Body Studies
A New Anatomy and Physiology for Living in the Anthropocene
No rack can torture me,
My soul’s at liberty.
Behind this mortal bone
There knits a bolder one
You cannot prick with saw,
Nor rend with scymitar.
Two bodies therefore be;
Bind one, and one will flee.
The eagle of his nest
No easier divest
And gain the sky
Than mayest thou,
Except thyself may be
Thine enemy;
Captivity is consciousness,
So’s liberty.
––EMILY DICKINSON
How we think about, study, and perceive the body is largely base on Enlightenment thinking. That may have been a good story then, a good fit for those times. It no longer serves us well, straining at the seams.
Here we spend only 32 hours to start to shift from reductionism and individualism
Some Topics:
Ubiety, the extended organism, the role of the body schema
History of the Body
The body is the way it is because that's how we are used to talking and writing about it. We do not have any good way to talk about the Body in its entirety. The best I can do is uppercase the word to dsitinguish the entirety from the fleshy moiety.
Richard Valasek will be in the DC area in June. He will be availabe to teach anywhere along the way with minimal travel expenses. Contact Richard if you are interested in coordinating a class in early June.
Flaneur (Out for a Stroll)
Contact
Richard Valasek 1308 Ala Kapuna St. Apt 103
Honolulu HI 9681
+1 (808) 256-1646
richard.valasek@gmail.com
to e-mail form
I am I and my circumstance;
and, if I do not save it, I do not save myself. —JOSÉ ORTEGA Y GASSET
Changing the Conversation
I was born. I am always a vessel for something other than myself. The self is only a
vehicle for Foreign matter which comes from elsewhere and is destined to go on
elsewhere without me, whether it's words, smells, vision ––EMANUELE COCCIA Metamorphoses
The Story Teller
Now, more than ever . . . our place in the universe and the place of the universe in us, is proving to be one of active relationship. That is more than a scientist's credo. The separateness of our lives is a sham. Physics, mathematics, music, painting, my love for you, my work, the star-dust of my body, the spirit that impels it, my politics, clocks diurnal, time perpetual, the roll, rough, tender, swamping, liberating, breathing, moving, thinking nature, human nature and the cosmos are patterned together.
—JEANETTE WINTERSON Gut Symmetries
What you do, what you become, is not my concern. –ROBERT MCCALL
Yes, there is beauty
There is love
There is joy.
All you who suffer from
the world's miseries
Defend them.
––EEVA KILPI
"Don't immanentize the eschaton."
––ERIC VOEGELIN
For the god of writing is also the god of death. He will punish the imprudent who, in their quest for unlimited knowledge, end up drinking the dissolved book.…To drink the tear and wonder about the strangeness of its taste compared to one's own...
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