In a podcast Almog Loven tells the story of a man who „taught himself to see“: Born blind to deaf parents, Meir Schneider started doing eyes exercises at the age of 17 and achieved full vision a few years later.
Almog, it seems, went to see Schneider in person, presumably to address his own issues with eye-sight. To Almog, the meeting was a disappointment, however because Schneider seemed arrogant and self-righteous. But then again, Almog concedes in the podcast, Schneider might have good reasons for both, having taught himself to see…
The issue of vision and visibility seems strangely relevant to a workshop Almog hosted in Berlin, near the closing of 2023. I say strangely, because me and the other participants of the workshop spent much of the three days with eyes closed. Yet when I think about the experience, my thoughts keep returning to the question of what seeing is, and what cannot be seen.
Seeing, one might say, is a sensory experience, in a way the very essence of aesthetics, and at the core of immediacy. Yet, most of us will rarely if ever marvel at the wonders of seeing in their day-to-day and when re-enchantment is on the menu, as it is so often today, it will seldom revolve around watching.
The easy explanation for seeing´s apparent lack of excitement lies with its ubiquitousness: obviously, those who can see do so all the time, and seeing is central to so many of our core cultural activities: most read with their eyes just as they look at pictures or watch „content“. How someone „looks“ – on many levels (posture, movement, shape, clothing etc) – can strongly influence social interactions. Many more examples could be called upon.
But this is certainly not all. There is another factor that Almog´s workshop highlighted for me and that I would like to report on in the following.
With reference to the title of Almog´s workshop, „Weightlessness“, I will refer to this aspect of seeing as its „weight“.
Does vision have a weight? To understand this off-beat notion let´s return to seeing as a sensory experience. Seeing is most often not thought of as experience with a capital E not only because of how often we use our eyes but also because of what and how we see: walking down the street, most will not see sleek metallic structures fitted with rubbery cylinders, – they will see cars.
This is to say: The meaning of visual input in our daily lives is often so pre-defined that closer observation is not required for orientation and superficial understanding. Going into foreign contexts and exotic locations this changes and we can at least somewhat taste the wonder of seeing. But the default of seeing is meaning-chasing, it is seeing pre-conceived images.
Seen from this angle, one could say that „meaning“ is like a gravitational field weighing down on vision, enriching it, but also distracting from its sensory aspect.
To clarify this dichotomy, two contrasts:
Seeing on the purely sensory level does not name what is seen, it does not qualify it. On the other end of the spectrum visual input is only cueing names, and even partial cues suffice to call up the name just like you can red txt wth mssg lttrs.
Sensory seeing is open, slow, endless in the sense that there is no inherent end to it, it is seeing for the sake of seeing. Meaning-chasing seeing is a means to an end, which is to say it has an end. It is secondary, quick.
But what does that have to do with Almog´s workshop?
Let´s start at the beginning: My first exposure to Almog Loven was on the Thinkmovement blog, with a report on a workshop that was already called „weightlessness“.
As I do not know Almog in a more than superficial way and do not have more resources on his story, I recommend the documentaries here and here for an eye-pleasing introduction to his „work“ (if it can be called that way).
What follows shall give an account of a meeting with Almog, as well as describe my experience of the workshop taught by him.
I first met Almog in 2021, for a brief session of Ilav Lev method treatment which he offered at that time. His presence during that session seemed soft, aerial, yet strangely down to earth: he said things like “shut up and lie down while I talk to your body” in a shamanistic way, then chatted about how he helped his cousins with their kids.
Two years later I heard that he would host a workshop in Berlin, and was able to attend.
One reason for me to write about this experience is to clarify what the workshop meant for me, to answer the question: what happened on that weekend? This is actually a question: Every night upon returning home my partner asked me what we did and what this “weightlessness” was about? And even right during the experience I struggled and mostly failed in naming what this was.
Almog’s workshop took place in a dance studio over three days. Participants were few and quite diverse: yogis, dancers, movement generalists, some in their twenties, some beyond forty.
When I arrived Almog, was letting the cold air in and adjusting things on his laptop. He briefly greeted arrivals with a sheepish smile and continued. When everyone was ready, Almog hugged participants, summoned a circle and let us know that much of what he would say over the weekend would not make any sense. We should not look for any message, for there was none. Also there was nothing to do right or well, we were already doing it perfectly. He loved us.
And then it started.
Over the course of the weekend we all would walk through the room, pull each other’s arms, push, lead and be led, hum, or play any of the games that Almog created on the spot, accompanied by music he selected on his youtube account just as spontaneously as the whole workshop unfolded. Indeed, at times Almog hinted at the fact that he selected music based on the title alone without actually knowing the songs.
In between, Almog cheered us on saying we were “nailing it” – regardless of how we were doing it, – then give quite specific instructions how to do it, – before finally reminding us that we should by all means do whatever we wanted. He loved us.
As a side note Almog shared that two or three months before he had given away all of his belongings, leaving his elderly parents whom he had cared for to camp alone in the desert. He hadn’t spoken to a human being in a while before coming to Berlin, he said. Although resemblances to any prophets might have been accidental, it for sure augmented his aura of a guide into uncharted territory.
For much of the workshop I had my eyes closed. When my eyes did open, it felt mostly unfocussed, secondary. At no point did I observe in any specific sense. After the first day I asked myself whether I would recognize the person whom I had just played with for the last two hours.
I felt myself moving away from images, from seeing in general, during the workshop. The pinnacle of this being a session of drawing with eyes closed.
But this requires clarification, obviously…
[Continued in Part 2]