“Foolish Fire, Holy Fools And Thoughtful Paths” by Andrea Codrington Lippke
This essay was published by Lia Chavez Studio in the book, Light Body, released on the occasion of “Lia Chavez: Light Body” at the Farm of Isabella Rossellini in July 2016.
My heels reared aloft, my toes they hearkened,—thee they would know: hath not the dancer his ear—in his toe!
—Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Second Dance Song,” Thus Spake Zarasthustra
On the night of January 1, 1840, the English antiquarian Jabez Allies was looking out the window of a friend’s house in a small Worcestershire village when he witnessed something that until that time he had only heard about in legend: an unusual dancing light in the distance that fluctuated in intensity between the pale blue of an electric spark and the brightness of the dog star Sirius.
Sometimes it was only like a flash in the pan on the ground; at other times it rose up several feet and fell to the earth, and became extinguished; and many times it proceeded horizontally from fifty to one hundred yards with an undulating motion, like the flight of the green woodpecker, and about as rapid; and once or twice it proceeded with considerable rapidity in a straight line upon or close to the ground.
English folklore was full of explanations for such eerie encounters, as Allies discovered once he started to research the phenomenon that was first dubbed ignis fatuus (“foolish fire”) in the 16th century. The table of contents for his subsequent 1846 book, On the Ignis Fatuus: Or, Will-o’-the-Wisp, and the Fairies, reads like absurdist poetry, with headings like “Spunkies” and “Kelpies” and the tongue-twisting “Tom Thumb, Pach, Grim, Sib, Tib, Lull, Dryp, Trip, Pin, Win &c.” Although Allies ends his book with a rational treatise on the physical cause of such mystery lights (the combustion of gases produced by decomposing plant matter), his great delight is in recounting the distinctly supernatural explanations of his people, usually involving the Devil, demons, ghosts or unsaved souls luring the curious to their demise. It turns out that such beliefs have long extended beyond Albion to places as far flung as Bengal and Brazil, Australia and America—where they persist to this day, as any visitor to the famous ghost lights of Marfa, Texas, can attest. That light shining in darkness can represent things fell and foul seems somehow incongruous, given the canon of Western representation that indicates just the opposite (Lucifer notwithstanding).
But the enduring human desire for things numinous and transcendent can take many forms, even UFO conspiracy theories, to name a latterday equivalent to Allies’ 19th-century fascination. Is there such a difference between Spunkies and extraterrestrials—as long as they refer to unknowable, uncontrollable forces that are distinctly not us?
Plumbing paradox: walking the line between light and dark, the physical and the spiritual, the canny and the uncanny is the territory of art, of course. And this leads us to our particular night path, our moment of luminous mystery—and to the work of Lia Chavez, whose experimentations in light’s spiritual and phenomenological aspects are born in literal darkness, whether meditating amongst India’s burningeyed sadhus in the caves of the Himalayas, choreographing a dancer’s movement for a collaborative photo session in a pitch-black New York studio or transforming brainwaves into audiovisual spectacles in a darkened Las Vegas nightclub.
A longstanding interest in deep meditative states has led in recent years to Chavez partnering with a team of neuroscientists at Goldsmiths College in London to try to map the psychedelic phosphine hallucinations that can arise from them. Her own past experiences of meditating for up to ten hours at a time led to the almost antithetical discovery that the stiller and more focused she was, the wilder the imagery became. Connected to a specially designed headset that tracked the complex cerebral firings of her brain during deep meditation in a dark room, Chavez and her scientific colleagues were able to locate neurobiological correlates to her vivid visions, and even intensify them with biofeedback.
Chavez’s interest in the inward journey of meditation, visions and the physical exigencies of religious devotion have led to a particular fascination with Holy Fools— those people who have dedicated their lives to following a spiritual path in ways that may seem odd at best or crazy at worst. She points to the Hebrew prophet Ezekiel as a prototypical performance artist. Constructing a miniature diorama of Jerusalem; lying next to it on his side for a year; cooking his food over excrement: Ezekiel’s actions recounted in the Old Testament bear a striking resemblance to latter-day durational performances. Visionary ecstatics like Teresa of Avila and the indefatigable German nun Hildegard von Bingen also provide inspiration in their lives and creative outpourings, which include in the case of von Bingen no fewer than 73 musical compositions, three volumes of vibrantly illustrated visionary theology and two tomes of medicinal and scientific writings—all of which emphasize the importance of engaging the senses as a means of worship.
Embodied spirituality is perhaps nowhere more emphasized than in the yogic traditions of India, and it was there, in Rishikesh, that Chavez discovered the practice of contemplative walking, which entails slowing down that most basic of human activities and bringing physical, mental and philosophical intentionality into every micromovement— toe first, then heel. “When you walk it should look like dancing,” said Swami Rama, one of the great yogi masters of the Himalayan tradition and a touchstone for all subsequent adherents of the practice.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Chavez’s Light Body starts out as gentle moving contemplation and ends up in an ecstatic, almost fearsome dance —a threedimensional analogue of sorts to the phosphine storms she has experienced during deep gamma-wave meditation. Through the gloaming, disembodied ribbons of light evolve over the course of an hour into corporeal dervishes that would put the fear of God into Jabez Allies himself.
Fear, of course, is not the point; transformation is. And while most of us will most likely never see our bodies change into the rainbow energy forms allegedly possible in the most dedicated of meditation gurus, we can at the very least bridge the gap between the every day and the extraordinary, the physical and the metaphysical. Even the great atheist Nietzsche acknowledged the transcendent power of embodiment—and the possibility of being attuned to the world in a way that supersedes the intellect. “It is our habit to think outdoors,” he wrote, “walking, leaping, climbing, dancing, preferably on lonely mountains or near the sea where even the trails become thoughtful.” Whether in the mind’s eye or in a darkling wood, Chavez’s Light Body forges thoughtful trails that lead us to the luminous, numinous nexus of flesh and spirit that has been her life’s work.