Quintessential

Every great and profound experience would like to be insatiable, would like repetition and return to last until the end of all things, the restoration of an original situation from which it emerged…the transformation of the most upsetting [and joyous]  experience into habit: This is the essence of play.

—-W. Benjamin.

Each people’s gestures are determined by their response to the environment they live in and are a product of the type of work they are engaged in. These gestures are  carried over into all walks of life , from art to dance to language. These gestures become so internalised that one can meaningfully talk about a style of soul emanating from a particular region-a fundamental ’speech’ or set of gestures that is unique to a certain place. Through repetition the distinction between geography, history and nature gets blurred. Could it be that there is a religious vocation or temperament, say, that orders the body and the soul? And within these fixed categories -be they determined by work, landscape, an inner constitution or some combination of these elements- is there a further stratification along family lines? (I was once recognised by a cousin who had never seen me by the way in which I kept my head in my hands). Just as a household may have a ‘taqiya kalaam’ ( a set phrase) , might it not be the same when it comes to rudimentary gestures, the way one holds one’s hands?

A distinct landscape (urban, mountains, rural etc) can be associated with a particular relation with the body. It is said of the Bedouin Arabs that their expressions (linguistic and non-verbal) had remained unchanged-like the landscape itself-for thousands of years, chiseled down to a few quintessential self-revealing gestures of the soul. One is reminded of the hand positions of Buddhist statues that depict the interior state of the soul or the hands in Leonardo’s Last Supper.

But beyond this deep continuity between the land and gesture there is the desire to re-create it , to see it before our very eyes, and this is manifested in our Utopian projects, our sense of play. The city is, in this sense, not just an ordering of the soul, a pattern for the mind to follow, but a space that reconfigures our awareness of our bodies and those of other people. A way of binding and separating: the body politic.

—–Based on Plekhanov.

I’ve started so I will not finish. I’m struggling to complete even a single book. These are the books that I am currently wading through-some half completed, others only barely a chapter old and discarded: Herzog, Three-arched Bridge, Cabaret, Philosophy and Law , Goodbye to Berlin, Wind-up Bird Chronicles, Lawrence’s Essays, Dangling Man, Black Lamb, Grey Falcon, Language and Solitude, What Ought I To Do? 

Today I ‘ve given them all up and turned to Tallis’ Hand with its endlessly fascinating insights, though why one should renounce style in favour of ideas remains a mystery to me. The hand as the agent of action, knowledge and communication. On the handedness of the universe see: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/lopsided.shtml

Quintessence. n. 1. Most refined part of any substance, refined extract; purest and most perfect form, manifestation, or embodiment of some quality or class. 2. (Ancient Philosophy) Fifth substance (besides the four elements) forming heavenly bodies and pervading all things. 3. Hence quintessential [Medieval English] in sense 2., f. F, f med. L. ‘quinta essentia’ fifth essence.

The quintessential is all that eludes definition.

Als das Kind Kind war,
warf es einen Stock als Lanze gegen den Baum,
und sie zittert da heute noch

Each act, each act of perception, discloses something of our style of soul-whether we would know it or not. Each movement of the hand is a self-revealing gesture of the soul and bears witness to what and who we are. The poet would say:

My eyes have seen

what my hand did

There is no disjunction between thought and action, self and the world and a semblance of unity is achieved. We strive wholeheartedly to find this innermost self, this image of perfection and completion haunts us; to touch all that comes our way and imprint on it something of our unique essence. But this emphasis on knowing who we are is doomed to failure for our path, unlike that of the stars, can only be traced when it have run its course.  It is a line still being drawn…the ink is not dry.

Augustine would say that we can only know what we are, not who we are; that only God can know. There are acts which the left hand should not know, that should be done in silence, that must be suffered…and lest it be forgotten: God created us with Two Hands.

Have we not darkened and dazed ourselves with books long enough?—-A Passage to India.

But this is not a simple return to innocence-it is an achieved naivete, an ability to sustain ourselves beyond sadness. The innocence of doves and the wisdom of serpents.

Creation: the earth still trembles to this day, the steam still rises from the seas, the clouds still hover over the mountains, remembering their former lives; the light still streams forth from beyond yonder and unploughed fields hold the dreams of palaces. Everything is a running flame. Only from a distance does thought see this as the geometric perfection of an architect. A sense of something utterly completed vied with a sense of something startled into scope and freedom. When we close the books we acknowledge that within matter itself a space is reserved for a mysterious element that opens up infinite possibilities. It is life itself that is this fusion of the mathematical and the biological, the interplay of thought and feeling, and it is life that forms the warp and woof of the universe, that sets us riddles and offers us answers, that is both chaos and order. We may know something of that order of being but we remain, quintessentially, unknown.