Drawing on Life : Bento's Sketchbook/A Hut of One's Own : John Berger/Ann Cline/Bento de Spinoza

In the backyard of where she was living, Cline once decided to build a hut inspired by Kakuzo Okakura's The Book of Tea.

As my dwelling took shape, it began to shape my life as well. And when I sat inside reading the recluse poets, the terse simplicity of their record framed my own perception, one I likened to a camera recording a world of pure experience.

The hut has a sense of immediacy that no room-filled house can achieve. The hut focuses its dweller on immediacy and meaning fulness. "I had found the commodity of my dwelling through the poetry of its use," Cline concludes.

The hut addresses the core of ritual as a part of nature versus the supposed freedom of modernist thought and the architectural contrivances it pursues. The hut represents the convergence of ritual and naturalness, at the same time addressing cultural issues and practices.

With an agility larger structures can never match, huts bring together the physical environment with such disparate aspects of culture as necessity, fantasy, faith, and "life-style." The hut, then, may be humankind's supreme experiment.

This may seem a bold conclusion given the modesty of the hut throughout history, and the modest ambitions of its makers, but this is Cline's point, that the experiment in solitude and simplicity is bolder than any social or culturally-sanctioned experiments or projects, simply because the latter are contrived and unnatural, even anti­ natural.

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Then the days of working at home on it. The image in my head was often clearer than the one on the paper. I redrew and redrew. The paper became grey  with  alterations and  cancelations.  The drawing didn’t get better, but gradually she, about to stand up, was more insistently there.

The effort of my  corrections and  the endurance of the paper have begun  to resemble the resilience of Maria’s own body. The surface of the drawing - its skin, not its image — make me think of how there are moments when a dancer can make your hairs stand on end.

We who  draw do  so  not only  to  make something  observed visible to others, but also to accompany something invisible to its incalculable destination.

The bodies of dancers with their kind of devotion are dual. And this is visible whatever they are doing. A kind of Uncertainty Principle determines them; instead of being alternately particle and wave, their bodies are alternately giver and gift.

They know their own bodies in such a penetrating way that they can be within them, or before them and beyond them. And this alternates,  sometimes changing  every  few seconds,  some­ times every few minutes.

The duality  of each  body  is what allows them,  when  they perform,  to  merge into  a single entity.  They  lean  against,  lift, carry, roll over, separate from, co-join, buttress each other so that two or three bodies become a single dwelling, like a living cell is a dwelling for its molecules and messengers, or a forest for its animals.

The same duality  explains why  they  are as much  intrigued by falling as by leaping, and why the ground challenges them as much as the air.