I began reading Saidiyah Hartman this week, and when I started it was difficult to stop. Her writing caressed me, held me, as I cried for the stories she told. The material we are reading, speaking and listening for this class is so so so so needed. It is growing inside my body, slowly transforming, tearing, repairing my ideas on hierarchy, race, linear-thinking, intelligence, poetry, belonging, memory. When she describes gaps in her family’s lineage - gaps in memory - names such as the dark times it reminds me how important a sensation belonging is; love in relationship to people, to place.
More thoughts on belonging… I am wondering what the importance of knowing ones ancestral history is and how it creates belonging. To be able to look back and see-feel a lineage of people who came before, to know that there has been life lived in close proximity to one’s own blood, yet in another era. That one can tell the story of the reasons for the way one feels, does, is, will be. Is it knowing that your parents had care from their parents who had care from their parents who had care from their parents etc etc? Is it feeling a through line of care that stretches out? Is it a feeling of seemingly infinite care? Then, how is this linked to memory - in the body, in objects in other people, in place? In a way, the souls who were cut off from their families in Africa still have that ancestry, it was interrupted by a severely intense traumatic event, yet it still exists. This then brings up questions of what it means to feel close to family: Can one feel a kinship with family that have been lost touch with for 4 generations if given the chance to meet them? Can one form relationships with non-biological family and create a similar deep and settled sense of belonging?
Sometimes I wonder how to cultivate belonging in small moments.
I recently began taking classes in Qiqong, a meditative movement practice that aims to foster and balance qi - life energy. During one class, the teacher was explaining to us that qigong was about becoming like a tree, with legs like tree trunks rooting into the ground sending qi down into the earth, and an upper body soft like branches that can sway in the wind. After last weeks class my body/mind was completely sober and present, with no trace of fear or living in the future (where I spend a lot of my time).
Was this a deeper sense of belonging in my body? Can this be a small moment of belonging?
((On a separate but related note))
I have splintering thoughts -
as I am starting a sentence my mind is often simultaneously pulling apart the logic or meaning at the seams, looking for fallacy, what’s missing, what else it could be. This makes it difficult for me to follow linear trains of thought, and why I’m appreciating this class so much - because we are exploring tangental, fractal, interrupted networks of stories. The question then becomes, how do we follow such an explorative way of speaking, writing, being that Da Silva, Moten, Baraka and Mackay express?
I know that I’m feeling it more and more. It is a listening to rhythm as much as listening to meaning. Its giving rhythm a chance to have a rich voice. The cut, the interruption, the transition - its everywhere, it is in the always already existing, and we are listening for it, giving it care.
I am listening to Steve Reich as I write this and remembering listening to his music in class as in connection to the cut.
notes meeting and letting go
separate, but always together
always returning, always repeating
following each other, filling in the gaps
sameness and yet constant evolution
almost undetectable
As we allow music to be in a flurry of variables, then maybe we can transfer these listening skills to, for example, Denise’s thoughts of unhinging from universal reason and allow ourselves to experience the world as movement. While revisiting A Black Feminist Poethics I looked up the word ‘subjectum’ and found out that it translates to ‘seat’. This is incredible to me because a seat implies sitting implies a stillness, where Denise and Moten speak of undoing subject and object whereby we are left with constant shifting, dislocating, orienting.
Universal reason assumes that the subject will be looking from the same place. There is no room left for another Universe, a Plenum.
More thoughts on belonging… I am wondering what the importance of knowing ones ancestral history is and how it creates belonging. To be able to look back and see-feel a lineage of people who came before, to know that there has been life lived in close proximity to one’s own blood, yet in another era. That one can tell the story of the reasons for the way one feels, does, is, will be. Is it knowing that your parents had care from their parents who had care from their parents who had care from their parents etc etc? Is it feeling a through line of care that stretches out? Is it a feeling of seemingly infinite care? Then, how is this linked to memory - in the body, in objects in other people, in place? In a way, the souls who were cut off from their families in Africa still have that ancestry, it was interrupted by a severely intense traumatic event, yet it still exists. This then brings up questions of what it means to feel close to family: Can one feel a kinship with family that have been lost touch with for 4 generations if given the chance to meet them? Can one form relationships with non-biological family and create a similar deep and settled sense of belonging?
Sometimes I wonder how to cultivate belonging in small moments.
I recently began taking classes in Qiqong, a meditative movement practice that aims to foster and balance qi - life energy. During one class, the teacher was explaining to us that qigong was about becoming like a tree, with legs like tree trunks rooting into the ground sending qi down into the earth, and an upper body soft like branches that can sway in the wind. After last weeks class my body/mind was completely sober and present, with no trace of fear or living in the future (where I spend a lot of my time).
Was this a deeper sense of belonging in my body? Can this be a small moment of belonging?
((On a separate but related note))
I have splintering thoughts -
as I am starting a sentence my mind is often simultaneously pulling apart the logic or meaning at the seams, looking for fallacy, what’s missing, what else it could be. This makes it difficult for me to follow linear trains of thought, and why I’m appreciating this class so much - because we are exploring tangental, fractal, interrupted networks of stories. The question then becomes, how do we follow such an explorative way of speaking, writing, being that Da Silva, Moten, Baraka and Mackay express?
I know that I’m feeling it more and more. It is a listening to rhythm as much as listening to meaning. Its giving rhythm a chance to have a rich voice. The cut, the interruption, the transition - its everywhere, it is in the always already existing, and we are listening for it, giving it care.
I am listening to Steve Reich as I write this and remembering listening to his music in class as in connection to the cut.
notes meeting and letting go
separate, but always together
always returning, always repeating
following each other, filling in the gaps
sameness and yet constant evolution
almost undetectable
As we allow music to be in a flurry of variables, then maybe we can transfer these listening skills to, for example, Denise’s thoughts of unhinging from universal reason and allow ourselves to experience the world as movement. While revisiting A Black Feminist Poethics I looked up the word ‘subjectum’ and found out that it translates to ‘seat’. This is incredible to me because a seat implies sitting implies a stillness, where Denise and Moten speak of undoing subject and object whereby we are left with constant shifting, dislocating, orienting.
Universal reason assumes that the subject will be looking from the same place. There is no room left for another Universe, a Plenum.
I'm putting this here so that more folks may see it in case they missed it (I posted it at the same time but as a comment 2 weeks prior:
ReplyDeleteI was at a Contact Improv Jam a few months ago and I experienced an epiphany. We were warming up with a small dance, which is an exercise created by Steve Paxton, the founder of contact improv. The small dance is a conversation with gravity and the vertical body, to do it you stand in one place and observe and allow gravity to act upon your body, which manifests in a micro swaying like a bowling pin does when it gets brushed up against. I chose to stand looking out a window, and so as I was getting in touch with the subtle rhythms in my own body I was also looking out at the world happening. There were two people passing a soccer ball, someone riding their bike, another walking, a garbage can stood still, a plastic bag blew in the wind. Somehow, in this moment my being was struck with the understanding of time being encapsulated within matter and vice versa - I saw rhythms existing on their own (of course also in relation to each other), in what I perceived as indifferent to clock time, to time with a capital T. I really believe that its a distinguishable phenomenon to understand something theoretically, and to understand it viscerally. (( On a tangental note, I find it strange to wonder about thoughts living in certain places in the body, travelling, dispersing, condensing. Its a very complex thing to undue Cartesian mind body dualism on a visceral level. )) This visceral understanding that I had landed on is a key into realizing that there are an infinite number of rhythms that we can attune with that aren’t clock time. It is also about time not being separate from matter - that time isn’t something that is acting upon matter but that it is entangled with and within it.
I am speaking of this memory because I am wondering about Denise Da Silva’s sentiment of ending the world as we know it and if this type of relationality could be an entry point. As I attend to the diversity of rhythm that exists in the world, I realise that I am listening for multiplicities of intelligences, ways, opportunities for structuring or unstructuring truths. Somehow when we are not all living parallel to clock Time related to industrialisation related to commodification related to linear thinking, it softens the unsustainable heirarchical ideals of importance that can only be held up by continuous ritual. And so I wonder, what are rituals that we can practice to end the world as we know it? I see dance as one way - sensing multiplicity in environment and body. Reading, listening, thinking and discussing Denise and others has definitely been aiding my transformation. And I can feel it - molecule by molecule - conversation by conversation - undoing my bias’s of western, white, patriarchal culture.