Re: what's so great about zopeds?

diane celia hodges (dchodges who-is-at interchg.ubc.ca)
Sat, 18 Oct 1997 20:53:07 -0700

At 11:25 AM 10/17/97, Susan Leigh Star wrote:
>Diane, That's a great story. I too studied T'ai Chi. What a difference
>I've found in working with my teacher in San Francisco and now, up in the
>mountains without a teacher, trying to follow a videotape with the
>movements! That moment of seeing just isn't there, and it's nearly
>impossible to work with the tapes.

"Ain't nothing like the real thing, baby... Ain't nothing
like the real thing..." (Peaches'n'Herb? 1986?)

So true. T'ai Chi is about the body in concert - another body enhances
this to such transcendent levels... Like a cello playing with
a viola, as opposed to a cellist playing along with a CD... ce n'est pas
la meme chose.

>
>When I read your story I could "see" the moment of the ZPD -- What I see in
>the T'ai Chi moment, which ever so rarely happens in the classroom, or
>talking with a student, or reading one of those books that changes you
>forever, is extremely hard to describe in words. To me it's somewhat
>shimmery, something like heat waves, but a definite zone, a space. It's
>perched, high-tension, perhaps right on the edge between visible and
>invisible. I'm not trying to be mystical here --I'm just curious about if
>people do have a concrete visual sense associated with processes of change,
>learning, and that "betweenness."

Interesting.
My T'ai Chi techer described it similarly, the "shimmering," as though she
were floating...

and yet I've never visually connected with T'ai Chi - it has always been a
flesh-thing, as though my cells were all communicating simultaneously,

every pore, every microbe, every follicle, every molecule of my body in sync,
so that it"feels" as though I am connected in a way which is extra-sensory,
...
and with that boy, certainly that was my reaction - an instant of
relating in that zone of where utter electrodes are in sync, the body's juice
and flow somehow synced in a moment of communciative intimacy.

Phew. I oughta write a book on the spiritual goo of the body in motion
or something eh? Secretions and (in)discretions - that was the title of an
article I was going to write once... hee hee

Have you read Guy Debord's (1967) _The Society of the Spectacle_?
It's quite extraordinary, a treatise on the dominance of the visual -

also Donna Haraway's written on this, _Situated Knowledges_ (1992?) -

But I appreciate so much your understanding of T'ai Chi.
I wish you'd been there when the psycho-linguist police
were bleating about parental consent to engage a child's body
in alternative movement practices.
Progress schmogress.

cheers,
diane

"Every tool is a weapon if you hold it right."
Ani Difranco
*********************************
diane celia hodges
faculty of education
university of british columbia
vancouver, bc canada
tel: (604)-253-4807
email: dchodges who-is-at interchange.ubc.ca