Embodied T. S. Elliot

Day 3 of the Berlin Congress is about to begin.

So far, it has been a healing experience. One apology, one accusation - and the dislikes and resentments of an ageing generation dissolve into an awakening of our limited time.

How many more Congresses do we have left?

Also, I performed for the first time in… I can’t even remember. We’re talking decades. Congress co-organiser Rossella Buono organised a Poetry reading with beautifully speaking English actor/Alexscovery teacher Duncan Knowles, so I performed T. S. Elliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”. I believe it was recorded.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/44212/the-love-song-of-j-alfred-prufrock

I have read this powerful poem so many times, but for the first time 3 nights ago, I stood up - smartphone in hand - and started to perform it. It was like I had unleased an unseen fury of angst - revelations and insights overwhelmed me, tears appeared - emotions roiled. 

As Shakespeare advised so many centuries ago:

“Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounc’d it to you, trippingly on the tongue. But if you mouth it, as many of our players do, I had as live the town crier spoke my lines.”

Lines that had puzzled me for decades revealed their meaning in the embodiment of Elliot’s words. And a profound thought occurred to me:

Meaning grows out of the embodiment of an idea. Yes, from the performing of a poem.

Thanks to Peter Jacobson, I quickly renamed my open workshops…

“Embodied Neuroscience”

…and participants were sweating and ready to sit down by the time I started individual activities in the first of my three practical workshops yesterday.

At that workshop, I also met a new generation of teachers who knew little of Marj (Marjorie Barstow 1899~1995) - and even less of her radically transforming ideas in the teaching methodologies of communicating Alexander’s Discoveries. Just because FM discovered these insights, it did not qualify him to be the best communicator of them…

As one startled teacher blurted out in shocked realisation:

“But that is different to everything I was taught for years !”

Yes, Marj was like that.