SNC

Sand and String

On the little card advertising the “installation sculpturale” at Art sur Wellington, on October 17th, the first name listed is Amanda M Brown’s. Her contribution to the installation is its eponymous Sable et Fil. The gallery’s front half was covered in sculpted creatures made of pottery, cloth, and string, imitating the forms which might crowd on the sea-side dunes of an alternate Earth. These were variably tendrilled, chitinous, and calcified. Some, resembling sea shells in black, white, and brown colours, were affixed to the walls, sometimes alone, sometimes in clusters of two or three. One looked somewhere in between a gazebo and a crab, squatting over another version of itself. Another, positioned near the window and visible from the street, had the look of an eight-legged starfish or alien crustacean, radially symmetric except for one extended arm, coiling upward like a scorpion’s tail. One species consisted of hollow tubes, resembling a colony of calcified tunicates; another resembled a three-tendrilled squid, only with a chitinous head. In one way or another, each was guarded against danger.

The only creature with no apparent exoskeleton was a series of tentacles dangling from the ceiling—or possibly one tentacle, displayed at various moments in a movement. Closest to the wall, these tentacles hung limply and apparently lifelessly, acting as though cut-up strips of a curtain. Further along, however, the tendrils flexed further and further, curving away from the ones before them, until the last reached up and across the remainder of the room in an arch, tensing itself. The end of the flexed tendrils consisted of delicately woven patterns; the limp strips of curtain, however, lacked them. Interpreting the different limbs as different entities, the progression seems to contrast the animate with the inanimate, animacy appearing through tension and the apparent intention to reach out for something. If the limbs are a single entity, however, they instead portray two capacities of living things, to go tense and to go slack, to be alert or to be dormant.

Someone I spoke to was surprised that the actual carapaces had not been used to make the sculptures which I considered to be a relief. The hardened aspects of the sculptures were convincingly lively. What creates this impression? Living creatures are self-preserving loops of sensitivity and reaction, becoming aware of external and internal situations, then acting on this knowledge by influencing their internal states and the world around them, doing so in order to ensure that, for a time, they will continue to exist. One aspect of this existence is metabolism, taking in material from outside the body to integrate into the body, as well as forming waste to be excreted; another aspect is reproduction, by which the body forms yet another body. Tendrils and limbs resemble this description quite closely, in that they are both used for sensing and for acting. Carapaces and shells, however, are in themselves insensate, formed of nerveless matter. Actual living animals with exoskeletons are not insensate: a crab, for example, has hairs along her carapace with which to feel, and a mollusk’s shell is attached to a sensitive fleshy mantle which registers touches. Brown’s sculptures, however, appear generally desiccated, and there is little indication of some sense organ beneath the exoskeletons. The ambiguity of whether these creatures are alive in the first place, versus being dehydrated strays on a beach or long-dead fossils, seems to concord with Brown’s intent to convey a sense of anxiety about nature in the context of the recent period of the Holocene extinction.

Nevertheless, there is a sense of liveliness even in insensate secreted matter, like chitin and calcium carbonate. A living creature has something to persist in being—not ultimately, since all life dies, but for a while. A stone has no need to protect itself from damage, and no mechanism by which to do so. It can undergo a variety of changes, some of which are marvellously dynamic, and bear the traces of these changes upon and within itself, the record of a history potentially lasting hundreds of millions or even billions of years. Yet at no point in this process does the cycle of sensing, reacting, metabolizing, and sometimes reproducing, occur. Nevertheless, a stone may bear witness to this process, such as by being weathered by bacterial communities, imprinted with fossils, or shaped into microliths or macroliths. Chitin and calcium carbonate fall into this camp, but are yet deeper involved by the fact that their structural coherence is linked to the coherence of the living creature. The life of a crab is linked to her carapace keeping its form, and the life of a mollusk to her shell remaining sturdy, in a manner that is not true for a great ape wielding a stone tool, a corpse impressing into a fossil, or bacteria eating at a rock. Living creatures are vehicles of the non-living and subject to their processes, carrying on their chemical reactions and transformations within their biology. In a like manner, chitin and calcium carbonate are the non-living companions of the living, and greatly faithful ones at that. They act like the pavilion-crab crouching over her little one, that which is younger protected by that which is older.

The sculptures of Amanda M Brown are also a kind of insensate correlate of the living, shaped to represent a living project relying on an unliving support. However, they acquire a formal independence of the living creature who created them through the impression, upon that creature, of the images of creatures who, being fictional, are neither living nor dead. Their formal quality as art derives from the impression of the non-existent into the existent. Their content, meanwhile, presents the manner in which that which is materially unliving, senseless and inert, comes to possess the form of life. The life which imparts that form may, from the evidence presented, have withered up and died however long ago, or it may be seen in a freeze-frame, in the instant before the tendril springs into motion, the hairs of the carapace twitch, or the mollusk feels the impression of her shell on her living flesh.

In the back half of the Art sur Wellington, Carla Collins presents another view of shells and their inhabitants. Various plates, with designs resembling radially symmetric blossoms, are arranged with five small creatures, appearing to me most like five oblong falafel pointing toward a centrepoint. These are made from clay, etched with textures differing between segments of their bodies, and with their midline adorned with wooden balls and stones, some black and some coloured. Some of these adornments cover the three perforations which each one bears, while others just sit on the shell. Each differs from all the others in its details, size, and adornments. Together, they seem to be a school of cyclopean fish when examined closely. And I did get to examine a group of five of them closely: a tatami mat was set up where viewers were encouraged to take off their shoes, sit down, breathe deeply, and take up each one on a plate of five, look closely, and smell.

Each of Collins’s shells is filled with some kind of perfume, which can be gotten at by unblocking their perforations. I cannot speak to the full range of these smells, but of the five I examined, two were like sweet soap, one strawberry-tinged and another somewhat minty; two were like acrid chemicals, one fairly intense and another mild and a bit lemony; the last was a sour, artificial lemon-lime scent. These may be idiosyncratic impressions; I wish I had the olfactory acuity of a Jahai-speaking hunter-gatherer, but I do not. Nevertheless, none felt much like the smell of any living creature on Earth that I know of, and I began to wonder what kind of lifestyle could produce this kind of organism, venting chemical perfumes from clogged-up spinal holes. I also began to wonder what kind of alternate world would make an object like this thinkable as a household object, in which one might on regular occasions go to a room of one’s house, prepare a dish of five perfumed cyclopean perforated ceramic fish, sit on a tatami mat, stare into their stone-eyed faces, and smell their orifices.

The practical purposes of ordinary life—such as facilitating social occasions, preparing and consuming food, sleeping, grooming oneself, and relaxing—afford the opportunity to come into contact with certain materials and perform certain actions. Because of the manner in which I eat, objects like the refrigerator, microwave, bowl, and fork fill the niches of my home. These objects possess physical forms and sensory qualities not at all obviously concordant with their purposes. I come into contact with a fork’s metallic tines or my fridge’s black carapace because they serve a function, yet these sensory qualities, and not merely the qualities of the food I eat, make up the sensuous content of my days. Likewise, the acts of scrubbing a bowl or typing numbers into a microwave are actions performed for the practical purpose of facilitating eating, but these actions, and not merely eating, are what my activity consists of. A gallery filled with shelled falafelfish set upon plates presents a different set of sensations and actions which might fill my life, no more or less arbitrarily than the ones which do today, if my practical purposes were different and if, for some reason, I had some reason to seek them out beyond the carnivalesque inversion of an art gallery.

The sensuous and active qualities of means to an end are not without their own desirable qualities. A key example, in my mind, is the appeal that the matter of wizardry has for many people. Wizardry consists of a set of objects—staves, wands, spellbooks, orbs, robes, elaborate chalk circles and sigils, potion bottles, etc.—and actions—incanting, brewing, inscribing, drawing and interpreting cards, attending to unseen things—which are rarely practical in daily life. Yet this cluster of sensations and actions clearly present various pleasures; certainly not everyone, but a minority of people fantasize about ending up in situations where this is what they are seeing and doing. Many people sate this urge by imagining or roleplaying fantastic worlds in which wizardry is an expedient means to practical ends, allowing them to create great and useful effects in the world, and therefore giving them an excuse to regularly engage with these means. A smaller number of people are convinced, whether rightly or wrongly, that in their situation wizardry really is the most expedient means to their ends, and so they practice it for themselves, rather than through a vicarious character. This practice may be facilitated by holding different empirical beliefs about the efficacy of wizardry. It may be the result of holding different practical aims than the people around you.

The invitation of a gallery exhibit to perform a rite like smelling the innards of clay shells is a pretense by which to engage in impractical means, and experience the novel existential conditions of different forms of matter. It is a pretense similar to how playing Faustus in Marlowe’s play provides an opportunity to pronounce Latin spells and summon demons, for people who cannot admit of a practical reason to do so otherwise. Yet the effect is the same as if there was no pretense, and it was wholly practical—one has nevertheless found a way by which one’s living project includes these actions and these sensations, which one really has done and felt, and not merely pretended to do and to feel. An actor playing Faustus really has found a way to perform a ritual, without needing to account for themselves as a ritual-performer in general. And I really have closed my eyes and breathed in the odours of a plate’s worth of shelled falafel, and can remember the feelings, and could do it again with a more practiced ease, if ever I find a reason to do so.

From my point of view, the centre of the exhibit was the butoh performance, enacted by Adalia Pemberton-Smith and a few other actors whose names I wish I could confidently identify. This is what I had come to see, although I did not know that it would be a butoh performance, or even what butoh was. I was also inherently unable to watch the entire performance, because there was no obvious single moment that it started, and it occurred throughout the gallery, with events happening simultaneously in areas which I could not observe at the same time. As such, a complete recount seems impossible, as well as inappropriate to the form as I understand it. Instead I will recount it in the way that I was thinking about it at the time: by interrogating the question, “What exactly, from an anthropocentric perspective, is a spirit?”

1. Spirits Are Not Straightforwardly Human

Accounts of spirits vary dramatically between different cultures and persons. Some portrayals are of creatures who look very close to human, such as Merlin or the ladies of the lake, but possess an eerie quality to their conduct which marks them, nevertheless, as belonging to a different class. Most, however, do not have apparently human bodies at all. Spirits may be humanoid non-humans, such as gnomes or pixies. They may appear like non-human animals, such as kaibyō or dragons, or like plants, such as dryads. Sometimes, as with will-o-wisps, they appear as indefinite spots of light or fire. Others may be formless, like a leshy. The throughline of these qualities is that spirits are at least in some way apparently distinct from humans.

This criterion, as I have defined it, consists of literally all animate and inanimate creatures everywhere which are not humans, so it is not terribly useful yet. But it will be whittled down further. What is important at this stage is only to mention that the characters of the butoh do not look straightforwardly human either. Of course, the performers are humans, but their faces are caked in pale-white powder, their dress consists of elaborate lace in three cases and a dark black cloak in the fourth, strings of clinking cutlery hang from a few of them, and their comportment is entirely unusual. It is easily plausible from their appearance that they are gods of some kind, demons, ghosts, or something else altogether. They are at least as strange as the incubus-fathered Merlin.

2. Spirits Engage in Living Projects

Spirits are not insensate and inactive. What exactly they sense, and how exactly they act, may be idiosyncratic from a human point of view, but they nevertheless engage in the loop of acting and sensing in order to persevere in their being and accomplish what suits them. This definition is also extremely broad, including every cell and every multicellular organism, but at least it is much narrower than simply “not quite human.” What it establishes is that one can expect certain analogies between the sensitivity and activity of spirits and other modes of life, though what these analogies may be is quite variable. Spirits may, or may not, feed and reproduce, as single cells do. They may or may not drink and breathe, sleep and wake, see and hear—or perhaps metabolize energy from the sun, or from deep sea vents. They may have modes of activity unlike any of these, but whatever they are, they are marked by the fact of being an ongoing living project.

But here we can make a further half-definition: the living projects of spirits conventionally involves a symbolic aspect. Here is where we can at last distinguish spirits from non-human life in general. All life communicates—C.S. Peirce has accounted for how this occurs in terms of icons of identity and indices of change, which humans and non-humans alike register ably. Non-humans are not, however, known for certain to make use of symbols, communicative means whose significance is defined not in relation to changes which occur in the world but to their differences with other symbols. Language falls in this category, in that words are used primarily due to the symbolic differences between them rather than because of how their sounds differ. I consider Walter Benjamin’s argument that in fact words in general bear the traces of onomatopoeias quite compelling, and it unsettles this dichotomy, but thankfully I do not need the dichotomy to be unsettled in this case. But language is not the only form of symbolic expression either. One’s choice of clothing may be on account of its sensory qualities, or to avoid communicating certain icons (e.g. not wearing red around a bull given how that may be interpreted), but it is frequently done to present a symbol defined in relation to other symbols. For example, I do not wear my pyjamas to the art gallery, and the symbol of what I do wear is defined in part by the fact that it differs from pyjamas. By contrast, my reason for not wearing a Justin Trudeau disguise is iconic I don’t want people to think I’m Justin Trudeau and my reason for not carrying a giant knife is indexical people would fear what I might do with it.

Spirits may not engage in symbolic thought, but commonly they do. Many speak in language legible to humans, and those who do not may still engage in ritual or customary activity which has a symbolic component. Spirits of this kind are distinct from humans and from non-humans except, controversially, certain rare social animals with very large brains. However, symbolic life is an optional requirement for spirits, and so this only narrows down “spirits with symbolic projects” rather than spirits in general. Yet the potentiality of symbolic life among spirits is relevant even if it is not ascertained. I have heard that in certain human communities, orangutans have been thought to be wizards living in the woods. Wizardry is, at least in part, a symbolic project, and defining an orangutan who is practicing wizardry as a spirit does not feel very far-fetched to me; such a person would fill the role of a spirit quite appropriately.

The characters of the performance I watched this evening having written this sentence on October 17 spoke only a little: only two spoke at all, somewhat incoherently, and this was mostly toward the end. However, their behaviour was constantly at least potentially symbolic. One character dumped out a chest full of utensils, then sorted them into forks and spooks, then dumped them out again, then arranged them in a complex array, before leaving to take flowers out of a chest and place them in a vase. While this occurred, another sat at a desk and marked up pieces of paper with a writing utensil, then connecting these papers with a string, all the while in various states of entanglement with a long thick rope. There is no guarantee that this behaviour has a symbolic element. It is possible that placing the cutlery in that arrangement was done absentmindedly or for the delight inherent in the action or its sensory effects: I certainly wondered what it felt like to place the spoons on your cheeks or to smell them, or to be wrapped in the rope or hunched over the desk. It is also possible that it is a form of purely iconic or indexical communication: perhaps the arrangement of cutlery indicates something about the state of the world which I simply do not know how to parse. But it certainly seems that the arrangement could be symbolizing something different from another arrangement of spoons, and while the writing at the desk might be scribbles, it could very well be language. Most spirits at least threaten to present a system of symbols, though often not a very legible one.

3. Spirits Live in Alternate Societies

On its own, this definition does not rule out very much either. Societies can be understood as a continuous spectrum of communication and interaction between living beings. By this definition, alternate societies exist everywhere. Of course, there are many human societies, in which the communications and interactions that frequently occur differ significantly, on the basis of language or culture or the people involved or simply their place and time, from other human societies. Then there are many societies of social non-humans, such as societies of flying foxes or naked mole rats. Then there are societies which are not centred on one species, such as coral reefs or forests—Eduardo Kohn’s book How Forests Think is excellent on this point. Even the deep hot biosphere, of prokaryotes deep underground, is a kind of society, in that it is an area in which multiple organisms exist, interact, and communicate—albeit on a very long timescale, in a resource-scarce environment requiring frequent stasis. There are a huge number of societies involving a huge number of kinds of life, and many of these societies interact. To say that spirits live in alternate societies is simply to say that, from the perspective of a humanist or otherwise anthropocentric viewer, spirits have a different social world.

For the duration of the performance, the butoh characters constituted another social world within the gallery. While they often were physically distant from each other, they also repeatedly interacted, sometimes whispering, exchanging extended glances, and making difficult-to-classify slow gestures while in close proximity. Meanwhile, the attendees were having many interactions of our own, with each other, in which the characters did not partake, however physically nearby they may have been. One might analogize this distinction to a cultural difference—to how, in one human culture, social interaction may occur by one set of norms, while a largely different set of norms prevail in another contemporary culture. The trope of discovering an unknown group of humans and finding that they were in fact spirits, such as in The Fox Bride and the Stolen Cup, plays on this likeness between cultural outsiders and supernatural societies. Certainly, for the attendees, used to their own set of manners, to interact with the characters in accord with their manners is liable to be a form of culture shock.

During the performance before its denouement, in which this occurred more often, I noticed two primary occasions where the social divide between attendees and spectators was apparently unsettled. In the first, one of the characters gave several flowers to someone who was dressed and had been acting like anyone else. This moment gave me something of a shock, because I had become accustomed to a basically total social division for over an hour at that point. That same person then came to perform a song toward the end of the performance, making it unclear which social world they were part of in the first place. This event touches on one important nuance of the alternate social arrangements of spirits: while the societies of spirits are alternate from anthropocentrically-constituted societies, they can very well contain humans, or various other kinds of non-spirits. Societies do not need to be homogeneous in terms of their form of life, although they can be. A society is a kind of shifting dynamic equilibrium, of which multiple may be in effect at once, and more or less homogeneous or broad systems frequently overlap. Certain humans have always been understood to be participants in the societies of spirits; these may participate to varying extents in human societies as well, and may integrate better or worse with either society.

The other occasion was when one of the characters looked me in the eyes for an extended period of time. At the beginning this made me nearly laugh, because it was unexpected to be acknowledged after such a long period of obvious social separation, though eventually I caught control of myself. By the fact that I carried on the gaze, I very much agreed to the interaction. What happened next was that the character first smiled and looked on very intensely, then after a long time broke eye contact by shrieking, doubling over, and collapsing to the ground. This form of interaction is of a very different kind from the first occasion I had noticed, because it occurs under a condition of social dissonance. Contact between disparate societies may occur under fairly consonant terms: consider the manner in which more distant gods may receive offerings from human societies, according to a formalized custom, while the two societies nevertheless remain generally disintegrated. Trade between foreign and relatively unacquainted cultures also falls into this category. Yet my interaction was simply one in which there was no shared dynamic equilibrium between us. The outcome of our social coexistence was indeterminate to begin with, and the result did not create stable conditions for enduring interactions, whether through social integration or the reliable bridging of two separate societies. Instead, I had a weird, disconcerting interaction which is, to be clear, not a problem for me.

4. Spirits Repurpose the Commons

The overlap between the spatial and temporal situation of spirits and humans varies significantly. In certain cases, spirits may be unreachably distant; in other cases, they may occupy the fringes of territory used by humans, or else areas a human might reach with effort or by accident; they may also be close at hand. However, when space is held in common with humans, its use differs substantially from human usage. While the space may be shared, what it means to occupy that space, and the pursuits that are worthwhile within it, is on some level incommensurable. There are here two useful comparisons to make to other intelligent, living groups of people: urban wildlife and worker.

Urban wildlife, such as squirrels, skunks, doves, and sparrows, is routinely in physical proximity to humans. However, the significance of the shared space is radically different. When I walk through the park, I am frequently surrounded by squirrels for whom the park is a three-dimensional space, extending from the branches of the trees, to nooks within the trees, to the ground where they chase each other around, to stores of nuts beneath the earth. While we share a physical area, their manner of moving through that area is incommensurable with mine, and leads to a fundamentally different interpretation of what we share in common. My understanding of the space is itself deeply affected by the presence of squirrels within it, as they constantly catch my gaze and fascinate me, and I believe squirrels also register and bear in mind the presence of humans. Nevertheless, our mutual presence is integrated into very different life projects. Squirrels do not understand what I am doing in the park—that I am generally on my way to or from the metro—and honestly I do not understand what they are doing either. I do not understand why they chase each other in the way they do, what leads them to cluster or disperse, or even the utility of their wave-like steps. I am certain that they exhibit many behaviours that I simply am not suited to notice, just as I do for them. And I do not understand either the details of how they use the objects we are both routinely adjacent to, such as trees or benches or paths, nor their experience of them.

Urban wildlife is effectively another society, denizens rather than fellow citizens, in the terms of Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka. Within my own human society, however, it is common for the use of spaces to be radically split by the on-the-clock/off-the-clock divide. Within my own workplace, I routinely enter spaces from which non-workers are barred, and I rarely enter certain spaces that non-workers spend a great deal of time in. My temporal experience of the space is different, mediated by my shifts rather than my demand for services. My understanding of the objects that populate the space is radically different, in that objects which are of no use to them are of great use to me. My purposes in being there are wholly different than voluntary attendance. And my actions and consequent experiences are not only greatly different, but not even reliably comprehensible on the other side of the divide. When I am not at my workplace but am in someone else’s workplace, I experience a similar dynamic from the opposite perspective. And yet, I am generally socially integrated with the people on the opposite side of the divide, operating in a comprehensible set of symbols, regularly interacting and communicating effectively.

Both of these dynamics occurred to me throughout the butoh performance. In one sense, the use of objects by the characters resembled how much a tree differs between myself and a squirrel. Within the context of a gallery, I cannot open up a chest and start pouring out forks and spoons, any more than I can make my nest in a tree. Neither do I have any compelling reason to do so. It is the quality of spirits, however, to find reasons to do what I will not and cannot, whether for its sensuous-active pleasure or as a means of symbolic or non-symbolic communication: this is their magical mode of existence. At the same time, the conduct of the characters in the space was also evidently the conduct of humans, from within my society, engaged legibly in their trade, and therefore authorized to use the space in the manner of a workplace rather than as visitors. The actual reason I cannot rub spoons on my cheeks is because I would be worried about being chastized if I did so there, rather than in my own home or, in a pinch, in a public space. The difference in conduct is in fact socially legible, and derives from our different roles in a collective project in which I am provided something. But this, too, is an aspect of the life of spirits. Growing up I was told stories of brownies cleaning one’s house and doing one’s chores at night, when no one else is awake, so long as they are provided their bowls of milk. This is a case of two populations in a common space, operating within it with a differing relation to its temporality and contents, which is the product of a stable, negotiated social arrangement. Between these wild and servile aspects, the common thread is the sort of reinterpretation of the commons with which spirits are at home.

5. Spirits Are Not Taken for Granted

Much can be assumed about the conduct of a human operating within the same society as oneself. Humans, like other social animals, are dependent on remaining in the good graces of their societies, as they otherwise may be denied a place to reside, food and drink to consume, and good company to live with. They are not necessarily dependent on a single specific society—one may, for example, from within a dominant culture find company and solace with a minority culture, whose standards of behaviour and propriety are different. One may also be more or less dependent, in various qualitatively different ways, depending on one’s needs and desires. Yet even if a human does not admit of any need for my validation, my good opinion, or my company, whether because they disdain me or because they appeal elsewhere for these needs, I still trust that they will usually not act totally out of line in a way which would jeopardize their basic social position, with the material benefits that are afforded to it. This principle becomes uneven in its application to non-humans. Skunks I do not expect to attack me, not because of a shared social context but because they would be afraid to enter into a conflict with me, just as I would likewise be afraid. Domestic cats, by contrast, I expect to more or less intuit their social position in our common matrix. Between the two cases, a wild social animal that wants food from me is liable to act in a way which sets me at ease, but is also free to defect from this approach. None of this should be taken as a moral judgement of how things should be, only of what I expect in practice.

Spirits elude the social expectations of human societies in a number of ways. Firstly, they often act subtly and elude visibility. Non-human animals may also act in this way, as do humans at work. Squirrels, sparrows, millipedes, and whatnot are both physically unobtrusive and are not constrained to act in such a way that humans would think to look at them—they do not need to make use of common spaces in comparable ways to humans, or to interface with humans if they do not want to. Likewise, working humans often disappear into the background of the experience they are working to provide, whether to their benefit or detriment. The subtlety of spirits resonates with all of these aspects. Spirits may elude detection because they are physically different from humans, or even from conventional matter in general; they may elude detection because they are not dependent on human society or upon its lifeways; and they may elude detection by fading into the background of an effect that they produce. In this third camp, one might mention how Berlioz represents spirits lulling Faustus into sweet dreams and reveries, certainly exercising an apparent influence, but one in which they need not appear as identifiable individuals.

The characters of the butoh performance embodied certain of these aspects of subtlety. Until the very end of the performance, their activity did not depend on the responses of the attendees at the gallery, and they therefore did not need to call themselves to attention. The interactions which appeared necessary for them were with each other: for one to whisper something in the other’s ear, or to mourn, or to grin widely. Because these interactions were within their own social sphere, a level of emotional expression was possible which would not be permissible in the social sphere surrounding them, including intense apparent expressions of distress or joy. Certain lacunae were also possible, such as a marked absence of ordinary human speech and the use of other symbolic means. This subtlety was facilitated by their role in contributing to the experience of the exhibit, of being in an exhibit, which they produced without requiring one’s attention to be fixed upon them. The characters were also subtle purely by certain physical qualities of their locations: being interspersed through the sculpture-laden crowd, and often in far-flung locations from one another, they were not visibly accessible. However, as regards the matter they were made of, their physical deviance did not contribute to their subtlety, given their clanging strings of spoons, pale white faces, and elaborate gowns or dark robes. This conspicuous aspect is what leads us to the next mode by which spirits cannot be taken for granted.

Humans of a given society are as a rule expected not to be overly stealthy; then, when they are perceived, they are expected to respond proportionately. This is to say, the ability to perceive another human is not only the ability to have access to a certain kind of knowledge, but also to impose an effect. As a basic example, it is expected that, seeing a friendly acquaintance on the street, the two of you will greet each other. Spirits, however, when they can be perceived, do not necessarily give that perception a predictable form of power over them. I have already written about the intense reaction I witnessed once when holding eye contact, but mostly there simply was no interaction, though one character seemed to look at people with apparent impish amusement from time to time. This lack of reactivity resembles the lack of reaction of stage performers in general, but differs due to its unreliability and due to sharing space, as well as objects of attention. The objects of interest for the butoh characters, being installed throughout the exhibit, attracted the attention of spectators as well, who in many cases were physically adjacent to the characters and paying attention to the same thing, but joint triadic attention did not arise: mutual interest did not result in a sense of shared purpose or community.

Spirits represent, to an anthropocentric perspective, the prospect of a symbolic project which can play out without reference to you at all, and which, if it does refer to you, cannot be assumed to do so on your own terms. To say so is not to say that this is what spirits are. My statement is that spirits are have living projects, involving all the manifold aspects I have mentioned, and these are irreducible acts of gratuity, of the pleasure which belongs to being allowed by the prevailing circumstances to exist in a given moment. All living creatures play themselves out: “Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: / Deals out that being indoors each one dwells.” The conditions of their bodies, societies, activity in the world, and relations to outsiders are each relevant to consider as part of this process. What is centred from the view of human society, however, is how this project, in claiming to divorce symbolic self-expression from the sphere that humans take for granted that they can regulate, becomes an eerie threat, one which ought to dissipate and go away.

The spirits from the night of October 17th did dissipate, in the end. The gallery did not remain like the city of Ilé-Ifè, where the shrines of the orishas are still found, or the beyuls of the Himalaya, patrolled by snow leopards. They could not be expected to remain—the matter was the reverse of the words of Shakespeare in the tempest, “These our actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits, and have melted into air, into thin air.” These our spirits are all actors. This process of dissolution was a gradual one. Two of the characters began, more and more, to speak as though they were engaged in a concert, reorganizing the scene to the more familiar divide of audience and performer, rather than overlapping societies. The other two characters, for a time, continued to express apparently extreme emotions, without giving any explanation. But then these two gradually left the stage; eventually one resurfaced without face paint and began to dance, leading to a strange ambiguity as to whether the performance was now over or was continuing. By these gradual steps, the spiritual society eroded, until it disappeared with a final bout of applause after the last song, ending in the manner of a concert an event which, of its own nature, has no obvious procedure of ending—without answering at all what had exactly occurred.

The essence of spirits is not to be taken for granted, and when an essence needs to be granted, it is a counterfeit. Nevertheless, I am grateful for that which I have been permitted to witness, and the activity which, because it eludes my comprehension, has composed the forms of the Earth.