To discover one’s own absence is to discover one’s immortality…

The valley has a mystery in it, just as its hold on me is indescribable, and yet I try to use words like a flashlight of a search party fumbling through the dark. “Words give us the world by taking it away,” says Hegel.

Next week marks one year since 76 year-old, Marlies Jansen, walked into the valley one foggy, summer evening, and was never seen again. Along with 100 volunteers, the police sent horse-mounted officers, K-9 dogs, infrared-equipped aircraft, bloodhounds, and park police into the 1,100 acre area but they never found a trace of her.

She lived near the park and walked it everyday for years. She knew the park as well as anyone, undoubtedly more intimate with the birds than I am. She was last seen walking towards the park by a neighbor. But then the words about where she possibly could be, who she had become, trailed off into silence.

George Steiner describes how great artists can lay bare something central about its subject but also an undisclosed “inviolate inwardness.” In doing so, the artist conveys knowledge, but not knowingness. On the other hand, in controlling an artwork to evince such knowingness, the artist destroys in his creation the “mystery of independent vitality.”

Masakazu similarly proscribes the guardianship of the unknown by way of the Japanese aesthetic term of Yugen: “We are not entranced by that which we can totally understand.”

 

(Kontakthof, by Pina Bausch’s Tanztheatre)

Towards the end of her life, Pina Bausch choreographed a modern dance for her Tanztheatre company which featured 3 ages of dancers. The exact same piece was performed first by teenagers, then by middle-aged dancers, and finally by dancers over 65 years old. The choreography — all the intricate gesticulations and steps — were exactly the same, but somehow the dances remain completely different. And the ways in which they are different say something about who we are as humans, who I was and who I will become.

Time does separate us, in ways that appear irreconcilable. Compassion, it seems, can cover many distances, but it struggles against the rugged distance of time. Until an artist like Pina Bausch can transform those distances into intimate proximities of dancer and you and me. We all dance the same steps. Agnes Martin said it is of the most complete human ignorance to think we are unique, a radical statement in the realm of artists trying to express themselves uniquely.

(Painting by Agnes Martin)

A few months ago, while I was on my jog, I had to pull off the trail to allow a sheriff’s car up through the park. The car was way too wide for the trail, but he managed through the valley up to where it dead-ended and turned around. At the end of the valley, two women were sitting on a bench so when I reached them, I made a crack about the Sheriff letting them go this time. But after this pleasantry, we all agreed it was a disturbing, violating presence in this halcyon park. Especially since in no way, could his “patrol” have ever brought up anything but dust about our missing woman.

In my thinking of Marlies, and what I don’t know about Marlies, I am dislocated for just a moment — I can walk her steps in an intimate choreography along the valley floor — and come upon my own absence. And what I don’t know seems interminable, because this valley has rough terrain, dense underbrush, and inaccessible places. But for now, because I am far from at home in the unknown, I merely practice disappearing into the recesses between words.

There in close covert by some Brook,
Where no profaner eye may look,
Hide me from Day’s garish eie,
While the Bee with Honied thie,
That at her flowry work doth sing,
And the Waters murmuring
With such consort as they keep,
Entice the dewy-feather’d Sleep;
And let some strange mysterious dream,
Wave at his Wings in Airy stream,
Of lively portrature display’d,
Softly on my eye-lids laid.

— Milton, “Penseroso”