On Genese Grill’s Portals — Anisa Verma
Reading Portals feels like biting into a juicy mango and imagining yourself on a beach in the tropics. A fruit lying around becomes a portal as you relish not just its physicality, its taste, but what it stokes in your imagination as your mouth is full of it. I could certainly separate the two: imagine being in the tropics without the mango in my mouth or simply having my taste buds be stimulated by the pulp. But why would I? Why would anyone want to separate spirit and matter in the first place? Reject one in favor of another, and have them be mutually exclusive? This is the central premise of Portals, written by scholar and translator Genese Grill. In seven essays on topics that range from sexuality and sexual looking to the plundering of beautiful objects during colonialism, Grill examines our “natural” impulses as individuals and people who are part of societies that impose puritanical ideas, valuing, since antiquity, the spirit over the flesh.
A portal, by its very definition and form is a contained, bound object that is a window into some other world. It is magical. The internet could be considered a portal, into other lives, other ideas, but Grill rails against this. Its very limitlessness and unboundedness is what defiles it. Because “(it) can provide the illusion of an infinite number of choices; in reality there is no need to make a choice at all as the choices proliferate, unbounded.” Rather than being viewers, we become static objects (or things) that images are shown to. It is a wheel that keeps spinning, hypnotizing the passive viewer and holding her hostage. In its infinity, it’s similar to the universe. It is a universe unto itself, but man made (and therefore putrefied?). When confronted with infinity, one can’t help but cower a little, shrink into oneself slightly, realising the full extent of one’s diminutive humanity. With a book, the world expands too, but differently. One is still confronted with a certain proliferation: of different minds and lives and worlds. But this expansion is more benevolent, or at least salutary. Our own humanity and inner dialogue and preoccupations are magnified and shown to us. And even after the object stops being tethered to you, the residue stays. It stays with you in spirit. Spirit: such a sacred word. This can’t compare to the constant shallow inundation from the internet, which is seemingly endless. Nothing can take root in this case. The bounded unboundedness of a book is what makes it a portal. A physical thing, an object has a solidity. It won’t just vanish like on the click of a button on the internet. Its solidity, its thereness allows for contemplation, to sit with it and deify it. Its thereness allows its spirit to take hold in you, to entangle with your spirit.
Grill argues that robbing the book of its corporeality and its place in the physical world and rendering it mostly virtually, i.e. in “spirit,” is a manifestation of the pervasive belief that books are meant to exist in some sort of ether: as lofty things that haven’t and shouldn’t have any bearing on reality.
The key question she asks is, “Are we more or less empowered or disempowered by fragmentation and dispersal?” Removing a book from its context and its history and place, transplanting it and relegating it to some virtual realm, does it more harm than good. She’s concerned a lot with boundedness; the volume of a book is bounded—in the physical and other sense. Just like we are as humans with a beginning and an end. But in it, our life itself can feel expansive and infinite. She believes that we can access unboundedness from only within the precepts of a certain boundedness.
After the pandemic, when I started going out more regularly and interacting with people around me, what struck me, surprisingly, was the presence of the physical world. On the internet, the frames are evershifting, not always or even at all out of our own volition. It’s a spinning wheel but without circularity, that transfixes you. There's a cacophony of voices and material and text; it feels like one can touch anything, any voice and opinion. Everything feels transparent, permeable. We’re given access to the conscious, waking detritus of thousands of minds. Someone is doing this and that, so one should want this and that. Grill exhorts that this very overcoming of distance prevents us from truly getting close to anything, very unlike a heavy book weighing us down and rooting us. A fragmentary contact with everything means contact with nothing. The world is literally at one’s fingertips but the problem is that the fingertips aren’t necessarily choosing what to see.
Reentering into life after the pandemic, the physical world had a comforting opaqueness to it. Walking down the street or looking out of my window, it didn’t shift within the blink of an eye, but stayed there, solid and sturdy. I didn’t have the power to shift it, except over a long period of time, as I tinted it with my own moods in response to life changes. It just stood there, going about its thing, unblinking and in this sense, oblivious to me, even with all the people milling about. I had to move through it if I wanted it to change. While Grill insists on a whole-hearted embrace of the physical world and its pleasures, she nonetheless acknowledges that it doesn’t exist to give one pleasure, or to be for one’s benefit, and that these two ideas aren’t necessarily contradictory. The latter can reassure when one has with abandon, attached themselves to worldly pleasures and found, along the course of it, that a certain something won’t bend to their will, regardless of their enhanced experience of it resulting from viewing everything as a synthesis of spirit and matter. That will be when the spirit of the matter in hand may not speak kindly to one’s own spirit or speak at all. But understanding that the world can have a rightness to it in its own right can help to engage fully with it, without being embittered. A being at one with the world can liken this obliviousness to a benevolence, a certain freedom.
The only window I looked through for months during the pandemic, that had any import or intrigue, was my tablet and laptop. After lockdown, when I moved out for college, I started looking through actual windows and often: those of my dorm room, dining hall, common room, and lecture hall, all looking out onto different landscapes. All those windows frame the same old landscape day after day, solid to the touch in the fall and winter and spring. When my hand touches the glass, it’s firm and pushes back, and what fills it stays the same, impelling me to change it ever so slightly, in my own mind, this unmoving colossus. So I do.
It’s quite innocuous, no? Just winding streets with students on them, and streetlights and trees. But they will not entertain you, or exist for you. Who will exist for you?
A window is a portal if one wants it to be. It is bounded as Grill would like it to be but weighty, giving one a glimpse into the world while you and it are both rooted, free to dream. What I would have liked most, my ideal, was a phantasmagoric window. Moving pictures, all dreamlike and fantastic but none of them trivialised because they were fast moving. Only excitement.
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Grill narrates an anecdote where a young kid refers to her as a witch and she agrees with him. I like to think of her as a fairy, sprinkling pixie dust on anything she sets her sights on, by dint of her beautiful sentences.
“There was a growing inclination to regard external reality as a transient metaphor for the true, primary and invisible transcendental world.” In response to this, Grill waxes poetic about the importance and delights of the corporeal. Portals incorporates many tales from history, mythology, and religion, juxtaposing them to illustrate a pattern, a human tendency. This incorporation is seamlessly stitched into all the essays. The I of the personal and confessional isn’t present in most of them but when it is, it brings the reader back into the everyday, into the humdrum of the present which is sticky with the pearls of the abstractions and ideas that went on for the previous twenty pages.
By tackling weighty topics such as colonialism and trade with delicacy and boldness, Grill gives us something other than the trite moralizing that usually attends these topics, following her own belief in “vital acts of speech that seek to make a fresh and private content more publicly available without weakening the felt edge of individual intention.” Acknowledging that “criticisms of civilization tend to suggest that less is more and that our great fault as a culture is that we have produced too much and have in doing so, abused resources and strained capacities,” she asks whether it is possible to “separate the hunger for power from the hunger for knowledge which in part has been motivated by a desire to make life better.” She asserts that aggression is inherent in human nature and not just a result of the structures we put into place; it isn’t to be anaesthetised.
In ancient cultures, people believed that things in the world inherently had meaning and that words aligned completely with that meaning. Even if this wasn’t the case, Grill says that they tried their hardest to “invent new symbols that promised to heal the rift between the word and the world, human mind and cosmos. The idea that language could be intrinsically related to reality.” Because we can assert something through language, a moral or an aphorism, in a convincing way, build entire religions, it must have some basis in reality: that because it was possible to utter it in such a comprehensive, whole manner, it must be true and must align with how reality is. According to this, language isn’t a superimposing of human values onto the world through words. But words themselves fit into the mold of the world, of reality. The world is a carved, engraved slab with etches and the words are sand that fill its hollows, taking the shape of reality as it truly is unbeknownst to us, showing it to us.
She opposes the view that “this tyranny of words deceives in yet another fundamental way. By presenting an order that is invented, words give lie to the actual disordered state of the world. Words cover up a chaotic, fluid abyss that cannot be (or rather should not) be reduced, differentiated or delimited.” Words serve as delimiters. Imagine a tree. This is the tree and its leaves and the soil and the microbes in the soil. We may know intellectually that they are connected and in some essence, undifferentiated, but we still see them as discrete units because of the naming. When one can take out discrete units in such a way, one can also mix and match them, creating something entirely new. Inventing instead of discovering now.
If everything was undifferentiated and connected: just one big sweep extending over everything, it would equalize, put them on the same plane. Without names and words, one cannot use these elements to assign them a higher or lower significance by putting them into a sentence as a subject or object, at the beginning or end of it; no hierarchy. They would resist classification. What if thousands of years ago, Nature did have the divine power to resist classification? What then? Our tongues would have been tied. Nature would be immutable and therefore unexploitable, undissectable.
Yet, while reading Portals, answers come to mind in response to rhetorical questions that aren’t demanding an answer: “Why should human language-making be something outside of nature? If words were arbitrary, they grew out of each other in accord with reality. Why do we worry so much about the distinction between what is perceived or how named, when the perceiver-namer is made of the same nature as the observed? Why would it commit treachery on its own kin through language?”
This I would say is because the mind, despite being made of the same nature as the observed, isn't compliant to nature, only operating within the ambits of the instincts deposited into us, as in animals. That singular organ having evolved to the degree it has in humans, makes it and its products apart from Nature. There isn’t mere obedience or even an alignment but power and audacity to look Nature in the eye, unlike any of her other children, in whom there’s still a capitulation. She hadn’t prepared for this inadvertent exposition of herself, so she shivers ever so slightly.
In the science fiction movie Arrival, the protagonist is only able to access a certain hidden nature of reality after she learns a new language that fundamentally changes the nature of reality for her, allowing for a supposed impossibility: time travel. This is a fantastical example taken out of a movie but it demonstrates an interesting thought experiment that’s rooted in linguistics. A different, alien language can change reality and this means that our current language might have been obfuscating it.
Words having roots and growing out of each other doesn’t preclude them from being incapable of describing the true reality of nature and what it demands of us: of how to live, of what we call God, which might in essence resist a delineation. Grill paints the opposing view as a sterility, a stultifying void that’s rejecting life, instead of satisfyingly dismantling it.
Reading Portals, we look at the world through the eyes of not a critic, essayist, or philosopher (though Grill may be all of these) but an artist. She gives us no easy answers and neat moralizing solutions but rather sheds light on a delectable surfeit full of distressing contradictions and complexity that demands to be engaged with. Grill trains her incisive eye on a variety of topics but the dominating quality of these essays isn’t trenchancy and exactitude, but vividness, specificity, child-like wonder and an overflowing love of the physical world, a softness that bleeds onto every page making the argument at times secondary to emotion. The essays are at their best when they rally against arguments that can be easily dismantled but are less so otherwise.
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Like any good book, Portals intentionally or unintentionally ends up touching on something curious that isn’t the focus of the argument but which diverges from it like a small tributary the reader is impelled to follow after closing the book. Grill says that “The medieval artist looked upon the physical world, mainly as a symbol of some higher idea: thus it was not only no longer necessary, but more or less frowned upon to paint a body in all its glory.” The only exception to this was Nature because the artists painted it with excruciating physical detail. Did this mean then, that Nature was exempt from this dichotomy of spirit vs matter? That it was the only thing synthesizing the two seamlessly? And yet, animals weren’t considered as having a spirit. Because people believed they presided over Nature, they subjected themselves to stringent and nobler laws that necessitated that a rejection of the physical and a certain disembodiment would lead to salvation. In a similar vein, appropriating Nature isn’t really appropriation but the very basis of civilization. One chapter lists the different parts of animals (shells, horns, tusks, heads) that were heavily ornamented, but this severance from their original place of being to be fawned at by us isn’t the same appropriation which it would it be for artifacts and objects of cultural significance plundered from another culture.
Grill uses the 19th century tale of the match-girl from a German fairytale to demonstrate how inner warmth and giving in to visions of heaven and God at the expense of bodily needs and desires is, not a cautionary tale but a model of good virtue, something to strive towards. What cannot be seen and touched must therefore belong to the realm of God and be elevated above the physical world which is base and secondary. This is precisely the idea that Grill observes throughout history and everywhere and is in strong opposition to.
Grill says that art can change for the worse when it stoops to the level of life. This, according to her, divests art of its “artistic qualities to become more life-like, more random, less art-ifical, while it remains dubious as to whether or not life has become more artistic or people more aware of its beauties, dynamics, ironies and messages.” This is the stance that any serious artist who’s fully immersed in her work would take, to whom mere living without creation would feel worthless. Quoting Oscar Wilde, Grill says “Art is art because it is not nature.” This is true.
Our reactions and emotions in everyday life are just this: drudgery, mere nuisances and unheroic discomforts, and we cannot see them as a thread in some intricate tapestry that's grand, affirming and justifies itself. And the role of high art isn't necessarily to make us see them as such (one can have this rapprochement when making art herself and maybe not even then: the two worlds might still remain separate) but rather to give us an essential, elemental (static?) awareness of every stray component of life and have that awareness be present in every feeling, object, exchange, conversation, as one lives her life, going about her day without active thoughts of art.
This, at its strongest, can engender a blissful complacency, an embrace, that gives no impetus to interpret, explain, reconfigure, or add to life. But at its best, it fosters a love of living, not because the living has art in it that one can get lost in, but that after contact with that art, it injects a potion into everything in the world: not in terms of opening it up for that person as raw material to create more art (though certainly that is an effect) but as an ineffable, formless awareness of reality's being that's an affirmation. There is also the subconscious knowledge that these components in the barefaced tribulations and necessities that comprise living, are all disassembled parts that when arranged properly, novelly, after some intangible alchemy, make up the thing that transformed one's world for a few moments or days. It isn't a conscious thought. The rift between art and living is too big for that seamless correspondence. Grill agrees with this when she says that, “Although we cannot help but imbue matter with such subjective coloration, matter does not necessarily need our colorizing to be impressive.”
If there is another overarching theme that Grill inadvertently comes back to no matter what the topic at hand is, it is discernment– as in discrimination, of putting one thing before another in importance and value, acknowledging a necessary hierarchy, a person’s will to power, instead of an equalizing anodyne sameness where anything could be anything and anyone anyone.
While it is true that beautiful surfaces– faces or otherwise– might veil an inner ugliness, Grill says that it doesn’t make sense to malign them and consider them suspect; they demand to be admired and valued, even when one is ignorant of an underlying evil.
Looking at art and art-making through the political lens and aligned with social justice has its place, Grill argues, but this compromises what the art-object is for in the first place. It should be free from the need to make life objectively better, for it to directly impact life in tangible, actionable ways. It should be allowed to exist in its own climate.
Portals contains lush, evocative passages from when Grill is sauntering in Italy, soaking in the sensuous pleasures that characterize the culture and way of life there. When the writing takes such a turn, there’s a chance that it’ll turn belletristic but this never happens. Grill’s wanderings and descriptions don’t stray, like threads from a loosely held quilt, but are held tight by being woven in with robust and satisfying philosophical discourse. The form she’s working with is never forgotten by her. The tone of her argument isn’t combative but insistent and self-assured. This matters, because she is interested more in building up than tearing down: “The axes must be turned into chisels, to carve new idols, new values…..that affirm the instincts.” And build something she has with this book.
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Anisa Verma is a writer living in Wisconsin. You can find her on twitter @janodeigh