Anam Cara

IN HIS DIALOGUE ‘DANCE AND THE SOUL’, THE FRENCH POET PAUL Valéry has written of the beauty of dance. He describes the thoughtlessness of our normal walking: ‘Our steps are so easy and familiar to us that they never have the honour to be considered in themselves, and as strange acts . . . in the simplicity of our ignorance they lead as they know how; and according to the ground, the goal, the humour, the state of the man, or even the lighting of the way, they are what they are: we lose them without a thought.’ He contrasts this with the way the dancer walks: ‘A simple walk, the simplest chain of steps! . . . It is as though she purchases space with equal and exquisite acts, and coined with her heel, as she walked, the ringing effigies of movement. She seems to reckon and count out in pieces of pure gold what we thoughtlessly spend in vulgar change of steps, when we walk to any end.’ Later in the dialogue, he offers a eulogy to the dancer:

who divides and gathers herself together again, who rises and falls, so promptly opening out and closing in, and who appears to belong to constellations other than ours – seems to live, completely at ease, in an element comparable to fire – in a most subtle essence of music and movement, wherein she breathes boundless energy, while she participates with all her being in the pure and immediate violence of extreme felicity – If we compare our grave and weighty condition with the state of that sparkling salamander, does it not seem to you that our ordinary acts . . . are like coarse materials, like an impure stuff of duration . . .

In dance the gravity of the body is released. A fluency and lightness invest each gesture and stir the whole body. Stillness breaks in waves of visible grace. Writing of the Countess Cathleen in Paradise, Yeats has these lines:

Did the kiss of Mother Mary Put that music in her face? Yet she goes with footstep wary Full of earth’s old timid grace.

One of the most intriguing forms of dance is when an object is cut against the stillness in such a way that it becomes filled with the suggestion of movement.

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Abandoned stones which I become interested in invite me to

enter into their life’s purpose. It is my task to define and make

visible the intent of their being.

ISAMU NOGUCHI, The Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum

SOMETIMES WE UNWITTINGLY HAPPEN UPON THE SECRET LIFE OF objects. One day, some years ago, I was out on the mountains herding cattle. I had walked for hours and I lay down on the mountainside to rest. It was a gloomy day of muted light. Just as I was about to arise, I looked over my shoulder across the broken limestone pavement to see a small limestone version of the Egyptian Sphinx looking across at me. I gazed at it for a while, enthralled again by all the shapes of natural sculpture with which these stone mountains are bestrewn. I eventually got up and walked on; then I turned back for one more look, but try as I might, I could not find the sphinx again. Whatever light, vision and space had conspired to render that image explicit among the stones had now vanished.

For the new infant, becoming acquainted with objects is a real adventure. The other day I watched a new lamb interrogate a group of daffodils on the hill outside my window. She seemed amazed at how a rush of breeze could make those yellow aliens dance. Like the little lamb, to the human eye there is no end to the mystery of objects. Forced by fire and tension from beneath and carved by glacier, time and weather above, the forms of a landscape are primal sculpture. Though it is hard to analyse, the surrounding shape of the place where we live must exercise considerable influence on the rhythm and weather of our minds; perhaps outer sculpture does influence the inner sculpture we call thinking.

Thought is our great mirror and lens of vision. Though it might carry a world, a thought is light. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why even the simplest objects remain mysterious to us. Everything we feel, think and do is mediated through thought: thinking is the air in which the mind dwells. The wonder of an object is that it is not a thought. A thing is first and foremost itself. An inconsequential pebble picked up on the side of the road has preceded us by anything up to four hundred million years, and its face will be brightened still further by rain that will fall here thousands of years after we have vanished. We might change things in the world, yet the most minimal, seemingly insignificant object outlasts us.

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The beauty of a composed intricacy of form; and how it may be

said . . . to lead the eye a kind of chase.

WILLIAM HOGARTH