Writing as a method of inquiry1 has led me into a state like improvising (Richardson 2000). I am totally awake, in the middle of the thing at hand, but I do not have a clear thought about what will become of the writing, it will be revealed step by step. I am being sunk into something where the writing itself will be in constant transformation. Writing is a state where many directions will open up; I am being pulled toward the unknown where images, smells, touches intersect. I am being drawn somewhere where the contours of my body are in motion; my former knowledge dissolves; certainties turn pale. The only certainty is the changing situations, the emerging sentences. In the midst of writing I suddenly do not know where I am; I fi nd myself writing in another way; new connections are being
made; many things keep their uniqueness, their singularity. I fi nd new landscapes in myself; I visit places I did not know about. Still, in my fl esh they are strangely known. I am tightly intertwined with the world. Writing is a physical act2 (Cixous
& Calle-Gruber 1997). I am rooted in my bodily being in the midst of words and sentences. I am aware of layers of dancing experiences in the body while writing; I write through bones and muscles; I am surrounded by the wholeness of being. At the same time I dwell in an unknown reality. I land upon another reality; my body guides me to the unknown. Sometimes it happens: writing as action takes over; it possesses me; it has routes of its own. I am not totally responsible for the developing text at that moment; something half hidden wants to be revealed. Something similar happens at the moment of improvising: I am attuned to a particular focus in dance;
the senses are open and in a moment some unintentional discoveries can be made.
The world shows itself diff erently at each moment.
Writing is an experience as such. Words do create an experience. Though it is not the one like that while one is dancing, it is still rooted in bodily experiences; it is being supported by sensibility, by all the journeys I have gone through. Sometimes I feel breathless; my fi ngers jump fast on the keyboard, and images hold in their grip;
the sensations are very alive. At other times the breath travels through the whole body: with each breath writing travels with force and calmness. The writing takes me to a land I do not know, a wave of strangeness. Eventually there is the touch of familiarity; there is a taste in some words that hit straight to the bones.
Tere Vaden writes about the locality of language, locality that embraces language, thinking, and the human being. This locality does not mean only physical location but lived distances and intimacy. Language carries meaning and it is thoroughly pierced by the experience. In many cases language and experience are inseparable.
The experience is not free from the eff ects of language, and language changes; it fl ows, lives and dies. (Vaden 2000, 25–26) Vaden stresses the uniqueness of language and its tight relation to the experience. Words create a particular atmosphere. The experience will get another life by means of words that describe it. The words are like guideposts towards particular places, places are being created by the words that arrive; nuances also dwell in rhythms and silences between the lines.
Language makes a diff erence in writing. This language is alien to me; it is not rooted in me. This strangeness is an advantage: I can tell things diff erently by writing in English; other things can be revealed through this language. The words touch the surface of my skin; they do not hit the bones. There exists a completely
diff erent echo with words in my mother tongue, Finnish. Here I am, thrown into this play of words with a foreign language to communicate my thoughts, some routes in my pathway of research. I get lost in the jungle of words; they sometimes seduce me; they take me somewhere else; the clarity disappears; the traces of dancing melt into a foggy landscape. Writing in English alienates, but at the same time it may reveal other things. It gives a particular distance to see, to observe, to recognise.
The bond between words and their meaning that has been rooted in one’s being since the cradle will loosen while one is using a foreign language. The airy space between the words and their meanings creates an opportunity to write in another way, the opportunity of seeing in another way, or to be lost in a strangeness, in a foreign landscape.
Writing about bodily experiences in dancing becomes an endless game: to circle around something, the intention is not to nail them through the defi nite concepts into something fi xed. The impossible cannot be included in the circles of the possible. The game is to say something, to keep on repeating, to fold and to unfold – though not to fi x it. The text will remain obscure; it still exists: the sensation, the lived experience. Emmanuel Levinas writes about the saying and the said. Saying is communication as a condition for all communication. The subject is vulnerable to the other. Saying is being exposed to the other where no slipping away is possible.
(Levinas 2006(1974), 48–50) This exposure means that the subject is corporeal and sensitive to the Other; one’s own identity absolves. There is something radical in the Saying; it goes beyond being thematized or totalized. By contrast, the Said belongs to the area where everything can be known, ruled, determined. It is concerned with truth or falsity. Everything that can be said, everything that manifests itself in the Said consists of the Said. In the Saying, the subject is already directed towards the other by its concrete presence. (Levinas 1996, 22) The question that Levinas asks is how is the Saying, my exposure to the Other, to be Said so that it does not betray this Saying. He answers by letting the Saying reside as a residue, or an interruption, within the Said. The manner in which Levinas writes, particularly in Otherwise than Being, means a spiralling movement; the inevitable language of the ontological Said and the attempt to unsay that Said in order to locate the ethical Saying in it. (Critchley 1992, 7–8) In that way the Saying is intertwined with the Said, the ongoing play with the Saying and the Said means that all the time something that becomes said will be denied. Something emerges in this constant interplay between the Saying and the Said. Still, these two are irreducible.
I recognise this continuous play with words; something emerges, something hides and disappears at the same time. The exact language does not totally serve the way in which the bodily experiences emerge, how they aff ect the body. In the midst of research, my route travels between writing and dancing. There is a gap, an abyss in between; there is a strange possibility that they inform each other in an unpredictable, untranslatable way. They do inform each other through their own means. And, inevitably, dancing hides from writing; it reminds one of Levinas’s endless play between the Saying and the Said. Writing is able to create obscure scenes, to search more than to make statements. The gap will stay; it remains. That is consoling.