(A book by Paulo Coelho that provided just the right form of words to help me link together some of my understanding of blank spaces, or emptiness.)
On the role of imagination in literature (and all art):
“…you’ll manage to fill in the blank spaces that all those writers left there on purpose to provoke the reader’s imagination.”
On Athena’s (the central character) development as a calligrapher:
“When you’re concentrating, your hand is perfect, but when it jumps from one word to the next, it gets lost.”
On human interaction:
(Athena accepts a student, and spends the first part of the first meeting in silence, causing great consternation and confusion in the student.)
On buildings: how spaces are shaped by their boundaries:
“A curse on those who never listened to the words of Christ and who have transformed his message into a stone building.”
***
“…you’ll manage to fill in the blank spaces that all those writers left there on purpose to provoke the reader’s imagination.”
This point hammers home the idea that ‘the film of the book is never satisfying because it never tallies with how you imagined the book’.
A book is a series of abstract symbols, which causes us to dream up imagined experiences. When we read a book, we don’t experience what the author experienced, we experience a uniquely personal remix of our own past experiences and ideas.
Films aren’t like that: they aren’t made from abstract symbols: they are proxies for vision and hearing. A film is more like sitting in someone else’s head.
But this is no argument for books being better than films: experience is not just raw sense data: it is also the interpretation of that sense data. A book allows you to generate your own sense data from an inspiration of abstract symbols, but a book is also uniquely positioned to bias your interpretation of your self-made sense data using direct, verbal instruction. A film gives you sense data pretty much ready made, but is far more constrained with regards to how it can influence your interpretation of that sense data. Film and literature are very different modes of expression that can reveal very different things to us in very different ways. Perhaps films give you time for more committed interpretation, because you’re not so busy generating the sense data first… (or largely skipping over generating it altogether…)
And the blank spaces? Next time you are reading a book just think, of your experience from the words, what did you bring to the table and what did the author bring to the table? Perhaps a good book is more gaps (for you to bring your own ideas) than anything else… a scaffolding for you to enjoy your own thoughts. And next time you’re watching a film, just notice how staggeringly much is left out, and yet the continuity is (in a half passable film) still there. Without blank spaces, art, and life, would be an oppressive, disorienting, incomprehensible babble.
***
“When you’re concentrating, your hand is perfect, but when it jumps from one word to the next, it gets lost.”
For me, this point links in beautifully with martial arts. In randori, improvising multiple attacks (or successfully defending against them) is difficult: although each technique has been rehearsed and can be carried out relatively easily and automatically, there is inevitably a little pause between one technique and the next.
Unless you can stay calm through the pause (ie, allow it to be a true blank space, rather than a source of distraction), and allow yourself to enter and exit the pause at the right time, in the right position, and with the right frame of mind, each pause causes your form and intention to deteriorate a little until eventually you end up unable to continue the sequence. With that broken form you have to recompose yourself, ready for the next sequence.
The ideal might be to get the pauses right, and never have to break form… or to make it so that ‘broken’ form is not broken, but merely a larger (more centring) pause in an appropriate place…
***
(Athena accepts a student, and spends the first part of the first meeting in silence, causing great consternation and confusion in the student.)
This point is harder to get across, because there isn’t a neat quote to sum it up. But the gist of the encounter is that the student, with nothing to grasp onto except the expectations and preconceptions she brought with her to the meeting, became very agitated as time passed. Her mental state evolved based only on her own mind, with no direct input from the teacher. What a strange way to meet! But this was the point of Athena’s lesson: when we interact with people, our communication is a way to keep on the same page as time progresses. If you take away the communication (create a blank space), but remain present, how can you keep on the same page? There is enormous ambiguity, caused by the space. Given ambiguity, we are liable to fill in the gaps from our imaginations, which can give us powerful insight into ourselves. There are ambiguities and silences in every meeting, of course, sometimes perfectly comfortable long ones, but the combination of expectation and ambiguity can be one that makes for an interesting opportunity for introspection (and confusion).
***
“A curse on those who never listened to the words of Christ and who have transformed his message into a stone building.”
This echoes loudly with Gandhi’s autobiography where he mentioned that he wanted his movement to have no property, because (something along the lines of) ‘property and buildings lead to calcification.’ He said that social change, and satyagraha, should be dynamic and alive, and not constrained by the preconceptions a building imposes. (And that buildings lend an unfounded permanence to an endeavour which can all too easily prolong the endeavour far beyond its appropriateness.)
The idea of religion becoming calcified (and hence losing an understanding of its purpose and core, becoming a cargo cult) through its adoption of highly purpose-made (but nevertheless often very beautiful) buildings seems interesting.
I suppose the idea here is that Jesus’s message is essentially empty and ambiguous, an inspiration for action. But when clothed in the stone of a building, it takes on the shape of the building, embodying a far narrower range of possibilities, and with less scope for interpretation. Messages passed from person to person evolve with each telling, they adapt to the circumstances and people they sit with. Messages passed with the aid of unchanging objects adopt an element of that unchangingness: they are less able to adapt to the people they sit with, and are more liable to impose on those people. This is what can happen when you transform space (ambiguity, and opportunity for imagination) into stuff (comparatively unambiguous, less room for imagination). Moving naturally onto the book/film metaphor: transforming space into stuff (abstract symbols into proxied sense data) perhaps means you have to move from imagining to interpreting…
Perhaps a building says ‘this is the situation, interpret it if you like, but you cannot question the situation’.
This is why I like the quote: Christ, the revolutionary, the embodiment of ambiguity and imagination and new possibilities, in becoming established (transformed into stone), is in danger of losing the very essence of what makes him worth following (unless you can look past the stone).
***
And finally, blank spaces as the bedrock of our minds. This is what The Witch of Portobello is alluding to, illustrated more elliptically by some Rigpa Glimpse of the Days:
August 12
My master had a student called Apa Pant, a distinguished Indian diplomat and author, who served as Indian ambassador in a number of capital cities around the world. He was also a practitioner of meditation and yoga, and each time he saw my master, he would always ask him “how to meditate.” He was following an Eastern tradition where the student keeps asking the master one simple, basic question over and over again.
One day when our master Jamyang Khyentse was watching a Lama Dance in front of the Palace Temple in Gangtok, the capital of Sikkim, he was chuckling at the antics of the atsara, the clown who provides light relief between dances. Apa Pant kept pestering him, asking him again and again how to meditate, so this time when my master replied, it was in such a way as to let him know that he was telling him once and for all: “Look, it’s like this: When the past thought has ceased, and the future thought has not yet risen, isn’t there a gap?”
“Yes,” said Apa Pant.
“Well, prolong it: That is meditation.”
April 6
In the ordinary mind, we perceive the stream of thoughts as continuous, but in reality this is not the case. You will discover for yourself that there is a gap between each thought. When the past thought is past, and the future thought has not yet arisen, you will always find a gap in which the Rigpa, the nature of mind, is revealed. So the work of meditation is to allow thoughts to slow down, to make that gap become more and more apparent.
We can think of our thoughts as the signals in our minds. Typically they might be loud, conscious, deliberate signals. We usually feel that we are going about doing something or thinking something particular most of the time. If we aren’t, we aren’t typically paying much attention, and we very rarely think much of it (unless we happen to know about meditation…).
I think this is what mindfulness is: if you allow the intensity of your thoughts to diminish, but remain aware, you learn to observe your quieter thoughts (which are what really occupy the blank spaces between what we think of as our ‘thoughts’). Not the big thoughts, ‘cake’, ‘pretty girl’, ‘fast car’, but the little thoughts, maybe ‘small pebble under my left heel’, ‘breeze on my face’, ‘small bird singing far away’. As you allow the intensity of your thoughts to dim even further, maybe you can sense very routine aspects of your biology, your heart beat, the contents of your gut, your temperature, and most classically of all, your breathing (perhaps because it is the simplest biology to observe, and interestingly one of the few parts of vital biology that can function normally under either or both voluntary and involuntary control: I think that’s no accident: breathing is the gateway to awareness of the subconscious domain, because it falls under both domains, so you can smoothly and slowly transition from one to the other as you learn).
Perhaps as we allow our thoughts to quiet down we can sense the quieter parts of our psychology as well, to see if we can push aside the veil between the conscious and the subconscious: sentences half formed, before they’ve been vetted or are already committed to the vocal chords or typing fingers, embryonic intentions and plans, the earliest stages of emotional reactions to situations before they’re fully fledged and have already caused a cascade of other thoughts and reactions. The feeling of deciding to move, and committing to move, but before you already have moved.
How far down does this go? I think that’s part of the fun… getting as close to the sound of a single neuron as you possibly can.
And finally, I wonder if our dreams aren’t just this background chatter writ large, without consciousness or external stimuli to distort the undisturbed but ever-evolving shape of the mind.
***
Some more interesting places to look for blank spaces:
EVERYWHERE.
