CHARLES STEIN and Raymond Foye: In Conversation about "Being, Liberation, and Creative Practice"

[intro blurb]

Raymond Foye (Rail): Who were your early influences in poetry? I know you were personally acquainted
with Charles Olson and Robert Kelly from a fairly young age, and they had a big influence on you as a
young poet. But previous to that you encountered the Beats. Did they have a crucial influence on you the
way they did with so many young poets and artists of the 1950s?

Stein: Oh, absolutely. I was already into jazz with another friend, Andy Muson, who was learning to play
the bass. We had met at a summer camp for the arts, when I was still in high school, at Horace Mann

Rail: Jazz then meant what, Be-bop?

Stein: Well, it meant Be-bop and West Coast cool jazz, but very quickly for me it meant free jazz. I had
heard some Duke Ellington records at home, and I just started going after that music. Andy and I would go
listen to jazz wherever we could at places like Village Vanguard. I joined a jazz club in my high school, and
there was a guy there who had just bought a copy of Howl, and he said, “You’ve got to read this,” so I
went down to the bookstore, and I read Howl on the bus coming back home. It completely ripped me
open. I was weeping. It was unbelievable. Suddenly, I didn’t know where I was; I didn’t know what the
world was. Everything had been opened up by that. Like many people, that text was the great lightning
bolt that struck the tower. It wasn’t like it made vivid a reality that was otherwise unvivid--up to that
point it wasn’t even there. What is he saying?

Rail: Your first writings were in the thrall of Howl?

Stein: Yes, in fact the first poems I showed people were called “Anarchist in the Subway,” attempting to
get into that kind of rant, to loosen the language, get it all flowing. Then a few months later I was reading
people with a more measured form, and the actual initiation into the poetry world included Ferlinghetti
and e.e. cummings. The first time I picked up on a kind of phrase-structure poetry was from Ferlinghetti.
So the first poems of mine that were impressing people were poems that were kind of weird!

Rail: Based on A Coney Island of the Mind and Pictures of the Gone World?

Stein: Yeah, exactly. Pictures of the Gone World.

Rail: Poems that were little stories, vignettes, with a gentleness...

Stein: Yeah, and turning things. As soon as my own mind began to grow, I was alert to absurdism. I was
alert to transcendental things. I was alert to surrealism and dadaism and philosophy and eventually
mathematics and poetry, of course—anything that gave you something that you didn’t understand, that
opened your mind.

Rail: Did you get into Kerouac’s poetry?

Stein: Well, of course, and then there was the record of Kerouac reading, with Steve Allen playing the
piano in between, and another one called Blues and Haikus with Al Cohn and Zoot Sims. And we’d read
the many poems from Mexico City Blues. That was literally the first poetry I ever knew. Of course we were
given poetry to read in school, but Kerouac was in my ear--the first poetry I was interested in was
probably what I heard.

Rail: Which are very well-observed sketches that have a cosmic quality to them.

Stein: Oh yeah, "The wheel of the quivering meat conception turns in the void expelling human beings... I
wish I was free of that slaving meat wheel and safe in heaven dead."

Rail: So Mexico City Blues was a Grove Press edition with Franz Kline on the cover, was it not?

Stein: That came later. There wasn’t any copy of it. I didn’t have the text. I just had the record.

Rail: Oh, interesting.

Stein: And then of course one became aware of Burroughs and Corso and everybody. And then I started
going down to Greenwich Village and everybody would show up in Washington Square on Sunday
afternoon. So I would always go down there, and it felt like, this was...

Rail: The tribe.

Stein: Yeah, this was freedom. Suddenly just to be there was to have entered into a world of possibility.
And after I went to hear Ornette Coleman in concert at Town Hall, I started making big signs all over my
room in Arabic letters that said, “The world does not exist, and God save Ornette Coleman.” [Laughs.] It
came from a kind of Sunday morning teenage religious program, in which teenagers from all around the
world were brought in to talk about their religions. And there was a boy from Burma talking about
Buddhism and saying, "Well, you know, the world doesn’t exist." That made a big impression.

Rail: So free jazz really gave you the form and energy that you were looking for at that point?

Stein: Well sort of, but you know the truth is, what really got me into Ornette was just the immediate
soulfulness of it. That it was so fucking direct...

Rail: And exuberant. Very similar to Howl.

Stein: Yeah, but it was very positive. It wasn’t like Howl, which was ripping into you. Ornette ripped into
you, but it ripped into you at the level of immediate affect. That wail—that was like the “eli eli lamma
lamma sabacthani saxophone cry” in the night. There was that saxophone cry. And Albert Ayler, even
more so in that regard.

Rail: Does Kerouac stay with you as an enduring influence?

Stein: Actually, it was only fairly recently that I really got how much that prose really is jazz prose. I mean
On the Road and The Subterraneans and all of that. Those texts, you could really read them as bebop
prose. There’s no question about it. I can’t say that it stayed with me, except the things that I got stayed
with me. What I got was with me right at the beginning. But he wasn’t somebody that I read a lot over the
years.

Rail: Did you ever go back to Some of the Dharma, or Wake Up, or some of the texts about the Sutras? For
me those are some of the most insightful texts on Buddhism ever written.

Stein: Well, in that regard Gary Snyder was very important to me, his translations of the Han Shan's Cold
Mountain poems that appeared in Evergreen Review. He maybe was the one that introduced me to
Buddhism as it could relate to poetry. I read Riprap and those early books, and I liked them well enough.
They certainly had a particular thing they did, that I incorporated. But it was his presentation of Buddhism
within the context of poetry that attracted me.

Rail: And you knew he was Japhy Ryder in Dharma Bums.

Stein: Yeah, of course, all those connections were there. But I was looking for the reality of those
experiences.

Rail: How did you come to meet Charles Olson?

Stein: I went to a party and met Paul Blackburn and Jerome Rothenberg and Rochelle Owens and what I
called the other New York Poets. And then later in that day we went and met Robert Kelly at a restaurant
in Chelsea, and Robert was my introduction to the rest of the universe. When the Donald Allen anthology
[The New American Poetry 1945-1960] came out, of course, we ate that up right away. Donald Allen
included Olson's essay "Projective Verse" and it was very puzzling to me. I didn’t know what it meant or
what the issues were at all. But in 1961 as a junior in high school I found my way to Vincent Ferrini at his
frame shop in Gloucester, Massachusetts — which is now the Gloucester Writing center and has in some
sense continued his legacy — and he said, "You got to go meet Charlie!" He told us how to get to 28 Court
Square, we knocked on his door, and he talked to us for seven or eight hours. I was just sixteen and that
was my introduction.

Rail: Lets talk about "Projective Verse" for a minute in terms of encapsulating what it’s about. He’s
proposing a 'field.' The field is the page, but all the rules, the formal rules, are now being thrown out and
replaced by a sphere of action, dictated by consciousness itself, and perception. He’s following the lead of
the Abstract Expressionists, in the sense that the poem is now going to be enacted on the page, and its
'subject' is going to be its own creation. He’s also looking to eliminate metaphors and similes and all of
these poetical devices--to get down to the thing itself, the most concrete thing. Now you once said that
when Olson succeeded at this and arrived at the most concrete thing, he found, paradoxically, that it was
also the most abstract thing. To state the case in the terms of painting: a portrait of a person is not that
person, but a red painting is red. So by eliminating all these contrivances, he arrives at some kind of
bedrock of consciousness that you call concretism.

Stein: I formulate it this way in my Olson book, The Secret of the Black Chrysanthemum, which is based on
Olson’s reading of C. G. Jung. My book is really an attempt to articulate this idea of his concretism, that
everything is created from a "stance." “Stance” is his word in Projective Verse, to create a stance towards
reality "nexal to the practice of verse" at that time. "Nexal" meaning “connected to," a term borrowed
from Alfred North Whitehead. But this is how I see it now: there was something happening at Black
Mountain in the 1950s that is fundamental to the landscape we inhabit today, and you can feel it—in
Rauschenberg, in Twombly, in Franz Kline, in Olson, in John Cage, in early Merce Cunningham, M.C.
Richards, all those people. They all had this relationship to the concreteness of the situation of making
their art. And it manifested in the different modes, of course, as the different arts do, when you’re dealing
with the medium not in the abstract sense that later "medium artists" do, where you define a specific
medium by its specific material properties, but in the concrete sense of that which you actually confront
in working with paint, or working with sound, or working with, as with Olson, the syllable and the breath,
the somatic condition of speech--somatic not in the abstract idea of the body, but the body in relationship
to the physical place that it's in.
So there’s a kind of rough continuity, not in the sense of mathematical continuity, but just no
discontinuity--no disruption--between a) the site at which one is making the perception, having the
perception of what’s happening in one’s presence, and b) the act of making speech that would be
involved with that. Now of course it spreads out. With Olson it’s hardly that the poems are fundamentally
concrete subject matter--it's not at all “no ideas but in things”--which very quickly becomes no ideas--but
it’s starting from things and moving out while simultaneously staying with the things.
I felt in later years, when I was actually able to go into Olson’s apartment more deeply (because
when I was visiting him I never got passed the kitchen--he was protective of his books and his masks and
whatever--but later on I was friends with the person who had been living with him at the end of his life,
and I got to see the whole house,) the house felt like Black Mountain College. It was like there was a spirit
that was Black Mountain, and that I have felt every time that I have had a direct contact with one of these
people. And it was also with their personality, a kind of immediate confrontation, not in the negative
sense. Olson was not confrontational, but he still took you as a physical presence. But it wasn't like he was
looking at you--you couldn’t see what he was looking at! It was like he was looking at what I would
become. He would be talking to me, and I feel he was talking to me as I am now, at 73. I could talk to
Olson now. As a kid, it was completely bizarre, and it made a kind of impress on me that I had to spend a
lot of time trying to figure out. In fact, I did dissertation work on him after he died and his papers went to
the University of Connecticut at Storrs. Gerrit Lansing suggested that I go and get an assistantship there
and work on them, and I did. I spent a good seven or eight years trying to figure out what Olson was for
me, and it came from the fact that this thing had happened to me that I couldn't explain.

Rail: You also were trying to figure out what he had written down on the page.

Stein: Completely, that was the point--using the actual literary study to come to a sense of it, because
although I was enormously impressed and it was incredible being around him, I didn’t understand it. His
poems came to me very slowly. There would be one poem or one line here. But at first it sounded like
protest poetry of some sort, the early Maximus poems.

Rail: So maybe you got into Archaeologist of Morning first, or “The Kingfishers” or some of the earlier
poems?

Stein: No, no, I can actually go through the sequence of it. It was lines towards the end of Maximus, the
book of letters to the people of Gloucester, where he says, "Men are so sure they know very many things,
they don't even know night and day are one. A fisherman works without reference to that difference..."
And, "You rectify what can be rectified, and when a man's heart cannot see this, the door of his divine
intelligence is shut."

Rail: Olson the sage.

Stein: That got me, you know, and then there were other places, particularly like in the beginning, "One
loves only form, and form only comes into existence when the thing is born, born of yourself." That’s the
complexity of it. Projective verse is about form, but it’s about the question: “How does form arise? Where
do you get it?” It doesn’t arise from a cultural standard imposed upon speech to which you assimilate
yourself in order to write poetry. Form is something that’s an original aspect of one’s own actual
existence in the world. One is a form-making organism. And that form-making organism operates upon
what it has available to it, which is its own perception, its own body, its own position in gravity, its own
relationship to the landscape, and its own relationship to the concrete history of the condition that one
finds oneself in--and that it is the divine intelligence nonetheless that is at concern there. And that was
the key to the question of Jung, because I had spoken with Olson a bit about Jung.

Rail: How would you formulate that question about Jung?

Stein: Ok, so there was a dinner party and Olson said, “Will you come to this hotel and sit in the lobby and
when the dinner is over I’ll call for you.” And I sat there, and he came for me, with John Wieners, and we
all went out to another place and talked all night. And one of the things we talked about was Jung. So I
had a clue that there was a kind of use of Jung that was not obvious, not on the surface.

Rail: When I first encountered your Olson book, it struck me as odd that Olson would be so involved with
Jung, because when you think of it, Robert Duncan seems to be more of a Jung person and Olson would
seem to be more of Freud person, but it's the exact opposite.

Stein: That’s absolutely right. Duncan almost had no use for Jung, and Olson--it wasn't that he had no use
for Freud, but he wasn’t interested in psychology in that sense. He would always say something like,
“That’s the social.”
Rail: “That’s the social?”

Stein: In other words, when you would start talking about your own personality and your own life and
your own concerns and your own anxieties and your vision of yourself, he would dismiss that. He wanted
to cut past that to the relative conditions under which your consciousness was forming itself, which had
social issues and psychological issues as part of the material, but it wasn’t the subject. The subject was not
the psychological subject or the social subject--it was something that came into its form in a very concrete
manner.

Rail: That’s the divine intelligence at work.

Stein: The divine intelligence, yeah. What my book actually demonstrates is Olson’s Jungian heresy, that
his heresy is that the archetypes are the organs, that the unconscious is the interior of the body. And so
the question of how the heart affects one’s consciousness already had the structure of an archetypal
relationship. Your affect, your relationship to your own bodily rhythms and your own energy, was already
connected to a general archetypal situation through one’s being a member of the species.

Rail: But within Jungian construct that was an apostasy.

Stein: Definitely, and in Jung the idea of concretism was a negative term. He actually uses that term. And
his idea is that concretism is when the libido—because it has failed to reach the symbolic level—can flow
infinitely into the object. And so he uses Lévy-Bruhl and his idea of "participation mystique" in which the
magical charging of objects by shamans and tribal people is a kind of pathology of the psyche that hasn’t
found a way to symbolize. This is part of Jung’s progressive history of consciousness. Olson says the poet
whose mind knows order is for participation mystique, and the attention to the object itself is finite and
binds the energy. So instead of needing the symbolism in order to put a limit on the projection of the
libidinal energy, the attention—the exact attention—to the concrete situation would provide a boundary
towards the projection. But it would be a boundary that wouldn’t be sublimated. It wouldn’t be a
sublimation of the energy into the symbolic register, it would be an actual energetic charge that could be
transmitted to the work that was being done in order to realize that form.

Rail: And that’s the Black Mountain aesthetic that you can find in Rauschenberg, you can find in Cage, you
can find in Twombly. It’s a hugely exciting moment in consciousness, isn't it?
Stein: I think that it stands. Olson said, on a piece of paper that I used from his notes to actually create the
structure of my Olson-Jung book, “I have to take Jung for psychology--a greater projection of the
archetypal force of the person, language, and place.” He uses that as a schema for the organization of the
later Maximus poems beyond those letters, but it becomes more cosmological and spreads out in its
historical reference. But then he says, “I have to take Whitehead for the metaphysics,” and my idea was
that I was going to study Whitehead and do Olson’s metaphysics. In the process of doing that Don Byrd
told me that there actually is a copy of Process and Reality in the Storrs library that is deeply and heavily
annotated by Olson, but I couldn't find it, so I never did that.

Rail: So instead?

Stein: After that, I got interested in other kinds of philosophy. I never was satisfied that I could justify the
ontology of the Olson position. But nonetheless it is a viable configuration that really does stand as a
resistant to the present, ongoing--what I call “contemporary default" ontology: that only information is
real. That’s been my pitch in recent years. If I have a single political thing, it’s an attack on this notion.
There is a default ontology that is sucking everything into it, which is not information technology, not
information "this-or-that," but the belief that only information is real. And as strong a stance as one could
imagine against that would be that which Olson actually embodies and projects.

Rail: By "information,” what does that mean? Things that can be measured and quantified?

Stein: Well, it’s the way in which anything can be turned into something that can be measured and
quantified, and which gives a pseudo-resolution between subjectivity and objectivity, because if you can
render the qualitative character of consciousness precisely, you can turn it into information. And if you
can measure the external reality you can turn it into information. So when you think about information as
that which takes qualities and turns them into quantities and makes them capable of representation, then
information is also the generalization of the process of representation.

Rail: That is something that science needs to struggles with as well as art.

Stein: Science is that! I don’t want to go too far on science, but I’ve written pieces about it.

Rail: I used to always be amazed hanging out with Robert Creeley how every single day it was Olson,
Olson, Olson, always going to back to Olson. It was the basis of everything for him, how enduring it was.
Curiously none of Olson's students wrote remotely like him.
Stein: That's precisely my point about Black Mountain College: it is not a style, it's about specificity and
potentiality... There is a recent piece in Michael Boughn's blog Dispatches ("Poetics’ bodies – Charles
Olson and some poetry wars, 1913-1990") about the history of the relationship of Olson to SUNY Buffalo,
and he claims that basically Creeley kind of sold it out. The truth has to do with Tom Clark's biography of
Olson, which is a horrible book as far as I'm concerned--it's got so much misinformation, there are so
many things that he simply gets wrong. But Creeley and Ed Dorn both praised it, and this was father-kill.
They needed to separate themselves. Olson was being attacked because of his patriarchy and his
masculinity and his misogyny--which is a very complex matter when you get into the work and the
different people who have said different things about him. As far as I'm concerned, the one to trust on
Olson is Diane di Prima.

Rail: One of the things I love about Olson is he leads you back to all the vital primary sources. Is that what
lead you to Ancient Greek studies at Columbia University?

Stein: Maybe a quick take on the whole matter... since I've already been yacking on about ontology. What
I was reading after I finished working with Olson was Martin Heidegger, a whole series of his book started
coming out, and I’m still struggling with the question. But what the Heidegger material did open is that
you could see very clearly that the question of Being is what he focuses on. I almost would have to lecture
on the whole thing to say what it is, but one of the things that Heidegger does in a number of different
places is to say that at the origins of early Greek thought--which is conventionally called "the pre-
Socratics"--in the poem of Parmenides, which is the first text to start talking about Being, there is
something still unthought in Parmenides. [Chuck maybe this paragraph can be tightened up?]

Rail: Parmenides is so beautifully confounding, like the Tao.

Stein: I had always been interested in Parmenides. When I was studying Greek at Columbia he was
included in a Greek poetry course, and everybody was reading it, and everybody was saying: “This is
insane, nobody can make any sense of this.” But I thought: “I don’t think this is nonsense--I’m really
interested in this!” So a seed had been planted. Some years later, I started translating it. You know,
Robert Duncan includes chunks of Parmenides in his book Of the war: passages (1966), but before that
happened I had the idea that I wanted to do something like that, so I started translating him. Then in the
early ’80s I became aware that although I had been thinking about abstraction, particularly in relationship
to painting--since when I first went into the MOMA when I was maybe fifteen years old and sat for an
hour in front of the big Jackson Pollock and was exposed to all that--I couldn’t really tell you what
abstraction was and that made me realize I really needed to learn something about mathematics.
 So I sent a call out into the aether: “Find me a mathematician, please.” And my wife at the time,
Michelle Rhodes, saw a sign for a poetry reading by two or three mathematicians, and Catherine Christer
Hennix appeared there. I met her and we slowly became friends and I began studying her version of the
philosophy of mathematics, which had its own rhymes with this concretism. It was based on the actual
character of a concrete intuition of mathematics.
Catherine in the late ’80s gave a series of seminars in Rhinebeck that she called the "Rhinebeck
Seminars on Pre-Socratic Set Theory," and it was basically a presentation of her view and the view of her
teacher, a mathematician named Sergei Esenin-Volpin. I attended them all and got kind of initiated into
this world. But one of the things that happened in the course of that was that Christer got interested in
the partial translation of Parmenides that I did. And so I finished it. My idea was that, among other things,
the text is a real poem. It's always treated as if it's bad poetry but important philosophy, and so when you
try to read Parmenides, it doesn’t read very well. It just reads like somebody is saying impossible things.
So I decided I was going to try to render a literary version of it, which I did. I made a poem of it, a fairly
accurate translation. Eventually I will have to do an annotated version, my view of what Parmenides really
is.

Rail: Is that translation in the Persephone book? [Persephone Unveiled: Seeing the Goddess and Freeing
Your Soul, North Atlantic Books, 2006]

Stein: It's in that book, it’s in the book that I edited of Christer's work (Io #41: Being = Space x Action,
North Atlantic Books, 1988) that La Monte Young blurbed. I've published it a number of times. A few years
later, I was reading Herbert Günther’s The Matrix of Mystery. Herbert Günther is a major German early
Tibetologist who writes about Dzogchen texts and philosophy, but does so with a kind of Heideggerian
angle that makes it somewhat difficult. He has many useful formulations, but the Heideggerianism is
questionable. Nonetheless, at a certain point in Matrix of Mystery, he says, “I'm going to take Heidegger's
idea of Being to translate the concept, in Tibetan Buddhism or in Dzogchen Buddhism, of what they call
the base, which would be like the ultimate underlying principle.” He's going to say that's Heideggerian.

Rail: You once said to me something I've never forgotten: “Being is the only word that is not one word too
many.”

Stein: Well, that's my formulation: Being may be one word too many, but it's the only word about which
you can say that it's only one word too many. You can't do without it. In poststructuralist thought, from
Derrida on, when they write “Being,” they'll put a cross over it. And there's this French phrase, “sous
rature,” under erasure, meaning you don't actually accept it as a concept but you have to use it. I have an
alternative to that where I write Being with a little arrow before the B, before the E, a little arrow after
the G, going up. So that being always has the possibility of meaning more than what you say it means.
[Chuck: we should illustrate this here.] So that, for instance, the deconstruction of presence in the
postmodern Holy Trinity—Foucault, Lacan, Derrida—the deconstruction of presence basically in the
Derridian idea of différance, which is about something that, in the place of an ultimate irreductible
principle, you have this thing that can't come to presence. But then in doing that, all he's doing is showing,
from my point of view, another layer to the question of Being.

Rail: What would be the Tibetan word, or the Sanskrit word, that is the equivalent of this?

Stein: In each different school you'll have different words. In general Vajrayana Buddhism the word
"Dharmakāya" would be like that. It's the actual fact of emptiness. But that is only what it is in its most
concrete actual experiential practical condition—it’s just a word that is functional and practical. I recently
read a piece by Chögyam Trungpa in that big book that was recently published, this giant book on
Vajrayana (The Tantric Path of Indestructible Wakefulness, Shambala, 2013). Right at the end of it, where
he's talking about the actual experience of realization, and he says, “You know, from that point of view,
even the word Dharmakāya is just stuff humans talk about.” Hence, my arrows from the word “Being.”
But I flashed while I was reading this: what if I take not Heideggerian being, but Parmenidean being, in
that position? Wouldn't I now find the lynchpin, the link between the very origins of Western intellectual
life and the possibility of Buddhist practice by a contemplation of this Parmenidean Being, on the
stipulation that it's what the Buddhists really mean by "realization" at that highest level? I then evolved a
thought experiment (this was in 1981), which I'm still involved with to this day, and the thought
experiment was precisely that. I'm going to take what Parmenides says as the Buddhist enlightenment,
and I'm going to now look at what the whole tradition of western metaphysics—which Heidegger says is
the history of ontology, but not just the history of ontology, for Heidegger it’s the history of Being. The
knotty difficulty with Heidegger is that his historicization of the question of ontology becomes a dogma
about history —the history of Being, and furthermore, he claims to know what it is. I'm not that, but I'm
making as a stipulation, as a configurative starting point, to take the word for Being in the Parmenides
poem, which by the way isn't one word but is actually seven words. So the Platonic understanding of
Parmenides as being about “the One” is not in Parmenides. Parmenides does say, “It’s one,” but what he
means by that is, “it's not many and it's not nothing.” He doesn't mean it’s “the One” as a summit of a
hierarchy. So my idea was that if you take being from what I claim is the Parmenidean point of view,
which is very much not the Platonic point of view, suddenly the entire text is intended to ward off what
becomes philosophy.

Rail: It's the philosophical road not taken. Or rather, it's the end of the road. It's almost as if he kills off
philosophy in the cradle.
Stein: Exactly, Parmenides is saying: You can't go further than this. Each previous philosopher in the
Hellenic world—Pythagoras, Anaximenes, Thales, Heraclitus—each one takes a metonymical image, a
piece of reality, and projects it over all of reality, and then tries to understand everything. Metonymy is a
poetry term, a philosophy word, meaning you take the part and treat it as the whole. So here is my history
of Western Philosophy: You can see that all the early Greek philosophers—Pythagoras, Thales,
Anaximander, Anaximenes, Heraclitus, up to Parmenides—each one of them is getting beyond making
mere analogies but is still taking some part of reality and treating the whole of reality under the aegis of
that part. So you have one guy who thinks everything is made of earth, and you get a cosmology that’s
based on the idea of solidity. Another one, everything is made of water, so you get a cosmology that’s
based on the idea of flow. Or everything is fire, so you get everything as burning up and being very
impermanent or energetic. With Pythagoras everything is made of mathematical proportions. With
Heraclitus you have this idea that there's something called logos, the word: everything could be
understood through language. Each one is a metonymy. Parmenides is the first guy who doesn’t do that.
He just says, “Being.” Full stop. And suddenly you’ve reached a point of abstraction in which you’re no
longer making a metonym. It’s no longer a part for the whole. Being isn’t a part of Being. You’ve suddenly
got it. There’s nowhere else to go.

Rail: Does this connect with Olson’s dispensing of metaphor, or is that something we shouldn’t get into
right now? When you quoted Olson saying 'night and day are one'—I thought of Thales, who answered
the question, "Which is older, day or night?" by saying “Night is older, by one day.” It's interesting how in
philosophy we don't seem to have gotten any further than the pre-Socratics, no matter how advanced the
thought. Conceptually, everything keeps circling back to them.

Stein: I wrote a text many years ago that I still hold by, in which I say what Parmenides was saying, “This is
as far as you go.” And what happens after is that is too austere, and so immediately Socrates and Plato
are saying, “Well, what is this Being?” And they come up with an answer, and the answer is, "It's the
world of forms," and so you now have Being and Becoming. But really, what Parmenides says, according
me, is the only thing you can say about Being is that it is itself: Being is Being, and everything else is
merely appearing to be. And the nature of the relationship between appearance and Being is that the very
structure of appearance is that it appears to be. Therefore, in every appearance, there is a link to Being,
but it’s a link which only can only be accessed by a release from the idea that the appearance is as it
appears to be. That the “is” in appearance has to be dropped, but then Being appears beyond
appearance, because Being can’t appear except through the way it manifests as appearance.

Rail: Which of course has profound implications for contemporary painting, doesn’t it?
Stein: Well, what I’ve been doing for the last twenty-seven years now has been running it through in
relationship to music, in relationship to painting, in relationship to poetry, in relationship to every
philosopher that I become aware of, because what Heidegger traces in his history of Being is the way in
which each philosophical movement opens the question of Being and then answers it. Its answer is
whatever the first principle is going to be in the philosophy, whether it’s experience, or whether it’s
reason, or whether it’s the forms, or whether it’s economics. So whether it’s space, time, matter, energy,
or information, each of these ontologies is asking the question of Being but then occulting it, covering it
over by precisely answering it. The key to the connection to Buddhism for me is that Buddhism rejects
rejects ontologies. It rejects the idea that there is any construction.

Rail: Buddhism denies that any of these ontologies even exist.

Stein: It says that the struggle of the mind—its desire to put together a thinking that would be adequate
to reality—is impossible, because the only thing that's adequate to reality is reality itself, and that’s
formless. Being itself has no form, but being generates form. In the Dzogchen language, it’s said that the
ultimate principal has an essence and a nature, and its essence is it's formless, and its nature is that it
takes form. And that formulation in the Dzogchen tradition in Tibetan Buddhism I lay exactly next to a
formulation that I translated in Parmenides, “Everything that seems must seem to be.” Yet Being itself
doesn’t seem. There is a contrast between Being and appearance, but it’s not an opposition--it’s a unique
kind of dyad. It’s a dyad that in Pythagorean terms is called the "indefinite dyad." That is to say it’s neither
one nor two. If you say it’s two, it immediately becomes one; if you say it’s one, it immediately splits into
two. Maybe that’s enough that we need to say about Parmenides here.

Rail: One thing when you were talking about Whitehead and Olson and not really understanding
Whitehead at the time, is... I think of Olson's book Human Universe, which I read as a metaphor of the
universe as a body with organs...

Stein: That’s how you hear that phrase?

Rail: Yes, it is...

Stein: There is in his work, for sure, a kind of Macanthropos, a giant man that is the archetypal Maximus,
but Olson calls it the Bulgar, which is mythologized very physically as this kind of giant that's straddling
the Atlantic and the continent, with one foot in the Atlantic and one foot on the westward drifting
continent. I always took the title in a much smaller sense, in that there is this universe that the physicists
describe, then there is the human universe, which is the world of the exact human experience.

Rail: I remember Robert Motherwell once saying to me that all his life was an attempt to play out and
establish the importance of Whitehead’s thought to him at Harvard, and he felt he was never successful
at somehow getting that through in his work—that it was an absolutely fundamental inspiration that kind
of haunted him in his work.

Stein: It’s a very, very useful way of thinking about the relationship between coming to form and the
cosmos and natural world. It certainly does an incredibly interesting job on that. My term that I use now
for recovering the worlds of metaphysics and philosophy is the idea of "configuration"--neither figurative
nor non-figurative, where, understanding all the problems with representation and figuration, one
nonetheless also understands the positive value of coming to a figure and of calling that "configurative."
And there would be an ethics of configurative thought, which is that you always recognize it as
configurative; you try to state the motives for looking at things in this way, and you acknowledge the
difference [correct?]. That is to say, you acknowledge that other forms of thought would be distorted if
you try to represent it from this point of view. So there can never be one configuration, or one
metaphysics, or one ontology, and so I’m calling that after a theologian philosopher, David Leahy, a poly-
ontology, and I’ve linked that with Peter Lamborn Wilson's "ontological anarchism." In fact my
conversations with Peter are to a large extent my trying (to the extent that I can) to provide a
philosophical basis for what his whole work really is saying. So poly-ontology in relationship to
Parmenides no-ontology, Buddhist no-ontology, and Peter Wilson’s ontological anarchism on the other—
that’s a kind of complex quaternium, as it were.

Rail: So you have this interest with various systems, philosophical, mathematical, but also alchemy and
hermeticism, which leads me to ask how you came upon the tarot? What did it mean to you as a poet,
and how did you relate to it as another abstract framework?

Stein: I had gotten interested in Yeats, I was reading John Unterecker’s A Reader's Guide to William Butler
Yeats, and Richard Ellmann book Yeats: The Man and the Masks, so I was beginning to get familiar with
the question the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, but none of the 'legitimate' Yeats scholars were
quite talking about the tarot. Then one day on a remainder table in a bookstore somewhere there was
MacGregor Mathers’s little book about the tarot. It looked fascinating and I thought, “I’ve never heard of
this. Nobody I know knows anything about this. I’ll study this!” Because back then one of the keys to
knowing, to being able to come in from left field, was that that you had to know things that nobody knew
anything about. This will relate to Harry Smith, actually.

Rail: It already does [laughs].

Stein: So I bought that book, and immediately the tarot started appearing to me in various different
places. Eventually I read A. E. Waite’s book on the tarot. Also a book by Gerard Encausse, whose esoteric
pseudonym was Papus, he was a leader of one of these late nineteenth century occultist cults. He had a
very complex symbolic system that included planets, Egyptian symbols, Hebrew letters, Renaissance
figures, but also an esoteric numerological system that went back to Pythagoras and further. There were
two stores that I knew of at that time in New York where books of this sort were sold, and one of course
was Samuel Weiser’s, the other was a little store on 55th Street called Inspiration House. The woman who
ran Inspiration House was somebody whose name was Eden Gray, and she had a little “how to read the
tarot cards” book that was sort of based on Waite, and used Pamela Coleman Smith's Rider-Waite deck.
She was giving a course in how to read tarot cards every Thursday night in the spring of my senior year in
high school. I also made contact through the phone book with the Yoga Society that was founded by
Rammurti Mishra, who founded Ananda Ashram that’s still going in Monroe, New York. So my freshman
year in college I was going to both of these organizations, studying yoga and the tarot.

Rail: I think a lot of people lose sight of the fact that the tarot, like yoga, is a practice.

Stein: Exactly. Now, the way they taught the tarot was they gave you outlined versions of the various
cards, and the first thing you did is you painted them according to the color symbolism that they taught.
And you studied week by week in great detail the entire outline of their occult system by reading the texts
that they gave you and painting in the tarot cards, visualizing them, meditating on them, and connecting
oneself to them. And the interesting thing about it was there were all these kinds of doctrinal
proclamations and descriptions of the symbolic relationships between the different elements, which
involved a whole picture of astrology, the tree of life system of the Kabbalah, the Sephiroth and the paths,
an incorporation of all kinds of different mythological material, geomancy, alchemical symbolism.... In
other words, it was the whole of the great Golden Dawn syncretic occult esoteric system. And you learned
it by keeping a journal, in which as you meditated on what they said, and painted in the pictures, you
wrote what you thought. So I started a Tarot Journal, which was my own development and my own ideas,
only within the scaffolding of that system. And what I learned from that is that this is the essence of the
Hermetic tradition. It has a kind of fundamental structure, but the actual transmission takes place through
your own participation and elaboration of it. So in the Golden Dawn system, and as Crowley presents it, at
a certain level at a certain grade, you have to reconfigure the whole system. You pass through a certain
grade.

Rail: Recently you and I worked on an edition of Harry Smith's Lectures on Native American Cosmology,
which will be coming out soon. Harry was one of the great occultists of our time. What did you learn
about him in terms of his practical application of hermetic knowledge?

Stein: With Harry Smith, I came to see how all of his collections were like the different systems which
were integrated into the one system, because what these systems—the Kabbalistic system, the alchemical
system, the astrological system, the numerological system—did was give you a kind of catalogue
structure; as you had experiences, you connected them to the different positions within the structure.
And the beauty of the construct was the multiplicity of the systems. Of course within traditional
hermeticism, all of that is arranged very schematically, so if you get a book like Aleister Crowley’s 777, it’s
an entire way of setting the correspondences between all of the different systems that he’s integrating. It
includes the I-Ching, it includes Sufi terms, it includes Kabbalistic terms and so forth, all arranged like a
table. What I think Harry was doing was for each of his collections, is they were organized in his mind like
one of these systems because he already knew anthropology, and he knew what Levi Strauss said about
totemic systems—that they functioned just like medieval category systems. And so, if you had Seminole
blankets, or Easter eggs, or paper airplanes, or string figures, you could think of them in themselves as a
particular configuration of the cosmos and gather experiences and material around them, and then you
would allow them to interact in your mind, so your mind will be formed by the interactions, now not of
the traditional systems (which Harry already knew because he had studied a version of the same system
that came from these two other teachers that he and Gerrit Lansing studied with together), but he was
making up his own system by the multiple integration of these different collections. And that’s why the
actual keeping of the collections was not crucial, you could let go of them once you had internalized the
structure.

Rail: In this respect his film Film #r 18 (Mahagonny) is really the masterwork. You've just described that
film perfectly. It's a symbolic study of ritual correspondences in daily life by an occult-structuralist-
anthropologist. Seeing that film four times in two weeks when Harry first screened it at Anthology Film
Archives fundamentally changed my sense of what was 'real.'

Stein: And that Black Book of Harry's that you showed me that you own—you know those notebooks—
that’s what seems to be in there. They seems to be largely schemas for connecting the number system to
various different kinds of events. That’s the impression one got of Harry, that everybody talks about,
you’d be walking on the street and suddenly he’s got seventeen different sets of associations for any
given thing. How could he possibly think of any of those things? Well that was it! It’s all Sherlock Holmes.
The correspondence system is like Holmes’s cigarette butts or bicycle treads, where he knew 150 different
ashes from different kinds of brands of cigarettes and cigars, and forty-three different bicycle treads that
he could always identify. And to a certain extent, the forensic sciences are an elaboration of these things,
except of course for Harry it was an ontological, cosmological, configurative invention of the mind.

Rail: Oftentimes I'd be sitting with Harry, and he’d be looking at something completely ordinary but with
such penetration...just a table with some cups and maybe a lamp off to the side, and I’d think to myself,
“What the hell are you looking at?” It was clear he was getting stations the rest of us were not tuned in to.
And he was seeing some deep pattern, some cosmic structure, behind all that.

Stein: This is my theory: that his own cognitive grid had been elaborated with such ingenuity and
singularity. Systems of magic are essentially syncretic scaffolds, gathering images, concepts, practices, and
various other materials from heterogeneous disciplines and ontic realms. Like mathematics, they offer a
scene for recombinant performances, allowing unheard of connections and insights to emerge both
within themselves and within the daily life of persons whose consciousness is informed by them. The
magus is thus a polymath by calling and by the nature of his practice. Harry Smith’s work – and those
lectures are themselves an aspect of that work – show evidence that Harry toiled through and from,
explicitly or implicitly, such a system.

Rail: And isn’t that where his love of Thelonious Monk fits in as well?

Stein: Well of course, of course.

Rail: Like when you take psychedelics and suddenly you unloosen all of the habituated patterns of
perception and thought.

Stein: It just accesses all of those possible cognitive fields.

Rail: You traveled in many of the same circles as Harry in New York in the 1950s but you never met him?

Stein: I only met him once, in the 1960s, at Ed Sanders' Peace Eye Bookstore in the East Village. I think it
was a meeting of the Society for the Legalization of Marijuana in the back of the store. I knew Harry’s film
work but had never met the man. He was interested that I was publishing Crowley and that I was planning
a trip to Europe the following summer. Harry directed me to the British Museum where I might examine
the original manuscripts of John Dee, which in fact I did. My friend Gerrit Lansing knew Harry from those
occult circles in New York in the 'fifties. In fact he has a poem about Harry, back then, called "The Dark
Grammarian."

Rail: Was Robert Kelly a part of these same groups?

Stein: I only knew Robert casually, but when I joined Builders of the Adytum, he got interested in me,
because he was already very involved in thinking about these matters. The last thing he wanted to do was
to join a group, but he wanted to know. He was always picking my brain for what I was experiencing, so I
would come up every week for several years and be a guest in Robert’s house, and we would talk about
all of these different matters. He was an enormous source of education for me both in the poetry
universe and in the esoteric religions and magic and all of that. I was interested in him because it seemed
that what he was doing was something like what I described with Harry, except instead of it being
systematic things, it was like everything that happened would be an object for contemplation as if it were
part of an occult symbolic system.

Rail: Well I read him that way...

Stein: That’s how he wrote, that’s what he did. He’d notice everything so that the principle of poetic
attention and noticing at any given moment becomes a kind of revelation.

Rail: For me reading Robert Kelly is like consulting the I-Ching. Whatever the question you have that day,
you go to him and you get an answer.

Stein: But his I-Ching was the birds outside or the leaves on the tree.

Rail: Your writings about and conversations with Philip Taaffe ("In Conversation: Philip Taaffe with
Charles Stein," The Brooklyn Rail, December 2014) shed light on your own work in some ways?

Stein: Exactly. Phillip's influence had to do with being around an artist who spent a great deal of time
looking at what he had done and waiting for the work to tell him what the next move was.
It's that the importance of that mulling time. Plus, the love of organization and pattern, the rigor of the
organization of his materials was so instructive and useful. A general means for me in terms of my own
mind is that on the one hand, I'm sort of evolving this pseudo-philosophy, as if I were going to write a
philosophical treatise. I don't know if I am or am not about all of this. Another is simply the generation of
ideas about different things and how to be able to do that without being caught by one’s own ideas is the
great struggle. In a talk I once gave about Robert Kelly at Anthology Film Archive years ago, I quoted
William Blake's saying that “I must create my own system or be trapped by another man’s." And Kelly's
comment on that: “I would not be trapped by another man’s system, I would not be trapped by my own
system." There were wonderful maxims in those years when I knew Robert. “The sage in his wisdom
loves waiting for the right moment.“ And another one was: “Stick to what you know exactly; make use.”

Rail: Robert Kelly was really kind of a wise man for you.

Stein: Yeah. Oh, very much. There was a level in which his proposition of how to perceive aesthetically
and spiritually that for a long time was a measure from all the other kinds of teachers.

Rail: I always felt that he was a very vulnerable person full of doubt.

Stein: Interestingly enough, that showed when he became a Buddhist. In all those years when I was close
to him, he didn't like Buddhism. He was suspicious of emptiness. He didn't like Japanese culture, that was
the one area that we didn't jibe on. Also, he was suspicious of psychotherapy. Because my suffering lead
me into wanting to do therapy, and I made a decision not to do Jungian therapy because I felt I could
handle that on my own. I wanted something more challenging. So I got involved with somebody from the
Gestalt institute who was also a kind of existential Rollo May, with some Heidegger stuff. I was involved
with that for a number of years, and during those years, Kelly and I were not very friendly. It was like he
felt that was a kind of rejection of poetry or something.

Rail: When you mentioned Yeats, what about A Vision? Were you interested in A Vision?

Stein: Yeah, A Vision and Papus were the first two intellectual systems I ever learned. When I was still in
high school I was studying A Vision.

Rail: What is it that turns everybody off about A Vision, and yet it’s so great?

Stein: Because they think it’s crazy dogma—people who don’t have that itch for a system. Harry says
towards the end of his last lecture that he does not think he can get everyone “interested” in this welter
of material, but that “the ones who get interested in it are the ones who are already interested in it.” The
package beckons to its own, and excludes from initiation the ones who are not in fact or destined to be its
initiates. To a certain extent I had always a somewhat dissonant relationship with everybody I knew,
because I took the mysticism seriously in a way that when the poets dealt with it, it somewhat offended
me. On the one hand it made me able to connect with them, on the other hand, the treatment of it in a
kind of performance, “make-art-out-of-it,” as if the poetry were the main thing as opposed to the
seriousness of ones engagement with the practice--that was always a problem for me.

***

Stein: I want to say a quick thing about Buddhism at this moment, for where I actually am with it and how
it connects to the Parmenidean business. It kind of comes down to something like this: that the Buddhist
picture as a whole makes a single ontological proposition, and it's the first so-called noble truth, and it
says, "All is suffering." So the only statement about “all” is a statement about something that is going to
be overcome. And the rest of that sequence of statements says, it has to do with something that we
translate by the word “desire” — which we can parse in a lot of different ways, but there is a path out of
it, and that path is an actual condition whose name is Nirvana. It seems to me that the single question
about Buddhism—drop Buddhist geeks and the entire universe of discussions about the behavior of the
gurus and this-or-that aspect of its cultural history—the single question is simply: Is it so, that there is a
way out of suffering, at a universal level? That's the question-- there isn't any other thing that's a
question. Western religion, for the most part, is mixed up with philosophical issues on the issue of
certainty, that you're supposed to be convicted of certainty in the signing onto a credo, a belief structure.

Rail: Steady in your faith.

Stein: And to keep faith means, “Don't abandon these propositions about reality.” In other words, that
there's a fundamental lock-and-key on the question of ontology: that to be saved, the soteriological
concern is laid very heavily on accepting a particular metaphysical, ontological view. Buddhism doesn't do
that; in that way it's as if it were more like a kind of western empiricism or existentialism. It's saying,
"There is a way out." First you have to recognize that you don't have it, and second is you have to try it
and see if it lures you, see if you make some discoveries that make it so that it's your thing. And so like the
hermeticism, that I was saying is based on a development of your own imagination around propositions
that look like dogma but are actually provocations to meditation and intuition, the Buddhist thing was,
“Try this and see what happens.” Very early I started having experiences of relief. And the experiences of
relief were experiences of, basically, social situations in which I looked bad, or in which I had become
involved in a negative perception of myself, and that the practice of mediation brought into view the way
in which my own activity of mind was causing that suffering. And the subsequent release from it produced
an experience of something at a very major level and relationship to mind and affect and will and
everything else, of relief and release, and ultimately a side of possible bliss.

Rail: True liberation.

CS: Liberation, realization, bliss. That has been this thing that's run through my own experience and where
I still am today, and the great thing about it is that it can remain a question. In terms of a conversation,
you ask me: “Do you believe in this?” I can tell you the story. I know what happens in myself is that I am
motivated to continue with the practice, and nothing seems to go beyond that. The idea that everything is
suffering in the sense that suffering comes from attachment to one's cognitive commitments and that the
cognitive commitments are precisely those commitments which say that appearance is more than
appearance of Being but has being in itself, and that the way this path works is by a further and further
intimate and intensified allowance of the presence of awareness with the events in one's own Being
which have cognitive elements--which means, perception, affect, elaboration of thought, desire--the
desire to grasp at, conceive, to get everything, to getting all together. That's the desire--it isn't desire in
the sense of the existence of the libido, because clearly what all the Tantra traditions do not say is,
“Repress the libido.” Rather they say, “Work with that, too.” You work with the libido, you work with the
way in which the arousal of desire is involved with cognitivities and the creations of image and self image
and body image, and image of the other and how those things are conditioned by the social magic of
endless bombardment of things that are trying to arouse your desire. So, if you think of desire in terms of
the compulsive cognitivity on the one hand and the implications of advertising and public media image
making, those are the kinds of desires that the Four Noble Truths are saying you have to be released from.
It isn't because you have to be released from your own energy in say, the Blakeian sense of The Marriage
of Heaven and Hell where the devil is... The flip flop of good and evil is around the question of energy and
intelligence. It's not about suppression of desire. I remember it was always a challenge that among the
Blake statements in that book is that “He who can give up his desire didn't have strong desire to begin
with” or something to that extent. So that seemed a difficult saying in relationship to Buddhism and in
particular Meister Eckhart, who I found extremely fascinating. To a certain extent I had always a
somewhat dissonant relationship with everybody I knew, because I took the mysticism seriously in a way
that when the poets dealt with it, it somewhat offended me. On the one hand it made me able to connect
with them, on the other hand, the treatment of it in a kind of performance, “make-art-out-of-it,” as if the
poetry were the main thing as opposed to the seriousness of ones engagement with the practice--that
was always a problem for me until Buddhism hit the scene. And now the problem with Buddhism when it
first appeared, I mean with Chögyam Trungpa and the other Suzuki, and when the Buddhist teachers
started being available, was that I had quit Builders of the Adytum. Because I kind of broke its—what I
thought was—it’s shell. And my attempt to put everything into those terms was no longer working. I'm
sure that's what happened to, in one way or another, with Harry Smith and with Gerrit Lansing. But they
knew that they were in a position to make it up for themselves, so they didn't actually have to quit. I had
to quit. And so having quit, it made it hard with Trungpa, to join that teaching because he made such a big
deal of the taking refuge as if it were converting. Whereas the Zen people didn't. I started studying Tai
Chi, the Tai Chi people didn't make any, you didn't have any belief commitment or that kind of thing. And I
studied Tai Chi very, very seriously, and when my Tai Chi teacher died I had some connection with the
Japanese world from Michelle. Michelle Rhodes was my wife from the seventies and into the eighties, and
she was a very serious potter. She'd been trained in painting and then became an art potter, and was
seeking—learning, really—from Japanese traditions. She had made contact with the Urasenke School.
Urasenke is the branch of the tea ceremony institution that's connected to the Japanese emperor and the
UN and everything. She spent some time in Bizen studying there, so there's a lot of my whole relationship
to art making that comes from being with her. The way they make pots, which is both this incredibly
present material, centering the clay on the wheel and allowing the clay to take form in your hands on the
one hand. But in the Japanese tradition it's making this one form tens of thousands of times to make a tea
bowl that's acceptable in the tea ceremony. There's enormous rigor in that, but that rigor comes out of
this material relationship to it, so that the question, the relationship between Zen as a kind of concretism,
Tai Chi is a kind of concretism with gravity. At the same time, that something grows if you repeat the
form.

Rail: Yet there are no rules about it. For all it's codified nature, it's purely intuitive.

Stein: It happens out of the concrete situation of your doing it. The thing that we talked about all the time
and that I was involved in was this idea that staying with the material, in a concrete sense, if your
consciousness is alive while you are staying with it—things grow. And that's my whole relationship to my
art, whether it’s drawing or music or poetry. When we were in the car we were talking about that when
you're presented with the entire panoply of all the possibilities, it's kind of meaningless unless your own
discipline is, “I’m an artist whose going to study all the possibilities and find the one that hasn't been
done.” That kind of relationship to it, which is completely opposite of the way I work. I will work with the
clay, which is my own mind, or my own impulses, or my own fingers.

Stein: The Planthouse show was my first art opening I’ve ever experienced and it just wasn’t pleasant. It’s
just neurosis on my part, but they weren’t happy there. Something that was happening and it wasn’t
good. I wanted them down from the wall. They belonged in a book. I’m not remiss talking about them, but
to some extant I have not gotten to the point where I can really write about them, so I don’t have a fixed
set of things that I say. I haven’t had any formal art training. I’ve been around artists all my life and have
been very involved in the question of what is the nature of abstraction, the relationship between
abstraction and visual arts, abstraction and music, abstraction and mathematics, abstraction and thought
in general. And more profoundly, perhaps, abstraction in relation to contemplative practices. There’s
huge numbers of things that I think because the work is extremely mind-emptying and time-consuming. I
have a bizarre experience that sometimes happens when I’ve been drawing for many hours. I’ll close my
eyes and particular patterns that I’ve been drawing will start running. They’re completely conditioned by
the pattern I was drawing but they’re not what I drew. They just start inventing things spontaneously on
the retina.

Rail: I know what you mean, I sometimes see that too in these drawings. It's like you've created an
inclusive structure, and a set of operations, and then the drawing does the rest.

Stein: The first thing I actually understood about Western music was something I realized when I first
heard the very earliest Mozart symphonies, written when he was eight. The structural picture of the then-
current idea about musical form is present: it’s absolutely clear how the whole thing is working. Later
Mozart develops this, with forms turning on forms, doing every imaginable kind of thing. There’s a certain
aspect of drawing that is like traditional Western musical composition, where you have a sense of the way
in which the whole thing is going together.
There’s a huge amount in these drawings that is structured in advance, almost as much as there
would be if you were doing some kind of actual realistic composition. There’s never any erasure. There’s
no possibility for correction, but there’s endless possibilities for course-changing, opportunities for a
pattern to emerge within the grid. There's a kind of coincidence of opposites going on within them. For
instance, there are several of them that articulate the whole question of the relationship between a
replete space, a space that’s filled with all its possibilities, and an empty space in which those possibilities
are purely latent. They are an attempt to re-engage a kind of imagination in which some of these things
are at play. It all comes under the umbrella of what I call "emergent pictorialism" that I developed in my
book about Terry Winters (Placing Space, Picturing Time: Time, Space and Emergent Pictoriality in Some
Recent Paintings by Terry Winters, Autonomedia, 2015). A summation here would be too lengthy, but
those are all concepts that I also discovered personally in my own work, living inside those spaces of
interference and displacement, the flattened representation of a four-dimensional thing. In a certain way
the drawings are metanyms for infinite space, infinite dimensionality — it’s a kind of poem. In fact, I
resisted very strongly the idea I had many years ago of simply calling them poems.

Rail: These are all drawn freehand, no rulers, no compasses, no straight edge?
Stein: That's right. It’s like anything you do a thousand times, it’s in not in any sense amazing, but there is
an interesting thing about drawing a straight line. What I discovered is that a straight line is simply a
counterbalance of two curves, and if you just arc your wrist in one direction you get a curve, and if you
imagine arcing it in the opposite direction at the same time, you get a straight line. You just have to have
them balanced between those two gestures and it’ll be as straight as you like. This is a simple example of
a much broader mathematical concept, the name of it is the continuum. And the continuum is an
abstraction from time and space of all of the different ways in which things can be measured, and the
totality of the continuum would be something like the goal of science, to be able to put all representation
into formulations that could be described by points on/in the continuum. The curious thing about the
continuum is that in one formulation of it, in order to get to that which is completely smooth, a
continuum in which nothing is left out, no gaps, everything completely smooth, you have to have a very
high order number, an infinite number but a very big infinite number (laughs). Hence the totality of the
ultimately smooth is identical to an infinite number of roughnesses. If you go all the way with roughness
you come out with smoothness, and if you go all the way with differentiation you come to a principle that
is beyond differentiation. This is the fascinating universe of mathematics that I’ve been hooked on since I
was a little child — not at the level of thought, but at the level of a heightened contemplative state, in
which your mind-stuff has been brought to the focus of its own substance, so that it can be present
through everything that happens in the body and in the intelligence and in the intuition and in the affect;
it can be present in the world, and in the culture, in the art world, in one’s thoughts, in one’s relationships
and in the confederacies of beliefs that one creates with ones friends. I'm talking about all of those
different modalities of not only having a world as an object but being in the world as something that is
continuously composing itself through one’s engagement through all these different modes of intuition,
of thought, of cognition, And if that were brought to its highest peak, if you were able to come to the very
thing that you really are that has the capacity to connect one’s most concrete being with one’s modes of
knowing and feeling and thinking and touching and relating, you would have as a kind of metonymy for
exactly this idea of a continuum, in which things endlessly complexify, endlessly relate. And if you took
that process all the way to its endpoint, you would come to something absolutely simple. That is the
impulse behind these drawings. Another way to go to the same place would be monotone painting.

Rail: There is a very similar energy in these drawings as I get from a Tibetan thangka painting. Almost like
ultimately the object itself doesn’t matter very much. It’s like pointing to the direction of Being...

Stein: Yes, thanka paintings are exactly what I’m talking about. They have this complex use of spatial
symmetry and balance and colors and relationship of detail and so forth, with the expressed intent to
exhaust consciousness. To actually fill it, so that there’s nothing in all of those different functions that I
mentioned, that isn’t absorbed and given its place. And the point is not the place. It’s not like one studies
a Tibetan thangka in order to convince oneself that this is the way the world is. It isn’t an instruction in
that sense: here is a picture of the world that you will now accept—quite the contrary. It’s how it exhausts
the entirety of your cognitive field and brings you to a place in which the very nature of your own
awareness that allowed itself to become so enormously engaged can suddenly wake up to itself and
discover itself on its own ground. Its nature is the condition of potentiality for all of this complexity, for all
of this manifestation, for all of these endlessly cooperating and competing and annihilating so-called
realities, until the great enigma is the relationship between utter simplicity and infinite complexity. That's
the impulse, at least for me, and the pay off is that the drawings, by having so much layered time and
being concentrated in them, so much actual time while being present in each moment… ultimately all of
the endless divagations of desire in relationship to all of these issues metonomize on a piece of paper.

Rail: One's first impression of the drawings, as a viewer, is of a highly charged optical field, but one quickly
falls into that and emerges in much more conceptual space.

CS: It’s very interesting, because the eye does two things at the retinal level. It recognizes color and it
recognizes edges. But what is happening in these drawings is that the vibratory character of the black and
white is set into some kind of resonance with the color world, but is doing it through the edges, so the
cortex has got a lot of work to do, because it’s getting the two different kinds of signals mixed. I would say
there are four levels, almost like the four famous medieval levels of interpretation: the literal, the
allegorical, the moral, and the anagogical. The first level is retinal, the immediate presence of something
that is working instant by instant on the level of sensation, and with this one particularly they start to
buzz. They start doing what optical art does. But it hardly remains at that level, so the second level is what
we would normally think of as perception, because what the cortical level does is try to take all the data
and resolve it ontologically, to tell you what it is you’re seeing. But it doesn’t do that verbally, it does it on
a non-thematic pre-verbal level, of organizing what it’s received and discerning — call it reflective
thinking, all the aspects of that. Then there’s a conceptual level in which you spontaneously become
engaged with what you’ve just experienced at the retinal and at the cortical level. And finally there is the
anagogic: the highest level, the last stage, something like integral-ineffable, moving towards the fantasy,
an induction of a higher state of intuition. I’m working that part out by staying with the drawing for forty,
fifty hours, however long it takes, and it’s drawing me on and leading me to something. What is it leading
me to? It’s leading me to that thing that my being wants to see, wants to resonate with its own highest
state, its own capacity to intuit continuous being in its own way, and this permeates the sensation,
perception, cognition, conceptualization. So that that would be the idea: it would be a kind of induction, a
giving rise to something, but particularly a self-induction, and I’m doing this as part of my practice, in the
same way if you meditate every day, you go back and forth between lots of different experiences, and
then you release yourself from those experiences and awaken at another level where the different kinds
of experiences become signals that you’ve gotten to a certain place, but there is still the obstacle of
desire. Now the desire is something that you have to work with. You don’t just suppress it or be pitted
against yourself just because you have these desires, because the desires are the things that are drawing
you into the practice in the first place. You’re trying to receive what you already have, something that is
already there. I'm describing a vector, a kind of direction, and that’s exactly what’s happening in the work.
I find this identically with the poetry too: you’re trying to write what you want to know. Its not like you
know what you know, and you’re just trying to operate to find the right technique in order to express
something that you’ve already got. You’re trying to actually induce a higher state of being, whether it’s at
the level of a visual work or at the level of poetry, or of music, so that there’s a real process going on, of
bringing something into concrete existence from a conceptual awareness. This is my whole picture about
the question of art in our impossible times, in which the actual context for art-making is undergoing such
a wild transmogrification. Nobody has any idea what that’s going to be in five minutes from now.
Nonetheless, there’s something in this activity that we’ve all been engaged in most of our lives, and
coming from a huge wave of the past, that is not only the monstrosity that it’s turned itself into, but is full
of positive things too. And in the middle of all of this, there is this possible role for actual serious artistic
work. It's the best thing we have, still.

[END}

Not included is discussion of teaching at SVA

No discussion of psychedelics
No mention of Quashas/Station Hill