Maria Meindl

The woman with two spines

July 20, 2011

I needed a day like today at the beginning of this trip. I’ve stepped outside the round of meals, meetings, workshops and discussions which fill each day. I’ve been walking around, orienting myself to the campus of Hampshire College, as well as to the town about five miles away. Settling in, just in time to go home again.

In mid July, there’s a not a student to be seen. The campus is used as a conference centre for the summer months. There’s one area reserved for Feldenkrais practitioners, and a couple of camps for teenagers inhabit the dorms around the piney fringes. Three times a day, these groups compete for space in the dining hall, primal fears inducing us to elbow each other out of the way and fill our trays with more food than we can possibly eat.

Hampshire College feels like a newer and ritzier version of Bishop’s University in Quebec, where I did my B.A. It’s a large campus, with carefully spaced and well-maintained buildings, all of which appear to have been build since the 1970s.  The Bishop’s buildings are a hodgepodge, spanning over a century of architecture and crammed together in odd clumps rather than carefully spaced, as they are in this campus; still, the aura of a liberal arts college is inescapable. I can almost smell the combination of safety and adventure which thirty years ago opened up the world to me, and me to the world.

I remember my claustrophobic feelings as I realized that the sum total of my familiar faces for the next three years would be smaller than the population of my high school in Toronto. I remember crying myself to sleep for weeks on end in the dorm with its sandpaper carpet, its mattress covered in squeaky plastic, its pressboard desk facing a wall stained with tape marks from previous inhabitants. There was the constipating awkwardness of sharing a bathroom with strangers – all of whom seemed so ungovernably rowdy I refused to speak to them for fear of giving offense and being attacked in the night.

This soon gave way to excitement as I saw how much was available to me within that little circle of buildings. Soon, I turned to those formerly-threatening neighbours for dating advice. I came to love the intimacy of the place.

It took me a long time to write that.

It was painful to put every sentence together. I’m rusty. Out of practice, simple as that. All week I’ve been concentrating on a discipline which cultivates spontenaity, and puts me in touch with my most basic urges and fears, the traumas and joys of childhood development, the accommodations I have made, skeletally and emotionally, throughout adulthood. Rich material for writing. You’d think it would release a flood of verbal treasures but instead my thoughts have been fragmentary, words elusive.

Well, I haven’t been doing it. It’s all about the bum in the seat, the 10,000 hours that it takes to master a craft and the daily commitment it takes to maintain it. I’m oh so aware that those 10,000 hours of practitioner-craft are going to take a long time to accumulate, because they always come second to writing. At a certain basic point they’re part of the same thing. But at another basic point, they’re not. When it comes to spending time, there’s a always choice to be made. And I always choose writing.

Feldenkrais is supposed to calm the nervous system and to be sure, it was chronic pain and allergies that led me to seek out the method and become a practitioner myself. Feldenkrais is no less than ideal for folks like me who pretty much wear their nerves on the outside. It is the only thing that has helped. But only to a point. Not unlike in homeopathy, it’s a matter of finding the ideal dose. When immersed too much in my body, I become more, not less agitated. Yesterday as I lay on the floor doing a fascinating Awareness Through Movement lesson led by David Kaetz, I could literally feel the impulses firing up and down my spine. The situation was getting worse, not better, and I knew it was time for a day spent with words.

After cutting out of this morning’s worskhop I went to the Yiddish Book Centre. Built to look like an old east European shtetl, it houses thousands of Yiddish books which continue to be shipped in, daily, from all over the world, faster than they can be catalogued. The moment I walked through those doors, I felt the agitation and trouble of the week settle.

The centre houses not only books but posters, sheet music, films and recordings. They even have the old printing presses recovered from various sources. It’s a library within a museum, a museum within a library, where among the stacks you can read wall panels about various authors, and get information about how their books were recovered. You can sit at a listening station to hear music, or visit the theatre at the back, where videos of Yiddish comedy and music play constantly. There’s an audio-visual installation celebrating Jewish home life in America, where I spent more time eavesdropping on a couple reminiscing about their childhoods, than I did watching the images on the screen.

Best of all there are boxes of books in piles, everywhere. The unarchived books are part of the display, and part of the ongoing task of the museum. As a visitor, I felt I might as well open one of the boxes, roll up my sleeves and start working. There was so much to do. The vitality and oppenness of this struck me as lovely. I found no “Staff only beyond this point,” no “Please don’t touch.” A downstairs sorting and storage area had no door on it at all – no one stopped me from walking in and taking a look around.

The chaotic feeling — within a most beautifully designed and maintained facility – puts across the message that life is renewed in the preservation of history. Preserving history – through words – is quite simply one of the pillars of my existence. Another kind of spine.

Things to do: write blog

July 13, 2011

I’m at the annual conference of the Feldenkrais Guild of North America, being held on the campus of Hampshire College, in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Tonight, at the end of yet another day filled with classes and meetings, catching up with old friends and making new acquaintances, I’ve come to the student lounge to take advantage of the wireless service. It’s in a building of its own. To get there from my residence I had to cross a quad.

Outside I saw a dozen or so standing figures, their faces illuminated by ipads, cel phones and other devices, checking email with the shreds of coverage which can be caught outside the lounge. No one came in though. No one except me. Straight into the heart of the wireless. Where late at night I maintain tabs on my life in Toronto and phone my husband, whom I miss.

That’s not healthy, is it? The keeping tabs part I mean?

Or is it?

My first couple of days here saw me more agitated than I’ve been in a long while. Miserably so, head- explodingly so. Long story, but I didn’t finish everything I had hoped to do last week, and I’m not the type of person to let a conference interfere with a to-do list. In fact, I’m the type who creates a whole parallel to-do list for while the conference is going on.

This is pretty much normal when I’m intensely involved in somatic work.

My four year training was a feat of scheduling. During breaks I rushed in and out of the huge room where we all lay on mats, sensing the workings of our skeletons and muscles … and indeed of our thoughts and emotions … to answer sometimes 21 messages on my answering machine. I sat up all night taking care of details for the health care research projects I was doing for a living, and got up early in the morning to try to write my papers for the degree I was taking at the same time.

Granted, there were unavoidable obligations at that time (another long story). Still, I had choices, and it’s fair to say I kept myself pretty damned busy at the very time when I was supposed to be slowing down and reducing stimulation. And here, where we have an ideal opportunity to absent ourselves from day-to-day concerns, I’m doing the exact opposite.

Is this just ingrained habit asserting itself in a situation where it is being challenged? Or is it a healthy impulse to surface from this world of sensation, to orient or ground myself?

My mind goes back to one of the philosophy courses I took at OISE at the same time as I did my Feldenkrais certification. We talked about indoctrination versus education. Pages could be spent on how to define these terms, but let’s just reduce the argument to: Education — Good … Indoctrination — Not so much.

Our professor, Chris Olsen drew three intersecting circles on the blackboard and wrote a word in each. Motivation, method and subject matter were the three terms. Where there’s a motive to indoctrinate, a teaching method that is less than rational, and a subject which might have to do with the values, emotions, or spirituality, you’re into the territory of indoctrination.

In Feldenkrais lessons, we lie on the floor with our eyes closed, following instructions from a teacher who can observe our every move. In an attempt to break habits and offer new possibilities the lessons take us back to preverbal development. There is sometimes discussion afterwards – if you can find the words — but debate is impossible while the lessons are going on. This is what I’d call non-rational teaching.

The material is scientific. We learn how our bodies move, how we’re built, but it also includes a whole value system, a world view, posited by a man who (as I just learned) had the childhood ambition of becoming king. It’s a world view I happen to agree with, which has helped me become happier and more successful, but it’s not neutral.

That leaves the motive. I chose Feldenkrais because I wanted to be more aware of my body, and of all the methods I’ve encountered including yoga, meditation and a few others, this imparts more – as Feldenkrais himself put it – potency to the individual. I love the rationalism of it, the scientific quality of the lessons where variables are added and subtgracted, with the ever-present goal of generating more choices.

This method seemed to give me the greatest chance of being fully in language – which to me includes logic — as well as inhabiting my body and my life. I have to think that anyone teaching me thinks the same way. But I don’t know. Motives vary from individual to individual, from day to day. I choose my teachers carefully. As a teacher, I am careful. For this and any sort of learning to do with the body — the self — it’s important to set up checks and balances.

Most of the time, an hour-long Feldenkrais session is an oasis in a day spent running around and getting things done. We hope that some elements of softness, of play and exploration manage to creep into everyday existence. But here at the conference, as in trainings, we are like toddlers, spending more time rolling around on the ground than we do upright.

Under these circumstances, my bullshit metre runs on overdrive. If I take something away with me, make it part of my life and my own practice, it’s because I’ve subjected it to rigorous examination moral, intellectual and emotional, played devil’s advocate in discussions with friends.

Maybe this To-Doing and froing is not monkey mind (as the meditators call it) but a healthy impulse to surface from the credulous, sensory world and stay in charge.

If my To-Do list is a way of keeping that questioning part of me available, well then I’m all for it. Who knows, maybe someday I’ll find a more efficient way to do the same thing, and one that allows me more sleep!

Distilled, complaint free informative version of the previous post

April 18, 2011

Two launches
April 20th

TOK6
Wednesday April 20 from 7:30 pm (Doors Open at 7 pm) at the Gladstone Hotel
1214 Queen Street West
http://dd.maytree.com/index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid=1

And Also Sharks
Toronto Underground Cinema from 6 to 9 p.m.
186 Spadina Ave.
http://www.jessicawesthead.com/happenings

Mercury Retrograde Ends
April 23

The Royal Wedding:
April 29th

Oh, and to celebrate (or recover), why not come to my breathing workshop May 1?http://www.feldenkraiscentre.com/

Every day in every way

March 29, 2011

It’s 1986 (or thereabouts) and I’m sitting with about fifteen people in a room that’s – well I don’t remember the details – but I think it is a room with long, horizontal windows set deeply into concrete walls, and that the building is not particularly old. It’s a relentlessly sunny day: we’re happy to be inside, in a room that’s barely above ground. We sit in a circle, on couches and low chairs.

The details have faded with time, but I do know for sure that the speaker was W.O. Mitchell, and that all this took place in Banff. He was telling us about the writing life, about what to expect now that we were about to graduate from his six-week writing workshop, and about how to conduct our lives as writers. Here’s what I remember of his advice:

— We were not to expect the frequent breakthroughs we had enjoyed in Banff. “These are not ordinary days,” were his words.
— We were to get married as soon as possible, to someone stable and tolerant.
— We were to go to teachers’ college.
— Our lives would be tough, but if we continued writing we would enjoy a special kind of health, a health that was more profound than what other people could hope for, people who weren’t artists. This would come from expressing ourselves, and from living out our dreams.

For some reason, his last point was the only one I believed.

It sustained me through the years of fear and loneliness, poverty, heartbreak and exhaustion that came from not taking the other pieces of advice. The belief that the quest to express myself and live out my dreams was making me better in some way. I believed the inverse as well: that not doing it – that giving up – would make me sick. Come to think of it, the stick of sickness was more influential than the carrot of health. Whatever it takes, I guess.

I didn’t give up,  so I don’t really know whether Mitchell’s insight was correct, but lately, I’ve been starting to question whether writing really is healthy. Or whether in fact, it’s just the opposite.

I say that because I’m as close to a life of self-expression, as close to living out my dreams as I’ve ever been. I spent the winter immersed in rewrites on my first book, which is coming out in the fall (more on that later). I’ve been having the kind of bracing and respectful editorial discussions on my work that I crave and that many others would envy. A long-incubated project is at last coming to fruition. I haven’t had a day job. Writing has been “it.”

And I feel terrible. 

I mean, physically. And I mean, terrible.

I am coughing consumptively, as I have since October when the first cold arrived, which turned into the second cold, which gave way to the flu, which morphed into my third and fourth colds this winter. My glands are swollen, my throat is sore, and the skin on my face is livid with a crop of painful, subterranean pimples. My joints hurt. My calf muscles ache, as if I’d been climbing hills, when in fact I’ve been doing little else than sit at the desk. And migraines. Oh the migraines! August and September consisted of one long migraine. This eased up slightly when the cooler weather came. But with the cooler weather came the colds.

This is probably just a sign of some emotion that I’ve been hiding from myself. Fear, for instance. Or guilt. Or anger. Who could forget anger? Of course: my grandmother – the subject of the book – spent her fifties enjoying three hour, three martini lunches. She got the cocktails, I got the footnotes. For my sins. (See guilt, above.)

Or is it just fatigue?  Is writing – even without a day job – just really, really hard? Hard enough to make you sick?

Just now, I googled: “writers illness,” and found a lot of websites about writers and mental illness. A study that came out in the American Psychiatric Journal in 1987 (around the same time as I was in Banff) said that writers and their first-degree relatives have a “substantially higher rate of mental illness, predominantly affective disorder, with a tendency toward the bipolar subtype.”

So W.O. (Or Whoa! as some of us called him) was going against the medical literature of the time. I think I knew that. But what about physical health? Does writing make you sick?

Let’s try: “Writers disease.” I get lots of websites talking about The Midnight Disease, which refers either to writing itself or to writer’s block, but with the pea-sized amount of attention I usually accord my google searches I didn’t bother to investigate further.

Because I have what I was looking for. Writer’s block. That’s what W.O. was talking about, I think. Writer’s block, which is merely a chip off the older, bigger and more dangerous state of Blockedness. Of the mind. Of the self.

His method was called Freefall, and the idea was to sit with your typewriter(!) in a quiet room and let everything come out. Don’t censor yourself. Write what comes to you.  Better out than in. (Or rather, “Be’er au’ van in!”) This was the phrase my mother used, to make me feel alright about throwing up, calling up a cockney accent to remind me to take pleasure in earthy things, to laugh at the body’s frailties. May she rest in peace. And Whoa! too, while we’re at it.

The idea that something that’s inside you – that’s meant to come out – turns against you and poisons you is based on elimination. It’s often applied to creativity. There was even a joke going around among my fellow students in Banff: Have you had your Freefall today? 

Not that I have anything against Freefall. I have it to thank for all my university essays, which seemed to garner pretty healthy marks. It’s a good method.  But I don’t believe that the elimination model applies to anything more than removing waste matter from our bodies. I don’t believe it applies to emotion or creativity or words. Or dreams.

Especially now. I’ve written something very personal, something I always longed to be able to share. Do I feel emptied of something that needed to come out? No. Most emphatically no. Maybe I will feel that some time in the future but so far the process of writing about my own life and experiences has been one of holding back, of extreme self-restraint. I have faced dilemma after dilemma, how to phrase things, what to leave in, what to take out, all in the interests of taste or sparing the feelings of the living and the reputations of the dead, or just sounding like a decent person myself. It has been the opposite of cathartic. It has felt like being forced back to a time when I had no choice but to hide things, to keep things in.

I guess that’s healthy in itself, returning to what was once a compulsion with a new sense of choice. But it’s not catharsis, and it doesn’t feel good. It’s hard work, too. Hard enough to make my joints ache.

The book is about the consequences of keeping secrets, about the importance of remembering history and telling it as truthfully as we can. I hope I’ve written persuasively on the subject, but it doesn’t feel like I’ve lived it.

I remember seeing a Laurie Anderson show called The End of the Moon. If I’m quoting correctly, she said, “The moment you realize you don’t get to tell your whole story, your own story is the moment …” What?  Did she say it was the moment you begin to write, or the moment you begin to live? I don’t remember. All I remember is the part about your whole story, your own story. That you don’t get to tell it. Not really. And that you have to come to terms with that.

I’m not hiding anything from myself. I know what I feel: tired. And scared. Scared of getting things wrong. I am writing about my grandmother’s strange way of representing the truth. In my book, I deconstruct that, and look at the facts that it was based on. But taking the authority of the narrative has only reinforced my self-doubts. Steeped in the memory of how her memory was altered over time, I have lost faith in the reliability of my own. If that faith were ever there to begin with. This has not been a process of gaining confidence; just the opposite, at least for now.

And so, I don’t feel better.

I feel obliged to ask these question because, reluctantly and with ever-wavering commitment I’ve taken on the role of health educator through my Feldenkrais practice. People come to me because they want to feel better. They believe – well, let’s face it – I believe I may have some answers for them.

Whaever you do, don’t try to express yourself. Would I give anyone that advice?

Of course not. Why? Because of the stick. I ask myself what it would be like not to be doing this. Not to have something that I care enough about, to make myself this tired. I’d probably be achy anyway. That’s what happens when you’re going on fifty-two. Life itself wears down the joints.

I don’t believe there would be something stuck inside me, but I do believe I’d be dissatisfied. And possibly bored. And it would bother me to feel that I hadn’t done something useful with my experiences. I do feel better knowing that I have made something from them, than I would if I had not.

Is that health?  It’ll do for now.

Last Sunday

February 12, 2011

The day stretched deliciously ahead. Empty. It felt so good to have nothing to do.

No need to come up with anything intelligent to say, to clean the house or even get dressed. No need to pile on heavy clothes, those cumbersome and increasingly itchy layers, the heavy boots that make me move like a toddler. No need to endure the assault of cold wind, undertake the feat of navigating slush or ice or snow banks. It was a day of rest. 

And there was no need to produce anything either. At last, a break from bending my mind out of shape to try to think up a title for my book. A title which has to include – get this –my grandmother’s name, the fact that she was my grandmother, the fact that she was a poet and broadcaster (because no one remembers her any more), and the fact that it’s about creating an archive for her. Oh, and (at my own insistence) it must not include the phrase, “a granddaughter’s search for …” anything.

Think laterally! You’re supposed to be good with words, aren’t you? Nothing like trying to dredge up a catchy title to make someone feel like the least creative person on earth. I will presently whinge: Could anything, just one little thing, about this book come to me easily? It seems not. The title is no exception.

But I got a break from all that on Sunday. Rolf and I sat in two squashy chairs in the living room sipping coffee and reading our books. Reading: the perfect antidote to fatigue and sensory overload. I was reading a book called This Charming Man by Marian Keyes, an Irish writer who will never quite take the place of my beloved Maeve Binchy, but whose work gives me the same kind of satisfaction to read. The covers of Marian’s books are in bright, solid colours, and show girls in Capri pants and ballet flats, whispering secrets to each other. Within the books’ pages those same girls overcome Troubles by dint of pluck, persistence, and the ministrations of their girlfriends. They are thick books, topping six hundred pages, the kind you can really settle into. The kind I wish I could write, (but fear I may be forever condemned to conveying the Subtle Shift in Sensibility). Marian’s books are the kind which – to quote an expression they use on the other side of the pond – lift the spirits. Not before they extract a few tears.

(For those who don’t know such books, they are not to be confused with romances. Sometimes they’re about getting over bad romance, discovering abuse and standing up to it, but mostly, they’re about money and power. They’re about women who find themselves powerless, and then get power. You go girl!)

Not an especially demanding read, in the sense that you don’t have to go over each paragraph again and again to understand what it means, nor do you want to; you want to find out what happens. A lot happens in those six hundred pages. The books have great stories, and are insightful about the human condition. And, being Irish, they contain lots of fun and fascinating new words for bodily functions, drunkenness and money.

I was so happy, sitting there, reading This Charming Man. Nothing whirring, humming, dinging or flashing in the house, except for the oh-so-comforting furnace. So happy to be reading … a book. As I think everyone these days is realizing, reading and books are not necessarily entwined any more. The screens are coming! Fast. Which is part of the reason I was feeling overloaded on Sunday.

It had been an exceptionally good week. Stimulating and encouraging. I launched this blog, did lots of organizing for the Draft reading series, spent time with friends, generally lifted my head out of thinking about the past. My as-yet-unnamed book submerges me in the past: my own and that of my family. This week I realized it’s okay. There is a future out there. And it is fun.

It was exciting to launch a blog, though scary. At a time when I feel uncomfortably exposed, it opens the doors just one step further. And yet, it’s wonderful to take that exposure into my own hands. I have lots of thoughts and ideas, and I want to be able to air them, share them, and then move on. To other ideas. To the future.

As we get ready for the bloggers’ edition of Draft, my thoughts are very much on blogging. Why do we do it? What does it give us? For me, it’s an outlet, a structure for expressing myself and the potential for a community. And all you need is pluck, persistence, and … girlfriends! I’ve been appreciating the blogs of my fellow Drafters, each one so different, so special in its way.

On Friday, my friend Terri and I went to an event put on by the Writers’ Union called “Secure Footing in a Changing Literary Landscape.” The seminar talked about what in publishing is dying, and what’s growing up in its place. It was exciting. Partially because I was in a roomful of other people instead of just by myself, but the material was fascinating, too. The charismatic Ross Laird talked about how e-publishing is just beginning, how new technologies provide new opportunities for self-expression.

But I also felt overwhelmed. I chose to be a writer because I’m a solitary person. Simply sitting in a roomful of others, simply talking to strangers is a big thing for me. Good, but big. And then there was all this new stuff. Potential demands on my time and attention. The idea of Creating a Platform irritates the hell out of me. It’s all so much jargon. It makes me feel ancient, not because I don’t feel I have a good grasp on technology but because I have seen so much jargon come and go. What will come after Platforms? Wedgies? Not again!

And am I completely innocent in thinking that good writing does speak for itself? Sure, we all need to work a bit to get noticed but the bottom line is that the only way to do good writing is to sit and do it. To concentrate on it, and set aside other things, sometimes painfully. Am I suggesting that someone with a good web presence is necessarily short-changing her writing? I hope not. I can only speak for myself and I know that to write something I’m happy with I need to turn myself inside out, go to my limit, then go beyond that point, and then I’m just beginning. At the end of a day like that, I don’t have anything left. But now, apparently, I’m supposed to think about this platform business. It makes me feel old.

Still, it was a good seminar. At the end of the day, I decided that the frontier woman in me was saying yes to all this. I feel well situated to enjoy the new world of publishing. I don’t have anything to lose. I never had the traditional writer’s career, the one where you’re like a fairy princess being carried off in a publisher’s arms. For one thing, as my research into my grandmother’s history shows, that type of career has never been much more than a fairy tale. But I wouldn’t want it anyway. I feel exhausted by passivity, energized by taking things into my own hands. I left happy.

Then home to check email. A most amazing event: I heard from Found Press that they had accepted my story “The Last Judgment” for one of their spring editions. It is hard to convey my feelings about this, except to say that I had to get up from the computer and walk around the house for half an hour to absorb it. I wrote that story in 1986. I’ve had it rejected approximately once a year ever since. Sometimes with praise, yet at 6,000 words, the length didn’t work for most magazines. Also, it’s a quiet story, which mostly takes place inside the mind of a twelve-year-old girl. Not a whole lot happens in it. It hasn’t attracted much notice. Last year I took it out again, preparing for my annual send-out. I braced myself for an honest purge: What can I do without? Honestly, nothing. Honestly, I added 2500 words. More of the girl’s thoughts, as it happens. I sent it to Found Press, who said it would be perfect for them.

Hearing that the story was going to be accepted was – well, I felt transformed. Different from before I read the email. Though year after year I had steeled myself to send the story out, those rejections hurt me more than I let myself realize. “The Last Judgment” is different from what I’m writing now, but it’s the best I can do with that particular subject. The rejections made me feel deeply disillusioned. Had someone said, “It’s a really terrible story, and you should throw it away,” I would not have been as hurt. These rejections meant that there wasn’t a place for the best I could do in the world.

The subject was part of the issue. It’s a story about a girl coming face-to-face with the life she can look forward to as a woman. It’s a story about rejection, and I think our world rejects twelve-year-old girls. Their struggles in and of themselves are not interesting, unless amplified by traumatic events. Not interesting to adults, anyway. We’ve left all that behind. (Or have we?  I have seen Kristen Thomson’s I Claudia three times now.  Three times I’ve seen an audience dumbstruck and weeping, unable to get up from their seats for many long minutes after the performance. Not just the women, either.) Somehow, the rejection of that story felt like a rejection of something deep in myself.

The length was part of it. No, all of it. I felt that I needed to tell this story in a deliberate way, explore the character’s thoughts, sparing no detail. Not her feelings, her thoughts. Now, because of e-publishing, there’s a place for all that length, all that detail, for my story and whatever part of me it links to. Something about me feels settled, and profoundly happy.  But it’s big.

And so I needed my Sunday, my book. 

My book. It’s not just reading that provides the sense of rest and renewal that I daresay we all crave. It’s reading a book, something that doesn’t come at you. Would I have wanted to read a text with sound effects, videos, links that allowed me to choose which characters to follow? Smellorama? Hell no.

The pages, the scent and feel of a book are honestly not that important to me. I’ve been through too many moves, spent too much time clearing out people’s stuff after they’ve died. If I could live paperless, I would.  But there’s something about the quietness of reading, the invitation to put myself into the book, as much as let the book in to me. That’s something I can’t leave behind. It’s a big mistake to think of reading as an experience of just taking in content. Reading happens between me and the book.

The best moments are the ones when I look out into the room and absorb a thought, appreciate a phrase, shed a few tears for this plucky character or for myself in a similar situation. This is all the more true of a demanding book, a work of philosophy, or a painful and unsettling work of fiction. To me those moments are the essence of reading, they are why reading is a welcome experience, and a healing one. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be buying an e-reader (one without a backlit screen of course). I guess I’ll find out if it gives me the same experience.  I really, really hope so.

The (lower case) body in Question

January 14, 2011

This is something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time, set up a blog about writing and … well.  You see, right away I’m up against one of the issues that have kept me spinning my wheels for so long.  Writing and what?

It would be easy to say movement, because I’m a movement teacher, but it’s more than that. Is it writing and health? Sure. But the health of what?

Okay, I’ll say it: the body. 

I really wish I could avoid using that term. 

I don’t even mind ‘body’. It’s ‘the body’ I object to. The Body with a capital B. Can’t you just hear the somber tone? Somber and slightly accusatory. As if you’d failed to clean or shave it adequately. ‘The Body’ banishes thoughts of any of the fun things bodies are capable of. It is humourless. And as I get older, it seems more and more important to have a sense of humour when it comes to …The Younowwhat.

Okay. Maybe I should say my body? But I don’t only mean mine. Our bodies then? Sounds like a gym teacher, preparing to talk about something embarrassing. Our bodies as opposed to someone else’s bodies – namely, the boys’. The ‘the’ is important. It conveys the idea that a body – the body – is something we all have in common, even though we don’t share a single one.

 I was attracted to Feldenkrais technique because practitioners seldom use the word ‘body’. In our training we were taught to say ‘self’. Much as I hate jargon, and hate even more being told how to speak, this sat very well with me. In Feldenkrais, there is no distinction made between the body and the self. 

I agree with this position wholeheartedly, but it doesn’t solve my current problem. I need something to refer to the corporeal part of the human being, the part that is not the mind or (if you believe in that sort of thing) the spirit. The part that might, for instance, think. Or write.

For now, I’m skirting the problem by using ‘body’ as a modifier in the name of my site. This integrates the word, relieves the pressure on it. Also, I like the idea of expanding the ‘writing’ part to include language as a whole, even spoken or sung language.

Body Language has a nostalgic appeal for me. I heard about it for the first time as a kid. It was a fad in the 1960s, something like the drink called Tiger’s Milk which was purported to keep people virile and attractive. My parents and their friends (may they rest in peace) discussed Tiger’s Milk, and Body Language in our living room over drinks and cigarettes.

You know there are people who can see what’s going on inside of your mind, just by watching you?

No!

What could they see? Sex and aggression, of course.

Granted, this is not the most positive association, but it is funky and irreverent, a reference to a time when people drank and smoked and said completely inappropriate things in front of their kids. (And we so didn’t come out okay …but that is another story.)

All I mean is, when it comes to The Body, I think it’s time to lighten up.

Which only adds to what has become a tall order for the launch of this blog.  I want to write about body/mind disciplines: therapeutic and educational, talk about where the therapeutic side of the spectrum ends, and the educational begins. I think these things deserve to be talked about, thought about – and critically, too – but from a sympathetic perspective, the perspective of one who can see the benefits of taking the body into account. I’d like to write about my own explorations in body language, though I have no conclusions to share.

Though I consider myself a pretty smart person I still find it hard to write about the subject that has fascinated me for thirty years – since I decided to forgo a career in academia and study theatre instead. I could not have been more unsuited to theatre, but I didn’t want to live my life as a talking head. Nor did I want to “get out of my head” as many an acting professor urged me to do. (I wanted to answer, “No, and by the way, you’re a fascist,” but was too repressed.) Still, the conflict between these forces rages on.

There’s a lot of debate on the subject, but I really do believe body and mind are one. They don’t always feel like one, though. Hence the debate. For me, there is a tension between being feeling well and at ease with my body – feeling my body at all – and writing. I don’t think I’m alone in this.

I have come to believe that there is something fundamentally incompatible about body and language. Incompatible, but not irreconcilable. That’s the interesting part.