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March
12, 2006
Anna, and Marty's ball
I talked to Dave's girlfriend Anna last night.
She's from Portugal. She's done yoga all over
the world, and she also has cool perspectives on embodiment, thanks
to her perspectives as a foreigner in the US.
We're
all at poetry, and Marty
does this thing he does when he's really excited. He punched
her in the shoulder and then hugged her and laughed. It doesn't
hurt or anything. He's just being enthusiastic, but sometimes people
don't know how to take Marty. But Anna loved it! She said when she
first came to the US, she noticed that people maintain huge distances
between each other. Nobody touches anyone else. She said in Portugal,
if two people were sitting as far apart as we do, you'd know as soon
as you walked into a room that they were estranged.
But
Anna said everyone in our culture maintains that distance. She
seems really intuitive and physically plugged into whoever she's
talking to, and she said for months when she was first here, she
felt like she was constantly being rejected. As if everyone was snubbing
her. She said in Portugal, people aren't just just
affectionately physical, but also playfully physical, the way Marty
is. And she said she LOVED it that he felt free enough to touch her
the way he did.
 Speaking
of Marty, he used
to teach all over the place he even taught a class about rock and
roll at Johns Hopkins in the sixties. Last summer we decided he'd
teach me about contemporary American poetry. He thought we should
start with Whitman, and I really tried to like Whitman, but he seemed
too whiney and self-absorbed to me, so we never got to Elliot and
Sexton.
 Anyway,
now Marty has me bouncing a Super Ball. He thinks it will help me
connect my mind to my body. He also wants me to become aware
of how I walk. He said if boxers never worked to become
conscious of how they punch, they'd flail at opponents
like bears - naturally, but inefficiently. Boxers have to learn to
punch from the body. Even though it feels weird at first, it's more
efficient. Marty says if I become conscious of my walking - of subtle
shifts and adjustments - I'll learn to move more efficiently,
and also link my body and my mind. So I've been bouncing the ball
everywhere, but it sucks when the ball rolls into the street.
Ellie: This
is a suggestion about language. If mind is actually a function of body,
then it is a part of body, and the two can neither be disconnected
nor reconnected. So this manner of speaking is irrational if
not pathological. And yet there is a reason we talk that way. There
is something actual we are talking about. What is it? If we speak more
carefully the problem becomes more interesting as well as more solvable.
Does he mean it will make you aware of body feeling, proprioceptively
aware? And if so, why doesn't he say it that way? 
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