The Breaking Project: Discussion

When Alice visited my course on "Literary Kinds" today, to talk about The Breaking Project--> "choosing radical change —Breaking away, in, up, through, down, out, . . . ground, free . . . the cycle, the spell, the mold"--one of my students "said," in reply, on Serendip, that "Break is Fake: Our thoughts have happened before. There is no such thing as radical. There is no such thing as 'break.' Change and evolution, by their fundamental nature, are S L O W, iterative, 'tinkering' processes. "

I see two different orientations, here, towards change-and-how-it-happens--and I also saw an interplay between them this week, while reading Muriel Barbery's The Elegance of the Hedgehog. The novel has a chapter called "Break and Continuity," from which I quote below. This passage is about the disruption of space (rather than time), but it nicely pairs sliding doors--which please because they do NOT interrupt continuous space--and the jerky movement of a Japanese woman's walk, which pleases because it DOES disrupt continuous movement. We need, in other words, and are pleased by, both break and continuity…..

Barbery's narrator says, "I was fascinated by the way the Japanese use space in their lives, and by these doors that slide and move quietly along invisible rails, refusing to offend space. For when we push open a door, we transform a place in a very insidious way. We offend its full extension, and introduce a disruptive and poorly proportioned obstacle…. An open door introduces a break in the room, a sort of provincial interference, destroying the unity of space. In the adjoining room it creates a depression, an absolutely pointless gaping hole adrift in a section of wall that would have preferred to remain whole. In either case a door disrupts continuity…. Sliding doors avoid such pitfalls and enhance space. Without affecting the balance of the room, they allow it to be transformed. When a sliding door is open, two areas communicate without offending each other. When it is closed, each regains its integrity. Sharing and reunion can occur without intrusion. Life becomes a quiet stroll--whereas our life, in the homes we have, seems like nothing so much as a long series of intrusions….

… an association of ideas led me from sliding doors to women's feet…. women come in, slide the door along the wall, and take two quick steps that lead them to the foot of the raised area where the family rooms are located…and with a supple, gracious motion of their legs pivot upon themselves as they climb, back first, onto the platform…. the slight pirouette of their feet leads to a curiously broken and causal series of steeps, as if their ankles were hobbled…. when a Japanese woman disrupts the powerful sequence of natural movement with her jerky little steps, we ought to experience the disquiet that troubles our soul whenever nature is violated in this way, but in fact we are filled with a unfamiliar blissfulness, as if disruption could lead to a sort of ecstasy, and a grain of sand to beauty. What we discover in this affront to the sacred rhythm of life, this defiant movement of little feet, this excellence born of constraint, is a paradigm of Art.

When movement has been banished from a nature that seeks its continuity, when it becomes renegade and remarkable by virtue of its very discontinuity, it attains the level of esthetic creation.

Because art is life, playing to other rhythms."