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-- the void and the art of not-seeing

The light is just coming. Civil twilight, the sound of train wheels on steel track from the open door, my white long-haired cat, Peyote, a glimmer against the grey sidewalk. I can see through the foot high gap between the bottom of my closed blinds and the bottom of the window pane. I am typing, drinking broth, listening for the bird calls to begin rising from the wood and wire. Underneath it all, under the rumble of a truck across the bridge spanning the river behind me, under the lone bird song now calling from my left, supporting and underpinning the presence of morning is the resonant void.

Lately, it is as if the void is getting louder. Not that I think it is, just that it’s getting harder for me to separate out its constant thrum from the rhythm of daily living. Perhaps that’s the point—that there is no difference? I don’t know. All I can do is concentrate on how it feels and what that makes my body know.

Teaching this experience is difficult. All one can really do is ask someone to try and have the experience for themselves. Here is an example of what that might be like.

Tracking in the void is the art of not-seeing. Imagine: no sight, or ears, no taste, nor even touch of skin. Only the thun thun of your legs walking. Thun thun, thun thun. Walking down a hill—the pressured thigh and stretched calf. Above the thun thun of feet falling, knees cycling up and then down, there is the slitch of the torso twisting as the thun thun continues, and if you can hold—the cadence of the body—your attention to the sensation of moving, there will be a body-song rise up from the patterned connections between thun slitch thun. The song-sense accretes; grows outward from the moving sinews like the nest of a cliff swallow under the eaves of a body walking. Out and around, the weaving of cadence thun slitch thun becomes the globe of the nest. And then—imagine—the feel of your shoulder lifting and sliding forward, its arm swinging, a pleasant pull in the gravity well of feeling, and the other arm, its hand curled gently, dangling at the wrist, a petal suspended on the rising arc of a backward swing. This lateral swirl of shoulder and arm moves—a layered cadence of its own—the dropped bi-beat of the arms ting ting and the sibilant sloss of the shoulders. And your head nodding pin pin, chin cocked tip to the feel of the body moving, its rhythms gliding against each other. Hold them all and walk and the nest of kinesthetic sensation will weave out, close the belled nest into a safe dark universe where the cadence of the resonant void can sing in muscle and bone. There will be only a small round tunnel through which, when you choose, the return of ear and tongue and eye can come rushing back.

The watcher—as I call that woman born the day of the jagger-bush experience—stands always with five toes curled over the edge of the great well of unknowing. This experience of self rarely subsides, even in sleep. It is as if she were a lighthouse perched there thrumming at the edge of the human world. I have come to think of the edge of the void as a cliff in my awareness. It feels that way. As if it were the edge of the world—the edge of a world I can safely story and therefore know through the history of my conscious mind’s experience. Beyond that lies this other set of universes and what can be known of that place can only be known through the agency of the body—everything human—the body thinking.

What can be known of the void is, in my experience, only adequately shared through direct experience—and then most potently in shared experience. The existence of the void (the 14th century anonymous Christian mystic called it ‘the cloud of unknowing’) is felt through the body as layer upon layer of sensation. It is like a full orchestra, which under the blaring power of the aware self thinking and the eye discerning, becomes heard only as the beat of the deep drum. The rest of the instrumentation, the flutes and viols, the cello and trombone, go on but it is as if they were silent, the blare of the I/eye is so loud. It is not surprising then, in this "silence," that the cadence of one’s life begins to crack, falling out of rhythm with the deep music to which one can no longer attend. But do not mistake: unawareness does not equate with lack of existence. The void continuously hums. In fact right now, the light finally full force, my cats asleep on the bed, coffee ready; the sky is singing.