Repetition + Adaptation = Truth

[Nicole Garlando]

On November 19, I attended Vida Midgelow‘s lecture and post-discussion “Dance Improvisation as Research: Liquid Knowing and Languaging” with OSU cohorts and faculty (I consider them “cohorts” in ways) and was sparked as thought fanned questions. Some of the language from her felt sense turned voice dripped over me like warm oil, running down, finding spaces of dry flesh to slick. Others hung in the air and didn’t approach my skin to sink in. There was discussion after about the liquiding of knowledge – how it is a violent process – as disruption of a solid to become a liquid can be thought of – so that a certain knowing, which is thought to be solid, may run through our bodies as liquid. Ok.

But what of the ether? What of the knowledge that is felt to be like air? Liquiding this knowledge is a much different process. The knowing which we do not have language for is said to be in the ether. It is for the interest of liquidating and languaging this knowledge that I proceed. It reminds me of something Lyndsey said to me, I paraphrase: “maybe for you it’s about learning new language”. 

During the post-discussion we bleed self-reflection like reflex.
The circle sees something. But what is it?

False dichotomies run through my awareness on into the night:

Self- Other
Masculine-Feminine
Words-Movement
Maker-Witness
Known-Unknown
Space-In Between Space
Finding-Losing Oneself
Myth-Truth
Listening-Responding
Motion-Stillness
Pleasure-Pain
Question-Answer
Together-Apart

The way of this or that.
Seems to me that all things can explain/correlate/equate/negate one another.

This is that, as it is not.
So now what?

Move. Even sitting here. feel the movement of thought. the blood in the veins, the juice in the hips. pleasure yourself as these fingers stroke the keys and learning cums.

Ok, so for example there is pleasure and there is pain, in an endless spectrum but i am unable to think of any other occupier. The spectrum i see is linear. Pleasure at one end and pain at the other. Though of course, pleasure and pain often coincide. So it is a circle – yet even a circle is a line curved. Linear. But I know it is  not. There are many other models of choosing. there is the unfeeling. the giving of no fucks. The thinking of cramming of density. emotionless. the style of guts/ the style of gut that is in your face, that is in the place. Be still and see the you in me. What is the void? What is a human, anyway? We are neither this nor that.

Model of dichotomies is false.

We are the *third thing* (a term I borrow from K.J. Holmes), or an infinite number of things, and maybe only one.

Repetition + Adaptation = Truth

(excerpt 11.20.14 | nicogarlo.wordpress.com)