Tag: learning

496: “A Dimly Felt Sense” (Aviva Freedman)

                “People learn to write in discipline-specific ways through a “dimly felt sense,” a complicated, lived, sensory, largely un-verbal and un-rational awareness of how things like this are supposed to sound and be presented and be shaped. This dimly felt sense helps generate the text, but it also generated by their ongoing attempt to create the text: it pushes their writing and is pushed by their experience of reading, talking, writing (and having feedback on their writing).”
                -Aviva Freedman, “Learning to Write Again: Discipline-Specific Writing at University” (p. 96)

                I find something soothing—and powerful—in Aviva Freedman’s language of learning through a dimly felt sense. Maybe that’s because I’m trying to learn a lot every day. Trying, in these last six months, to learn to be married—a wonderful, delightful learning, and something I’ve never done before. Trying to learn to work inside (or to resist, reimagine, remake) all of the flawed and broken systems through which my society organizes everything from education to healthcare to road maintenance. Trying to learn the dances of hope and horror.
                So many of the models I’ve been taught for learning are rational, verbal, directional, disembodied, abstract, simplified. In the face of all that Aviva Freedman goes back to the complicated, lived, sensory, un-verbal, un-rational, aware, and I would add, relational. We walk and rest in the ways we are learning, dimly, to walk and rest. In the ways we see and feel something like this done. Which leaves space for not knowing. For fumbling with it. Maybe more like this. Maybe less like this. Maybe here. Maybe not. And in the attempt we’re learning.

by Azlan

480: Performing Card Tricks (Jean Hugard & Frederick Braué)

                “We cannot emphasize too strongly that knowing the secret of the trick is not the same as knowing how to perform that trick.” -Jean Hugard & Frederick Braué, The Royal Road to Card Magic

                It’s a long way, maybe, from this book on learning card magic to the workshop my partner and I joined last Sunday. And in another way they’re close. In their joyfulness. Their serious playfulness. Their habit of being lost (and found) in the movement itself, and not the knowledge of it.
                Last Sunday’s workshop built on body mapping. We lay on the floor and traced one another’s shapes onto two large pieces of paper. Then we drew around and with our shapes: our hands, our legs, the messy cloud of our hair. We started by tracing with black markers. As soon as I got up I reached for colors. Purples. Pinks. Golds. Next to me my partner started growing roots, up from beneath her feet and into her legs. Watching her roots became drawing my roots. Drawing our roots became twining these roots together, weaving them, our papers and our hands and our colors playing together. At the end of the workshop we were invited to share about what we’d drawn, and I realized I didn’t want to say anything. It’s not that I hadn’t liked the workshop: I’d love it. But I’d felt something and learned something in the drawing, the time together, the crawling on the floor to find my colors, and I didn’t (not then, at least; not yet) want to put any of it in words.
                I know the secret for a few card tricks. At one point I knew how to perform two—how to push a card through the table, maybe, which was always a delight to share on a bored afternoon when we’d forgotten why talking had once felt exciting. Beyond the tricks (or through them?) there’s this playful wonder. This magic. The what? The how? Too often, in thinking, I can mistake the secret of the trick for the practice of its performance, but it’s in the performance that I’m always falling in love.

by Azlan