THE SPACE IN-BETWEEN
Published: July, 2001
It’s two o’clock in the morning. I’m awake. The hollow light of faraway streetlights illumine the sky between my boat and Oakland. A filmy cover protects the stars. I can’t tell as I sit up and look through the hatch of my sailboat whether it’s fog or lowlying clouds. That is, until I hear the sound.
Not the long blast of a container ship outbound from Oakland port nor the bullying air horn of a 16 wheeler negotiating the turns to rid itself of Oakland’s port and get on the road for the east coast.
There it is again! More like the low gutteral bellow of a mother cow calling for her young. I count the seconds. Three seconds of absence, then the moaning. "Oh yeh, I remember now. It’s a buoy out in the Bay, it must be foggy out there. But which one am I listening to? Angel Island? Yerba Buena? Alcatraz?"
On the San Francisco National Public Radio station recently, I listened to an interview with Paul Horn, the floutist who spoke of returning to the Taj Mahal in India after a 35 year lapse. "I was playing with Miles Davis back then, in the mid-sixties. I was young, Miles kept yelling at me, ‘Slow it down, man, give it space. Give it space.’ I can still hear him."
"It takes 28 seconds for a note from my flute to travel upward, bounce off the ceiling of the Taj Mahal and return to me. 28 seconds. And I have to wait for it before I blow another note. Man that’s space. When I sat on the floor in the late 60’s in that mosque, in the fading twilight and blew that note and waited, I finally got it. I knew what Miles had been telling years before."
I lie here thinking about 28 seconds. I could warm my coffee in the microwave in 28 seconds. I could write a few sentences in my journal. I could tune into channel 2 and listen to the marine weather station. There’s alot I could do in 28 seconds. All Paul Horn could do was to sit crosslegged on the floor and wait. My mind wants to turn away from waiting and think of something more productive. Must be the Yerba Buena buoy, I decide.
When I was a teenager, some 35 years ago, I was an acolyte assisting the priest with communion, carrying the cross and occasionally getting out of school to help conduct a funeral. I liked that. Scooting out of school at 10:30a.m., dashing across the street, slipping into scarlet red vestments, half covered with laced white overgarment, lighting candles, picking up the cross, at ready. But what I looked forward to the most, was pulling that long rope, 50 feet of it, attached into that little boxed in space-the bell tower.
Before and after. I rang it to summon the congregation to church, I returned after the groundbreaking, the laying in of the body and the prayers. The ringing announcing the final passage of body from this world into the next. At first when I was learning, the burly hands of the priest held the rope and encompassed my hands. I still felt the heft of that bell, the willfullness of the clapper.
"Slow and steady, wait at the top, let the bell and the clapper meet. Don’t rush it." Like my dad’s hands, steadying mine on the wood plane, back and forth, even, steady strokes, plus a good follow through. The priest’s hands pulled mine and the rope sure, determined, holding at the bottom. Waiting. Then the release, a sharp retort then another, and we would pull down again, holding, waiting, then the release. Creating the empty space for the bell to do its work.
My first few attempts on my own declared my unwillingness to wait. Down I’d pulled the rope, a quick release, then down again. The bell chattered uncertainly, as if bruskly pushed out into the cold. More practice was needed. Not of the pulling but of the waiting and the timed release.
When I finally got it, the signal descending was a sharp clarion cry out above tree tops catching robins, blackbirds and pigeons in mid-flight.
Thirty five years later I was a priest teaching young girls and boys how to ring another bell, a thousand miles from Trinity in Michigan. This bell in an even older pre-civil war church was grouchy. More delicate, taking more deliberations on our part to make her work. Saturday mornings we would practice, a half dozen of us. Townspeople at the nearby post office chuckled, knowing that a funeral was not in procession but noviatiates were simply learning the ropes. Just as impatient as I was, those teenagers practiced until they all got it right. My wrinkled hands covering theirs, a good long, steady pull, a pause, then a release. "Let’s try it again." I would say, time and again.
When I was a dancer taking a composition class, my teacher kept reminding me, "Bill remember, you have to imagine the negative space that you are creating as well as the shape of your arms, legs, head, torso.
‘Negative space.’ The space created where I am not. The in-between space open, empty created in, around, and through the positioning of my lanky, wirey body. "Hold it there," she would yell at me. I would, sensing what I couldn’t see, hoping that the empty space reflected the curvature of spirit, the flutter of the hope, the mind’s curiosity.
These days when I write I have difficulty capturing the exact movement of the winged heron, the playfulness of seagulls engaged in hide and seek among the waffling boats. So I am taking a photography class to remind me of what memory fails at. Exactness. Last Tuesday was the class on composition. One photograph was put up on the screen and I swooned. A sailboat, going downwind in an ocean of glazed waves at sunset, towing, some 40 feet behind, an empty dinghy, a little boat of 10.’ Used to row ashore at the next harbor.
The class was critical of the photo. "The sailboat is too near the edge of the photo." "The ocean is too much apart of the picture, rolling waves, too many of them." "That little boat, snip it out of there, it’s not needed to make a good picture."
I was mesmerized by the ocean’s waves, rolling, rolling, swells rising up, taking the sailboat out beyond my horizon. A crossing. But right in the middle of the photo there was nothing but waves and a tiny thread. The rope that tethered the dinghy to the sailboat. Negative space. I waited in the breach, my imagination ballooned. At first I felt the thrill and fear of the adventure. Then I was on that journey. This was a ritual, this going out to sea, this was my final voyage. That empty dinghy held me, alone, lightly tethered to waves, sun and vessel until... Surprisingly no sense of lonliness overcame me, just the certainity that my time was coming. And that it was time for me to release myself into that empty space, "the negative space" created by vessel, wave, a slim thread of a lifeline. My death coming not to overwhelm nor terrify, no images of coffin nor critical care ward, a simple leavetaking, breasted on the crest of a wave. Away.
When Paul Horn returned 35 yeats later to the Taj Mahal, he was told to return at dusk after evening prayers were sung. The security guard swung upen the large gated door, Paul moved in quietly. The guard followed him and asked "Are you Paul Horn?" Paul was caught off guard, standing here in India, in the Taj Mahal after a such a lengthy absence, he looked at the young man and asked "Yes, how did you know?"
"My father sang with you 35 years years ago. May I sing the chants to Allah tonight?" There they were, old man with a flute in his hand, a young man sitting crosslegged. Together, breathing in deeply, holding their breaths for a moment and then releasing. Preparing. Soft bellies, opened to the spark of Allah, flute then atonal chant filling in the empty space, then the waiting.
It’s 3:30a.m. now. I must have dozed off but the boat is rocking hard against the dock, the fenders being squeezed are groaning. I have to go and rework the lines to lighten the strain, cut down on the complaining. I throw on my jeans and climb out on to the deck. The clouds are chasing each other, urged on by the sparkling of stars. I wait but I do not hear the throbbing, warning bleat of the sea buoy. The fog is gone, climbed up Oakland Hills, making a hasty retreat as this cold front hurtled in from the Pacific.
"Just where is that buoy?" I vow to check my charts in the morning. But right then another, stronger voice catches that thought and turns it around. "You don’t need to know, do you?" I climb back into my v-berth.
This is not about knowing, the baritone hum of the sea buoy riffling up and through the hatch of my v-berth. This urgent yearning resonates deeply with my water soul. Just like in the mornings, when an Islamic man hearing the call to prayer, prostrates himself, facing east. My body in this predawn hour is stretching out, preparing, being made ready to be taken. The echoing silence in between the reverberation of clapper and bell in the middle of the Bay alerts to another call. The final one, ringing only for me.
In those moments between the faraway plea of that mysterious buoy, I have fallen into that empty space. My body does not clench, no does overwhelming lonliness surge upward from gut to heart. Nor does some productive strategy of resistance appear in my mind. I rest and wait wondering whether this was a chant, prepared for me, coming to get me. Placing me gently into the dinghy. Then carrying me away.
