An essay on listening and Pilgrimage by Karin Horowitz
I recently had the pleasure of listening to David Kaetz, Feldenkrais practitioner1 and musician, talking on the theme of listening with your whole body. David invited us to listen to short passages of music and to ask ourselves where we listened from in our body. After identifying the first place — our ears or our heart or our bones or our mind or wherever – we were encouraged to pay attention to, where else were we listening from? And then where?
Kaetz says, ‘To pay attention to how you listen is tricky because listening is how you pay attention.’ Listening to how we are listening is an art and, reflecting on that art, takes me to the book I return to through so many different routes, Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage.
Richardson’s 13-chapter-volume masterpiece, published between 1915 and 1967, is a triumph of language and self-expression. It is also a triumph of listening — listening to the internal self; listening to the mind; listening to how people express themselves; listening to dialects, hidden languages, accents and conversations; listening to sounds in the internal and external environment. As readers, as we make our way through the 13 chapter-volumes, we listen to Richardson’s prose and Miriam’s voice, both of which change over time.
May Sinclair described Richardson’s ability to get ‘closer to reality’ through her self-modelled protagonist ‘Miriam’s stream of consciousness’ in The Egoist in April 1918. Richardson’s writing is original and lyrical. Each individual volume of Pilgrimage and the entire 13 chapter-volumes is like a musical composition, with different movements, pieces, paces and colourings. Some passages and some chapters are lengthy, lyrical, reflective and pensive; others are short and full of staccato exchanges. The reader follows Miriam Henderson through a series of life chapters where she explores who she is, who she wants to become and how to be free in the world, how to be her whole self. Miriam tries out various professional roles (for example, schoolteacher in Germany and England, dental assistant) and mixes with various social groups (such as intellectuals, writers etc) in search of an identity and a voice. Miriam is a creative spirit and Pilgrimage documents her emergence as a writer through her life. She is also a musician and an avid listener of music as of human exchanges. She has an ear for nuance and intonation. Throughout the 13 chapter-volumes or chapters, as Richardson considered them, of Pilgrimage, music comes and goes, one of many motifs that holds the book, loosely, together.
Listening to Kaetz talk about listening, I felt intuitively that Miriam listened with her whole body, not just her ears, and certainly not only cerebrally. In fact, beyond that, I feel that Miriam listens with her whole self. The self includes the body but is more than the body — it’s the mind, feelings, memories, stirrings of the soul. The ‘whole self’ is a term that is used frequently in Feldenkrais lessons — to the unqualified Feldenkrais enthusiast (me) the frequent use can be bewildering, sometimes seeming to mean ‘whole body’ and other times, quite clearly, more than that.
I decided to revisit some of the powerful passages in the first six chapter-volumes of Pilgrimage where music moves into the foreground to explore how and whether Miriam listens to music with her whole self, and what that means for her. What do David Kaetz’s insights bring to our appreciation of how Miriam listens?
These passages are densely packed examples of Richardson’s writing. Each offers itself for close examination, listening to the language and to the feel of the prose as it invites the reader to experience what it means to listen with your whole self. As an aside, I have found that reading Richardson’s prose aloud allows me as reader to listen to myself – the sound of my voice and my internal feelings and responses to what I am reading – as I listen to Miriam and to Richardson. There is a dissolving of boundaries and the shape of the prose takes form through the action of listening.
Sometimes Miriam goes into a private reverie, where she is transported somewhere else, where the sensory experience of listening morphs into an internal visualisation, as in this passage from the first chapter-volume of Pilgrimage, Pointed Roofs. Past and present come together in ‘a vague radiance in the room’. [Radiance is a recurrent and important word in Pilgrimage which is often linked with significant moments of realisation.] Often when Miriam listens intently, the light in the room changes. There are physical sensations too as all of the senses are awakened through the prompt of deep listening which is also the last sense to go when we leave the world.
In this passage Miriam is teaching at a school for girls in Germany and is listening to one of them playing the piano:
Clara threw back her head, a faint smile flickered over her face, her hands fell gently and the music came again, pianissimo, swinging in an even rhythm. It flowed from those clever hands, a half-indicated theme with a gentle, steady, throbbing undertow. Miriam dropped her eyes – she seemed to have been listening long – that wonderful light was coming again – she had forgotten her sewing – when presently she saw, slowly circling, fading and clearing, first its edge, and then, for a moment the whole thing, dripping, dripping as it circled, a weed-grown mill-wheel…. She recognized it instantly. She had seen it somewhere as a child – in Devonshire – and never thought of it since – and there it was. She heard the soft swish and drip of the water and the low humming of the wheel. How beautiful…it was fading…. She held it – it returned – clearer this time and she could feel the cool breeze it made, and sniff the fresh earthy scent of it, the scent of the moss and the weeds shining and dripping on its huge rim. Her heart filled. She felt a little tremor in her throat. All at once she knew that if she went on listening to that humming wheel and feeling the freshness of the air, she would cry. She pulled herself together, and for a while saw only a vague radiance in the room and the dim forms grouped about. She could not remember which was which. All seemed good and dear to her. The trumpet notes had come back, and in a few moments the music ceased. (Virago edition Vol. I, p.44)
Here Miriam listens with her whole self — less with her eyes which she drops to turn her gaze inwards, then hearing inside the memories of the mill-wheel that the external music conjures. She feels the physical sensation of the cool breeze and smells the earthy scent. This in turn fills her heart and she feels a tremor in her throat finding herself on the brink of tears. The mill-wheel hums, both a sound and a vibration inside. Miriam is transported somewhere beyond her physical setting, something we find time and again when she moves deeper than her conscious mind and, I suggest, inhabits her whole self when listening to music. And on other occasions too the physical objects in the room take on a half-presence, a dimness, when she goes to this other level, this other place. The forms are indistinguishable as her internal feeling expands to encompass them all.
Miriam observes that, for this effect to be created in the listener, the music has to be made by someone with the right kind of sensibility — and it is unlikely the musician will be English!
Kaetz reflects that it has been shown that babies cry in their mother tongues. As Ed Yong explains in his National Geographic article ‘Native language shapes the melody of a newborn baby’s cry’ (November 5, 2009), ‘The bawls of French newborns tend to have a rising melody, with higher frequencies becoming more prominent as the cry progresses. German newborns tend to cry with a falling melody.’ Perhaps different nationalities also listen differently and express themselves differently when playing music. Certainly, we find that Miriam feels there is a difference in the way the Germans and the English play music, reflecting their different sensibilities.
In the same passage from Pointed Roofs, Miriam is transported by the piano music and then two English girls play and bring ‘back the familiar feeling of English self-consciousness.’ Although the girls ‘were learning in Germany not to be ashamed of “playing with expression”…. They did not think only about the music, they thought about themselves too…. Perhaps that was how it was with the English. They knew, but they did not dare….’ Perhaps also the issue is that they are thinking at all.
And then an Australian girl takes her turn:
The Vorspielen was brought to an end by Gertrude Goldring’s song. Clara Bergmann sat down to accompany her, and Miriam roused herself for a double listening. There would be Clara’s opening and Clara’s accompaniment and some wonderful song. The Australian stood well away from the piano, her shoulders thrown back and her eyes upon the wall opposite her. There was no prelude. Piano and voice rang out together – single notes which the voice took and sustained with an expressive power which was beyond anything in Miriam’s experience. Not a note was quite true…. The unerring falseness of pitch was as startling as the quality of the voice. The great wavering shouts, slurring now above, now below the mark, amazed Miriam out of all shyness. She sat up, frankly gazing – “How dare she? She hasn’t an atom of ear – how ghastly” – her thoughts exclaimed as the shouts went on. The longer sustained notes presently reminded her of something she had heard. In the interval between the verses, while the sounds echoed in her mind, she remembered the cry, hand to mouth, of a London coal-man. (Virago edition, Vol. I, p.46)
The Australian’s way of singing with its shouts and brashness, (amusingly, showing Dorothy Richardson’s playful side, reminiscent of a London coal-man), prompts Miriam to abandon her characteristic (English?) reticence. Her first reaction is horror as her conditioned mind and ear are offended by what she hears. Is she listening with her whole self? There is some kind of internal dissonance as her conditioned mind rejects entering in with an open spirit to what she hears. Thoughts and judgments are playing in parallel in her mind, along with an effort to listen.
Miriam gets distracted by her thoughts in this passage and the technicalities of what is considered good singing and what isn’t. But she doesn’t get stuck there. She is carried beyond her thoughts.
Then she lost everything in the story of the Sultan’s daughter and the young Asra, and when the fullest applause of the evening was going to Gertrude’s song, she did not withhold her share. (Virago edition, Vol. I, p.47)
She is drawn deeper than her thoughts into the story and beyond judgment into appreciation. It remains unclear, however, whether it was the story that redeemed the experience or whether she was truly able to let go of preconceptions and listen with her whole self.
Miriam’s at times scathing disappointment with the English sensibility and its inability to listen authentically in a way that Kaetz would affirm, recurs in chapter-volume 4 of Pilgrimage, The Tunnel, where she comments on how nearly all English people were wrong about music. Listening, she observes:
The player’s air of superiority to other music was insufferable; her way of playing out bar by bar of the rain on the roof as if she were giving a lesson, was a piece of intellectual snobbery. Chopin she had never met, never felt or glimpsed. Chopin was a shape, an endless delicate stern rhythm as stern as anything in music; all he was, came through that, could come only through it, and she played tricks with the shape, falsified all the values, outdid the worst trickery of the music she was deprecating. At the end of the performance, which was applauded with a subdued reverence, Miriam eased her agony by humming the opening phrase of the motive again and again in her brain, and very nearly aloud, it was such a perfect rhythmic drop. For long she was haunted and tortured by Alma’s horrible holding back of the third note for emphasis where there was no emphasis…it was like…finding a wart at the dropping end of a fine tendril, she was telling herself furiously, while she fended off Alma’s cajoling efforts to make her join in a game of cards. She felt too angry and too suffering — what was this wrong thing about music in all English people? (Virago edition, Vol. II, p. 125)
Listening with her whole self to the music connects the sound with a shape, even connects the composer with a shape. There needs to be an authentic connection though, otherwise the shape is as ridiculous as a wart at the end of a fine tendril. Miriam is outraged by the performance element, the inauthentic connection of the musician with the music which makes it impossible for the listener to have a whole-self connection. The connection of listening to music with shapes happens on more than one occasion in these passages where Miriam is listening to music. But it cannot happen if the act of listening to music is combined with a social pursuit, whether a game of cards or light conversation. Listening authentically with the whole self is at odds with being at a soiree or playing a card game. Again, in chapter 5 of Interim, Miriam observes that ‘Mr Bowdoin had probably thought she would talk to those women. But after talking to them how could one listen to music? Their very presence made it almost impossible.’ Listening to music means music is in the foreground, it is not relegated to the background. How can the listener be present to and with the music if the brain is engaged in polite, intellectual exchanges?
Kaetz observes, ‘When you listen to Bach, the less you are thinking the more you are hearing.’ Miriam understands that listening is not about thinking. Listening to Mr Bowdoin:
The long sonata came to an end while Miriam was still revolving amongst her thoughts. When Mr Bowdoin sat back from the piano she returned to the point where she had begun and determined to stop her halting circular progress from group to group of interesting reflections, and to listen to the next thing he might play. She was aware he was playing on his own piano better than he had done at Tansley Street, but also more carefully and less self-forgetfully. Perhaps that was why she had not listened. She could not remember ever before having definite thoughts, while music was going on, and felt afraid lest she were ceasing to care for music. (Virago edition, Vol. II, p .370)
Miriam’s love of music is affirmed by her ability to lose herself in it and listen with her whole self which is a medley of the senses rather than ‘defined thoughts’. She fears that if she is no longer able to do that, this is a sign that she has lost her love for music. Importantly Miriam observes that her inability to listen may be linked with the way the musician plays the music and how able the musician is to forget or lose themselves in merging with the music.
Kaetz says,
‘Listening has more in with love than it does with obedience, because in love the boundaries break down and the parties involved are in resonance with each other. Listening does not separate, it integrates. So listening with your whole self is something like this: I give you my presence, I feel what’s going on. When you put sound in the air, I feel that sound. When you touch me, I feel that touch. When I speak, I touch you at a distance. When you can listen as if you’re being touched, which you are, then you’re listening.’
Miriam sometimes remembers such moments and captures them after they have occurred as in this passage in chapter-volume 3 of Pilgrimage, Honeycomb:
Recalling the song, as she sat back in the alcove of her bed, motionless, keeping the brightness of her room at its first intensity, Miriam remembered that it had brought her a moment when the flower-filled drawing-room had seemed to be lit, from within herself, a sudden light that had kept her very still and made the bowls of roses blaze with deepening colours. In her mind she had seen garden beyond garden of roses, sunlit, brighter and brighter, and had made a rapturous prayer. (Virago edition, Vol. I, p. 405)
When she listens with her whole self, the room is lit from inside her rather than from an external source. Once again, there is a blazing or radiance. Often at these moments there is flow within her and stillness outside. The light from inside stills the outside, which is captured in Richardson’s prose almost as if it is a still.
Kaetz reflects that ‘listening in your totality implies not only listening to others but also listening to yourself and to others and to nature where you listen to nature the way nature listens to you.’
Here is an example where in chapter-volume 2 of Pilgrimage, Backwater, Miriam listens with her whole body and self, when a guest visits the Henderson family and plays for them. Miriam observes of herself:
She seemed to grow larger and stronger and easier as the thoughtful chords came musing out into the night and hovered amongst the dark trees. She found herself drawing easy breaths and relaxing completely against the support of the hard friendly sofa. How quietly every one was listening….
After a while, everything was dissolved, past and future and present and she was nothing but an ear, intent on the meditative harmony which stole out into the garden.
3
When the last gently strung notes had ceased she turned from her window and found Harriett’s near eye fixed upon her, the eyebrow travelling slowly up the forehead.
“Wow,” mouthed Miriam.
Harriett screwed her mouth to one side and strained her eyebrow higher. (Virago edition, Vol. I, p. 205)
Everyone listens together here, and there is a shared stillness as well as easy breath. This is like what Kaetz describes as ‘a silence that’s full of presence’, for example at the end of a concert where there is a hushed audience, in those moments between the end of the music and the first applause.
When Miriam listens with the whole self, boundaries dissolve, those of time, those of the senses, between self and the music.
Here too once again we catch a glimpse of Richardson’s familiar humour, her light-hearted play which is also an essential part of the whole self in Feldenkrais. Richardson captures the response in Miriam’s sister Harriett’s eyebrow straining ever higher in amazement and admiration. They re-enter the ordinary world, no longer listening with their whole selves. Back to normal, they are body parts not a whole body or self – Miriam is nothing but an ear and Harriett a strained eyebrow.
Kaetz points out that listening with the whole body is not just about hearing what’s in the foreground. Just as we have peripheral vision which is vital to our well-being and balance, so there is what we might call peripheral hearing (my phrase), listening beyond what’s in the foreground, below the surface, and to the sides. We are not just an ear, or only using our ears, when we listen in this way.
And so we find Miriam in chapter-volume 5 of Pilgrimage, Interim, being touched from a distance when she listens at this deep level:
Miriam emerged smoothly into the darkness and lay radiant. There was nothing but the cool sense of life pouring from some inner source and the deep fresh spaces of the darkness all round her. Perhaps she had awakened because of her happiness…. Clear, gentle, and soft in a melancholy minor key, a little thread of melody sounded from far away in the night straight into her heart. There was nothing between her and the sound that had called her so gently up from her deep sleep. She held in her joy to listen. There was no sadness in the curious sorrowful little air. It drew her out into the quiet neighbourhood…misty darkness along empty roads, plaques of lamplight here and there on pavements and across house fronts…blackness in large gardens and over the bridge and in the gardens at the backs of the rows of little silent dark houses, a pale lambency over the canal and reservoirs. Somewhere amongst the little roads a group of players gently and carefully hooting slow sweet notes as if to wake no one, playing to no one, out into the darkness. Back out of the fresh darkness came the sweet clear music…the waits; of course. She rushed up and out heart foremost, listening, following the claim of the music into the secret happy interior of the life of each sleeping form, flowing swiftly on across a tide of remembered and forgotten incidents in and out amongst the seasons of the years. It sent her forward to-morrow, sitting her upright in morning light, telling her with shouts that the day was there and she had only to get up into it…The little air had paused on a tuneful chord and ceased…It was beginning again nearer and clearer. She heard it carefully through. It was so strange. It came from far back amongst the generations where everything was different; telling you that they were the same….In the way those people were playing, in the way they made the tune sound in the air, neither instrument louder than the others, there was something that knew. Something that everybody knows…. They show it by the way they do things, no matter what they say…. Her heart glowed and she stirred. How rested she was. How fresh the air was. What freshness came from everything in the room. She stared into the velvety blackness, trying to see the furniture. It was the thick close-drawn curtains that made the perfect velvety darkness…. Behind the curtains and the Venetian blinds the windows were open at the top letting in the garden air. The little square of summer showed brilliantly in this darkest winter blackness. It was more than worth while to be wakened in the middle of the night at the Brooms’. The truth about life was in them. She imagined herself suddenly shouting in the night. After the first fright they would understand and would laugh. She yawned sleepily towards an oncoming tangle of thoughts, pushing them off and slipping back into unconsciousness. (Virago edition, Vol. II, p.300)
In this passage once again we find ‘radiance’, ‘flow’ and inner space. The small sound of the melody pierces straight to her heart. The boundaries dissolve and there is nothing between her and the sound she hears. She holds in her joy and there is no sorrow in the sad tune which draws her into nature. Human emotions can get in the way of this deep listening perhaps as much as thoughts can. The players are playing to no one – no audience is intended. When Miriam listens with her whole self, her heart glows and stirs. She is transported on a tide of memories and also carried forward, to a time when everything was different yet the same. The room she is in takes on the quality of how she feels listening to the music. The music lifts her out of sleep and lets her return to it, the velvety darkness.
A little later in Interim, Miriam is both musician and listener as she cautiously reacquaints herself with the piano and with pieces from her past. She both plays and listens with her whole body, her whole self. She connects with nature, she merges with the instrument, the room, the natural environment around her and the world, moving outwards all the way to the Taj Mahal. She connects with every level of her life and her deepest sense of self.
Moszkowski’s Serenade sounded fearfully pathetic; as if the piano were heart-broken. It could be made to do better. Both the pedals worked, the soft one producing a woolly sweetness, the loud a metallic shallow brilliance of tone. She shut the heavy, softly closing, loose-handled door very carefully. Its cold china knob told her callously that her real place was in the little room upstairs with the bedroom crockery cold in the mid-morning light. But she had already shut the door. She came shyly back to the piano and sat down and played carefully and obediently piece after piece remembered from her schooldays. They left the room triumphantly silent and heavy all round her. If she got up and went away it would be as if she had not played at all. She could not sit here playing Chopin. It would be like deliberately speaking a foreign language suddenly, to assert yourself. Playing pianissimo she slowly traced a few phrases of a nocturne. They revealed all the flat dejection of the register. With the soft pedal down she pressed out the notes in a vain attempt to key them up. Through their mournful sagging the magic shape came out. She could not stay her hands. Presently she no longer heard the false tones. The notes sounded soft and clear and true into her mind, weaving and interweaving the sigh of moonlit waters, the sound of summer leaves flickering in the darkness, the trailing of dusk across misty meadows, the stealing of dawn over grass, the faint vision of the Taj Mahal set in dark trees, white Indian moonlight outlining the trees and pouring over the pale façade; over all a hovering haunting consoling voice, pure and clear, in a shape, passing, as the pictures faintly came and cleared and melted and changed upon a vast soft darkness, like a silver thread through everything in the world. Closing in upon her from the schoolgirl pieces still echoing in the room, came sudden abrupt little scenes from all the levels of her life, deep-rooted moments still alive within her, challenging and promising as when she had left them, driven relentlessly on. (Virago edition, Vol. II, p. 333)
In her playing, the ‘magic shape’ comes out. In a moment that is reminiscent of her listening to the Australian singer way back in Pointed Roofs, she reaches a point where she no longer hears the false tones. This powerful passage journeys through to a jarring moment of despair and inauthenticity when she realises she has played with the intention of commenting on her old schoolfriend Alma’s way of playing which she considers lacking in sensibility. Miriam plays through her anguish, her sense of being passed by in life, her sense of being a ‘dingy woman’ who, had she been a man, would have been entitled to her assertions. She works through this complicated bundle of feelings in the presence of the alien room that is ultimately filled with a friendly light as she concludes her playing with a sense of triumph. And then there is the thin lone sound of a violin as the outside world responds, also echoing the earlier moment in Interim where she hears the sound of the players outside at night.
The last chord of the nocturne brought the room sharply back. It was unchanged; lifeless and unmoved; nothing had passed to it from the little circle where she sat enclosed…. Her heart swelled and tears rose in her eyes. The room was old and experienced, full like her inmost mind of the unchanging past. Nothing in her life had any meaning for it. It waited impassively for the passing to and fro of people who would leave no impression. She had exposed herself and it meant nothing in the room. Life had passed her by and her playing had become a sentimental exhibition of unneeded life…. She was wretched and feeble and tired…. Life has passed me by; that is the truth. I am no longer a person. My playing would be the nauseating record of an uninteresting failure to people who have lived, or a pandering to the sentimental memories of people whom life has passed by. “You played like a snail crossed in love”; perhaps he was right. But something had gone wrong because I played with the intention of commenting on Alma’s way of playing. That was not all. It did not end there. There was something in music when one played alone, without thoughts. Something present, and new. Not affected by life or by any kind of people. In Beethoven. Beethoven was the answer to the silence of the room. She imagined a sonata ringing out into it, and defiantly attacked a remembered fragment. It crashed into the silence. The uncaring room might rock and sway. Its rickety furniture shatter to bits. Something must happen under the outbreak of her best reality. She was on firm ground. The room was nowhere. She cast sidelong, half-fearful, exultant glances. The room woke into an affronted silence. She felt astonishment at the sudden loud outbreak of assertions turning to scornful disgust. Entrenched behind the disgust, something was declaring that she had no right to her understanding of music; no business to get away into it and hide her defects and get out of things and escape the proper exposure of her failure. In a man it would have been excusable. The room would have listened with respectful flattering indulgent tolerance till it was over and then have relapsed untouched. This dingy woman playing with the directness and decision of a man was like some strange beast in the room. It was too late to go back. She could only rush on, re-affirming her assertion, shouting in a din that must be reaching up and down the house and echoing out into the street the thing that was stronger than the feeling that had prompted her appeal for sympathy. It was the everlasting parting of the ways, the wrenching away that always came. …The room became a background indistinguishable from any other indifferent background. All round her was height and depth, a sense of vastness and grandeur beyond anything to be seen or heard, yet stretching back like a sheltering wing over the past to her earliest memories and forward ahead out of sight. The piano had changed. It gave out a depth and fullness of tone. By careful management she could avoid the abrupt contrast between the action of the pedals. Presently the glowing and aching of the muscles of her forearms forced her to leave off. She swung round. The forgotten room was filled with friendly light. Triumphant echoes filled its wide spaces, pressed against the windows, filtered out into the quiet street, out and away into London. When the room was still there was an unbroken stillness in the house and the street. Striking thinly across it came the tones of the solitary unaccompanied violin. (Virago edition, Vol. II, p. 334-5)
The final passage I’d like to look at is from chapter-volume 4, The Tunnel. It’s different from the others because here Miriam is listening not to a musical composition but to the St Pancras church bells in their delightful, pealing raucousness.
St Pancras bells were clamouring in the room; rapid scales, beginning at the top, coming with a loud full thump on to the fourth note and finishing with a rush to the lowest which was hardly touched before the top note hung again in the air, sounding outdoors clean and clear while all the other notes still jangled together in her room. Nothing had changed….
St Pancras bells burst forth again. Faintly interwoven with their bright headlong scale were the clear sweet delicate contralto of the more distant bells playing very swiftly and reproachfully a five-finger exercise in a minor key. That must be a very high-Anglican church; with light coming through painted windows on to carvings and decorations.
As she began on her solid slice of bread and butter, St Pancras bells stopped again. In the stillness she could hear the sound of her own munching. She stared at the surface of the table that held her plate and cup. It was like sitting up to the nursery table. “How frightfully happy I am,” she thought with bent head. Happiness streamed along her arms and from her head. St Pancras bells began playing a hymn tune, in single firm beats with intervals between that left each note standing for a moment gently in the air. The first two lines were playing carefully through to the distant accompaniment of the rapid weaving and interweaving in a regular unbroken pattern of the five soft low contralto bells of the other church. The third line of the hymn ran through Miriam’s head, a ding-dong to and fro from tone to semitone. The bells played it out, without the semitone, with a perfect, satisfying falsity. Miriam sat hunched against the table listening for the ascending stages of the last line. The bells climbed gently up, made a faint flat dab at the last top note, left it in the air askew above the decorous little tune and rushed away down their scale as if to cover the impropriety. They clamoured recklessly mingling with Miriam’s shout of joy as they banged against the wooden walls of the window space. (Virago edition, Vol. II, p.21-3)
The sound of the bells is clear outdoors but jangling at first in her room. Unlike the other examples where she listens to a musician and refuses to attend to something else at the same time, here in listening to the bells which are a background soundtrack to daily life, she eats while listening. Another church joins in with its bells, spontaneously, and there is a medley of sounds inside and outside. The exuberance of this listening experience and the joy and freedom it unleashes in Miriam, offers a different option of how to listen with the whole self.
As in Feldenkrais, there is not just one way to listen with the whole self and Miriam continues to explore how to listen to music in a drawing room, to street sounds, to others and, perhaps most importantly, to herself, as she continues on the pilgrimage that is her life.
I felt moved to look closely at these passages because, in listening to David Kaetz speak on this compelling subject (essential to Feldenkrais and essential to life), the spectre of Miriam was hanging there in the foreground for me. If you’ve persevered through these passages, I hope that this piece has brought some clarity to what it means to listen with the whole self. It’s a gift and an art and the more a person does it, the more connected they are within themselves, with the world around them, and with others. For me, three ways of finding these connections are through Feldenkrais Awareness through Movement lessons, through reading Pilgrimage (and some other literature), and through writing.
- I heard David speak as part of a 12-week programme that Feldenkrais Education have created, to demonstrate the relevance and application of the Feldenkrais Method across a range of environments. David was speaking as part of a series about Feldenkrais and music, listening and playing.
‘The Feldenkrais Method® offers a unique way of making lasting improvements to our lives through the medium of movement. We learn how to move through the world with greater ease, co-ordination, flexibility and grace.
It is a somatic practice that harnesses mindful attention and gentle movement to heighten awareness of ourselves and our sensations. In doing so we learn from the inside out, making use of our brain’s plasticity – its ability to change for the better at any age.’ Feldenkrais UK ↩︎
Karin Horowitz has an undergraduate degree in English from Yale and a PhD from Newnham College, Cambridge. Her love of literature evolved into a fascination with human psychology, leading to a non-academic career as a coach; she is also a yoga practitioner and teacher as well as a Feldenkrais enthusiast.