All real living is meeting…A little performance theory

I and Thou, Martin Buber’s best-known work, presents us with two fundamental orientations – relation and irrelation. We can either take our place, as Pamela Vermes (1988) puts it, alongside whatever confronts us and address it as “thou”; or we can hold ourselves apart from it and view it as an object, an “it”‘. So it is we engage in I- Thou and I-It relationships. We can only grow and develop, according to Buber, once we have learned to live in relation to others, to recognize the possibilities of the space between us.

The Space Invader Interventions enabled an embodied investigation of these relationships and spaces. As we struggled to traverse the school environment as traceurs or simply remember each other’s names and cross the circle we plunged into the depths of relation and confrontation. Reaching for the Thou by meeting each other through our play.

For Buber, the meeting was most important.

 All real living is meeting (Buber, 1958)

That doesn’t necessarily mean that he believed that everything in life is meeting, but real in the sense of that which fulfills the humanity that is possible for you, in your unique way, resides in the meeting. What is important is the manner in which we meet others; the quality of each relationship was vital to Buber. In Buber’s own words:

“I think no human being can give more than this. Making life possible for the other, if only for a moment.”

According to Buber the meeting involved in genuine dialogue is rare, and is, in a real sense, a meeting of souls. (‘The primary word I-Thou can be spoken only with the whole being”, Buber 1958). The life of dialogue involves “the turning towards the other” (Buber 1947). It is not found by seeking, but by grace. In a very real sense he believed that we are called to genuine dialogue, rather than actively searching for it.

So how do we practice meeting? How do environments, communities and practices such as the Name Game encourage and grow such a state of grace in which we can turn towards each other in genuine dialogue?

Buber believed that,

“the relation in [genuine] education is one of pure dialogue” (Buber 1947). “In order to help the realization of the best potentialities in the student’s life, the teacher must really meet him as the definite person he is in his potentiality and his actuality; more precisely, he must not know him as a mere sum of qualities, strivings and inhibitions, he must be aware of him as a whole being and affirm him in this wholeness. But he can only do this if he meets him again and again as his partner in a bipolar situation. And in order that this effect upon him may be a unified and significant one he must also live this situation, again and again, in all its moments not merely from his own end but also from that of his partner: he must practice the kind of realization which I call inclusion.”(Buber 1958)

Buber uses the analogy of the chrysalis and the butterfly. He teaches us to meet others and to hold our ground when we meet them. And I think the important, the essential, word there is ‘teaches’.

“It takes a lifetime to learn how to be able to hold your own ground, to go out to the others, to be open to them without losing your ground. And to hold your ground without shutting others out.” (Buber, 1947)

According to Buber “Such educators need to find and guard ‘the narrow ridge’.  The narrow ridge is the meeting place of the We. This is where man can meet man in community. Any only men who are capable of truly saying ‘Thou’ to one another can truly say ‘We’ with one another. If each guards the narrow ridge within himself and keeps it intact, this meeting can take place. Through encountering each other as truly human we can both place ourselves in the world” (Buber quoted in Hodes)

Projects such as the Space Activator Interventions provide a ground to practice meeting, a structure to experience relation, and teaches the importance of cultivating a passion and hunger to reach across the spaces between us. The community created in the Space Activator Projects has been strengthened, challenged and amplified through the work we have shared on the narrow ridge of our meetings.