The Mysterious Power of the Unbounded

Almost every afternoon I go walking in the Arboretum, one of Ottawa’s major parks. There’s a wildlife garden beside the formal park, along with a stretch of unkempt fields where someone has mowed paths through a few overgrown acres of golden rod, milkweed, thistle, burdock and dog tangle weed. Surprisingly, at intervals along the path there are art installations. I always linger at one in particular: a series of nine weathered wooden poles, their tops painted different colors, set in a flower garden. And in front of them there’s a gleaming, pure white frame, about 12 feet wide and high, the work of a different artist. You see the poles and the little garden and the rough fields and the high sky throughthat precise white frame, and that’s the point of the installation.

There’s nothing intrinsic to the poles and the garden that begs for such a frame. The same sky continues above, the same expanse of autumnal field stretches out on either side. If you removed it, the poles and the garden would be unchanged; indeed, they were created by a different artist, and presumably that artist imagined that they would be sufficient, of themselves. The frame is unnatural and wholly unnecessary: a “construct.” 

Yet it has a kind of organizational power. It creates an image by defining its boundaries, with a limited space within and vast, unlimited space without. That’s its fascination. The artist is reminding us that we define everything that we perceive through the act of perception itself—yet our definitions are arbitrary and unrelated to the reality that we thus set apart. 

I walk on, meditating on the silent power of that simple white frame: the bounded and the unbounded. 

I once took a couple of courses in ancient Greek thought, and I was fascinated by the notion of the apeiron(the unbounded) and the peros(the bounded). In their quest to discover a rational basis for the universe, Greek thinkers were uncomfortable with the apeironbecause, being unlimited, it could not be fully understood and defined— infinity for example, or (of greater interest to me) the Unconscious. It was like the dark empty stage, before a play begins, when all is potential, and who knows what creatures may (or may not) emerge from the black? 

I get goosebumps when I look at an empty stage.

Like religious ritual, theatre is rooted in the apeiron. We could use other words for it: the unknown, the unknowable, the unconscious, the deep, the “other.” Theatre brings that “other” into the light of the peros. Sometimes it’s monstrous, a thing of terror (Oedipus); sometimes it’s a different species of the unbounded—the socially unacceptable, the embarrassing fart, the ridiculous, and that’s the subject of comedy. Puppets are particularly adept at performing this function, and they probably predated human theatre. Indeed, I would argue that the performers of the great Greek tragedies, with their masks and costumes and platform shoes and stylized voice and gesture were effectively body puppets. 

To push the idea a bit further: the unstated, underlying struggle that gives a theatrical piece its power is the eternal conflict between apeironand peros. That elemental struggle underlies more than theatre. It underlies our life—the dreaded unknown on the one hand, and safe, apparently secure rationality on the other. What else is Pulcinella doing when he fights with Death? And (since this is a comedy) he always wins.

But that shiny white frame in the open field tells me that boundedness, as a state of being, is arbitrary, a convenient illusion that we, in our discomfort, impose on reality. 

So what do I—Mr. Peros personified—do with that?