Question Three

The Air I Breathe is not Quite Like Yours

“After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, — a world which yields him no self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world” (W.E.B. DuBois 2004, 2).

The revelations of the other world force me to live a life where I am the target of others' fears. This is an experience of navigating society as a racial body that is fraught with ambiguity. Fear engulfs my beingness like air, transforming into an impenetrable substance that encases my flesh; my being in the world. Every step I take is policed, and as a consequence, I am forced to police myself. Breathing in an environment where the dread of your existence becomes the focal point of another person's imagination is one of the most difficult tasks to conquer. As a Black man living in a culture where white hegemonic systems of control have molded and reshaped what and how black people, their bodies, and their flesh should be perceived and regarded as humanity's abject objects, I find myself in a difficult position. Black people have been excluded from what it means to be human for decades. Today, I'm exposed to a barrage of physical assaults alone with the toxic effects of COVID.

As a result, in every area where I emerge, I am forced to question my own existence. As I travel through spaces where my body is unwanted, I am forced to inhale the toxic residue of white fear to ease the inner strife, the hopelessness of being feared because society refuses to see the human in me. I hold my breath for 5 seconds or longer, only to feel the release. Exhaling becomes meaningless after inhaling the stench of other people's fear and my own dread of contracting COVID.

The Air, the Mask and the Embodiment of the White Gaze

Today, I write to you from a place of lived, embodied experience, a place of vulnerability, in order to conceptualize from a personal existential position. It was during the first wave of COVID-19 that I began to critically consider what it means to breathe as a Black man in a predominantly white conservative town, all while emotionally coping with the killings of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor. The government mandate to wear a mask became my entry point into a world that most white Americans or those who consider themselves white are unfamiliar with, but is part of many black Americans' everyday living experience: the experience of existing as dead objects placed outside our understanding of what is deemed human. I was reminded of Paul Laurence Dunbar's 1896 (1976,112)  poem "We Wear The Mask," in which he writes:

We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,— 
This debt we pay to human guile; 
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile 
And mouth with myriad subtleties,

Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs? 
Nay, let them only see us, while 
     We wear the mask.

We smile, but oh great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile 
Beneath our feet, and long the mile,
But let the world dream otherwise, 
     We wear the mask!

The mask becomes a figurative and literal veil that protects me from COVID-19 and the claustrophobic realities that my body faces while living in a racialized society. Though I struggle to breathe with it on, the mask has always been a part of my metaphysical existence in the world protecting me from the toxins of anti-black racism. A world where I am forced to take refuge in being invisible. My escape into a state of invisibility arises from the unsettling awareness that my body has never existed in this society as pure and innocent, but only tainted and guilty of something. So, now, I wear the mask as a shield to protect myself from the stench of other people's fear and the air of pseudo-white supremacy.

The vivid memories of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor's lifeless bodies remind me all the time that when the essence of fear is transferred onto black and brown bodies, it has the capability to convert them into corpses. As a result, the toxic air I breathe is that of an innocent fugitive, a survivor of what can be, longing for a better place to exhale the fear I am forced to embody, like air. Thus, the mask becomes a device that I use to read the Other's gaze. While wearing the mask, I discovered that fear is most obvious in the gaze. The white gaze, as characterized by African and African American authors such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Toni Morrison, and James Baldwin, to name a few. The gaze's hidden desire is to morph my body into an undesirable object, preventing my body from freely moving around society like other bodies. Nonetheless, as I resist the gaze's intrusive objectification of my body, a sense of hopelessness overtakes my consciousness. Despair develops as an emotional reaction to the numbing reality that the fear that encases my body is omnipotent, forcing it to be policed by everyone, any, and everywhere. "I" am bound to confront my existence outside of my body as the object that frightens others. I must admit that this embodiment of the white gaze evokes in me a conscious third-person sensation in which all three are enacted and the moment of the gaze: the "I" for self, the "I" for the "Other," and the "I" imagined by the "Other." Within this clash between my sense of being in the world as a racial body, I am obliged to be hyperaware of how the Other perceives and imagines my body, as an alien thing that binds me, particularly when the gaze is thrust onto my body like air.

 The Air to My Blackness

“Locked in this suffocating reification, I appealed to the Other so that his liberating gaze, gliding over my body suddenly smoothed of rough edges, would give me back the lightness of being I thought I had lost, and taking me out of the world put me back in the world. But just as I get to the other slope I stumble, and the Other fixes me with his gaze, his gestures, and attitude, the same way you fix a preparation with a dye” (Franz Fanon, 2008, 89).

When my body is present, this experience of being the mystery object is frequently expressed through timid "hellos," "good mornings," “the gripping of handbags,” and the nervous tension displayed through various body positions. In a predominantly white conservative community, I am immediately conscious of how black bodies disrupt a type of imagined space devoid of black people. Like the bodies of other Black men and boys in this society, my body has been scripted to the point where it evokes fear in the bodies and minds of many white Americans. As a consequence, I am left wondering if the root cause of this fear is triggered by the tones of my flesh which I am forced to question and, more pressingly, how the essence of blackness appears to exist in a racialized society.

 In a society that is anti-black, my blackness, like toxins in the air, manifests as wretched wherever it appears. This perception of blackness serves as a metaphysical domain that encompasses both black people and black people's existence. Those who exist in blackness are continuously in conflict with being treated inhumanely. This is the outcome of living in an anti-black world while being black. Within this anti-black environment that I reside in, I exist as a danger to humanity, a toxin to my community and society. My everyday living experience is to avoid becoming enmeshed in the Other's fantasy where I am desired to be feared. My struggle to breathe is indeed a battle with the fear that penetrates the air around me. I am constantly aware that the gaze, like fear, becomes ever-present, like air. Fear like air often restricts my breath and thus my way of freely existing.

- Adeyemi Doss, Indiana State University

Touching Visions: Speculative Imaginaries

The Danish artist Nanna Debois Buhl created Sky Almanac during a 12-hour walk in which observations materialized as a response of moving through the air, by responding to information conveyed through the ether. The artist talks about drawing connections across histories of scientific, aesthetic, and speculative perspectives — a process of “epistemological gathering” which is encircling and hard to pin down. It is an approach that I have been thinking about whilst asking how to use the air to make a series of drawing/ print hybrids within a body of work entitled ‘Touching Visions: Speculative Imaginaries.”

A drawing is a mark of some sort with a human touch. A print is a mark of some sort facilitated by human touch often constrained within a historical context. But it can escape associations of the multiple and representational mimesis, by considering the potential of the spatial metamorphosis of its making, the intimacy of touch across a surface, and its recording of contact. It can respond to the notion of truth with the first print pulled from a matrix surface being termed the ‘proof.’ It is “forensic evidence” of presence. It can make the invisible, visible.

The intermittent stasis and enforced restricted movement due to lockdowns have tipped my head back with time to re-engage with the art of slow looking, searching upwards, leading me to question what it means to feel the air today. Stargazing has become a preoccupation, it offers the opportunity to consider celestial histories, shift a visual point of view, and meditate on fundamental opinions. Having family scattered literally across the globe has found me trying to transport myself more literally to other lands, trying to somehow pull them closer, as in Italo Calvino’s “Distance of the Moon.” I think about the flow of humanity across time and space.

Amidst such wanderings of thought, I discovered “A Luminous Darkness” by Melanie Starr Costello, Ph.D.: “The stellar sky mirrors back to us the luminous darkness that steers the course of individuation. Just as ancient mariners depended upon the night sky to traverse great distances, so too do we depend upon subtle sparks of light hidden in the unconscious psyche to guide our life’s passage. These points of light—image, idea, sensation, intuition — meet us as we release ourselves to the darkness of sleep, to the pain of grief or to the will’s defeat in the face of realities and happenings outside our control.”

Feeling in the dark, I have been exploring what I term as ‘speculative imaginaries,’ an opportunity through particulates and pollution to go beyond the immediate sense of self, to draw across distant atmospheres and search for ways of revealing presence from a more aerial perspective. In my practice, I am interested in exploring the poetic, mutable space that is difficult to articulate, the hazy zone of inquiry that evolves through research and experimentation. A thin, slippery structure on the edge of categorization and clear vision. I have found that being prevented from wider freedom of movement has enforced a state of lingering, of looking, of thinking, and wondering. It has provided time and sensory opportunities to expand a dimensional potential and its contiguous relationship to materiality. With the immediate orbit of human touch being reduced, I have been yearning to reach outwards through drawing.

There is an area of the ocular field which is obscured, a blind spot. An area of intermittent blindness in sight and coherence. Georges Did-Huberman in his 2015 keynote speech in Prague, “Que ce qui apparait seulement s’apercoit” (That which only appears is noticed), proposes that a collection of fleeting, transient, glimpses of an image, which resist categorization and appear at the periphery, can be perhaps viewed as a genre in its own space – between seen and unseen, an edge, border, threshold or ‘interspace’. Can our inner eye highlight elements not obviously visibly recorded and registered at the time that they move across our field of vision?

Historically the five senses existed in a hierarchical structure where vision was correlated to light, and hearing to air. The senses of touch, sound, smell were anthropologically also seen as being vital for communication alongside that of vision. I think about the notion of visual listening and recall watching James Benning’s film ‘Ruhr’ where the distant sound of a plane causes the incremental, latent movement of a leaf. This sensation of traveling through space and time informs my practice, and I find that drawing can be used to navigate questions, delineating and condensing ideas onto a surface. It is an attempt to articulate a sensation of being.  Yet there is a paradox and democracy to drawing. Through movement and observation drawing records whilst simultaneously containing the potential for one to subvert or intervene. 

In “The Pleasures of Drawing,” Jean Luc Nancy wrote that purposiveness, the pursuit of a purpose, “postpones or delays the end.” It produces a state of tension, a search for some sort of presence to become visible. Using found and gathered materials in my home studio throughout the past 12 months, I have been working more directly with the elements - light, air, wind, rain to produce a series of hybrid prints/drawings where the traces, marks, and lines are made with a non-human touch. It is an experiment to echo the uncertain, the fragility of interconnectedness between the human and nonhuman.

In rain prints i, ii during one of the many rainstorms we have experienced as our climate shifts, I allowed the falling water to document its trace in another series of hybrid prints of nonhuman touch. Using a drop of Japanese Sumi ink as a starting point, the receiving surface paper was secured and left outside throughout the duration of the shower. Over time, and with a lightness of touch impossible to replicate by human hand, a series of delicate marks slowly evolved as the water changed state from liquidity to evaporation. Some of the works, when dry, resemble planetary eruptions from distant stars, collapsing supernovas evoking a sense of movement and transition. Through the altered state a fragile trace, a record, a documentation of a drop of water falling through the air remains. It is estimated that a drop of rain takes 2 minutes to fall 2500 meters at a speed of around 14mph, yet its impact is often imperceptible.

My explorations into these ideas are in their infancy, but I am interested in their affiliation to the history of drawing, of print, and ideas of acheiropoietaa — traces left without human intervention that occur across the air. It is an opportunity for small moments of quiet, haptic discovery to counterpoint being saturated by the vast seas of data, overwhelmed by zeroes and ones. 

It is a commitment to the relationship between drawing/print as touch in some form, with its innate relationship to a sense of care. It may be imperceptible, fleeting, but as Maria Puig de la Bellacasa writes in Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds:

“My engagement with touch remains situated within an exploration of what caring signifies for thinking and knowing in more than human worlds. Here, a caring politics of speculative thinking could reclaim hapticity as a way to keep close to an engagement to respond to what a problem requires.”

- Caroline Areskog Jones | Instagram: @are3kog

Work Cited

Benning, James, Ruhr, released 2010.

Calvino, Italo, Distance of the Moon (Originally published as part of Cosmicomics 1965).

Nancy, Jean Luc, The pleasure of drawing (Fordham University Press, 2013).

Puig de la Bellacasa, Maria, Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in more than human worlds (University of Minnesota Press, 2017).

Instructions for Feeling the Air

There is a levity to air. Practicing taijiquan outside as a gentle breeze blows, letting the whole body relax, letting all the movement happen by turning the waist. The arms float, the air cradles the body. The air is supportive. Professor Cheng instructs taijiquan practitioners to feel the air as if it has the substance of water. Cheng writes, “Air is not empty; it is just like water. With every movement we feel the turbulence of the air, just as if we were swimming.” (25). When the body becomes relaxed (light and lively), the air becomes heavy and substantial. As the air becomes substantial, the body becomes less substantial. This is “another yin/yang nondual polarity: our bodies are visible and insubstantial, the air is invisible and substantial.” (Fife)

Though we are constantly enveloped in this thin blue layer of atmosphere, to paraphrase Joy Harjo, we feel and act as though we are in empty space. Momentarily becoming aware of the air, forgetting it the next. Usually one experiences the body as “heavy and substantial” moving through the air without regard. When the body is substantial and the air is empty, we're alone in space. We're separate from everything else, our motion and body are primary in our awareness. This feeling of separation and isolation is both physical and meta-psycho-physical and has implications not just for taijiquan practice, but in how we see and approach the rest of our companions in this world.

When the air has the substance of water, one’s perception of the air changes how one’s body feels the air. Beth Rosenfeld writes, “the substance of air provides buoyancy for the body, helping it be soft and lively.” Being soft, relaxed, and gentle, the body rests on the air. When the body relaxes, movement changes and the mind changes. The air is full of qi. “Qi (ch’i) is a continuous, flowing, immaterial life-force which connects all that exists in the world.” (Piccirillo). Moving the body, consciously enveloped in the air, we become part of the movement of the cosmos. The invisible air connects us with everything else. This awareness enables us not only to feel the air but allows us to perceive the air filling and feeling us.

In taijiquan practice, the conscious awareness of qi is developed through relaxing the body and feeling the air. My teachers instruct us to feel the particles of air parting one millimeter ahead of the fingertips, feeling the air like moving the hand through water. This subtlety of awareness extends into the entire body. Moving without force, softly, gently, and aerodynamically, connected to heaven and Earth, as a peaceful part of the world, not the center, not alone, just one piece, an embedded part of the whole

- Jennifer Lord, Independent Curator and Scholar

Cosmic Time and the Unseen Voice

Cosmic Time and the Unseen Voice, a research study of Vaslav Nijinksy's Le Sacre du Printemps choreography, 1913, music by Igor Stravinsky, and set and costume design by Nicolas Roerich, stages dialogues between Nijinsky’s “spiritual atmosphere” drawn on ballets’ sacred geometry and its symbolic meanings inherent in the costumes' plastic presence. This essay turns the attention to how a close examination of material culture and its role in a historical performance practice can change our understanding of a canonical work of art.

In Nijinsky’s Sacre we can see how costumes and motions virtually reshape the human body. Watching materials become creatures seems natural, and the actual human performing on stage during the aspects of drama is a projection to the naturalness of this parallel world. A letter from Stravinsky to Roerich in January 1913 documents that Nijinsky would not start any choreographic work as long as he did not see the costume drawings and the actual garments in front of him (Stravinsky & Craft 92-93).  In their essay, Shamanic Sources & Ultramodern Forms, Archer and Hodson observed “how two-dimensional motifs on the costumes appeared as three-dimensional forms in the dance” (Archer & Hodson 1-2). In contrast to Archer and Hodson's concentration to bring each and every shamanic motif on costumes in relation to the dance, this essay moves past to investigate how Nijinsky used geometry in space. With primitive, yet gestural elaboration he addressed the material with a new life force to epitomize the physical air around the dancers to create an ecological unity between dancers and their spatial environment.

Creating felt from wool involves water and energy that holds and pushes wool apart by forces of attraction of our hands, causing the substances to change.  My intention with the use of wool is a practice-based interpretation of Nijinsky’s Sacre to solve what the choreography means. A journey that allowed me to feel the rhythm of tangling wool that undulates a physic state and brings the essence of textile and dance alive. The awkward heaviness that Nijinsky exhibited in Sacre used the same effort to make dance more positive. The weight he gave to his dancers’ body, the center in which he gave plastic motion, strike a balance between the eccentric and isometric force of the air. Indicates an “accented frenzy”, but  “rhythm on the spot'' as Hodson refers to Rambert’s annotation on the Sacre score. (Hodson, 59) It allows us to see an underlined aerial-ethereal transmission of the subjective medium, dance. This extended force allowed him to express Architectural Stillness. Movement means more when we experience the other end of the spectrum, stillness. A stillness that uses various atmospheres, light waves, spiritual breathing, physical forces that vibrates forth into space.  Nijinsky’s balance of different forces such as dynamic rebounds, degrees of effort, leading, following actions of the body, the use of muscular tensions increasing / decreasing levels of energy formed a seamless synergy. A thematized synergy of mortal existence based on three-dimensional composition of colors, forms, and movements. Making visible the “invisible information.” Every object in his dance, the dancers’ gestures, has spatial and temporal meanings. His use of directed energy conveys the direction of any particular pulling, pushing, resisting in the summary of our sensory experience of space on stage. Evokes the subtle fluids of the subjective atmosphere and exhales matter in space blurring the boundaries of the two parallel worlds to mold a “spiritual atmosphere.”

Nijinsky was a dancer, choreographer, and notator as well. My studies in Benesh Movement Notation to pursue a further understanding of Nijinksy’s movement linguistics helped me to see how he used gravity in his dancers’ bodies creating “movement in stillness.” BMN records the body in the third dimension, uses the fourth dimension to record the rhythm, and the fifth to represent all dynamics that a dancer uses in his/her kinesphere.

In order to conceptualize this expanded theory, I would like to bring Jacques Rivière’s November 1913 essay on Le Sacre that refers to “karyokinesis” in the choreography, as in seeds splitting and multiplying in nature, or a cell division in the human body. (Hodson, 52) Furthermore in an interview, Marie Rambert described this sequence to Hodson at the end of the opening scene as “splitting of the cell.” (Hodson, 52) Hodson describes that the motif of five circles is thus turned into a crossbones figure as the dancer’s race toward the center on separate diagonals, all using the same driving steps. Our research suggests that the choreographer read the costumes as dance diagrams. (Hodson, 31) In this study, I reveal how Nijinsky created a ”middle place,” a spherically surrounded space-form between dancers and their environment. His way of using sacred geometry implements Roerich’s knowledge of the ancient Slavs’ living culture and tells the genre of this century-turning choreography. Nijinsky’s primitive and minimalist use of movements paired with Rambert’s statement of “splitting of the cell,” reflects the use of universal principles of astro mythology that penetrate the subconscious symmetry with nature.

In Part 1, Scene 1, “Augurs of Spring” I cite Plato’s Timaeus connection of interaction between bodily motions and psychic motions: “For Timaeus, all human movements are an imitation of the movements of the universe, suggesting that his “cosmology is in fact biology.” Furthermore, Laban  (Founder of Labanotation)claims that “we become aware of ever-circling motions in the universe” through dance. In his dance theory, he merges cosmological and biological notions of harmony. (Christian 134) In my interpretation, the mentioned scene’s architectural platform focuses on the nomadic tribes' living arrangement within their felted tent. A dwelling that played a special role in their lives. In order to understand Nijinsky’s choreography, we need to fully understand the nomads’ material culture. Although basically identical in structure, such felted tents were referred to by different names in different places, such as yurt, topak, ev, kece cadir or bazulj. It mirrors their religious belief, the tree of life. According to their ideology, the felted tent, like the world, is three-layered. The third layer, top layer tündük, is a geometric formation of a cross within a circle that serves as a portal between the middle and upper world. At the same time is a symbol of the sun god, that Nijinska referred to in her writing, (Nijinsky's sister) about the Chosen One’s role - a bride being offered to sun god “to save the earth.” (Hodson 72-73)  As a square-shaped light- wave enters through this form, and it moves around the inner part of the tent throughout the day, it orders how the man and woman occupy and interact with each other within the living court. When we screen this formation on a spatial plane, we receive not a “crossbones” figure as Hodson refers to it in Part 1, Scene 1 but a cardinal cross that refers to our solstice shaft, equinox. According to Pap Gábor, art historian’s theory on folk art within astral mythical frames, the cardinal cross takes the form of a pelican feeding on the blood of our sons, which makes it clear that sacrifice must be made here. (Pap 1) Then Nijinsky explains that she stumps her feet like a bird building a nest. She tries again to escape, according to Rambert, and then, as Nijinska’s reports, she beats her wings as though attempting to fly away. He created an architectural environment, Oneness.

Oneness can only form in our spiral galaxy. Nijinsky’s visualization of primitive movements opened a “larger space”, a cosmic milieu that through his use of ballet’s sacred geometry, modeled a harmony between microcosmos and macrocosmos. Indeed, a never ever before used dimensional layout that established modern dance.  Laban’s narratives of modern dance birth states, “we never leave our movement sphere but carry it always with us, like an aurora. His theory of choric space turns the “prospect of contacting and physically experiencing the essential nature of space” (Christian117) self -portraying what Nijinsky laid out for later scholars to find. In Timaeus’ sense dance can mingle the ancient cosmological accord between humans and the cosmos with biological interpretation of the bond between an organism “cell” and their environment. (Christian 134)

Cosmic Times and the Unseen Voice brings a firmly conceptualized study with a turn-of-the-century find to activate a new understanding of what Nijinsky’s choreography means. An origin theory to cultural inheritance by showing the hidden structures of Nijinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps by embodying the intention of material (wool) culture.

- Barbara G. Haines, University of Mobile

Work Cited

Archer, Kenneth and Millicent Hodson, Experiment 20 (Leiden, NV: Brill Academic Publisher, 2014).

Christian, Margareta Ingrid, Objects in Air (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2021).

Forrás: Fõnix 1 szám, Asztrálmitoszi Keretek - mai sorok (Debrecen: HU, 1995).

Neff, Severine, Maureen Carr, and Gretchen Horlacher, with John Reef, The Rite of Spring at 100 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2017).

Stravinsky, Vera and Robert Craft, Stravinsky in Pictures and Documents (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978).