Inner spell checker
‘You just lie down, relax and listen to the text. You don’t have to do anything special. At some point the lesson will end. Yes, I mean … well, I promise you the lesson will end! It will take about 30 minutes.’
After having introduced her research into ‘fantasmical anatomies’, choreographer Anne Juren starts her Lesson on Gravity, reading it aloud to a group of about 40 people scattered on blankets and cushions on the floor one evening in March 2023 at the rile* bookshop in Brussels. I’m one of them.
‘No lying on the floor here. No rest. No floor. No stability. No support.’ She reads instructions and guides my attention inward, excavates traces of unlikely encounters lingering in my anatomy, conjures up imaginary bodies. ‘We are weightless. But our body still remembers what weight means, the sensation of weight, the idea of weight … its verbalization … It’s a different kind of weight not acted upon by gravity.’
The score allows one to drift off, but I’m not quite losing myself in this unruly landscape. I flinch in unsuspected moments, get restless and itchy. How to get out of here? It dawns on me that my mind is curiously riddled with worries over grammar, wording, odd punctuation. They’re traces of my recent life with this text as an editor, now triggered by Juren’s diction and an occasional slip of the tongue, even though I’m well aware that she embraces the awkwardness of not being at home in the English language as part of her aesthetics.
‘Let go,’ she instructs. ‘Lie on your back. Rest a moment.’
But I can’t. I can’t get rid of that inner spell checker going rampant, find myself in an altogether different anatomy lesson, a different practice of dissection and cutting the flow. No punctuation here. No italics. No indentations. No line breaks.
‘We lose the capacity to talk. The language extracts itself from the chaos of stones. Some mumblings of strange words crawl on the stone. Sounds of howling reach our bronchi, stretching the membranes of our lungs.’
After the lesson, Anne and I have a public conversation about her freshly published book Lesson on Gravity. As co-editor I introduce the poetics of Varamo Press and our interest in fleeting and informal kinds of writing that seldom make it to the printed page, such as reflections on practice and embodied knowledge, performance writing and scores. Snatching, transcribing and printing them, they can be read and considered as ‘minor’ literatures.
Juren’s anatomy lessons are rough drafts in a notebook, a support for their oral delivery – and indeed, during the lesson she did read from her notebook, not from the edited, published text. Her ‘text’ is distributed across bodies and media, it’s mutable and alive as it carries on in the imagination and memory of the people attending the lessons. It appears to have many parallel manifestations that cannot be pinned down – where is this text actually taking place?
We speak about the editorial process of ‘imagining the book’ together – that transformation from fleeting words or a pile of manuscript pages to a bound paper body that can be shared and read by others. I notice Anne scratching her neck. ‘Well,’ she says with a grin, ‘I would rather say you were teasing the book out of me’.
Reading and editing texts that live out in the open here also meant considering the body of the book. The transverse direction of the text was adopted from the way Juren sticks slips of paper in her notebook, inviting a different corporeal relation while reading. Or take accepting some of the mistakes and ambiguous zones, making them stand out and shine as if they were deliberate. But now they crept up on me like revenants, are still at large somewhere as I try to keep my poise while philosophizing about tending unintended indentations and what have you. How could I get out of here?
I remind Anne of her promise that the lesson would end at some point and want to know what has changed for her now that the text is published as a book. We end up talking some more about instantiations and alterations and digressions, all the while holding on to the word ‘text’ and imagining gesturing quotation marks around it as if it were a talisman. It’s an inspiring conversation and people join in, but I’m still clouded by that editorial fog, yet other differences that to me seem to matter for readers of the printed version but maybe they don’t – and then Anne breaks the spell.
‘Sometimes it’s good’, she says, ‘to place the text outside of you, on paper. The lessons have been part of my work and life for several years, but in the end they have their own urgency and desires that don’t need me. In a sense, it’s also a relief.’ And with nervous laughter she adds: ‘It’s like dispossessing a limb’, and makes a somewhat violent gesture as if shedding her right leg.