"When the sun stood at midday, he held a market. He caused the people of the earth to come together and collected the wares of the earth. They exchanged these with one another, then returned home, and each thing found its place."--I CHING

ANTICS
TABLE OF CONTENTS

I. AT THE FLEA MARKETS & SWAP MEETS
Survival
Pentimento
Willie's New Wife's Song
A Renaissance Story
Expect the Unexpected
Trading Lives
David the Trader's Second Wife's Song
Cowboys & India

II. IN THE GROUP SHOPS & ANTIQUE MALLS
Sex Sells
The Teacher
Side Effects May Include...
Food for Thought
The Shape-shifter
Naming Names
Trajectory
The Man in Question

III. ON THEIR OWN
The Search for a Perfect Love
Aunt-tiques, or, How We Become
There Will Always Be Another You
The Skin of Water
Goldilocks & Bagels: The True Story of How New York's Central Park Market Got Started
In Motion. A Book of Hours. Ruminations from an ex-Madison Avenue Antiques Dealer.

BACK TO TOP

In this book we investigate these themes in detail to tease out the relationship of movement to perception, conception, emotion, and affect. Many personal explorations are suggested to reveal these relationships. Much recent research and new thinking is cited in support. The third part of the book will be devoted to the practical application of what amounts to a new way of thinking about movement and life.

Click here for Book Proposal and Chapter Headings.


AN INTRODUCTION TO THE BOOK

The Importance of Movement as a Biological Dimension

As human observers, many things in the universe are seen by us to move. But only living things are seen to move themselves. Moshe Feldenkrais said, "Movement is the key to life." What could he have meant by this statement? A life form that sustains itself, and moves itself, must be sensitive to its surroundings, and is therefore proof of the intelligence of (self-) moving bodies. Everything alive is in movement and has at least some movement autonomy in relation to a wider environment. Science writer and anthropologist Jeremy Narby (2005) in his recent book, Intelligence in Nature, documents the scientific evidence and experiential evidence that intelligence exists at every level of life, from the bacterium to the highest levels of evolution. By intelligence he means, as he hones this concept, adaptability and variability in response to the conditions of an environment in which life can be maintained. To achieve this, self-movement is essential.

Hard science as a modality of learning, thinking and exploring is constrained by established habits and norms of investigation. We more often think of this methodology as leading to the freedom of thought that established our modern world and do not notice its limitations. More politely you could say the activity we call science has developed certain rigorous procedures in order to establish what is so in our world. We want to know that our conceptions have validity. While the successes of physics, chemistry and the application of these conceptual realms to the engineering of our environment can be much admired, the application of its methodologies to living beings creates unexpected problems. The methodologies of hard science fixate the attention on isolating mechanisms, finding causes and effects, narrowing attention to limited areas, and constraining thinking to an artificial realm we call, objectivity. This is not to say that the reductionist and objectivist program cannot yield knowledge of the living world. Many important discoveries about our selves and other living beings have followed. We now know many details about the biological mechanisms of genetics, cellular activity, nerve transmission, and how learning takes place in terms of structural changes in nerve cells. And we have established that many of these details are common to organisms at vastly different levels of complexity. The complexity itself on the other hand has not yielded easily to reductive models. The point is that the integrative, and relational, aspects of living systems require more than simply adding the pieces together. We need a biology of coherence to improve our understanding. Yet we imagine that staying on the current popular pathway of trying to engineer our life's problems will lead to a far better life. We think we know much more about our selves than our ancestors. On the other hand we continually produce new disasters and cover up for our lack of understanding. I remind my self of the statements of Albert Einstein,

Insanity is doing the same old thing the same old way while expecting different results.

and Moshe Feldenkrais:

You see, so it's difficult for the first time too to have a thought, which is contrary to what everybody believes.

To do the work of the Feldenkrais Method required that I put aside many habits of thinking and doing ingrained by my long apprenticeship in school. I evolved a very different perspective about life as a result and discovered the necessity of thinking by simply sensing, feeling and acting without the mediation of language. You might describe this as thinking directly in movement. Strict adherence to the objective stance simply interfered with successful exploration of the human situations I was faced with, both with my self, and those who sought my help. Often solutions appeared indirectly and without me figuring them. This shift in thinking and the return to experience has practical consequences. In afterthought I could return to language, which is necessary for conceptual communicating. The essence of Feldenkrais' work was to take abstract concepts into concreteness. Every thing in his work could be shown through demonstration.

Feldenkrais' work, while unique in its particular way of using movement exploration to expanding awareness and self-growth, was also part of a growing trend in modern thinking. Not all scientific approaches stayed within the realm of strict objectivism. What is of value should be observable to others and therefore discoverable. Feldenkrais had contact with a number of seminal thinkers and scientists who were pioneering new ways of thinking in biology, psychology and neuroscience. Among them were Aaharon Katchalsky (Katsir), who helped begin the development of dynamic systems theory; Karl Pribram, who at the time developed a hologram model of brain functions and some of the founders and elaborators of the cybernetics movement; Gregory Bateson; Margaret Mead; Heinz von Foerster; and Francisco Varela. They all appreciated something in Feldenkrais' work that echoed their own new approaches. What we all found in watching him work was that people with many varied difficulties could find a way, through his contact with them, to improve in functioning even when all previous interventions had failed. It looked miraculous. Nevertheless he was simply using his extraordinary sensitivity and understanding of human complexity to guide people to self-correction. In doing so he trusted that a living person had this capacity as a consequence of the fundamental ability to learn. Many thinkers today now call this self-organization.

Human movement and the embodied life already had a practical tradition behind it in the Oriental healing practices and martial arts, and in a growing development of somatic awareness practices based on the work of Elsa Gindler, Heinrich Jacoby, Ida Rolf and F.M. Alexander. Somatic awareness practices involve self-observation and self- awareness processes in moving and acting. Feldenkrais had interacted with the work of each of these teachers. In 1975, however, in most fields of thinking and study of the human being, movement was either ignored or relegated to a separate field of study such as motor learning and behavior. In the past century what now is labeled 'embodiment' was taken seriously primarily by those in the field of phenomenology, especially in the work of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and in the psychoanalytically related work of Wilhelm Reich and Paul Schilder. One notable exception in science was the pioneering work of Russian physiologist and psychologist, Nicholai Bernstein. We will meet him in later parts of the book.

Today the situation is changing radically. Neuroscientists are now speculating that without dynamic connections to a living body and environment, the nervous system cannot function. Professor of Neuroscience at Rutgers University Georgy Buszaki writes in his recent book Rhythms of the Brain (2006, p. 221), "However, without the output interacting with body and environment, no amount of sensory stimulation can produce a useful brain." And Professor of Neurophysiology Giacomo Rizzolati at the University of Parma and Associate Professor of Philosophy of Science Corrado Sinigaglia at the University of Milan write in Mirrors in the Brain (2008, p. xi), "The rigid divide between perceptive, motor, and cognitive processes is to a great extent artificial; not only does perception appear to be imbedded in the dynamics of action, becoming more composite than used to be thought in the past, but the acting brain is also and above all a brain that understands."

The above comments are prompted by many new discoveries about the nervous system. But the whole question of body - mind has been reassessed in recent years from scientists and philosophers. The seminal book, which helped promote the idea of an embodied cognitive science, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Mind and Human Experience (1991) by biologist and neuroscientist Francisco Varela, philosopher Evan Thompson, and psychologist Eleanor Rosch moved the discussion forward in a very positive way. They describe their book as an "exploration of deep circularity" (p. 12). Philosophers such as Shaun Gallagher with his book How the Body Shapes the Mind (2005), Alva Noe with Action in Perception (2004), and Evan Thompson with Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology and the Sciences of Mind (2007) have continued the discussion within the philosophy of mind. There is nevertheless deep resistance among many scientists and thinkers who wish to preserve a scientific quest for objective knowledge, as we have understood it. There is a belief that science depends on objectivism and must proceed with a series of slow steps. Many scientists operate in their fields of inquiry as if each aspect of their study is a separate and independent entity with the idea that the accumulation of bits will create a storehouse of knowledge. Nonetheless there were many predecessors who suspected this approach was not enough, that we had to consider that we are embodied beings where the fact of embodiment challenges objectivism. I mention only a few of the other scientists and thinkers who had considered that embodiment and or movement are important for a more complete understanding of life in all its aspects, and that we our selves are essential. (There is no view from nowhere.) I include psychologist J.J. Gibson and his associates, E. J. Gibson, Edward Reed and Michael Turvey; biologist Humberto Maturana; cognitive scientists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson; movement scientists Marc Jeannerod and J.A. Scott Kelso; developmental psychologist Esther Thelen; philosopher and psychotherapist Eugene Gendlin; and psychiatrist Daniel Stern. Finally I would include in this list from the more distant past, Charles Darwin, Henri Poincare, and William James and John Dewey.

Two recent books with movement as a central or major theme bring awareness to the very essential place of movement itself: The Brain's Sense of Movement (2000) by neuro- physiologist Alain Berthoz, and The Primacy of Movement (1999) by philosopher, biologist and dancer Maxine Sheets-Johnstone. They are important sources for further study of the issues brought forth in this book and for much more detail of the scientific basis and intellectual discourse in relation to the themes of this book. If movement is so essential, we have to consider it as integral to living beings and not just a separate aspect of life that can be studied independently.

Thus the theme of this book is movement in relation to everything else. There are many questions: How did we get to adulthood where we live with other human beings, interact with them, talk, make love, fight, and carry on with many activities? It is impossible to think that we can live without the matrix of other humans and the other life forms around us. How do we develop our capacities in relation to this matrix? We learn in intimate contact with caretakers whether they are our parents or not. We learn also in an environment, which includes the resources necessary for life. The environment also includes gravity, which makes a very special demand on growth and development. Development is a serious business in life for animate, interacting beings. Thus we will ultimately have to account for many levels of interaction from the molecular to the social and then to the ecological.

As I am no longer an active scientist, what I have to contribute comes much more out of my 27 years of active practice and experience with the Feldenkrais Method. Much of this work is unique, as will become apparent as the book proceeds. Thus this book will emphasize as much as possible, in book format, personal experience. It is to my mind a very good route to wisdom if used carefully and with training. Wisdom is not the same as technical and scientific knowledge, which require the practice of specific methods of investigation differing from what I am proposing. But personal experience also requires a disciplined mode of investigation in order to arrive at a useful perspective. With this we can begin to sweep out the cobwebs of conceptualization that confuse our sensing, feeling, acting, and thus our thinking. It is not a question of opposing knowledge developed in other ways. In fact it is essential not to do this. But a disciplined personal exploration can help clarify the conceptual confusions that arise from an attachment to third person accounts of our selves, as well as how we understand our first person experience. I hope thereby to engage you, the reader, on a journey, to move you away from your over-educated knowing and into the realm of finding out for your self to whatever degree is possible; but finding what, or better yet, finding how? This is our question. We can then ask how we perceive, and how it is different from sensing, how conceiving takes perceiving to the level of thinking, how movement leads to perceiving and conceiving, and how perceiving our selves accurately can lead to a better life and a better thinking for our selves. Movement also takes us to another realm of living related to perceiving and thinking. And that is the realm of affect. Affect is more than what we can label emotion. Without affect intelligence has no way to operate. The context of the investigation will be the matrix of interaction where we live and in which we developed.

The book is divided in three parts. In Part I, From Origin to Perception, we will explore the ground of a new thinking about life and its origins. We begin with the insight that in biological life the first living thing enclosed itself in a membrane and that within that boundary there was a structure and function that ensured self-propulsion. Nothing lives or survives without the separation and some form of sentience. We expand from this point to investigating intention, action, perception, and how this leads to concepts such as space and time.

In Part II the question of learning and development is brought to the foreground, as well as the vast topic of affect and emotion. We will follow with an emphasis of finding how movement is necessary for affect and how affect is necessary for thinking, learning and developing. We will touch on the question of language and the relation of affect to music and other art forms. We will explore how movement and embodiment are essential to the development of thinking, which begins without words but becomes languaging in relation to living in an environment of speaking persons.

Part III will bring us to the practical aspects of this new thinking about life. We will through examples show it is possible to resolve particular problems within our selves and discover that through thinking in movement we can find a way to free our selves from habitual impasses. Specific movement explorations will be given so that the reader can experience directly the learning process. Hopefully then each person can find a path for acting more constructively in life and with greater pleasure and connectedness. And we will sum up how the developing understanding of this new view of life leads to reconsidering many questions about learning, being, and acting in modern life.


To read the full introduction and Chapter One, click here.

BACK TO TOP

Light Years: An Anthology on Sociocultural Happenings (Multimedia in the East Village, 1960-1966)