At Play In The Field

At Play In The Field
the poetics of orthobionomy

Coming in November, Ipswich QSD Australia:

PHASE 5

As If

Body Schema

Hauntology

Reciprocity

Trauma-Informed Care

Antigonish

Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn't there!
He wasn't there again today,
I wish, I wish he'd go away!

When I came home last night at three,
The man was waiting there for me
But when I looked around the hall,
I couldn't see him there at all!
Go away, go away, don't you come back any more!
Go away, go away, and please don't slam the door... (slam!)

Last night I saw upon the stair,
A little man who wasn't there
He wasn't there again today
Oh, how I wish he'd go away....

William Hughes Mearns

Phases are different perspectives, different ways of looking at the body/person.

When shall we open our minds to the conviction that the ultimate reality of the world

is neither matter nor spirit, is no definite thing, but a perspective?"

--José Ortega y Gasset

"My wife and my mother-in-law" W.E. Hill. 1915

You can always come up with other ways of looking at things. That's what the Phases gives us, different ways to approach the Body, different portals, different perspectives.

The Body Schema

Body Image is your conscious perseption of your body. But underneath your awareness, your brain keeps an operational map of your entire body: its position, its pressure, its boundaries, its threat level; this map is called your Body Schema.

Hauntology

(not Ontology)

The word was coined by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. In French the word sounds exactly like ontology, the study of being, existence, and reality. The pun is fully intended. Hautology looks at "things" that are there and not there, having a spectral existence. It is an "as if" kind of being. This has much to do with how the Body Schema functions.

Reciprocity

Most simply defined, reciprocity is a practice of exchanging things with others for mutual benefit. Mutualism is a related term.

While theories of evolution have constrained our thinking to focus on competition and "survival of the fittest, there has been another, possibly more important force at work. In the latter part of the 20th century, some biologists, most notably Lynn Margulis, began shifting the focus to the role of reciprocity and mutualism. Earlier still, the French anthropologist Marcel Mauss published in 1925 The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. Mauss brought to the fore the role of reciprocity in human relations. This essay continues to resonate deeply.

Reciprocity is a foundational principle of orthobionomy, to the extent that care of the self and care of the other are the same action. The individual body does not exist separate from the social body.

Trauma-Informed Care

Contact Richard here

Flaneur (Out for a Stroll)

Contact

Richard Valasek 1308 Ala Kapuna St. Apt 103

Honolulu HI 9681

+1 (808) 256-1646

richard.valasek@gmail.com

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I am I and my circumstance;

and, if I do not save it, I do not save myself. —JOSÉ ORTEGA Y GASSET

Changing the Conversation

I was born. I am always a vessel for something other than myself. The self is only a

vehicle for Foreign matter which comes from elsewhere and is destined to go on

elsewhere without me, whether it's words, smells, vision ––EMANUELE COCCIA Metamorphoses

The Story Teller

Now, more than ever . . . our place in the universe and the place of the universe in us, is proving to be one of active relationship. That is more than a scientist's credo. The separateness of our lives is a sham. Physics, mathematics, music, painting, my love for you, my work, the star-dust of my body, the spirit that impels it, my politics, clocks diurnal, time perpetual, the roll, rough, tender, swamping, liberating, breathing, moving, thinking nature, human nature and the cosmos are patterned together.

—JEANETTE WINTERSON Gut Symmetries