August Asides

Looking for the Embodied Mind in 1971-72: 

In the earliest days of Contact Improvisation, I was a Bennington College student… dancing as much as I could … taking remedial English, and studying anatomy and physiology. I was interested in the mind and started doing experiments studying how thought influenced physiological responses through the GSR machine (a polygraph). This machine recorded peoples’ glavanic skin response and I had a selection of questions to ask my subjects. I recorded their responses both while they listened to my questions and as they answered them.

Here’s how it works. Water underlies bodily composition (55-60%) and what appears to happen is that when people have feelings, the water moves, particularly on the level of their skin - they sweat… in tiny increments of measurable difference! So, more feeling, bigger feeling, bigger sweat. This gets recorded through electrodes and onto a graph by a tiny needle moving up and down while the paper moves horizontally, recording time – much like an EKG does. So, when I asked most people questions, their GSR’s were like a landscape of mountains… up and down with each word or series of words they spoke. It was fascinating how immediate and detailed their response was. 

But…I had a vocal teacher who taught students to “become” or “resonate with” the micro tones they were singing. Remarkably, his GSR looked far more like a city scape. He had distinct responses to each sound or sound combinations and their “meaning.” The detailing that I saw in this early work has stayed with me for a lifetime. This man’s specificity of felt, mental, physical feeling is very similar to how it always is for me to move as a dancer. I feel with great precision the micro shifts, flows, and relations that pepper my whole body, each specific and unique, each unfurling meaning within its immediate relations. I have learned to be alive to this level of detail. It is an attentional practice of being embodied. And, it is the vitality of life itself for me. In Relational Intelligence, I endeavor to bring dancers to the felt-sensing of this level of relations, the level of detailed micro shifts of relational sensemaking. It is an uplifting wake-up. 

Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.

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The dead world?!

Right off the bat, you should know that I am making an argument against living in a dead world. If that means I am making an argument against science, so be it. Stay with me, and you might think this way too. 

Here's the background… 

We know our relations with the world are on the edge of collapse. How we have been living “on” this planet isn’t working. We think the issue is with our economic systems, the issue is with our political systems, the issue is with our over consumption, and/or our inability to live sustainably. I think the issue is with our imagination. Right. It is with our inability to recognize and embody a lively and sustaining practice that activates our lived imagination. It's an inability to recognize that the imagination is vital and already at work, right here, in this very moment, in this very relationship. Usually it is barely activated, because it is set on repetition in order to have the cultural reproduction of a recognizable and manipulatable world – remember, the white people who dominated this culture are the people who invested in slavery – they can’t see life, intelligence, and vitality except where they want to see it. We culturally continue this practice on every level and scale of being because our imagination shapes us. My imagination frames this human embodiment I am currently experiencing, the brilliance of this moment now. To think otherwise, is to be blind to our more than human power, vitality, and connections. But most of us, culturally educated humans, think otherwise. Thus, we mostly live in a dead world. 

This is how that happens: We believe that there is a truth that exists separate from our imagination. Right. We believe that the truth of truths is rational and that matter, fundamentally, is dead. It is not vital. Pull a tooth, it is dead. Pick a flower, it is lovely but unfeeling, and while not “dead”, It is not living in awareness. Wash your face in a stream, refreshing but only to us and all that is “living.” And of the living, humans are in a very special category (yea, and have you noticed that some of us are more human than others?!)…. How is that working for you? If you are like me you know that it is pure fantasy! We live at the top of a hierarchy of which 99% of the remainder is essentially inert stuff for us to move around and make other stuff with. Now we are important! Really important… but … What I want to know is… How is that working for being in right relations with the planet and all the non-human world? I say this “reality” is killing us. We can distinguish imagination from fantasy and learn to embody our imagination. Let’s change this equation now: Dead world = dead us. 

Let’s discover VITALITY. Let’s generate joy! Let’s change our history and bring the world back to life! I can explain why the imagination is not at all superfluous – rather it is so very underrated and important. Join me.

Excerpt from Nita Little’s Monthly Newsletter