"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