The Poem and the 256

What happened to the beautiful words when I tried to use them on real paintings.

I have two vocabularies for the same thing, and I've stopped trying to reconcile them, because the distance between them turns out to be the most honest part of the whole project.

When I describe the taxonomy in the abstract — across a dinner table, in the opening of an essay, to someone who asks what I'm building — I reach for a certain kind of word. Attention. Emergence. Tension. Surrender. Transcendence. Inquiry. They are lovely words, and I mean them. They point at something true about what abstraction does to a person. That is the poem of the thing — the register in which the work first announced itself to me.

But open the actual catalog, and the poem isn't there. In the catalog, the feeling dimension has eight names, and they are plainer: awe, reverence, tenderness, longing, solitude, aliveness, defiance, restlessness. No transcendence. No emergence. No surrender. Someone reading the schema after hearing me talk would be entitled to ask where the beautiful words went.

The honest answer is that they didn't survive the paintings.

Or — more precisely — the ambition behind them survived, but the words themselves had to change shape under the weight of two hundred and fifty-six real canvases, each one asked, in turn, which of these do you actually invite? A vocabulary you write at the desk is a hypothesis. A vocabulary that has been dragged across an entire body of work, painting by painting, and forced to answer honestly each time, is something else. It's an instrument. And the two are almost never the same set of words.

I can show you the seams, because I remember them.

I started grander. There were more emotions, and they were more exalted. Then I did the un-poetic thing: I stood in front of the work and tried to assign. And assignment is merciless. It kept exposing distinctions that were eloquent on the page and meaningless at the wall. I had "exhilaration" and I had other words near it, and when I tried to place them, painting after painting, I could not reliably tell them apart from a plainer, truer thing — so exhilaration collapsed into aliveness, which held. I had "unease," and it kept sliding, under honest looking, into something with more spine and less fragility — it became restlessness. And I had "stillness," a word I genuinely loved, that felt essential to any account of what a quiet painting does. Stillness did not earn its keep. Held against the catalog, it never once did work that reverence or solitude weren't already doing better. I dropped it. Each of those cuts was a painting refusing a word.

That is the lesson underneath the whole enterprise, and it took me a long time to trust it: a taxonomy is not authored at the desk. It's authored at the wall. Every painting you place is a vote against your favorite abstraction, and the only words that deserve to survive are the ones that keep coming up true across the entire body — not the ones that sounded most like you.

So the gap between the poem and the eight is not a failure of nerve, and it is not a draft I forgot to finish. It is the record of the work having been done. The philosophical vocabulary is what I believe abstraction does — the horizon, the reason any of this matters. The operational vocabulary is what I could prove I was able to see, repeatedly, without flinching and without cheating, on the two-hundred-and-fifty-sixth painting as honestly as on the first. One is aspiration. The other is evidence. A serious practice needs both, and needs to know which is which.

I've come to think this is the same discipline as the painting itself. In the studio, in the work I make by listening, I don't get to decide when a canvas is finished; the canvas signals, and my only job is to be honest enough to notice and not overrule it out of impatience or pride. The taxonomy asks the identical thing of me in a different key. I don't get to impose the vocabulary I'd prefer. I have to listen for which words the paintings keep answering to — and let the beautiful, unearned ones go, however much I wanted them. Art that listens. And, if it's built with any integrity, a taxonomy that listens too.

So I keep both, and I no longer apologize for the distance between them. When someone wants to know why this matters, I give them the poem — surrender, transcendence, the whole shimmering horizon — because that is the true reason and I won't pretend otherwise. When someone wants to know what is actually true, painting by painting, I give them the eight, because those are the words that stood up to the work.

The space between the poem and the 256 is not a gap to be closed. It is exactly the distance between a manifesto and a practice — and I'd rather live honestly in that distance than collapse it and lie in either direction.

Frequently asked questions

What are the eight emotions in the Taxonomy of Abstraction? The feeling dimension uses eight names: awe, reverence, tenderness, longing, solitude, aliveness, defiance, and restlessness. This compact set was arrived at by testing candidate emotions against a full catalog of paintings and keeping only the ones that could be applied consistently and honestly across the whole body of work.

Why were some emotion words merged or dropped from the framework? Because they could not be assigned reliably across every painting. "Exhilaration" collapsed into "aliveness," "unease" became "restlessness," and "stillness" was dropped after it never did work that reverence or solitude weren't already doing. Each change came from the paintings refusing a distinction that only sounded good in the abstract.

What is the difference between the philosophical and operational versions of the taxonomy? The philosophical vocabulary — words like surrender, transcendence, and emergence — expresses what abstraction is believed to do and why it matters. The operational vocabulary of eight emotions is what could be verified and applied consistently across hundreds of real paintings. One is aspiration; the other is evidence.

How is the vocabulary of a taxonomy decided? Not at the desk but at the wall — by attempting to assign each term to real works one at a time. Words that can be applied consistently across the whole catalog survive; words that sound compelling but blur under honest use are merged or removed. The paintings, in effect, vote.

Passage of the Blue