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.
