The Non-Verbal Humanities

Though I’ve learned some things about how to write, I am realizing that my capacity to represent on the page will always be incomplete so long as I don’t know how to draw. In drawing, the principles are the same as I’ve been learning. Corporeal Mime is often taught to visual artists because, as a discipline that tries to express thought through movement, it teaches the artist to see the thought in movement, and so, to represent the character of bodies, objects, environment—all things. 

Reading through one of Tom’s books as he explains each movement of a piece in words, I realize how imperfectly words track the dynamism and fluidity of physical movement. Listening to an audiobook about Zen Master Ryokan, it’s evident that a description of each individual calligraphic line won’t give a clear image of the whole. The word and the image are each sublime, in different ways. When the word or the image try to explain the other, naturally, they fail.

Our education is largely verbal, so it fails essentially to do what it attempts to do. It inflicts on the world students of the humanities who know little about humanity, their own or anyone else’s (paraphrase: Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception).

In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, William Blake wrote,

“I have always found that angels have the vanity to speak of themselves as the only wise; this they do with a confident insolence sprouting from systematic reasoning.”

I remember summer 2018, having daydreams of an angel with a clipped wing and writing that “I have a difficult time believing that I have a bright future.” I think I saw myself risen as an angel, having gotten to Pomona, and then having fallen by everything seeming to come apart, me returning home that year, ill, with nothing on my plate to do. 

Huxley explicates,

“Systematic reasoning is something we could not as a species or as individuals do without. But neither, if we are to remain sane, can we possibly do without direct perception, the more unsystematic the better, into the inner and outer worlds into which we have been born. This given reality is an infinite which passes all understanding and yet admits of being directly and in some sort totally apprehended.”

Systematic reasoning is a gift of the verbally-educated elite, a gift which to William Blake makes them angels. But, as Thomas Aquinas asks, how many angels can dance on the head of a pin? The question is nonsense. The separation into angels is a product of systematic reasoning. 

The key out is unsystematic direct perception. To direct perception, concepts are distortions that make facts into familiar likenesses, general labels, and explanatory abstractions. Nature, as the primary fact of existence, cannot be fully realized by concepts; it can only be realized by experience. I am no angel, I never have been—I’ve just thought I was.

Goethe wrote that “I personally should like to renounce speech altogether and, like organic Nature, communicate everything I have to say in sketches… A person able to decipher their meaning properly would soon be able to dispense with the written or spoken word altogether.” Echoed through my mind is Beckett’s “every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.” I still think stains are important, even if they only take something transparent and make a spot of it visible, but I see how much more important it may be experientially for the individual organism to draw, and even, to move—to represent directly.

The non-verbal humanities don’t have to do with the perennial humanities question, “who influences whom to say what when.” The non-verbal humanities ask “how do we make ourselves more aware of inward and outward reality; more open to the spirit; less apt by psychological malpractice to make ourselves ill; more capable of controlling our own autonomic nervous system” (paraphrase: Huxley). Unbeknownst to me, maybe this is what I have really been studying.

I set out to learn about movement. What I knew was that the way western society has grown to move reveals a deep inner chasm where some essential somethings seem to be missing. I didn’t expect I would learn that the way we breathe, what we eat, and even the way we perceive time are getting in the way of our ability to be expressive. I did not expect that going on a journey to explore the body would take me into a process of healing my mind—but that is exactly what happened.