o balance: Single Bihllcralism/Balancings: 'Yoke-Balancing' and 'Burden-Lifting';
Double Bilatcr'alisml Balancing: 'Berceuse-Cradling'
IBilol(cralismlIRh~'thmk SrhcmasllMncmotcchnicll1 Devices]
Jousse idem~fies three modes o/balance in pair words. mnemofechnlcal devices and or rhythmic schemas as manf(esfotions of/he Low of /Ji/aleralism in human expression:
• from side 10 side (from right 10 left) : the 'Yoke' or (he 'Balancing'
• Iromfront (0 back: fhe 'Burden' or the 'Lift;"g'
• the combinGtion oJthe 'Yoke-Balancing' and fhe 'Burden-Lifting': the "/Jercew,'e' or the 'Cradling'.
JO/lsse ident~fies the visceral embeddedness o/Ihese balancings from their man~reslalion in human expression. as/orms a/behaviour and demeanour and in the mode o/verba! and linguistic expression in nllmerow' examples in the recitations of Oral-style milieus. He relales Ihis balanced structural element in the expression 10 the balanced structure of the human body and to the phenomenon of memory. learning and knowledge.
Examples of Usage
• "The Anthropological foundation of Human Rhythmics is accessible only from the Double Bilateralism of the living Anthropos.
I will now address this Double Mimismological Bilateralism:
I in its gestual balancing from right to left, it is the Yoke 2 in its gestual balancing from front to back, it is the Burden
3 in the synthesis of Yoke and Burden, it is the Berceuse. (Jousse 2000:297) rheYoke ofld the Bu.rden
• "Apprehending is, therefore, essentially a question of childlike suppleness and receptivity that banishes rigidity, stiff-neckedness and resistance. Hence the well-known, yet so little understood, formula which runs like a sweeping reproach through Palestinian civilization over the centuries of its history: "You are a stiff-necked people!" because their receptor muscles did not readily lend themselves to submission under the pedagogical Yoke and under the pedagogical Burden of Ihe Torah" (Jousse 2000:357).
• "Palestinian paysans observed that animals, like themselves, obey the law of labour. They saw how the oxen balance the yoke by walking forward in an idiosyncratically curious manner. How well we feel the rh)1hmed gesture of the ox alternating its legs from right to left, and from front to back, on the taut traces! So it was that the paysans compared the recalcitrant reciter to tJIe maverick heifer. The gesture from right to left, and left to right, is both the regular pace of the heifer and the regular balancing of the reciter who recites his Learning.
Given that the Yoke is tJle 'Labourator', the learning of the Apprehender-child is understood in the following terms: the Palestinian teacher will put the Apprehender-child under dIe balancing of the
'labour', the 'labour' being the yoke of the study of the Torah. To 'labour' at dIe Torah is to make the geste of 'labour', which is identified as the balancing of those beings that labour, both animals and people. (. .. )
Even after my explanation, it is clear how far we are removed from those great laborious gesticulations which enlighten us about the true human labour of memorisation which follows the human mechanism of ex-pression. \Vhat a multitude of explanations would be required for the word
~Yoke'!
1llC Nab. who wanted to demonstrate to Israel that the oppression of a foreign potentate was terrible, took an Iron yoke and a yoke of wood and he 'let himself be seen' to be cnlshed under this heavy and hard yoke. Hence the antithetical significance of Icshoua's proclamation: "My Yoke is Light". It does not hurt the neck for it is easy to carry. 1l,e yoke to which leshoua refers is the yoke which is the equivalent of the recitation which one recites by balancing it from right to left. \Vhilst one is thus balancing the recitation, onc is performing thc same gesture as the ox when it carries the yoke. TIle Palestinian teacher will therefore say:
Burden your child like a heifer as much as she will be able to eafT)' ...
11,ese are terms which have, for us, no recitationalmeaning at all. But it is analogous to one of our little children singing, and liS saying that the child is dancing 'around'/ 'a round'. To us, 'a round' is a recitation that is sung whilst tuming 'around'. Would we translate this by circulus? It is not 'a circle', it is 'a round', Equally, for the PalestiJlians, the Yoke is a recitation with a right 10 left balancing. 1lle Burden is that which one lifts up, the recitation which is recited by balancing it from front to back, All tJlis is untranslatable without gestures, which is precisely why we have such unbelievable mistranslations on this subject. (",),
Balanced under tJle Yoke, the Recitatives could be stnlctured from strikingly similar parallel isms:
b c
Hc who Icams as a ch.ild He \\ho learns in old age to what will he compare? to what will he compare?
To ink ,,'filing To lIlk ,,'filing
on new parchmem on scnuched IXlrchmenl
One sees how simple this is, It cannot escape from the Memory because it is constnlcted in the multiple mechanisms oftJle formulaic Oral-style Tradition. It is concrete and there is no 'algebrose', J am not saying dlat there is no abstraction, because, J repeat yet again, all human ex-pression is abstract. In the following admirable fragment-sample of a lesson, we have leshoua, a slight Galilean paysan, presenting himself alone to the world as the encapsulation of pays an life. Very simply, he lIses tJ,e great, yet familiar, rhythms which we have already analysed, and balances them splendidly, yet simply. with the eternal cradling mechanisms of our mothers:
Come 10 me, you. 31\.
Because you arc o\'crworkcd and arc you overburdened And I. I will give you rest, to you
meaning: I will give you a short teaching, which is easy to remember and memorize, He says it, in:
b c
Rcceive upon you And be. you
this. my Yoke apprehenders of me ...
You may translate this as 'sweet and humble of heart', While there are no doubt seventy-seven meanings in tJlis Hebraic formula, from among which you can choose, there is nevertheless one fundamental formula:
d For I am simple. I
f
e
and brief for the memory and you will find rest for your throats
g
For the Yoke that is mine and the Burden that is mine
illS casy it is light
This, die principal characteristic of leshoua's teaching is simultaneously synthesizing and concluding, which is why he adds logically:
I did nOl come to undo the Yoke
of the
Torah
and of the NflbisWe, on the other hand, have 'undone' this pedagogical and memorizing Yoke very thoroughly, because we have 'redone' it so often that we do not know the first word of it in our bookish milieu. We are all apraxic, in terms of ollr intelligence. We talk of the Yoke without knowing what we are talking about.
42
TIlis Law of Lhe Yoke is the Law of Pedagogy re-constructed by this great Renovator and Regulator of Gestes, Rabbi It~sholla Lhe Galilean.
Let me make the point once again: if we are satisfied with our studies of the Palestinian milieu being conducted through the medium of our own language, and if we continue to think as we do presently about Pedagogy (or rather the lack of Pedagogy), then we will never understand anything abollt the prodigious RhytJlIllo-pedagogical movement of this young Rabbi, who threw the world into a turmoil with his bilateralized proverbs and twelve paysans -mere peasants!
We experienced the very first sensation of the soothing and calming effect of equilibrati.ng balancing in our motllers' rocking embrace. All mothers instinctively soothe their young with this comforting geste. History records the rocking embrace, the great balancing, of a Mother who knew, quasi-prophetically, that her son would be the greatest of all human Liberators. We fmd this prophetic- temporarily triumphant -matemal balancing in Palestinian literature. In it is balanced uniquely the ex- pression of exaltation:
b Nld Mar)· rose
in those days
d
c
And she wenl by the mountain in great haste
towards a lown of Judah
c
r
And she entered the house of Zachariah and greeted Elisabeth.
TIlcre, an invisible encounter of two beings 'accorded' from the matemal womb occurred: he who visited, and he who was being visited and who would one day rise in order to Rhythmo-catechize, in antithetic balancings:
I am not the way but I am he who prepares the way
And the matemal memory-heart improvised the triumphant song of a mother:
My tluoat exalts the Lord and his breath rh)1hllls In God my Saviour ...
TIlis is the same balanced exultation which mothers will repeat when they feel how the balancing which they have initiated bursts forth victoriously into life. The whole Apocalypse is subsumed in this formula which Mariam rhythmo-melodized in her joy at being a mother:
b c
For he saw the smallness And sce how from now on of his servant all generations will callmc blessed ...
In the Dead Sea scrolls, we deal with the work of scribes, whereas here, we are dealing simply with a mother who rhapsodises in her native Galilean proverbs. But mothers do not stop at this victory song.
When this same woman, who rhythmo-cradled this prenatal Magnificat, found herself, thirty-three years later, at the foot of the Roman cross on which her son, the liberator, was dying in agony, did she do what all Palestinian moUlers did? Did she intone a funeral chant for this son, the vocero, the same vocero which we find intoned by Corsican mothers to this day? I remember seeing at Saint-Anne, a poor woman who had lost her child. With her apron rolled up in her anns, the mother rocked continuously, intenninably. from right to left in front of the corpse of her child! I have seen men dying in their thousands. On rare occasions, I have witnessed the almost inhuman tiger-like leap of a mother throwing herself on the still-wann corpse of her child of twenty. twenty-five years old. who had just convulsed for the last time!
Pure art can never attain the pitch of agonised spontaneity ex-pressed in the lamenting of mothers for their dead sons. I remember repeatedly, the poor, old, paysanne woman, who arrived too late, and saw, on the small hospital bed, the dead soldier who was her son. And the old paysanne took her son wholly in her amlS and cradled him as of old, repeating:
b c
AJas, alas, Alas, alas,
my poor little child! my poor little childl
.3
How well I understand that the Mother of Griefs, the Pieta, is always sculpted in this attitude! But be careful, lest your understandmg be limIted to the rigidity of the sculptures, for then you will no longer understand the living geste, ulllirillgly balanced, balanced, balanced .
As an anthropologist, I have 110 bookish dogmas to defend. I have only to observe gestual facts. I apply precise laws to the emire world, and I watch them play. I brood over swaying mothers in order 10
analyse their gcstes. ll1CY rock to and fro, from side to side, according to the great laws of humanity.
I see people living. I see people dying, but always I see balancing from right to left, and lifting up and bending down from front to back. I will continue to study all these balancings and liftings, which I find in all human ex-pression, and in the traditional mechanisms of the Galilean paysan memory.
A psychologist of Liturgy once told me: "The greatest strength of your work lies in the fact that you show the meaning of the traditional gestes which we all make too mechanically."" (Jousse 2000'297-30 I)
See also Jousse 2000, 220-221. 238. 2n. 297. 301. 309-311. 297-307. 286. 215. 214. and also JOllSSe 2000, Pari 1 Chapfer Ill.
o Beatitudes - Sermon on the Mount - Rhythmo-catechism of the Mount - Rhythmo- c:ltechism of the Lesson on the Mount (Matthew 5, 3-20)
lOur FathcrllOI'ill St~'lcl
./ollsse idenr~fies the 'Sermon on lite MountJ - like the "Our Father· -as an excellent example of
• the reliability of age-old traditionally fransmllted formula being IIsed in new ways to convey nuvel messages- 'new wine in old bOflles ':
• Oral-style leachmg and learning - rhyrhmo-catechlsm as science in an oral ethmc Imltell:
• GeslI/Ol-visl/aloral-allral pel/ormed lext,,· as preferred mode for apprehending in an Oral-slyle rmhell.
Examples of Usage
• 'This so-called 'Sermon' 011 the Mount was not a sennon but a targumically formulaic Rhythmo- catechism" (Jousse 2000:462).
• "h~shoua alludes to this pedagogical procedure when he repeats seven times to the crowd, in his Rhythmo-catcchism on the mount, the initial formula of the seven recitations: "You have heard that of old it was spoken to the elders." He has a sound reason for not saying: "You have read ... "." (Jousse 2000:358)
• "\¥hen I started observing the anthropological and ethnic mechanisms of human memory, I found that the solutions posited for problems were based mainly on the strength of affirmations and !legations of bookish amnesics and outdated metaphysicians. Only a pen-pushing theologist, for example, would decree that 'the Apostles, illiterate people', could not possibly have retained the 'Sermon on the Mount' by heart. So, I observed, and understood quickly that what had to be created was an Anthropology of Geste and Rhythm and not a Psychology of Geste - and that this Anthropology of Geste and Rhythm should not be founded only on the observation of a few individuals from our ossified and algebrosed Written-style ethnic milieux." (Jousse 2000: 130)
• "An exegete, filled with artistic innuendo and sarcastic condescension, once challenged me: "Jesus was not making music when he gave his sermon on the mount." Of course not. neither music nor sermon. There was simply a young paysan-Rabbi who was recounting. and re-counting, his pearls-of-Iearning.
according to the crystallising anthropological and ethnic rhythms of his country, Galilee. And his Apprehenders faithfully received this teaching in order to wrap it, as a living rosary of pearls-of- learning, around their reciting throats in order to transmit it, alive and vivifying. That is why I follow the law of the interactionally miming anthropos - the mimer of what is interactionally real - well aware that Algebrosis is necrosis, and that death has no rhythm. I resuscitate that which conceives the
.4
unique essence of the grandeur and nobility of the human throat - the emission of sounds, as all animals do, and expression of meaning, as no animal does." (Jousse 2000:207)
• "The geste of eating and the geste of drinking are constantly highlighted among human actions in the
Palestinian ethnic milieu. For example, hardly had leshoua begun to rhythmo-melodize the first lesson of his prestigious pedagogy, the Rhythlllo~catechisrn on the mountain, for his disciples, when we find eating and drinking inserted in one of the Beatitudes:
Happy are those who hunger and thirst for Rightcousness for it is they who will tx: satisfied
If we too are to be faithful to this Palestinian primacy of mandueation, then we need to begin by distinguishing and analysing its three constitutive phases: to Eat is to Take Food in Hand, to Buccalise, and to Taste." (Jousse 2000:356)
• "Indeed, let us not think dlat we must consider the Rllythmo-catechism of The Last Supper - nor for that matter, the Rhythmo-cntechism of the Lesson on the Mount - as a threading together of pristine and original lessons that had never previously been perfonned. In truth, what we have in these lessons is a necklace of h~shoua 's pearl-maxims - his pearls-of-wisdom, as it were. Almost all of these pearl- maxims were, without doubt, worn around the singularly supple napes of the necks of the memories of all these Palestinian reciters (notwithstanding the ironic reproach of the prophets). 111ese pearl-maxims could be infinitely rc-arranged in a series of new patterns, but each element of wisdom, each pearl- maxim, remained inevitably the same." (Jousse 2000:378)
See also JOlIsse 2000:-162. -1-85. -1-87. inter alia.
CJ Beaumont-sur-Snrthe - Snrthe - Sarthois - Sarthian
IEthnic milicullcthnic laborator)·1
./ollsse was born and raised in Ihe Oraf-slyle miliell of IJeaumolll-sur-Sarthe jllst before the tllrn of the
2(/" cenlllry. His childhood experience eql/lpped him 10 condllct insigh!ful observations of human
behaviour that informed his discoveries of the operation of human expression. memory. learning and understanding in a way that no materially-privileged literate urban upbringing would have done. He maintained contact with his childhood ·ethnic laborOlory· all his I!fe. and returned there when he cOllld no longer work because o/poor health.
Examples of Usage
• "It is true to say dlat I am able to contribute something new in this arena of linguistic training because oftlle audlentic, spontaneously and unintentionally 'experimental' behaviour of my mother: no sooner was I born, than cantilenas were being sung over my cradle. My mother had an extraordinary memory.
As she was an orphan, she was raised by her totally non-literate grandmother, who taught her her own personal oral repertoire of the ancient cantilenas of the Sarthe region." (Jousse 2000: 15)
• "When I was about five or six years old and had become accustomed to the rocking melodies of my mother, she took me to my first evening gathering. 1l1ese gadlerings of peasants, all more or less non- literate people, took place on a fann near Beaumont-sur-Sarthe. These evening gatherings generally took place during winter, when the paysans came together to eat chestnuts 'with sweet cider', as the song goes. As the evening progressed, and as the paysans got more and more into dle swing of things, they would get up and strike up a song. I could feel that the rhythms imbricated in me by my mother's songs, responded to the deep 'rhythmisation' of all these paysans. This was not so much song as a kind of chanting singsong. They all had large repertoires. The people, and more specifically, the women, who knew the most songs were the old grandmothers. They were extremely interesting to observe, because they were passionately particular about accuracy. Thus when someone began to intone one of these chants and dared to introduce a variation, one or other of the old ladies, (and I can once more picture good old mother Guespin in her corner), would reprimand the reciter and say: .. It's not that word, but this!"" (Jousse 2000: 16)