The Vertical and the Horizontal

Today climbing out of the subway I suddenly thought about how a minister I once worked for described the goal of liturgy: to help an individual balance and develop the experience of the vertical plane (relationship with God or something spiritual) and the horizontal plane (relationship with ourselves and the world). I thought of how that vertical/horizontal dynamic maps onto the disposition of the arms and the placement of acting objects in a baroque style, how there is a physical sense to high and low, close and far and how the performer does work to integrate and relate these areas. It helped that I was climbing several flights of stairs out of the subway at the time, moving my own body through a vertical space many times taller than it is, and thinking too about how often and how far I move around on the vertical plane, from deep underground to shooting up in an elevator to the 29th floor of a tall office building, or on the horizontal plane, by walking or hopping on the subway and traversing quite the area in the course of a day. The geography of the 21st century city-dweller is definitely one that negotiates and hopefully balances these fundamental planes.

So I opened my notes and transcription of Austin's gestures for the exerpt from Gray's Elegy, which I have been carrying around with me for some time. And looking at the first verse, I found the vertical and the horizontal neatly bookended. The text is as follows:

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day
The lowing herd winds slowly o'er the lea,
The ploughman homeward plods his weary way
And leaves the world to darkness, and to me.

The first line has two gestural complexes, "listening" (on "The curfew tolls", which includes a gesture of the head and eyes, the arms spread wife and the body moving forward in space), and one we might call "falling" on the second half of the line, with a prepatory ascent of the hands up the body's central axis, the arms marking "knell" at the beginning, parting at the high point, and then descending through "day".

The second two lines take place gesturally almost entirely on the horizontal plane, Austin's middle area; the gaze returns forward and the right hand traces the lowing herd over to the far right, then the left hand follows the ploughman going home, off to the left. At the end of the line, on "weary", the hands raise a little, more I think to prepare for the next line than to depict his state, though that could come into it.

The final line again invokes the vertical axis, the eye intent on vacancy at "leaves" and both hands noting "the world" in an elevated position and descending to rest by "me."

In fact, to trace the track of the fingertips of someone performing this would more or less make a cross, so firmly does it adhere to the vertical (the dying day), the horizontal (the actions of the world) and again the vertical (darkness falling, the world left to the narrator for his musings). And by emphasizing the dying fall, the first stanza already prepares us formally for the the next time both hands will come to rest, when at the end of the fourth stanza the performer points out the graves of the place's forebearers.

I shall try to get some of these pages scanned in for next week so I can post what the gestural notation actually looks like.