Just browsing through your posts tonight, Ellie, and having a fine time of it. I really love the quote from
Hartmut Rosa: "When we love these things, there emerges something like a vibrating wire between us and the world." Because to really love something is a felt experience, one of whole-bodied attention. Maybe we have forgotten how to really love the world. I mean, not everybody, but--life is now so deadened. Driving on highways fucking kills me. I don't know how I could be ok if I had to do that everyday. So yeah, I'm sensitive, but isn't that exactly the point? How sensitive did we have to be way back before the Industrial Revolution, before Christianity, before the Roman army went out with its order of destruction and demanded its tribute? We lived with the land in a way we can't even fathom now. Once I was at a retreat in the Chiricahua Mtns in Arizona--sacred land of the Apache, but taken from them, and I could feel the land yearning for that deep relationship of being so intimately woven with humanity. I've felt that in other places, too. Places that are still wild and were once in sacred relationship with the people. Because the people loved the land, and the land loved the people. Thank you for all your writing--wild and passionate and exactly what I needed.
Ahh Stephanie, thank you so much for this. Yes — so true that to really love something is a whole-body, felt experience. And I agree that there’s so much that’s deadened and deadening today — I think we’re definitely in agreement on that. But the thing I keep coming back to is that that vibration, that ability to step back into resonance and love with the whole body, is always right there. It’s so hard, maybe impossible, to inhabit it all day every day, because as you point out the structures and architectures of modern life are so deadening. And yet it’s astounding and miraculous, really, that all we need to reconnect is a quiet half hour. That a quiet half hour of realignment can actually change the world we inhabit.
I am so glad to find you here! I resonate so deeply with so many threads you have woven into this. You have pulled together so many thoughts, feelings, images and theorists, what a beautiful and rich sharing. I have spent the last four years in a deep artistic, psychological and physical exploration of the dark. On of the things I love most about the dark is that it inhibits our sight. We pulled towards our other senses, touch, smell, hearing, sensing. We have to find our way...it requires an initial period of disorientation, but, soon we inhabit new ways of being, in ourselves, in space in relation to one another and the objects around us. Kukaine calls this inhabiting a "visceral aesthetic" where we relate to the world more and more through our bodies, through intimacy and through tacit knowledge....Sara Ahmed also writes about the dark and the need for disorientation in Queering Phenomenology...I could keep writing. I am so interested in what it would mean for us to learn to see differently, to see with a soft gaze, wide and open, a gaze that orients towards what is "other", a gaze that holds the peripheral and allows for the emergent to come forward. I wrote my thesis on "Being and Seeing in the Dark" and have subsequently started a substack to explore these ideas further! Happy to have found you! P.S. I have spent a lot of time in caves and these experiences have been very shaping -
I am very involved with a community in Northern Ghana, West Africa. In their festivals the "linguist" performs, that is, he recites/sings the history of the "family" accompanied by drums. The family, the Nantumba people, are actually a large group of cousins whose ancestors can be traced back centuries to the ancient Dagbon Kingdom of West Africa. The linguist among them is trained from childhood to remember their stories. He grows up in a family of linguists. This is his job. To remember the stories of the family and to recite them at all the important events during the year. Many if not all of these linguists can neither read or write in any language. They've trained their bodies to remember the stories.
Love this piece, Ellie. Thank you. Cleaning out my files today, I came across this passage that feels appropriate to share:
“The powers of creation are eternally musical, their mystic cadences swell from star to star with note divine. All nature, seen and unseen, formed and unformed, listens in rapt awe to the endless symphonies of the Great Unknown. Then there is another music, the song of Life, the beating of human hearts, the peals of merry laughter, the broken sobs of sorrow. All these blend into a mystic orchestra, ofttimes unheard, which swells in note invisible through eternity to the very footstool of the Divine. Man’s nature pours forth from his being with the expression of living music... the very emotions of his soul pour out in divine harmonies from the instrument that registers and seems to live the innermost thoughts of the musician, the innermost symphonies of his soul.”
Just browsing through your posts tonight, Ellie, and having a fine time of it. I really love the quote from
Hartmut Rosa: "When we love these things, there emerges something like a vibrating wire between us and the world." Because to really love something is a felt experience, one of whole-bodied attention. Maybe we have forgotten how to really love the world. I mean, not everybody, but--life is now so deadened. Driving on highways fucking kills me. I don't know how I could be ok if I had to do that everyday. So yeah, I'm sensitive, but isn't that exactly the point? How sensitive did we have to be way back before the Industrial Revolution, before Christianity, before the Roman army went out with its order of destruction and demanded its tribute? We lived with the land in a way we can't even fathom now. Once I was at a retreat in the Chiricahua Mtns in Arizona--sacred land of the Apache, but taken from them, and I could feel the land yearning for that deep relationship of being so intimately woven with humanity. I've felt that in other places, too. Places that are still wild and were once in sacred relationship with the people. Because the people loved the land, and the land loved the people. Thank you for all your writing--wild and passionate and exactly what I needed.
Ahh Stephanie, thank you so much for this. Yes — so true that to really love something is a whole-body, felt experience. And I agree that there’s so much that’s deadened and deadening today — I think we’re definitely in agreement on that. But the thing I keep coming back to is that that vibration, that ability to step back into resonance and love with the whole body, is always right there. It’s so hard, maybe impossible, to inhabit it all day every day, because as you point out the structures and architectures of modern life are so deadening. And yet it’s astounding and miraculous, really, that all we need to reconnect is a quiet half hour. That a quiet half hour of realignment can actually change the world we inhabit.
I am so glad to find you here! I resonate so deeply with so many threads you have woven into this. You have pulled together so many thoughts, feelings, images and theorists, what a beautiful and rich sharing. I have spent the last four years in a deep artistic, psychological and physical exploration of the dark. On of the things I love most about the dark is that it inhibits our sight. We pulled towards our other senses, touch, smell, hearing, sensing. We have to find our way...it requires an initial period of disorientation, but, soon we inhabit new ways of being, in ourselves, in space in relation to one another and the objects around us. Kukaine calls this inhabiting a "visceral aesthetic" where we relate to the world more and more through our bodies, through intimacy and through tacit knowledge....Sara Ahmed also writes about the dark and the need for disorientation in Queering Phenomenology...I could keep writing. I am so interested in what it would mean for us to learn to see differently, to see with a soft gaze, wide and open, a gaze that orients towards what is "other", a gaze that holds the peripheral and allows for the emergent to come forward. I wrote my thesis on "Being and Seeing in the Dark" and have subsequently started a substack to explore these ideas further! Happy to have found you! P.S. I have spent a lot of time in caves and these experiences have been very shaping -
Another meaningful piece, Ellie! Thank you!
I love this idea that the body can hold a story.
I am very involved with a community in Northern Ghana, West Africa. In their festivals the "linguist" performs, that is, he recites/sings the history of the "family" accompanied by drums. The family, the Nantumba people, are actually a large group of cousins whose ancestors can be traced back centuries to the ancient Dagbon Kingdom of West Africa. The linguist among them is trained from childhood to remember their stories. He grows up in a family of linguists. This is his job. To remember the stories of the family and to recite them at all the important events during the year. Many if not all of these linguists can neither read or write in any language. They've trained their bodies to remember the stories.
Love this piece, Ellie. Thank you. Cleaning out my files today, I came across this passage that feels appropriate to share:
“The powers of creation are eternally musical, their mystic cadences swell from star to star with note divine. All nature, seen and unseen, formed and unformed, listens in rapt awe to the endless symphonies of the Great Unknown. Then there is another music, the song of Life, the beating of human hearts, the peals of merry laughter, the broken sobs of sorrow. All these blend into a mystic orchestra, ofttimes unheard, which swells in note invisible through eternity to the very footstool of the Divine. Man’s nature pours forth from his being with the expression of living music... the very emotions of his soul pour out in divine harmonies from the instrument that registers and seems to live the innermost thoughts of the musician, the innermost symphonies of his soul.”
– Manly P. Hall, The All-Seeing Eye, 1923