A Gesture, Once

I sit motionless at the table. Before me lies a sheet of fine, noble paper; my drawing tools are arranged in a row: slender, curved steel nibs, jars of ink and stain, soft-bristled brushes, small pots of translucent colours. Off to one side is a little bowl, an unusual one. It is made of something transparent—it might be glass, but it is not, because somehow it keeps changing its size, swelling larger and then shrinking back again, though only for a while.

My anxiety is in it.

There is no painter, draughtsman, maker of signs, engraver, stone carver or shaper of clay who does not feel a sense of awe when standing face to face with raw material. For raw material is that which confronts us. It stands before you untouched and pure, like a question mark, a faithful gaze awaiting instruction, a flower opening its chalice, a body willingly offering itself for sacrifice, an army drawn up and ready for battle. The possibility of creation, the materia prima. Yet creation is more than a possibility. Creation is a duty: the duty of survival, of sustaining what is. Continuous re-creation is the guarantee of eternity, and in every act of making, man ritually repeats this original, sacred act.

The history of consciousness is not the history of thought, but of awareness. And awareness is awakening, echoing through eternity.

We all know the image of the writer in a film, sitting in his study and angrily ripping one ruined sheet after another from the typewriter until the pages all but cover the floor. A simplified but vivid image of the striving for perfection. The greatest scientific minds have obsessively sought—and continue to seek—the equation of the universe, the formula that holds the origin of all that exists. Monks, Gnostics, alchemists, yogis, lamas, Sufi sages and mystics walk the path of realisation towards union with the Creator, towards extinction, towards the vessel of all possibility, towards the ultimate emptiness.

Hands folded in prayer, prostration, Eucharist, the Sufi tariqa and dhikr, the dance of the whirling dervishes, meditation, contemplation, satsang, zazen, koan, budo, mantra; the processes of the alchemical work: nigredo, rubedo, albedo; experiments, laboratories, blackboards and data stores filled with calculations, functions, algorithms, theories and models. Instruments for attaining Certainty, once, sometime, now.

And Certainty is nothing other than the pure awareness that I am. Once, sometime, now.

And Now is now. The one-pointed moment.

Before me is the paper, the brush in my hand. What is needed is a gesture: right, forceful, yet measured. In the universe of the paper, nothing can be corrected.

Off to one side, on the table, is the strange little bowl.

Anxiety is the noblest raw material into which an artist can dip his brush. For art, anxiety is nothing other than raw material. It is like a finely wrought instrument: it challenges, inspires, urges us onward, makes us deliberate, calls upon us to overcome. Anxiety is not something to be feared; anxiety is something to be worked with. To use it, to know how to handle it, requires a particular ability, a particular knowledge. The artist contemplates his anxiety, examines it. He moves closer to it, then steps back and observes it again from a distance. He knows that he does not know it, because anxiety is the Unknown itself. And the unknown is nothing other than possibility. The empty, pristine sheet of paper, the string waiting to be stretched taut, the untrodden road, the mountain peak vanishing into mist, the depths of a cave, an endless plain, a passing shadow, an enigmatic gaze and an unspoken word. The farther shore. World. The world itself is the unknown, and the presence of the unknown is self-evident. The artist knows, feels, that the Unknown is presence itself: the origin of events, the beginning of space, the force that sets actions in motion. Without the unknown there is no time, no gesture, no force and no direction; without the unknown there is not even a state of being, because there is no experience—and experience is already a gesture, and one can move only into the unknown.

The artist knows: the unknown is presentness itself.

And anxiety—this shivering, trembling, throbbing, chilling, feverish, surging, vanishing and ever-present anxiety—is nothing other than the inward, visible face of the unknown.

And so the artist lifts his anxiety into the palm of his hand and breathes in its scent: within it he catches the breeze of fresh meadows at dawn, decomposing corpses, exotic spices and musty cellars. With a fingertip he gently strokes its surface: soft and rough, like the tongue of a kitten or the skin of a shivering child. He presses his ear to its deep rumbling, through which come the distant singing of children, the clatter of weapons, the echoes of cavernous castle halls and the sound of an organ; the choirs of ancient liturgies resound, cries from torture chambers, the pulsing of blood vessels and the whistle of a distant train. The artist waits and listens. With his hearing, sharp as a knife blade, he separates the swirling, surging bodies of sound as they collide with one another, calms them, orders their movements into a measured dance, and listens. Slowly the Sound begins to resonate through the mist—the one, the only Sound, complete and indivisible, yet bearing within itself every sound that ever was and ever will be: the symphony of the world.

Then, with his gaze, he peels back the rusty-green skin of anxiety, releasing trails of ghostly flashes; he spreads the orange glow of candlelight across the darkness of burial chambers, drives the flicker of muzzle flashes beyond the reddening horizon, smooths mauve over pallid skin, immerses tear-swollen eyes in a healing, pearlescent lake. His finger enters the body of anxiety, touches its trembling entrails, sets a fractured bone, lances an abscess, breathes air into collapsing lungs, tenses muscle and soothes an ulcer, cuts through proliferating tissue, pours the fluid of life into weary blood vessels.

The purpose of art is not the work of art, but the purest gesture. The purest gesture of awareness.

And anxiety, this strange, pulsating body, is no longer anxiety, but sacred anticipation, consecrating a minute into a feast, matter into life, birth into creation, the world into myself.

I dip my brush into the pot and raise it above the paper.

We may begin.