Being and doing (Doo-be-do, bee-do)

I get back to work in one week.

It's the end of the summer; and what a summer.
From one angle: Swaying between being and doing... What to do? What to make? What to buy? And why not just... slow down and stop!?

Because stopping kinda makes me dizzy. 'Cuz as Hiroko Tamano (Subterrean Arthouse, Berkeley) says: ''When you stop, then you start moving at a thousand miles per hour.''
And Google agrees with teacher Tamano:

''The earth rotates once every 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4.09053 seconds, called the sidereal period, and its circumference is roughly 40,075 kilometers. Thus, the surface of the earth at the equator moves at a speed of 460 meters per second--or roughly 1,000 miles per hour.''   -Google

“Stop acting so small. You are the universe in ecstatic motion.”
― Rumi

Complete liberty! (which is different than absolute freedom, by the way.)  
A whole lot of free time! (At least as long as I have money in the bank.)
As I anticipated, I've felt it somewhat compulsory to ''furnish'' the time-space I live in. I really wanted to do nothing. But I guess the mind did not quite surrender so easily. I guess I can't handle an empty room; there's always writing on the walls. That's what happens when you get a taste of mindfulness: the mind is so full!

I seek balance between doing and being. I take care of small actions that need to be done, like taking out the compost bin or trimming and watering the tomato plants. I dance a lot and I juggle; I so need to move the energy through my body. I haven't learned to contain the impressions the world make on me; I need to find appropriate ways to ex-press them. And when I stop moving my body, it's my thoughts that keep running. Observing the chatter in your mind will make you dizzy. Finding that you're quite powerless when you want to make it stop, that's a lesson in humility. Recognizing that trying to control or fight the stream actually gives the chattering mind even more power, that could lead to revolution.

...

Stopping to face a pregnant void. A distorted time-space of some sort. A plane of immanence. Matrix of potentialities, in which all things get revealed. And many demand to be made into manifestation; to be manifested.

(It's is a beautiful word;

man·i·fes·ta·tionˌ manəfəˈstāSHən,

noun

Event, action, or object that clearly shows or embodies something, especially a theory or an abstract idea.

"the first obvious manifestations of global warming"

• the action or fact of showing an abstract idea. "the manifestation of anxiety over the upcoming exams"

• a symptom or sign of an ailment. "a characteristic manifestation of Lyme disease"

''And I think to myself''... 'Am I manifesting anything'? What am I really doing with the time given me? Or should I ask myself about what I should be doing? What? No! The teachers have told us, 'There are no more shoulds', at least not in this case.
I should be doin' just what I'm doin' right now, conversing with my heart, grounded in cyberspace, spinning a thousand miles, per minute.
Just that. Living a blessed life. Doing what I love.

I'm sorry, I didn't get the credits for these three images. I give all credits to their authors et cetera.

“Dance, when you're broken open. Dance, if you've torn the bandage off. Dance in the middle of the fighting. Dance in your blood. Dance when you're perfectly free.”
― Rumi

“silence is the language of god,
all else is poor translation.”
― Rumi

Mes bouquins, suivi de Rimbaud

Je suis debout devant ma bibliothèque et je regarde mes livres.  Je fais souvent cela. C'est un geste chargé..

Je regarde tous ces titres, ces ouvrages, ces richesses... et je flirt avec l'abysse tentation de plonger dans un verre d'eau à moitié vide: comment pourrai-je jamais mémo... absorber tout ça ?!

J'ai passé les sept derniers mois à réfléchir sur la pédagogie, l'apprentissage, la cognition, ''l'acquisition de connaissances''... la méta-cognition.  (Finalement un nom pour ce qui me passionne... m'enfin, l'une des choses qui me passionnent...).  

J'ai toujours aimé étudier le contenant en même temps que le contenu.

Comment aider les étudiants à apprendre? Pardon! Je devrais plutôt dire ''à développer des compétences''?  Pour ça, j'ai des tonnes d'idées!

D'ailleurs, j'aurais tellement voulu pouvoir tenir mon blogue durant les sept derniers mois passés au microprogramme en enseignement! Parce que j'en ai eues des réflexions et des réalisations! J'en ai eues... des bribes de révolutions. 

Le temps, l'espace, et ma psyché ne m'ont pas permis de tenir journal.  J'ai préféré laisser mijoter en me disant que je finirais bien par créer un nouveau blogue dédié à la pédagogie.

Mes puisque l'intention qui alimente Fool of Love est d'être et de partager l'ensemble de mes expériences autant émotives/affectives que réflexives/analytiques, je me permets cette fois à nouveau d'explorer et de laisser place à ce moi décousu.  

Je fais l'inventaire de mes bouquins. J'en ai lus la plupart, au cours les dix dernières années. Ces bouquins, ils ont contribué à faire l'être que je suis aujourd'hui.

Assise devant ma bibliothèque.  J'imagine enseigner la philosophie...

Comme j'aimerais pouvoir mémoriser tout ça!

Pouvoir en discuter avec éloquence

Par exemple.

Épistémologiquement parlant, 

vous raconter tout ce que je comprends;

Ou empiriquement... tout ce que je ressens.

Empiriste ou rationnaliste transcendantaliste?

Phénoménologiquement, définitivement, existentialiste.

L'Anarchisme est-il/elle vraiment un humanisme?

D'avoir lu toutes ces oeuvres... Pour me construire un monde.  Pour me représenter ''le monde''.

Comme j'aimerais pouvoir expliquer tout ça! 

Je compte bien élaborer davantage sur le thème de la pédagogie, sur les contenus et sur les contenants, et sur les vases communicants.

Mais pour ce soir, une pause.  On dira que c'était une introduction.

Parmi mes livres...

Poésies d'Arthur Rimbaud 

(Derniers vers/ Une saison en enfer/ Illuminations) 

Édition parue au Livre de Poche, Librairrie Générale Française, 1972. 

Extraits donc, d'un poème de Rimbaud.

Pour Annabelle,

 et pour Guillaume.

Et pour la poésie, oubliée.

Comédie de la soif

1. Les parents

Nous sommes tes Grands-Parents

 Les Grands!

Couverts des froides sueurs

De la lune et des verdures.

Nos vins secs avaient du coeur!

Au soleil sans imposture

Que faut-il à l'homme?  boire.

Moi - Mourir aux fleuves barbares.

Nous sommes tes Grands-Parents

    Des champs.

L'eau est au fond des osiers: 

vois le courant du fossé

Autour du château mouillé.

Descendons en nos celliers;

Après, le cidre et le lait.

Moi - Aller où boivent les vaches

Nous sommes tes Grands-Parents

    Tiens, prends

Les liqueurs dans nos armoires;

Le Thé, le Café, si rares.

Frémissent dans les bouilloires.

--- Vois les images, les fleurs.

Nous rencontre du cimetière.

Moi - Ah! tarir toutes les urnes!

2. L'Esprit

Éternelles, Ondines, 

     Divisez l'eau fine.

Vénus, soeur de l'azur, 

      Émeus le flot pur.

Juifs errants de Norvège,

    Dîtes-moi la neige.

Anciens exilés chers, 

    Dîtes-moi la mer.

Moi- Non, plus ces boissons pures;

        Ces fleurs d'eau pour verres;

Légendes ni figures

        Ne me désaltèrent; 

Chansonnier, ta filleul

        C'est ma soif si folle,

Hydre intime sans gueules

       Que mine et désole.

(...)

p.141-42

Apoca-postmod-idiosyncratisme... et Jean Gebser

Just do it.
Write it down.  It doesn't matter if it makes no sense at first.  Eventually, it will.
Because I feel it in my being.
Visions that come from instincts.  Now I want to use conscious projection, now that I have come to see it clearly: The world is made up of psychic projections.  Call it Maya, or the Veil.  And that's what I mean when I say I want to talk about: the Apocalypse.  (Okay I admit, I don't actually say that often. But in my head I do.)  For,

An apocalypse (Ancient Greek: ἀποκάλυψις apocálypsis, from ἀπό and καλύπτω meaning 'un-covering'), translated literally from Greek refers to a revelation of something hidden, although this sense did not enter English until the 14th century.^[1] In religious contexts it is usually a revelation of hidden meaning - hidden from human knowledge in an era dominated by falsehood and misconception.

Isn't it time we lift the Veil of ignorance, together, so as to acknowledge how we've been going down a path of falsehood and lies, which seems to be leading us towards catastrophic times?  Isn't time we dare to recognize the impact of our behaviors?  Modern man has prided himself on the capacity to use logic and lay out the laws of cause and effect.  Modern man has gone too far in wanting to use these sciences in order to control the world, for his own ends.  Modern man doesn't have control...

But do not despair!  For ''post-modernity'' has been formulating responses!  Tadam!  Thanks to Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, Einstein, Derrida, Heisenberg, etc.  (Some womyn in there ??)

If all that is human is projection, if God is finally dead (thank God!) and humanistic morality has showed itself to be but another unsatisfying panacea against the depth of our existential guilt and anxiety,  if relativism today gets thrown around by social and natural scientists alike... what can postmodernism give us?


I have picked up Jean Gebser's book ''The Ever-Present Origin'' again.  I'd started reading it two or three years ago but had lost momentum (this is one thick and dense piece of philosophical work!); today, the timing feels just right...

Structures of consciousness: archaic, magic, mythical, mental... integral.
I won't get into all of this right now, but my idea was to try and put some of the myriad of concepts and intuitions in ''order''.  (How faithful to the mental's obsession with ''dividing and conquering''!)

So as a point of departure, let's sample a few quotes:

It is of fundamental importance that we clearly distinguish between ''irrational'' and ''arational,'' for this distinction lies at the very heart of our deliberations.  Arationality has nothing to do with irrationality; their only connection exists in the fact that a rationality is not possible without irrationality, or far that matter without the pre-rational or the rational.

Wow.  I was just thinking about this recently!! Well, that's what I was coming closer to express, though my thinking was incomplete.  I was pondering the anti-rationalist stance I seem to have gradually adopted over the last decade.  How can I become a CÉGEP philosophy teacher (I'm about to go back to school and get some teaching tools and credentials) when I can also picture myself writing a Ph.D dissertation on the topic of wildness and the necessity to overcome and transcend rational thinking?!  Would that make me a hypocrite?

Gebser says it so well.  It's time we integrate all structures of consciousness.

Furthermore addressing my conundrum and the fear I have about teaching, he writes:

Two difficulties present themselves in these deliberations with which we must contend.  The first is inherent in the demand of any treatise for a sequential presentation, which is necessarily contrary to the simultaneity of an integral mode.

Believe it or not, this actually speaks to what I was telling my mom, just last week!
''I don't know if I can be a good teacher,'' I was admitting to her, ''because I don't consider myself very eloquent when it comes down to conveying the knowledge I'd like to share.''  She said she thought I'd be a great teacher, on the contrary.  ''I don't know.  I feel disillusioned and borderline resentful towards half the curriculum, and whatever I am passionate about, I have such a hard time verbalizing in a clear, concise, and linear fashion!  I feel like a webpage with dozens of hyperlinks: I want to open them all, enter in every concept, explore all angles and all directions so as to really get the whole picture!''

My mother laughed.  I felt that she understood and it felt good.

No doubt I could keep this blog entry unfold to great lengths.  I mean, I didn't even get to explore my first idea in sitting down to write a blog today!  I wanted to reflect a bit on Gebser, but I also wanted to explore the intuition I've been having, that my addiction to food (it's so intense these days!! Compulsion galore!) could have something to do with the shift we-I are going through.

Making loose parallels between the fast burning, highly concentrated energy which is characteristics of fossil-fuels consumption (along with their long-term consequences), and the energy resources I am fueling my own body with: carbohydrates and simple sugars.  Isn't there a parallel there?

Immediate gratification versus health.  Why can't I stop reaching for breads and sugars, when I am perfectly well aware that it is not good for me?!  I call this an addiction.

The good thing about this is that I get to belong and remain part of the collective.  (Belonging is a vital and primary need.)  Observing my addictive behavior fills me with empathy for all the addictive behaviors everyone is grappling with.
The ecological crisis is a question of addiction.

Oh! There's got to be a thread linking the contents of this entry... the apocalypse, postmodernism, Jean Gebser's genius work, and my idiosyncratic challenges and ways of making sense of them...

The thread?  Consciousness.

Butoh with Yumiko Yoshioka

Friday night sitting at the dinning table.  A new house.  A new life.
I haven't felt like writing much, as some of you might have noticed.  I needed, I wanted, to just be with what I'm going through.  Being, in the midst of the storm.  To see.


The beautiful thing is that these past five days have managed to tie me back to my core... in a way that I had deeply been needing.  I knew it would happen.  I had been waiting for this workshop for a while now: finally: a bit of Butoh. (Or as they write in French: butô.)

Studio 303, Montréal.  Twenty movers I had been excited to meet, for I figured they would share my love of Butoh, or at least, of one aspect of it.
We had the opportunity to spend 20h with world-renown teacher and choreographer, Yumiko Yoshioka, as part of her big tour.  How wonderful it must be to travel the world and teach this art form and this wisdom!

As she said, Butoh is not just a dance.  It's also a way of life.

Yumiko Yoshioka tells us that, for her, ''Butoh is dance of transformation.''  She said, ''It is a passageway, a medium.  It can be also be dance of darkness, of the unconscious.''
And that my friends... is why I am attracted with this art form-process...
It's that encounter with the in-between again, that space of transition... for it's at the very center of every breath, in the heart of the process, that I experience Life to her fullest...


When I dance butoh, I am in relationship with oneness.  I do not always feel at one, but I am searching for it, through consciousness and through my body... from inside AND outside, simultaneously, within both the physical and the imaginal environment, I try to listen and surrender.  I stop thinking and I move.  Naturally.

 Waves.  Waves.  Waves.
I thoroughly enjoyed Yumiko Yoshiota's Butoh.

''The essence of wave, is to transmit.''
Yes.  That's what I want to do.

''The yin and the yang are always within one another.  Life and Form chase each other...''

I'd be lying if I said I completely succeeded in forgetting about my [looking for work] situation... ''What do I want to do?  Where do I want to work?'' ... I've come to realize I've been throwing my energy in a million directions.  Work? Work?  I could do a million things!  I only need someone to give me a chance!



What I really need right now, is to stop and be for a little bit... in a yin kinda place.  There is no need to be all yang and proactive if I haven't given myself the time to listen... to what I really want to be doing.

Sure, I seem to be running out of money.  But I must accept, this is a big transition indeed.  Butoh is reminding me: the beauty is in the process.
(Caution: I've known this for a while and I might be a bit addicted to that state of becoming...)

Yumiko says: ''Pain is often the best teacher.  Love is the best healer.''

This week, I did EXACTLY what I LOVE.

A space I had found in Barcelona...
the last time I took half an hour to dance like this...
slowly...

P.P.S. For those that could be interested: Yumiko will be teaching in Québec city next week (I think I'm going for part of it!!) and then in Toronto...

P.P.S. For my part, I'll be teaching in a community center somewhere north of Montréal...  My first dance class to a group of 3-5 years old!!
:)

L'Empereur (poème de Jodorowsky

Poème d'Alejandro Jodorowsky, extrait du libre Le Chant du Tarot 
(traduit de l'espagnol aux éditions Le Relié)


Commentaires à suivre dans un prochain blogue...

L'Empereur (4)

Ce n'est pas moi qui soumis à l'horreur du vide
fuirais le lieu véritable sur les traces d'un rêve devenu patrie.

Mon présent n'est pas la prolongation d'un hier inacceptable,
l'avenir ne me tombe pas sur la nuque comme un store métallique
et toutes les ombres du monde ne peuvent me dévorer.

Du navire des ténèbres je suis la clairvoyante figure de proue,
l'abeille dorée qui guette sous chaque lettre, la clé qui ouvre les dimensions scellées
l'ouvrier qui construit un manoir infini, l'oeil qui palpite au ventre du hasard

Comme le vol héroïque d'un aigle blessé, je vais plus loin que là où cessent les mots.
Entre accords, nuances et structures, je permets que l'illusion accède à la beauté,
j'octroie un projet aux décombres, je convaincs le chaos d'accoucher d'un ordre,
j'accepte d'être le cri d'espoir que poussent les pierres.

Ni le scorpion des jugements ni le cobra des doutes ne peuvent me séduire.
L'important n'est pas un déguisement du banal, le nécessaire n'est pas un farce du hasard,
ce qui dure n'est pas un soupir de l'éphémère, la vérité n,est pas un poisson aveugle dans l'océan sans fin...
Qui ignore les menaces de la lune et humblement accepte ma présence
prend possession de l'épée qui resplendit dans les entrailles de l'âme.

Chant secret des os dans la fragilité des traces,
pilier de marbre vif parme le labyrinthe létal du lierre,
montagne qui donne un sens au vol fugace des luciole,
refuge pour le marcheur qui avance les pieds en sang
Comment ne pas donner du pain aux affamés ? Comment ne pas humilier le superbe?
Je décortique les verrous de fer, hé libère les déchus de leur ruine,
j'expulse de la langue l'immondice, les battements de mon coeur dictent les Lois.

Inexorable essaim, autour de mon sceptre tournoient les ancêtres.
Comme un pont sur les tranchées du temps nous avons uni la racine de nos esprits,
bu le sang de bêtes impitoyables, tiré des flèches pour dominer le vent,
sur des têtes coupées élevé des temples, enroulé nos pénis dans du cuir de serpent,
avec un masque d'oiseau et un couteau vert, soumis le règne des morts
Où mon trône peut-il s'élever sinon au centre du firmament?

Entre l'arôme fécond de la cime et l'haleine viscérale de l'abîme,
j'échange les cornes de mon front contre une couronne qui impose l'obéissance.
Sperme où s'unit la folie de l'eau avec l'ardeur du désert,
dans mon oreille interne j'entends le chant de net milles oiseaux blancs.

Cesse de te sentir un fils abandonné, pour t'éveiller accomplis ce qui t'épouvante,
accepte que ton corps soit un rêve, fais du temps un battement du cil,
déracine de ta langue les concepts, transforme ton nom en brasier,
n'offre pas de résistance à l'abandon, demande au vent qu'il efface ta mémoire,
renonce à marquer un territoire, transforme les frontières en corde d'arc,
agit comme un complice du cosmos, déguisé en mouton entre dans la gueule du loup,
avec l'obstination d'un roc, persévère.  Un jour, jetant des flammes comme un soleil de chair, tu te changeras en Sa personne.
Tu seras alors le seul propriétaire de toi-même.