Thoughts From Last Week

I have a really hard time reading and writing – which is a difficult thing to admit for anyone navigating academia. I find written words visually intimidating and difficult to relate to, as if there was too much of a distortion between words and experience. When trying to read both Wynter and Denise's texts every word felt too important to simply read in silence. In the silent act of reading by myself, I oscillated between opaque silence and an excess of resonance, and it became all noise inside. So I tried to listened to the noise – what I got from it was rather a feeling than an understanding, a quite violent feeling.

But when Denise's words were embodied in sounds and gestures, through her own body in relation to mine and everybodies and objects around us, presences/absences – it all took shape for me and I felt the movement and meaning of words. Listening is a relationship, and it involves touching.

(Now that I am thinking of all these things, I will try to read her text again, but out loud – listening to her voice through mine.)

(This brings me back to notes from last January: “On utilise les mots pour avoir accès à ce qu'il y a derrière les mots, et quand on est vraiment à l'écoute, une écoute incarnée, on entend plus que les mots, on entrevoit(/entend) ce qui les précède. On utilise les mots pour ce qu'ils ne sont pas.”)

In this sense, Denise's discussion of poethics was touching. Poethics as experiential ways to “gather something that is already there but that cannot be seen otherwise”, “putting time into experience”. But is the grammar of our dominating structures enough? No. Is blackness really other, or is saying this is merely a perpetuation of the colonialist paradigm? “Is blackness rather an other way of existing in the world that cannot be described using the elements available by grammar?” She talks of a possibility of something else. She says: “I am always looking for something else. Other ways of hearing, listening, engaging.” And what really resonated with me was when she talked about learning/listening as attention, attending to something/someone, fight distraction, “how is my body attending to your body?”.

(distance/bringing together/TOUCHING are knowledge)

How do we know we're learning? – TOUCHING. Like the Pro-tactile language – creating words together, with two bodies, touching – there is an absolute necessity of contact, which doesn't necessarily go back to the individual.

(This reminds me of zen scholar Albert Low's discussion of awareness-of and awareness-as using the example of touching in his book Creating Consciousness: A Study of Consciousness, Creativity, Evolution and Violence. He asks the reader to touch the page of the book they are reading and asks the reader to notice what they are feeling from this touching. Awareness-of is the recognition that you are touching something and therefore feeling something. In awareness-of, there is the involvement of the ego, a self-rationalization of the concept of touching. Then, he also asks the reader to touch the page again and try to feel where their finger ends and where the page begins. A question without answer, since the feeling of touch brings together the two elements in a new awareness. There is no separation between the page and your finger, that separation is only made by you rationalizing what you are feeling. The feeling of touching itself, is what he calls the awareness-as, it is the experience itself without the ego.)

(Un)learning about learning.

I think this class is challenging because it allows us to collectively build new structures of learning/listening and we are not used to that. And I think that is where meaningful deep learning can happen. 

-Alessandra