Meditations on orthobionomy/Ortho-Bionomy(®)
Conversations with a Specter
Disclaimer: What I write is not meant to speak as a representative of the Society of Ortho-Bionomy International, the organizaton that owns and maintains the trademarked name. I speak from my own experience. it is my belief that the practice of Ortho-Bionomy will, ideally, become an expression of who you, the practitioner, are; mimicry of a teacher is a kind of plagiarism.
These “Meditations” are not about techniques of Ortho-Bionomy®, but are more pertinent to theory and pertain more to orthobionomy. I find beginnings problematic, where, how to begin. I can place no constraint on any reader; the reader always has the choice of where to begin and may ignore the top as a beginning and start wherever the wyrd points a person.
I have found that in teaching Ortho-Bionomy, there is no strong argument to favor starting at Phase 4 even though the “program” seems to dictate that as the starting point; that is an artifact of history; it is where the founder started. Further, it creates confusion for the students, who reasonably think they should start at square one, where all things start.
The truth is there is no proper beginning. The numbers of the Phases are not ordinal numbers, though they appear that way. I think of them as nominal numbers, i.e., numbers used as names, like in a quiz show, “Do you pick door number one, number two, or number three? These are the names of the doors; they could just as easily be door red, door white, or door blue. I will write more about the Phases in a separate section.
Ortho-Bionomy® is taken apart for pedagogical (teaching) purposes. It must be put back together as a whole for the proper doing. Whichever door one enters may make some difference according to the particular bent of an individual but there is no good univeral reason to go through one door or another (I hear an echo: there are twelve gates to the City).
What Do We Owe to Arthur Pauls,
Arthur the Author of Ortho-Bionomy if
Ortho-Bionomy is seen as a text we read;
Founder
(he often called himself the Flounder of Ortho-Bionomy; “I don’t want to be treated like a guru” he would say, quaffing a beaker of piss)
of Ortho-Bionomy, seen as a particular flavor of a healing practice.
He gave ownership of the name over to SOBI,
(they added the ®)
and flew off to France.
He told people there,
“SOBI stole it from me”
but he never called the cops.
He had freely agreed to things he later regretted.
]
Alfred North Whitehead once remarked, in an address to the British Association in Newcastle, 1916, “A science which hesitates to forget its founders is lost." This is what we owe to Arthur Lincoln Pauls, with honor and deep respect, our forgetting. Roland Barthes adds to the argument on the pro side, for forgetting in his famous essay, The Death of the Author.
Authors are always dead, Barthes argued, because they do not control the text we are reading, or the reading process. This conclusion is important as it provides us with new options for reading a text, or in our case, of learning and doing Ortho-Bionomy.
Arthur Pauls lived in the push-pull gap between holding on and letting go. He left us in the gap of honor and forget.
Arthur Pauls authored the name Ortho-Bionomy. He made it from old Greek roots, loosely translated as “The correct application of the laws of life.” The name lives as names tend to do, as simply a name. I am Richard; no one thinks, “Ah, Mr. Stern-but-Just.” Just as well then to forget what the name was meant to mean; it’s just the stuff we do, what we call it.
Or we can continue to mine the name. What are these laws of life it references? Pauls never mentioned a single one, and doing some searching, there are no reliable lists of laws of life to be found. There are plenty of claims from any number of spiritual practices
blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah b
BORING!
BEGIN AGAIN
Alright, beginning, again…,let us say; Yes—the whole inquiry may have begun with that damned deleted hyphen.
A tiny typographical act that turned out not to be typographical at all. Ortho-Bionomy named an established system; orthobionomy allowed the word to loosen, to become something you could think with. And once the name became questionable, its grammar did too: what kind of thing is it—method, practice, language, text, event? How does it move? Who determines what it means?
Deleting the visible gap, uncovered a much larger one.
The Gap
A space between fulgent emptiness
inhabited by <s>-</s>
specters ghosts schemas
Denizens of the Subjuntive
Taking it away made meaning greater than had it never been, like the lent-deleted Alleluia(!) What is a gap? SparkPlug. A Pushmi-Pullyu dance move. Could be a membrane, a transition zone, a boundary…
the gap became inhabitable only after it had been marked and then removed.
Life itself s’wahappenin’ in the gap.
[read all such statements as questions; where you see . read ?. Unless otherwise indicated. Life does not offer any ansers (but may answer your offer) but only one damn scintilating question after another]
IMPORTANT NOTE:
Ortho-Bionomy has become a name, especially with the ® brand stamped on it. Now think where branding originated: it is a burning of a sign into flesh, of cattle—and yes, human ‘cattle’ too—a sign of ownership and dominion. All of that is to be forgotten. The correctness insinuated [I say alignment], the rigidity of Law tempers into the Ways of…, and lastly, Life. Ah, Life…? Life under Laws? Ridiculous, say they; I’ll none of it! All this to say is that now, Ortho-Bionomy is simply a name, like, frinstance, Richard. Quick now, who of you three or four reading this instantly heard “Stern but Just” where you saw Richard? Liar. You did not. Just a pointer name now, not redolent of incense and laden with deeper Truths. It no longer says to us what Pauls over and over repeated “the correct application of the Laws of Life” while Life responds with what might be her Law, “Ain’t no correkt way—any ole wyrd-way I can slitther-slather my way athrong.” Or something like that. Life is a hack of the inbetween.
Ortho-Bionomy is but a name; and, by any other name would smell the same.
GRAMMAR MATTERS
About Grammar, Grammar is important
Don’t ever, under any circumstance, end a sentence with a preposition!
What’s he talking about? Certainly sounds like a ‘he’, or a ‘she’ in drag. Pompous. Authoritarian. Direct from On High. Daddy. Daddy must be high. Where’d he get that from? These Rules of Grammar I was taught remind me of studying a cadaver, something dead. Real grammar lives and plays at the edges, where the rules are tested against usage and morph into something rich and strange. grammar is what’s going on in that love nest gap where Meaning and Structure intertwine in an erotic embrace. [Sorry, sky turned purple.]
Thinking of orthobionomy as a kind of text I wonder about its grammar. ‘Life’ feels wrong, too nouny, substantiated; should be verb; ‘Lifing’ might do,
provisionally
Sensing
Orienting
Attending
Choosing [I retain the e: the verb, not the hardware.]
Coupleing
Moving
Holding
Releasing
Yielding
Nine of them, so far. Sorry Arthur, not seven, not your story.
We might call these Elementary Verbs of the Body, though possibly true for all of life. I urge caution when tending towards universalizing, but even a simple (sic) bacterium lives many of these verbs.
Note that sensing is on the list (tops it) and perceiving is not. That is a higher order avtivity, compounded of several of the elementaries.
Read the -ing inchoatively: each act ongoing, yet at every moment just beginning. Process can become a kind of continuous conveyor belt; the inchoative adds renewal. Every moment is not simply later in the same action. It is another arising.
AN INTERRUPTION, THE NAME IS CALLING
JERKED back,
“Look at me, Look at me! [The Name in an Imperative Mood]
At first glance
Looks so sciency, with those fancy Greek roots
But what’s that thrust there impudently near the middle,
holding correctness off from bios or is it
an arrow aiming toward life’s beating heart
It certainly is a sign,
whose original intention died with the author.
on the map that (-) indicates the territory of Poetics
standing shoulder to shoulder
with the lords of the lands
of Science.
[Beware Arthur quote: “Ortho-Bionomy is not so much a scientific way of working but an intuitive way.” Something close to that; maybe it’s really a paraphrase of what I heard him declare, at least once. Thank you Arthur.]
Then there are the two caps, O and B.
The three orthographical signs are signifying.
Not so sciency now, are we?
It’s the sort of trick the poets play.
Okay, mostly the more Modern ones.
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