Big Bang and Stardust
One thing Hubert Reeves wrote long time ago always stuck with me:
we are made of stardust
(Poussière d’étoiles, Hubert Reeves, Le Seuil, collection « Science ouverte », Paris, 1984.)
Poetically, it is beautiful but he means it literally: we are made of atoms created in the cores of stars that have exploded.
All animals, including humans, all things
animate and inanimate,
the planet itself,
the whole universe
is made from just a few basic atoms.
And life forms, from even a fewer of these atoms.
A common base, in different beautiful assemblages, connects us all.
Our State of Porosity
We move through the world and the world moves through us.
We are porous.
We are in a state of constant energic exchange with the world and each other.
We are not in a static finished state but in renewal, in transformation, evolution.
We are in a state of change…
When I fell in love with Butoh in early 90s’, I encountered once again this experience of porosity between the world and me. This time: at a practical level.
Butoh is an “anthropo-cosmo-morphic” dance.
We live and move the becoming-other.
We dance the porosity of our being, of our cells, the intermingling of the world with ourself.
Horizontal Relationship: Everything at a Same Level
I like to think about this horizontal relationship as a rhizomatic one:
(rhizome means “mass of roots” in ancient Greek)
Developed by Deleuze and Guattari, this type of relationship
(…) allows for multiple, non-hierarchical entry and exit points. (…) A rhizome works with planar and trans-species connections (…) in which different species interact together to form a multiplicity (i.e. a unity that is multiple in itself). (…)
Source: Wikipedia
In Butoh, it comes from ancient Shinto philosophy and relates to many indigenous philosophies where it is believed that there is no distinction between the world (animate and inanimate) and human beings.
In many indigenous languages, the same pronoun is used to talk about a tree, a rock, the sun, a deer, yourself or a cousin. No “I” or “it”.
Everything is at the same level of existing, of being.
We are all made of the same fabric, exchanging in a rhizomatic relationship.
Humans are not above all but part of it all.
And all is part of us.
All in all.
Impermanence • Short movie by and with Geneviève Johnson • Music by Sofina Johnson
Embodied Memory of the Universe
This porosity allowing everything to be in everything creates what I believe to be our embodied memory of the otherness.
A universal memory at a physical cell level.
Our cells memory of everything and everyone who came before.
The physical experience of all that precedes us bodily recorded in our cells.
