Taped to the wall above my desk is a promotional postcard from Poetry Magazine. A quote from the editor, Christian Wiman, reads: “Let us remember that in the end we go to poetry [or art] for one reason, so that we might more fully inhabit our lives and the world in which we live them, and that if we more fully inhabit these things, we might be less apt to destroy both. “ It feels increasingly challenging to fully inhabit our lives and the world in which we live them. Robert Pogue Harrison argues that Western civilization promotes ‘institutions of dislocation [I would add disconnection] in every dimension of both social and cultural existence’, and this has led to an ‘aggravated confusion about what it means to dwell on the earth’(198-9). In attempts to negotiate this confusion, I am exploring ways of knowing, documenting, sensitizing, and measuring to enrich my understanding of the space between myself and what we have come to accept as ‘the natural.’ To “more fully inhabit” seems to necessitate firsthand experience and a heightened sensory awareness of surroundings. This idea of full inhabitation is something I am exploring in my work. I would like to consider, speculate, and reflect on larger issues using my particular relationship to the natural world as a point at which to begin. I am grounding my investigations in two sites, which comprise one place for me. One site is my backyard from ages three to eighteen, and resides in my memory. The other site is a few blocks away from my current San Francisco apartment and is also functioning as a surrogate for that initial stomping ground, and the site for my project field research.

Wednesday, April 4

Day 3: The Edge of Certainty

I had just taken a “water sample” from one of the green ponds in the park, meaning I had just filled a used water bottle with the bright green liquid, trying not to fall in. I planned to look at it with my new digital microscope to see if I could reveal new layers of the park. I was walking toward the road when I was asked, “You a scientist?”

I probably did look like a scientist more than an artist. It was not the first time I had been asked about science in reference to my work. What I am after is an aspect of science that was shamed and buried during the Enlightenment. I was investigating in avoidance of answers; trying to find a place to dwell for a moment, in what I can only call wonder.

“Since the Enlightenment, wonder has become a disreputable passion in workaday science, redolent of the popular, the amateurish, and the childish. Scientists now reserve expressions of wonder for their personal memoirs, not their professional publications. They may acknowledge wonder as a motivation, but they no longer consider it part of doing science” (Daston, 14-15). I am engaging in a constant observation that delves beyond the scientific in the sense that I am not bound by hypotheses or limits of reason. These experiments, or encounters are more in the service of dwelling more fully in my relationship to my surroundings. Most often, they are attempts at connection with or knowledge of something that isn’t fully knowable. Jung writes of our inability to perceive anything fully or comprehend anything completely:

He can see, hear, touch and taste; but how far he sees, how well he hears, what his touch tells him and what he tastes depend upon the number and quality of his senses. These limit his perception of the world around him. By using scientific instruments he can partly compensate for the deficiencies of his senses. But the most elaborate apparatus cannot do more than bring distant or small objects within range of his eyes or make faint sounds more audible. No matter what instruments he uses, at some point he reaches the edge of certainty beyond which conscious knowledge cannot pass (p.21).


It is this edge of certainty that I find most compelling.
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