As I began to feel I began to swim through life. Reality was no longer a spectacle of observation, but a feat of sensation; no longer made up of air, but the fluid which binds all existence – past, present and future, faraway and immediately close – into the mesh constituting each moment’s experience. I sense, therefore I am. I take my body with me as I permit it to inform me of concepts thinking alone could never conjure.
The current age of exalted analytical reason had clouded my corporal intelligence for too long. It is no wonder we suffer from mental illness if all we inhabit, if all we are taught is worthy of inhabiting, is the realm of the mind. It is but an imbalance, a healthy part of a rounded whole turned sour in receiving undivided focus at the expense of other organs of sense. To reflect is a great gift, but our ability to feel must consciously envelop our capacity for analytical evaluation should we seek wisdom in a state where we do not abuse one another, or the greater ecological whole we are a part of.
Inhabiting our bodies carries a knowledge whose value is not undermined because it is ineffable; it merely exists in a realm that language, our analytical mind’s primary tool, cannot access. To dismiss its existence based on this failure of representation is foolish; and to access it begs dedicated practice with tools which can. The body is where I begin and as my practice deepens, I peek within my tissues to discover a sensory organ, ubiquitous and intuitive, which processes information much the way my brain does – by receiving endless stimuli and unconsciously transforming them into guidance for my being, as I swim and sway and dance lightly between past, present and future, feeling.
This excerpt is inspired by my readings of Susanne K. Langer’s work on the symbology of music, as well as a love for rhythmic, embodied and undulating movement.
Notes From Afar 