empty you

“The true method of making things present,” says WB in “Convolute H: The Collector,” “is to represent them in our space (not to represent ourselves in their space).” A consideration of history, he illustrates further, follows that method: the method entails “receiving things into our space,” an approach that cautions against “displacing our being into theirs.” In other words, WB distinguishes between: (a) imposing ourselves onto the space of the thing we are considering; and (b) letting the thing approach our space and occupying it. WB’s remarks pertain to a consideration of history; perhaps it can also be relevant to thinking about the future. When a future prospect falls through, for instance, we are disappointed: we imagine ourselves in some future (preferably happy), we displace our wishes onto the space of that possible future, and when our imagined possibilities do not happen, we are crushed. The force of disappointment that crushes us is equal to the force of will we had exerted trying to make something happen. For WB, it seems, one way to make past things present is to adopt a stance of openness: a receptivity especially to the unpredictable, the contingent, the difficult. By contrast, we mustn’t rush blindly into the space of things; according to WB, in trying to come to terms with history, we should acknowledge that elements from the past arrive into our lives with the crystalline logic of chance: “they step into our life.” Which means, returning now to the idea of the future: we don’t know when and how it comes to us, what is asked of us is to be open to its arrival; we empty ourselves so that when it’s here, we can recognise it, we can take it in, the future can be present in us.