A Sense of Taking Part
In which I travel to Venice and knock on the stone's front door.
I knock on the stone’s front door.
‘It’s only me, let me come in.
I want to enter your insides,
have a look around,
breathe my fill of you.’
You’re reading Wislawa Szymborska’s poem Conversation with a Stone. The stone responds bluntly:
‘Go away,’ says the stone.
I’m shut tight.
Even if you break me to pieces,
we’ll all still be closed.
You can grind us to sand,
we still won’t let you in.’
Cities are obviously stony, all manner of hard materials covering up and towering over soft soils. But it applies regardless of material. At times all the world’s a stone that says: you can grind me to sand; I still won’t let you in. ‘In’ is a tricky concept.
A few weeks ago, when it was still spring proper, I noted:
Chestnuts offer their flowers proudly upwards to blue. Every other homefront wisterical1. Spent some time traveling slowly on the water. Saw nests everywhere, in all the nooks under all the bridges. Every structure an invitation to take part. Most structures more generous than they realise.
All of these nests are feral. All of them contain plastic. This is how the city’s next generation of birds enters the world. Welcome, welcome. It’s warm right now, it’s green & serene. Your foremothers and fathers have built up tolerance to the pollution. In other words, the water’s fine.
I knock at the stone’s front door.
‘It’s only me, let me come in.
I’ve come out of pure curiosity.
Only life can quench it.
I mean to stroll through your palace,
then go calling on a leaf, a drop of water.
I don’t have much time.
My mortality should touch you.’
A lot of the time, people — artists, but not only artists — stroll into the realms of ecological thinking and practice like this, like curious flaneurs, ready to notice, to appreciate, and move on. I do it too.
Earlier this month I hatched the outrageous plan to travel to Venice for a weekend to attend the New European Bauhaus Summit titled ‘Archipelago of Possible Futures’. Why? Because I desired very much to be in the room where it happens. Where what happens? ‘A new European vision for culture, ecology and technology.’ Where they make Europe’s structures and systems beautiful, sustainable, inclusive, so goes the hook. Where they let art-science connect the twin transitions, build a suspension bridge from the tower that is the sustainability transition to the tower that is the digital transition. By ‘let’, I mean fund. The NEB, if I understood correctly, is where the European Green Deal is translated into financial incentive for a cultural movement, a widely-told, read and lived story for a Europe that is beautiful, sustainable, inclusive. If you think this is repetitive, it’s because it’s a catchy refrain and I’m drilling it in. It’s been stuck in my head, might as well get stuck in yours, too.
It’s only me, I thought, squinting my eyes at the screen that promised to take me there. Let me come in. Let me in, let me in, let me in. I don’t have much time. None of us do, but I want what you want. I want to think with you, work with you.
Attendance was free, anyway. I booked a plane ticket there and a bus ticket back.
‘I’m made of stone’, says the stone,
‘and must therefore keep a straight face.
Go away.
I don’t have the muscles to laugh.’
Before dipping my toes (figuratively only, because the water’s not fine) into La Serenissima, I’d promised to attend another function: The inaugural Gentle Disco at ‘Plaats de Kleine Aarde’ in Boxtel.
You might not know what any of part of that sentence means, so I’ll break it down for you:
De Kleine Aarde is a farm, a foundation and a testing ground in Boxtel which, since 1972, has offered pioneers the space to experiment with ecological agriculture, sustainable energy and different ways of living.
a Gentle Disco is part of the practice around artist Arne Hendrik’s mycelium towers. I’ve written about them before. Using waste mycelium blocks from oyster mushroom farms, Arne builds towers which make space, wherever they are built, for surprising little ecosystems to take root. In order for the blocks to become good building material, they need to be flattened. This has become a celebratory ritual: the blocks are laid out into a dance floor, a DJ is hired, free beer is provided, and for two hours in the late afternoon, everybody is invited to exchange their shoes for white sports socks and gently dance on the mycelium.
Let me put on my academic hat for a moment, just because I see it lying on the shelf over there catching dust and I think it goes well with my outfit today:
“Culture generates desire — for vehicles and appliances, for certain kinds of gardens and dwellings — that are among the principal drivers of the carbon economy”, Amitav Ghosh writes in The Great Derangement. Culture emerges from the practices of artists and writers; it also emerges from meaning-making habits. The culture around the Gentle Disco, Arne hopes, is generating open-ended desire not for vehicles and appliances, but for a different kind of relationship:
The word “gentle“ is so important: It’s not just a disco, it’s a Gentle Disco. We are gently dancing with another life form, and we have no idea what that means, but we understand that it’s a physical experience and that it is slowly building a culture that has not been before, an imaginary space that was not available to us. Like an abstract painting, we don’t know what it will trigger in the people who do the dancing. I don’t know, some paths towards a different type of future or a different type of relationship with the soil that they walk on, maybe there will be a sort of resonance between the feet of all those people who danced here and the earth that they will travel over in the coming decades.
Now let’s thread the needle, stay with me:
I knock at the stone’s front door.
‘It’s only me, let me come in.
I don’t seek refuge for eternity.
I’m not unhappy.
I’m not homeless.
My world is worth returning to.
I’ll enter and exit empty-handed.
And my proof I was there
will only be words ,
which no one will believe.’
Do you believe me? I get the feeling that I can explain it to death — sports socks, pigeon masks, a DJ who was famous in the 80s! — and it still won’t let you in. Or maybe you’re the stone in this case? You’ll just have to come to the next one.
Inaugural, I forgot to address. Inaugural: a ceremonial installation or consecration (from Latin inaugurare, ‘take omens from the flights of birds’!).
For the past years, the Gentle Disco took place monthly at Mediamatic, now it has moved to Boxtel: a good-life place with an archive of magazines dating back to the 70s, five decades of care (literally) flowering. Idyllic, I’m tempted to say, at least at first glance and second glance. I want to apprentice myself to it immediately.
I found that idea, to apprentice oneself to a place, in David Abrams’ The Spell of the Sensuous. Apprentice yourself to a place like a sorcerer’s apprentice to a sorcerer.
There’s a beach in Venice, Arne told me on the train to Boxtel — not really a beach, more an assemblage of rocks, seaweed, driftwood, plastic. He saw it there years ago and thought it was just simply amazing. It’s next to a wall around a sports court. You have to climb a wall and wade through two meters of water to get to it. He started spending time there, filming. Even took a group of students to visit it years later. They all came up with such good work inspired by it, he said. It’s just a fantastic place.
He sent me the coordinates. I promised to visit. He said: Oh, but I hope you’re not expecting anything much.
I think you’ve got to apprentice yourself to a place in order for it to begin to consider to let you in. In imagination, and in practice. What does it take?
Curiosity, of course, and something rarer, a really roomy consciousness.
In one sense, it’s chicken & egg:
imprinting — of a place on me2
apprenticing — of me to a place
In another sense, apprenticing takes willingness & work. For some people that work appears to be like hatching, inevitable. Then again, hatching is an event. Whereas traipsing around the mud for worms and crumbs, that’s a practice.
Here’s the best part of Szymborska’s poem:
‘You shall not enter, says the stone.
‘You lack the sense of taking part.
No other sense can make up for your missing sense of
taking part.
Even sight heightened to become all-seeing
will do you no good without a sense of taking part.
You shall not enter, you have only a sense of what that
sense should be,
only its seed, imagination.
It’s a fun exercise to divide all the worlds’ verbs, all the things you can do, into ‘taking part’ or ‘not taking part’. Here’s an exemplary, arbitrary little list:
Holding a grudge is not taking part. Flipping tiles is taking part, smelling the flowers is taking part, finding a beetle in your hair and telling it ‘this is not a place of honour’, and placing that beetle gently somewhere else is taking part. Flying to Venice is taking part in the sense that it’s what everybody seems to be doing. Taking the bus back from Venice to Amsterdam is taking part because it brings the distance home to your body. Speaking up is always taking part, but really listening is, too. Going to church is taking part because rituals are taking part: Harvest festival is taking part. Dancing on mycelium is taking part. Is 3D-printing a house out of local clay taking part? Uncertain. Is posting on Instagram taking part? Kind of. Is art taking part? Yes. Is curating? Depends. Is art critique? Depends. Is art funding? Yes.
But wait, wait! Where are we now?
In the room where it happens. Landed at 8:20 in the morning, stepped on a bus, off a bus, walked forty minutes through the city, which is empty, quiet, recovering from biennale opening night parties. We’re sitting on an uncomfortable chair in an empty church, prepared to listen to roundabout eight hours of talks about making Europe beautiful, sustainable, inclusive. Taking part: Inhaling and exhaling, filtering the air which transports the voices of the people who make it happen. At the same time, not taking part: There is no time for asking questions.
It sounds like a case of the ‘Venice Virus’, cautious voices had warned me in advance, we get that here a lot: Art-climate summits that fly everyone in for a tax-deductible weekend of self-congratulatory conferencing with no regard for acute local realities, ecologies, struggles.
Still, greenwashing seemed to me too blanket and uncaring of a critique. Clientelism, explained over a dinner of artichokes prepared five different ways, gets at it closer: Fund whom you know, whom you trust, for predictable results. Let those who speak the language determine the language. Not a spiral, not a wave, just a circle.
The program split the twin transitions fairly neatly in two: ecology in the morning, digital transformation in the afternoon. I won’t go into the details, it’s all here. The taking-part: designers learning from children and fish. And the not-taking-part: fifty shades of art-science solutionism. The black-suit-no-breaks formula. Not dressing up as rivers, as forests, as fires. Not playing very much at all.
In the afternoon a different energy: the wrestling for our data, the race to digital sovereignty, the heated discussion about what European AI could and should be has an edge-of-your-seat urgency. At one point, an uncanny chorus artificially generated from recordings of consenting community choirs echoes through the 9th century church, taking part in its architecture, taking part in the goosebumps on my arms.
But where is the suspension bridge? The one between the two stone towers, the connecting thread the artists are meant to weave for us? I’ll do you one better: where are your 12th sense glasses, find them and put them on your nose why don’t you. You’ll see the towers merge into one. The bridge become a door: The digital transition is ecological. Everything is ecological. Ecology is not just dying coral reefs. It’s here with us right now. What? Cat out of the bag, rabbit out of the hat — we’re not alone in the room we fly to to make things happen. Not even there. Everybody’s already in our house. This also warrants edge-of-your-seat urgency.
Glasses askew, we knock urgently on the stone’s front door. It says no, of course: no, and no again. You lack a sense of taking part. Even your AI-augmented, cyborg senses will not make up for your missing sense of taking part. If you want magic, apprentice yourself to a place like a sorcerer’s apprentice to a sorcerer. Come back again and again and again and listen. Or support artists who do it and who open it up, make it legible, ritual. Mediate between the feet and the soil, directly (for example).
Culture generates desire. And to a certain extent, money directs culture: the New European Bauhaus provides generous financial incentive for a cultural movement. So there’s a sense of what the sense should be: Imagination. From there it’s hit and miss. Still, I want very much to take part. I imagine the stone laughs at our scheming:
‘If you don’t believe me,’ says the stone,
‘just ask the leaf, it will tell you the same.
Ask a drop of water, it will say what the leaf has said.
And, finally, ask a hair from your own head.
I am bursting with laughter, yes, laughter, vast laughter,
although I don’t know how to laugh.’
Even to get in is not necessarily to take part. What have I to show for it? Only words, which none will believe. One thing left to do:
Walk through the streets of San Pietro di Castello to board a vaporetto, but step onto the wrong one, which takes you right back where you started. There I sat and thought a while and made up my mind to repeat myself. Walked through the streets of San Pietro di Castello a second time, passing the Catalonian pavilion once more, again tracing the fingers of my left hand along a stone wall while keeping to a strip of shade, then waited by the pier breathing lagoon air watching the turquoise water shift frothily this way and that. Stepping onto the boat, which, this time, took me to the beach.
Climbed the wall. Greeted the cormorant. Crunched through seaweed and toilet seats and sat another while, giving it a little more time.
Then knocked at the stone’s front door. The stone’s glass-green, lagoon-green.
‘It’s only me, let me come in.’
‘I don’t have a door,’ says the stone.
No door, but maybe a crack through which the light gets in, or maybe a nook in which to build a nest. I’ve been keeping it in my pocket just in case.
hysterical with wisteria
For more thoughtful thoughts on the ways places imprint on us I recommend Chelsea-Steinauer-Scudder’s post on Place Identities + the reading list her Substack community has compiled on the subject.