Or navel-gazing.
Today – an idiom for self-centredness, self-contemplation, self-indulgence.
Originally – a somatic meditation method used in Eastern religious practices (Hinduism, Buddhism and Eastern Orthodox Christianity).
The navel is the centre of the body. Its’ point of origin. Its’ point of separation. Where one became two. A wound. A scar.
‘the body is presented as a wound: the other way to subtilise its sense, exhale it, pour it forth, unbridle it, abandon it, expose in the raw. The spirit concentrates what the wound bleeds: in either case, the body subsides, more and less than death, robbed of its fair share of death, dug up, soil, sacrificed.’ (Nancy, 2008)
Nancy analyses the conception of the body in Continental experience and philosophy, mostly from a Christian perspective.
‘the sign of the self, and the being-self of the sign: such is the double formula of the body in all its states.[…] The body signifies itself as a body (of) sensed interiority.’ (Nancy, 2008)
The Eucharist – hoc est corpus meum (‘this is my body’)- a sublimation? exhalation?
While being critic of the Christian approach to the body, Nancy recognises that without the spirit dimension for the body to ‘bleed into’, it becomes, in his words, ‘a black hole’.
What I am interested in here is the recurring question of embodiment and immediacy.
In one of our dissertation sessions, David Mollin made the remark that what we describe as embodiment in the process of research and writing is actually more of an embeddedness. Embodiment does not necessarily necessitate physicality, but it’s rather an attending to the body. A rhythm?
The gesture of navel gazing reminds me of a sentence in Bachelard’s Poetics of Space that I have brought up in my arguments before: ‘We shall never reach the bottom of the casket’. (referring to the infinite quality of intimacy). I guess this is what navel-gazing resembles to me: an attempt to reach the bottom of the casket.
What does this mean sonically?
Damien Jalet’s choreography performance, Omphalos, comes to mind.
‘Using mythological and scientific cosmology, conscious and unconscious knowledge, the work results in a physical reflection on the perception of time, which is elastic, multiplicitous. The dancers, the lords of time, become weavers: undulating between cycles and patterns that blur the lines between their own experiences, and the forces that move them.’ (from website)
Sound by Marihiko Hara, Ryuichi Sakamoto – minimalist, electronic?
circularity
I am thinking of self and authenticity. I am thinking of cultural authenticity in particular. The tendency to look backwards for a more pristine existence. The tendency to romanticise one’s own past. The tendency to romanticise past or peripheral cultures.
References
Nancy, J.L. (2008). Corpus. New York: Fordham University Press.