The uncontrolled gesture: go to your edge

The uncontrolled gesture: go to your edge

place: Prescott, Arizona

John Hopkins 10::December::2009 11:13 → permalink

Starting with the immediate body as a field-of-action to release control (versus the control-at-a-distance regime we are immersed within now):

Bushwhacking is a method to relinquish control of the trajectory of the body. By exposing the body to the unknown, one has to respond in real time, in the present. This present invites the presence of be-here-now and within that state of be-ing, the embodied self yields to the edge that divides the controlled from un-controlled. Precisely at that edge is the locus of active transformation and change. Making the next step into the unknown is, literally, an act of trust in the body, in a belief that entering the unknown will present possibility. Whether or not this possibility is merely the chance of the continuance of the species (in a biological framework), the projection of life into the not-now, the future, or whether it is an operative pre-condition for a transcendent state I cannot at this moment comment on. Somehow, this is a question that each individuated being self-wise has to make in each of those moments.

Human-controlled flows — those apparently known, defined, located, standardized, measured flows — are merely thin veneers on an un-controlled cosmos which dwarfs all. Or does it? Are we not energized elements, expressions of that cosmos, as much as any else? Does the scalar really matter when space and time are suspended (along with the artifice of Cartesian models and all other abstracted human frameworks)?

Go to your edge. This phrase comes up in yogic teachings in the West. It suggests a shaky physical state where muscles struggle to maintain some configuration that they are barely fit to do. Of course, that meaning may deepen as a practice becomes more holistic and not limited to the mere physical (think pilates). Moving further into the image — what would it mean to an animal to go to its edge? The edge would be the dividing line between living and losing control over all body systems (organismic death). A tad over that edge precipitates a very different outcome than a tad under. Can it be that non-human systems exist at that edge at all times and at all scales — that this is the condition of non-equilibrium states? Or can this be the condition of the cosmos at all scales all the time? But it would seem that human systems exist at this edge as well, except that the human species has abstracted/constructed numerous illusions suggesting that it is not subject to the same razor-edge condition. (The illusion of control of future trajectories.)

And it occurs to me later that our retreat from that edge is in our deep desire for physical body to be maintained, for risk to be lowered, for future to be statistically more attainable. This state-of-being perhaps arose through our stepping away from simple (animal) living, and into the future-tension of linguistically-mediated half-lives.

How to translate this image into a practice? Go to your edge.