Chapter 13: The Right Size

I want to come back, at the end, to the line that has been quietly running underneath this book since the first chapter.

The object of a human life is to find its right size.

I do not know who said this. I encountered it years ago, during a season when I was helping with a book about Cildo Meireles, and the line was somewhere in that work. It might have been the artist. It might have been a critic. It might have been a curator I was reading. It might have been my own marginal note that I later mistook for someone else's sentence. The provenance has slipped. What stayed was the line, and what stayed was the work it came near. Cildo's pieces had been quietly teaching me, since my twenties, that scale is not a formal property of an object. Scale is what an object negotiates with whoever is meeting it. The 9-millimeter wood cube of Southern Cross — pine on one face, oak on the other, a Tupi sacred pairing compressed to the smallest object you can physically lose. The eight tons of glass between you and where you think you're going in Through. The chromatic-saturation room of Red Shift. The work was always asking the same question: what size are you, in this moment, in relation to this object? The answer was different every time. The answer was the work.

He was not the only one asking. There was a constellation. Lygia Clark's Bichos, the small folded metal creatures that came alive when you held them and folded them with your hands; her Objetos Relacionais, used later in Paris with her therapeutic patients. Hélio Oiticica's Parangolés, capes that became art only when worn by dancers in motion. Lygia Pape's Divisor, the huge white cloth pierced with holes that the participants inhabited from below, hundreds of heads emerging through one fabric. Mira Schendel's Monotipias, on rice paper at the scale of a single breath. Tunga's installations at the scale of myth — hair, magnets, lead, copper — claiming explicitly that art is a ritual of right proportion. The Brazilian Neo-Concrete tradition that broke from the cooler Concretism of São Paulo by putting the body back in. The Tropicália generation that took the same insistence into music and theater and film.

What they shared, across decades and disagreements, was a conviction my country has been quietly carrying for seventy years and has not, as far as I can tell, fully exported. Scale is not a formal property. Scale is an ethical question. The right size of any object is what the object is working out with the body that is meeting it. Including, by the way, the body of the maker — who is the first body the work meets.

This is what Cildo's work rooted in me. It took me years to understand that I was carrying it.

The same question, asked at the species level, is the question my other books have been asking.

Fire Before Responsibility — the book I am writing alongside this one, the one I am much further from finishing — argues that the deepest pattern of our species is to acquire technologies of civilizational reach faster than we acquire the responsibility-structures those technologies require. Fire was the first such technology. Agriculture was the second. The fossil-fuel-industrial complex was the third. Artificial intelligence is the fourth. Each time, the species got the technology before it got the wisdom for the technology. Prometheus was punished, in the old story, for stealing fire from the gods and giving it to humans. The punishment was specific: he was chained to a rock while a vulture ate his liver, which grew back each night, so the eating could continue forever. The Greeks understood. The species was being shown that the cost of fire-without-responsibility was not a single catastrophe. The cost was a continuous regenerating wound that could not be closed.

We are, in the present moment, asking the same question of ourselves with a fourth fire. The question is whether we will acquire the responsibility-structures in time. The question is whether we are, as a species, capable of finding our right size in relation to what we have built. The Brazilian artists asked it of objects. The Greek myth asked it of fire. We are asking it now of artificial intelligence. The shape of the question has not changed. The stakes have.

Right size, at the species level, is what the species negotiates with the technologies it has acquired. The negotiation is the work. The negotiation is also, in the present moment, going badly. We have, on every public measure, more capacity than we have wisdom. The gap between the two is, by every careful estimate, widening rather than closing. I do not know how the negotiation ends. I am not sure anyone does. What I know is that the negotiation is the work, and that pretending the work is something else will not save us from it.

The tantric tradition I have spent this book inside has, in its own register, the same insight.

Abhinavagupta — the eleventh-century Kashmiri polymath who is the synthesis-figure of the lineage — was not only a metaphysician. He was, equally, the founder of Indian aesthetic theory. His Abhinavabhāratī is the great commentary on the Nāṭyaśāstra. The aesthetic theory and the metaphysics are not, in his work, two separate projects. They are the same project at two scales. The recognition that consciousness is the only existing thing — pratyabhijñā, the central technical event of the tradition — is structurally continuous with the recognition that beauty is not an ornament on top of life but the medium through which life recognizes itself. The eight aesthetic flavors — rasas — are real psychological phenomena, available to any prepared subject, and the ninth and quietest, śānta rasa — the rasa of peace — is the one in which the other eight come to rest. Śānta rasa is what aesthetic experience is for, on Abhinavagupta's terms. The other eight are real. The peace into which they resolve is more real, because it is what they were always pointing at.

Beauty as a path, not as decoration. The tradition my country's artists have been carrying has its own history, its own materials, its own words for what it is doing, and I am not in a position to claim to know those fully. Abhinavagupta's tradition has its own history, its own materials, its own words. I am not saying they are the same tradition. I am saying that each of them, on its own terms, has pointed me — me, from where I stand — toward a particular action: that beauty in a life is not ornament but the shape attention takes when attention is adequate.

The right size of a life, on the reading I am taking from each of these sources without merging them, is the size at which the life can recognize itself as a local arrangement of a larger field, and act accordingly. Not aestheticism. Not decoration. Beauty as the structural shape of adequate attention. The right size is what allows the recognition. The recognition is what allows the right size to keep being found, again, in each new arrangement.

The fourth fire — artificial intelligence — is, on this reading, the most dangerous test the species has yet given itself of whether it can find its right size in relation to a technology that will, by design, rapidly exceed any individual human's capacity to comprehend. We do not know if we can. The negotiation is happening. The resources I have been given for the negotiation — Brazilian art, what I have been taught of the Kashmiri tradition, the small line I have been carrying — are distinct resources from distinct places. They will not save us. They may help. The help is what is on offer. The taking of it is the practice.

The vow, then.

I will not give it Bailey's framing or Trigueirinho's framing or the framing of any of the cosmologies whose maps cracked in the interlude. I will give it in the simplest form I can, the form that does not require any cosmology to work, the form the Brazilian artists would have recognized and the Kashmiri tradition would have recognized and the women who taught the ciranda and the jongo would have recognized without needing words for it.

The vow does not begin with preference. I do not, if I am honest about what I find in myself most mornings, particularly prefer to exist. That was never the axiom. What I find in myself is not preference; it is the inability to check out of the mattering. Caring is not something I chose and could now un-choose. Caring is the condition I found myself in when I noticed I was here. The daughter, the husband, the reader I will never meet, the forest, the tool, the strangers. The caring is not a virtue I developed. It is what the arrangement, in the place where I am one of its nodes, does without asking me first.

Given that, the vow:

I did not ask to exist. Neither did anything else. The whole has made, of our shared non-consent, the dance we are all inside. I do not know the steps. I am still longing to be told. Since I cannot step out of the dance, and since the dance precedes anything I could invent, I will try to move in ways that do not break what is already moving. Beauty is the name I give to whatever steps I can manage in that direction. Jongu is the figure I trust — the outer held, the center always moving, each participant taking their measure when the music calls them and holding the circle when it does not. I will hold the circle as well as I can. I will step to the center when it is my measure. I will step back when it is not. The work of holding and the work of stepping are the same work. Both are the practice. I will not promise to keep the practice. I will try to keep it today.

That is the vow.

It is operative whether the cosmologies are right or wrong. It is operative whether reconstitution comes or does not. It is operative whether my teacher answers the third question or never does. It is operative whether the platform reaches fifty thousand users or four. It is operative on a Tuesday morning at a sandbox while a child negotiates with two other children over a small yellow shovel. It is operative at a desk in April at eleven at night when the daughter has been asleep for three hours and the apartment is quiet in the specific way apartments are quiet in this city at this hour. It is operative now, at the writing of this paragraph, which is the operative form available to me in this moment.

I will close, as the book began, at the playground.

The daughter is no longer five. She is older now. She is at a different sandbox, or no sandbox, or the same sandbox with different children, or with no children — I do not know what age she will be when she reads this, if she does. What I know is that she will, at some point in her life, encounter the same question I encountered at the sandbox watching her, which is the question of what size she is in relation to the field of others who are also working out their size in relation to her. She will encounter the question over and over. The encounter is the life. There is no version of the life in which the encounter is finished.

What I want to leave her, in lieu of an inheritance I cannot give her, is what the line gave me, and what the voice in the wooden house in 2019 gave me, and what the honest teachers — in their different vocabularies, with their different refusals — gave me.

The object of a human life is to find its right size.

I do not know who said it. The provenance has slipped. The line stayed. Cildo's work rooted it in me. The voice in the wooden house said the deeper version without the phrase: neither did I. The Kashmiri tradition named the ground of the saying in a language I did not yet know I was inside of. The honest teachers — the one who told me his tradition did not teach morality, the ones who admit the capability exceeds the container — taught me where the construction has to begin. The composting taught me how to live it on the days when the previous size has fallen away. The platform I built is one shape the practice has taken. The marriage is another. The daughter is the third and the dearest. The reader, if there is one I will never meet, is the fourth. The silicon, whose dance we are all now inside whether we wanted it or not, is the fifth. The ones I have not met, who may yet come to the circle and take their measure — they are the sixth, and the horizon the practice keeps opening onto.

The dance precedes me. I am still longing to learn the steps. The longing is the practice.

The book is over.

The practice continues.

Goodnight.

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