104. Oak Trees and Distilled Broth

(With thanks to JM, who kicked off this discussion on the summer solstice, and some apologies to MC-M.)

  

This is a picture of an oak tree, or at least it would be if the artist, MC-M, weren't a coward. In 1973, he created one of the foundational pieces of conceptual art: an oak tree. Not a picture of an oak tree, but an oak tree. It consists of metal brackets, a glass shelf, a glass of water, and the ineffable act of having transformed a glass of water into an oak tree. "How long will it continue to be an oak tree?" an interviewer once asked him. "Until I change it," he replied. Tread carefully before you reject the whole premise as nonsense. I ask: would you be just as pleased to march into your nearest cathedral one fine Sunday morning, stroll down the aisle as the choir boys sing Mass, and unceremoniously knock the wafers and wine out of the bishop's hands as bullshit? If you'll bite that bullet, that transubstantiation is actually completely fake, then props to you, but today we're being a bit more cautious, a little more metaphysically open.

Let's back up a little: why are there things, and why are those things usually so obvious? There is the appearance of an object - its shape, size, mass, and other physical properties; we term these the "accidents" of that object, for reasons that will shortly become clear. Then there is what the object "really is": its "nature", "substance", or "essence". Consider, as Descartes did, a lump of beeswax. As it heats up, everything about it changes. It starts off hard and becomes soft, and then liquid. It starts off large, and ends up much smaller. It changes its scent and its color. Smoke and fragrance emerge from it, should it burn. Every single physical property of the wax has changed... and yet we would be justified in saying that it is still beeswax, and continues to be the whole time, up until it turns entirely into smoke and water vapor. The accidents of the wax change; the substance does not. Or take the Ise Shrine, one of the holiest shrines to the Shinto religion. Every 20 years, any given building in it - two buildings and an adjacent bridge - is completely torn down and then rebuilt from the ground up to the same general specifications with the same purpose on an adjacent plot of land, back and forth. And yet: it is the same building; it serves the same purpose, it is built to the same rough specifications, and the community surrounding it agrees that the point of the whole enterprise is to ensure that the building remains itself. From this we may derive an initial principle within this folk ontology: that essence persists through even a total change in accidents, should a community with standing maintain it.

Take the reverse case: anything to do with any financial transaction over any object. Some words are said, perhaps some tokens change hands, and - hey presto - that jar of jam that just seconds ago you'd have been chased down for taking away with you can now go with you, free and clear. The accidents of the jar are identical; the essence has been changed. Likewise, consider stocks of materials in a maker's workshop. Yesterday, the disused bell was a bell; today, it is irritatingly durable bronze scrap for making a new bell with. From this we may derive a corresponding principle: essence changes under unchanged accidents, should someone with standing perform a suitable speech act. "Standing" is as key to this transformation as to the previous one: I could not sell you that jar of jam, nor would anyone hear me if I claimed that the Ise shrine was no more.

The story, as other have told it to me, goes like this: in 1976, MC-M faced just such a test, and failed it. He was right: it would remain an oak tree until he changed it, and change it he did. While touring his oak tree, he was stopped at Australian customs, on the grounds that he was importing an oak tree to Australian soil from the UK without a permit or declaration, violating agricultural law. He had two correct answers to give here. First, he could have simply surrendered the oak tree. "Yes," he might have said, "this is an oak tree, and my apologies for having unthinkingly violated Australia's agricultural law." He could have surrendered what looked like a glass of water to the mercies of Australian customs and simply created a new oak tree - a local one, at that. More subtly, he might have argued metaphysics with the customs agents, though I admit this to be a less winning strategy. "Sure," he might have noted, "this is an oak tree. But its accidents are that of a glass of pure water. Given that Australian agricultural import law is aimed at the prevention of the introduction of plant diseases, surely you must see that although I have brought an oak tree, I have brought an oak tree whose accidents are incapable of contamination." The worst part is, MC-M's own care instructions give the correct answer which he was said to have passed up: the glass and the shelf may be replaced when worn, so long as the glass is filled with water and the proper intent that causes there to be an oak tree. From this we may derive a key observation: a declaration of essence may be audited, and that audit is when one may learn what that declaration is backed by. We will return to how, exactly, he failed that audit.

Here's another question drawn from another religion that I pose now and again, that I might partake in disagreement for the sake of Heaven: consider that in kashrut, Jewish religious dietary law, it is strictly forbidden to consume meat and milk simultaneously. "Thou shalt not boil a kid in its mother's milk", as it is written, and though that might have started as a proscription against animal cruelty, or a ban on a Canaanite ritual, a fence has been built around the Torah such that the modern interpretation is that one must not allow meat and milk to mix - not in the pot, not in the dishwasher, and certainly not in the diner's mouth. The thought experiment is this: suppose you take a big pot of beef broth, and distill off its water into a bottle. Then you take an equally large pot of cream and distill its water into a different bottle. You now have two bottles of water: one which was once beef broth, and one which was once cream; say for the sake of argument that through careful physical and chemical processes, all the water is molecularly pure. Pour a glass of water, half of each, and drink it. Have you violated kashrut? No, say the sages, citing "bitul" - "nullification". To throw out a whole pot of brisket because of a single drop of milk would be foolish, and to throw it out because of the mere possibility would be insane. The gold standard is "bitul b'shishim" - "nullification-in-sixty". If less than one part in sixty of the dish is traif - unkosher, forbidden - then who cares, as long as it is not a part that gives the rest its form. Collard greens with bacon? No. Meatloaf where maybe a fleck of ground pork made it in? Fine, probably.

To the "people of the land", the theological terror continues. Consider that kashrut strictly forbids cannibalism, as well as the eating of flesh from animals that died naturally, but that the water cycle exists. People and animals die, and some of the matter that once made them up makes its way back into the water cycle. Pour yourself a glass of water, any glass of water, and drink it. Have you violated kashrut? No, repeat the sages, some more annoyed this time, the wisest ones more amused. The connection here is more tenuous yet, and anyway, ha-Shem would decidedly not have made all water be forbidden for drinking. The preservation of life above all else would take precedence. But even before that, the concept of a contaminating taste - ta'am - makes the difference, and in both cases, by assumption, what we have is nothing but distilled water. The categories were made for man, and are thus at human scale; the water cycle has never once troubled a rabbinical court, because at least for Judaism, essence is not a property of water molecules, but a property of things, and the law sets the ontology - which things there are.

From these examples we may derive a key principle: that in mature, heavily-audited, or most modern systems, we solve the problem by legislating the only reasonable answer for where essence lives: on the books, and at human scale. Ask anyone who's ever had to carefully avoid calling the frosting on a pastry a gel when treating with the TSA as with the Fair Folk. This to say: the argument that MC-M might have made to the Australian customs agents was never winnable, not if he wanted the oak tree to survive.

 

Take another angle on all of this. Consider the genre of conceptual art having to do with careful copying of some (usually commercial) object. Duchamp's readymades, sure - though those have a mischievous tale of their own, count the holes some time - but also Vezzoli, and even Levine's leather, Strider's strawberries, and Jack Daws's pennies. Even in the cases where the object is made of the right materials, there is something novel about the meticulous replication of something mass-produced. MSCHF's mischief puts a finer point on this yet, turning one priceless Warhol ink into a thousand commentaries on the folly of exclusivity and provenance. From all these pieces of art we may nonetheless derive a contrapositive principle: perfect accidents convey no essence on their own, for the copy's ledger differs. Indeed, different people care about different sorts of ledgers: to some, MSCHF destroyed a piece of art for a cheap prank that day, but I say that they instead created 999 of them. To some, the only precious gems are those dug from the dirt and bought from the exploited for pennies on the dollar, but I say that lab-created gems shine all the brighter for their cleaner provenance, their lack of flaws, their depth of color, and their price.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, there are Zoroastrian fire rituals. Ordinary fire will not do to grace a temple; fire is so central to Zoroastrianism that the grandest fires, the Atash Behram - fires of victory - require the careful collection of fires from everything from a lightning strike to a goldsmith forge to a funeral pyre, followed by careful handling and distillation and mingling. Relics, too, hold a piece of the puzzle, be they Christian saints' knucklebones or Buddhist cremation pearls - in many cases, an important part or their story is what is said to have become of them after their morbid creation: a theft here, a miraculous survival of a fire there, smuggling throughout. Another question: consider the oak tree from the start. Would it have had a stronger claim to be an oak tree if its water had come from rendering the leaves and sap of a biological oak tree? What if it came from the water given off by a pyrolized oak tree? Or from a pile of acorns? I claim yes, but that's only because nearly any naive or folk ontology cares about provenance. Even your favorite hoodie has a history, a tale to tell, that you would be loath to go without. From this we may derive one last principle: that essence can be accumulated, that it is a function of worldline, yes, but also narrative and myth; provenance as liturgy, historic events as prized ingredients. And that suggests where it is essence has been living the whole time.

Let us step back for a moment to see all of this together: speech acts and shrines, fires and flipped artwork, bronze and broth, objects and oak trees. Essence, we have observed, persists through melting wax and rebuilt shrines, and it flips in an instant on a foundry floor; essence refuses to travel alongside molecules, and to inhabit perfect copies; essence can be collected through years of deliberate rite, or scattered in a moment of weakness at an airport. Just one theory predicts all these observations, and it is this: that the accidents live in the object itself, and that the essence lives in a ledger that a specific person keeps, and throughout it all, we deliberately blind ourselves to the brute fact that objects and categories aren't part of the true territory by binding ourselves to human perspective and scale. Somewhere - in a parish, in a market, in a rabbinical court, in a museum's destroyed files, in a family, in a bored security agent, and sometimes in a single stubborn artist - there is a book of regard in which a relevant entry is kept, and "what a thing really is" means nothing more and nothing less than what the book says as maintained by the people who have standing to write in it, be that granted, arrogated, acclaimed, or violently seized. Call nothing mere: books of regard are some of the most powerful invisible technology that our species maintains. Wars have been fought over them, and over less; without them, you would lack a name.

It follows, then, that a declaration of essence is a promissory note. Anyone can issue one; MC-M understood this perfectly, and likewise knew that it is not something that one can teach, and that it takes no effort at all, but requires a purity of intention as he distilled it. The whole artwork, by his own account, ran on nothing but his own confidence in his ability to speak, and our willingness to think and to extend him credit. What he missed, or perhaps couldn't afford, is that such notes get presented. Every transubstantiation is eventually audited, and the customs desk with its merciless forms and total indifference to your discourse is simply the audit arriving in its least flattering uniform. I can at last name the charge of cowardice I levelled perfectly, and in so doing, pay off the debt that my first words incurred with the interest of the intervening ones: at no point did MC-M lie; nothing he said was false, and in fact in saying them he made them true. The worst part is, he had no losing moves, if what he cared about most was the integrity of the oak tree and not making a gallery date - if the Aussies had taken the artwork, they would have co-signed its nature as a tree. Can you imagine the tales then, at the empty gallery? "Sorry, customs seized my oak tree, so it won't be here for the opening. Yes, the one that looks like a glass of water. I know, I know, I'll have one ready for tomorrow." Instead, he defaulted. Having issued a note, he devalued his currency at the very first real demand for specie in a single afternoon, sheepishly spending his afternoon changing the oak tree back into a glass of water before the border agent's eyes. What has been created by a speech act can be destroyed by a speech act, and in the only court that ever got to rule on it, he proved that the entry had been kept in a ledger with just one person having standing to write in it, who wrote the wrong thing and backed it with nothing.

Compare the institution that my opening dared you to disrespect. The Catholic Church would pass an identical audit without blinking, and indeed it does - routinely, procedurally, and without theological crisis. Hosts profaned, impounded, or dropped are reverently disposed of, and the rite is simply performed anew, for the rites are repeatable and the accidents have never been the point. I didn't know it when I started writing this, but the first answer I gave above, that I would have recommended at the customs desk - to surrender it, and remake it - is not a clever workaround but rather standard operating procedure for every priest on Earth. Transubstantiation, like any good ontological technology, ships with a disaster-recovery protocol; I would expect nothing less of any serious practitioner.

By now you might have guessed my own stake in all this, which goes far beyond that day maybe 20 years ago I first saw "An Oak Tree" in a Paris museum; I am an issuer myself. Scattered about the world, there exist objects - small ones, made of a specialty sterling silver, reeded at the edge, and square-holed - whose accidents assay as a few dollars of scrap metal but whose essence, the books say, comprises either a small slice of my savings, plus those few paltry dollars, or else a day's worth of my skilled labor. When I say that the silver is not the point, this is why. When I gesture to such an object and claim that it is not a Favor, but the point at which a Favor touches the physical world, this is why. They retain their value to others for just one reason: when one is presented to me, I pay. That is the entire mechanism, right there: not the silver, not the design language, not the mythology I have draped over them, but the honoring of that commitment. To even those who have become persona non grata, I would pay the same floor price for their return, if with no trace of a smile. My oak trees survive the customs desk, or they were never oak trees.

As for you? You have oak trees of your own; nearly everyone does. A ring which is more than just gold; dust which is more than just impure calcium phosphate. Flags, names, family recipes whose essence outlasts every substituted ingredient. Understand: you must tend the ledger deliberately, for it is you who has standing to write in it. Know which book each entry is kept in, who else has standing to amend it, and what you would be willing to pay if audited tomorrow, and in what coin. Someday, the forms will arrive for everything that you have declared, and when they do, there are just three answers that will let you keep the faith. You can dodge the audit entirely, if your oak tree is sufficiently immaterial or otherwise smuggleable, and keep the faith - untested. You can argue the accidents, if you have the nerve. And you can surrender the glass, walk through the checkpoint empty-handed and light-hearted, and on the far side, as the heavens, the crowd, and the border police all watch, fill another one.

And then? It will remain an oak tree. Until you change it. So don't.