Go swimming ...

A book I have spent considerable time with over the last few weeks, and which I had also in suitcase during the workshop, is “The Troubadour of Knowledge” from French philosopher Michel Serres. Much reminds me of the things we went through this week: we too went through this passage, through the third place, we too have been “cleansed, besmirched in sense and nonsense …”:

“No one really knows how to swim until he has crossed a large and impetuous river or a rough strait, an arm of the sea, alone. In a pool there is only the ground – a territory for a crowd of pedestrians. Depart, take the plunge. After having left the shore behind, for awhile you stay much closer to it, than to the one on the other side, at least just enough so that the body starts reckoning and says to itself, silently, that it can always go back. Up to a certain treshhold, you hold on to this feeling of security: in other words, you have not really left. On this side of the adventure, your foot, once it has crossed a second treshold, waits expectantly for the approach.: you find yourself close enough to the steep bank to say you have arrived. Right bank or left bank, what does it matter, in both cases it is land or ground. You do not swim, you wait to walk, like someone who jumps, takes off and then lands, but does not remain in flight.
The swimmer, to the contrary, knows that a second river runs in the other one that everyone sees, a river between the two tresholds, after or before which all security has vanished: there he abandons all reference points.”

“No, the game of pedagogy is in no respect a game for two, voyager and destination, but for three. The third place intervenes, there, as the treshold of passage. And, most often, neither the student nor the initiator know where this door is located nor what to do with it. One day, at some point, everyone passes through the middle of this white river, through the strange state of a phase change, which could be called sensitivity, a word that signifies possibility or capacity in every sense. Sensitive, for example, the scale when it seesaws up and down, vibrating, in the beautiful middle, in both directions; sensitive also the child who will walk when he throws himself into an unbalanced balance; observe him again when he immerses himself in speech, reading or writing, cleansed, besmirched in sense and nonsense. That state vibrates like an instability, a metastability, like a nonexcluded third between equilibrium and disequilibrium, between being and nothingness.”

“No learning can avoid the voyage. Under the supervision of a guide, education pushes one to the outside. Depart: go forth. Leave the womb of your mother, the crib, the shadow cast by your father’s house and the landscapes of your childhood. In the wind, in the rain: the outside has no shelters. Your initial ideas only repeat old phrases. Young: old parrot. The voyage of children, that is the naked meaning of the Greek word ‘pedagogy’. Learning launches wandering.”

“For there is no learning without exposure, often dangerous, to the other. I will never again know what I am, where I am, from where I’m from, where I’m going, through where to pass. I am exposed to others, to foreign things.”

(All quotes from the English translation of Le Tiers-Instruit, by Sheila Faria Glaser and William Paulson, University of Michigan Press, 1997).