Nothing Doing/Doing Nothing

Not this kind of nun

Around the block from my childhood house in Seattle’s North Capitol Hill neighborhood was a Catholic retreat called Still Point. To imagine the nuns who ran the hostel, erase any ideas you have of wimples and habits, of piously folded hands and tightly closed mouths. These women, mostly in later middle age, wore Birkenstocks, handwoven smocks and practical trousers. They played guitar, grew sprouts in a jar in the kitchen window, fermented their own goats-milk yogurt, and babysat the neighborhood children. My grandfather, Italian, Catholic, and deeply distrustful of the vernacular mass, did not like them.

These nuns were hardly cloistered; they belonged to an activist order of teachers, nurses, and social justice advocates. And they were anything but still; my favorite among them was Sister Rosario, a weatherbeaten woman in her sixties who was always doing something with her hands (though much later I learned that in fact she also practiced Zen meditation). All that activity, however, provided a space for rest and contemplation for others, for the weary clergymen and laypeople who came to Still Point to escape whatever it was that had worn them down spiritually, physically, emotionally, whatever.

Not this kind of yogurt

They were interesting people, too. I remember sitting at the kitchen counter in the big, sunny, health-food smelling kitchen listening to a priest who had just returned from a mission in Bulgaria (can this be right? we’re talking about 1975 or ’76, so the middle of the cold war), talk about how people there made their yogurt in a sheepskin, and then just carried the sheepskin full of yogurt around house to house to sell it. To my seven year old mind, that was pretty much the craziest, coolest (meaning, grossest) thing I had ever heard. Yogurt in a skin! I mean yogurt -- spoiled milk you ate on purpose -- that was already kind of a new and weird and uncomfortable concept. But in a skin!

The dynamic balance between the nuns’ activity and the stillness it created, that is what I am on about here. Perhaps my thoughts stray in this direction because of my enforced non-dancing while I take care of my hip. Or maybe I am still surfing the excellent wave of energy generated by the panel on No/Thing: Medieval Art and Apophasis that I had the privilege to organize at the International Congress of Medieval Studies at WMU in Kalamazoo last week. Or both. Probably both.

Not this kind of not dancing.

Not dancing pains me, but it also releases me from pain, so I am trying to embrace it for what it is, or as one of the panelists put it in the title of her paper, “the thing it is not and the thing it could be.” Indeed, all dancing is about not dancing, too. Without stillness, without a still point, all movement lacks order. Like music, dance is made up of the thing it is, movement, sound, and the thing it is not, stillness, silence. Or, to borrow a more eloquent expression of the idea from the redoubtable Ursula Le Guin:

Only in silence the word,
Only in dark the light,
Only in dying life:
Bright the hawk's flight
On the empty sky

(“The Creation of Éa” from the Earthsea trilogy)

Which is another way of saying

Form Does not Differ From the Void,

And the Void Does Not Differ From Form.

Form is Void and Void is Form;

The Same is True For Feelings,

Perceptions, Volitions and Consciousness

(The Heart Sutra)

Not this kind of paradox (this is paralipsis)

The caesura, the held breath, the blank space between words, the sudden cessation of movement, all these things draw attention to the most inexpressible thing of all, which is to say, nothingness. Not meaningless nothing, but the nothing of enlightenment, of the Buddhist satori. Apophasis (pronounced like hypothesis, as one of the panelists went to the trouble to find out), is the (usually spiritual) quest to know the unknowable through the things that it is not. Thus, when Christians interpret the 22^nd Psalm as Jesus’ agonized lament upon the cross, the line, “I am a worm, and no man,” is not to say that God made flesh is literally to be understood as the lowliest and lowest form of terrestrial life, but instead that perhaps by thinking on the worm the mind can begin to climb up toward its opposite, the inexpressibly divine.

So, could one imagine an apophatic dance? A dance of negation? Certainly the Danse Macabre of the Middle Ages was a way of thinking about the stillness of the grave through frenzied movement, and the spinning dance of the Sufi dervish uses a kind of centripetal force to fling the soul out into the Beyond. I am not certain, however, that these dances are so much apophatic as ecstatic, which is a different key of spirituality. Does classical ballet admit of such ambitions?

I think it would take a severely disciplined choreographer to get at this; shed the representational urge, the romantic architecture, the virtuoso impulses and get right to the bones of what ballet is (a rigorously formal corporeal vocabulary) and what it calls attention to by way of negation (the incipient disorder and dissolution of frail bodies). It would be something austere, maybe even harsh, but it would not be an empty stage. You need the possibility of motion to make non-motion work as an idea, just as the reverse is true. And it might also not be minimalist. Quite possibly it would look a great deal like certain late Balanchine ballets in which the non-representational logic of the dance is taken to its limit, and here I am thinking of say, Kammermusik No. 2 with its angular, antsy energy. 

Not quite an apophatic ballet, but close.

 

Sister Rosario had a room in the attic of Still Point, as I recall. The dormer windows looked out over the bramble of blackberries that grew along the downslope to the east, across Lake Washington, towards the blue silhouettes of the Cascades. The floor had an old, napless Persian rug, a guitar leaned against the wall, and the air smelled a little odd to my very bourgeois little nostrils, a mixture of old fir floorboards, superannuated wallpaper, sweat and incense, I think. Nevertheless, I liked that stuffy little room. I thought it was her bedroom, but when I asked her about it, she said no, it was just a place to come and be quiet. And then she was quiet and her hands, always busy, were still. Being small, I was not very good at sitting still, and maybe my memory is faulty here, but I remember that something about how she sat there, her wrinkled face wearing a slight, calm smile, made it seem possible just to sit and gaze out that window at the faraway. Sometimes doing nothing is something in itself, or to paraphrase one of the panelists, sometimes nothing is pregnant with what might be.

Not the view from Still Point, but still...