somatics 2: rib case

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ANATOMICAL FACT


Today’s focus is rib case mobility (rib case is Barbara Clark’s lovely rephrasing of rib cage). The diaphragm action we looked at in #1 expanded the lung fields by extending the lung cavity downward; that downward action pairs with mobility in the ribs, adding to the expansion. We have two main lines of attention today: first to the idea of the ribs as jointed and lightly articulating. In the front of the body, the ribs connect to the sternum flexibly through a small extension of cartilage. The first seven ribs run directly into the sternum through these cartilage extensions, the next three merge their extensions to join into the rib arch that we looked at last pop-up (the bottom two (“floating ribs”) articulate only with the spine, and not the front of the body). The images we’ll linger on vivify the soft, tensile strength of this cartilaginous link in the front body. 

In the back of the body, each rib circle articulates with the spine. We’ll use images that emphasize this back-body articulation, focusing on the strength of an easy inward compression into the spine in the exhale, and work with Barbara Clark’s image of “cross patterning” in the rib circles — an understanding of the strength and flexibility of the structure, as well as its depth in space, as arising through a dynamic crossing of lines (directions) of movement. 

What we take into writing from this is the idea of a case that gently articulates in its front and back, making a protective cavity for vital organs, the heart and lungs. We’ll call the case Thorax and let it-them show up in the prompts, embodied, as a protector.

As with installment one, these images are expanded in the audio guide.

IMAGE

Trace or freehand copy the rib circles from this image. Even just tracing the shape of the rib circle with your finger on your desk will do something. Let your hand teach you something. Tactic tracing guides can be found in the audio guide.

Pay attention to how each rib circle meets the spinal column. Also give attention to the space the rib case holds open and protects.

a rib circle, copied from a drawing by from Barbara Clark

AUDIO GUIDE

VISUALIZATION SCRIPT

Begin lying on the floor on your back, limbs extended.

Bring your attention to the places your body makes contact with the floor, and in your mind’s eye, follow the curving places where it does not.

Imagine that the floor is a giant ink pad for a stamp, and you are trying to ink the surface of your body. Allow yourself to gently and slowly roll and press to ink your body surface. As you do, give extra attention to the perception of the roundness of the body’s bony bowls:

the pelvis

the ribs

the skull

Move yourself onto your belly now, resting your head and arms in any position that’s comfortable for your neck. Allow the soft space in the front of your body to rest on the floor. As you breath, feel the belly against the floor, your first mouth, when you were umbilically fed.

Without hurry, shift onto one side and then scooch around to your back. Bring your knees up toward the ceiling and let them rest in on each other, feet wider than the hips and feet turning slightly in to help balance the legs.

Before we begin tracing the ribs in our mind’s eyes, let’s trace with our fingers.

Bring a hand to the top of your sternum, finding the depression where the collarbones meet the sternum, and then using a fair but comfortable amount of pressure with the pads of your fingers, try to find the shape of the bone. Switch hands as needed through this next section. Look for the sternum’s extension toward your belly. Find the nubby place it ends, the xiphoid process, like a little promontory. Feel for the sternum’s flatness. With a fair amount of pressure, see if you can find locate the spaces between the ribs. Depending on how much flesh and boob you have up front, this is easier or harder to find with your fingers. But find out as much as you can through touch about how much space your sternum occupies. Then trace the rib arch, above the softness of the belly, down one side and then the other, seeing if you can locate the places where the different cartilage extensions join and branch. 

Now drop the touch, and let your arms drape across your chest so the elbows point diagonally skyward. Let them fall partway toward your face so that you’re not doing too much work to hold them there. Adjust yourself as needed so that you are comfortable and doing a minimum amount of muscular work.

Try to visualize the network of cartilage that connects the bones of the rib to the sternum. See the cartilage as soft and flexible. Perhaps let it glow a pleasing color in your mind’s eye. See the socket where the rib bones meets the cartilage, and the socket where the cartilage meets the sternum. Imagine these places as soft, open meeting places. Yawn and watch them expand as you inhale.

Now travel your mind’s eye around to the back of the body, where the ribs meet the spine. Try to see your ribs from behind.

Now imagine that your rib cage is a giant ripe plum, centered around the spine. And watch it slowly, gently dry into a prune. Easily compressing toward the spinal column. You can watch this over one slow breath, or let the image happen over a series of normal breaths. The important thing is to see the convergence of the material around the spine, as if the spine were the pit of plum, the pit of the prune.

Let it expand back up into a plum. And watch it compress again to prune.

Now let’s switch the image. In your mind’s eye, watch your ribs meet the spine, the width of the joint overlapping both bone and spinal disc. Imagine that the discs are pillows that have been squashed a little. Now watch a pair of ribs heading in toward the pillow, working together on right and left side of the spine, to plump the pillow back up. Try to focus on one elevation in the spine and then another.

Now relax your arms at your side, and use one hand to feel for the place where the opposite collarbone meets the sternum, finding its sternal socket. Then move your finger down a bit and locate the sternal socket of the first rib, which sits right under the collarbone. Picture a circle moving around the first rib circle. The movement will go under the collarbone, up the front of the rib, over the top, passing across the spine at the base of the neck, back around the other side, under the collarbone, to meet the sternum. Watch this circle a few more times, track something moving the circular pathway in your mind’s eye.

Watching this circle as if it’s a lit pathway, gently roll to one side and bring yourself up to sitting. Sit on the sits bones with legs crossed or extended. Now we’re going to start at the fourth rib circle, which is as high in the chest as mid shoulder blades. Start by picturing the left fourth rib going into its spinal socket on the left side of the spine. Then in your mind’s eye, draw a diagonal line connecting the left spinal socket to the front right side, where the fourth rib meets the sternum. Note the depth from back to front along this diagonal.

Follow the curved line of the bone now around the right rib as it moves around to meet the spine. And then take a diagonal pathway from the right spinal socket of the rib, around the height of your mid-shoulder blade, to the front left side where the fourth rib meets the sternum.

Trace this path a few more times, like a blissed-out race car learning a course in slow motion.

Now move up to the third rib, in your mind’s eye, and repeat, starting from the left spinal socket, drawing a diagonal toward the right front, around the rib to the right side of the spine, drawing a diagonal line toward the left front, and around.

Take this pattern now at the second rib circle.

Take this pattern now at the first rib circle. Take the next few minutes to feel the easy circling of all the ribs as you slowly shift positions. As you breath, notice an easy expansion at each of the four sockets of each rib circle. Take a walk, feeling the easy depth of the ribs from front to back. Their gentle enclosure of the heart and lungs within.

WRITING PROMPT

Retell a borrowed story. As you do, allow a figure, call it a thorax, to appear in your writing, either within the story itself, or within the way you tell it. Attributes of the thorax are: a strong but flexible offering of protection; an ability to create a little extra space for the vital functions of the story to continue, a mood of happy enclosure. Part of the thorax’s strength comes from creating easy areas of movement and articulation. An equal part of thorax’s strength comes from its ability to continuously balance the forces of opening and closing, its circular, peripheral, continuous holding of a life-giving circumference.
 

SECTIONS

Architecture of a Day (Notes on Practice)

One of the things I do with my time is facilitate writing groups, both short and ongoing seasons of writing in the presence of others through a series of cycles, which may be locally defined as writing weeks, or writing fortnights, or other durations. Usually I begin our meetings by asking each writer to report on how their practice of writing went in the last cycle. It’s seductive to meet this request for a report by reporting on the interval between what one wanted to do and what one did. I wanted to write daily but on I only wrote once, and so on. I wanted to develop this other project but instead I transcribed fragments from my notebooks. 

Maybe there is something in this metric of lack that has some use? Maybe it allows us to sidestep the question, what is this writing that I actually wrote, labels the writing as not our real writing, something less than our real writing, where “real” takes on the old romantic connotation of a glorious capital-R Real that somehow exceeds the illusory, fragmented confusion of the actual world we find ourselves in. But I am interested in perceiving the being of the writing that has actually been written, which includes a perception of its futurities, its potentialities, its realities, perhaps, but attends most closely to what it is now. 

If a writer reports on the gap between plan and actuality as a form of lack or failure, I ask them to reframe the gap. The writing that happened: how did it happen? What were you doing when you wrote? In distinction to what you thought you needed to do to get yourself writing, what did you find out you actually need? How does the perceived failure to follow the plan teach you something about the expansive conditions in which writing can get written? The interval between what we project and what we find ourselves doing can be playful, can be a conversation, rather than just a source of disappointment. 

The question comes up again and again, what actually constitutes “the writing”? 

The other question is: Could we play with different understandings of the architecture of a day, a week, or a month, and the way that writing or making or just being with that free creative impulse might live within that rhythm. What containers create enough containment that we feel back inside their flow when we return to them? 

Some containers are marked by time. In one group, a writer shared her practice of folding her writing day into the way the light changed. On days she wrote, she would begin in late afternoon, in daylight, without any lamps or lights on, and continue writing through dusk as her room slowly darkened. In another group, a writer chose the same window but at the other pole of the day, rising in the dark and writing until the day was full day. In another group, another writer wrote late at night before bed, freely making a mess, then re-read her night pages first thing in the morning, making morning notes toward bringing them into some kind of order. All of these practices embedded themselves in the rhythms of the day and night. They might have been productive of something, but they were also, like toothbrushing, like eating, like waking and sleeping, something that belonged to the day and not only to the writing’s future as something that might circulate among others. 

In other groups, with other writers, different containers were found. Letting go of the ideal of dailiness, something else functions as a sustaining rhythm. Often these containers are documents combined with particular and limited tasks. One writer who is always with her phone, not only because we’re all always with our phones, it seems, but because her obligations take her away from her desk for most of her time, keeps an open note in the notes app, and adds to it whenever a small thought crystallizes in mind, and later, maybe only once in a writing cycle, carries these collected entries to her desk and transfers them to new pages, allowing herself to write into them, to reform them, to cull them, in the transfer process. Another writer kept an open document in which she collected words and images that appealed to her. Then once a week, as determined by the obligation to share pages, she looked through that collected pile of appealing things and wrote with or from it, leaving the pile at the end of the document like a combination pantry-compost. Something I am writing these days is held by its document and by a simple task. I open it up on a whim whenever I think of it, no more than once a day and often not for weeks at a time, and I add a single paragraph, either doing a fill-in-the-blanks game that amuses me and repeats as a grounding pulse throughout the ever-growing document, or picking up another thread that also carries through the pages. The limitation of the single paragraph is a pleasure for me, an inveterate spewer and piler-up of raw source material. Instead of going on and on, I fold as much pleasure-treasure into my paragraph as my whim that day holds and the paragraph can take. Then I close the document and forget about it. 

If the desire is to create writing that is alive, rather than writing that is good (thanks to Agnes Borinsky for reminding me recently of this way of renaming and so enlarging and enlivening the desire that attends the relationship we each have to our own writing), could we think of aliveness as something that is in cooperation with and maybe nourishing to our own aliveness. What does that mean for how writing occurs and is invited in the architecture of a day or week or year? Within what time cycle do we track its living energy? What numerical freedoms and mysteries are at play in its pattern of occurrence? What would its scene of communication be?