Postmodern art practice has lost one of its most ardent proponents. Mary Overlie is dead at the age of 74.
 
It is fitting that a picture of her life and work will slowly come into focus through multiple viewpoints, as colleagues, students, and friends reveal glimpses of her giant contribution to contemporary performing arts. I offer my perspective here as a former student of Mary, her friend for 20 years, and an ongoing practitioner of the six viewpoints.
 
The precise meaning of “viewpoints practitioner” is what I want to address in this short eulogy. Despite the global reach of the viewpoints, I suggest it is not a phrase that many people understand in the same way that Mary understood it. The primary reason for the confusion is twofold. On the one hand, there is the issue of Anne Bogart’s cooptation of the work. On the other hand, there is the anarchic horizontality of Mary’s teaching, which, while rigorous, caring, thorough, and artful, always resisted systematization and the rigid boundaries of rational coherence. To practice the viewpoints, for Mary, had less to do with composing works for theatre or dance and more to do with living life as art. Mary’s six viewpoints could be used to create showable experimental theatre and postmodern dance pieces, but this was merely one of its uses. More broadly, the six viewpoints was a breathing theoretical organism, a certain kind of performance philosophy that was equally available to welders, bridge painters, landscape architects, and casual pedestrians as it was to BFA and MFA artists. Bogart’s popularization of Mary’s work and Mary’s own presence as a teacher within one of the United States’s most innovative theatre conservatory programs may have given the viewpoints a semblance of knowability. But I don’t think anyone apart from Mary actually knew what it was and is. Our work, I believe, is to live into Mary’s teaching of the viewpoints so as to internalize the by-now all-too-familiar, yet deceptively deep, phrase “the performance of everyday life.” If we do that, then I think we become viewpoints practitioners. 
 
Nowhere was the living aspect of Mary’s viewpoints more palpable to me than in the late stages of her dying. Even after a grand mal seizure stunned her speech capacity, a panoply of medications coursed through her veins, a fatigued immune system had grown dim from a prolonged entanglement with cancer, and the contours of her own finitude began to show their seams, Mary’s herculean strength permitted her to speak on the phone with the same liquid perspicacity that I had always known. A couple weeks before her exit, I participated in a kind of duet with her that was not unlike an exercise in the Shape viewpoint. She presented various shapes in the form of thoughts and recollections to which I responded with my own shapes. She pondered, “Why am I still alive?” I asked, “Does it sound like Ornette Coleman?” She recalled of the jazz virtuoso, “He understood shape.” “The shape of jazz to come.” “Creativity.” “In pain?” “No pain.” “What would Barry Lopez say about it?” “The Arctic and Montana.”
 
We went on like this for a while, touching on motherhood, the inside of time, dizziness, silence, crying, and other such textures. It was a completely normal conversation with Mary. But this time I was struck by her commitment to her own teaching. This was the viewpoints of dying.
 
There she was, “standing in space,” aware of the fact that everything is moving, attuned to the Cunningham-like expression of the Cage-ian silence that buttresses all the buzzing, sensing the decay of her dura mater at a cellular level, calmly discoursing with a friend on creativity and the shape of things as the end of her life settled into view. The structures of Space, Shape, Time, Emotion, Movement, and Story were at play here in the grain of her voice and the correspondence between thoughts. I thought to myself: you don’t teach this. You learn this by going where you have to go. The viewpoints are a system for artfully going where we have to go, which is to say, going through life and through the door called death.
 
Mary’s students will all have memories of times when the full molecular complexity of the universe became sensible during her classes. Two of my own memories stand out to me now. The first recalls a spontaneous trip to the Museum of Metropolitan Art. The class had decided to compose a viewpoints improvisation on the steps to the museum. We wanted to alert visitors and passers-by to the particular temporal dimension of entering a museum. It came to pass that all of us lined up on the stairs leading up to the front door, each person behind the other, creating something like a huge gnomon. The light from the sun cast our shadows onto the steps as we slowly, nearly imperceptibly, moved out of the line formation. That was it. The class felt straight away that something important had happened, though we couldn’t put it into words. We all sat down and fell into thought. More than a handful of pedestrians came up to ask us what that was. Were we artists? What were we making? Our only answer was, “a kind of time.”
 
The other outing was also unplanned. It arose from an exercise on space. We wondered about the geometry of conversational distance and were curious to discover if such a thing was quantifiable, meaning could we, in fact, measure them all and then do something with the data? We departed the second-floor classroom of 721 Broadway, grabbed some hard hats, reflective vests, and measuring tapes from a tech storeroom in the building, and went outside. We stopped at every couple or group engaged in conversation between Tisch and Washington Square Park. We measured the distance between people. When we got to the fountain in the park, we climbed inside it and noticed that construction workers from a nearby building were waving at us from a distance of a couple hundred yards away. Somebody asked out loud, “Is this a conversation?” And then somebody else: “What counts as a conversation?” That question blew our minds and we realized that our measuring equipment was not calibrated to the task. We returned to the classroom and made dances built around the question, “What’s [the space of] a conversation?”
 
These two memories reveal the subtle and deceptive depth of Mary’s work. Both classes were part of “advanced” viewpoints training, which meant that everyone in the class had dedicated the requisite 40+ hours to exploring each of the six viewpoints and were comfortable creating improvisations with those materials. Yet here we were engaged in rudimentary explorations of Time and Space. What appears so clearly to me now is that there is no such thing as advanced viewpoints because the irreducible complexity of the universe is present in the very first viewpoints class you ever take from Mary or from one of her students. Mary folded her life’s realizations into her work such that any encounter with the primary materials of the viewpoints launched the student-practitioner into the quantum realm of reality.
 
Though we can now say that Mary is biologically dead, we can also say that she experienced many social deaths before her body stopped her working. She died every time people spoke of the viewpoints as Anne Bogart’s contribution to the world of theatre. She died every time people asked, “Mary Who?” She certainly died every time students engaged in the viewpoints without a willingness to confront the quantum realm of reality that attracted Mary’s attention since she was a young girl growing up in Montana. I think the only way she lived so long, despite the near persistent tolling of these social deaths, was that she crafted a pedagogical method that opened students’ eyes to the true depth of viewpoints work, thereby establishing a method for parrying the world’s slings and arrows. Her teaching was so precise that she helped students familiar with Bogart’s training to see the differences between the two sets of viewpoints straight away. Her teaching was so cunning that she was able not to answer the question “Mary Who?” but, rather, to accumulate greater mystery and awe, two of the key ingredients in pedagogical charisma. Her teaching was so smart that she could guide students effortlessly from walking around the room to probing the temporalities of their inner lifesystems in one snap of the fingers. Her teaching kept her alive, and I think her teaching is what we all must strive to understand as we continue on.
 
That is to say, there is more to the six viewpoints than any of us think we know, and we would be doing the art world a favor by pursuing that “something more.” There are two aspects of this pursuit of which I am sure Mary would want us all to be aware. The first is intellectual, perhaps even philosophical. Shortly before she died, Mary told me that she hopes she can be reincarnated as a masterful, technically proficient dancer who never thinks with her/his/their head but only through the body. I said, “well, perhaps, but thank goodness that’s not how you came back this time around.”
 
Within the practical work of the six viewpoints is a largely unexplored intellectual world that, if mapped, could change the way we teach the arts in primary, secondary, and higher education, not to mention the way we integrate the arts into other (seemingly) non-artistic fields. This intellectual component is underexplored, but certainly not a secret, as the first sentence of Moisés Kaufman’s jacket blurb to Standing in Space makes clear: “Mary Overlie is one of the greatest thinkers of the American Theatre.” A dancer? Yes. An institute builder who helped launch the Experimental Theatre Wing at ETW, co-founded Movement Research, the Danspace at St. Mark’s Church, and other international organizations? Definitely. But Mary was also a thinker, a theorist, and an intellectual, and that side of her work is something we must endeavor to understand in much greater detail.
 
The second way in which I hope we pursue Mary’s legacy is through group experimentation. While words and language in the shapes of books and articles on her ideas are much needed, there is a bodily knowledge and movement-based thinking without which the viewpoints makes no sense at all. All students of the work understand what this means, but I wonder if we overlook the significance of experimenting with this kind of knowledge. To experiment in this sense means to engage in the work without a clear idea of what may come out of it. We ought to do this collectively, in classes, in-person, through Zoom, and in whatever way “collectivity” is possible. This is especially important to do now at a time when the meaning of “to gather” is changing greatly and when the instrumental use of education to obtain practical ends seems to predominate in all types of schooling. The viewpoints could become a method for teaching and learning generally and for showcasing the ways in which movement is itself a form of thought, one as deserving of attention as the critical capacity of individual “genius.”
 
The timing of Mary’s biological death is, in other words, something for us to ponder. Occurring in such close proximity to the deaths of Kristin Linklater and Sally Banes, Mary’s death is a reminder that important work is frequently obscured by the shadows of “the great ones,” those who, for whatever series of reasons, have achieved legibility within the complex field of cultural production. Let us work harder to shine light on the work being done in those shadows. Next, given the tide change in education that is taking place now in the midst of the pandemic, we ought to consider seriously what place we are willing to make for the type of non-traditional pedagogy that Mary has created. How can experimentation continue to thrive in the arts education of the future? And, finally, what uncharted territories still remain within the phrase “the performance of everyday life?” Despite having had its heyday in the academe, this phrase continues to remind us that art and living are constantly entangled, which is also to say that art and dying are likewise entwined. Mary’s death can urge us to keep the borders of academic disciplines not only open to each other but also to the horizons of life and death in order to ensure that the work we do in the classroom speaks directly to the lives we lead on the streets. 
 
Finally, I’d like to relate one of Mary’s thoughts that she shared with me in her last weeks. During the last months or her life, despite her medical condition, Mary undertook a multi-week teaching tour through Europe and then a residency in Shanghai. During those trips, she earnestly discussed creating a bricks-and-mortar school for the study of the viewpoints, understood in all the senses (and more) that I’ve touched on here. Fascinatingly, her plan was to name this school something like, The Institute of Horizontality, a move that would have marked a profound letting go of the name “viewpoints” in order to grapple more directly with the nonhierarchical mode of living and thinking that Mary prized so much. I see in this act of letting go a model for how to continually deepen one’s engagement with art and also a challenge for all of us committed to the viewpoints. Each time we practice this work, which is to say, with each breath we take, we can sense the greater whole in which we all participate. To work through Mary’s viewpoints is to increase our aptitude of this participation. In this sense, it is possible to see death as more than the finite terminus of life’s long arc and, thus, to continue our work with Mary even if she is no longer here on this Earth to guide us.

An edited version of this eulogy appears in PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 43.3 (Sept. 2020): 50–54.
 
WILL DADDARIO is the author of Baroque, Venice, Theatre, Philosophy (Palgrave 2017), and co-editor of two anthologies: Adorno and Performance (with Karoline Gritzner, 2014) and Manifesto Now! Instructions for Performance, Philosophy, Politics (with Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca, 2013). He is co-editor of the Performance Philosophy Book Series and co-editor of the journal Performance Philosophy (performancephlosophy.org/journal). He currently lives in Asheville, North Carolina where he engages in grief work and continuing education services for local and international communities.

In anticipation of the 2021 Performance Philosophy conference, I've been thinking about "problems" in the sense that Deleuze discussed them. I particularly like Bourassa's parsing of the term in the book Deleuze and American Literature:

"Problems, far more than solutions, open our eyes. It is said that every solution is worthy of its problems and that every problem gets the answer that it merits. So we can talk about good and bad problems, problems that are more or less worthy. And this is truly the challenge of thinking. Not to get the 'correct' answers, but to formulate the worthy problems, problems that carry their answers with them in the clarity and rightness of their form. [...] The difference between a bad problem and a good one is that the bad problem demands a solution that will quickly be recognized and validated. When we read the essay that portentously comes to the same conclusion as the last dozen essays of its kind, we are in the presence of a worn-out problems. A good problem is one that changes our vision, makes new things visible, breaks up the previous divisions, and installs new ones (which may themselves be replaced). The good problem is often the articulation of a mystery that has not been voiced, and in the setting out of the mystery, much comes to us, not as answers, but as singular points of the question we have posed" (2009, 195; this appears in the conclusion where the problem being put forth is that of the Nonhuman)."

In this sense, a Performance Philosophy problem would be one of the mysteries that have evolved within the seams of the organization since its emergence in 2013.

I'm interested in the problem of "No," and I'd like to explore it along the following lines:

• Given that arts and humanities fields have gradually turned away from "Criticism" as a means of knowledge production in favor of a "productive" approach (in which Deleuze is often cited as a main point of inspiration), what has happened to "No"? 
• By "No," I mean the articulation of refusal. There are times when an approach or an ideology is wrong. Full stop. I believe, for example, that the protests of Trump supporters who wish to "Liberate" states from the Covid-19 quarantine are wrong. I want to say no to them. They may be productive expressions of specific modes of thinking, but they are also to be challenged.
• Is there a way that Performance Philosophers could challenge them, a way that employs the artistic-academic methods we have come to know from the field?
• Historical precedents for this type of "no" include: Dada's refusal of rational language through their poetry and performance practice; the creation of new calendar systems in the wake of political revolutions, which essentially negated the entire temporal scheme on which previous regimes were founded; hacktivist virtual sit-ins and the "classical" embodied sit-ins of the Civil Rights movements in various countries.
• I'd like to elaborate on each of these historical events so as to more fully understand what a Performance Philosophy "No" might look like.
• Ultimately, I'm interested in forwarding a specific "No": No to the current educational system (specifically Universities).
• I'll probably have to deal with Deleuze and Guattari's unique deployment of "No" towards the end of What is Philosophy?

(Full version coming soon)

Nurse:

• Wet Nurse: τιθήνη
  
  • Plato’s famous “receptacle and nurse of all becoming,” which he offers as a definition of Space or Matter in Timaeus («ὑποδοχὴ» καὶ ἔτι «ἡ τιθήνη»)
    
  • Plotinus comments on this passage and clarifies it somewhat in his Ennead: “For if it is receptacle and nurse, becoming is other than it, but that which is altered is in becoming, so matter would be existent before becoming, and before alteration; and the words “receptacle” and also “nurse” imply its maintenance in the state in which it is free from affections; and so does “that in which each thing appears on its entrance, and again goes out from it”3 and the statements that it is “space” and “seat.”4 And the statement which has been criticised as speaking of a “place of the forms”5 does not mean an affection of the substrate, but is trying to find another way [of participation].”
    
• One who waits on the sick: θεραπευτής
  
  • It can also be “one who attends on anything,” but is more commonly a “worshipper.”
    
  • There was a group of philosophers (an Alexandrian sect)  who went by this name, the “Therapeutae”
    
  • In Plato’s Republic, the word is synonymous with (translated as) “doctor,” “one who care for the sick.”
    
  • And in Galen, “one who treats the disease”
    
  • In Plutarch’s Moralia, in a section titled “That a Philosopher Ought to Converse Especially with Men in Power,” we find the adjective--θεραπευτικός—used to describe “an attendant”: “No, on the contrary, the man who is ambitious for himself and afraid of every whisper is just the one who avoids and fears being called a persistent and servile attendant on those in power. For what does a man say who is an attendant upon philosophy and stands in need of it?”
    
  • And then the verb--θεραπεύω—leads to many compelling sources:
    
    • Pseudo-Lucian, writing of the figure of the Cynic: “But I dance no attendance at the doors of the so-called fortunate, but consider their golden crowns and their purple robes mere pride, and I laugh at the fellows who wear them.”
      
    • Epictetus, considering the question “How ought we to bare ourselves toward tyrants,” plays with the verb throughout an entire paragraph. The translator explains: “The whole passage turns on the various meanings of θεραπεύω, which include serve, attend to, give medical care to, pay attention to, pay court to, flatter, etc.”
      
  • Thus the connection between the nurse and the philosopher: one attends to the sick of body, the other to the sick of soul
    

Nursing:

• When we get to the activity--Nursing—we encounter (variants of) both of the keywords above: τιθήνη and θεραπευτής. But we also encounter another word, one that is quite familiar to me but somewhat surprising to find in this search: παιδαγωγία. In that form, there aren’t too many entries in the Loeb library. It’s more common variant, however, παιδαγωγός, one who undertakes παιδαγωγία, shows up much more:
  
  • There is an entire character in Sophocles’ Electra named “Old Slave”
    
  • Pedagagos appears again in Euripides’ Medea, but there it is translated as “Tutor”
    
  • Also “tutor” in Menander’s Aspis
    
  • The translator of Plato’s Lysis explains, “The παιδαγωγός was a trusted slave who was appointed to attend on a boy out of school hours and to have a general control over his conduct and industry.”
    
  • Plutarch, pursuing the matter of how we ought to study poetry, shines some light on this role of “tutor” as explained above: “Now in all cases it is useful also to seek after the cause of each thing that is said. Cato, for example, used, even as a child, to do whatever the attendant in charge of him ordered, yet he also demanded to know the ground and reason for the order. And so the poets are not to be obeyed as though they were our keepers or law-givers, unless their subject matter be reasonable.”
    

Attending:

• So what is interesting thus far?
  
  • Connection between the nurse who cares for the sick, the therapist, and the philosopher who cares for the sick of soul
    
    
  • The nurse and the philosopher meet another figure, that of the pedagogue, who serves a similar function, namely to guide
    
  • But the figure of the pedagogue is not one we would necessarily want to emulate today:
    
    • Cite secondary sources (below): Close members of the family, but... 
      
  • This question leads to an important matter for all teachers: Do you care for your students like the nurse and philosopher, or do you watch over them like the slave who guides well-to-do children to school? 
    
  • What would it mean to “attend” to our students like the nurse and philosophical therapist?
    
• That question leads to a confrontation with the word “attend”
  
  • When we look that word up in the Ancient Greek dictionary, we find a number of synonyms. One—Attend on (as a servant on a child)—is pedagogue. Another—to attend medically—is the variant of therapy that we’ve talked a bit about. 
    
  • But also this: ἐφέπω…
    
    • A look at the definitions paints an aggressive picture:
      
      • Molest, or follow a woman
        
      • Ply, or practice a pursuit
        
      • obey, attend to
        
    • Does this not set up a confrontation with the dialectic of power that teachers face in the classroom? [...]
      
• The compelling question to which I arrive is this: in what ways ought we, teachers, attend to/on our students? 
  
  • At the surface level of analysis, I think we all agree that we must avoid the violent role of overseer or stalker who, in the name of obeying existing ideologies, follows a student through a course of study like a stalker would follow a woman. 
    
  • Likewise, it seems obvious that an ethical pedagogue will steer clear of the Ancient role of “tutor” that sought to correct the conduct of the pupil through force or verbal harassment or anything of the sort
    
  • The only classical dimension of pedagogy that seems relevant is the thread that ties “teaching” to “attendance,” namely the kind of attendance that a nurse contributed to the sick. But here, the trap would be to liken students to the ill who are always necessarily coming to the classroom in need of repair or an antidote of some kind. The power dynamic there is unbalanced: teachers have the remedy of which students must partake. 
    
  • But my recent long stay in the hospital reveals a particular quality of nurses that point beyond this unhealthy power dynamic.
    
    • Nurses actually touch patients, whereas doctors seem more often to consult numbers and data gathered by nurses of the patients
      
    • Nurses resemble a medical generalist, one who knows a bit about each of the areas of medicine. By contrast, doctors specialize. The general knowledge of nurses feels much more comprehensive and starts to feel like the philosopher’s knowledge of “general” or “universal” truths (putting aside, for now, the challenge of those terms). 
      
    • It is easier to converse with a nurse than with a doctor, meaning that the close contact between patient and nurse (or patient’s parents and nurses) leads to conversations that reveal the connection between the medical world and the world beyond the hospital. This “dialogic” quality to the relationship is often lacking in the doctor-parent relationship
      
  • All of this is to say that “attending on” our students in the spirit of a nurse might lead to an intimate mode of teaching that is hands-on, that seeks to tie academic speciality to concerns of general knowledge, and that relies upon casual conversation as a genuine relationship-building tool.
    
  • More broadly, there is a “care” that nurses bring to their work that philosophers and teachers would do well to emulate. (Foucault and Hadot, of course, talked about this in great detail, at least in regard to philosophy.)
    

Secondary sources

Yannicopoulos, A. V. (1985). The pedagogue in antiquity. British Journal of Educational Studies, 33(2), 173–179. doi:10.1080/00071005.1985.9973708

• “While  the teacher's  function was to equip the  boy with useful knowledge and  skills, the tutor was to enforce decent  conduct. He also stayed continuously by the  side of his charge either inside or outside the school. According to Quintilian, Philostratus and Libanius, pedagogues,  holding their sticks in their hands ready for action, used to sit between the pupils in order to prevent them teasing  each other” (176).
  
• “What   is taught   to the child   by his teacher is supplemented by the pedagogue',  states Libanius, '...he coaxes the child, shouts at  him, produces the rod, shakes the lash, constructs the lessons  to be stored in his mind'” (176).
  

Christian Laes, “Pedagogues in Greek Inscriptions in Hellenistic and Roman Antiquity,” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik, Bd. 171 (2009): 113-122.

• Other terms such as τροφός (feeder, rearer) and θρέψας (nourisher) may refer to pedagogues, but the terms are quite broad (114).
  
• “It was already common in ancient Greece for a child to be entrusted to a pedagogue. His  task encompassed an intellectual aspect (tutoring of the young child and language instruction) and a moral aspect (accompanying and protecting the child as it walked to school, further socialisation through, among other things, training in politeness). The moral and  the intellectual facet were, for that matter, not strictly separated. These educators could be either slaves either free persons [...]” (114).
  
• “Paidagogoi were usually discerned from paidonomoi, who were officials or supervisors in charge of education [...]. Other terms as paideutai or epistatai also refer to officials supervisors of children or instructors and teachers” (114).
  
  

I have a frictious relationship with repetition. On the one hand, I don’t believe that anything ever repeats, not really, at least not in the strict sense of a “repetition of the same.” For example: I I I I I I I I. This is not the repetition of the same I. Each I is different. Each occupies a distinct space and has resulted from a distinct pressing of my computer’s keyboard. In casual conversation, one could easily suggest that I have repeated I. But when I really think about it, I don’t see a single I repeated. I see I and I and I and I, always new.
On the other hand, my body seems to feel the return of habitual action, specifically habitual actions that trouble me. The air seems to thicken each morning at 7am when my three-year-old bolts out of bed to start a new day. My body drags itself to an upright position so as to follow and hesitates because of a deep uneasiness about doing this again, of trying to get energy again, of repeating the struggle of parenting. I could possibly describe this as a “continuation” of parenting, instead of a “repetition,” except that there is something very Groundhog’s Day about it. Same with the non-linear path of potty training: poop, again! In this scenario, it doesn’t feel like new poop. It feels like I’m re-living the totality of the “training” process. At the other end of the continuum, where this repetition feels most invasive, I encounter trauma, which is the epitome of this bodily sensation of repetition: I, in the present moment, feel again a series of affronting and unwanted bodily reactions that I have experienced before. This is related to the idea of nomos that I wrote about last time, the habit of experience that instantiates itself through (ostensibly) repeated action.

I have a frictious relationship with repetition. Does it exist as a natural phenomenon of life, or am I the one who fabricates it? To answer this question, I have, for years, explored the topic of repetition in theatre and performance studies. Each time one performs (any habitual activity) or each time an actor steps onstage to enact a part in a pre-designed performance, what precisely is happening? Do we repeat our actions, or is each time a totally new experience? The most intriguing treatment of these questions, however, appears not in theatre and performance scholarship but in philosophy and psychoanalysis. Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition and Jacques Lacan’s re-workings of Sigmund Freud’s thoughts on repeated (neurotic and desirous) behavior are texts I return to, repeatedly (?).

>>READ MORE<<

Notes for forthcoming entry on repetition:

Repeat and Repetition

• Ἐπαναπολέω (repeat yet again)
  
• Ἐπαναπόλησις (repetition)
  
• Ἐπαναπορεύομαι (return)
  
• Ἀναλαμβάνω (take up again, resume, in narrative or argument; recollect in mind/memory) … spatializing memory...to walk through?
  
  • In Plato’s Phaedo: “I am reviewing this position a number of times on purpose so we don’t miss anything [...]”
    
  • In Lucian’s Saturnalia: [Cronos] “I take over the sovereignty again to remind mankind what life was like under me [...]”
    
• Ἐπαναλαμβάνω (take up again, resume, repeat; revise, correct, undertake)
  
  • As ἐπαναλαμβάνων, in Plato’s Phaedrus: [Socrates] “I know very well that when listening to Lysias he did not hear once only, but often urged him to repeat; and he gladly obeyed.”
    
  • Επανδιπλαζε, in Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound: [Prometheus, speaking to the Chorus about Io] “If any of this is obscure and hard to understand, please ask again and you will learn it more clearly. I have ample leisure—more than I want.”
    
• Ἀναπολέω (poetic: turn up the ground again, therefore repeat)
  
  • Ἀναπόλησις (repetition). In Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations: “An unphilosophical but none the less an effective help to the contemning of death is to tell over the names of those who have clung long and tenaciously to life. How are they better off than those who were cut off before their time?”
    
  • Ἀναπολητέον (one must recall to mind)
    
• Ραψωδών (recite)(Rhapsodize)
  
  • Ῥαψῳδέω (recite)
    
    • Ῥαψῳδία (repetition of epic poetry)
      
    • Ῥαψῳδός (reciter of poetry)
      
      • Famous conversation in Plato’s Ion about the Rhapsodist’s art.  
        
      • Oedipus refers to the Sphynx as a “versifying hound”
        
• Ὑμνέω (to sing of; commemorate; tell of over and over again) (Hymn)
  
  • Ὑμνήσεις, in Sophocles’ Electra: “If you do not leave off these lamentations, they plan to send you to where you shall no longer see the light of the sun, but while still alive in a dungeon, outside this country, you shall bewail your troubles.”
    
• Θρυλέω (babble, repeat over and over; related to “common talk”)
  
• Διήγησις (narration, narrative)...is the idea that to narrate is necessarily to repeat something?
  
  

I recently purchased a subscription to the Loeb Classics Online Library. To encourage my use of this amazing resource, I am starting a blog series called "Classical Bellyflop." The name comes from the feeling of leaping or diving into the classical texts curated in that library. Since my knowledge of Ancient Greek and Latin is pretty basic, however, any dive would scarcely resemble something pretty; not even a cannonball or a jack-knife would serve as an adequate comparison. No, when I dive into Ancient Greece I most certainly bellyflop. The text-water slaps me with as much force as my dive carries with it. The discoveries I make in the text are usually eye-opening and sometimes startling, similar to the surprisingly painful sensation of breaking the water’s surface. In these blog entries, I am confidently admitting my ugly bellyflop into these classical texts. Combined with definitions sourced through the Liddell and Scott online dictionary, these forays into the Loeb Classical Library will chronicle my flops and present them as lessons.

Why lessons? Why share these bellyflops? I am convinced that words are used too carelessly today. The rich histories packed into each and every word of the English language are hardly ever examined. As a teacher and a writer, I feel called to publicize some of these histories and the lessons that I myself learn every time I unpack the language that I use. Additionally, despite the foreignness of the Ancient Greek alphabet, the English language relies on Ancient Greek words to a great extent. Knowing a bit about this reliance helps us to become more astute readers and critical thinkers. This, at least, is my hope.

The first word I am exploring is νόμος (nomos).
 
You have likely encountered this word many times, though it is usually nested within a larger word, such as “astronomy,” “autonomy,” and “antinomial.” The most common definition of “nomos” is “that which is in habitual practice, use or possession,” “use, custom,” and, more generally, “law.” Thus, “astronomy” is the law or habit of the stars. “Autonomy” means to govern the self (auto = self). “Antinomial” is formed by fusing “against” (anti) and “nomos” (law) and means “the rejection of law.”
 
As I’ll show in what follows, this usual definition is accompanied by a now rare meaning linked to the production of music in Ancient Greece. Since music, mathematics, and philosophy were so intimately related for the Greeks, this forgotten definition of nomos helps us peer into the connection between order, the frequency of sound, and the workings of both human society and the wider universe.
 
I discovered this new-old definition of νόμος while writing a book with my friend and collaborator, Matthew Goulish, which maps the contours of the astonishing poetry, drama, and philosophy of Jay Wright. While reading Wright’s most recent book of poetry, The Prime Anniversary (2019), I encountered this verse:
 
That periodic bouncing between mirror points
might define the note’s order in the scale. Custom
could determine all that the spent soul might fathom,
make of it a blue galaxy that disappoints.
Consider a slow dance about an axis, dust
in an elliptical field. Now Emily must
go mad with her math, and take these errors in trust.
 
You’ll have to wait for the book to hear our fullest interpretation of stanzas like this one. For now, let me draw your attention to the second line where Wright ends the first sentence and begins another: “[…] the note’s order in the scale. Custom”.
 
It seems that Wright is aware of the familiar and less-than-common definitions of νόμος. He has united two sentences that each summon one of these definitions. “Custom” hearkens to the traditional meaning, and the discussion of a note’s order in a scale calls to mind the following: “melody [...] a type of early melody created by Terpander for the lyre as an accompaniment to Epic texts.” The Prime Anniversary is dedicated to exploring ancient philosophical ideas in verse, as did the pre-Socratic philosophers. This fact helped me tune into the subtle reference that one could easily miss while trying to figure out what precisely Wright is talking about here.
 
To give a brief peek into the complex working of this passage, I’ll widen my scope to the entirety of the first sentence: “That periodic bouncing between mirror points / might define the note’s order in the scale.” A “mirror scale,” or “mirror mode,” which comes to mind because of Wright’s word choice, is a musical phenomenon that reveals the type of “distance” between notes that so interested Ancient Greek philosophers. Arthur Fox helps us understand what’s going on in one of his blog entries:
 
Try reversing or “mirroring” the order of intervals in any given scale. Reversing the order of intervals in a palindromic scale will produce the same scale. Otherwise, we will end up with a new ‘mirror scale‘ that is on the opposite side of the brightness/darkness spectrum.
 
So, for example, intervals between the scale degrees of the Major (Ionian) scale are as follows:
T – T – ST – T – T – T – ST. If we mirror these degrees, we get the Phrygian mode.

For the Ancient Greeks, geometrical relations such as those revealed through the realization of mirror scales hinted at an underlying structural code to the cosmos. Philosophers such as Pythagoras, and even more staid ones like Plato, sought to understand whether the discernment of those underlying codes in nature could translate into a harmonious political situation among humans. If so, then the law of the land (nomos) might be developed from a deep understanding of musical harmony and the placement of notes in a scale (nomos). In fact, despite his protestations against music and its ability to mislead the soul, Plato seems to hint at the benefit of such realizations in his dialogues Laws and Statesman.
 
Wright, too, senses resonance between the mathematics of harmonious musical relations and the order of the universe, which is why this stanza moves on to discuss the phenomenon of the Blue Galaxy and elliptical orbits. Unlike Plato, however, whose philosophical systems seem to conserve a top-down governmental structure in human society, Wright’s poetry brings some dissonant dissidence. His fusion of sources challenges us to unite cultures and ideas that most people keep separated into categories like “Western,” “African,” “Musicology,” and “Philosophy.” By dismissing the historically developed separation of various modes of thought and cultural production, Wright allows us to think up new combinations. Or, rather, he helps us revisit old unities that provided glimpses of the active Oneness to the universe.  

If you think about the geometry of music long enough, you’ll start to understand why so many musicians find spiritual power in their art. A prime example is John Coltrane whose famous diagram of the circle of fifths hints at his dual role as mathematician.
 
When we listen to Coltrane and dwell on images like this, we find another example of the two-fold definition of nomos, much like in Jay Wright’s poem. At stake in Coltrane’s music is the possibility of re-ordering the habits of society through coming up with heretofore-unheard-of orders of notes, as if thinking up new musical formations will bring about a social revolution. Nomos evokes nomos. Play the old standards, things stay the same. Blow off the roof and change blows through.
 
At this point, it seems important to point out that, in a relatively limited number of steps, I have maneuvered from a dictionary of Ancient Greek words to a theory of political revolution embedded within a jazz musician’s sound. The Loeb Classical Library sent me back to A Love Supreme. What’s important here is not that I’ve discovered some new connection between seemingly disparate human artefacts. Rather, I’ve discovered something that was already embedded in the word “law” or “custom,” a type of knowledge that was released through poetic verse. Is there, perhaps, a methodology here that we can put to repeated use? Begin with poetry. Peer deep into the structure and words of the poetic verse. Unpack the history of the terms and listen to what that history has to say. Through listening, rediscover truths that have been forgotten or intentionally pushed aside, and then put those truths into action in order to bring about change.

In Second Grade, I (Will) remember having an afternoon class with a teacher I had never seen before. Even though it was 30 years ago, the experience of that day sticks with me. I can think of three reasons for this. First, the teacher guided us through a hands-on exercise intended to engage our senses. We passed spices and various liquids (like vanilla extract) around a circle and tried to guess what they were by smelling, tasting, and touching them. I volunteered to taste what turned out to be garlic powder, and the teacher was impressed that I could name what it was. I was less impressed with the taste in my mouth, but quite interested in the exercise. The engagement of all of my senses left an indelible mark on my memory.
Second, this was the first male teacher I had ever seen. Not only had all my previous teachers been women (in school, swim lessons, gymnastics, and other venues), but I had never even seen a male teacher in our school. Men could be teachers! Clearly, this realization stuck with me and informed, to some degree, my path in life.

Third, I remember vividly a meditation that ended the class. Our teacher asked us to close our eyes and visualize various things. The final thing was “nothing.” “Now think of nothing,” he said. “Try as hard as you can. Can you do it?” I opened my eyes and looked directly at him from my place in the back of the room. I said quietly, “It’s not possible. You can’t think of nothing.” But as I looked around the class, all the other students seemed immersed in the task. They nodded their heads in assent of his question: they were all picturing nothing. When I looked back to the teacher, he met my gaze and smiled. Can you think about nothing? I’ve thought about that question since that day in 1988.
This post is about nothing.  

While not strictly equal with death, “nothingness” provides a commensurate challenge. Nothing and death are equally gigantic in scale. How do we think of it? Why would we think of it? To think of one’s death is to prepare for and to become more intimate with one’s own finitude. There are multiple benefits to thinking of death often, not least of which is the overcoming of fear and the ability to sense new threads connecting me with my loved ones who have died. Similarly, to think of nothingness is to press the mind to its limit and expand our cognitive maps of the universe. If welcoming thoughts of death into our daily consciousness can demystify the great equalizer that so many people work feverishly to avoid, then coming to grips with nothing can throw the wild variety of our being into relief and perhaps help us to engage with the Great Mystery.

This kind of activity might seem abstract and unnecessary. My hope, however, is that I can reveal some of the mind-expanding potential bound up with the task of thinking nothing, and, furthermore, to demonstrate how thinking nothingness is helpful for imagining new forms of connection with dead friends and family. I emphasize the word “task” because, like so many words, it carries a fascinating history that, once unpacked, makes the word available for new uses. After tarrying with “nothing,” I’ll move on to “task” so as to end this reflection with some specific suggestions about how the task of (thinking) nothing deepens our relations with our dead friends and loved ones.

I’ve thought about nothing a lot, and I can easily summarize my findings. Nothing cannot be. There can be no nothing. Nothing, were it to have qualities (which it can’t), would need to be free from anything that has ever been. Thus, even if the universe was extinguished this very moment, it still would once have been, and therefore the remaining absence would flummox nothingness. You can’t have an absence because an absence is something, so even an absent universe is not quite nothing. Amusingly, the only way to get close to nothingness is to say that it doesn’t exist. There is no nothing. But even here, the laugh echoes back upon us since attributing any kind of is­-ness to nothing ends up undoing nothing (by giving it something, a weird kind of is-ness). Nothing, it seems to me, is a relative construct, something we rely upon to distinguish between the presence and absence of things. When it comes to the grand Nothing, however, we are bound always to find something posing as nothing. 

French philosopher and novelist Tristan Garcia wrestles with this problem in his carefully crafted book Form et objet. He concludes:

“Therefore, there is no nothing except from one of these three angles: a nothing which is in fact something; a nothing which is in fact the opposite of something [which for him means something’s form]; or a nothing which is in fact an absence of something (an emptiness or an exile). Each way leads to something, with none of them leading to a nothing” (Garcia, Form and Object 49).

His point, which is also my point, a point that deserves repeating, is that nothing is something, and, therefore, it has the potential to generate ideas, affections, activities, and events. We can make something with nothing.
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(To read about nothing’s counterpart—Everything—click through to the parallel post, “What about Everything?”)

I have had the opportunity to make something out of that which first appeared to be nothing. When Joanne and I left the hospital after Finlay’s inexplicable death during childbirth, we were overwhelmingly aware of the wrongness that was unfolding. You simply don’t leave the maternity wing with nothing. You leave with a child, as was demonstrated by all the other happy parents around us. Or not. We had, or so it seemed, discovered a loophole in the order of things. We left with nothing and commenced our life as parents whose child was dead.

Except we didn’t leave with nothing. Though it would take me several months to understand, and years to put into words, I eventually realized that we left the hospital that day with something. It wasn’t the thing we wanted. In fact, it was something we absolutely didn’t want. But it was something nonetheless. We left with an unbreakable connection between the land of the living and the land of the dead. We had forged a connection with all that lay beyond the realm of the visible and knowable.

 In a recent podcast episode, I interviewed David Harradine and Sam Butler, the artistic directors of the English art group Fevered Sleep (Episode 6 of “To Grieve”). At the end of the interview, I asked David and Sam what it meant “to grieve.” David’s answer was precisely aligned with my thoughts on nothing (which is really something). He said (I’m paraphrasing): To grieve means to build relationships with people who are no longer here. It may seem quite difficult, since the living party is going to put in 100% of the work, but the relationship with your deceased loved one continues. Grieving is the activity of nurturing this new, non-traditional, painful/praise-worthy/depressing/joyous connection with the dead.

My connection with Finlay is forged through my daily grief for his absence. What appeared at first as his nothingness when we left the hospital without him, his sheer lack of existing upon the “sterile promontory” (as Hamlet says) of my daily terrain, turned out to be his invitation to me to think beyond the limits of the ordinary. His nothing is really quite something.

But the burden of it. The tax Finlay’s absence withdraws from me. To ignore the difficulty of this relationship with the dead is to gloss over a major aspect of the grief-nothingness equation. And this brings me to the task of nothingness.

The history of the word reveals a connection with the Modern French word tâche, which means “duty, tax,” and this leads back into the Latin vernacular where we find tasca, “a duty, assessment.” By the late 16th century, the word (in English and French) acquires the general meaning of “any piece of work that has to be done.”  

This brief etymological foray provides me with a few insights. I might think of the effort required to establish an intimate bond with my dead son as a kind of tax that comes hand in hand with the wider work of conscious expansion. Among the death, dying, and grief community here in Asheville (and I suspect elsewhere in the United States), the work of reckoning with death is considered a privilege held by those for whom grief has bestowed a more nuanced understanding of death and dying. To die, I aver, is to change into a state of which we know quite little. We do know, however, that it is not an end. Death cannot lead to nothing, since, as I’ve already mentioned, there is no nothing. If death becomes, in this way of thinking, a portal to some unknown territory, then the living may find ways to communicate across the portal. To do so may mean risking one’s appearance of sanity or one’s lazy harmony with the status quo, but this risk is simply another word for the tax, or task, of making something of what first appears to be the nothing of the dead.

More profound is the general meaning assigned to “task” of “any piece of work that has to be done.” In this formulation, the task of nothingness, of forging meaningful and tangible relationships with the dead, joins the ranks of our daily chores. Wake up, brush my teeth, bond with my dead son, throw my two-year-old son’s Phalen’s cloth diapers in the laundry, make coffee, imagine Finlay’s favorite breakfast food, make breakfast, etc., etc., etc. As complex as this discussion of “nothingness” and grief may seem, the result of all this philosophical labor is merely another handful of moments in the day. One of the biggest challenges faced by grief workers is to spread the wisdom that grief and death and dying ought to be as banal as buying coffee, shopping for groceries, and getting gas. Grief, and the task of nothingness, is and should be a common occurrence into which we invest as much energy as is stored in our love for those who have died. We come back to this work whenever we can, each day, and then we do the laundry.
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Can you think about nothing? Of course. And if you experience a profound loss—either of a person or a version of reality that you hold dear—then you’ll likely experience the visceral feeling of a gigantic hole right in the center of your universe. But this hole is not nothing. It may in fact turn out to be the Whole. Whatever it is, it is certainly something, and I think it is worth the effort to consider what we might make with this peculiar entity.