In a recent encounter with a colleague, our conversation steered towards ways that we distract ourselves from work. My interlocutor described picking up his son’s console and playing a racing game during his lunch break. The ability to immerse himself into another world—one of fast movement in three-dimensional space—allowed his mind to reset, and to approach writing with renewed energy. I remembered my own brush with racing games when, during my childhood, a family friend—a professional race car driver—came to babysit me in Toronto when my mom was away for work. We went to play at the local arcade, and I urged him to test his skills at the racing game. As soon as he dropped the change into the coin slot, and he changed quickly from a well-coiffed, soft-spoken man, to someone who frightened me with frenzied energy; fast, jerky movements, and tousled hair.
Anthropologists have long debated the role of the body in structuring our behaviours, perceptions, and practices. Marcel Mauss introduced the term habitus to anthropology by describing variations of swimming techniques (1973: 73). For English speakers, the nuance of Mauss’ “Les Techniques du Corps,” translated as “Techniques of the Body,” is partially lost in translation; “corps,” in French, refers both to the human body, and a collective body of people engaged in a similar activity. A whole embodied in parts, and vice-versa, as Pierre Bourdieu would later argue, when he extended Mauss’ concept to describe the way society reproduces itself through practical behaviours. Observing postures amongst Kabyle men in French-colonized Algeria, Bourdieu observed that through habitus, individual bodies embodying modes of control exerted by military, state, or economic power, thus reproducing practices characteristic of their social position. Culture guides behaviours, although individual actors may skillfully negotiate these behaviours (1977).
When I initially began to walk around nondescript panel-home neighborhoods, I oftentimes felt at a loss about what to paint. I would try to find a satisfying angle, or seek out interactions between geometric shapes of concrete blocks. Oftentimes, a good composition would be muddled by a poorly-placed tree, or a parking lot. In such cases, it was easy to get lost in details, and to render my watercolours with unnecessary details. However, the more familiar the subject became, the more comfortable I felt about what to accentuate, and what to leave out in a painting; in other words, by seeing the whole in parts, I was able to select what I considered deserving of my attention. But there was another movement, which proceeded in the opposite direction. When rendering the architecture of panel homes, I would dismantle the structure of the building if not brick-by-brick, then panel-by-panel. Physical observation allowed me to contemplate the whole, but technical skill allowed me to place it in correct perspective, to break it up into a patterned structure, to render geometry as a set of predictable, repeating figures. I would eventually lose myself in this geometric way of looking at things, trying to capture the nuance of each patterned block, and imagining how each resident fashioned their life both inside and outside their homes: what objects did they store on their balconies? Did they have a satellite dish, or an air conditioner? What kind of materials did they use to cover their balconies with glass? Did they keep plants, or were they drying laundry?
Such a detailed way of looking at things humanized the experience of residents. But this interaction was by no means one-sided. As I sat inside panel-home courtyards, people returning from work, going for a walk, or simply gazing out of their windows would see me paint their home. Many conversations were started by local inhabitants coming to look over my shoulder, commenting on the painting, and talking about their life or the history of the neighbourhood in the context of my painting, and details concerning these encounters undoubtedly deserve a separate discussion. Suffice to say here that notwithstanding the quality of my watercolours, many inhabitants saw their inner lives, accessed through windows, noticed, reflected, and rendered into an art form by a stranger sitting outside their apartment building.
A famous René Magritte painting imagines a street of row houses, but one of the houses is missing. Rather, instead of the structure itself, and seemingly floating in the sky, the house’s windows are visible suspended in air, and positioned where they would typically be situated in a house. In a characteristic surrealist play between discursive and figurative representation, the title of the painting, The Waking State (1958) only adds to the ambiguity. Even visually, it remains under question whether the rest of the house is gone, or was simply well-camouflaged against the surrounding landscape. adding a Magritte’s typical surrealist reversal between waking life and dream.
In the act of drawing an image, Michael Taussig describes what he sees: “My picture […] is drawn from the flow of life. What I see is real, not a picture. Later on I draw it so it becomes an image, but something strange occurs in this transition” (2011:7). Taussig describes this state as being “on the threshold between sleeping and waking, across which, back and forth, flood multitudinous images” (2011: 7). He infers that this is something that philosophers such as Roland Barthes described as the third meaning, not carnival, but a movement oscillating between discursive language and that, which eludes representation.
I often lose myself in the process of painting. Time stands still. Hours could pass without me acknowledging bodily needs, or mundane commitments. In reflecting upon how friends have commented on seeing me paint, I am weary of the comparison to my racing car mentor. I enter into a state of flow, into a kind of trance, from which very few things could truly distract me. Jean Rouch describes this as an embodied process, which he experienced in filming a possession ritual amongst the Songhay in West Africa. Waiting idly for days for the possession ritual to begin, he picks up his camera, and this, finally, triggers the possession dance (Rouch 2003[1973]: 97). This “ciné-transe,” as Rouch describes it, alters his feeling of “self” in front of the Songhay, in the same way that the “self” is altered amongst possession dancers (2003[1973]:99). As David MacDougall describes it, the local culture is “slowly gaining an influence over the filmmakers and the film” (1991:6).
In a classic cartesian reversal, the body becomes a vessel through which the mind is altered, and which, in turn, is inscribed on the body. But how do we get from cultural patterns inscribed in the body, to a sense of place? Casey asserts that we are always already there ‘by our own lived body’ (Casey 1996: 21). We train our bodies to swim in bodies of water, which are places. ‘To be located culture also has to be embodied. Culture is carried into places by bodies. To be encultured is to be embodied to begin with’ (Casey 1996:34). If I was to summarize Casey’s argument in a pithy statement, it would be that bodies are always-already emplaced in culture, which exists in places.
Of course, I am not the first to describe the state of flow as a mutually-symbiotic relationship between an embodied, cultural experience, and a deeply felt embeddedness in place. While I was still an undergraduate student, I remember attending a Diamond Way Buddhist seminar headed by Lama Ole Nydahl. The Diamond Way tradition follows an ancient Tibetan Buddhist lineage, but rendered accessible to Western audience. In the seminar, Lama Ole described the thrill of skydiving, or the experience of racing motorcycles as an emptiness of the mind. When asked elsewhere about this state of emptiness, Lama Ole responds,
It’s like this: if you fly out of the curve, you were too fast, and if you don’t fly out, you were too slow. There is a fine line in between, depending on what you like and the quality of your tires. When the motorcycle, the road, and the driver come together as a natural totality, then everything works by itself (2021).
And if this doesn’t sound like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), uniting science, art, experience of place, and cultural embodiment, I don’t know what is.
Literature Cited
Bourdieu, Pierre
1977 Outline of a Theory of Practice. Translated by Richard Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Casey, Edward
1996 “How to Get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of Time: Phenomenological Prolegomena.” In Senses of Place. Steven Feld and Keith Basso, eds. Pp. 13-52. School of American Research Press.
Magritte, René
1958 L’état de veille [The Waking State]. Painting; gouache on paper. New York: Di Donna Galleries.
Llama Ole Nyadahl
n.d. “Questions to Llama Ole.” Online resource accessed June 27, 2021: https://lama-ole-nydahl.org/questions/tag/limits/
MacDougall, David
1991 “Whose Story Is It?” In Visual Anthropology Review 7(2): 2-10.
Mauss, Mauss
1973 “Techniques of the body,” Economy and Society, 2:1, 70-88
Pirsig, Robert M
1984[1975] Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. New York, NY: Bantam New Age Books.
Rouch, Jean
2003[1973] “The Vicissitudes of Self.” In Ciné-Ethnography. Feld, Steven, trans. and ed. University of Minnesota Press.
Taussig, Michael
2011 I Swear I Saw This: Drawings in Fieldwork Notebooks, Namely My Own. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.