E.B. White and movement
If you are a literary geek like me who re-reads The Elements of Style by Strunk and White every year or so, you may recall the injunctions to "let every word tell" and "omit needless words.”
For many years in New York City I worked at The New Yorker magazine—perhaps the geekiest grammatical gathering outside the offices of the OED—so I have an outsized appreciation for clarity in language.
These days, I am often asked how my background in literature and languages (I spent years immersed in Arabic’s arcane grammar) has anything to do with movement. What does language have to do with movement anyway?
To me, they are the same:
both require awareness and discipline
both have rules and structure
both give form to our inner lives, allowing us to be known
E.B. White says that William Strunk, who was his teacher at Cornell University in 1919, would repeat everything three times, such as, "Omit needless words! Omit needless words! Omit needless words!"
White later used this in Charlotte's Web where the gander did everything in triplicate: "Here, here, here! I'm idio-idio-idio-syncratic!" The gander sounds a little crazy, which is exactly the point: Inefficient words, just like inefficient movement, make us a little crazy!
If your words are not efficient and evocative, you fail to lead your listener to the sunny clearing in your mind you are tying to share with the outside world. It's like shouting into the wind.
It is the same with movement: If your movement is inefficient and unclear, you will fail to get the results you want. Perhaps this will occur in the flash of an instant when you twinge your back or your neck, or perhaps it will occur throughout the entire arc of your life.
No matter what the time frame, inefficient, unclear movement leads to excessive firing of the synapses in the brain and general flailing about. More concretely, needless contractions in places like the jaw, neck, shoulders, eyes, and stomach waste energy and oppose elegance.
Let's reverse the injunction to say, "Use necessary words!" and "Use necessary movement!"
Let every word tell
Have you ever heard people say a lot without saying much of anything? Or, have you ever seen people move a lot without going anywhere in particular?
Moshe Feldenkrais would have liked E.B. White. Both men had a confidence with communication that conveyed exactly where they stood.
While E.B. White worked at The New Yorker long before I did, he was always my hero. But he is not a grammarian. He admittedly wrote by ear, and his grammar was flawed, even in The Elements of Style. Nevertheless, he unquestionably knew what he meant and so, therefore, do we.
What I take from this is that if you know what you are saying, you can say what you want. And, conversely, if you don't know what you are saying, you can say anything because it won't matter anyway.
With movement it is the same: if you know where you are, you can go where you want. This may sound elliptical, but it's practical. How can you get across town if you don't know where you are now? How can you move through space if you don't know where your spine is, your right hip, or your left knee? How will you get up from the chair you are sitting in?
When we lose track of our selves, we lose track of more than our kinesthetic sense, we lose track of perspectives and options.
This also points to one of Moshe Feldenkrais's main tenets: "If you know what you are doing, you can do what you want". So let every movement tell, let it express your intention perfectly, with elegance and precision.
For me, movement and language manifest who we are; it's the only way we can be known. If we cease to communicate clearly in our movement and our language, we cease to be known, and we cease to take our place in the world.
The Feldenkrais Method can bring out the E.B. White in all of us. By exploring our movement we can discover clarity, confidence, and self-expression we never imagined possible.
“We can clean our brain from patterns that are not necessary. We assume that “this is what I am,” but it’s not true. Our brain has been wired in by our experience, and we can have new experience.”