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.

Birthdays

Birthdays are a special milestone in our society. It is a time for us to celebrate our own life as well as for our friends and family to show, at least verbally, their love for us.

I remember a time in my life when I looked forward to the day with great anticipation.  We look at the calendar with great worry, fearing that we are caught in a space-time continuum problem that you can’t solve because you haven’t learned calculus yet and you are convinced that the universe has slowed downed indefinitely, just to mess with you as you look expectantly on the coming of your day of birth.  That day that you are absolutely positive will change your life forever because of the promises that the world has offered you; that day where you are forever beloved, at least for 24 hours; that day that your parents and family are all looking upon you adoringly, as if the planets revolved around you; that day where you can do no wrong, in anyone’s eyes.

You dream longingly about the traditional celebration made up of a family gathering of friends, food, sweets, games, and never-ending happiness and celebration and the best payoff of all: the collection of loot, the gifts from everyone. These gifts will keep you interested probably for weeks, maybe even months, but they will be relegated to the garage sale pile sometime within a few years.

Oh, there is the cake aspect as well; we rarely get sick of cake, which is always a good thing.

We then become more social, we look forward to the birthday because it is a time to get together with friends, to hang out, to approximate living life as a person of your age would imagine living life; living those halcyon days of youth, when the complexities of the world rarely intruded upon your hothouse like world. But then we become aware of the illicit pleasures of life. The stuff that the adults would not share with us.

We discover libations, the effects of said libations and of course the effects of libations on libido. So for a few years the excitement was to get libations before you are legally allowed to drink libations. That is what birthdays become, a marker for the day when you can drink legally. 

That day comes and the euphoria you were expecting really doesn’t happen. The infinite flow of Long Island Iced Teas really doesn’t mean infinite happiness.  Far from it, it means infinite trips to the toilet to infinitely empty your stomach of the copious amounts which you had assiduously consumed in the immediate hours prior to the reversal of flow.

But then you get wiser and more mature, relatively; and birthdays become less important than when you were young. You are responsible now. You are educated and you put away the childish things for more important things.  There may even be times that you don’t even celebrate your birthday. Too busy, too important for frivolous things, you may go grab dinner and drinks with your buddies or a meal with the family but the days of the all-day bashes are gone. The caches of loot have all disappeared as well. Other than maybe weird Aunt Helen with the goofy sweaters that are two sizes too small. She always got your age mixed up anyways.

Until now. Today. When the ubiquity of social media and technology leashes are everywhere.

Holidays and birthdays are the days when people who aren’t usually on your feed will reach out and send you a note: “Yo, HBD.” Or some kind of a variation on the theme.

Texts come incessantly, your Facebook timeline is blowing up with simple single sentences, yet with each glance of the message a history unfolds in your mind.  The good times and bad that you had with this person, you ponder your relationship. How close you once were or were not. How you came to know this person. Occasionally, there is the: “Who the F--- IS this person?” response, and then you think back, hard. The glimmer of a memory comes to you and you begin to recreate the time, the place, the situation, the smell, the light, the colors, and the memory once again becomes vivid.

The massive amount of messages stops you dead on your track for the day, your memories are filled with mini-reminiscences and tangents from that specific person and that specific time to sometime closer to it but not quite the same instance. You go on that long nostalgic ride into the past, into the deep recesses of your mind, the parts that have not been impaired by that long ago experiment with alcohol or other substances of recreation, that part of your memory that you hope and wish will never go away but you know will inevitably be robbed from you just because that’s life.

But you have the now, the flood of your memories and they are alive with images of the past that seem as fresh as daisies, as immediate as now, and as sharp as a ginsu knife.

This was a day that you live through as if in an extended but much better version of Groundhogs Day, because you want to relive the memories, and you know you have a much better ending in mind, an ending that is better than having Bill Murray nd Andie McDowell in it. You want this day to never end because you are actually replaying your life with all these people all over again; in slowmotion, in technicolor, is The Matrix slow motion, and it is epic, and it is better than it actually was, and you memories begin to play tricks on you because you are blanketed by the warm thought that all these people cared enough to reach out to you on this one day just to make you feel special. That little kid living inside of you,  that insecure one, is asking: do I actually deserve all of this attention?

And you end up saying: abso-fucking-lutely.

Yeah, that was my day. I want to do it again. Tomorrow, and the next day.