ELECTIVE FALLING
With care and attention, the initial hesitation met within the act of falling might give way to strange and vertiginous pleasures, the rapturous fall from self and certainty experienced as syncope’s swoon. Syncope — from sun (with) and kopto (cut) — refers to a missing beat or break in rhythm, the fall experienced by stepping off from that which came before. Through repeatedly falling, a conversion is made from self-consciousness (that excessive, at times embarrassing, hyperattention focused on the illusory apartness of oneself from other things) towards a heightened sense of subjectivity, desirable porosity between self-other, self-world. Care of the self — not in guarded self-preservation or protection but through one’s willingness to be transformed. Release of self-attachment — self as malleable, capable of change. Practise the self differently. Practise not for the perfection of a given move or future performance but towards the deepening of awareness. Become more sensitised to one’s lived experience, more attuned to its risings and falls, its intensities and durations. Yet the fall from what is known requires some loss of power and control, while the passivity and apparent weakness often associated therein can be converted into a potential means of strength. From humiliation to humility; fallibility to vulnerability; fragility to an ability to break down or unravel, start over, start over. Droop. Dangle. Flop. Fold. Notice the capacity for expansion in select moments as one gives in or over to the charge of forces other than one’s own. Succumb to gravity’s pull. To fall electively is not to be defeated by gravity’s law but to experimentally test or try its logic. Feel the liberation of momentary flight and groundlessness that arises through disobeying the habit that would have us upright, to trip this tendency up.
From Emma Cocker, How Do You Do? (Nottingham: Beam Editions, 2023)