31 Jan 2012 11:22 PM. Joan Chodorow wrote:
Dear Chuck, Donna and All,
Chuck, your wonderful yearning passage brings to mind Curt Sachs' great work WORLD HISTORY OF THE DANCE, English edition published in New York in 1937. The epigraph to his Introduction quotes a Gnostic Hymn of the 2nd century attributed to CHRIST:
Whosoever danceth not, knoweth not the way of life.
Here are the opening words of Sachs' Introduction:
"The dance is the mother of the arts. Music and poetry exist in time; painting and architecture exist in space. But the dance lives at once in time and space. The creator and the thing created ... are still one and the same thing" (Sachs 1937, p. 3).
Sachs closes his magnificent study with another quote, this one about a thousand years later by the great Islamic mystic, poet, scholar Jalaluddin Rumi (1207-1273 CE):
"Whosoever knoweth the power of the dance dwelleth in God" (Rumi quoted in Sachs 1937, p. 448).
Around the same time, the great 13th century Spanish Kabbalist mystic Abraham Abulafia described the experience of fear, trembling and rapture that may come when meditating on the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. As the letters begin to move, their mysteries are revealed:
"After much movement and concentration on the letters, the hair of your head will stand on end...your blood will begin to vibrate...and all your body will begin to tremble, and a shuddering will fall on all your limbs, and...you will feel an additional spirit within yourself...strengthening you, passing through your entire body...like fragrant oil, anointing you from head to foot" (Abulafia, quoted in Kabbalah: The Way of the Jewish Mystic, by Perle Epstein, 2001, p. 87).
I imagine Abulafia may have unconsciously perceived/projected his own dancing spirit into the letters of his beloved, living, moving Hebrew alphabet. And I imagine mystic scholars from various cultural traditions open themselves to their own beloved, living moving, dancing letters.
Moving toward the future, it would be fascinating to explore some of the elements in Chuck's yearning passage from the perspective of the image-producing brain networks that map our interactions with the world and the embodied self. As Antonio Damasio puts it: "When the brain makes maps, it informs itself. The information contained in the maps can be used nonconsciously to guide motor behavior efficaciously, a most desirable consequence considering that survival depends on taking the right action. But when brains make maps, they are also creating images, the main currency of the our minds. [...] The construction of maps never stops, even in our sleep, as dreams demonstrate. [...] The human brain is a mimic of the irrepressible variety. Whatever sits outside the brain -- the body proper, of course, from the skin to the entrails, as well as the world around, man, woman, and child, cats and dogs and places, hot weather and cold, smooth textures and rough, loud sounds and soft, sweet honey and salty fish -- is mimicked inside the brain's networks" (Damasio 2010, Self comes to mind: Constructing the conscious brain, pp. 63-64).
I imagine many of us have also been reading the 2007 book by Sandra Blakeslee, science writer for the New York Times and her son Matthew Blakeslee. A well-written summary and update of The body has a mind of its own is available online. I found the link when I entered mirror neurons and body maps in a search engine and was led to this website:
http://www.sandrablakeslee.net/index.asp?PG=3
To put it briefly, they list, discuss and amplify a variety of dynamic shape changing body maps, each described by a particular category of sensory receptors as well as a primary motor map, and other special cells for example:
primary touch map
primary motor map
surrounding space map (what we called reach space or kinesphere)
mirror neuron maps
visceral maps
And so, on and on...
I'll leave it here for now.
I too, would love to read other quotes, questions and explorations from DMT colleagues.
Joan Chodorow
