Waiting on Value
Tom Break, Night, cut black tulle mounted directly on the wall, 11.5 x 11.5 inches, 2016.
This article is part of a series. You can find parts one, two, and three here.
In Part 3, we left Wallace Stevens on the back side of an event, a revelation. In his early poem “The Idea of Order at Key West,” he assumes that the order of the human mind and any order there might be in the world cannot be assimilated. By “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” the speaker has begun to perceive that there might be a way for human perception to open up to a non-human order, a non-human value, that it might be possible, and that indeed it must be possible. In his final poem, “Of Mere Being,” we find evidence that the crisp wall he had erected between the human and non-human orders of value had suddenly become transparent, and that he could see, with new eyes, a world replete with value that is not his own, but that belongs to the world itself.
To arrive at this new vision, this new ability to hear, something must have happened. Light has come through the window. Stevens has been able to receive that vision he desired so much. True, he has had to be patient. He has had to wait. But waiting just is the character of seeking value outside of myself, of seeking value in the world as such—as a world outside of me to which I both do belong and don’t belong. Because that value that I’m looking for is outside of me, it’s not going to be something I can deduce. It’s not going to be something within me that I can find. I have to look until it becomes visible. The attitude of waiting, while not the same as idly standing by, is essentially receptive. Because I’m trying to conform myself to the order of the real, and not to conform the real to the order of myself (as, perhaps, Walt Whitman would like to do), it will surely involve the shaping of myself into a vessel that can hold what vision could be given. I can’t take just take some bit of the world and hammer it into my own shape and presume it to be revelatory of a value outside of me. I have to hammer myself into a shape that can receive the world as it comes to me in itself, as itself.
It’s an attitude that’s generally considered laughable for someone seeking truth in our culture. We don’t really want to admit that it’s possible for something to come to someone who waits, or perhaps even to someone who doesn’t know they’re waiting, but receives the thing, nonetheless. It’s terribly inconvenient for the go-getters, for the distinguished professors and chairs of academic departments if the deep perception of the real is a matter of waiting. We prefer insights that can only be gotten by well-funded studies, so as to assure the powerful with access to funding that they control everything that can be said and “known.” We revere stories of achievement through hard work and determination, but we can neither imagine that waiting could be hard work, nor conceive of a determination to wait. We hate the poet or the artist who insists on waiting, preferring those who work hard, or at least require funding to produce their revelatory works. We prefer value that can be bought and paid for. But that isn’t the value of the world—that’s our value, human value. To get beyond ourselves, something has to happen, an event—something that can only ever be waited for.
If there is a moment in history when you might wonder whether there has been an event that has happened, surely the birth and death of Christ is paradigmatic: it’s a moment in history when we encounter a person who speaks for the non-human world in a human voice. He speaks as the Word, the logos of the world we inhabit—its reason, its sense, the ethos of its creation. He speaks with authority out of the innermost source of its proper value. And of course, it is less in words that he speaks (though the words help) and more in the shape of his life that so manifestly articulates a non-human order of value.
Abjuring bodily comfort, political power, material wealth, visible piety, and easy fellowship in favor of solitude and humiliation, torture and ignominious execution as a common criminal, the life of Christ is replete with an order foreign to ordinary human life. It’s a historical moment when the human value that constitutes the horizon of our possibilities was pierced by a vision of a value that humanity couldn’t see. Should we be surprised, then, that the value of the world as world—as other than me—the value constitutive of a human possibility that flows from the source of our being instead of out of our psychological furniture, should be invisible to us? That it should look foolish, even?
If, for Stevens, the possibility of being open to, receptive to, a world of value that is outside of and beyond the human order, was genuine, necessary, and needful, it is a mark that times have changed. Today, such a thought hardly exists outside of a religious context. It is inconceivable within our wholly secular culture. Perhaps Simone Weil’s diagnosis of the affliction of the first half of the twentieth century, the disappearance of a concept of value, has become terminal. But what Stevens shows us is that, if we take it seriously, even the disappearance of a concept of value in the world, the assertion that it can have non-human value, leads inexorably to a hope for value. It leads us to wait for it. If we take this hope for value seriously, it means that we ought to take quite seriously those moments in our lives and in our history when it seems that people have seen it.
If it is obvious enough that a non-human value, a value of the world as the world that it is outside of me, should be invisible to me if I am looking through lenses corrected to the human order of things, then the emergence of a new order of value in the wake of the life and death of Christ, or in the revelation in a work of art, or in the enlightenment experience of a monk, or in a casual moment in my day when everything is suddenly, inexplicably clear—if such value should emerge and if it doesn’t make human sense and isn’t measurable by human instruments, it shouldn’t come as a surprise. Moreover, the dismissal of it as specious on the grounds of its invisibility or immeasurability should axiomatically be taken to be irresponsible. Because that’s not the way that value, that non-human value flowing like sap under the outer bark of material existence, is going to become visible to us. If naysayers condemn it as a dream or a figment of the imagination without evidence or rational justification, the criticism doesn’t actually stand against the substance of the revelation: because a value that is not our own, that exists beyond the reach of human perception, will of course not appear to us in the usual ways. In fact, its resistance to human measure is a testimony to a veritable non-human—I would say divine—origin.
When I want the world to speak to me, to speak freely, in its own language, when I want it to reveal value in the register of its own proper being, I have to be patient. When I ask it a question, I can’t demand that it answer in categories that I have already defined (as scientists in their experiments, according to the rules of that game, can only do). When I do that, I have set the terms of what can be said and of what can be discovered. I have defined the range of value delimiting what I can hear.
Tom Break, Cross, cut black tulle mounted directly on the wall, 12 x 8 inches, 2018.
The possibility of an event, of perceiving a thing in the difficulty of what it is to be, of a momentary vision shot through with an other-worldly value, is necessarily predicated on a certain degree of silence. On listening. On waiting. Just like I must wait for other people to speak, freely, in unguarded moments if I have any hope of getting to know them for who they are, and not for who I think they might be. The hope of some true vision deep into the heart of the real, of some value spiraling out from its atomic center, and the possibility of conforming my life to what is outside of me, isn’t possible without an attitude of patient waiting for something outside of me, some vision not imagined but real, really real, to be given. It’s what Simone Weil calls “attention,” and it is the only disposition open to genuine contemplation.
Tom Break is an artist, critic, and editor at In the Wind Projects.