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VIOLENCE AND SPLENDOR

Northwestern University Press

Contents

1 Extremes................................................52 Nature Abhors a Vacuum..................................93 Space Travel............................................114 Learn to Say............................................195 Metaphysical Habitats...................................216 Departures..............................................397 Plumage and Talismans...................................458 Inner Space.............................................499 The Fallen Giant........................................5910 The Stone..............................................6511 The Voices of Things...................................6712 Nature and Art.........................................7713 Nature.................................................7914 In Touch...............................................8115 Sacrilege..............................................8716 Material Culture.......................................9717 Orders.................................................9918 Filth..................................................10119 Fake Fetishes, Disrobed Mannequins.....................10520 Wallowing in Glory.....................................11121 The Art of War.........................................11922 The Face of Death......................................12323 The Emergence of Dance.................................12724 Collective Performances................................13325 War and Splendor.......................................139Notes.....................................................151List of Photographs.......................................161

Chapter One

We let go, let the rhythm take over, and selflessness, voluptuous pleasure, and communion are blended together. It happens in dance and in music. Forty years ago you crossed the Atlantic by ship, and for ten days saw only the ocean surface in moving furrows. You saw and felt all existence in shifting crests and troughs. The oceanic experience is dance and music stripped of everything narrative or anecdotal and become fundamental and immense.

In Bali you got very sick, went to a Balinese doctor, another, a third, and then to a Western doctor; they said it is hepatitis. They said there aren't pills to cure hepatitis. You have to wait it out, weeks, maybe months. You moved into a small hut by the sea. The Balinese are not seagoing people; right offshore the ocean current hurls through the Wallace Trench, seven kilometers deep, patrolled by great sharks. The Balinese live upland and terrace the mountain slopes, irrigating them from the crater lakes of volcanoes. But at the end of the day they descend to the ocean shore, hundreds of them, and seat themselves on the dunes where they wait, silenced by the descending sun. There are always clouds about this mountainous island, and the sun blazes the skies and highlights the cloudbanks with colors found nowhere on terrestrial things. It is each evening different and changing by the minute. You sat among them and the cosmic splendor vaporized your misery and your sense of yourself. You came to realize that there healing was going on and that you were being transformed. Today, thirty years later, you can still remember many of the people and events you encountered those months in Bali, but their memory no longer retains the emotional charge. Yet how vivid still is the cosmic glory of those tropical twilights!

From Tierra del Fuego you took a ship to Antarctica, a big ship because they said a smaller one could not cross these stormiest of seas under winds that gallop around the planet unrestrained by any land barrier. It was twenty years ago. A big ship has a lot of service staff, daily lectures on oceanography, on famous Antarctic explorers, on whales and penguins, and in the evening long meals at big tables where hostesses circulate to keep everybody frenetic with talk. After asking to have your meals taken in your cabin you get such a reputation as a misanthrope that soon nobody talks to you, even greets you anymore. You gaze in silence at the glaciers imperceptibly flowing into the ocean, ice millions of years old, compacted under enormous weight so that the crystalline structure of the ice is changed, and the slabs of light frozen in prismatic colors of violet, lime, azure, indigo glow in your heart like immemorial ecstasy.

Viewed, say, from above, Patagonia is a dagger, with a mountain ridge on the edge of its flat blade, plunging into the Antarctic Ocean. Trekking there, ten years ago, you stomped across stretches of grass so wiry that sheep, they told you, have ground their teeth to the gums on it and have to be slaughtered at two years old. Now, with the market for wool and mutton shrunk, flocks of sheep are few and the homesteads miles apart. Their buildings are made of sheets of corrugated iron, not shaded from the sun, for no tree could stand in the sixty-kilometer-per-hour winds that race across this narrow ridge stuck between one ocean and another. That unceasing wind penetrated you and filled you with its fury and its exhilaration. You could not think of Patagonia without passionately longing to go back, back to that wind.

Chapter Two

The philosopher Immanuel Kant argued that we have an intuition of space—pure space, empty space, extending infinitely—which precedes and makes possible our perception of things extended in space. This intuition is a kind of sight. Kant took space to be something known, all of its properties and shapes and their relations identified by the first complete science, geometry.

But the space about and ahead of us is nowhere empty; it is filled with light, radiant, vibrant, tinted, or somber, or it is filled with the darkness of the night; it is filled with warmth or cold, with dryness or mugginess. When we awaken, in our sleeping bag laid in a meadow, we do not look at the glowing expanse, the warmth about us, the stable ground beneath us. We do not gauge their horizontal and vertical axes or survey their limitless extent. Feeling still opaque and torpid, we are contented with the constancy of the ground that we feel in our body. Feeling the warmth and the radiance of light energizing us, the stability of the ground anchoring and supporting our steps, we stir, we stretch, we get up, we move. We move about because we exist in a luminous and warm medium, supported by the ground, like fish move because they exist in water and birds move because they exist in the open air and the winds.

The light opens before us, marking out the rooms, the corridors; the radiance of the day conducts us outdoors, marking out the paths and the fields, outlining the contours of things. We do not look at the light as we look at things; it orders our movements: our eyes follow the light. The outlying surfaces and contours of the earth summon forth our steps; we advance by following its directions and directives. The sliding waves of the sea direct us to let go of our primate upright posture and slip and slide and flip like dolphins.

Things are not just scattered about in empty space; we find them on the ground, which supports them in their places and supports our positions and our movements toward them. We find things floating in the air, or drifting in the light. As fish swimming about in the lake come upon a tadpole and swallows circling the air come upon a swarm of gnats, we come upon, in the water...