[-empyre-] corrective in the morning

[Elisita Smailus]

Yesterday evening it was late and perhaps through tiredness or through deepening too much into 'logos', I made an error in yesterday's e-mail which I herewith would like to correct immediately, citing myself and correcting BOLDLY ...

"For me this [the breathing pattern] is a good possibility of getting into contact with the existential ground of my being - following the long chain of evolution, the same way our fetal body goes through many stages of ontological HERE IT SHOULD SAY: ONTOGENTIC development. or even more precisely paralleled in filogenetic development.

So to be more precise: the development of every child (from the fetus making its way to birth, continued by creeping, crawling, sitting and finally standing (and then perhaps also hopping around playfully) - which is called ontogenetic development - parallels in some way the filogenetic development one may observe in the world  of other animal species, beginning with one-cellular organisms right up to the primates. The ontogenetic patterns (developmental patterns according to Bartenieff and Bainbridge-Cohen) are based on reflexes and basic neurological patterns which are inherent in our biologic body. These developmental patterns need impulses to establish inner body connectivity and allow so called connectivity patterns to unfold and organize themselves in an overlapping mode, enriching our moving capacity, mainly found in the following organisational progression

1° breath / breathing pattern
2° navel radiation / connection of centre to perifery
3° spinal movement / head-tail connection
4° homologue movement / upper-lower connection
5° homolateral movement / body half-connection
6° contralateral movement / cross-laterality - diagonal body connection

In the growing awareness of moving towards an integrated body in a lively interplay with inner connectivity and outer expressivity, I would like to quote Peggy Hackney from her book "Making Connections" (Gordon and Breach, 1998. P. 14):

"As we become conscious of these stages of bodily development, we recognize that we are in a creative process at all times - creating our own embodied existence. And we can see that these stages and patterns are mirrored in the development of our other creative work as well."

And I would like to add a quotation of Bonnie Bainbridge-Cohen out of "Sensing, Feeling and Action" (1993) with respect to the conscious and unconscious dialogue:

" The interplay between our unconscious and conscious mind is fluid and flows in both directions all the time. The conscious and unconscious are a contiuum of one mind." (p. 13)

Now I am off to weekend activities like cooking marmelade, baking cake and making ice-cream, all out of the figs in our garden which have delighted us this year with their abundance - and after that withdrawing from the daily routine participating in a workshop on ritual body postures and ecstatic trance (developed by Felicitas D. Goodman, Hungarian-born linguist and anthropologist, 1914-2005).

Getting back online next week, surely altered in state, but still curious about new income of reflections by the soft skinned space community and leaving you with the lemniscate as a symbol for this sort of interplay and continuum. According to Ciane Fernandes "Laban was the first to cite and work with the Moebius band, which has become a major Post-modern image" as she wrote in the proceedings of a Laban & Performing Arts Conference in Bratislava, published by Miroslava Kovárová and Regina Miranda (2006, p. 39)

Elisita