[Part One]
Allow me to elaborate on a very general notion of „image“ – which is different from seeing, of course – and how it contrasts to the experience of the workshop.
That there can be a disconnect between „real“ feeling and projected image can be discerned in social interactions, sometimes subtle, sometimes less so. Typical examples include discussions with children („I am calmly telling you to clean up!“), loved ones („It´s okay, I am not mad at all.“), or supervisors at work („Yes, sir, I enjoy this type of challenge.“). The body can, in these instances, tell a different story than the words do. Fittingly, this divide is often portraited as an essential rift between the verbal and the corporeal.
But there is something more: Focusing on how you might be seen or understood, on your „image“ in this broader sense, can lead to a relationship to yourself which is mainly verbal, where every cue is meant to be seen and named.
What Almog seemed to be conveying during his workshop (using encouraging language and leading by example) is that we are all so used to projecting or saying something – often something different from what we feel – that we can forget to feel in the first place. Indeed that returning to yourself can feel like a new and exciting experience.
Returning or venturing into this experience of yourself beyond images and words, to experience for the sake of experiencing, can feel like losing control. During some exercises I, at least, felt myself thrown back into a confusing world of adolescence. I felt insecure – but at the same time the removal of protection also gave space.
One theme Almog kept returning to in this context was (negative) self-talk derived from the constant comparison with the image of other people: many of us judge ourselves against the standard of an imagined alter ego who has it all: more friends, more joy, more money or whatever it is, blocking out any feelings of satisfaction you might already experience right now. If you get rid of the pre-conceived notion of a standard which needs to be attained, you can just be happy right now, Almog seemed to be saying.
Living in the moment like this one might ask: what about potential futures? What about risks, dreams, goals?
As it were the workshop got to this point as well: we played a game where a circle of people is pushing someone in their midst from one player to the next like a ball. The ball, though, has their eyes closed and lets go completely. The players are encouraged to get creative, to ask themselves how they want to receive and push the ball.
Being in Germany questions about liability and risk inevitably came up: what if the ball flies off towards a wall and no one is there to catch it?, one participant asked, wouldn´t the ball crash into the wall and get hurt?
Almog used this question to emphasize again the importance of focusing on our own experiences, of not projecting. “Listen to yourself! If you really want to know what happens when she crashes into the wall, then you need to find out.”, he said and I remember how radical this proposition felt among this circle.
Obviously, no one got hurt.
„Weightlessness“, then, means getting rid of images, of meaning in general, means experiencing for the sake of experience. During the workshop, this correlated with closing the eyes as the main gateway of meaning.
It would certainly be easier to frame the ideas which formed in my mind during the workshop as something simple and general as “listen to your feelings, let them be your guide, accept them all”, but the context asked for a more complicated verbalisation.
The workshop took place in December 2023, just short after Israel’s ground invasion of Gaza began. Experiencing weightlessness and joy, accompanied by Almog who had just left Israel, who told stories about how animals were enchanted when missiles lit up the night sky in the desert, made questions about the events in Israel and Gaza inevitable.
Almog responded without hesitation, clearly shook by what had happened, possibly as much as by what he expected was to come (“it can only end in a catastrophe”), but not deterred from his vision which was personal, felt in his and our bodies at that moment. The questions did not derail the workshop in any way. They clearly fit the moment, and passed like thoughts that come and go.
There was another moment when the war came to the surface: one of the participants, prompted about her experience, shared that she felt disgusted by Almog’s constant reminders of personal perfection and that we should only care for our own experience especially when working with a partner. “At first I thought, bloody Israeli, of course you only want us to see ourselves!”, she said. Upon reflecting, upon feeling and looking inside, though, she had realized that she, too, had betrayed herself in certain situations, accommodating, giving more than what she would have been willing had she listened to herself.
Why does this happen?
I think this is because „meaning“, and related to it social interactions, have their own logic and mechanisms: start a sentence and some end will inevitably come to mind, the beginning calling for an ending. It takes effort to break these mechanistic reactions.
Maybe one can put it like this: seeing also means keeping your distance. From a distance things can be distinguished, separated from each other and from yourself. Getting too close everything blurs. But even more: get extremely close and there are no more “things”,- they’re not even separate, not from each other, not from you. Something is still being seen, but it cannot be named, cannot be fixed.
Possibly, Almog´s disappointment with Meir Schneider can be clarified then: Schneider´s arrogance might not have been only an expression of personal satisfaction with his own success, but rather appeared as one aspect of a closed-off mindset. Instead of breaking through to the sensory experience of sight, Schneider had closed off the potential of vision as pattern recognition for practical use.
While it is, of course, practical to be able to drive a car, it is questionable whether this is the pinnacle of seeing. Confronted with Schneider´s defnite ideas, Almog might have learned to appreciate his own openness of vision.
Put yet another way, Almog’s “weightlessness” can be imagined as an experience of extreme proximity, as entering the vision of someone who does not see in the default sense, of experience for the sake of experience.