“Space is the relationship between bodies, and without it there can be neither energy nor motion.” So Alan Watts launches an explanation of our misguided dualism, and reaches the insight (among many): “differentiation is not separation,” “for every individual is a unique manifestation of the Whole, as every branch is a particular outreaching of the tree” (The Book, 79).
Some lines of William Wordsworth chimed in my mind when I read those words of Alan Watts’:
A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.
No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.
She has no motion now, because she has become other manifestations and is now nothing.
Space is no thing.
Actually, it’s more like time.
The word entered English around 1300, and its first meaning was temporal—the duration or extent of time “between two definite points or events” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, in which the entry for space goes on for five densely printed pages. And of course space implies time, because it can only be known in time.
But as we know, “definite points or events” don’t really exist either; where do you draw the boundaries to make them definite? In that little elegy from 1798, Wordsworth marked the boundary between two definite events—her life and death—with the space between stanzas, which is also a pause, a caesura.
I just received a package from Amazon from someone who is also thinking a lot about space:
… the paperback edition of a book I had the honor to work on with Nona Orbach, an inspiring artist and art therapist in Israel who thinks about space and time in very interesting ways—through the unfolding of culture as seen in excavated artifacts, and through the dynamics of permission between people that trigger transformation. She’s an inspiration to me to think of creative living as an open process, rather than as something to “do” in a genre.