somatics 4: roundness

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This installment drifts slowly toward the anatomical fact, so there’s a long preface, but the workshop structure remains the same: get a feeling for an anatomical fact then transpose that felt fact into a structure for writing.

DRIFTING MEDITATION ON CONTAINERS

I am writing this in the first month of the coronavirus lockdowns. I can’t keep track of the days and if before I felt any remnant obligation to a weekly schedule beyond a few video music lessons that my son takes each week, that imperative has mostly faded. There are some things I could say I am “working” on, but I have found it best to pick them up when they call me, but not push them to happen on any particular day. 
Many of the days that have felt best in this hunkering down pause are filled instead with practice, practice that doesn’t really lead to anywhere but its own pleasure. There is a deepening that belongs to practice, some pleasure in getting a little better at an instrument or a little more mobile, or learning a new alphabet, or being able to identify a few more types of minerals or trees, but my main experience of practice is being held in an engrossing present, a dropping away of goal thinking and a dropping away of the anxiousness that belongs to the confusion and indeterminacy of what’s happening in our world. They are containers in this containment, containers that allow me to experience the day in a way that feels gratifying, meaningful without being public facing. 

This paradoxical idea of a good container, the lightness gift given by a limit, has something to do with today’s attempt at drawing a thread between an anatomical fact and a way of writing. 

roundness of the glass bowl

One year when my kid was just old enough that I felt I could take a week to myself, I went to SFDI, a dance and improvisation festival, where I took a workshop with (the bodhisattva) Ralph Lemon. He talked a lot about making and unmaking as an ongoing oscillating polarity of practice, whether improvisational or compositional. A word that I left that week with, marked with the special compact energy of a key, was container. Looking back at my notebook from that week, I found: 

“Container that allows the energy some agency”

The energy, here, I think, is the energy of showing up in the medium. The thickness and reality of the medium. What does the medium you work in allow, when you are able to show up in it? I used to think of this as species of thinking or forms of life – and I’ve flown the flag of expatriate “choreographic thinking” in all of my wanders – but today as I try to write about this, I find myself really thinking of the medium itself as its own material, as a kind of substrate (whereas, perhaps the varieties of thinking concept envisions the same world material differently navigated according to different intelligences and vocabularies). 

Lately, I have been on a memory dive, and I have been rejoicing in the particular experience of conjuring the dead that can occur in writing, and even be held by the cadences and images so that the conjuring can be revisited and shared. The conjuring that occurs, the dead-presence that occurs for me then, is different from flashes of memory; it belongs to the medium of words and the act of writing, it is a fruiting body made of language stuff. Likewise, when I am dancing, especially eyes-closed and so deep in the visual experience rendered by my mind’s eye, I can experience a continuity of form between my body and other living things, a feeling of being held in the vast network and deep time of growing things that have resulted in, among other things, the movement possibilities that my physical body affords. And that is a kind of hallucinogenic fruiting body made of anatomy stuff.

Maybe some part of you says yes, I recognize that, I’ve done that kind of ocean swimming? I hope so.

How do you build an invitational space so that “the energy [of your medium] has some agency”?

Container, like a festival tent.

Well anyway, container in the way Ralph Lemon invoked it in this workshop was like taking the idea of a limitation (think of “limitation” in a formalist way, like an Oulipo constraint or something equally strict), and imagining the limitation not as a task, but as the outline of a circle, a circumference around you. Inside the circle, which is utterly constrained by the simple limitation that bounds it, is freedom, presence. The presence is found in relationship: to the other occupants of the container, human or not, living or not, materially real or not. The container could be anything; it’s a tool to keep yourself there. And anything can act as a container. It could be a literal, marked out space (we watched videos of Chicago footwork, taped boxes on the floor defining a zone of action) or a syntactical form (speak only questions, for example, use only words that contain the letter “e”). The container’s value is in demarcating a space within which you can keep yourself alive, present, questioning—moving in a medium. 

We had a score, I think even called the container score, where the group would stand in a circle and someone would enter the circle and dance for maybe a minute, and that minute’s dance would become the container for the group. We would then continue, as a group, for maybe 45 minutes, entering, moving, retreating, watching, all occupying the container laid down by the first mover, however we understood it. The group’s physical circle would be a container for this container score (although at a certain point we would inevitably allow it to dissolve). Instead of “playing with” or “developing” a movement idea—a sort of added-value way of thinking that we are inundated with—the score asked us just to stay inside the idea. But at the same time, inside the idea, the idea itself becomes impossibly spacious. 

Obviously, containers can take other shapes than circles, but I like the image of a circle as its elemental visual representation. And that takes us to today’s anatomical fact.

Anatomical Fact

I wanted to think about three round chambers in our skeletal form. The pelvic bowl, the rib case, the skull. Thinking about these structure for their roundness takes us away from the precision of some of the other anatomical facts we’ve looked at. Rounding-up to roundness. (Actually so much of ideokinesis works through a kind of rounding up: the faith that a simple active image can interface with the incredible actual complexity of the body.) 

One of Barbara Clark’s manuals is called The Body is Round – Use All the Radii. In it, she tracks through a whole set of bony structures offering roundness ideas. Wheels of weight transference at the ankles and pelvis. Ribs as fingers encircling. Below is a compressed version of “The Head is Round” from that manual. You can follow a short version of this even sitting in a chair. Before you start, touch one finger to the tip of your nose, and place a finger from the other hand directly across from that point on the back of your head. Project a line between your two fingers and try to visualize a center point between them (tap the top of your skull to help define the center if you need). About at that projected center point is the front of the atlas joint (C1), where the skull rests on the top of the spine. Just below that is the axis joint (C2), which allows the skull to swivel side to side. You can think of these two places as a center region of the skull sphere, the meeting place between the spine and the skull, the skull balancing and hanging off that point like one of those balancing bird toys. 

THE HEAD IS ROUND – BARBARA CLARK (COMPACT VERSION)

 “Think of the head as round. Feel a line through the center of the sphere. Let the head finds its balance front to back on the atlas and turn side to side on the axis.

“Exercise 1: Look at the drawing and think of capping your head with a cone. The tip of the cone points directly up the ceiling. First, picture moving clockwise around the circle at the base of the cone. Then think of the action…counter-clockwise. Finally, think the line from the center of the top of your head through the middle of the cone to its axis tip. Drop down through the spinal heels [imagine each vertebra as a pair of feet, toes toward the front, and relax the heels down] as you direct the tip of the cone toward the ceiling… [I like to add, draw circles on the ceiling with the tip of your cone hat.]

traced from a drawing by Barbara Clark

“Exercise 2: Awareness of balancing the head at the center of its depth gives you a sense of a round back of the head. The forehead is also round. To sense this shape, get behind the back of the forehead. Think of how it curves forward into a spherical shape. This allows the forehead to take the lead in movement as the chin and jaw soften downward. Then you will be able to feel the uplift of the brain and not its weight.
 
“Exercise 3: …Think of narrowing in toward from the base of the head through the width of the atlas to the axis pivot. Then widen between the outer ears.”

ACTIVITY: With those images now— 
Take your round head for a spin. A walk, a roll around the floor. 
Then project a similar roundness to the ribs and the pelvis. 
Walk around, imagining three bowls, three roundnesses, stacked up like a tea tray. 

Feel them as light. Feel the space between them. Try to perceive the extent of their roundness (at the perimeter) as a way of understanding the real depth of the organ masses within the containers. Don’t just be a front surface and a back surface. 

Writing Prompt

Choose a borrowed story to retell. If you have already been retelling a borrowed story for the earlier parts of this somatics pop-up, consider re-using a story so you can approach it in a new way. 

Before you write, diagram for yourself a light, easy chain of three containers or bowls, or if you like that china tea tray, some lovely bowl-like plates. Allow yourself to follow your impulse and name the three bowls. This is really wide open, so perhaps just accept the first three ideas that come to mind. Right now, I am thinking of Yallery Brown, a folk story I rewrote for the diaphragm study. And the three things that come to mind are: names; ground and soil; colors. Those are categories, so here’s another more syntactical version of a constraint, just an example: drifting tumbleweed sentences; curses; questions. 

Then retell your borrowed story, writing only the material that exists in those three bowls. 

This might mean going through the story in the same chronology as before, but with an interpretive frame or emphasis belonging to the bowls. Or it might mean parsing the story into elements and presenting it outside of narrative chronology. Or it might mean retelling the story three times, with three successive angles of vision on what details matter. You might move through the bowls in series or bounce between them, or focus on only one, but let some consciousness of what sits in the others leak in. Or it might mean anything else. As always, the vagueness is an invitation to fill in the blank with your own choices. And as always, accept a “wrong” version of following the exercise as perfectly fine.

As you write, consider especially how the container can gift a sense of purpose, focus, or ongoingness to the stuff in the container. How it can also gift you a satisfaction in simplicity? How can it relieve you of the burden of a certain pressure toward development or improvement in the Lockean sense? Is there a different feeling of the being of your story that arises when you write this way? 

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?