As much as I love objects, it's the pathos of distance between them which fascinates the most; that gulf of negative space and suspended time in which relations are conceived (for even love is a product of the void).
The Japanese have a word for it: ma - sometimes translated into English as interval or gap, though I doubt very much the verbal injunction to mind the gap issued by London Underground invites us to consider the play between being and non-being (or form and formlessness). But then, to be fair, London Underground are more concerned with passenger safety when leaving the train, than opening ontological doors through which a black sun might shine.
However, despite the prosaic nature of rail bosses, there are thinkers in the West who have shown a sensitivity to the concept of ma. Heidegger would be an obvious example, who, in a meditation on the thingness of things, has this to say about the essence of a jug: the jug's thingness resides in its being qua vessel. That is to say, it's the holding nature of the jug that is crucial. But this holding nature belongs to the emptiness of the jug - it's not a physical property of the clay as such.
In other words, Heidegger is arguing that although the sides and bottom of the jug appear to hold the liquid contents, at most they merely contain the fluid. We pour the wine, for example, between the sides and over the bottom of the jug and whilst they are obviously crucial to the operation, they are not essential; the wine flows into the empty space and it is this void that does the vessel's holding.
It's for this reason that the potter who is credited with making the jug, doesn't really make it at all; he simply shapes the clay on the wheel. Or, more precisely, he shapes the void, which ultimately shapes the jug, the potter and all things (including music, language, flower arrangements and peace of mind).
See: Heidegger, 'The Thing', essay in Poetry, Language, Thought, translated by Albert Hofstadter (Harper Perennial, 1971), pp. 163-80.
However, despite the prosaic nature of rail bosses, there are thinkers in the West who have shown a sensitivity to the concept of ma. Heidegger would be an obvious example, who, in a meditation on the thingness of things, has this to say about the essence of a jug: the jug's thingness resides in its being qua vessel. That is to say, it's the holding nature of the jug that is crucial. But this holding nature belongs to the emptiness of the jug - it's not a physical property of the clay as such.
In other words, Heidegger is arguing that although the sides and bottom of the jug appear to hold the liquid contents, at most they merely contain the fluid. We pour the wine, for example, between the sides and over the bottom of the jug and whilst they are obviously crucial to the operation, they are not essential; the wine flows into the empty space and it is this void that does the vessel's holding.
It's for this reason that the potter who is credited with making the jug, doesn't really make it at all; he simply shapes the clay on the wheel. Or, more precisely, he shapes the void, which ultimately shapes the jug, the potter and all things (including music, language, flower arrangements and peace of mind).
See: Heidegger, 'The Thing', essay in Poetry, Language, Thought, translated by Albert Hofstadter (Harper Perennial, 1971), pp. 163-80.
Thank you for this epigrammatically elegant, deliciously suggestive and dare I say nostalgically Barthesian post, Stephen. Some may also find it decidedly Buddhistic, perhaps, for the way in which 'ma' seems to translate the Buddhist concept of 'suññatā' (associated with the not-self in Theravada Buddhism, and the emptiness of things in the Mahayana tradition), whose 'nihilist'(as contrasted to 'eternalist') historiography Roger Jackson has gestured towards.
ReplyDeleteWhat fascinates me as a poet about 'ma', in its obvious application to the negative theology of 'white space' in verse, is the vacuum it opens for poetogenic musing (and philosophical exploration). Blanchot's divagations in 'l'espace littéraire' come to mind here, as does the work of Mallarmé. The latter's commitment to 'ceding the initiative to words' may ultimately mean an initiation into the desolation at the heart of words.
'When the day comes, as the day surely must,/when it is asked of you, and you refuse/to take that lover's wound again, that cup/of emptiness that is our sole completion...', what then? (Don Paterson).
Supposing humanity to be a vacancy, what then?