The florilegium is a textual corollary to the movement work as though your body were right. It exists as a limited run of hand-bound copies created with a hand-held cordless drill, half-century-old leather from an attic trunk, and a branding iron. It wants physical interaction and is not available online. If you would like to borrow a copy to read, contact us. Below is an excerpt.
The action of the thumbsucking child
Is determined by pleasure
A human being is a wild creature
Open to time and death painlessly
To enter into a society
Is to bend oneself to its ways
Humans break themselves in like animals
It is common to close the eyes
And call the nervous system as a witness
But what I am speaking about
Is the cells and fluids
Witnessing themselves
To be bodies together
In vulnerability and power
A shared liveliness that is life itself
Vital purposiveness without purpose
Texts were written in part by Jonathan Meyer but are primarily from sources including the following people and works. In most cases, sourced texts have been heavily altered from the original, in a kind of verbal collage. The list is partial, and roughly in order of significance to the florilegium.
– Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, various Body-Mind Centering writings
– J.M. Bernstein, Torture and Dignity: An Essay on Moral Injury
– Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception
– Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
– Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies
– Steven Johnson, Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software
– Richard Grossinger, Embryogenesis: Species, Gender, and Identity
– Sigmund Freud, secondary source
– Kevin Bales, Zoe Trodd, & Alex Kent Williamson, Modern Slavery: The Secret World of 27 Million People
– P.W. Singer, Children at War
– Alexandra S. Moore & Elizabeth Swanson, Witnessing Torture: Perspectives of Torture Survivors and Human Rights Workers
– Henri Lefebvre, secondary source
– Elitsa Dermendzhiyska, “Cradled by Therapy”
– “Complexity Labs”, Emergence Theory: An Overview
– Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk
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