The Reflexes

Taking up roughly one-third of the text, situated in the very middle of the book, and titled Chapter Seven, we find what Arthur Pauls titled The Reflexes. And, of course, there are seven of them. Taken as signals, Pauls seems to be saying that the Reflexes are central to his Ortho-Bionomy and are of signal importance.

I have written about the reflexes and may dredge up what I can find rather than do another complete write-up. It is curious that something Pauls came to see as central to his Ortho-Bionomy has no fixed home in Ortho-Bionomy® but gets tucked in here and there. I started covering them in my "Phase 5" classes, and other instructors have followed suit. Pauls's Reflexes are not Phase-dependent.

I recently taught a "Phase Five" class, and though I had not planned it, the students wanted to know about the Reflexes, which had been showing up. I did a quick review of what we had covered, leaving the last three unaddressed. I had learned the "Volery Response" directly from Pauls, and it was quickly presented, not at near the depth it deserves.

Two remaining, the last of his set of Seven, the obscure "Ciny Time Zone" and "Space Between the Notes." I have had a very cynical read of these Reflexes. I feel Pauls needing to force (important) things to fit into septets; like Procrustes, he laid his Reflexes on his rack of a bed and stretched it to make Seven. I also saw, in the eponyms  Volery and Ciny a need to honor two remarkable women, vitally important to him in his later years.

I opened "the book" (I had brought with me Pauls's "Philosophy and History of Ortho-Bionomuy"; it was careless of me as I should have brought the second edition, as the first has become a collectible text, potentially worth a lot of $$$$). I turned to the many pages he had devoted to this Reflex and performed my cynical read. I exaggerated his overuse of the comma and his rambling narrative. I read randomly selected passages. A sudden head-on collision, Ciny Time Zone slammed into Derrida's hauntology.

Pauls goes to great lengths to say that whatever this is, he can't teach it (as in it can't be taught). He is not able to call it forth at will; it seems it is simply something that happens, no way to make it happen.

The class assigned me my homework. I was tasked to read the text through a different lens, not cynical but hauntological. [Note: I am writing about hauntology here with further references here.] I read pages 89-119 (twenty pages for it!) again for the first time. A different me yields up a different text.

Derrida was interested in how the past intruded in the present. But not only the past but lost futures as well. These intrusions of different "time zones" are spectral in nature. They are there and not there. This is the hallmark of the spectral zone, Whitman's "both in and out of the game." This is also a defining feature of the body schema, the subjuntive of the body, the "as-if" phase of the body.