Online Dialogues
Mist, howling wind, cold
The water screams for help, for
A rest from the wind
I was in an online workshop today, titled “Thirty-six online dialogues at the Foot of Mount Fuji”. Hokusai’s gripping Great Wave has fascinated me for decades, ever since I first saw it, and this was a session I didn’t want to miss.
Our host showed us a selection of 36 Hokusai prints, inviting us, strangers until this workshop, to tell a story about ourselves as if we were part of the picture. Then, in small groups, he invited us to create one co-operative story around the same image.
My strongly philosophical teammate in this, a Peruvian having grown up at the foot of Mount Fuji’s twin, took me on an unexpected path. We randomly selected one of the ukiyo-e (pictures of a floating world) from the website. Because it was an online session, I clicked randomly until he said “Stop”, and only then did I share my screen for him to see the image we landed upon. As instructed, we started taking turns in building the story. Each putting in a sentence, two or maximum three at a time. Building on each other’s words, ideas, feelings.
Tama River in Musashi Province (Bushū Tamagawa), from the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (Fugaku sanjūrokkei). Details here.
Now, maybe you have some experience in improv theatre. Or followed some team coaching workshop. Well, I don’t know if you ever played this game, called “Yes, and”. That’s all you are allowed to start your sentences with. You are never allowed to say “yes, but” or do anything that resembles a turning-down of the idea your counterpart offers up. In case you never tried this in real life, let me tell you: This is hard. Way harder than it looks. It’s easy to understand, but hard to do, and even harder to be aware of how you are soon subtly starting to revert to covert “yes, but, you know, nah, let’s not, here’s the way I see it, and…”. So it was for me. More often than I wanted to admit, I felt that this guy was going somewhere else with the story than where I wanted to take it. I felt all these urges come up inside of me to gently steer the storyline towards my idea.
Because I wanted the man in our story to change his life, to break with tradition, to boldly go where no ancestor had gone before, and glory and discovery and all that jazz would follow… But that wasn’t happening. The flow was not going my way. I had to let go. I had to constantly follow the flow of the conversation between him and I and the character we were creating, and be attentive to what he was sending me, while listening to what I was feeling. I could not mute him and cling to my own idea. I would have broken the story. Worse – I would have broken the connection I had made with my new friend.
I let go of my preconceived ideas. I clung to the connection, instead. And discovered a much richer, deeper, and more meaningful story through it.
