CAPACITY BUILDING
Indeed, it is with and in the body, through the body, that we might escape its limitations. Or instead, our limitations, for a body is boundless, it is we who set its limits, determine its perimeter edge. Exercise with the body. Experiment with other bodies. Remember too, that mind is of the body, muscle and memory equally receptive to the push and pull of working out. Train(ing) of thought; thinking pressured as limbs tested against the leverage of external force or weight. Meletē: an Ancient Greek term meaning meditation. In myth, sibling to the muse of melodic voice and memory, related then to rhythm and remembering. Meletē: to ponder, the mental weighing up of an idea or thought, the contemplation of a repeated phrase. Ponder — from pendēre, to be suspended, to hang in the balance. Training is never the end, never ends, rather the building of capacity. Capacity is both actual and potential, an ability both to yield and to withstand, a measure of both receptivity and resistance.
From Emma Cocker, The Yes of the No, (Sheffield: Site Gallery, 2016), p. 85. Extract of a text that was previously published in Manual, an artists’ bookwork produced in collaboration with performance artist and writer Victoria Gray, (2014).