Phenomenal encounters

Tree of Fluids, by Jean Bubuffet

Much as I might plan for a journey, it is chance, in the end, that points to directions of interest.

This has certainly been the case with my research journey so far. Chance encounters have set me on paths inconceivable. My journey began watching an expeditioner crouching over a Sydney Nolan painting of Antarctica last year; or before that, walking and talking with an Antarctic whale observer on the red rocks of Flinders Island; or even earlier, with my father holding me tight on the bow of the ship that carried us across the sea to Australia.

It is often through some physical encounter, with people and environments, that I connect memory and experience. Though physical movement I learn, and express my understandings. Or does moving through landscape embody my knowledge? And what kind of knowledge is that? I can still feel the Tango rhythms of Buenos Aires in my being. I felt I understood glaciers more, walking through valleys of England’s Lakes District that were carved by them.

The picture above is my drawing of a painting by Jean Dubuffet that I saw in the Tate Modern: Tree of Fluids. It caught my eye. I saw it as a body integrated with its landscape. Body and ground are one, and both are painted in layers of glaze. It reminded me of what Siobhan Davies had talked about, of our bodies and landscapes made up of the same elements. The fact of our connection with environment is easily forgotten, she said.

Today, reflecting on the last two months in Argentina and the UK, I read:

We grasp external space through our bodily situation. A ‘corporeal or postural schema’ gives us at every moment a global, practical and implicit notion of the relation between our body and things, of our hold on them. A system of possible movements, or ‘motor projects’, radiates from us to our environment. [Our body] is our expression in the world, the visible form of our intentions. Even our most secret affective movements… help to shape our perception of things.

Merleau-Ponty (1964 p.5) cited in Kaylo, 2008 p.3

Here, Janet Kaylo was talking about phenomenology, in the latest Edition of Moving On, a journal published by the Dance-Movement Therapy Association of Australia. She writes that,

Consciousness is understood as a process of making meaning of one’s existence, and the body is seen as the nexux, or gestalt, within which that meaning happens. All perception occurs as a continuous series of relational actions, between the bodil and the environment, which makes individual meaning out of the unfathamable complexity of information available to us (Welton 1999; Leeder 1990; Merleau-Ponty 1962).

References

Leeder, D. (1990) The Absent Body. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962) Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routeledge and Kegan Paul.

Welton, D. (ed) (1999) The Body. Malden, Mass and Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.

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Today I selected and secured after hours access to a very large room for Moving and Drawing with a small study group.