own inimitable manner on gold lined print on black grounds, a monochromatic unity between script and paper in a stylised over-ornamentalism and in other attenuations, all with the common purpose of revealing its content only to those capable of intuiting them or alternatively pushing those who are not, through the unusual effort in the reaching of his most hidden messages. By so doing Byars seems to be telling us that the truth and art are too important to be given free of charge and that the bonae virtues of ease and clarity merely serve to render meaningless their underlying substance. To follow James Lee Byars, therefore, you must change you life... Du musst dein Leben Andern - as Rilke has already told us with respect to art. Not easy but very important.' While accepting the general drift of these remarks, I would argue that what matters to Byars is not so much a Keatsian concern with truth and beauty as a quality that is poetically beyond them. His poetics are playful, sparkling, intuitive, subtle and free of all dogmatic intent. His writing partially hides what it says because he wants its wealth to remain accessible only to those who recognise the need to decipher it. It is a 'star-writing' that belongs to the heavens.

What, perhaps, he does share with Keats is a yearning for an eternal present unstained by immediate reality, where the imagination can be liberated from the greatness of a past that threatens to blend memories and images into a denser, more massive unit than ever existed in actuality. He also shares Keats' thirst for luxury and his abandonment to a 'negative capability' where the poet is 'certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of the Imagination.' Byars lives at ease amidst uncertainty, seeking a world that is more than a sublime projection of his own ego. He fills his sphere with the Nightingale's song! He knows the imaginative richness of mortality. He knows that human splendour has no source but the human imagination and that the truth of art may be all the truth our condition can apprehend, but it is not a saving truth!

The sphere is coated in gold. It stands, thus, as an image of the perfect, of the unattainable, of wealth, but also to lucre and capital. Byars likes these contradictions to abide within the same house. Gold is the colour of Venetian painting, of Byzantine art, of the celestial itself but it is not the only colour to which Byars feels drawn. He also knows the lure of red, blue, black, almost like the court dyers in Ch'ang-an who recognised five official colours other than white: blue, red, yellow, black and purple. To make them there existed ancient and honourable vegetable dyes to supply them: Chinese indigo, madder, gardenia, acorn, and groomwell. Mineral pigments on the other hand, were used primarily by painters to colour their pictures and by women to tint their faces: axurite for blue, malachite for green, cinnabar for red, ochre for yellow, carbon for black, and ceruse for white. Colours carry their own stories. They come laden with symbolism.

Gold is Christ and Buddha. It is El Dorado and the promised land. In China gold was found in the rugged territories of Lingnan inhabited only by aborigines. The men of the south said that gold is found where snakes' teeth drop their poison or where the dung of a serpent adheres to the rocks. The stones are broken and the places which have received the poison become raw gold. In T'ang times the native sources were in Szechwan. It was found there as flakes in deposits and called 'bran gold'. Bran gold is found in the midst of river sands and is taken by washing it out on felt. We might recall here Beuys' use of this same material and Byars' contacts with him - a performance at the opening of the Speck Collection: the unanswered letters to Beuys proposing a death lottery; the performance of the Introduction of the Sages to the Alps where Byars and Beuys walked up from opposite sides of the Furka Pass and then faded away in the mist as they greeted each other at the top; and The Perfect Death in Honour of Joseph Beuys where he made a world toast asking everybody to recall the spirit of Beuys every time they had a drink from that moment on!

My purpose in relating these anecdotes is not to explain away Byars' use of gold but to open up the world of meanings that accrue to it. Chinese lore also has it that wild onions are a sign of silver deposits and that shallots grow where gold lies hidden. Western science has recently acknowledged that certain plants respond well to metallic traces in the soil In other words, the perfect weaves its own resonances.

Gold was a powerful drug to stabilise the soul and lengthen life. Yet for Byars what matters more than all else is, I suspect, its role in the realms of the imagination. Things of wonder and divine splendour are often portrayed as gold. These ideal images were especially enriched during the times of Chinese Buddhism in T'ang by ideas that were transmitted from India. Buddha was golden and his images were equally covered in gold. The language of Buddha was said to be golden, as were his lodgings and attributes. The heavens of Manjusri were golden hued and Garuda, the bird companion of Vishnu, had golden wings. Byars himself wears a gold suit and covers his face on those occasions when he stands before us as the creator of event, as the vehicle of question. He dresses 'for the occasion' because occasions demand rituals of respect. Gold denotes the heightened presence of the imagination.

He tells us in the Good Luck Catalogue that 'Gold is the colour from nowhere' and nowhere, in Butler's terms, is 'Erewhon': a golden Utopia or a site of possibilities. Byars is not so much investigating phenomena as the 'possibilities' of phenomena. He even plays with fire and invents his own golden language of birth and destruction. It was Blake, of course, who told us that fire finds its form and establishes its own momentary fulgour of perfection. He uses lava as his material for This and This. It is a piece conceived as two identical spheres but it simply shows that however identical they may appear they are never the same. The perfect has no mirror-image, nor anything ever the same!

There is something Steinian about this title just as there is something Steinian in his insistence on the sameness and difference of the now in his equation 'is is is'. Perhaps even more to the point, is the way Byars and Stein seem to sustain some kind of Spinoza-derived vision of God as a single infinite substance. That is to say that since God is infinite, nothing can be excluded from him. This may seem a rather simple and not over-appealing statement but it clearly implies in ontological terms a significant view of the world where all things are equally important, all equally and indiscriminately divine presences. Despite our reticence before such language, we surely recognise in Byars and Stein that precisely what is strange is this - meaning that this thing as this thing is always new and unfamiliar. The more this thing 'is' the more it comes loose from the class to which it belongs, from identification and identity.

The evident sense of collusion between Vattimo's and Byars' thinking comes as no surprise. Byars clearly shares Vattimo's insistence on the need for the recovery of a Heideggerian sense of being - not, however, as centred and authoritative but as worn and weakened, as memory, as trace, and only for that reason as worthy of attention. Byars, as I have said, repeatedly emphasises the idea of 'is is is', of being as a process, as literally be-ing. Vattimo sees Byars as involved in 'the foundation of a code, the deliberate seeking of a ritual frame of mind which might lift us into the "high" atmosphere (the gold coat borrowed from the Peking Opera being one manifestation of this high atmosphere), into a situation of "conversion" where he can inhabit a world rather than possessing it.' In other words, the less anxious his glance the closer he can move to the perfect. Gold is taken as a symbol of luminous inaccessible perfection: 'as that which is not consumed. Even when it serves as the universal standard in the form of money, it still avoids consumption. It shuns the banal connotation attached to use value.'

Byars seeks to turn perfection into an expression of material reality. His objects aspire to this condition on all levels, as form, as colour, as question. Black, he says, is the inexplicable power of God that flows in absolute unity and gold is the colour of the eternal. His concerns are never predominantly metaphysical but centre rather on the power of the imagination to intensify the present.

The golden sphere not only emits the sounds of the human voice from its very core (song being in itself the high register of poetry and human speech the low) but gathers to it evocations of Andalucia's poetic past. I am thinking here not so much of the voice of Lorca but of his Arab predecessors, of Al Andalus, of a culture that was profoundly rooted in simple abstract forms and in a live poetic tradition. The Arab poet sought surprise. It is poetry that deals with the ideal conception of the beautiful, with a life of total idleness, and with refined, voluptuous enjoyment rather than with passion. Byars' works are equally dependant on their metaphorical potential and on an understanding of love as an idealisation of our search for the perfect. In the act of love we learn how utterly we are alone. Byars' work seems to drive this radical and simple paradox towards the ground of mystical experience.

Byars wants his words and objects to earn the freedom to suggest all possible meanings. They have to escape into their own mystery. He wants them to reaffirm their singularity. Singularities are surrounded and erased by factions. In history the individual is easily lost. René Thom, the mathematician who writes about catastrophe theory, shows us just how necessary singularities are. They are, he insists, precisely the points where chaos might break in or out. Byars works in flashes. Risk becomes a material. He is willing to speculate on nothing, on whiteness. He wants his sites to have a secret ministry - earth shaping earth while nourishing the spirit. He relates to the totality in which he literally stands and that totality is the shape of life itself.

Byars has constructed an aesthetic experience explicitly rooted in the ideal of perfection. Yet, in the same movement, he recognises the need for imperfection, as did the Navajo Indians in making their blankets, so as not to compete with the gods. He knows, to quote Wittgenstein, that 'to imagine a language is to imagine a form of life' and he intuits that to glimpse something in its completeness is to start to change our lives. His questions energise the present.