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The Essential Body

"All our knowledge has its origins in our perceptions" Leonardo da Vinci'

"Perception is not whim, it is fatal. " Emerson

" Time is change. - We measure its passing by how much things alter." Nadine Gordimer.

We started at the physical aspects of our brains and continued through the many disciplines that tend to separate the thought from the thinker. Tracing techniques and personality traits and unconscious content we have come to the conclusion that the whole being creates. In that, we have come full circle. The physical aspect of the creative act cannot be ignored. Thought and insight that is not transferred into concrete substance, is forgotten, and relegated to the never world.

Transformation takes time and it requires a medium of transference that documents the process

This is the first and only law of Process. It is not aimed at the production of SOMETHING. It is a way of life. Spending time struggling with a medium.

Most creatives resonate to some medium more than others. It is a function of their inner situation as much as their physical disposition. Tai Chi considers the physical the 'primary element' that human beings must learn to master first. The rules of one's medium needs to be understood and pushed and moulded and experimented with for it to transform and work its way back into our own consciousness.

Thus one enters into a dialogue with oneself. Creating and feeling the internal range of opposites develop and tug this way and that. In order to allow a new child to be born from these adversaries it needs to be a daily practice.

The whole body creates. Concrete thought and action sets the whole process of low focus thought and endorphins, and everything else in motion. Without ACTION, the thought never gets a chance to transform into something new, that nobody, not even the creator, had thought of before.

We all transform or are transformed by life itself. Yet we do not call everybody's life art nor does everyone necessarily live creative lives. The difference for the artist is that the transformation is documented.

Transformation needs a medium. The artist can draw no inspiration or conclusion from his transformation if he cannot recall it. If the minute details of the moment that will never come again is not caught when it happens, it is lost forever.

Posted 04 August 2006, www.annisnyman.co.za, author: Anni Snyman

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