Philosophical Improvisations

JON COTNER

on Misha Glouberman and Sheila Heti’s
The Chairs Are Where the People Go.
Black Whole Conference © Michel de Broin, 2006 (72 chairs)

Misha Glouberman and Sheila Heti
The Chairs Are Where the People Go
Faber & Faber, July 2011. 192 pp.

At Pratt Institute, in Brooklyn, New York, I teach a writing workshop called “Daily Life.” Students read poets, philosophers, essayists, and novelists, each of whom emphasizes, in one way or another, the sheer fleetingness of time. Chinese poet Tu Fu describes life as “whirling past like drunken wildfire.” Twelve hundred years later American poet James Schuyler says: “A few days / are all we have. So count them as they pass. They pass too quickly / out of breath.”

Daily life is the most available and least accessible realm. Fundamentally speaking, it’s our existence, “the what we have now” (Schuyler). But the present speeds past, flowing with such momentum that we need extreme discipline if we’re to glimpse these one-and-one-time-only moments. Of course our days seem to bear some resemblance to each other. Yet at another, deeper level, let’s say the level of the microsecond, there’s constant Heraclitean flux — phenomena that never happen twice.

After reading The Chairs Are Where the People Go, my students came to class with a new kind of intensity. They felt closer to themselves. The background against which their minds operate, often ignored on account of more “productive,” more “serious” pursuits, rose into sharper focus. As Misha Glouberman observes: “There is so much pressure on people to achieve, to become ever more accomplished and impressive,” that it can amount to a loss of the present, which is to say a loss of contact with the relationships, sensations, and opinions that constitute us.

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