Good afternoon.
I'll be here just for a second.
I would like to thank, first of
all, this wonderful audience.
Thank you for being here.
I know exactly why
you've been here.
I don't think you've
sacrificed yourselves at all.
Thank you for joining with us
in this remarkable celebration
of ideas and thoughts and works.
I also want to thank
my colleagues who
have been enormously supportive
to the Mahindra Humanities
Center.
They give fully, and
they give so well.
And I thank you all
for collaborations,
for introductions, for always
being there for the center.
Sarah Razor at the
Humanities Center
has done a remarkable job in
bringing together people, food,
speakers, ideas, and
I want you to all
to give Sarah a real hand.
To the Kentridge family
for turning the Norton
lectures into a real family
occasion, our gratitude.
It's wonderful to see various
Kentridge's in various shapes
and forms, different
generations, come
in and out of these lectures.
It makes them feel enormously
close and enormously intimate.
And I thank you for being here.
Finally, I want to thank William
Kentridge for giving the 212
Norton lectures in poetry.
The Norton lectures
in how to draw,
the Norton lectures
in how to make videos,
the Norton lectures
in animation,
the Norton lectures about the
importance of the hand in art
now, the Norton lectures in
how to make everybody else feel
their lectures need to be
rewritten and restaged.
The Norton lectures in giving
us great ideas and aspirations
and confidence, the Norton
lectures in deflating our egos.
Let me introduce my
friend, Peter Galison.
I've had the privilege
over the last two years
to work with William
Kentridge on a project.
Began just about
two years ago when
David Edwards, one of our
colleagues here at Harvard,
introduced us.
And we began to think
about possible topics
that we might explore.
Right away, we were
clear that this
wasn't going to be an
illustrated science project,
and it wasn't going
to be a consulting
project from science of art.
But instead perhaps, more
like a child's turn story,
where we took turns telling each
other stories that amused us
about a period that we
both found fascinating,
the end of the 19th
century, beginning
of the 20th, when there was
a kind of visible modernity,
a moment before
things got shunted
into chips, black boxes, and
proprietary code, a moment
when modernity, everything
from machines to weapons,
wore their functions on
their sleeves, so to speak.
It was a kind of hunt
for parabolic stories,
for parables in history and
in the relationship of people
and things.
We were interested
in colonialism.
And I told him some of my
stories were about the way
that time had been distributed
in the 19th century, sent
by cables under the
water, across the oceans.
Sent over the mountains with
telegraph poles and wires.
It was a time when colonialism,
communication, economics,
and trade were all being
covered over the world
with this network
of cables at a time
before there were
even electric lights.
This visible modernity
also held its resistances,
and people cut the cables.
People didn't like having
their local time squashed.
They didn't want their
noonday sun taken away
as the arbiter of noon.
There were stories of the
meter, the burial of the meter
standard near Paris, which
came to be a kind of secular
religious event in which
this buried object suddenly
ascended to become the
world's standard of the meter.
And yet, this standard meter
and the standard kilograms
seem to be losing weight.
And the Bureau of
Standards, to their horror,
announced that it was losing
a tiny fraction each year,
which meant that in two
or three billion years,
it would be completely gone.
It would disappear
as if it had arisen,
disappeared into
the platonic realm.
So Williams said,
that's a great story.
What if we had a platonic
standard of a cat?
What if we had a
platonic standard
in a bell jar of a bicycle?
What if we had platonic
standards of everything?
And we began to imagine making
a museum of the world standards
of all the different objects.
We began to think
about pumping time.
Paris, at one point, pumped
their time with pneumatic tubes
underneath to set the clocks.
And William said, really?
They pumped time?
Well, maybe we can do
something with pumping time,
with signaling, and
we began to experiment
with optical telegraphs.
And William had the great
idea of switching it around,
so everything worked backwards.
But giant optical
telegraphs that
would mirror, and yet
go against the movements
of the human body.
We began to think about this
museum of failed objects, which
itself didn't work,
which I suppose
becomes a failed museum
of failed objects,
leading to Russell's [INAUDIBLE]
and other logical disasters.
We talked about the resistance
to Einstein's idea of twins,
and that one twin,
Einstein called it
a most big most peculiar idea.
One twin would go
out and come back,
and be younger than
the stay at home twin.
So we began to think about
duplications and fate,
and how one could separate in
one's fate from one's own twin.
William told stories
that he remembered
from childhood of Greek myths,
of stories from philosophy.
Back and forth we went,
over these two years,
meeting in snowstorms
in cafes in [? x, ?]
in Berlin, and Paris.
We worled on Skype
and by telephone,
constantly going back and
forth telling stories.
And perhaps, most strikingly
in the great workshop
that took place in the studio.
You've seen and in
several of the videos.
It's a remarkable
place that William
has made into a laboratory
for thinking and doing
with a terrific set
of collaborators,
who seem to be able to produce
almost anything any time.
We talked about black holes,
and whether things really
disappeared or whether they
left a last and lasting image.
We talked about processions
into the black hole
of clocks that began to
freeze as they fell into it.
It's been an amazing trip
these last two years,
and I think that
you've had a chance.
I've had a chance.
We've all had a chance to
see William thinking out
loud, thinking through
performance and demonstration
of what it is to use a studio
as a space for inquiry.
Something that made
the artistic project,
the philosophical
project, wound around
each other into one
extraordinarily exciting event.
It's a great pleasure to
welcome our colleague,
and my collaborator and
friend, William Kentridge.
[APPLAUSE]
When I was eight
years old, my father
took me and my sister
on a train journey
from Johannesburg
to Port Elizabeth.
And on this train journey, he
read us the story of Perseus
and the slaying of
the Gorgon Medusa
from a children's book of
stories of Greek myths.
King Acrisius of Argos asked the
Oracle how long he would live.
The Oracle declined
to give him a number,
but told him that he would be
killed by his own grandson.
King Acrisius, terrified,
had his own daughter, Danae,
locked up in a dungeon in a room
with neither door nor window.
But Zeus, the king of the
gods, saw her through a crack
in the wall, and he entered
the wall as a shower of gold,
and then he seduced
and impregnated Danae.
Quite how my father described
this part to a 9-year-old,
I'm not quite certain.
But Danae bears a son,
Perseus, and King Acrisius,
enraged, terrified, has
Danae and the infant,
Perseus, put into a wooden
chest and thrown out to sea.
But instead of sinking, the
chest and its two inmates
wash up on the shore of
the island of Seriphos,
where a shepherd,
Dictys, finds it.
The shepherd looks after Danae
and her son, and over the years
Perseus grows into a
strong, agile youth.
Meanwhile, the King of
Seriphos, Polydectes,
has heard of the
beauty of Danae,
and wants to take
her as his concubine.
But fearing the protective
wrath of her son, Perseus,
he sends Perseus on
a suicidal mission.
Perseus is sent to
kill the Gorgon Medusa.
And this is the heart
of the story of Perseus.
The Gorgon's, as we know,
are a tribe of women
too terrifying to behold.
Their hair is made of living
snakes, and to look at them
is to be turned into stone.
Another page of the
book that he was
reading which had
the image of Medusa
head to be turned very quickly.
It was to be glimpsed at,
but not to be looked at.
I mean, it fell into a category
of pictures which were too
powerful to be contemplated.
I mean, you could add to
the list images I remember.
The red enraged terrifying
head of Beethoven
in Percy Scholes' Oxford
Companion to Music,
an image of the lonely
lady in a children's
book of stories of
the Canterbury Tales.
We could add to
it the fire which
is too bright for the prisoners
in the cave to look at.
We could add to that, the sun,
which is too bright for them
and for any of us to look at.
But to get back to Perseus,
he sets off on his journey.
The gods help him.
He has given wings on his
shoes to make him swift.
He is given a cloak
of invisibility.
And he is given a
reflective shield
so that he does not have
to look at Medusa directly,
but can look at her
reflection in the mirror.
The curved child is an
anamorphic translation
of Medusa herself.
Now using these aides and
with his demigods power,
his slays Medusa.
He puts her head in a sack,
and he starts his journey home.
Perseus, who has been told
of the Oracle's prediction
that he would kill
his grandfather,
decides to return to
his ancestral land,
the island of
Hispaniola grandfather,
the now aged King
Acrisius, to show him
that he bears him no ill will.
He has no desire to kill him.
All has turned out well in
the end, or Perseus desires
to make peace with
his grandfather.
Meanwhile, the news
has traveled to Argos
that Perseus has slain
the Gorgon Medusa,
and that Perseus is
on his way to Argos.
King Acrisius, the
grandfather, immediately thinks
of the Oracle, and
knows that Perseus
is on his way to kill him.
So King Acrisius
flees his kingdom
and his island disguised
as a beggar with ashes
and sackcloth.
Perseus is approaching
the island of Argos,
but decides to stop his journey
at the nearby island of Larissa
to take part in an
athletics competition that
is being held there.
He has killed a gorgon.
He is half a god.
He has high hopes for
success in the games.
And he says that if he
wins the Laurel wreath,
he will take that and
give this Laurel wreath
as a gift to his grandfather.
He takes part in the
discus competition.
The stands are crowded.
There's expectation in the air.
He takes a stone
in his left hand.
He builds up momentum, rocking
backwards and forwards,
his body undulating
as the strength grows.
He transfers the discus to his
right hand and he launches it.
It sails over the grassy
field, past the markers
of the other competitors.
The discus soars over
the edge of the field
and into the stands.
And there in the back
row of the stands,
it strikes and kills an old
man in ashes and sackcloth.
For me, this was intolerable.
If only the grandfather
had not sat in that seat.
Why not one seat to the left
or one seat to the right?
Then he would have been safe.
Why did Perseus have
to be such a show off.
If only he'd gone straight
to his grandfather's island,
all would have been well.
Why did the grandfather
have to run away?
How could so many chance events,
so many unlikely elements,
the discus, the disguise,
the date of the athletics
competition, all
conspire to make
the predicted inevitability.
Maybe every step I took was
the wrong step, or didn't take.
Maybe every decision which
seemed so insignificant
would lead to consequences
so much greater.
Every decision was
the wrong decision.
If Perseus or his
grandfather had just
read the last page
of the book, this
could have all been avoided.
But once launched, the discus
could not be called back.
Now this the story of
Perseus is a nostos.
A nostos is a poem of return.
And all Perseus and
adventures are, in fact,
made in the course of his
return to his homeland.
The arc of the discus
complete this nostos.
A discus launched at birth,
and we await its return.
The most familiar
nostos, of course,
is Homer's Iliad and the
Odyssey, the story of Ulysses,
who sets out for the Trojan
War, spends 10 years at the war,
and then spends 10 years
returning home to Penelope
to Ithaca to kill the suitors
who are haranguing Penelope.
Some years ago I directed
an opera production
of Monteverdi's opera Il
ritorno d'Ulisse in patria.
And one of the questions we
had to solve in the production
was the relationship of
Ulisse to fortune, to fate.
I mean, Ulisse is
up against the gods
who govern the sea, the storms,
who erect or remove obstacles
to his return, and
all the obstacles he
faces on his return home.
We are at the mercy of the gods.
They are forces
beyond ourselves.
We know that all
efforts, acts, creations
are made in their shadow.
In Ulisse, it is
the gods who release
thunderbolts and storms.
Nowadays thunderbolts are
somewhat less terrifying.
We can put up
lightning protectors.
But there are still things that
exact the same terror in us.
We do not anymore have to fear
the external lightning stroke,
but we have complete terror of
the internal lightning stroke,
of the lightning bolt.
So although we do not make
libations to the gods,
and burn incense in the
temple the way we used to,
we do that in our own ways.
We forswear smoking.
We give up fatty foods.
We go to the temple of the gym.
We try to appease that part of
us which is, on the one hand,
separate from us, but on
the other hand, a part of us
we know that is at some point
going to betray us and kill us.
The lightning bolts of fate
now become internal lightning
bolts, a lightning strike of
dye around the blood vessels
of the heart, the
split and separation
between that part of
ourselves we are conscious of
and have control of and
that other self, the insides
of our body, that
dark inner self
we take for granted that sends
messages onto us with whom we
live in better or worse accord,
a dark, wet unknown we hope
will pump, digest, move for us.
The cave we know through
X-rays, other probings,
knowing that what
is growing inside us
is not only our lives.
We are caught between the
internal clock of the heart
and the inescapable
arc of the discus.
I mean, there are
displacements here.
First, the shift from
the external constraining
forces and fate to the
inside of our body.
The power of the gods
now brought inside us
to what is invisible, but
which now is both part of us
and beyond our control.
There is a second displacement.
This internal imaging of
the insides of our bodies--
MRI scans, X-rays--
this internal split--
at its simplest, this is
a split between our skin
and that which is inside
or underneath it--
obviously refers to another gap.
It refers to the gap
between who we are,
who we are aware of being, and
all the other selves we can
imagine or wish for ourselves
that we cannot reach.
We're at the brink of a
point of understanding.
We almost understand something,
but then are shut out.
We're shut out by
a phrase that keeps
repeating over and over
again in our head, which
we can't get beyond--
the 15-centimeter
circuit of the brain,
the 15-centimeter
circuit of the brain--
a block to us getting from where
we are to some further thought.
In this case, the physical
dye around the heart,
the MRI scan become ways
of envisaging other selves,
other elements.
There's the separation
between the ideas we have
and the ideas we sense we ought
to have, that we almost have.
I mean, we try to follow an
idea to make a connection,
but there is a limit where
it comes up against our skin.
We look for help from
within, as if some new idea
deserves to come
up from us, but are
left with only
the sentences that
finally emerge beyond us
and out into the world.
The idea I almost had
disappears like a dream which
we trying to bring up from the
depths of sleep to wakefulness,
only for it to
disappear as we reach
the surface when you see
the idea disappearing
into the depths.
So we take the external
world, and we bring it
inside us-- the lightning
bolt from outside
now becomes the
internal lightning
bolt-- to try to
understand who we are,
to use this physical
metaphor [? of ?] way
of understanding other gaps
and distances inside us.
And then we projected
out again, to an image
of the dye around the
heart, to an image
of the arc of the discus.
We are at the final lecture
here, and we return home here.
In all the other
lectures, I've used
as an [INAUDIBLE] some image
or some fragment of a film
from some previous
work that I have done.
And perhaps it is appropriate
in this, the final lecture,
to rather talk about
work that is still
in progress, work that will
be completed in the next two
months.
As Peter Galison
described to you,
the project I've been working
on over the last two years
but particularly
over the last year
is a project called
"The Refusal of Time,"
which is a kind of messy, boozy,
overlapping series of stories
and films, dances, and drawings.
And time is not a new
subject to bring up
in the lectures at
this stage, and when
we have been tracking time
and its transformations
in different ways through
the five lectures.
In the first lecture,
I made reference
to time turned into
celestial distance.
We talked about space
as a universal archive
of images that have left the
earth and are spreading out.
And if we could just
be at the right point,
the right distance, we would
also be at the right time
from those images.
If we were at Jupiter, we
could see the beginning
of this lecture now going past.
In the second lecture
we were concerned,
amongst many other things,
with the contraction that
happens in operatic time,
the subjective time, where
a moment of thinking can be
expanded into the four or five
minutes of an operatic
aria, where time
starts to stretch and change
shape in different material
forms.
Geological time was a
theme in the third lecture,
the 2 billion year
history of Johannesburg
and its [? meteor ?] impact,
time turned into human history
and into metallurgy.
In the fourth lecture,
we talked about time
turned into the material
distance of the studio.
A 1 and 1/2 second
sweep of the arm
turned into the 35 2-centimeter
divisions on a sheet of paper
to be drawn and erased, time
which is then held in the paper
or in a roll of film.
In lecture 5, we
talked about time
caught in a zoetrope,
an action moving forward
but still kept in
the same place.
So time has not been a
new element to bring in.
And this project,
"The Refusal of Time,"
encompasses all of these, and
continues the exploration.
Now at one point I had
hoped that this project,
"The Refusal of Time," could in
fact become these six lectures.
That did not work.
Then I hope that
these lectures would
become the basis for
that performance piece,
and that also did not work.
So we end with the
uneven resolution
here, somewhere between a
text and a drawing of a clock.
And these two projects--
the writing of the lectures,
the making of the lectures,
and the making of this
installation and performance
piece--
going in tandem.
The project commenced
and continues,
as Peter described, as an
ongoing series of conversations
with Peter Galison.
And then the team and the
project coalesced further.
Catherine Meyburgh, who
has done all the editing
of the video material in the
lectures, was part of the--
central collaborator.
Philip Miller, who
has also written
a lot of the music you've
heard in different fragments
of videos on it
came in as composer.
A costume designer, someone
to work on the sets with me--
a whole series of people
gathered together,
as if I needed an
army in support
of making these lectures.
And at this point, I
would ask, in fact,
to be joined on the stage by
some further collaborators,
some musicians from
Harvard and from Boston
who have very kindly
agreed to join
the ranks in making this army.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
The piece, "The
Refusal of Time,"
began with various
considerations
of different kinds of time.
But as it progressed,
it became clear
that it was more
and more about fate,
and our attempt to
escape from that which
insists on how and where
we are and our resistance
to this determination.
It was more than that.
It was the hope
that if I started
with a practical material--
set designs, costumes,
machinery, musical instruments,
a loaded tuba--
the direction and
thrust of the lectures
could be changed into a path
I did not know or had not
taken before, as
if I could change
not just their trajectory
but their final destination.
We've spent much time in these
lectures in the 19th century,
talking about
photography, looking
at time running backwards
in early cinema,
at attempts to codify and
capture the speed of light,
at attempts to put a European
construction and constriction
over the rest of the globe
in the form of colonialism,
all about attempts to
wrest control of the world
and to bring it to order.
Now in the mid-19th
century in Paris,
there was also an attempt
to bring time to order.
[FAINT, PULSING TUBA MUSIC]
A network of pipes and
tubes was constructed
under the streets of
Paris with the idea
of bringing hygienic
time to institutions
and citizens of the city.
A mother clock was made
with a powerful bellows,
and every minute, the mother
clock would give a pent of air,
a breath, which
would travel down
the thick pipes of
the grand boulevards,
be distributed into the thinner
pipes in the smaller streets,
and divided further
into narrow tubes that
led to the municipal
offices, the train stations,
and the private
subscribers who would all
receive this officially-approved
breath of air
in their daughter clocks.
Every minute, the clocks
would all shift one minute.
Breathe.
Wait a minute.
Breathe.
Wait a minute.
A whole city
breathing in unison,
regulating themselves
to a mistress
clock, which stood for
the idea of perfect time,
of perfect order.
[STRING SECTION JOINS TUBA]
[APPLAUSE]
Here we have a meeting
of the clock as body,
and the body as
clock, as if one way
of comprehending the world is to
take all its attributes and all
its elements and map them onto
our body, into who we are,
as if in our very breathing
we are both enacting and able
to resist time.
If we could know the number
of breaths in our lives,
the 530 million breaths
or the 490 million
breaths we take,
and then breathe
more slowly, hold our breath, in
our very bodies resisting time
coming towards us, knowing
we will run out of breath,
knowing we will always
sit in the wrong seat,
knowing that the discus
will hit us wherever we sit,
unable to stop it hitting us,
but unable to stop ourselves
from changing chairs
as if our life depended
on it, at the very
least, trying to make
the journey of the
discus be broken
by unexpected arabesques,
but still holding
our breath against time.
Now, time can be
turned into distance,
and through this, time
becomes geography.
The 19th-century
coordination of clocks
was undertaken to synchronize
clocks with stations in Europe.
The cities in Europe
would no longer
construct their individual noons
from when the sun was directly
at its zenith.
Paris and Basel would no longer
have noon seven minutes apart,
but would sacrifice
their own noon sun
for the sake of agreement
in commerce and control.
And the perfection
of chronometers
had long been the
aim of geographers,
to fix more precisely
the positions of islands
and continents in
relation to Europe.
With the spread of cables
under the sea and over land,
there followed the development
of electric telegraphy.
Time was taken from the
master clocks of Europe,
and sent out to the colonies.
These strings of cables,
these bird's nests of copper
turned the world into
a giant switchboard
for commerce and control.
The world was covered by a huge,
dented bird cage of time zones,
of lines of
agreement of control,
all sent out by the
clockrooms of Europe.
The lines on maps were
miniature renderings
of the real lines of cables
that snaked around continents
or drew great arcs across
the floors of the oceans.
The clock and the
colonial observatory
completed the
mapping of the world.
The resistance to
colonial rule--
the Chilembwe revolt of
1915, the Herrera revolt
of 1906, the movement and
actions against Europe
that spread through all
the continents and all
the colonies, well-articulated
in terms of cattle and land,
were all attempts to resist the
control and weight of Europe.
Give us back our sun.
Give us back our sun.
As if the blowing
up of a train line
could blow up the pendulum
of the European clock which
swung over every head.
[AGITATED MUSIC FOR TUBA,
 VIOLIN, TAMBOURINE, AND VOICE]
Let us look at what
this resistance means.
Entropy, as we are
all familiar, talks
about the degree of disorder
or randomness within a system.
And the resistance
we are talking about
also is about a universal
certainty showing its cracks,
the beginning of
its own disorder,
a resistance to the dictates
arriving from the center,
from Europe, and more than that,
a celebration of the cracks,
a celebration of
the fragmentation.
Entropy is a measure
of the unavailability
in a system of the thermal
energy of that system
to perform work.
Let's rather describe
it rather as a tendency
for order to dissolve
into disorder.
It refers to the
breakdown of something
that starts from its
site of generation
as a coherent thought,
a coherent object,
a coherent project, a
colonialism with everything
intact, and gradually
disintegrates,
becoming fragmentary,
so that when it reaches
its site of reception, the
distant colony, what arrives
are shards and fragments.
Concerning Entropy, Number 1.
Take a vase, use
a number 9 hammer,
and rap firmly on the rim.
Smash the thing.
All the pieces with
their half-athletes,
the discus, the tree, the
maiden, all in pieces.
Place the shards in a hat.
Shake vigorously.
Spread the evidence
and read your fortune.
Concerning Entropy Number 2.
Take a vase, use
a number 9 hammer,
and rap firmly on the rim.
Smash the thing.
[VIOLIN PLAYING]
All the pieces with the
half-athletes, the discus,
the maiden, the king, the
grandfather, the oracle,
the fisherman, the shield,
the sandals, the cloak,
the shower of gold, the
right chair, (EMPHATICALLY)
the wrong chair, the wrong
chair, the wrong chair,
the wrong chair, the wrong
chair, the wrong chair.
The train, the father,
the son, all in pieces.
Place shards in a hat.
Shake vigorously.
Spread the evidence.
Read your fortune.
Concerning Entropy Number 3.
The evidence with place.
Take a firmly maiden.
Stir vigorously the shards,
fragmented, and read.
Athletes, a hat on the
shards, all spread.
Rap rim, smash, use.
Hammer your vase,
fortune, a discus thing.
[? Hold. ?]
Concerning Entropy Number 4.
Hammer on the shards.
Maidens firmly all,
with tap discus,
place, use, fragmented
edge all thing.
Hat your fortune.
Smash shards in the air.
The evidence of vase.
Read spread vigorously.
Number 9 athletes.
[? Taker ?] and--
Concerning Entropy Number 5.
Rap maidens with your
athletes you read.
Place on the discus
spread rim the telegraph.
The breathing lung, the beaten
clock, the reel of string,
the directory, the Atlas, the
encyclopedia, the donkey--
[MUSIC BECOMES CHAOTIC]
--the prisoners in the
cave, the drive-in cinema,
the letter to the
newspaper unpublished,
the bushman family
preparing their meal,
all translations of the
panther, the rhinoceros,
the rhinoceros of the right eye,
the rhinoceros of the left eye,
waiting for the
right barrel, waiting
for the left barrel, the
wrong chair, the wrong chair,
the wrong chair, the wrong
chair, the wrong chair,
the wrong chair,
the wrong chair.
[MUSIC CALMS]
The horizon, the perpendicular,
the acute, the arcane,
the reflex, shards in a
hat, and fragmented thing.
Use all fortune.
Smash.
What is the hope?
That through the
course of the last five
lectures there are images or
thoughts that have remained
even in fragmented form.
And the invitation is to try
to hold onto the narrative,
to construct a narrative, to
prevent the different elements
from disappearing into a state
of disorder or background
radiation.
In the lecture here,
there is a note.
This won't happen.
[AUDIENCE CHUCKLES]
We have to continue.
But let us try to again trace
our journey geographically.
In lecture 1, we started
with the Cave of Plato
and the large questions.
In lecture 2, we
narrowed our focus
down to the Enlightenment
and the colonies to Africa.
In lecture 3, we came from
Africa down to Johannesburg.
In lecture 4, we came from
Johannesburg into the studio.
In last week's
lecture, we closed
in on the bookshelf of the
studio, and the poems of Rilke.
And today we continue
that investigation,
narrowing our focus down to
the two lines in the poem,
the eye of the needle.
We ended last week's lecture
talking about the lines
from "The Panther"
which are describing
a movement of the panther
as "a dance of strength
around a center where a
mighty will was put to sleep."
And there is no avoiding it.
We need to see how close
we can get to that center.
On the one hand, it is the
circle around the studio,
and the phrases going through
one's head which get repeated
again and again-- typewriter,
hat, tool chest, typewriter,
hat, tool chest, panther--
trying to stop the
limited words arriving.
On the one hand, hoping the
walk will produce something new.
On the other hand, the
walk itself lulling us
into this repetition of phrases.
The circle is also the zoetrope.
We are still
circling the circle.
The action that
continuously returns
to where it began and
repeats itself, again pushing
against expectations
never realized.
The hope that the image
will escape the zoetrope,
that it will take
us to some new land
and not just return us home.
The zoetrope becomes a
nostos on a small scale,
a panther circling in the
cage, the one end of the cage
four meters away his
Troy, the feeding bowl
at the other side, his Ithaca.
Walking continuously--
Troy, Ithaca, Troy, Ithaca--
as the panther circles the cage.
To try to get closer
to the center,
to approach from
a different angle,
why does one become an artist?
And here we go to "The Panther,"
and to the radical gap,
to the radical
insufficiency in the center.
I mean, there has to be
some gap, some lack which
provokes someone to spend
20 years, 30 years making
drawings, having to leave
tracings of themselves.
I'm sure it has to
do with the need
to see oneself in other people's
lookings at what you have made,
as if you are not
enough in yourself.
And insufficiently
in the self, a need
to be a snail, leaving a
trail of yourself as you
move through the
world, a Hansel who
has to leave a trail of
crumbs to lead you home,
to leave a report of the studio
on the walls of the studio,
the gallery, the museum.
As if it is only in the
reflection of other people
looking at these traces that
one finds one's existence.
I mean, and this is not healthy.
[AUDIENCE CHUCKLING]
I think it is one of the
reasons why artists do not
take criticism well.
[AUDIENCE CHUCKLING]
When their work is
criticized, it is not simply
an attribute or
product of themselves
that is being discussed and
evaluated, it's as if they
themselves--
I mean, every criticism
carries with it
the threat of annihilation.
And it's to avoid that this
endless production of work
around the center happens.
Can we escape who we are?
I think of myself as an
artist making drawings,
even when the charcoal is
replaced by a spoken word
or by an ink word, where we are
led by a line-- in this case,
by an ink line--
a kind of lapidary
thinking and drawing,
an embroidery of
words and lines,
to bring us to some new
image, to some new sentence,
and then to take this all back.
All the potential taken back.
All the potential
returned into the pen.
The barrel of the pen refilled.
The pen becoming
again a loaded weapon
full of every other thought
that is yet to be expressed,
but understanding that as each
word of the lecture is said,
it cuts off all the
possibility of other thoughts.
Can a drawing escape
where it is going?
When it begins, when one
is circling the studio,
everything is possible.
There is a new sheet of paper.
All the energy is
waiting in one's arm,
ready to make the decision.
But as it lands, as
it gets ready to land,
all that potential gets
limited, gets coalesced,
and it becomes a coffee pot.
[AUDIENCE CHUCKLING]
Launched again, a new sheet
of paper, new possibilities.
And while the shards are in the
air, it's possible for anything
to arrive.
But what comes?
Another coffee pot.
[AUDIENCE CHUCKLING]
There's the question of, can
we be better than we are?
Can we be other than we are?
There's the hope for
something new to arrive,
that this time, this
time, this time there
will be something different.
But what comes?
A typewriter.
Trying for something new,
and what will happen?
Can we stop the reduction
of all potentiality?
And in the end we are
reduced to making ourselves
as a self-portrait-- a
self-portrait as a rhinoceros,
a self-portrait as a typewriter,
a self-portrait as a coffee
pot, a self-portrait
as a megaphone,
all that we wish we could be.
And then there is the
[? tortuous ?] panic,
the fear that with
each decision that
is made, with the final
arrival of the image,
all other images are cut out.
The door to other
possibilities closes behind us,
and we turn in panic to
the sound of that door.
And what would we wish for?
I mean, for the shards
for once to land
as a phrase in the subjunctive
in French ultramarine,
for a diagram of a galaxy in
cobalt violet, for a griffin,
for a baby's sphinx
in one's arms,
for a clear line of sight from
the history of Greek slavery
to the complexities of
the political situation
we are in now.
We'd wish for a
painting of peonies
by Robert Motherwell in
rose madder alizarin,
for the design of a new
escapement for a watch,
for just one
unqualified, unguarded,
declarative certainty.
But even as these
possible ideas emerge,
they become so
limited, so small.
And the gap between that
part of us which feels all
that we should be gets
larger and larger,
and the only safe
space is the edge,
the margins of the circle.
I mean, I have a pile
of notebooks of lectures
begun and abandoned.
And the lectures themselves
have taken their own direction.
I mean, I would have liked to
talk about different things.
I made notes to give a
lecture about Titian,
and about the two different
paintings of Danae
and the shower of gold.
I found many interesting
comments by Michelangelo
on the condition
of modern painting,
and of the debate between
disegno and colore.
There was a second
lecture about the erotics
of looking, going from Titian
again, the glimpse of seeing
and not seeing, of
looking and not looking,
about a surfeit of looking
when a fixed gaze for too long
can turn desire to
ashes, or at any rate
just a contemplation of
varnish, pigment, and canvas.
There was to be another
lecture with very
many interesting observations
about Perseus's story of Atlas
with the world on his shoulders.
And then I discovered it was
not the world on his shoulders,
but only a map of the heavens.
So that disappeared.
There was a very good lecture
about Gandhi and [? Kausov, ?]
and the master-slave
dialectic, about the ethics
of a politics of reconciliation,
a completely vital lecture,
a very beautiful lecture.
But it had been written by a
friend of mine, and not by me.
[LAUGHTER]
These all failed.
They stopped.
And we've followed the
path we have taken.
I tried to keep away
from the studio,
not to talk about my work,
but only other people's work.
But I failed.
The lectures arrived
saying, this is who you are,
and this is all that you are,
and you shall not escape.
There's a Ghanaian proverb--
or an aphorism-- he that fled
his fate, a journey of 60
years, while he was going,
it waited him seated next
to the gutter side and it
said, come, let us eat,
my dear friend.
And when he asked it, who is it?
it said, am I not thy fate?
How do we know we are in time?
We listen to the
pips on the radio.
We watch the conductor as
the downbeat of his baton
is broadcast to all
members of the orchestra.
We stand closer to each other.
And we set our watches.
We rely on the breath
coming from the mother clock
down to our daughter clock,
receiving the impulses,
to check we are synchronized.
And if we move further
apart from each other,
we send signals, and
wait for a return signal,
and measure the
difference between the two
signals, the sending and
receiving of signals.
And after adjusting our
watches for the difference,
we say that we are in time.
Now once it was established
that the speed of light
was always invariant what had
to give up its central position
was time itself.
From 1905, all the coordination
of 19th-century clocks,
the rationality of science,
the meter, the kilogram,
all the relationship from
Newton to the French Revolution,
was thrown into disarray.
Just as it seemed that perfect
timekeeping was feasible
it was shown to be impossible.
A single universal
time no longer held.
It was shown that
as you get further
away from the center of the
Earth, time passes more slowly.
An atomic clock placed at
my feet, and an atomic clock
at my waist, and one at my
head go at different speeds.
As you get further
up the body, it
was found that clocks
run more slowly.
As bodies move faster, their
clocks run more slowly.
A clock at the equator runs more
slowly than one at the pole.
The platonic inviolate
universal clock and time
is not operating.
We each have our own clock.
The Ghanaian aphorism
that I read to
is retold in 1905 by Einstein.
There are twins.
One twin brother stands on
the platform of a station,
and he ages more
quickly than his brother
in the carriage passing
through the station.
Their clocks, synchronized
at birth, are out of kilter.
A new accommodation has
to be made between them.
Take a larger journey.
One twin sets out for a journey
in space, and one stays behind.
They wave to one another.
Together their waves
are coordinated,
but then offset by the sending
and receiving of waves.
And the traveling brother's
wave gets larger and slower.
His hand is hardly moving.
The unmoving upraised hand
pushes the brother away.
While to the traveling brother,
his brother on the shore
is more and more agitated.
His waving arm oscillates
faster and faster
until the farewell gesture
becomes a vibrating fist.
The traveling twin has
a journey of 20 years.
But so much happens
on this journey--
adventures with
Gorgons, with Atlas
carrying the world on his
shoulder, with sirens,
with witches--
that the 20 years he is
away seem a lifetime.
For the twins staying at
home, the days are the same,
and the years that past
disappear into the sameness.
The 60, 80, 200 years
he waits for his brother
feel at the same time
no time and an eternity.
And when the messenger comes
to say, we must celebrate,
for he who has
voyages has returned,
the one at home, now so aged,
can only look up and say, who?
This split of twins
that we have observed
at different points
in these lectures,
in the gap between the
abilities of the self
and the abilities
we wished we have,
between the abilities of
the self and the shadow
of the self, the speed, the
agility, the dexterity of one's
own shadow, it is of
me but more than me.
It is in the split between
the artist as maker
and the artist as viewer
and the gulf between them.
And I am aware of other twins.
I am aware of the
self in Johannesburg
writing these notes, projecting
them to myself here in Harvard.
Myself here in Harvard
now, thinking back
and cursing the
self in Johannesburg
for not having got it right,
for not having written better
notes, leaving me high and dry.
Do not complain.
[AUDIENCE CHUCKLING]
These notes are sufficient.
It's up to you to use them well.
I mean, all the possible things
he could have written about,
all the possible things I
could have been speaking about,
reduced to this.
What do you need, big
statements, answers
to universal questions?
The artist reveals
mystic truths.
You could at least--
he could at least have written
about the responsibilities
of the artist, the
duties of the artist,
and the obligations
of the artist.
The duties of the artist--
[PAGES RUSTLING]
I have it here, under
Duties of the Artist.
Put fresh water in the dog bowl.
[LAUGHTER]
Number 2, work.
Work?
No, "work" crossed out--
play.
Play.
"Work" crossed out.
Play.
Play.
Number 4--
Work--
--work--
--crossed out--
Play.
Sleep.
[AUDIENCE CHUCKLING]
The artist is at work
even when he is asleep.
I mean, such wide
ambition reduced to this.
I mean, there was
not a word said
about Clement Greenberg and his
visit to Johannesburg in 1975.
[LAUGHTER]
I have written about what
happens in the studio.
He has not written
a word about art
in the era of
multiple biennales.
[AUDIENCE CHUCKLING]
I have spoken about what
happens in the studio.
He has not once mentioned
Mr. Derrida or Mr. Foucault.
[AUDIENCE CHUCKLING]
We did refer to GWF Hegel.
John Rawls and Frantz Fanon were
in lecture 2, on the colonies.
But after the second
draft, they left.
[LAUGHTER]
Does he really think there is
no place for an intellectual
in the studio?
I am not saying that.
They should be
invited in for coffee.
[LAUGHTER]
But generally, while
the work is being made,
they are better on the
bench outside the door.
He takes his chances with
that answer in the space,
too smug by half.
Am I correct when I say
that we have returned
to where we began, using the
Socratic method of question
and answer?
I had not noted it, but
that is so, inevitably so.
And is the Socratic method not
appropriate to this university?
Let us not go down that road.
[LAUGHTER]
There are three more pages
of notes and dialogues
that continue here--
three more pages.
All right, all right, enough.
All right.
You've had stupidity as a theme.
Enough.
I give you my blessing.
I write the note
in Johannesburg,
"stop writing," at to 2:10 PM
on the 25th of February, 2012.
You have five minutes on your
own to say what you'd like--
make it up, improvise--
before we get to the concluding
section of these lectures.
Patience.
Ithaca is in sight.
[AUDIENCE CHUCKLING]
You may begin.
It seemed like a good
idea at the time.
[LAUGHTER]
There are still four
minutes and 30 seconds.
[AUDIENCE CHUCKLING]
So this is the point at
which to invoke John Cage.
[LAUGHTER]
And just be quiet.
[LAUGHTER CONTINUES]
They do talk about
fire being made
both by the logs-- a poet
writes about fire being made
by the logs and the
space between the logs,
that a fire is made by the
fuel and the absence of fuel,
in the way that a
lecture is made by words
and the absence of words.
And it strikes me
that what we need now
are more gaps between the words.
That at this stage, after all
these lectures, what I need
is a Trappist vow of silence.
So we can return to John Cage.
But it also strikes
me that what you
have in the very
center of the studio,
in the center of the life
drawing class, but the model,
being observed by everybody
else in the studio,
standing quietly in the center?
So we have John Cage
and this artist's model.
I mean, there is
a question of what
will happen when these
lectures are finished
and I go back to Johannesburg,
back to the studio,
and what will the
activity be when I begin?
And there's a sense, I
suppose, that the first thing
is to forget the
lectures and get back
to the work of drawing.
And there are many
things that I've
seen that know will be used
when I get back to the studio.
There was an astonishing
drawing of six pillows
by Durer that I saw
in the Metropolitan
Museum, a mixture of the
softness of the pillow
and the hardness of the
lines of the quill pen
he was using to
make the drawing.
And the question is whether
one can continue to use this--
find the softness
and the hardness that
would go together, and to see
whether the same technique
of ink drawing could
be taken further
as a way of finding
how one could
produce a similar softness,
to see about the softness.
And there is a question of
going on with the ascent,
with a different ascents
we're talking about,
to make an ascent--
[SHRILL WHISTLE]
--out of.
[AUDIENCE CHUCKLING]
If I may interrupt,
there was a section
here that we meant to
put in that I forgot--
that we forgot--
about collisions,
about particular
collisions, before we
get to the final section
on the black hole,
about the artist running around
the studio in one direction,
and the other artist,
the other self,
running around in
the other direction.
We were talking about Ulysses.
And I meant to
bring in Tennyson.
Alfred Lord Tennyson and
Ulysses, and little prophets
that an idle king, wadda, wadda,
wadda, something, something,
something.
Though much is
taken, much abides.
Tennyson.
We can do a collision between
Alfred Lord Tennyson and Samuel
Beckett.
Between Samuel Beckett
and Alfred Lord Tennyson--
to strive, to find--
To fail-- to fail better.
And not to yield.
And not to yield.
I didn't want us to forget.
All right, you still
have another two minutes.
See what can be rescued.
There's a question of whether,
do I believe in these lectures?
I think that after
giving the lectures,
after writing the lectures,
I believed in them all.
But mainly after
you hearing them,
I believe in them a lot more.
I mean, do I believe
in the broken promises
of the Enlightenment that we've
been speaking about a lot?
And I think I do.
I do in both, both in the
promises that are made
continuously, and in the
condition in which we live,
in which they are
endlessly broken,
as if we are in a zoetrope
of the Enlightenment,
seeing things coming towards
us-- democracy, emancipation,
freedom--
and continuously tripping
over them as they
arrive, but still wanting
the chairs with those on them
to keep coming towards us.
I think there's a belief in
the philosophical claim--
30 seconds.
--of the studio.
OK.
Whether whatever communications
ideas have happened here
in these lectures have, in fact,
been a reference to the place
where the real making
of meaning happens
with me, which is
in the material,
in the form, whether it's
a film, a piece of theater,
a drawing, or the
form of a lecture.
As if these lectures signal
towards other spaces--
10 seconds.
--where other engagements and
ideas can find this space,
which is where they
become a membrane
between the outside world and
the material inside the studio.
Now the twins, of course,
that you've seen referred,
back to the stereoscope we
referred to in lecture 4,
the double-image left
eye and right eye
that we construct into a
coherent illusion of stability
and coherence.
And this is what
the artist does--
takes the fragments, the
shards, and rearranges them.
From the broken bicycle
handlebars and saddle,
he makes a bull.
He tries to distract
the inconsolable child.
Here, look at this.
With our hands, we can
make a shadow on the wall--
an old woman, a bird, a horse.
The meaning is always a
construction, a projection,
and not an edifice, something
to be made and not found.
There is always a
radical incoherence
and a radical instability.
And all claims to
certainty can only
be held together via a text,
a threat, an army, a fatwa,
a sermon that hold the
fragments in an iron grip.
And we return to the beginning
ready to enter the cave again,
but this time carrying
the rusted bicycle frame,
carrying the box of
broken pottery, the bones
of the [? lost ?]
rhinoceros, ready to take
our place in the procession,
to throw our shadows
onto the walls of the cave.
We come to the dark center
of the panther's walk.
When mass is huge, gravity
grows until it is irresistible.
A black hole traps all
that passes, allowing out
of its gravitational
field no object, no light,
no trace of light that
has been attracted to it.
A black hole the
size of a full stop
swallows the sentence,
as they swallow
a house, a city, a galaxy.
The journey of the projection
of an image comes to an end.
Perseus, Danae, the
grandfather, the zoetrope,
the 8-year-old on a train
journey with his father,
all the volumes of the
library, they're all
swallowed by the black hole.
[HALTING MUSIC IMITATES RADAR
 BLIPS]
[STEADY METRONOME CLICKING
 ENTERS]
[MUSIC GROWS IN INTENSITY AND
 VOLUME]
Is all gone, none
to be retrieved.
Entropy forbids all elements
from entering the black chasm.
As an object approaches a black
hole, its wavelength lengthens.
Slowing down, it becomes
redder and redder.
The information and attributes
separate from the object
and remain as strings--
as vibrating strings,
as twists, as knots,
as cat's cradles of
information vibrating
at the edge of
the event horizon.
The bank at the
edge of the river
Styx where Charon deposits those
headed for the black darkness
of Hades.
But he keeps in his boat those
attributes they have shed--
a suitcase of teeth, a pile
of shoes, a sheaf of words,
an old stone discus, held in
trust, waiting to be decoded,
for the shards to be
rearranged to be made new.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
