The movement quality of thought or life consists of – pauses, resistance, difficult bits, sudden jumps or leaps, changes of direction, etc. Drama and engagement come from watching this happen in the body. We cannot directly communicate thought but we can tell by watching someone move what he or she is thinking. Everyone can relate to the struggle against or with a thought.
(Decroux?) “The body is the battleground of the mind … Mime makes movement with stops and curves and straight lines.”
“One may dream, not in plots, but in sensations. The sensation of not being able to push or pull something heavy. The sensation of free fall, of inclination, of pressure. The sensation of being unable to take a deep breath. Many sensations of being inside of something, perhaps something moving out of control, like an elevator that does not stop at the basement but continues to descend. Psychological states are inextricably wound up with these physical sensations, and vice versa…
Then perhaps whole narratives swiftly assemble themselves in the waking.
We always talk about dream or memory as something located in the head. Why do we locate the mind in the head? Brain cells extend the length of the spine – sensory neurons and motor neurons – and from there send out their axons to all perimeters.
Remembering is something that goes on all over the body.”
Elizabeth King, sculptures and bio at the Kent Gallery, New York.
“… a walker stops sometimes. He pauses. He changes his objective. He was looking at the view – now he contemplates a blade of grass, or he withdraws into himself. … I invite you at these times to sit down with me, side by side, for the sake of the grass-blade, or the view, or ourselves.”
“Neurologists are finding evidence that the cerebellum, which coordinates physical movement, also coordinates the movement of thoughts. Motor function is as crucial to some forms of cognition as it is to physical movement. It is equally crucial to behavior, because behavior is the acting out of movements prescribed by cognition. If we can better understand movement, we can better understand thoughts, words, and deeds.”
cf. Elliot Eisner – [we need to] confer form upon ideas … in order to have them.
“I am lost in thought, moving about in my mind in a familiar room. Suddenly, with shock, I realize I am in that exact room. A tiny shift of attention and one room explodes into another. In bursts all the light, air, and sound of the here and now. What is this shift, in and of itself? I’d like to be watching at the moment of this interruption in someone else’s reverie, to see what it looks like from the outside. Maybe the head makes an imperceptible jerk, the eyelids flicker. It could look like almost nothing! Or take the return trip: the precise instant when a child ceases paying attention and slips into daydream. All but invisible: the eyes stop seeing the world in front of them. But what is really changed on the face? Perhaps only that two pupils release their convergence on your own face a few feet away, a movement the width of a hair.”
