Leaving Space For the Divine

I was listening to Radio 360 this past Saturday when I heard an exchange between Tavi Gevinson and Ben Wishaw. The discussion about acting and trying too hard in acting; Whishaw was making a point about trying too hard, being too disciplined and leaving little to chance. He quoted Jane Campion, quoting her as saying: “making space for the divine”. Gevinson also talked about reading the phrase: “Leaving room for the divine” from The Argonaut.

In the context of their conversation, they were talking about not being too regimented, that the idea of acting is an exercise in creation, reacting to and allowing the other performers to act and in being spontanepus; as Gevinson remarked: “You don’t want to end up acting like robots.” In other words, “leaving room for the divine means to leave room for the spontaneous, the moment of dealing with the unknown, whether the spontaneity is due to something mundane, i.e. the situation, or whether the spontaneity is due to impulse.

This got me thinking about the meaning of the particular phrase in other contexts and in a more general way.

“Leaving room for the divine” means two things: one involves how we act or react and the second is how we view our reality. In the former meaning, the sole word that comes to mind in spontaneity; while the second meaning, the world is random.

The first context, making space for the divine, means to allow the spontaneous to happen, by itself and in its own time, without undue pressure and rigorousness. This means to be in a state of wu-wei, a concept that the Chinese Daoists and Buddhists have cultivated: living in the moment and and Trying Not To Try as Ed Slingerland so eloquently describes in his book of the same name. http://eslingerland.arts.ubc.ca/tryingnottotry/.

It is a real conundrum, trying to not try, cultivating the spontaneous while not trying because trying to be spontaneous is not spontaneous.

In the second context, “leaving room for the divine” leads me to think in terms of the random, the unmodeled, the unpredictable and the unknown.

We, living in modern society as worker bees toiling in the technology and science infused ethos have been inculcated in the idea that humans are so knowledgeable of our world that our sphere influence are so vast that  our world is deterministic, that leaving nothing to chance is an attainable if not an already organic state of reality. We believe that there are so much already known that the possibility of the unknown and the random entering into our reality is not only undesirable but impossible.

Dr. W. Edward Deming, the total quality and Statistical Process Control (SPC) expert recognized our hubris and pointed this out in his book Out of the Crisis: “the most important figures that one needs for management are unknown or unknowable” in response to the American management’s hue and cry for management by results, pointing out that the most powerful numbers are those that we cannot possibly measure.

Yet, as Nassim Nicholas Taleb so forcefully pointed out in his Incerto series of books that not only is randomness a reality, it is inevitable. Moreover, the more we disregard randomness, the more we will inevitably suffer from our intentions to ignore the random. http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/series/INO/incerto

I find the link between spontaneity and the random very hopeful, inspirational, and invigorating.