Being Born Into This World Itself Is a Great Talent

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Last night I saw two performances by the amazing butoh dance group Dairakudakan at ADF. They foster a style called Tempu-Tenshiki which literally means "being born into the world itself is a great talent."

As I watched, I felt so much, heard so much, saw so much. I suppose it was thinking but a totally embodied cognition, of the kind that inspires awe, everywhere, beyond words, or not reducible to any words I've ever heard (or all of them, all at once). Everything was gorgeousgrotesquehilarioustragicblackwhitebutohtraditionalkabukiloudsonorousredredredturningpowermovementpowerlessnessstupidbravetwiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiitchingggggggggggggg.

I sat with gaping mouth which (see photo above) is entirely right for ourtrageous Dairakudakan.

I sat in wonder which (see photo above) is right, too.  They make beauty from the grotesque. 

 At some point in the performance, I began thinking about thinking.  I began reflecting on how we often think without words but rarely (in our culture) think we are thinking without words. We tend to make an easy slide from the analytical to the textual or the numerical/statistical.  We often ignore analyses that happen by shape, color, sound, form.  As my friend Paul Berliner said, teaching a course with one of the world's most famous mbira players, his friend and collaborator, taught students that careful analytics don't need over articulation.  You can be minutely analytical without a word.  Musicians are, dancers are, artists are.

Sometimes I get sick of words. (That's a writer talking.) Sometimes I need wordlessness, I need experience-of-beauty, I need experience-of-experience. Maybe that "I" should be a "we."  Maybe we all need thinking without thinking sometimes.  Probably far more than we think we do.  

We need the arts--not like, not want, but need--since the arts return us to synesthetic un-lingual experience of the everything.  As in infancy, a performance such as the one I saw last night is an explosion of simultaneous inputs that hit many senses at once.  Infants see the world that way, a synesthetic explosion of experience, from birth on.  The arts remind us of the world before it gets squeezed into the linguistic sausage-grinder, before it comes out in bounded and neat but oh so impoverished and telegraphed categories, our culture's way of shaping experience into value. 

It's always a reduction.  Ambiguous and contradictory experiences don't fit, not really, into the concepts, the concepts are always too unwieldy for the words we give them (love, truth, God, etc).  There's always an excess of content that doesn't fit and it's the excess that is often the meat and substance of the matter.

Like junk code which rears its head unexpectedly to mess you up, just when you thought you'd left it behind. Like junk DNA that (surprise!) turns out to be incomparably more important than the stuff that clones are made from.

The excess beyond words is what great art aspires to. Dance, brilliant dance like last night's, allows us to think all over and all at once. It frees us to remember what it is to experience without words. Such art is a relief, a gift, succor for the word-heavy.

It is wearisome all the time to think in words. So much of the word exists outside them.

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Image courtesy of Dairakudakan from Poetry Comics on Flickr, with thanks. Pls click on the image for full documentation and more of Poetry Comics' photostream.