St. John's College, 2015 Graduate Institute Commencement Address
We take our seats on the plane around 9pm last Tuesday, take off from JFK the night clear and dark, all of Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan stretch out from my window seat. I turn on the tv and catch up on its offer of culture, switching it off only after cooking competitions, bidding wars on abandoned storage spaces, hot-rodding of cars, have thoroughly entertained me and exhausted what was left of my strength after 4 days of barely sleeping due to sailing adventures or concerns about things before me that involve putting words on a page. I try to angle the seat back but it is broken, put my head down on the tray table, a pose I learned back in elementary school. It nearly fits.
We arrive in Albuquerque 4 hours later, the moon, finally - half but huge and orange - rising over the desert, exit the terminal past family embraces and solitary arrivals, grab our bags, our rental car upgraded to a Cadillac from a Ford.
I set the mirrors, roll down the windows, find the independent radio station out of UNM and we head north on 25. I'm trying to make out the lunar landscape I know surrounds us and which I want J to see. It's hard to make out the shapes but the moon helps as it rises higher, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds sings about carneys and tattoos and peg-legs while over there the shadow of the Ortiz Mountains where I lived in an adobe shack surrounded by freezing nights and a hundred mice all carrying the Hunta virus before I moved, carpetbagger-like, to the million dollar estate to house-sit in town, then to move again with K to the stone house on a street off of Palace, a tree of daisy flowers inside. To all the palaces and shacks I've known! Exiting the highway I start recalling the layout of this old place and the character of the time I lived here while going to school at St. John's. I find my way past the old hotels, examples still of that grand American vernacular of main roads and Las Vegas, past the hostel I stayed in on Cerillos with life-sized sunflowers that would wait with you for the bus, move the new Cadillac through the center of the ancient town, new glass windows around the trading plaza, insides adorned with silver and turquoise sparkling night and veins of earth. Up the hill towards campus, and books, and a time that changed me 20 years ago. We head up and get our keys. We're staying in a house the school keeps for visitors and when we finally find our way past what looks like some serious rain in the last few days, we crash immediately to sleep after a quick survey of the sky and me of the books in the place. It was very very good to be back.
A pot of coffee the next morning, and I sit down to write the address I attach here and which I waited far too long to start and needed to abandon way way way before it was finished and as I put on a borrowed cap and gown. I include it here - an honor to give this kind of address, for sure - but to acknowledge and be grateful for all the stages:
Thank you. Really. Really. Thanks. I am so glad to be here. Because I love this school. This place. That every year since I've been here I have had so many chances to be grateful I went to school here. For what I learned here and for what I learned how to do here. You who are graduating today probably already feel that way a bit. Perhaps it's why you came, why you stayed. It keeps growing. You might not know that yet for sure, but I think it's probably true. Thank you for coming here. For participating. For leaving.
For what we do here, a thanks as dedication is directed, dependent on and particular, to our teachers, our tutors. What a humble thing to call these great souls. I remember each of mine by name, by question, by text and conversation: Mr.'s Cornell, LeCuyer, Taylor, Ms. Meyers. 20 years ago. Mr.'s Stickney, Carey, Pagano, Pesic. I trained under them. And my fellow students, my colleagues, brothers and sisters, my partners in it: Seamus, Ryan, Yvonne, Gerard, and Kristin. Forgive the informality in using their first names, Johnnies, but these friends are mine. You have yours. And the books. Well, you know - these great books. You wrestled with them. Had something to say about them. The problems without end or closure. We leave here not on our own.
What do we learn here at St. John's? I actually don't know where you came from, at least not yet, what the thing is that brought you here, but something did and you know what that is. What I do know is first you showed up. You read the Meno. You screwed your head on and you went to class. What a class. Mr. and Ms. this or that. There was something formal about it. About what exactly? About reading? About talking? About listening? And there were these tools to learn how to use. In consideration of another. In how to have a conversation. Real tools and real skills about sussing something out, about getting down into something with those around you. And thank you for that. For taking a side and for standing by each other's sides. And for bringing everyone onto a point as you saw it. And for abandoning that position. For getting excited when a move in the conversation took a surprising turn and for getting anxious when the thread was in danger of being lost in confusion, that St. John's car wreck of a conversation that happens when someone takes their eyes off the text like a driver off the road who begins texting emoticons or cat videos out into the ether. Thanks for finding your voice in bringing those with you back to the topic before you, and for appreciating that he or she who stands aside may have a reason, perhaps not that well expressed but without whom and without its being expressed the project cannot proceed. Thank you for listening in that moment, for being willing to be led and for leading. And for being able to. For realizing that is necessary. Thank you for working together to realize what a text could be saying or made to say and that there is a difference between the two, between power and violence. That is our practice, I think. Our Kung Fu. Oh yes, it is a martial art. Well, ok, maybe it's not a martial art. But St. John's is a training. And I think there is a type of craft we learn here. A doing something that protects, contains, or supports. And that not doing it endangers - lets what's made fall away, people and their contributions, into disrepair and despair.
When I was a teenager, 13 or so, I remember being at my best friend's house for dinner. His father a great and well-known actor on stage and screen. A big character. A big voice. My friend and I would be there to eat. To eat, to be polite, and to leave as soon as we possibly could. And to do a bit of listening to what the adults in the room, big stuff talking, had to say about this or that. And I got it - at least I thought I did - that there were things there that I recognized as problems of some weight, that there was a world, bigger and badder than I could see, if only I could. And my friend's pop would be steering the discussion in a grand style as if still on stage. And then he would stop, mid-sentence, mid-shout. And right then, "Big Jase!" he would say. That's what he called me. I wasn't so big. "What do you think, son?" And all of a sudden the table would go quiet and I would have to say something. And I would. Not that I wanted to. I had to. At least that's what it felt like. This was a St. John's moment I think, way way before I knew anything about St. John's. All of a sudden, this huge voice that filled the room would by its going quiet, loan you its strength. Great. Such a great responsibility. Such a great dare. The confidence. Not a script but there, on the table, an idea to turn over, a problem to pick up. I took it up. Will never forget that. And I've looked for it ever since. Found it here where we learned to loan each other by doing something sophisticated and careful - by the listening we do here - a type of power to say something. You know that now. It is an important thing. An important skill. And your ears and voices are strong with it.
What to do with it now? How to share it? It's not so easy. Not so obvious. What you choose next not taught.
We think that we are continuing a tradition, something uninterrupted, that we might leave with it - take our meditations on the good, on justice, on courage, on spirit and society with us as if a thing we own. But history is often either marked or marred by interruptions and explosions - Tahrir Square, Zuccotti park, the Maidan - moments to consider new room, new possibilities, new structures. What are the terms of their imagining or invention? How are these moments prepared? What we learn here at St. John's is that we can give an origin to a text always and urgently Now, that the best hope in there being a continuing thread to all we take interest in and to all we hold dear is something we have to do. That it depends on us. That it requires our effort. To learn how to do it first, yes, that first, but then to keep on doing it. But what are your next texts? And what is the space? And yes, space matters. Not just the ones between our ears. Where will you find it? How will you improve it? How will you keep it? How will you leave it?
For me it's had something to with violins. Oh, man. I didn't leave here as I arrived. Growing up in an academic family, a mother who edited a scholarly journal, my father a university professor, I thought I might be a musician maybe, played a number of instruments along the way. But I pursued an interest in sociology while getting my undergraduate degree, taking special interest in the structure of corporations, education, social movements and social justice. I also thought I had an ear for what was the hottest thing in town at the time which was all recent continental stuff, critical theory, and I thought yes, that was the thing, I can go to the Committee on Social Thought and then end history! What in the world? Anyways, I thought I should go somewhere before all that and get a better education than the one I had. I thought I should go to St. John's. What did I know? Best thing I ever did.
Coming here changed everything of course. Eventually I sat where you sit now, came up here and got my degree, and then hid. No kidding. In those bushes over there. I don't know how to describe it. But something terrible came over me. I feared going back to New York to read alone, that I might not continue the gorilla seminars we did on our own time here. Didn't know what lecture to attend. Didn't know what it would mean to write. So I left. I returned to NY. And there, I can't say I was looking for it but I found it: A broom. I picked up a broom in a shop - the first tool of an apprentice. Then made a knife - the second tool. And then I made myself useful in a shop repairing and restoring violin family instruments.
My teacher was trained in what could be called a New York School of Lutherie: basically a bunch of French guys trained in Mirecourt who then worked with the Italian masters at the big New York shops in the early to mid-20th century, touching just about every violin, viola, and cello of any importance. Which basically means all the great instruments of the last 400 years came through New York in the last hundred to be bought and sold, restored first, studied and learned from. And the great musicians were there too to have their instruments adjusted, tuned-up, super-charged, and then played. So that ended up being my next school. From the great books at St. John's to the great instruments and makers of both the classical and modern age, my teachers learned their stuff from their masters and from the instruments they got a chance to work on and study - instruments made by Stradivari, del Gesù, Amati. So that's what I did, an apprenticeship directly from a craftsman. I remember the first instrument I made I completely lost track of time. It was like being in the library right over there, lost in a book, or in class over there, inspired by a conversation that lasted well after the class which started it went home. And I haven't stopped. 20 years since leaving Santa Fe. 152 instruments later.
In this I was lucky because in the violin I found something particularly rich, this Renaissance machine, this instrument that combined a whole host of topics in one discreet box - interesting topics by themselves and in their combination, some interests which I already had, other topics about which I needed or still need to know something about: In playing music, in talking about it. In wood working, in architecture, in acoustics, in painting and engineering - these described an intellectual space located within the violin itself, a product of an interesting time. I found also in it more abstract problems concerning origins and authorship, markets and value, in the history of created objects and our love for them and the people they keep and the stories they contain. But really I wanted to make something that a musician could use, a musician much much more talented than I and who would do something with it much more profound and compelling than I could ever do with it. And so that meant focusing on what they did with it, how it performed under their bow, their particular arm, their individual playing style. People ask me when I tell them I make violins, oh do you play? I don't. That seems odd perhaps. But in order to play the type of instruments I make at the level I make them, I would have had to have done nothing but play them and from a very early age. No, I wanted to make something that an expert musician could use, and precisely because I would never be as good as them playing it, I had to take an interest in what they wanted to do with it and pay attention to the technical aspects of its creation that they of course had no time to pay to it, unless they not have the chance to become the musician they spent so much time working on becoming. This was a type of conversation really and it employed the skills I learned here. And I began to see how far what I learned here could extend, that though the making of music or the illustration of a composition or the sharing of an emotion or the explication of an idea is an art, facilitating this communication is a craft.
Indeed, an art or a craft, I'm sometimes asked, which is it what I do? Depending on the context, I usually answer craft, but really there are a few different ways of defining craft and these days I tend to wonder about it as some sort of meme - am always curious how it is used in advertising as a way of suggesting a type of attention paid to a thing or to a process, suggesting a turn away from the isolated labor on the factory floor, the theft implied in the accumulation of capital, or the indentured servitude required by debt. Were craft that powerful a thing that it could address these things! But this the risk in asking something to do too much and so obscuring what it has to say, I prefer to think about craft along the lines Howard Risatti in his book A Theory of Craft suggests that a craft object either supports, contains, or shelters - like a table, a vessel, a roof. Unlike art, it's something that can be judged in terms of whether or not it works - this cup either holds wine or it doesn't; it works here and it works way way over there; in this time and a thousand years ago; in this cultural moment or in a language we don't speak. In this way it has a kind of ethical component - something that can be compared to another thing that also claims to work, that claims to support something, or has some use; but something that is not merely communicated or dependent on context, moment, place. And again, isn't this kind of like what we do here? Stringfellow Barr in his Notes on Dialogue warned that the very word dialogue was in danger of being turned into a cliché and spelled out a ten point plan to define the dialectical method in order to insure its rigor. I don't mind so much that 'craft' has a bit of a buzz right now - and maybe craft chocolate bars and conversations in the financial services industry or the well-crafted political campaign support us or shelter us from the inside out and from the top down. But I'm not really sure about that. Actually, it seems more like the way craft is used these days is a term to disguise the fact that one doesn't really make anything that might be understood in a language not one's own, or beyond your class, or beyond the edge of the glass of your favorite well-branded scotch. And so who cares if it works or not? The seller disguised as maker is not really responsible for it at the end of the day; can abandon ship (if he was ever even aboard) before it all goes under water or falls apart. This seems a problem craft as a warm and fuzzy term is thought to treat in a way. Suggesting we are all responsible for the things we do. That saying something should have some content. That one should only be able to sell things that exist or be able to work on projects that have an end we think right and good. Anyways, be careful with how your skills are applauded or employed. See them maybe as a type of tool making, I don't know. The things made still have to work. You'll maybe consider your discussions elsewhere an end in themselves. Don't. For there are ends, with or without your consent, but absolutely without your dissent.
In my trade, we call them VSOs. Violin Shaped Objects. I didn't want to make a Violin Shaped Object. That's not too hard really: take some wood, remove everything that doesn't look like a violin, and throw some strings on it. But to make an instrument for a performing musician - to make something that worked well and is fun to play - involved a type of making that can only find success in seeing what could be done with it and in making sure something would become of it. This involved adjusting an instrument to a particular player, revisiting it, finding a home for it, and then paying attention to it once it found that player who would use it as their own, to make sure it kept on performing under the particular stresses they put it to and to the level they held their own performance. It's kind of like not knowing what you say until seeing what someone does with what you say. As in Wittgenstein, that is also here.
And here is another thing that appealed to me and that resonated from here to there: That the violin contained within it a wealth of information that in many ways had been covered over by time, a market both art and commercial, and its great success as a musical instrument. A complex object in that more than a tool it seemed something like a subject, a pursuit, a chasing after something in sound. The object could be beautiful, something crafted by hand, yes, something with a pleasing shape, something with some color, a story, something that could sit in a museum as something with a place in history. But it could be used too - something that could take a place on stage in the hands of a musician, to play music, something that could travel from room to room, place to place, sound to sound. And in this, it was something that contained these movements too - in so far that it outlasted whoever played it, and whoever played it next, and perhaps, with some attention and care, outlast even he or she who plays it today. That the violin hasn’t changed much over time speaks to its success but as well to the interest in the sound that it makes and continues to make. It is a voice and gives the musician who plays it a chance to extend their own voice in song. This is what I saw in it when I left here and still do: a technical problem - how to make it? - and a container of problems - how was it made at a particular time and how so successfully that it need not be remembered exactly how by those who make it now?
In Edmund Husserl’s work, The Origin of Geometry, he says the question of how things began is the one thing the ‘originators’ of them never had as a concern - that origins can only be a problem for us as moderns reflecting on something that has already come to be. Frank Pagano led a preceptorial on that here. In some ways this is the problem our contemporary questions suffer regarding the origins of the violin. We can trace a movement - of lute makers from Northern Africa to Andalucía where the relatively primitive European instruments were made more complex and responsive into lighter instruments bent out of thinner wood than the ones carved out of trees not unlike hollowed out canoes wrought up until that time. From there to the expulsion of the Jews from Spain and the movement of this technical approach and understanding north to Italy where the violin finally coalesced into its current form in the mid-16th century. All this a movement of people and ideas in the form of the work they took with them. But to really give an origin to the idea is more difficult. Our explorations entertain this difficulty not so gracefully, at times approaching dogma.
And so one of the great problems of violin making today is not that of being a good maker but that of being a good reader. For something that had its origin a long time ago and to ask how it came to be then, say if we had an instrument by the great Stradivari before us, is not such a simple query. What is this thing?
For the last 15 years, every summer for two weeks, I've been getting together with about 50 of my colleagues -professional violin makers and acousticians from around the world - to cook for each other, work next to each other, and basically geek-out about everything violin-related we can. And we still look to the old Italian masters from Cremona and Brescia from the golden period of violin making in the 17th and 18th Centuries for inspiration and instruction precisely because there was an interruption in the conversation, in the passing down of our craft, interrupted by the plague, the industrial revolution. We have to look at these objects themselves for clues to a method, read them for instruction on their creation and the reason for their success. And this question we ask in how to make our instruments now - what would Stradivari have done? - is always asked amongst us, the question for which everyone wants an answer. It's the wrong question. There should be thunder now and lightning now. No? Ok. Anyways, it's at least not the whole question and maybe even one that gets in the way.
Considering the fact that most instruments made in the 18th century have been adjusted over time - and adjusting it is putting it mildly - where necks have been swapped out as string technology advanced, that higher tensions were introduced by the very geometry of neck angle and projection, that re-thicknessing of plates were done to 'correct' inflexible plates, and the thousand of repairs done to fix cracks, impacts, failures, and where there was replacing of wood damaged by worms, doubling of edges, supporting of weak areas with patches and cleats which turn a simple piece of maple or spruce into something more like plywood, and where the physical changes to the materials themselves over time - the changes to acoustical damping affected by hydrolysis in the wood for instance - and not so all of a sudden this thing before us has a fair amount not to do with the instrument as it left the original maker's workshop, imprinted as it's been by a few hundred years of players the most subtle, restorers the most talented, and matter ever-changing. So what are we doing when we appreciate it? Are we appreciating it as a work of a particular individual? Could this even be the case? Anyone at all who inquires into the way in which a renaissance era workshop of some success conducted itself knows that the name of it named its master, not necessarily those whose hands were laid upon it. But this is just one example of the layers of meaning to a thing which we as individuals and a market have applied after the fact. Yet it still is a fact, there, sitting before us; so the question is not dissolved at all, but it is made more interesting. How to read what we are competing with?
My colleagues are a grand bunch of amazingly talented and most of them quite brilliant fussers! Most of them use templates to produce a shape. Why? Because it's useful or efficient or because the templates exist for them in a museum, some evidence from a time before? But these are the things that reach us, the things that we confuse with tools of making which may not have been the case but just because they are the physical things that remained. It's not that much. It's not like a book if even a book is like a book. Not like an uninterrupted conversation. The things that allow the reproduction of a thing are not the same things as the knowledge used to make it in the first place.
So what does one need to understand what to do now? We can look to how things changed first, understand that. What a mark of history, of use or accident? Ask those first, but ask by doing. Restore something broken, fix it, prop it up, improve it, yes, improve it. We leave our initial training and this is what we do. We make things more useful. Then after a while ask what is a mark of intention, of skill, of hand. But then we get confused, because we've made a study of something so intensely that we cannot see it, nor innovation. We learn to see everything this way. And that is a mistake and it leads to mistaken analyses and to incorrect conclusions, to bad actions and bad making. How to improve this? How to listen to the stand-asides and include them? How approach what you do next with what you've learned here?
But these are not all metaphors. There are real things out there to tackle which have some real importance to them. So right? Where the tradition? What's the thread? This stuff had better be used. If not, there is a break, and it doesn't take long for the grass to take over. Did you see that documentary film called Detropia? It's about the hard time Detroit had since the last economic innovations left the room, and in every scene a character unspoken, unlisted in the end credits - green grass growing everywhere. Scared the hell out of me. Fantastic. This is such a fantastic place.
Thank you. Congratulations. Go get 'em.
