A Present That Withdraws
On noticing what was always there
When I was very young — four, maybe five — I noticed a ceramic sculpture in our apartment that had been made by a family friend named Paula. It was a wedding gift to my parents. It had been in the apartment for as long as I had, sitting on a shelf I could see from the floor. I had never noticed it before.
I think this is significant. The object didn’t arrive. My consciousness arrived at the object. Something had become ready — some capacity for a certain kind of attention — and at that moment, an object that had always been there became visible to me for the first time. It appeared. Not because it moved or changed, but because I could finally see it.
I must have been looking at it for a while, because my mother noticed. Without saying anything, she moved it to a higher shelf, beyond my reach. She was concerned I would break it. This only intensified the pull. I began asking her about it — what it was, who made it, could I hold it. She was somewhat dismissive, giving me very little information, probably calculating that engaging my questions would only stoke the curiosity she was trying to manage. “If you want to play with something,” she said, “that’s what your toys are for.”
She assumed I wanted to play with it. But I didn’t want to play with it. I wanted to look at it. I wanted to hold it. I wanted to be near it in a way that had nothing to do with what I did with toys. Toys were things I used — I understood them by using them, and once I understood them they became familiar and I moved on. This was different. This object didn’t invite use. It invited a kind of attention I had never experienced before and couldn’t explain.
I persisted. Eventually she relented. She took it down from the shelf and sat with me, holding it herself while I touched it carefully — the glazed surface, the ridges, the weight of it. After a while she made the leap of trust and let me hold it.
The object was roughly the size of an adult’s two cupped hands. It was vase-like — or rather, it oscillated between being a vase and being something else. Its surface was glazed in colors that shifted depending on where you held it and how the light hit it. Some areas were smooth. Others were textured, ridged, slightly rough under the fingers. The form was organic — it swelled and narrowed in ways that suggested a body, or a seed, or something geological, but it never resolved into any of these. It was familiar enough to hold and strange enough to keep looking at.
I remember feeling that something was happening between the object and me — not an emotion exactly, but a quality of attention that I had no name for. The object pulled. It invited a kind of looking that was different from looking at a chair or a cup or a toy. Those things were what they were. This thing was what it was and something else, simultaneously, and the something else kept withdrawing just as I thought I had arrived at it.
My mother watched me for a while. Then she asked, “What do you think it is?”
I didn’t answer. I wasn’t ignoring her — I was inside the encounter, and the question didn’t connect to anything I was experiencing. What I thought it was had nothing to do with what was happening between the object and me. The question assumed I was trying to identify it. I wasn’t trying to identify it. I was trying to stay with it.
She waited. Then she asked me to name its colors.
My mother taught first grade — she taught children how to read. English was her second or third language. She had arrived in the United States as a child, from a country with no sizable diaspora to absorb her family, and had learned early that fitting in meant speaking clearly, naming precisely, participating in the shared language without hesitation or accent. For her, the ability to name things was not a small skill. It was the key that had unlocked her life in this country. It provided options, freedom, belonging. She was insistent that her children learn this lesson.
I refused. Not reluctantly — viscerally. I didn’t want to know the names of colors. Something in me resisted associating names with what I was experiencing, as if the act of naming would contaminate the feeling the colors produced. The colors were part of what made the object alive in my hands. They shifted and played against each other in ways that were inseparable from the form, from the weight, from the texture under my fingers. Naming them — blue, brown, green — would pin them down. It would convert the experience into information. It would answer a question I hadn’t asked and in doing so would close something that was open.
This was not a passing mood. It caused tension — at home and at school. I was refusing to learn something every child my age was learning, and neither my mother nor my teachers could understand why.
We argued. My mother’s position, as I recall it, was that learning the names of colors was necessary in order to communicate with other people. Given what had just happened between the sculpture and me, this seemed like a terrible rationale. The conversation ended, only to be rekindled several times over the following months until I could identify colors by name.
She took the object from me and placed it back on the shelf.
“If you want to look at this again you need to ask me first.” She said. “I don’t want you climbing up there and breaking it.”
I knew I had bonded with it, and her returning it to where I couldn’t reach it and worrying that I would damage it seemed to indicate that she didn’t understand what had just happened — how could she? — and I was frustrated and angry, but I didn’t have the words for why. So we argued about colors instead.
My fear — the wordless, pre-verbal conviction that naming would eclipse the encounter — never materialized.
I saw Paula’s sculpture regularly until I moved away at eighteen. We moved several times during those years, but the piece always came with us, always found a shelf, always on display. Whenever I looked at it — at seven, at twelve, at sixteen — the same oscillation was there. The object was and wasn’t a vase. The colors were and weren’t nameable. The form was and wasn’t organic. The encounter didn’t close. Learning the names of colors didn’t destroy what the colors were doing. The logical didn’t consume the phenomenological. The two coexisted — and it has taken me a lifetime to understand that they don’t merely coexist but require each other.
This is the thing I couldn’t have articulated as a child and that I am only now, decades later, able to say clearly: the recognizable and the unrecognizable are not opposed. Recognition does not foreclose encounter. It is one of its conditions. The object was compelling precisely because it was almost a vase — because the familiar form was present enough to orient me and strange enough to keep me looking. If it had been entirely abstract — pure form with no reference to anything I knew — it would have been interesting but not arresting. If it had been simply a vase — functional, identifiable, resolved — I would have looked at it once and moved on. What held me was the oscillation: the way meaning appeared at the threshold between the known and the unknown, flickered, and withdrew before I could capture it.
This oscillation is what I have spent my life as an artist trying to produce. Not strangeness for its own sake — not the disorientation that contemporary art often courts as an end in itself, the isn’t this weird that functions as a substitute for genuine encounter. And not familiarity — not the comfort of recognition, the work that confirms what you already know and calls that confirmation beauty. But the threshold between them, where meaning shows itself by simultaneously arriving and withdrawing, where the object or the sound or the space is present enough to hold you and elusive enough to keep you looking.
I think about this in relation to how art is discussed — how the conversation has divided itself into camps that don’t often speak to each other.
There is a way of thinking about art that emphasizes the logical: form, structure, composition, reference, context. This thinking asks what the work is — what it’s made of, where it sits in history, what tradition it extends or refuses, how its formal decisions produce its effects. This is the language of criticism, of art history, of the classroom. It is genuinely useful. Without it, the encounter remains private, incommunicable, sealed inside the viewer’s experience with no way to reach another person.
There is another way of thinking about art that emphasizes the phenomenological: presence, encounter, disclosure (not the observing of some thing, but the appearance of meaning itself within one’s lived reality), the quality of attention the work produces in the viewer. This thinking asks not what the work is but what it does — how it changes the structure of attention, what appears in the space between the viewer and the object, what happens to time and to the body in the work’s presence. This is the language of the studio, of the late-night conversation, of the experience that the artist knows is real but that criticism cannot quite reach.
The division between these two is not a disagreement about art. It is a disagreement about what matters — about whether meaning resides in the object or in the encounter, in the structure or in the experience, in what can be said or in what withdraws from saying.
What Paula’s sculpture taught me — what it has continued to teach me for most of my life — is that this division is false. The logical and the phenomenological are not separate domains. They are aspects of a single event. The form of the sculpture — its glazes, its weight, its texture, its vase-like shape — is what gives the encounter its purchase. Without the form, there is nothing to encounter. And the encounter — the oscillation, the pull, the withdrawal of meaning at the moment of its arrival — is what gives the form its life. Without the encounter, the form is inert.
Recognition and appearance need each other. The familiar is the ground from which the unfamiliar emerges. And the unfamiliar — the withdrawing, the not-quite-graspable — is what keeps the familiar from becoming dead.
While writing this piece, I asked my siblings if any of them remembered Paula’s sculpture. I expected nothing — it was a small object from a childhood apartment, many years ago. One of my sisters sent me a photograph. She still has it.
After multiple moves, my mother’s passing, more moves, my father’s death — somehow this modest work remained present and intact. My sister couldn’t recall how she ended up with it. No one could trace the path it had taken through the family’s dispersals. It had simply persisted, the way it had always persisted — without announcement, without explanation, present in the way that only things which no one deliberately preserves can be present. I don’t know why my mother kept it through all those years and all those moves. Perhaps she remembered our moment with it — the argument about colors, the child who refused to name what he was seeing. Perhaps it was simply a memento from a lifelong friend. I’ll never know. The object resists this question the way it has always resisted questions: by remaining, quietly, itself.
I looked at the image on my phone — the glazes, the form, the ridged texture I remembered under my fingers — and the oscillation was still there. Smaller than I remembered. More modest. But alive in the same way: present and withdrawing, familiar and strange, a vase and not a vase, offering itself and holding something back.
By the time she died I was in my thirties. I had launched my music career, transitioned from composition to visual art, and begun teaching. She and I had arrived at a kind of détente about my work. “I don’t understand what you do,” she would tell me whenever it came up. It wasn’t a criticism. It was simply how she felt. I experienced it as a rejection — her will to categorize, to name, to place things where they belonged, her will overriding the possibility of simply being present with something that resisted naming. It took me back, every time, to the shelf, the colors, the argument. I didn’t know how to respond to her without arguing, and often didn’t.
Looking at Paula’s sculpture now, I understand that the object has always evoked both things at once — the encounter and my mother. The phenomenological pull and the pressure of correctness. The oscillation within the object and the oscillation between us. These are not separate. They are aspects of the same threshold. The tension between naming and not-naming, between fitting in and standing apart, between the logical and the phenomenological — that tension was never a problem to be solved. It was the condition under which meaning appeared in our household, between us, across decades. I have learned not to pathologize it. I have learned to let it be itself: a threshold.
I thought about my composition teacher Charles Jones, who told me early in my studies: “You don’t need to say everything. You’re not trying to write the last piece of music ever — in fact you’re trying to do just the opposite. You need to leave space for the listener to find their way into and out of your work.”
Into and out of. Not just in. Not just the arrival of meaning but its departure — the withdrawal that makes the next arrival possible. The oscillation. The present that withdraws.
Paula’s sculpture is still doing this. It has been doing it for my entire life, for at least two people in the same family, in different cities, in different lives. It has never been exhibited. It has never been discussed in a critical context. It has no place in art history (though much of her work does). It sits on a shelf in my sister’s home and continues to oscillate between what it is and what it almost is, offering meaning and withdrawing it, present and elusive, a threshold that has never closed.
That is what I make work for. Not the object. Not the meaning. The threshold.
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