A Time for τεχνή
Fleeing a Flood
Two weeks ago a pipe from the bathtub cracked and turned our kitchen ceiling into a tremendous, suspended reservoir. My Saturday morning began with the sound of water rushing downstairs after my wife ended her shower; I rushed myself down to the kitchen and was struck by the sight of our light fixtures transformed into four cataracts, pouring a deluge of water upon the kitchen floor. Running down the next flight of stairs, I found steady streams of water hanging like stalactites into my basement. Three floors of our house all flooded, bloated, and pierced with water.
After a little while, a crew of professionals tore out the sopping wet ceiling and began the process of drying out what could be salvaged from the walls. Industrial fans pointed their cyclones at the soggy beams in our ceilings; the creeping tendrils of hoses snaked themselves into our walls to dry them from the inside out; colossal dehumidifiers were parked in each room with tubes draining gathered moisture into our sinks. For the next five days, this army of air would strive to separate out water from dust, lest those forces ally themselves and foster mold in our home.
While I was grateful for all the power tasked with the waging war in my kitchen, the drone and whirring were maddening the instant the machines were turned on. Rather than forming a chaotic yet calming blanket of white noise, the voices of these militant machines coalesced into a constant, whining tone that bore itself deep into one’s being. Again, this sound would drone for five days straight—around the clock. Nothing but sound and fury, day and night. The din of war without pause, and seemingly without end.
Yet, as Fate or Providence would have it, our family had coincidentally booked a cabin up in Northern Michigan and invited us to join them for the week. Naturally, we graciously accepted their offer. Leaving behind all those bellicose tones behind us, we settled into the gentler music of the lake: waves lapping against the shore and the dock; breezes awakening harmonics from between the branches of trees, both deciduous and coniferous; the patting rhythms of cherry pits being spit and bottles of wines being popped. Along with the music, there was a dance of colors: the water covered the whole spectrum between the deepest shades of lapis lazuli and the brightest glow of turquoise stones; the trees and grasses seemed drunk with green; the flesh of dark cherries poured out their vermillion juices which were so rich, one could mistake them with beets; the light on the lake sometimes shimmered with an ivory so purely white it almost seems metallic, at other times pools of pinkish, orangish salmon hues gathered in its waves; the sun transfigured itself in a myriad of radiances, depending on whether it shone through a riesling or a pinot grigio. The most remarkable thing about this music and color was how it was ever-changing. There were no fixed tones or static colors. Capricious and playful winds, infinite angles of effulgent light, vibrant and tremulous water—they all collaborated and none would hold still. Everything was alive. For that whole week, the beat of every moment seemed to take me and my family up into the steady current, the multifaceted dance, of this adamantly ephemeral world.
The Embers & The Stars
I sense my own place in the rhythm of the seasons, from seed time to harvest, the falling leaves and the stillness of winter. Some tasks are, perhaps, uniquely mine, not shared by other dwellers of the field and the forest. I can cherish the fragile beauty of the first trillium against the dark moss, and I can mourn its passing. I can know the truth of nature and serve its good, as a faithful steward. I can be still before the mystery of the holy, the vastness of the starry heavens and the grandeur of the moral law. That task may be uniquely mine. Yet even the bee, pollinating the cucumber blossoms, has its own humble, unique task. Though distinct in my own way, I yet belong, deeply, within the harmony of nature. There is no experiential given more primordial than that.
During this time removed from my wreckage of my kitchen and the churn of city life, I found myself embedded a bit more in the flow of nature. As I watched the light and lake, several thoughts accompanied me from a book read earlier this year: Erazim Kohák’s The Embers and The Stars. Kohák was a Czech philosopher living and teaching in New England who built his own cabin in the woods. Obviously, comparisons could be drawn with Thoreau’s Walden and the whole the American Transcendentalist tradition. If I had a lakeside cabin of my own, The Embers and The Stars would certainly be on my spartan wooden shelf (along with probably The Peregrine, The Compleat Angler, and The Wind and the Willows). His lyrical reflections on human existence and meaning in the context of the natural world and its rhythms seem like walking into one of Heidegger’s dreams: he talks about man-made objects and our world of artifice; he talks about our primordial kinship with nature and how that grounds our moral sense of the world; he talks about glimmering leaves in streams and families of porcupines; he talks about all this helps us find our place in Being. But just as he talks about Being, he naturally also talks about Time—specifically he talks about the significance of day, dusk, and night. In like manner, I’ll be sharing my reflections on them in three parts, beginning today with the Day.
The content below was originally paywalled.
Day: Time for τεχνή
When the sun casts its rays upon our world, distinct objects emerge out of the contrast of light and shadow. Before dawn, all was one continuous mass of Being “without form and void” (Genesis 1:2), but now the light comes down and outlines many kinds of diverse things, offering these goods to our gaze. Now, we can see which branches are brown, dead, and ready for the fire; we can see which branches are green, alive, and full of fruit we might eat. Whether budding on the tree or on display in pints at the farmer’s stand, we saw in those sunny summer days which cherries were ripe and ready for us to eat and which we should pass by. While out on a hike or gathering firewood, our eyes saw from a distance which plants had leaves of three without needing our hands to touch them; without eyes and the light of day, our bodies would’ve already run into these leaves and their toxic oils. (Some of the brasher members in our party did not avail themselves of their eyes, and learned the lesson to look next time as they scratched their skin later in the day.)
When it came to water, where would we be without the sun? While looking for places to swim, our eyes were lured by the glassy clear water of Suttons Bay and the phosphorescent hues of Glen Lake. While driving jetskis or pontoons across Lake Leelanau, our eyes distinguished between those safe blues of stoney or earthen hues signifying deep waters, the pale, pear yellows of shallows reflected from the sandy bottom rising up to meet us, and dark deep ridges of wakes striping the water’s surface like the back of tiger swimming across our path.
All of these activities happened during the day, and they could only happen during the day, because of the sun bringing these things to our attention. Light brought them to light. These daytime doings or actions could also be called our “crafts” or “arts,” which is why Kohák says that Day is the time of τεχνή (techné), as he writes: “Daylight with its individuating brightness and its pressing demands is the time of technē. In its light, the beings of this world stand out in insistent individuality.” During the day we ply our trade in the world; we see the objects presented to us here and now, and we we begin to respond to their presence. We do things to them and with them. When one’s attention falls upon a tree during a walk, the tree rarely remains just a tree. The presence of the tree gives rise to a question from us who are confronted by it: what must we do now?
Just walking down the path, preoccupied with other matters, I yet note a tree that needs to be culled, make a mental note of the type of wood, refer it to its possible uses. My intentional presence transforms even nature around me into an artifact. The world of my daily doings is a world structured by my active presence, unintelligible, it seems, without it.
The sun shed light on objects and they reflect that light on us. This reflection is our responsibilities. Again, the ripeness of dark cherries in season demands that we eat them lest they be wasted; the dry wood suggests gathering now for a bonfire later tonight. Most importantly: the attentive eyes of our babies laughing on the boat summon our attention to wholly present itself so the joy might be shared and continued while sun alights upon our eyes and smiles.
No matter what particular action or craft we might be called upon to perform in the daylight, first we must have our eyes open. Seeing is the first craft. Attention is the first art. The use of the eyes is our primary τεχνή bestowed upon us. (Note: the Greek word θεός, theos is related to other words that have to do with things which are “seen” θέα, thea, theater, theory, etc.) If we have properly done our first doing of seeing, we can move on to the cruder forms of doing afterward.
Unfortunately, ours is an age addicted to doing. Our current world wants to perpetuate the activities and work of the day, as we “Rage, rage against the dying of the light” (Dylan Thomas). Whereas a humble lamp or flashlight help us gently navigate our way in the dark, the ubiquity of modern electric lighting in our homes, lining our streets, and spreading out from our cities seeks to replace the night with day. Perpetual day, perpetual work, perpetual motion.
In the global city of our civilization we have banished the night and abolished the dusk. Here the merciless glare of electric lights extends the harshness of the day deep into a night restless with the hum of machinery and the eerie glow of neon. Unreflectingly, we think it a gain, and not without reason. We are creatures of daylight, locating ourselves in our world by sight more than by any other sense. We think of knowing as seeing.
Thus, our world of endless light promises security, productivity, and knowledge. For a time they might prove useful, but ultimately they cannot deliver on their promises—not in the deep way we need. All of our factories, casinos, hospitals, and homes are lit around the clock like those whirring machines I left behind to dry my flooded kitchen. Just as my ears couldn’t hear anything over their noise, our eyes cannot see things when bulbs keep them lit into the wee hours of the night. Ironically, all the light we hoped would let us see what we were doing just ends up blinding us. Naturally our eyes fatigue from the flicker of overhead florescent lighting or the stimulating blue light from our screens. But our eyes also get burned out from the responsibility of watching. Vigilance is taxing. Again, using our eyes is our first responsibility, and the vigilance of the day is exhausting when it runs at all hours of the night. When we find ourselves both physically and morally exhausted by the artificially extended day we’ve created, we blind ourselves to our place in the the world, and its rhythms:
Yet in our preoccupation with techne we stand in danger of losing something crucial-—clarity of vision. Surrounded by artifacts and constructs, we tend to lose sight, literally as well as metaphorically, of the rhythm of the day and the night, of the phases of the moon and the change of the seasons, of the life of the cosmos and of our place therein. The vital order of nature and the moral order of our humanity remain constant, but they grow overlaid with forgetting.
In the end, all good things must come to an end. As Ecclesiastes says, There is a time for this and a time for that, and the day is filled with moments taking their place in time while also giving themselves over to the next moment. While looking at the lake, I noticed every hour had its own character; morning, noon, afternoon all had their own face, their own light, and their own activities. The drinking coffee and reading while the babies played in with their toys effortlessly gave way to the paddleboarding or dune climbing of the afternoon. Likewise, all our days give themselves over to dusk and night. And it is to them that this essay now hands itself over…