Incidentally, I just came across
this Substack article from Jonathan Rowson on... 'improvisation' as a spiritual practice : ) I think it has some helpful points and quotes to contemplate.
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I can’t currently find the source for the quotation, and I think it might be Cynthia Bourgealt, but I recently came across the line:
“An omniscient God cannot laugh.”
Some see God in austere terms, and I can’t speak for every believer, but personally I can’t get too excited about any God - existent or imaginary - that doesn’t laugh, either in some literal physical sense or through some mysterious divine cosmic grammar.
Every time we laugh we step out of a structure, and laughter can be thought of as a low-level everyday spiritual experience, a glimpse of the freedom that is part of our true nature.
So that line about omniscience knocked my head back in a good way and is relevant to improvisation's power. There is something about not knowing what is going to happen next that is fundamental to the human experience, and it is a critical element of humour, which, along with text, technology, long childhoods, and a weakness for self-destruction, is what marks us out as a species.
Not knowing everything is a precondition for finding something funny because otherwise there would no subversion, surprise, absurdity, excitement, or spontaneity. So assuming we want God to exist, we probably don’t want her to know everything.
Improvisation is fun and rewarding, but it’s more than that too - it’s a method of inquiry into the moment. And why does the moment matter? Because in a sense now is all we ever really have to work with. While we can interrogate nowness with meditation we can also inquire into it in more socially interactive and playful ways, and indeed we may have to.
Jean Gebser highlighted that our current mental-rational structure of consciousness is in its deficient mode, which is partly why the world appears to be becoming less intelligible. He said that the emerging Integral structure of consciousness would have the character of time-freedom and Perspectiva explored this in our work on temporics last October.
I believe improvisation gives us a taste of the challenge is to refocus on the question of where the future resides in us, and there’s a lovely quote that captures this:
The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.- Rainier Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (1929)
Gebser called this latency and it refers to things that are real but concealed and yet are full of potential.
As we free ourselves from our attachment to crisis we pay more and better attention to what crisis thinking may unhelpfully perpetuate or occlude. For instance, we may start to attend better to what Bonnitta Roy calls ‘complex potential states’, Nora Bateson calls Aphanipoiesis and Indra Adnan calls Ada! These are different ideas, though I don’t think it’s entirely incidental that they come from women, and draw attention to the value of what is latent, unseen, and yet perceptible through the kinds of subtle and appreciative inquiry that are precluded by the ‘I-can-fix-it’ crisis mentality.
A key part of grasping the reality of complex potential is to realise that it resides in the perception of a different quality of time.
I’m quoting from Bonnitta Roy’s chapter in Dispatches from a Time Between Worlds where she references Donna Haraway’s emphasis on Kainos (not Kairos!) in Staying with the Trouble(2016).
The Greeks had two words for time:
Note the contrast with Kairos being ‘saturated with resonance and meaning’ while Kainos is ‘the sense of thick ongoing presence’. Later Bonnie says: “Kainos means each moment is replete, and precious and precarious.”
I’m fine with Chronos, and I’m all for Kairos, but Kainos is just as important, and today perhaps more so, because it gets us beyond the sequential limits of Chronos, and the Weight of Kairos, back to the lightness and potential that can lead to the spirit of freshness and renewal through which a transformed world might be brought into being.
Again quoting from Bonnie’s chapter:
Gebser called for a new kind of statement “to make the strength of spirit perceptible” to express the energies of the psyche, the self, the soul and the culture. He declared that philosophy based on abstract representations was coming to an end and that the new form would render spirit transparent to us, would allow it to enter our awareness directly. Gebser experienced his own time as in between worlds. He understood the need to address the inherent fatalism at the heart of our relationship with time
At the end of Bonnitta’s chapter, she puts this poetically, and indicates that the heart of our historical challenge may be to become better improvisers:
What then must we do? We are the people to create enduring acts of inspiration and imagination for others to find when this world finally comes to an end. These will be seeds that can grow in the next world, but not in ours. We will never see them bloom. It would be like planting a Tamarack in the Pleistocene for someone today. We are the people to do this religiously, but not with messianic fervor, rather with loving care, trusting that our purpose is not of this world and for us, but of the next world and for them.Who are we, then, these people assembled at the end of the world?
I believe there’s an important relationship between the practice of improvisation, the experience of Kainos, and the vitality of regenerative culture, and this is something we’ll be exploring at this year’s festival. I am not saying that improvisation is the only way to renew our relationship to time, nor that it automatically saves the world from itself, but I believe it’s a great place to start.
