echoes of no thing Before you start to read this book, take this moment to think about making a donation to punctum books, an independent non-profit press, @ https://punctumbooks.com/support/ If you’re reading the e-book, you can click on the image below to go directly to our donations site. Any amount, no matter the size, is appreciated and will help us to keep our ship of fools afloat. Contri- butions from dedicated readers will also help us to keep our commons open and to cultivate new work that can’t find a welcoming port elsewhere. Our ad- venture is not possible without your support. Vive la Open Access. Fig. 1. Hieronymus Bosch, Ship of Fools (1490–1500) echoes of no thing: thinking between heidegger and dōgen. Copyright © 2018 by Nico Jenkins. This work carries a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 International license, which means that you are free to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format, and you may also remix, transform and build upon the material, as long as you clearly attribute the work to the authors (but not in a way that suggests the authors or punctum books endorses you and your work), you do not use this work for commercial gain in any form whatsoever, and that for any remixing and transformation, you distribute your rebuild under the same license. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ First published in 2018 by punctum books, Earth, Milky Way. https://punctumbooks.com ISBN-13: 978-1-950192-01-4 (print) ISBN-13: 978-1-950192-02-1 (ePDF) lccn: 2018968574 Library of Congress Cataloging Data is available from the Library of Congress Book design: Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei Cover photograph: Nico Jenkins, “Il Passo del Monte Moro,” 2015 ECHOES OF NO THING Nico Jenkins Contents Introduction 17 • A New Thinking (Towards) 43 The Questioning of All Questions 63 The Question of Time 71 Dōgen’s Being-Time 103 Augenblickstätte and Nikon 121 Everything is Nothing 147 The Practice of Thinking 175 Conclusion 187 • Bibliography 199 For Jessica, who let me do my best, and who believed I could, always. Acknowledgments This project would not have been possible but for the help of many. I wish to thank, first and foremost, and with devotion and love, Jessica Kerwin Jenkins, who, as already mentioned, always believed I could do my best, and gave me the freedom and space to try. Without her, nothing happens. I wish to also thank Robert Brewer Young, who has walked beside me from the Tenderloin to the Lower East Side to the Marais, and who, gently at times, and harshly at others, queried who I was and what I believed, and in turn invited me to do the same to him. With Robert, I wish to acknowledge the late Hal Sarf, whose Saturday morning classes on thinking led me, for the first time, into the circle of wonder, as well as Ray Mondini, at the San Francisco Art Institute, whose pedagogy of passionate madness drove me to think I could (wonder). I thank also both my parents, Nancy Harmon Jenkins and Loren Jenkins, without whom I could not have been who I am. I am also indebted to my colleagues at the various institu- tions where I have taught, and who believed in me before I did. To both Husson University and the University of Maine espe- cially, I owe a debt of gratitude. In addition, without the support of my advisor Christopher Fynsk at the European Graduate School, who gave me the space and encouragement to read and explore, as well as Judith Balso and Alain Badiou who took me to dinner and listened, none of this could have happened. Indeed, without the University in Exile — and its mad, mad hatter, Wolfgang Schirmacher — little occurs. Finally, I wish to thank the tireless vision and labor of all at punctum books, especially Eileen Joy, whose relentless pursuit of the para-academic and open access is an inspiration and critique to all, and to my editor, Vincent van Gerven Oei, who has both spoken with me and carried me through this pro- cess — sometimes patiently, and at other times with delightful scorn. My debt to you is constant. …they’re going to abandon me, there will be the silence, for a moment, for a good few moments, or it will be mine, the lasting one, that didn’t last, that still lasts, it will be I, you must go on, I can’t go on, you must go on, I’ll go on, you must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me, strange pain, strange sin, you must go on, perhaps its done already, per- haps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the si- lence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on. — Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable Introduction Younger Man: In waiting, we are purely “present” as literally “waiting-toward.” Older Man: And nothing else. We are this so purely that from nowhere else does something stand over against us, to which we could cling and into which we would still want to escape. Younger Man: In waiting, we are in such a manner as though we were to have passed away unnoticed and unnamed — not there for all who still await this or that and still expect from this or that something for themselves, Waiting is in essence otherwise than all awaiting and expecting, which are basically unable to wait. — Martin Heidegger, Country Path Conversations Entirely worlding the entire world with the whole world is thus called penetrating exhaustively. To immediately manifest the bodying of the tall golden Buddha with the body of the tall golden Buddha as the arising of religious mind, as practice, as enlightenment, as nirvana — that is being, that is time. One does nothing but penetrate entire time as entire being. There is nothing remaining left over. — Dōgen, “Uji” John Cage’s 4'33" remains an echo, a repetition of the space of silence and all silence entails. Performed for the first time by 17 echoes of no thing pianist David Tudor in 1954 during a piano recital in Wood- stock, New York, it asks of the performer to sit at the piano, and to “perform” a piece of music. Tudor interpreted the instruc- tions Cage had written and sat at the piano, with the lid raised, for two minutes and twenty-three seconds. He then closed the lid, checked his watch, and raised it again. He sat for another two minutes, and then left the stage. Whereas the music cre- ated during a conventional concert, in effect, banishes the sound of the world by filling a discrete space with a sequence of pre- selected notes, Cage’s 4'33" — performed as silence — beckons sound forth, to come forward, to intrude or even to rest in the space. Sound, noise, voice, music are all made present through silence’s be-coming. An echo of silence shelters and holds itself as silence as a vessel or form holds itself. In the destruction of silence, noise creates the piece. Noise presencing is allowed to be revealed through the absenting of action, through the absent- ing of the intentional making of a note, of composed, ordered music. In English, the verb “to make” remains the same whether one is making a building or work of art. In Latin, however, we can separate the two terms; facio, which refers to the making of material things, is contrasted to creo which, as its name im- plies, refers to the creation of a thing. Creation carries with it a semblance of the divine, something which is primordial, un- made. Allowing noise to come forward as an incipient irrup- tion into the silence, to be-come, is an unmaking of its origi- nal form. Though criticized as a sham and a farce at the time, 4'33" has become an iconic1 piece of “music” and inscribes per- fectly a silence between words (without language) as the space between notes, between intentional noises. What is important about the piece, however, is not its shock value, but rather the attempt Cage made to say, or to think, silence within sounds, to think the unsignable within an architecture of signs, to say — or give voice to — the unsayable, that which refuses to be said, and 1 There are numerous videos online “recreating” the silence(s) of Cage’s 4’33”, including a death metal version by Dead Territory, https://youtu.be/voqC- QSDAcn8. 18 introduction which emerges in the space between, and which makes noise qua noise impossible. Heidegger’s Echoes Like the dynamic silences in 4'33", the world itself seems to be defined by the movement of objects within the lacunal spaces of nothing, objects that are both in relation to each other and to no[special]thing. Martin Heidegger describes this movement as a resonating, or the play between withdrawal and unconceal- ment, a resonating which allows for the “essential occurrence of Being [Seyn] in the abandonment of being.”2 Like the anticipated withdrawal of formal composition in 4'33", Heidegger describes a space between, the abandonment of the absolute in favor of the unconcealing of that which remains covered.