Academic philosophers—people for whom philosophy is a profession—like to joke about their discomfort on airplanes. As you make light conversation with your neighbor, the question of what you do for a living tends to come up, and then you have to cope with other people’s ideas about what it is to “do philosophy.” A friend from graduate school confessed that he hated these conversations so much he would pretend to be a mathematician. (Why not a financial adviser or a travel agent?) A colleague from my first job at Johns Hopkins would head things off by saying “I teach philosophy” rather than “I am a philosopher.” It definitely sounds more approachable. But when I still felt the novelty of being a professional philosopher—and pride at having survived the rigors of graduate school—I was not about to dumb it down. I was even eager to tell people I was a philosopher. Follow-up questions fell within a range: Who are your favorite philosophers? Does anyone listen to you? Isn’t that a job from the olden days?
Then on a flight from New York to Los Angeles I was asked, What are your philosophical sayings? A colleague later drew my attention to a piece in the Guardian about prominent philosophers being asked this question, and to subsequent discussion in the blogosphere. I was not aware of these reports when I received the question, and I was by no means a prominent figure. I heard myself explaining to the person next to me that philosophers write journal articles and books and contribute to existing debates. I spoke of training graduate students, and the American Philosophical Association. Eventually I bluntly said that we don’t have sayings anymore. I got the impression he thought I must not be very good; and somehow I did feel a surge of embarrassment, which I buried in a rush to be congenial. When I had a chance to think it over, I wondered if I had felt embarrassed for the guy because he was innocent about professional philosophy or embarrassed for myself because I do something as banal as contribute to existing debates. Had I cringed at a boyish fantasy about academic life? Or was I cringing at myself for devoting my life to something whose ways, whose point, would not reward this or any other fantasy? Maybe I should have some sayings. If my professional self regarded this prospect with bemusement, maybe I had missed something vital about my own undertaking.
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When I think of sayings, I think first of the early Greek philosophers—the so-called pre-Socratics—whose ideas, if they wrote them down at all, survive as elusive fragments of text. Fortunately for us, it was considered important for educated people to know who said what. So we have summaries of the opinions—or sayings—of the pre-Socratics by their successors. Widely attested are the pronouncements of the Seven Sages—nothing in excess and know thyself—thought so divine that they were inscribed on the temple for Apollo in Delphi.
I took the bus to Delphi from Athens on a trip to Greece in 2018. I was traveling with my parents who, as they live in Australia, I hadn’t seen in a couple of years. My mum sat next to me and we caught up on everyone as I looked out the large window. She said that in the light my neck and cheeks were covered in a surprising amount of downy hair. I snatched my hand to my face, but she assured me that it was quite nice (in the British rather than the American sense of “quite”—not “very” but “somewhat” or “more than you might think”). We stayed in a simple hotel and went early the next morning to see the ruins of the temple. I tried to imagine the fancy people, heads of state, coming here to consult the oracle for thousands of years. It was not so difficult to conjure with the mountains rising all around. It was a grand place but also hushed and contemplative because the beauty was not a ravishing distraction. (By contrast, I experienced no inner life whatsoever in the Cinque Terre.) Later that afternoon, my dad and I went for a hike in the hills behind the hotel. I recounted the story of the Iliad, which I happened to be reading. He remembered from his boyhood that nearly every scene ends with blood soaking the earth.
The art of coming up with “pithy memorable sayings” is said by the Socrates of Plato’s dialogues to originate in Sparta. While the Spartans are known for near-Homeric military prowess, Socrates says their real might lies in shooting devastating remarks:
Pick any ordinary Spartan and talk with him for a while. At first you will find he can barely hold up his end of the conversation, but at some point he will pick his spot with deadly skill and shoot back a terse remark you’ll never forget, something that will make the person he is talking with (in this case you) look like a child.
I relate to the first part of this description: of barely holding up my end of a conversation in its early stages. Conversation with strangers can be dangerous; sometimes it is an ambush. I need time to gauge my questioner, and to sense what is really being asked. And who can’t relate to the impulse to say something precise and puncturing? Isn’t that what everybody fantasizes about when they replay a conversation that has gone badly with a revised ending, a deadly comeback?
As Socrates describes it, the philosophical culture of the Spartans is marked by “laconic brevity.” Socrates gives the example of a saying by Pittacus, one of the Seven Sages: It is hard to be good. This strikes me as true but clipped to the point of opacity. How do we know what it is to be good, or, dare we ask, what goodness itself is? Is that how a saying does its work, and why it is a kind of weapon? It punctures the eardrum with a riddle that, like an earworm, will not go away until its meaning is grasped. What is the war, then, for which this is the weapon? The war of wisdom against ignorance? Socrates suggests that it is actually a battle for philosophical glory among the authors of sayings themselves, with one trying to give another the cerebral analogue of cauliflower ear (cauliflower soul?). A winning saying would make one famous in one’s lifetime through oft repetition and, presumably, inscription at sacred sites.
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The most famous of the Seven Sages is Thales of Miletus, who is widely remembered as saying: Everything is out of water. I had not heard of Thales until I was a teaching assistant in graduate school at Columbia for a large lecture course on the pre-Socratics through Augustine. (I don’t remember us making it to Augustine.) It was my first assignment as a TA. The professor was a scholar of ancient Greek philosophy with an understated but definite charisma. She began the first class by writing the saying from Thales on the board, inviting students to come up with suggestions for what it could mean to say, Everything is out of water. The question felt quite foreign to me (in the American sense) and I had no definite opinions. Was this philosophy? Somewhat to my surprise, the students were voluble. One suggested that Thales had meant that life is sustained by water, and the professor wrote this on the board. She made the student feel smart by sharing Aristotle’s speculation that Thales had noticed that what nourishes things is moist. Someone else wondered whether “everything” is the same as “life.” Is a triangle alive? Not in the way a frog is. But is it something? Yes. So they are not the same. This would mean that the scope of Thales’s saying is not everything but only living things.
Another student raised his hand to point out that if we said life is sustained by water, then we were saying life is one thing and water another. But it is possible to understand the saying in a different way, as meaning life itself is water. The professor seemed to like this and again she wrote it up. “Tell us what you mean that life is itself water,” she asked. The student couldn’t say. “Do you mean life consists of water?” The student accepted this formulation. “So are you suggesting Thales means that living things are made of water?” The student assented. Someone else pointed out that cells are mostly made of water and living things of cells. We appeared to have a sort of confirmation, and the body of the class itself seemed to vibrate, just as when water is heated, the molecules move more and more quickly.
The discussion had felt harmonious and collaborative, but a dissenting voice broke in. “I don’t think Thales is saying life is water. That’s to miss the clear and obvious thing. He’s saying life emerged out of water—out, as we can suppose, of the sea, because you can read that in pretty much any book on evolution.” This proposal, like the others, had not occurred to me. Could it be right? How could Thales have known that we evolved out of the ocean? Again, the professor seemed delighted. To our collective fascination she told us that in Greek poetry the god Oceanus is the father of all things that come to be and pass away. So it was thought, by Aristotle and others, that Thales’s saying encapsulated a view that was swirling around at the time as common wisdom, as poetic inheritance. My mind was blown.
I went to the library after class to look up everything recorded about Thales and his sayings. According to Hippolytus we were wrong to narrow the scope of “everything” to “living things.” For Thales had also said that “nothing at all of the things that are, immortal or mortal ones, animate or inanimate ones, is capable of being formed without [water].” I had an easier time seeing how a stone requires water for its formation than a triangle, and I wondered whether a triangle is, besides being inanimate, also immortal—I mean, not this triangle, but triangularity itself? A stone comes to be and passes away, but triangularity always is. It seems less peculiar when you put it that way. According to Cicero, “Thales said that water is the beginning of things, but that god is the intelligence capable of making all things out of water.” So should we say that evolution is guided by a higher power—a constructive intelligence? According to Aetius, “god is the intelligence of the world … and the divine power passes through the elementary moisture and moves it.” Thinking back to class, I had felt as though we were the elementary moisture, and that the professor was the divine intelligence moving through us and making all things—at least as they emerged in the discussion.
Revisiting Thales now in the magical small green books edited and translated by André Laks and Glenn Most, he comes across as a bit of a trickster:
To the man who wanted to know which came about earlier, night or day, he replied, “Night, earlier by a day.”
When he was asked why he did not have children, he replied, “because of my love for children.” And they say that when his mother tried to compel him to marry he would say, “It is not yet the right time,” and then, as she insisted when he was no longer young, “It is no longer the right time.”
I share this particular form of compassion for children, and apart from the bit about the mother’s compulsion, I now find myself in the same predicament about marriage. But I am more interested in the general paradox about timing. It can seem that students are too young for a topic and then, before you know it, too old to be teachable. It can feel much too early in the day to take care of the onerous thing, and then, imperceptibly, that it has long passed out of your hands. It can feel as if you first need to acquire the skills to do the thing you long to do, and then, after decades of training, that it is too late to put your acquisitions to their intended use. It’s too soon until it’s too late. Was this counsel for procrastinators? Could it be one of my sayings? I’m not sure it is more than a restatement of the phenomenon, though if Pittacus is anything to go by, that is not necessarily a strike against it. The graver thing is that it does not really promise the keys to the (metaphysical) castle. I’m not saying that time is unimportant. Thales said that “the wisest thing is time; for it discovers everything.” But it’s too soon until it’s too late deals only with a corner of time, with a problem about timing, and that does not strike me as comprehensive enough. Shouldn’t a saying contain everything (or at least all of life)? The big daddies, know thyself, nothing too much, are oceans unto themselves.
There is much testimony about Thales’s successes as a cosmologist. Among other things, he is said to have predicted a solar eclipse, the solstices and the fact that the revolutions of the sun are not always equal. I like Thales especially much in his aspect as a cosmologist. But he is also well known for political expertise. The professor had told us an anecdote about Thales’s advice for a king who needed to get his army across a river. Thales, on site, came up with the idea to dig a canal in the shape of a crescent moon to divert some of the water. Thales theorized about water, and he performed feats of hydraulic engineering too! (The army crossed safely.) The professor embodied the qualities of an adviser to a king as she told us about this achievement. It was a point of emphasis in the class because of the famous anecdote about Thales falling down a well. In Plato’s telling, the story is that a “witty and charming Thracian handmaiden”—I am at a loss for how to rephrase—made fun of Thales for falling down a well while he was looking up at the stars. The joke was on the handmaiden, though, because stars are easier to see from the cavity of a well, so it is thought that Thales took himself down there on purpose. Hegel complains of the valet’s view of history, and Plato (by implication) of the handmaiden’s perspective on cosmologists. Our professor, in the figure of a general parting the river, was disabusing us of the presumption that philosophers are too lofty to be practical.
Be that as it may, I find Thales’s practical sayings quite (in the British sense) underwhelming. When asked “how we could live best and most justly,” he replied, “If we do not do ourselves what we blame others for doing.” It is not that I disagree. He reminds us of the difficulty, and the importance, of avoiding hypocrisy. Talk is cheap. The first philosophical thought I remember having is that it is easier to appear than to really be good, and I was curious—not in a malevolent way—about what turns on the more difficult achievement. This has some claim to being the first question in ethics. But Thales gives us not, with Plato, ten books of the Republic, nor, with Kant, a deduction of the moral law, but just a flat little line. Is it a problem of “laconic brevity”? Or is the problem that the saying is not worthy of a sage—not least one reputed to have spent time with priests in Egypt? Although I remain open to the form of a saying, I am not content with a line from the playground. I would like something that is more, frankly, esoteric.
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Before I came to America for graduate school, I had a love affair with Iris Murdoch. I was attracted to her irreverence. In her early work (and she never really got off the subject) she was all about the difficulty of seeing things well. How can we act in a world we cannot see? With the correct perception, the rest takes care of itself. If I’d been asked for a saying at the time, I might have passed this off as my own. Murdoch was into the concept of attention, and her ethics can be summed up by saying that we should direct loving attention toward independent realities as a way of overcoming the “I.” “Independent realities” could be other people, beauty in art and nature, and even an academic discipline such as chemistry. I was committed to this for some years. The trouble was that I lacked guidance on how to cultivate my powers of attention. I read a lot of nineteenth-century fiction. I took notes on the way of the Bene Gesserit in Frank Herbert’s science-fiction epic, Dune. Was I supposed to turn next to Aleister Crowley? Eventually I wondered if I was searching in the wrong place. I wanted to attend to reality, but would perception ever get me there? Thales said that water is the thing, but it doesn’t look like the thing. I mean, we do observe water out there, but we also observe a lot of other stuff. If water really is the thing, we don’t know it because of the way it looks.
From water does all life begin. I shouldn’t be surprised to encounter Thales in Herbert’s Dune, but there he is thinly disguised in the Orange Catholic Bible (book of Kalima, 467). I grew up in a loose terrestrial analogue of the desert planet Arrakis: a small town east of Perth, Western Australia. Like the palace of Arrakeen, the city of Perth is incongruously lined with palm trees. Unlike Arrakeen, it is flanked by the Indian Ocean on the west. To the east, where we lived, is the desert. I am told it is no longer felt as a household problem—now they desalinate the sea—but growing up we relied on the inconstant rain. We stopped short of wearing Dune-like stillsuits to harness the body’s waters, but we took five-minute showers, or shallow baths for one sister and then the other. The water from a pot of potatoes, or a washed lettuce, went to a bucket in the laundry, and from the laundry to the back gardens. We lived on land that had been trampled by horses. My parents would rehabilitate the block over the course of thirty years, making it bloom into an oasis with bees and cherries, and zucchini to rival (or flatter) Priapus. But early on in this custodianship, the ground was still red clay covered in sand. There were fat bobtail lizards with orange heads and blue tongues. Huntsman spiders the size of my child’s hand would appear on the wall as I was falling asleep. I routinely woke my braver younger sister to take them outside in a jar. In Arrakis there is a saying that polish comes from the cities, wisdom from the desert. But as Herbert also informs us: “There are many sayings on Arrakis.”
I am told that my panic over the use of water began before I could walk. At the sight of a hose filling a swimming pool, I became inconsolably—in the neologism of Virginia Woolf, who knew firsthand what she was naming—“tantrumical.” Apparently, I flung myself on the ground and wailed and pointed urgently at the hose. I have no memory of this episode. The panic I do remember started at the Darlington Arts Festival on a weekend in the high summer of November. Everyone was there. You could get hot cinnamon donuts in a white paper bag. You could make marbled cards with saturated swirls of color. You could see Balinese dancers perform with red silk skirts and expressive hands. I saved up by washing windows. But the older kids from school had brought water bombs for a fight on Saturday night. Seeing the outside tap run to fill one latex balloon after the other, with more kids going in and out of the bathrooms to use the taps there, I started to watch a catastrophe unfold. The wild and unconscious spending of life. I was frozen and powerless with panic. Where was the divine intelligence? Where, for that matter, were the grown-ups? My mum consoled me with the principle of the conservation of matter. She said the water was going into the earth, where it belongs. She said the kids were using the equivalent of two loads of laundry. Consciously it helped; but it did not touch the painful heart of it.
It was a panic that undid joy all my life. For me Thales’s saying did not concern the sustenance, the constitution or the origins of things. Everything is out of water meant that everything is out of water. How’s that for a duck-rabbit. The worst thing I could think of was a room in the middle of nowhere with a light flashing on and off and a tap running to infinity. Funny that I would end up in New York City for graduate school where the summers were a permanent negotiation with fire hydrants. I read about the history of kids against cops in poor neighborhoods during a heat wave. I understood; but I also didn’t understand. People would make it gush onto the pavement at high volume all night with no one around. Was that an ode to mayhem? A claim on resources otherwise corralled by the rich? And how to make sense of my feelings about it? Oversensitivity? Environmental conscientiousness? I find it striking that I wasn’t in states of dissolution over the irrigation of golf courses in Spain, or the textile industry in every country in the world. But I was patrolling like a cop when I called 311 to report the flooding. Eventually, like a coward, I swapped apartments with a medical intern in Paris and spent the summers there. Somehow, the tap had to be turned off.
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A clue seemed to lie in graduate school. It was there that I learned that the discipline of philosophy requires total submission. You train along the dimensions of speaking, writing and reading; with those in the bag, the idea is that thought takes care of itself. Let’s say you are assigned a classic text for which you have no context. The goal is to get the text to make a sound—to open it up so that you can hear the music for yourself and, in time, compose a response. But the path is austere. You start by reading the text once through, restraining your impulse to write things down. The terms are strange, and there are references to people and debates you know nothing about. You notice but do not give in to your sense of alienation. You read the text again, now making marginalia. Then, as simply as you can, you make an outline of what the text says, parsing distinctions and being sensitive to terminology. You write a sentence down on the condition that you understand what you are saying, and you realize how hard that is by hovering often over the keyboard. You confine your questions and reactions to notes in square brackets so that you distinguish between what the text says and what you think about what the text says (a prophylactic against projective identification). This is the method I learned from my teacher whose outlines were works of art. It was like she was reading from another dimension. It seemed that, for her, failures of attention in reading were precisely ethical ones. Talk about devotion to an independent reality. This was exactly what I was looking for! I worked like this—reading, outlining, writing—for seven days a week, ten sometimes twelve hours a day. I embraced the tedium. I could not be pried from my desk—no days off for birthdays, no holidays. In the afternoons I would permit myself a walk along the Hudson in Riverside Park. If I didn’t make it across the road alive, then I wouldn’t have to finish my dissertation.
I did make it across the road. And when I finished my dissertation, a professor who had served on the admissions committee six years earlier told me that I was more interesting when I arrived. Philosophical training is something to survive, and this professor wasn’t sure I had made it. I am able to hear this now as a protective caution—don’t let them get you!—but at the time I felt dismissive. I didn’t care to be interesting; I wanted to be right, or if not right then unassailable.
This, too, I learned in graduate school. One of my teachers was named “philosophy’s gentle giant” in a recent obituary (the adjective may gently raise the eyebrow of generations of students left behind). He was a giant in part because he was able, as John Bayley said of Tolstoy, to see the elephant’s skin up close. He was exacting. He was relentless. But he could see, seemingly, all of life. When we asked him what his secret was, he said, Don’t make mistakes. Now that is also the secret to filing your taxes, but I have a sense of what he meant. You can’t intend to have vision or set your sights on being sonorous. You either have these talents or, if you lack them, you acquire them indirectly over time. But you can control your inferences. And when you are up in the night worrying about the argument you are putting together, you are not thinking about how it sounds. You want to know if the q’s are following from the p’s. I mean, you don’t follow a general into battle who blunders with elementary miscalculations. Thales would not be remembered for his sagacity had he failed to get the army across the river. Be correct and the rest takes care of itself (or it doesn’t, but that is not something you can affect directly).
The constraints imposed by the discipline provide form for the chaotic deeps. The discipline—think your thoughts, but not like that—is philosophy’s iambic pentameter. The constraints provide a container for something substantial to grow. And when it does, the elements—the hard and the generative—are held together in exquisite tension; it is a sublime art. But disciplinary norms have a function, and they can fail to serve it. Without counterpoint, an instruction like don’t make mistakes leaves divine intelligence with nothing to move through. It produces a field of petty bureaucrats who huff on their whistles to protest imprecisely formulated claims. It makes a roomful of people take note only of what they believe a speaker gets wrong. It is easy for me to see these deficiencies in others. It is harder to see the perennial creep inside. I tell an anthropologist friend that philosophy has been reckoning with its unsociability for the last ten years. She tells me that I have been reckoning with philosophy’s unsociability for the last ten years. The unsociability of philosophy, she says, is probably constitutive.
I ask a philosopher to read an essay of mine as I prepare to present it at a workshop. The essay is on the nature of value, taking intellectual and artistic pursuits as a test case. Against the view that these pursuits are good for people because they are good in themselves, I advance the view that they are good insofar as they engage imaginative and intellectual powers that are good for people. The philosopher finds the elements out of balance. He likes the part where I am in touch with live phenomena (where I am talking about what it is like to have your imagination set on fire by a penetrating argument, or George Eliot), but the philosophical debate he finds “scholastic.” I am quick to point out that this is the word philosophers use for any part of the field that is not, as this was not, their current preoccupation. And what I say is true; but this truth seems to conceal a bigger truth, as yet unclear to me. I am left with suspicions. Was the professor from the admissions committee right that I had been ruined by my training? Had I substituted technique for the thing itself? The man on the plane had a longing for sayings—for a precept to live by; apparently, he was not the only one.
I give the paper at the workshop. A sympathetic man in the audience with silver hair and a handsome face whom I’d met years earlier in New York asks the first question. “What is at stake for you in this?” The question surprises me. Isn’t it obvious? I want to be right, or if not right then unassailable. He leaves me with an injunction: “I want you to buck up,” he says. “Buck up!” The words ring in my ears with sense but without understanding. Later, at the dinner, I sit next to a graduate student who talks to me about her love of Iris Murdoch. We have both read Elias Canetti for the sole reason that Murdoch had had a perverse affair with him. Like me, she has read all the correspondence, all the biographies. I find her smart and hilarious and I hope I will see her again. Could we be members, as Iris Murdoch was—with Philippa Foot, Elizabeth Anscombe and Mary Midgley—of a latter-day quartet from across the pond? It is not that I’m convinced by everything Murdoch says. What really picks her out for me is that in the notably arid landscape of the ethics of her school days, she finds the deep amid the chatter by connecting to something divine. You can’t fuck with a high priestess.
That night I dream I am digging in the ground. I have a wand but it becomes a shovel. The ground is dry. My garden is spindly and without fruit. I have closed the tap too tightly. The next day, I read a perverse proclamation in Dune (this time, the O.C. Bible is cribbing from Ezekiel): “And I will make the rivers dry, and sell the land into the hand of the wicked: and I will make the land waste, and all that is therein, by the hand of strangers.”
Who are these strangers? The academy is marked by a culture of service. People you don’t know and will never meet ask you to do things, and you promise to do them for the honor of being asked. The promises start to accumulate like sticks in a bundle that you push in front of you. Bent under their weight, you can’t see the way ahead—but you press on in your devotion to so many independent realities. The underdog of the Delphic sayings is: Give a pledge and trouble is at hand. Promise something to someone and you put yourself under obligation to them—they have a right against you. Why incur an obligation to someone simply for the honor of being asked? You are mortgaging your vital forces for nothing now and hours upon hours of labor later. Is this the unsung trouble with making a pledge? The trouble is that pledges are powerful. You can pledge to realities you were not born to serve. You can pledge for no reason. You can pledge more than you have.
At the end of semester, I have lunch with a senior colleague from my department at the University of Pittsburgh. With the summer starting, we have the promise of months of solitude and protection from the public. As we eat our salads he makes the observation that teaching is a trauma. It is striking to hear this from someone so distinguished. I feel he is giving me permission to say it out loud. You stand up there day in and day out, no matter how little sleep you had, no matter how much time you had to prepare. You try to get the texts to make a sound—to open them up so that the students can hear the music for themselves and, in time, compose a response. Your goal is to trigger thoughts in them—movements of their minds along a fruitful path—and to do this you must embody the promise of something higher and more refined. But you feel bound by an earthly instruction—don’t make mistakes. In my early years on the tenure track I would wake at five in the morning to prepare for class. Fear of humiliation got me out of bed. I wanted to be as consummate as the professor from pre-Socratics to Augustine. As I was no master, I had to pretend, and I found myself performing as more alpha than I am. I was good at my cover. There was what I thought, and there was what I said I thought—a prophylactic against overexposure. Profundity doesn’t work in the classroom; it is easier to get precise about the structure of an argument. When in doubt, keep it as dry as bone china.
In my office during this period, I had a collection of hand-painted teapots. Bookshelves lined the walls from floor to ceiling and I put the teapots on the shelves in the absence of enough books to fill them. Sensing, I can only suppose, that I was in need of higher wisdom, a friend from Columbia told me I should speak to an oracle—a priestess born with visions named Annette. I would keep an open mind. “You’re a teapot,” the oracle told me over the phone. “A gorgeous teapot. That’s good enough. For many it is spectacular. But there is a hollowness, and there’s profundity humming as potential beneath it.” Was she telling me that I was impersonating the teapots in my office? And was she right? Socrates says the oracle is always right, so I put some thought into how to interpret her claims. A teapot is a special kind of vessel for water. Like Ganymede, cupbearer to the king of the gods, it is beautiful so it catches the eye. It could be an honor to be, or to impersonate, a teapot. Perhaps the trouble was that the teapots I was impersonating were not fulfilling their function. On display, they were empty of water. So where had the water gone?
I think back to my panic. Its first remembered object is the big kids wasting water with balloons, though apparently it had found a plurality of watery objects before I had concepts and could articulate my concerns. Much later, the object is strangers making water pour out of hydrants onto the streets. It is always panic at other people casually spending life. But what if I am the one wasting the water? What if there is no water in the teapot because I am mindlessly leaking it out, like a flask with a hole in the desert? As a child, did I know I would grow up to waste my own waters? A friend shares the hypothesis that my early panic was a premonition. I am confused. He draws my attention to a sequence from Dune in which Lady Jessica, a Bene Gesserit, drinks the water of life while carrying an unborn child. Laced with some variant of the spice, it gives her the memories of her ancestors and powers to see into the future. The substance is so strong and the acquired powers so great that the unborn child goes mad. My friend wants to know if my mother had drunk the water of life. Had she acquired the power to see into the future. Was I the mad child? If the mad child could speak, what would its saying be? Don’t waste your own waters on desert sands.
Let me try to put this together. Socrates says the oracle is always right. The oracle compares me to a teapot and suggests that something is going wrong. There happen to be teapots on display in my office. As I interpret the oracle, there is something wrong not with my impersonation per se, but with the teapots I am impersonating—they are not fulfilling their function. The teapot is designed to be empty so it can be filled with water; without water there is a hollowness inside. Once filled, the water is mixed with leaves and, after a measured interval of time, it becomes tea and is poured out. The pouring out seems important. Imagine hoarding the water in the belly of the pot. Like a puddle that insects lay their eggs in, or stormwater after a flood, the water would start to stink. Take the water in, and also pour the water out. But don’t just pour it out! And here’s the final piece of it. A teapot can be shiny or matte. It can be spare or decorative. Either way it is poised; it makes a clinking sound. The tea from a pot is not just poured, it is also offered—a cup for you and a cup for me. If you are as fine a water-bearer as Ganymede, then you are making an offering to the gods. To make an offering is not to spend unconsciously. And it is not to mortgage oneself. It is a gesture that replenishes in the very act. What is my offering? What are your philosophical sayings?
My offering is this: Everything is out of water.
Art credits: Ben Young. Hidden Layers, 2023, laminated float glass, cast concrete, stainless steel and white bronze, 22 x 16 x 8 in. Altered Perspective, 2023, laminated float glass, cast concrete and stainless steel, 16 x 22 x 5 in. Courtesy of the artist and Chesterfield Gallery.
Academic philosophers—people for whom philosophy is a profession—like to joke about their discomfort on airplanes. As you make light conversation with your neighbor, the question of what you do for a living tends to come up, and then you have to cope with other people’s ideas about what it is to “do philosophy.” A friend from graduate school confessed that he hated these conversations so much he would pretend to be a mathematician. (Why not a financial adviser or a travel agent?) A colleague from my first job at Johns Hopkins would head things off by saying “I teach philosophy” rather than “I am a philosopher.” It definitely sounds more approachable. But when I still felt the novelty of being a professional philosopher—and pride at having survived the rigors of graduate school—I was not about to dumb it down. I was even eager to tell people I was a philosopher. Follow-up questions fell within a range: Who are your favorite philosophers? Does anyone listen to you? Isn’t that a job from the olden days?
Then on a flight from New York to Los Angeles I was asked, What are your philosophical sayings? A colleague later drew my attention to a piece in the Guardian about prominent philosophers being asked this question, and to subsequent discussion in the blogosphere. I was not aware of these reports when I received the question, and I was by no means a prominent figure. I heard myself explaining to the person next to me that philosophers write journal articles and books and contribute to existing debates. I spoke of training graduate students, and the American Philosophical Association. Eventually I bluntly said that we don’t have sayings anymore. I got the impression he thought I must not be very good; and somehow I did feel a surge of embarrassment, which I buried in a rush to be congenial. When I had a chance to think it over, I wondered if I had felt embarrassed for the guy because he was innocent about professional philosophy or embarrassed for myself because I do something as banal as contribute to existing debates. Had I cringed at a boyish fantasy about academic life? Or was I cringing at myself for devoting my life to something whose ways, whose point, would not reward this or any other fantasy? Maybe I should have some sayings. If my professional self regarded this prospect with bemusement, maybe I had missed something vital about my own undertaking.
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When I think of sayings, I think first of the early Greek philosophers—the so-called pre-Socratics—whose ideas, if they wrote them down at all, survive as elusive fragments of text. Fortunately for us, it was considered important for educated people to know who said what. So we have summaries of the opinions—or sayings—of the pre-Socratics by their successors. Widely attested are the pronouncements of the Seven Sages—nothing in excess and know thyself—thought so divine that they were inscribed on the temple for Apollo in Delphi.
I took the bus to Delphi from Athens on a trip to Greece in 2018. I was traveling with my parents who, as they live in Australia, I hadn’t seen in a couple of years. My mum sat next to me and we caught up on everyone as I looked out the large window. She said that in the light my neck and cheeks were covered in a surprising amount of downy hair. I snatched my hand to my face, but she assured me that it was quite nice (in the British rather than the American sense of “quite”—not “very” but “somewhat” or “more than you might think”). We stayed in a simple hotel and went early the next morning to see the ruins of the temple. I tried to imagine the fancy people, heads of state, coming here to consult the oracle for thousands of years. It was not so difficult to conjure with the mountains rising all around. It was a grand place but also hushed and contemplative because the beauty was not a ravishing distraction. (By contrast, I experienced no inner life whatsoever in the Cinque Terre.) Later that afternoon, my dad and I went for a hike in the hills behind the hotel. I recounted the story of the Iliad, which I happened to be reading. He remembered from his boyhood that nearly every scene ends with blood soaking the earth.
The art of coming up with “pithy memorable sayings” is said by the Socrates of Plato’s dialogues to originate in Sparta. While the Spartans are known for near-Homeric military prowess, Socrates says their real might lies in shooting devastating remarks:
I relate to the first part of this description: of barely holding up my end of a conversation in its early stages. Conversation with strangers can be dangerous; sometimes it is an ambush. I need time to gauge my questioner, and to sense what is really being asked. And who can’t relate to the impulse to say something precise and puncturing? Isn’t that what everybody fantasizes about when they replay a conversation that has gone badly with a revised ending, a deadly comeback?
As Socrates describes it, the philosophical culture of the Spartans is marked by “laconic brevity.” Socrates gives the example of a saying by Pittacus, one of the Seven Sages: It is hard to be good. This strikes me as true but clipped to the point of opacity. How do we know what it is to be good, or, dare we ask, what goodness itself is? Is that how a saying does its work, and why it is a kind of weapon? It punctures the eardrum with a riddle that, like an earworm, will not go away until its meaning is grasped. What is the war, then, for which this is the weapon? The war of wisdom against ignorance? Socrates suggests that it is actually a battle for philosophical glory among the authors of sayings themselves, with one trying to give another the cerebral analogue of cauliflower ear (cauliflower soul?). A winning saying would make one famous in one’s lifetime through oft repetition and, presumably, inscription at sacred sites.
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The most famous of the Seven Sages is Thales of Miletus, who is widely remembered as saying: Everything is out of water. I had not heard of Thales until I was a teaching assistant in graduate school at Columbia for a large lecture course on the pre-Socratics through Augustine. (I don’t remember us making it to Augustine.) It was my first assignment as a TA. The professor was a scholar of ancient Greek philosophy with an understated but definite charisma. She began the first class by writing the saying from Thales on the board, inviting students to come up with suggestions for what it could mean to say, Everything is out of water. The question felt quite foreign to me (in the American sense) and I had no definite opinions. Was this philosophy? Somewhat to my surprise, the students were voluble. One suggested that Thales had meant that life is sustained by water, and the professor wrote this on the board. She made the student feel smart by sharing Aristotle’s speculation that Thales had noticed that what nourishes things is moist. Someone else wondered whether “everything” is the same as “life.” Is a triangle alive? Not in the way a frog is. But is it something? Yes. So they are not the same. This would mean that the scope of Thales’s saying is not everything but only living things.
Another student raised his hand to point out that if we said life is sustained by water, then we were saying life is one thing and water another. But it is possible to understand the saying in a different way, as meaning life itself is water. The professor seemed to like this and again she wrote it up. “Tell us what you mean that life is itself water,” she asked. The student couldn’t say. “Do you mean life consists of water?” The student accepted this formulation. “So are you suggesting Thales means that living things are made of water?” The student assented. Someone else pointed out that cells are mostly made of water and living things of cells. We appeared to have a sort of confirmation, and the body of the class itself seemed to vibrate, just as when water is heated, the molecules move more and more quickly.
The discussion had felt harmonious and collaborative, but a dissenting voice broke in. “I don’t think Thales is saying life is water. That’s to miss the clear and obvious thing. He’s saying life emerged out of water—out, as we can suppose, of the sea, because you can read that in pretty much any book on evolution.” This proposal, like the others, had not occurred to me. Could it be right? How could Thales have known that we evolved out of the ocean? Again, the professor seemed delighted. To our collective fascination she told us that in Greek poetry the god Oceanus is the father of all things that come to be and pass away. So it was thought, by Aristotle and others, that Thales’s saying encapsulated a view that was swirling around at the time as common wisdom, as poetic inheritance. My mind was blown.
I went to the library after class to look up everything recorded about Thales and his sayings. According to Hippolytus we were wrong to narrow the scope of “everything” to “living things.” For Thales had also said that “nothing at all of the things that are, immortal or mortal ones, animate or inanimate ones, is capable of being formed without [water].” I had an easier time seeing how a stone requires water for its formation than a triangle, and I wondered whether a triangle is, besides being inanimate, also immortal—I mean, not this triangle, but triangularity itself? A stone comes to be and passes away, but triangularity always is. It seems less peculiar when you put it that way. According to Cicero, “Thales said that water is the beginning of things, but that god is the intelligence capable of making all things out of water.” So should we say that evolution is guided by a higher power—a constructive intelligence? According to Aetius, “god is the intelligence of the world … and the divine power passes through the elementary moisture and moves it.” Thinking back to class, I had felt as though we were the elementary moisture, and that the professor was the divine intelligence moving through us and making all things—at least as they emerged in the discussion.
Revisiting Thales now in the magical small green books edited and translated by André Laks and Glenn Most, he comes across as a bit of a trickster:
I share this particular form of compassion for children, and apart from the bit about the mother’s compulsion, I now find myself in the same predicament about marriage. But I am more interested in the general paradox about timing. It can seem that students are too young for a topic and then, before you know it, too old to be teachable. It can feel much too early in the day to take care of the onerous thing, and then, imperceptibly, that it has long passed out of your hands. It can feel as if you first need to acquire the skills to do the thing you long to do, and then, after decades of training, that it is too late to put your acquisitions to their intended use. It’s too soon until it’s too late. Was this counsel for procrastinators? Could it be one of my sayings? I’m not sure it is more than a restatement of the phenomenon, though if Pittacus is anything to go by, that is not necessarily a strike against it. The graver thing is that it does not really promise the keys to the (metaphysical) castle. I’m not saying that time is unimportant. Thales said that “the wisest thing is time; for it discovers everything.” But it’s too soon until it’s too late deals only with a corner of time, with a problem about timing, and that does not strike me as comprehensive enough. Shouldn’t a saying contain everything (or at least all of life)? The big daddies, know thyself, nothing too much, are oceans unto themselves.
There is much testimony about Thales’s successes as a cosmologist. Among other things, he is said to have predicted a solar eclipse, the solstices and the fact that the revolutions of the sun are not always equal. I like Thales especially much in his aspect as a cosmologist. But he is also well known for political expertise. The professor had told us an anecdote about Thales’s advice for a king who needed to get his army across a river. Thales, on site, came up with the idea to dig a canal in the shape of a crescent moon to divert some of the water. Thales theorized about water, and he performed feats of hydraulic engineering too! (The army crossed safely.) The professor embodied the qualities of an adviser to a king as she told us about this achievement. It was a point of emphasis in the class because of the famous anecdote about Thales falling down a well. In Plato’s telling, the story is that a “witty and charming Thracian handmaiden”—I am at a loss for how to rephrase—made fun of Thales for falling down a well while he was looking up at the stars. The joke was on the handmaiden, though, because stars are easier to see from the cavity of a well, so it is thought that Thales took himself down there on purpose. Hegel complains of the valet’s view of history, and Plato (by implication) of the handmaiden’s perspective on cosmologists. Our professor, in the figure of a general parting the river, was disabusing us of the presumption that philosophers are too lofty to be practical.
Be that as it may, I find Thales’s practical sayings quite (in the British sense) underwhelming. When asked “how we could live best and most justly,” he replied, “If we do not do ourselves what we blame others for doing.” It is not that I disagree. He reminds us of the difficulty, and the importance, of avoiding hypocrisy. Talk is cheap. The first philosophical thought I remember having is that it is easier to appear than to really be good, and I was curious—not in a malevolent way—about what turns on the more difficult achievement. This has some claim to being the first question in ethics. But Thales gives us not, with Plato, ten books of the Republic, nor, with Kant, a deduction of the moral law, but just a flat little line. Is it a problem of “laconic brevity”? Or is the problem that the saying is not worthy of a sage—not least one reputed to have spent time with priests in Egypt? Although I remain open to the form of a saying, I am not content with a line from the playground. I would like something that is more, frankly, esoteric.
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Before I came to America for graduate school, I had a love affair with Iris Murdoch. I was attracted to her irreverence. In her early work (and she never really got off the subject) she was all about the difficulty of seeing things well. How can we act in a world we cannot see? With the correct perception, the rest takes care of itself. If I’d been asked for a saying at the time, I might have passed this off as my own. Murdoch was into the concept of attention, and her ethics can be summed up by saying that we should direct loving attention toward independent realities as a way of overcoming the “I.” “Independent realities” could be other people, beauty in art and nature, and even an academic discipline such as chemistry. I was committed to this for some years. The trouble was that I lacked guidance on how to cultivate my powers of attention. I read a lot of nineteenth-century fiction. I took notes on the way of the Bene Gesserit in Frank Herbert’s science-fiction epic, Dune. Was I supposed to turn next to Aleister Crowley? Eventually I wondered if I was searching in the wrong place. I wanted to attend to reality, but would perception ever get me there? Thales said that water is the thing, but it doesn’t look like the thing. I mean, we do observe water out there, but we also observe a lot of other stuff. If water really is the thing, we don’t know it because of the way it looks.
From water does all life begin. I shouldn’t be surprised to encounter Thales in Herbert’s Dune, but there he is thinly disguised in the Orange Catholic Bible (book of Kalima, 467). I grew up in a loose terrestrial analogue of the desert planet Arrakis: a small town east of Perth, Western Australia. Like the palace of Arrakeen, the city of Perth is incongruously lined with palm trees. Unlike Arrakeen, it is flanked by the Indian Ocean on the west. To the east, where we lived, is the desert. I am told it is no longer felt as a household problem—now they desalinate the sea—but growing up we relied on the inconstant rain. We stopped short of wearing Dune-like stillsuits to harness the body’s waters, but we took five-minute showers, or shallow baths for one sister and then the other. The water from a pot of potatoes, or a washed lettuce, went to a bucket in the laundry, and from the laundry to the back gardens. We lived on land that had been trampled by horses. My parents would rehabilitate the block over the course of thirty years, making it bloom into an oasis with bees and cherries, and zucchini to rival (or flatter) Priapus. But early on in this custodianship, the ground was still red clay covered in sand. There were fat bobtail lizards with orange heads and blue tongues. Huntsman spiders the size of my child’s hand would appear on the wall as I was falling asleep. I routinely woke my braver younger sister to take them outside in a jar. In Arrakis there is a saying that polish comes from the cities, wisdom from the desert. But as Herbert also informs us: “There are many sayings on Arrakis.”
I am told that my panic over the use of water began before I could walk. At the sight of a hose filling a swimming pool, I became inconsolably—in the neologism of Virginia Woolf, who knew firsthand what she was naming—“tantrumical.” Apparently, I flung myself on the ground and wailed and pointed urgently at the hose. I have no memory of this episode. The panic I do remember started at the Darlington Arts Festival on a weekend in the high summer of November. Everyone was there. You could get hot cinnamon donuts in a white paper bag. You could make marbled cards with saturated swirls of color. You could see Balinese dancers perform with red silk skirts and expressive hands. I saved up by washing windows. But the older kids from school had brought water bombs for a fight on Saturday night. Seeing the outside tap run to fill one latex balloon after the other, with more kids going in and out of the bathrooms to use the taps there, I started to watch a catastrophe unfold. The wild and unconscious spending of life. I was frozen and powerless with panic. Where was the divine intelligence? Where, for that matter, were the grown-ups? My mum consoled me with the principle of the conservation of matter. She said the water was going into the earth, where it belongs. She said the kids were using the equivalent of two loads of laundry. Consciously it helped; but it did not touch the painful heart of it.
It was a panic that undid joy all my life. For me Thales’s saying did not concern the sustenance, the constitution or the origins of things. Everything is out of water meant that everything is out of water. How’s that for a duck-rabbit. The worst thing I could think of was a room in the middle of nowhere with a light flashing on and off and a tap running to infinity. Funny that I would end up in New York City for graduate school where the summers were a permanent negotiation with fire hydrants. I read about the history of kids against cops in poor neighborhoods during a heat wave. I understood; but I also didn’t understand. People would make it gush onto the pavement at high volume all night with no one around. Was that an ode to mayhem? A claim on resources otherwise corralled by the rich? And how to make sense of my feelings about it? Oversensitivity? Environmental conscientiousness? I find it striking that I wasn’t in states of dissolution over the irrigation of golf courses in Spain, or the textile industry in every country in the world. But I was patrolling like a cop when I called 311 to report the flooding. Eventually, like a coward, I swapped apartments with a medical intern in Paris and spent the summers there. Somehow, the tap had to be turned off.
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A clue seemed to lie in graduate school. It was there that I learned that the discipline of philosophy requires total submission. You train along the dimensions of speaking, writing and reading; with those in the bag, the idea is that thought takes care of itself. Let’s say you are assigned a classic text for which you have no context. The goal is to get the text to make a sound—to open it up so that you can hear the music for yourself and, in time, compose a response. But the path is austere. You start by reading the text once through, restraining your impulse to write things down. The terms are strange, and there are references to people and debates you know nothing about. You notice but do not give in to your sense of alienation. You read the text again, now making marginalia. Then, as simply as you can, you make an outline of what the text says, parsing distinctions and being sensitive to terminology. You write a sentence down on the condition that you understand what you are saying, and you realize how hard that is by hovering often over the keyboard. You confine your questions and reactions to notes in square brackets so that you distinguish between what the text says and what you think about what the text says (a prophylactic against projective identification). This is the method I learned from my teacher whose outlines were works of art. It was like she was reading from another dimension. It seemed that, for her, failures of attention in reading were precisely ethical ones. Talk about devotion to an independent reality. This was exactly what I was looking for! I worked like this—reading, outlining, writing—for seven days a week, ten sometimes twelve hours a day. I embraced the tedium. I could not be pried from my desk—no days off for birthdays, no holidays. In the afternoons I would permit myself a walk along the Hudson in Riverside Park. If I didn’t make it across the road alive, then I wouldn’t have to finish my dissertation.
I did make it across the road. And when I finished my dissertation, a professor who had served on the admissions committee six years earlier told me that I was more interesting when I arrived. Philosophical training is something to survive, and this professor wasn’t sure I had made it. I am able to hear this now as a protective caution—don’t let them get you!—but at the time I felt dismissive. I didn’t care to be interesting; I wanted to be right, or if not right then unassailable.
This, too, I learned in graduate school. One of my teachers was named “philosophy’s gentle giant” in a recent obituary (the adjective may gently raise the eyebrow of generations of students left behind). He was a giant in part because he was able, as John Bayley said of Tolstoy, to see the elephant’s skin up close. He was exacting. He was relentless. But he could see, seemingly, all of life. When we asked him what his secret was, he said, Don’t make mistakes. Now that is also the secret to filing your taxes, but I have a sense of what he meant. You can’t intend to have vision or set your sights on being sonorous. You either have these talents or, if you lack them, you acquire them indirectly over time. But you can control your inferences. And when you are up in the night worrying about the argument you are putting together, you are not thinking about how it sounds. You want to know if the q’s are following from the p’s. I mean, you don’t follow a general into battle who blunders with elementary miscalculations. Thales would not be remembered for his sagacity had he failed to get the army across the river. Be correct and the rest takes care of itself (or it doesn’t, but that is not something you can affect directly).
The constraints imposed by the discipline provide form for the chaotic deeps. The discipline—think your thoughts, but not like that—is philosophy’s iambic pentameter. The constraints provide a container for something substantial to grow. And when it does, the elements—the hard and the generative—are held together in exquisite tension; it is a sublime art. But disciplinary norms have a function, and they can fail to serve it. Without counterpoint, an instruction like don’t make mistakes leaves divine intelligence with nothing to move through. It produces a field of petty bureaucrats who huff on their whistles to protest imprecisely formulated claims. It makes a roomful of people take note only of what they believe a speaker gets wrong. It is easy for me to see these deficiencies in others. It is harder to see the perennial creep inside. I tell an anthropologist friend that philosophy has been reckoning with its unsociability for the last ten years. She tells me that I have been reckoning with philosophy’s unsociability for the last ten years. The unsociability of philosophy, she says, is probably constitutive.
I ask a philosopher to read an essay of mine as I prepare to present it at a workshop. The essay is on the nature of value, taking intellectual and artistic pursuits as a test case. Against the view that these pursuits are good for people because they are good in themselves, I advance the view that they are good insofar as they engage imaginative and intellectual powers that are good for people. The philosopher finds the elements out of balance. He likes the part where I am in touch with live phenomena (where I am talking about what it is like to have your imagination set on fire by a penetrating argument, or George Eliot), but the philosophical debate he finds “scholastic.” I am quick to point out that this is the word philosophers use for any part of the field that is not, as this was not, their current preoccupation. And what I say is true; but this truth seems to conceal a bigger truth, as yet unclear to me. I am left with suspicions. Was the professor from the admissions committee right that I had been ruined by my training? Had I substituted technique for the thing itself? The man on the plane had a longing for sayings—for a precept to live by; apparently, he was not the only one.
I give the paper at the workshop. A sympathetic man in the audience with silver hair and a handsome face whom I’d met years earlier in New York asks the first question. “What is at stake for you in this?” The question surprises me. Isn’t it obvious? I want to be right, or if not right then unassailable. He leaves me with an injunction: “I want you to buck up,” he says. “Buck up!” The words ring in my ears with sense but without understanding. Later, at the dinner, I sit next to a graduate student who talks to me about her love of Iris Murdoch. We have both read Elias Canetti for the sole reason that Murdoch had had a perverse affair with him. Like me, she has read all the correspondence, all the biographies. I find her smart and hilarious and I hope I will see her again. Could we be members, as Iris Murdoch was—with Philippa Foot, Elizabeth Anscombe and Mary Midgley—of a latter-day quartet from across the pond? It is not that I’m convinced by everything Murdoch says. What really picks her out for me is that in the notably arid landscape of the ethics of her school days, she finds the deep amid the chatter by connecting to something divine. You can’t fuck with a high priestess.
That night I dream I am digging in the ground. I have a wand but it becomes a shovel. The ground is dry. My garden is spindly and without fruit. I have closed the tap too tightly. The next day, I read a perverse proclamation in Dune (this time, the O.C. Bible is cribbing from Ezekiel): “And I will make the rivers dry, and sell the land into the hand of the wicked: and I will make the land waste, and all that is therein, by the hand of strangers.”
Who are these strangers? The academy is marked by a culture of service. People you don’t know and will never meet ask you to do things, and you promise to do them for the honor of being asked. The promises start to accumulate like sticks in a bundle that you push in front of you. Bent under their weight, you can’t see the way ahead—but you press on in your devotion to so many independent realities. The underdog of the Delphic sayings is: Give a pledge and trouble is at hand. Promise something to someone and you put yourself under obligation to them—they have a right against you. Why incur an obligation to someone simply for the honor of being asked? You are mortgaging your vital forces for nothing now and hours upon hours of labor later. Is this the unsung trouble with making a pledge? The trouble is that pledges are powerful. You can pledge to realities you were not born to serve. You can pledge for no reason. You can pledge more than you have.
At the end of semester, I have lunch with a senior colleague from my department at the University of Pittsburgh. With the summer starting, we have the promise of months of solitude and protection from the public. As we eat our salads he makes the observation that teaching is a trauma. It is striking to hear this from someone so distinguished. I feel he is giving me permission to say it out loud. You stand up there day in and day out, no matter how little sleep you had, no matter how much time you had to prepare. You try to get the texts to make a sound—to open them up so that the students can hear the music for themselves and, in time, compose a response. Your goal is to trigger thoughts in them—movements of their minds along a fruitful path—and to do this you must embody the promise of something higher and more refined. But you feel bound by an earthly instruction—don’t make mistakes. In my early years on the tenure track I would wake at five in the morning to prepare for class. Fear of humiliation got me out of bed. I wanted to be as consummate as the professor from pre-Socratics to Augustine. As I was no master, I had to pretend, and I found myself performing as more alpha than I am. I was good at my cover. There was what I thought, and there was what I said I thought—a prophylactic against overexposure. Profundity doesn’t work in the classroom; it is easier to get precise about the structure of an argument. When in doubt, keep it as dry as bone china.
In my office during this period, I had a collection of hand-painted teapots. Bookshelves lined the walls from floor to ceiling and I put the teapots on the shelves in the absence of enough books to fill them. Sensing, I can only suppose, that I was in need of higher wisdom, a friend from Columbia told me I should speak to an oracle—a priestess born with visions named Annette. I would keep an open mind. “You’re a teapot,” the oracle told me over the phone. “A gorgeous teapot. That’s good enough. For many it is spectacular. But there is a hollowness, and there’s profundity humming as potential beneath it.” Was she telling me that I was impersonating the teapots in my office? And was she right? Socrates says the oracle is always right, so I put some thought into how to interpret her claims. A teapot is a special kind of vessel for water. Like Ganymede, cupbearer to the king of the gods, it is beautiful so it catches the eye. It could be an honor to be, or to impersonate, a teapot. Perhaps the trouble was that the teapots I was impersonating were not fulfilling their function. On display, they were empty of water. So where had the water gone?
I think back to my panic. Its first remembered object is the big kids wasting water with balloons, though apparently it had found a plurality of watery objects before I had concepts and could articulate my concerns. Much later, the object is strangers making water pour out of hydrants onto the streets. It is always panic at other people casually spending life. But what if I am the one wasting the water? What if there is no water in the teapot because I am mindlessly leaking it out, like a flask with a hole in the desert? As a child, did I know I would grow up to waste my own waters? A friend shares the hypothesis that my early panic was a premonition. I am confused. He draws my attention to a sequence from Dune in which Lady Jessica, a Bene Gesserit, drinks the water of life while carrying an unborn child. Laced with some variant of the spice, it gives her the memories of her ancestors and powers to see into the future. The substance is so strong and the acquired powers so great that the unborn child goes mad. My friend wants to know if my mother had drunk the water of life. Had she acquired the power to see into the future. Was I the mad child? If the mad child could speak, what would its saying be? Don’t waste your own waters on desert sands.
Let me try to put this together. Socrates says the oracle is always right. The oracle compares me to a teapot and suggests that something is going wrong. There happen to be teapots on display in my office. As I interpret the oracle, there is something wrong not with my impersonation per se, but with the teapots I am impersonating—they are not fulfilling their function. The teapot is designed to be empty so it can be filled with water; without water there is a hollowness inside. Once filled, the water is mixed with leaves and, after a measured interval of time, it becomes tea and is poured out. The pouring out seems important. Imagine hoarding the water in the belly of the pot. Like a puddle that insects lay their eggs in, or stormwater after a flood, the water would start to stink. Take the water in, and also pour the water out. But don’t just pour it out! And here’s the final piece of it. A teapot can be shiny or matte. It can be spare or decorative. Either way it is poised; it makes a clinking sound. The tea from a pot is not just poured, it is also offered—a cup for you and a cup for me. If you are as fine a water-bearer as Ganymede, then you are making an offering to the gods. To make an offering is not to spend unconsciously. And it is not to mortgage oneself. It is a gesture that replenishes in the very act. What is my offering? What are your philosophical sayings?
My offering is this: Everything is out of water.
Art credits: Ben Young. Hidden Layers, 2023, laminated float glass, cast concrete, stainless steel and white bronze, 22 x 16 x 8 in. Altered Perspective, 2023, laminated float glass, cast concrete and stainless steel, 16 x 22 x 5 in. Courtesy of the artist and Chesterfield Gallery.
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