Losing Oneself

Category: blog-post

  • shimmer again (video)

    My colleague Heinrich Escano has been playing a bit more with using motion extraction from the simple footage taken from a still video camera (although in this clip there are some still images as well).

    In this sample there are three different things to look at:

    1) you can see what happens when there is movement in only one part of the body (the rest of the body effectively disappears);

    2) motion extraction of a timelapse series of still images – this is the brief moment 19 seconds in

    3) a simple moment in the last part when Heinrich increases the size of the image to simulate zooming in on Katye sitting

    As I am watching I am increasingly drawn to how the motion extraction broadens my gaze across the entire body. That is, it asks me to see movement as a whole body activity even when there is the smallest quantity of movement happening. At a stretch I’d propose that this mirrors my attention when dancing – the kind of attention that absorbs the body as an entire field of energy.

  • the conviction that we are selves

    Here’s a bit more from Jay Garfield’s Losing Ourselves:

    The ninth-century Indian philosopher Śāntideva argues in How to Lead an Awakened Life (Bodhicāryāvatāra) that our conviction that we are selves arises from a primal fear of death, and that we construct the idea of a self as a bulwark against that fear. Śāntideva also argues that the idea that we are selves arises primarily in emotionally charged situations, as when we perceive that we have been harmed, or when pride is aroused. It is then that we think not of our minds or bodies, but of we who possess those minds and bodies. David Hume adopts a similar view. He argues that the thought that we are selves is a product of the passions – that we posit the self as the object of pride and humility, and then reify it in thought. If anything like these analyses is right, the idea of self is grounded not in reason or perception, but in affect.

    I’m not quite sure how these ideas fit in and around this work and research but I am struck by the feeling of a being a self only arising in particular circumstances: when threatened, anxious, proud, etc. That in moments other than these we are simply experience itself (and without a self that is experiencing).

    References:

    Garfield, Jay L. Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live without a Self. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022.

  • the thing itself

    In work like this that explores complex first-person experiences of and through the body, you inevitably bump into the issue of the thing or experience itself versus our description of it.

    Years ago I had a go at discussing this long-standing issue in dance and performance in a presentation called Hands that don’t want anything. It’s a little cringey for me to read these days (and much of it I now disagree with) but perhaps there are some ideas in there that readers might enjoy or be nourished by. One thing I still find useful is that beautifully important notion that “language is only a finger pointing at the moon and not the moon itself” (Johnston 1973 p.3).

    References:

    Johnston, William. (1973). ‘Introduction’. The Cloud of Unknowing and the Book of Privy Counseling. W. Johnston. New York, Doubleday.

    Ellis, Simon. (2009). ‘Hands That Don’t Want Anything’. Presented at TaPRA, University of Plymouth, 8 September 2009.

  • part of the experience

    Here’s Roger Linden from his website The Elusive Obvious on the nature of experience and the self:

    What is assumed to be at the heart of all experience, namely that I have to be there experiencing it, it’s not what’s happening. It’s not you who is experiencing reading these words, the experience is of you reading. The sense of self is part of the experience, part of what is happening.

    – Roger Linden

    This small excerpt underlines what I see as the value of embracing nonduality as a lens to understand movement improvisation. Actually, nonduality isn’t a lens, and nor can it ever be a lens. Nonduality is not an object to be applied anywhere. It is experience itself, and it defies subject-object dualism in which there would be a ‘me’ dancing that contains the contents of experience.

    As a small aside I am not at all comfortable or familiar with attempting to articulate these very complex ideas that are abstract and concrete at the same time. A blog post like this is pretty much just having a go. Rupert Spira’s 2008 book The Transparency of Things: Contemplating the Nature of Experience is an extraordinary example of writing the ineffable solidity of nonduality.

  • ask where the horse is going

    In our work and conversations together Katye would often talk about the moment in improvising where one becomes a passenger. Katye says this is Charlie Morrissey’s term for the feeling that rather than you driving the improvisation, it is driving or leading you. Here’s one moment when Katye is reflecting on this idea:

    and the ability to really be a passenger in whatever adventure the practice and you go on … and to … and to hold that, be in that, process that, let go of that, allow for that, is like … that requires a set of grown up skills.

    – Katye Coe

    I was reminded of the following from Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost:

    Where are you going? Ask my horse, says the man. And this uncontrollable emotion doesn’t let you pick your destination or even see it.

    – Rebecca Solnit

  • body awareness and embodiment

    Wolf Mehling specialises in family and community medicine and has published on interoception and body awareness. In one study, Mehling and colleagues sought to understand the “conceptualisation of body awareness” in mind-body therapies like yoga, TaiChi, Body-Oriented Psychotherapy, Body Awareness Therapy, mindfulness based therapies/meditation, Feldenkrais, Alexander Method and Breath Therapy. They created a series of focus groups with experienced practitioners and their clients/patients.

    The theoretical stance of the practitioners demonstrates a striking parallel to positions presented by phenomenological philosophers who, in the tradition of French phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty, attempt to transcend viewing persons in dualistic terms and focus not on “the body” as such but on what it means to be ‘embodied’. “Embodiment is the human experience of simultaneously having and being a body; the term conceptualizes the body as a dynamic, organic site of meaningful experience rather than as a physical object distinct from the self or mind”

    – Mehling, W.E., Wrubel, J., Daubenmier, J.J., Price, C.J., Kerr, C.E., Silow, T., Gopisetty, V., and Stewart, A.L. (2011) ‘Body Awareness: A Phenomenological Inquiry into the Common Ground of Mind-Body Therapies’. Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine 6 (1), 6 http://peh-med.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1747-5341-6-6

  • the infraordinary

    In Jenny Odell’s book Saving time: discovering a life beyond the clock (2023) she discusses George Perec’s concept of the infraordinary:

    In A 1973 essay called “Approaches to What?” the French writer Georges Perec coined the term infraordinary. Media and the public perception of time, he wrote, focused on the extraordinary – things outside the ordinary, like cataclysmic events and upheavals. The infraordinary was, instead, that layer inside or just beneath the ordinary, and being able to see it involved the challenge of seeing through the habitual. This was no small task, given that invisibility is part of the very nature of habit. “This is no longer even conditioning, it’s anaesthesia,” Perec writes. “We sleep through our lives in a dreamless sleep. But where is our life? Where is our body? Where is our space?”

    – Jenny Odell

    In some ways the work that Katye and I were doing in the studio is unequivocally everyday. There’s not much to see, there’s not a lot of action … there’s certainly nothing extraordinary about it. But it is also not ordinary and Perec’s thinking is useful. How might we seek to render visible that which is invisible? To peer into or within the ordinary. To be awake to the meeting of feeling and sensation and then wrestle with ways to communicate such remarkably complex everyday actions.

  • response to shimmer

    I had some interesting responses to the brief video shimmer from a couple of weeks ago. My colleague Scott deLahunta wrote:

    [the video] really highlights the variation going on across the whole surface of the body, the small balancing adjustments, the small dancing going on. which you miss normally since your attention is dragged toward quicker, bigger things.

    Scott was reminded of David Rokey’s watch, and written on that page is the following:

    People are only visible if they are in motion. They float as outlines of themselves in a dimensionless void, and disappear again as soon as they are still.

  • what we are doing in the practice is delicate

    I’m wary of this kind of digging as well. Because of it’s … because I think what we’re, what we’re doing in the practice is delicate. And yeah, I’m wary of it, as you’ve already expressed previously about planting seeds or … addressing something that you’ve seen, and the risk being that it becomes a preoccupation … or self-conscious …

    – from conversation with Katye Coe, post-dancing, 9 February 2024

    Although this description is a bit garbled, what it’s getting at is the slight concern that by discussing in detail the moving experiences that aspects of those experiences might become a “preoccupation” or a point of self-consciousness.

    Here’s Guy Claxton from Intelligence in the flesh (2015):

    This means we have to acknowledge and value ways of knowing that are not capable of being unfurled into language, because any language, like the symbols on a map, creates distinctions that are not actually present in the neurochemical territory of the body. All maps have to be crude (mis)representations, or they will not be useful for finding our way about (Claxton, 2015: loc 3170)

    And also:

    Nevertheless […] the struggle to get closer to being able to articulate your tacit knowledge, while ultimately doomed, may be very productive. It makes you think, and it connects you with other sources of support and criticism. Any deep process of verbal creativity will, of necessity, involve an uncomfortable groping for phrases and images that try to do justice to something ‘real’ in the territory that cuts across the conventions of the map (Claxton, 2015: loc 3176)

    This tension between that which can be described or articulated and that which can’t is an old one in dance and movement research. I tried to talk and write about it years ago in Hands that don’t want anything (which, by the way, is pretty difficult for me to read these days).

    What became clear to Katye and I over the course of the practice was that none of the things we discussed became a preoccupation during the movement sessions. Perhaps we didn’t go far enough into the mangle of articulating of that which cannot be articulated?

    References:

    Claxton, G. (2015) Intelligence in the Flesh: Why Your Mind Needs Your Body Much More than It Thinks. New Haven (Conn.) London: Yale University Press

    Ellis, S. (2009) Hands That Don’t Want Anything. Presentation at TaPRA, University of Plymouth 8 September 2009. <https://www.skellis.net/hands-that-dont-want-anything>

  • the sensing of a sensation

    In one of our conversations post movement (on 2 February 2024) I ask Katye:

    Are we expressing sensation? Can you talk more about sensation and movement? You say “sensation then movement”. What is this thing called “sensation”?

    I then wonder out loud if sensation is different from sensing.

    Once Katye and I have worked through the transcripts more carefully I’ll get to that conversation. But as I’m reflecting now what I suspect (or perhaps propose) is that there is no separation between sensation, sensing, experience, awareness and consciousness. That is, when perceiving (or feeling) a sensation (say pressure or tension on the outside of the left calcaneus) that is the experience one is aware of and that is in the open flow of consciousness. This is not to say that all sensations enter consciousness (far from it), but rather that the feeling or perception of a sensation (or the sensing of a sensation!) is indistinct from experience, awareness and consciousness.

    I’ll write more about the enfolding of perception, feeling, sensation, experience, awareness, consciousness, perception and action another time. It seems important to be able to disambiguate them as well as recognise when they are being used interchangeably. I should say also that I don’t think the above is quite right …