Meditation is a time to discover, uncover, explore the quiet: its layers, its endless depth.

Sound & Skin

At the beginning, the whole body or organism raises up a sculpture or statue of tense skin, vibrating amid voluminous sound, open-closed like a box (or drum), capturing that by which it is captured. We hear by means of the skin and the feet. We hear with the cranial box, the abdomen and the thorax. We hear by means of the muscles, nerves and tendons. Our body-box, stretched with strings, veils itself within a global tympanum. We live amid sounds and cries, amid waves rather than spaces the organism moulds and indents itself…I am a house of sound, hearing and voice at once, black box and sounding-board, hammer and anvil, a grotto of echoes, a musicassette, the ear’s pavilion, a question mark, wandering in the space of messages filled or stripped of sense…I am the resonance and the tone, I am altogether the mingling of the tone and its resonance.

— Michel Serres: The Five Senses

Poetry & Humour

The fundamental thing in the Japanese character is a peculiar combination of poetry and humour, using both words in a wide and profound yet specific sense. “Poetry” means the ability to see, to know by intuition what is interesting, what is really valuable in things and persons. More exactly it is the creating of interest, of value. “Humour” means joyful, unsentimental pathos that arises from the paradox inherent in the nature of things. Poetry and humour are thus very close; we may say that they are two different aspects of the same thing. Poetry is satori; it is seeing all things as good. Humour is laughing at all things; in Buddhist parlance, seeing that “all things are empty in their self-nature” … and rejoicing in this truth.

— R.H. Blyth: Japanese Life and Character in Senryu (Hokuseido Press, 1960)

Gymnastics

It is imperative to be nothing, all you need to think is to be nobody. The hygiene of thinking, the asceticism of thinking, comes down to gymnastics. Gymnastics means one seeks nakedness. Not that it is a question of taking off one’s clothes. One can remove one’s clothes, that isn’t the point. Gymnastic or gymnosophic or gymnopedic nakedness is very close to the absence that thinks. Nakedness goes back to the undetermined. To dismiss every opinion from one’s mind, every idea, every hate, is to level off the contours of opinionated determination, it is to find the bare and barren plain. The unwritten wax tablet has lost, forgotten its determinations, with no writing, it is un-differentiated. Opinion is stable, it is stiff, it is singular, it defines someone through hates. The opinionated person is differentiated like a lobster’s claw. Inventive thinking is unstable, it is undetermined, it is un-differentiated, it is as little singular in its function as is our hand. The latter can make itself into a pincer, it can be fist and hammer, cupped palm and goblet, tentacle and suction cup, claw and soft touch. Anything. A hand is determined, accordingly. So what is a hand? It is not an organ, it is a faculty, a capacity for doing, for becoming claw or paw, weapon or compendium. It is a naked faculty. A faculty is not special, it is never specific, it is the possibility of doing something in general. To talk about the faculties of the soul is a great misnomer, when we are differentiating between them: the soul is also a naked faculty. It is nakedness. We live by bare hands. Our hands are that nakedness I find in gymnastics, that pure faculty, cleared up by exercise, by the asceticism of un-differentiation. I think, un-differentiated. Thus I am anyone, animal, element, stone or wind, number, you and him, us. Nothing. Nobody. Blank. Bare. Our body comes down time, it comes down the valley, the thalweg of difference. It runs fatally along determination. Cracking with rheumatism, gnarled, arborescent, daily inured to one gesture and only one, the hand becomes a mere terminal, either technical or bestial. Old Renoir’s hand is the organ of the painter species. Difference is our old age. Metamorphosis, metempsychosis, tragic moments when our body altogether collapses into kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, and genus. These aren’t fables, or myths, or tall tales, this is the regular and physical march of time toward the determined. The beast difference cries help in the direction of beauty undetermined. La fontaine, the fountain of indifference invents fables with stable forms … The joint loses - as they put it in mechanics - a certain degree of free play, it ends up with only one drift, its difference. The hand becomes a mere clamp, the body a mere animal, and thought becomes a mere opinion. They have lost their freedom. Gymnastics does not require that one get naked to exercise freely. Quite to the contrary, it freely exercises in order to rediscover nakedness. It is a practice for going back in time. It undifferentiates the body, it seeks to put it into the state of a bare hand. It turns the body into a hand, a subject, a pure faculty. It turns the body into a faculty. It turns it into a capacity. It turns it into a possibility. Gymnastics bleaches the body. There it is, in the abstract.

      It has become the naked body of nobody.
      I think naked and I am nobody.
      I dance naked, I am nothing.

 — Michel Serres: Genesis, p34

John Cage - from A Year from Monday

The role of the composer is other than it was. Teaching, too, is no longer transmission of a body of useful information, but’s conversation, alone, together, whether in a place appointed or not in that place… We talk, moving from one idea to another as though we were hunters… (By music we mean sound; but what’s time? Certainly not that something begins and ends.) … (Hunted mushrooms in muskeg nearby. Got lost.) … A teacher should do something other than filling in the gaps… What we learn isn’t what we’re taught nor what we study. We don’t know what we’re learning. Something about society? … Something about art? That it’s experience shared?

 — JOHN CAGE, Diary: Emma Lake Music Workshop 1965

Quoted in MUSICAGE by John Cage & Joan Retallack