August 2007

Last week, the interweaving of three experiences: the journal writing of the participants in this project, the testing of my daughter's cello in her teacher's studio, and Virginia Woolf's writing. How is this possible?

Collaborative practitioners in this project write of not only entering into difference and otherness in their conversations with their clients, but they write of the ways they as practitioners, are different within each conversation. Each conversation draws something unique and unrepeatable from the practitioner. Sometimes the elicitor is the conversational partner, sometimes, a particular word, an utterance, an idea. Sometimes the elicitor is is the voice of the other, or the practitioner's voice, even the practitioner's "inner dialogue." At times the elicitor might be a certain moment in the conversation, perhaps the tone of voice, the conversation's rhythm, its feel, its silences. Collaborative practitioners are present and responsive to multiple diverse and continuous calls within the soundscapes of their daily practices... and, as their written accounts indicate, they cannot maintain a "sameness" throughout these encounters.

After lingering with their expressions awhile, I turn to pull Virginia Woolf's autobiographical writing off the bookshelf behind me. I wonder, where is that piece that said,

"Bernard, in The Waves, aware of his doffing and donning of carapaces, reflects how: "The tree alone resisted our eternal flux. For I changed and changed..."

"But now let me ask myself the final question, as I sit over this grey fire, with its naked promontories of black coal, which of these people am I? It depends so much upon the room. When I say to myself, 'Bernard,' who comes?"

"Susan echoes his thought as she muses: "For there is nothing to lay hold of. I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me." (taken from Moments of Being)

I thought of all of this last week as my daughter, her cello teacher and I met to articulate and evaluate the qualities of a new Czechoslovakian cello. Drawing our attention to renovations-in-progress all around us, her teacher explained, " The studio is different with the wooden floor pulled up... and the cello will sound entirely different as a result..." She went on to predict the cello would sound different in her livingroom... and still different, in our own livingroom.

And this reminded me of Woolf's words, and the journalling of my project colleagues. We can never hear our own voice apart from the relational rooms we occupy, just as we can never hear the sounds of the cello apart from its immediate acoustical surrounds. We always hear it with and within a very particular spacial context that directly shapes its sound. In every setting, the qualities of the instrument are "made and remade."

As one of our Mexican practitioners writes,

“You realize that you will
never again
be the same person,

rather
in each conversation
you are different
and you are transformed

and consequently,
you move

and each time you can become
more inquisitive
about life,
your own personal life,
as well as the life of the person that is working with you."

Best wishes for a colourful Autumn to everyone,

Janice