Suddenly It’s Now
In the words of my friend Stephen Nachmanovich, improvisation is the Art of Is. It is the art of presence, of being here, now. It is visionary poet William Blake’s seeing,
a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour(“Auguries of Innocence”)
It is T.S. Eliot’s “still point of the turning world”:
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.(“Burnt Norton” in Four Quartets)
“Neither from nor towards”: the improviser achieves the present tense by resisting the temptation to languish in thoughts and regrets about the past. S/he resists the insistent longing for future outcomes—purpose—that clutter our daydreams. Instead: Here, Now.
The art of now is not about the pursuit of purpose but about “the dance.” Dance, which I once heard described a vertical expression of a horizontal inclination, is all about desire. Not purpose, not longing, pure desire, expressed here and now. That’s what the improviser pursues. Embracing embodied emotion, not denying desire, nor putting it off, the improviser finds the present moment. S/he finds a way forward without even looking.
Perhaps it’s that theme which attracted me to one of my favorite Paul Spooner automata, “Suddenly It’s Now.” Spooner is a rock star of the automaton world where mechanical playthings made mostly of wood bring delight through clever cogs and turning devices. Here’s a video of “Suddenly It’s Now” in action:
You can learn more about Spooner and his wonderful devices at Cabaret Mechanical Theatre.
Introduced to automata decades ago by my fellow foodie friend and Vietnam Studies brother-in-arms Eric Schroeder, I collect them.
Here’s something Spooner wrote. Purpose and utility are clearly his nemesis, just as they are the improviser’s:
“As well as all the cars, clocks and other machines that make our lives efficient and comfortable, there are quite a lot of machines that have no practical use at all. Machines that are the antithesis of practicality, made by artists who have no interest in efficiency or comfort. They often make machines that express their anger about the dehumanising mechanisation of war, policing, bureaucracy or about the increasing distance between people who seem always to be on the phone but seldom talking to those next to them.
My machines are even more useless than those because I’m not even angry, having led an easy life in a beautiful country doing pretty much as I please all day. I make machines about things I find funny or absurd, hoping that others will feel the same. Even if I am a little annoyed when I start making something, the feeling has usually worn off by the time I’ve finished.
Better for me to start with an idea that strikes me as wonderfully funny, hoping that some vestige of that survives the making process.”
Useless, without purpose, and yet our dance with desire sometimes has what can only be called an outcome if not a purpose: that kitten that suddenly emerges. Maybe it’s what that celibate brainiac Immanuel Kant had in mind we he defined beauty as “purposefulness without purpose” (“Zweckmässigkeit ohne Zweck”). The present moment, once embraced, is where the future is born.
