Edward S. Casey
Quasha at the Edge
a stone at the edge is still happening
-- George Quasha, Axial Stones, p. 38
Precarious balance is the prayer of the edge.
-- George Quasha, “Breaking Wave”
George Quasha brings poetry and sculpture to their respective edges – each to its own edge, and by a unique twist both together. In this brief tribute to this singular double accomplishment, I shall explore the sense of edge ingredient in Quasha’s sculptural and poetic works – a sense that is both like and unlike. I will end by a brief discussion of the “absolute edge,” a term that suggests the farther limits of Quasha’s thought: on the very edge of theology.
Quasha’s remarkable axial stone sculptures are explorations in edgework. When one stone is precariously balanced against, or better with, another, at least two edges touch. Not two surfaces: as would be the case when sheerly smooth stones with flat surfaces are aligned with each other, surface-to-surface. But when the surfaces are irregular, as in virtually every stone sculpture created by Quasha, they connect at discrete edge-points. (By “edge-point,” I mean the discrete place where a given edge provides a point of possible contact with another such edge.) A particular edge-point figures into the balancing of stones in Quasha’s deft hands. These hands, guided by agile eyes, determine the edge-points in each of two (sometimes more) stones. Between these edge-points there is an equipoise sufficient to last indefinitely and to form a single axis for the contiguous stones.
In this bold action, edges cease to be merely the places where a certain material substance like that of stones runs out – to be just the edges of that substance, its outer limits. Quasha’s intervention in the life of stones surpasses this plebian sense of edge by discovering and thematizing those edges whose exclusive raison d’être is to be the agents of affiliation between otherwise unwieldy or uninteresting stones found strewn in rivers and streams – remnant stones, cast off from prehistoric sedimentary or volcanic events. The earth’s rejecta become the very materials of Quasha’s transforming presence. This presence and these raw lithic things intereact in the fulcrum of the edge. The alignment of effective edges constitutes the axis mundi of axial stones.
We are now in a position to grasp the meaning of Quasha’s enigmatic sentence (cited above as an epigram): “a stone at the edge is still happening…” At the edge of a stone an event happens if this edge can concatenate in the right way with the edge of another stone. Such a happening in time arises from the juxtaposition of stones in space. It forms an “actual occasion” in Whitehead’s term for a nexus in which unfolding in time and extension in space occur at once, coalescing in one moment, coming together in what we conventionally call an “event.” In the case of axial stones a geological event “still happens” – that is, continues to occur, though now as re-configured by Quasha’s artistry. And it happens as still, not moving in itself – as the rock-bound equivalent of “the still point of the turning world.”[1] Except that there is no center here around which a world could turn – no literal center but instead a decentered, off-center balancing act, which puts stones back in a still position: as still as artworks that consist in the arrest of motion, albeit the very slow motion of rocks in a stream that are borne along and gradually eroded by the action of water coursing over and around them. This arrest, this motionless motion, is effected by an artful juxtaposition of edges, rendered contiguous by the sculptor – even if often invisibly so connected.
Quasha is an edge master extraordinaire whose gift consists in disclosing the genius of stones to cling to each other at their extremities – at their edges.
II
This sculptor is also a poet, a rare and highly improbable combination. The same person who balances weighty stones also shapes weightless words. In his aerated poetry we witness wisps of edges that act in counterpoint with those that inform the gravity of his stonework. “Let the stones act on you,” [2] he writes, and by this he means act on us both lithically and poetically. The stones act with and by their own dense means, but they can also work their way into language by l’alchemie du verbe. Despite the difference in manifest materiality, the acting and the working–the literal Wirkung--happens through the edge.
THE EDGE IS WHERE THE ACTION IS. The edge acts at and as the point of impingement, whether of 2 + 1 stones or of n + 1 words. Like stones axially arranged, words work on one another through their edges. Quasha creates axes of concatenated stones just as he finds for words inner threads of sense and rhythm that constitute an axis just as invisible, and just as effective, as that which he realizes with stones. This double edging constitutes him as a biaxial artist.
Axis is always a matter of balance. In poetry the balance is no longer literal, a matter of finding and keeping physical balance (which implicates weight and force). Instead, it is a matter of locating words in a skein of meanings – achieving a delicate balance of significance and structure rather than of material substance and thinghood.
“Meaning arises at the edge of signs,”[3] and this is all the more intensely so in the case of poetic meaning. Quasha embraces Merleau-Ponty’s quasi-structuralist thesis when he writes that “There’s a meaning between assertions the poem can hardly escape.”[4] Or else:
Stand still when you smile at meaning waving your quill.
Wonder further!
Line, circumstance—going straight in bounding the empty.
Sign on the ledge: slight alteration in signal wakes across.
Would the undead please line up.
Nature articulates particulates.
..."round" bird cry situating in the moment that engenders it...
Torque potentiates the tongue that conjures.
In the mondologue the world is only description, strut, strut.
Everything slants according to the life/death outcome of the present instant
Discovery makes us—reach out lip first.
The legible edge strips bare. [5]
This poem abounds in edge aspects. “Bounding the empty” is tracing the edge of that which has no distinguishable content. Being “on the ledge” is tantamount to being on the edge. “Articulates” is an action of drawing the limit of something with the sweep of one’s arm. “The present instant” is the temporal equivalent of the point-edge, given that the instant is the lower bound of duration.
Other poems of Quasha’s show a comparable edge sensitivity, above all the recently composed “preverbs,” poems which in stopping short of full-fledged verbs end by giving a subtle intimation of the edges of things named by nouns and noun phrases – in short, a “mondologue” in which “the world is only description.” We are here at the doorstep of phenomenology. Common to such poetry and to classical phenomenological description alike is a shared liminology, a preoccupation for limits and thresholds and other varieties of edge. “Yet here we are at the threshold of cutting oneself off along the line.”[6]
Another poem, another line: “Still joint. The line of vision horizons the real, reeling.”[7] At work is the close imbrication of edges of diverse descriptions, including joints, lines, horizons, reels. The effect is that of a dense matrix of edges – as thick in its way as is the substance of the stone that Sisyphus rolls up the mountain in repeatedly vain gestures.
The edge that matters most in poetry is the line. In composing preverbs, Quasha is preoccupied with the task of putting words onto discrete lines – reeling them into these lines, locating them there before they fly away into the obscure reaches of connotation. That is to say, he is vigilant in his effort to put them onto the edge constituted by the poetic line. Such linearity comes to a head in these lines from “Thorough Through & Through”:
Declaring poetic vocation responds to a call to put it all on the line.
There stones lie with people, words in their sounds lie, lyres lie aligned.
Otherwise the line is wide open.[8]
In poetic alignment we find the wordwise equivalent of finding the axial line between precariously balanced stones. An axis, after all, is a line – whether it is a predominantly vertical line as in stone sculpture or a horizontal one as in preverbial poetry.[9] Around the line, in it and as it, we find the edge in which all biaxial art converges.
“Everything flourishes at the edge”: these words of Derrida, meant as a claim about Kant’s treatment of the parergon, hold true for Quasha’s artwork.[10] This is work that is finely balanced between the outposts of the line. Just as edge-points strike sparks between ill-fitting stones – much as words are the scintillae of the poem -- so the line-edge is the filament that draws out stones and words alike, the former toward the art of physical balance, the latter toward the array of equipoise.
III
The absolute edge: this term came unhesitatingly to Quasha’s lips as he talked of his manner of working. He was speaking intensely and almost mystically of that magical moment when an edge is achieved that is, in itself, invisible and intangible.[11] This is an edge absolved of accustomed physical or semiological parameters in space and time. It is the moment of the Event – of the actual occasion of creation, undergone up close in first person. As such, it is not relative to any other experience but sets itself apart as a strictly singular moment, sans pareil and sui generis. Nor can it be compromised, much less comprised, of anything else: it stands by itself, selbstgenüg, self-sufficient, no matter by what processes it has come into being, personal and other-than-personal. It exists in and by itself. In the same conversation Quasha cited Einstein, who said he regretted the connotations of the phrase “theory of relativity,” yet couldn’t speak of “absolute space and time,” as this locution had been pre-empted by Newton in the Scholium to his Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy.[12]
So regarded, the artwork arises autonomously whatever its heteronomous origins and destination. It is like an instant in time – the absolute appearing of temporal process. When Bachelard argued against smooth and spread-out Bergsonian durée, he invoked the instant as uniquely able to punctuate the otherwise heavy massive movement of duration.[13] The edge is of comparable necessity in the determination of spatial relations – lest these relations be dissolved in a neutral and indifferent medium, everywhere isotropic and “equably flowing” (Newton). Whether occurring as a threshold or a line, a point or a spot, the edge animates the spaces it acts to delineate.[14] Like the instant, it is an energizing force.
Quasha’s extraordinary art takes many forms, none of them indifferently the same as the others, each uniquely realized. In this brief foray into his work, I have singled out his stone sculpture and preverbial poetry. Two unlikely partners, in the end incongruent counterparts: different in internal structuration and medium, they rejoin each other as deeply if tacitly symmetrical attainings. The “link of links”[15] that conjoins them is the edge, especially the edge that occurs as axis – that is to say, as line. Quasha is a biaxial artist whose work is actualized in distinctly linear formats. Each work is liminal in its very axiality, and configured in the mysterium coniunctionis of both. The fil conducteur, the Leitfaden, is throughout the edge.
[1] T.S. Eliot, The Four Quartets.
[2] From “Response Request: Whence What Come” in George Quasha, Verbal Paradise (preverbs) (Tenerife: Zasterle Press, 2011).
[3] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Signs” in his Signs, tr. R. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 41: “this meaning arising at the edge of signs, this immanence of the whole in the parts...”
[4] This is a line from “whence what come” in the series “response request,” Verbal Paradise (preverbs) (Tenerife: Casterle Press, 2011), p. 34. My italics.
[5] The title of this preverb is “a hunt for defining gesture hints the stroke ending all doubt.” It is included in Verbal Paradise (preverbs), p. 30.
[6] From “Response Request: Whence What Comes.” For more on Quasha’s conception of the liminal, see the recent An Art of Limina: Gary Hill's Works and Writings, ed. G. Quasha & C. Stein (Barcelona: Poligrafa, 2009).
[7] From “and Sisyphus an huge round stone did reel” in Verbal Paradise (preverbs), p. 33. In this poem a stone repeatedly rolled upward returns to the base of the mountain – as if to suggest the poet’s endlessly repeated efforts to reach the summit of sense, only to fall back again into non-sense, moving in two ways across the edges of signs.
[8] From ibid., p. 39.
[9] “Preverbial” combines and condenses “preverb” and “proverb.”
[10] Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, tr. G. Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 151.
[11] This third section of this essay draws from a conversation I had with Quasha at Mt. Pocono, Pennsylvania, May 28, 2012. In that discussion, he emphasized that his work proceeds from three basic principles: axiality, liminality, and configuration. In this essay, I am not able to do justice to configuration, while focusing on the edge aspects of the axial and the liminal. However, a full accounting of his work would have to integrate this latter element so there could be a comprehensive appreciation of his achievement.
[12] Isaac Newton, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, tr. A. Motte, ed. F. Cajori (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), I: 6 (Scholium to the opening Definitions).
[13] See Gaston Bachelard, L’intuition de l’instant (Paris: Stock, 1932); English translation, E. Rizo-Patron, The Intuition of the Instant (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2013).
[14] On the spot, see this line from “night’s ignition”: “the purpose of poetry is to put you back on the spot.” (From Verbal Paradise, p.47).
[15] Giordano Bruno, On the Infinite Universe and Worlds, tr. D.W. Singer, in D.W. Singer, Giordano Bruno: His Life and Thought (New York: Greenwood, 1968), p. 264.
a stone at the edge is still happening
-- George Quasha, Axial Stones, p. 38
Precarious balance is the prayer of the edge.
-- George Quasha, “Breaking Wave”
George Quasha brings poetry and sculpture to their respective edges – each to its own edge, and by a unique twist both together. In this brief tribute to this singular double accomplishment, I shall explore the sense of edge ingredient in Quasha’s sculptural and poetic works – a sense that is both like and unlike. I will end by a brief discussion of the “absolute edge,” a term that suggests the farther limits of Quasha’s thought: on the very edge of theology.
Quasha’s remarkable axial stone sculptures are explorations in edgework. When one stone is precariously balanced against, or better with, another, at least two edges touch. Not two surfaces: as would be the case when sheerly smooth stones with flat surfaces are aligned with each other, surface-to-surface. But when the surfaces are irregular, as in virtually every stone sculpture created by Quasha, they connect at discrete edge-points. (By “edge-point,” I mean the discrete place where a given edge provides a point of possible contact with another such edge.) A particular edge-point figures into the balancing of stones in Quasha’s deft hands. These hands, guided by agile eyes, determine the edge-points in each of two (sometimes more) stones. Between these edge-points there is an equipoise sufficient to last indefinitely and to form a single axis for the contiguous stones.
In this bold action, edges cease to be merely the places where a certain material substance like that of stones runs out – to be just the edges of that substance, its outer limits. Quasha’s intervention in the life of stones surpasses this plebian sense of edge by discovering and thematizing those edges whose exclusive raison d’être is to be the agents of affiliation between otherwise unwieldy or uninteresting stones found strewn in rivers and streams – remnant stones, cast off from prehistoric sedimentary or volcanic events. The earth’s rejecta become the very materials of Quasha’s transforming presence. This presence and these raw lithic things intereact in the fulcrum of the edge. The alignment of effective edges constitutes the axis mundi of axial stones.
We are now in a position to grasp the meaning of Quasha’s enigmatic sentence (cited above as an epigram): “a stone at the edge is still happening…” At the edge of a stone an event happens if this edge can concatenate in the right way with the edge of another stone. Such a happening in time arises from the juxtaposition of stones in space. It forms an “actual occasion” in Whitehead’s term for a nexus in which unfolding in time and extension in space occur at once, coalescing in one moment, coming together in what we conventionally call an “event.” In the case of axial stones a geological event “still happens” – that is, continues to occur, though now as re-configured by Quasha’s artistry. And it happens as still, not moving in itself – as the rock-bound equivalent of “the still point of the turning world.”[1] Except that there is no center here around which a world could turn – no literal center but instead a decentered, off-center balancing act, which puts stones back in a still position: as still as artworks that consist in the arrest of motion, albeit the very slow motion of rocks in a stream that are borne along and gradually eroded by the action of water coursing over and around them. This arrest, this motionless motion, is effected by an artful juxtaposition of edges, rendered contiguous by the sculptor – even if often invisibly so connected.
Quasha is an edge master extraordinaire whose gift consists in disclosing the genius of stones to cling to each other at their extremities – at their edges.
II
This sculptor is also a poet, a rare and highly improbable combination. The same person who balances weighty stones also shapes weightless words. In his aerated poetry we witness wisps of edges that act in counterpoint with those that inform the gravity of his stonework. “Let the stones act on you,” [2] he writes, and by this he means act on us both lithically and poetically. The stones act with and by their own dense means, but they can also work their way into language by l’alchemie du verbe. Despite the difference in manifest materiality, the acting and the working–the literal Wirkung--happens through the edge.
THE EDGE IS WHERE THE ACTION IS. The edge acts at and as the point of impingement, whether of 2 + 1 stones or of n + 1 words. Like stones axially arranged, words work on one another through their edges. Quasha creates axes of concatenated stones just as he finds for words inner threads of sense and rhythm that constitute an axis just as invisible, and just as effective, as that which he realizes with stones. This double edging constitutes him as a biaxial artist.
Axis is always a matter of balance. In poetry the balance is no longer literal, a matter of finding and keeping physical balance (which implicates weight and force). Instead, it is a matter of locating words in a skein of meanings – achieving a delicate balance of significance and structure rather than of material substance and thinghood.
“Meaning arises at the edge of signs,”[3] and this is all the more intensely so in the case of poetic meaning. Quasha embraces Merleau-Ponty’s quasi-structuralist thesis when he writes that “There’s a meaning between assertions the poem can hardly escape.”[4] Or else:
Stand still when you smile at meaning waving your quill.
Wonder further!
Line, circumstance—going straight in bounding the empty.
Sign on the ledge: slight alteration in signal wakes across.
Would the undead please line up.
Nature articulates particulates.
..."round" bird cry situating in the moment that engenders it...
Torque potentiates the tongue that conjures.
In the mondologue the world is only description, strut, strut.
Everything slants according to the life/death outcome of the present instant
Discovery makes us—reach out lip first.
The legible edge strips bare. [5]
This poem abounds in edge aspects. “Bounding the empty” is tracing the edge of that which has no distinguishable content. Being “on the ledge” is tantamount to being on the edge. “Articulates” is an action of drawing the limit of something with the sweep of one’s arm. “The present instant” is the temporal equivalent of the point-edge, given that the instant is the lower bound of duration.
Other poems of Quasha’s show a comparable edge sensitivity, above all the recently composed “preverbs,” poems which in stopping short of full-fledged verbs end by giving a subtle intimation of the edges of things named by nouns and noun phrases – in short, a “mondologue” in which “the world is only description.” We are here at the doorstep of phenomenology. Common to such poetry and to classical phenomenological description alike is a shared liminology, a preoccupation for limits and thresholds and other varieties of edge. “Yet here we are at the threshold of cutting oneself off along the line.”[6]
Another poem, another line: “Still joint. The line of vision horizons the real, reeling.”[7] At work is the close imbrication of edges of diverse descriptions, including joints, lines, horizons, reels. The effect is that of a dense matrix of edges – as thick in its way as is the substance of the stone that Sisyphus rolls up the mountain in repeatedly vain gestures.
The edge that matters most in poetry is the line. In composing preverbs, Quasha is preoccupied with the task of putting words onto discrete lines – reeling them into these lines, locating them there before they fly away into the obscure reaches of connotation. That is to say, he is vigilant in his effort to put them onto the edge constituted by the poetic line. Such linearity comes to a head in these lines from “Thorough Through & Through”:
Declaring poetic vocation responds to a call to put it all on the line.
There stones lie with people, words in their sounds lie, lyres lie aligned.
Otherwise the line is wide open.[8]
In poetic alignment we find the wordwise equivalent of finding the axial line between precariously balanced stones. An axis, after all, is a line – whether it is a predominantly vertical line as in stone sculpture or a horizontal one as in preverbial poetry.[9] Around the line, in it and as it, we find the edge in which all biaxial art converges.
“Everything flourishes at the edge”: these words of Derrida, meant as a claim about Kant’s treatment of the parergon, hold true for Quasha’s artwork.[10] This is work that is finely balanced between the outposts of the line. Just as edge-points strike sparks between ill-fitting stones – much as words are the scintillae of the poem -- so the line-edge is the filament that draws out stones and words alike, the former toward the art of physical balance, the latter toward the array of equipoise.
III
The absolute edge: this term came unhesitatingly to Quasha’s lips as he talked of his manner of working. He was speaking intensely and almost mystically of that magical moment when an edge is achieved that is, in itself, invisible and intangible.[11] This is an edge absolved of accustomed physical or semiological parameters in space and time. It is the moment of the Event – of the actual occasion of creation, undergone up close in first person. As such, it is not relative to any other experience but sets itself apart as a strictly singular moment, sans pareil and sui generis. Nor can it be compromised, much less comprised, of anything else: it stands by itself, selbstgenüg, self-sufficient, no matter by what processes it has come into being, personal and other-than-personal. It exists in and by itself. In the same conversation Quasha cited Einstein, who said he regretted the connotations of the phrase “theory of relativity,” yet couldn’t speak of “absolute space and time,” as this locution had been pre-empted by Newton in the Scholium to his Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy.[12]
So regarded, the artwork arises autonomously whatever its heteronomous origins and destination. It is like an instant in time – the absolute appearing of temporal process. When Bachelard argued against smooth and spread-out Bergsonian durée, he invoked the instant as uniquely able to punctuate the otherwise heavy massive movement of duration.[13] The edge is of comparable necessity in the determination of spatial relations – lest these relations be dissolved in a neutral and indifferent medium, everywhere isotropic and “equably flowing” (Newton). Whether occurring as a threshold or a line, a point or a spot, the edge animates the spaces it acts to delineate.[14] Like the instant, it is an energizing force.
Quasha’s extraordinary art takes many forms, none of them indifferently the same as the others, each uniquely realized. In this brief foray into his work, I have singled out his stone sculpture and preverbial poetry. Two unlikely partners, in the end incongruent counterparts: different in internal structuration and medium, they rejoin each other as deeply if tacitly symmetrical attainings. The “link of links”[15] that conjoins them is the edge, especially the edge that occurs as axis – that is to say, as line. Quasha is a biaxial artist whose work is actualized in distinctly linear formats. Each work is liminal in its very axiality, and configured in the mysterium coniunctionis of both. The fil conducteur, the Leitfaden, is throughout the edge.
[1] T.S. Eliot, The Four Quartets.
[2] From “Response Request: Whence What Come” in George Quasha, Verbal Paradise (preverbs) (Tenerife: Zasterle Press, 2011).
[3] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Signs” in his Signs, tr. R. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 41: “this meaning arising at the edge of signs, this immanence of the whole in the parts...”
[4] This is a line from “whence what come” in the series “response request,” Verbal Paradise (preverbs) (Tenerife: Casterle Press, 2011), p. 34. My italics.
[5] The title of this preverb is “a hunt for defining gesture hints the stroke ending all doubt.” It is included in Verbal Paradise (preverbs), p. 30.
[6] From “Response Request: Whence What Comes.” For more on Quasha’s conception of the liminal, see the recent An Art of Limina: Gary Hill's Works and Writings, ed. G. Quasha & C. Stein (Barcelona: Poligrafa, 2009).
[7] From “and Sisyphus an huge round stone did reel” in Verbal Paradise (preverbs), p. 33. In this poem a stone repeatedly rolled upward returns to the base of the mountain – as if to suggest the poet’s endlessly repeated efforts to reach the summit of sense, only to fall back again into non-sense, moving in two ways across the edges of signs.
[8] From ibid., p. 39.
[9] “Preverbial” combines and condenses “preverb” and “proverb.”
[10] Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, tr. G. Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 151.
[11] This third section of this essay draws from a conversation I had with Quasha at Mt. Pocono, Pennsylvania, May 28, 2012. In that discussion, he emphasized that his work proceeds from three basic principles: axiality, liminality, and configuration. In this essay, I am not able to do justice to configuration, while focusing on the edge aspects of the axial and the liminal. However, a full accounting of his work would have to integrate this latter element so there could be a comprehensive appreciation of his achievement.
[12] Isaac Newton, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, tr. A. Motte, ed. F. Cajori (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), I: 6 (Scholium to the opening Definitions).
[13] See Gaston Bachelard, L’intuition de l’instant (Paris: Stock, 1932); English translation, E. Rizo-Patron, The Intuition of the Instant (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2013).
[14] On the spot, see this line from “night’s ignition”: “the purpose of poetry is to put you back on the spot.” (From Verbal Paradise, p.47).
[15] Giordano Bruno, On the Infinite Universe and Worlds, tr. D.W. Singer, in D.W. Singer, Giordano Bruno: His Life and Thought (New York: Greenwood, 1968), p. 264.