(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Is it possible that everyday life contains the source not only of recognition but of the deepest wisdom of life?
Several writers and artists have repeatedly pointed this out. But we ignore, forget it, reject it. Falling back to a world that can be measured, divided, mastered. Perhaps because what is closest is also what is most difficult for the thought to seize? Not only do you have to break through a long tradition that has made everyday life and what happens right before us an unworthy object of reflection (science, economics etc.), but also because you have to step back from the real world to become filled with wonder. So we can actually see something new about the world. So that the most confidential things, such as a ball coming against us, appear in a strange and strange way. So, we must step back to devote ourselves to the open view that lets things and the world appear when they meet us, be it a ball, a child, a tone, an atom…
Livsundren
Torben Ulrich, tennis player (Danish champion and 100 Davis Cup matches for DK, highest ranked senior player in the world in 1976), jazz writer for several decades (from 1940s to 60s in particular), Tibetan Buddhist, painter, author, freethinker, Add tutorials in music, philosophy, literature, visual art, physics, ecology, literature, wisdom thinking, mysticism, you name it. What unites it all? Undren. Livsundren. To be there. To be alive. Listening to the universe, right here, in the child's play, in the jazz, in the game, while the ball is coming. He wanted something more than just being a star, a winner.
Life is an infinite stream, but creative transformation is not just about seizing the many possibilities.
Early on, he noticed something else, in the game. A magic, something that is born, something that disappears ... Not just to return the ball, but to be present and understand what is going on in this game, right now. And magic. A tennis-playing philosopher. Many are the stories of Ulrich who interrupted his important struggles because other things were needed, a football match on television, a thought, a desire for music. The clarinet was often in the sports tank. For think about this game, this ball, can say something about creating, about transformation, about being.
Interaction with the world
It starts with the game, with the game and the ball, but it's about finding an interaction with the world. In fact, taking up residence in the conversation the universe conducts with man, in order to come to consciousness of oneself. Maybe another name for God? Thus, Ulrich is in search of a kind of eco-cosmic co-creative ethics. Not to return the ball to the opponent, but to find out what kind of world we share. Many years of training have been required! And thinking, 30 years, 50 years, 100 years, a whole life… He never takes possession of his object – the game, the ball, the game, the creation. But revolves around the conditions of its incomprehensibility in order to be able to relate precisely to this, our, ignorance. Not as soon as one thinks that now he must then finish putting words to the game, he returns and tries to enlighten it again. He waits and returns. And this patient wait is the great gift of the poetic approach. As in this book where the reader on the left side is met by a vertical song line (poem) over 108 pages and on the right side an essay, a philosophical poetics, also 108 pages. The whole book is a sculpture of the time. A publishing genius.
In the middle …
By staying in the middle, he shows us, with his sound-sensitive words, and his example, that we (man) are no longer even the center of what happens, the creative, the wonder, the invisible channel between the small and the big. Ulrich moves the focus from man to the ball and being. And yet. For in a way, it is neither man, ball nor being the focus and center, but the event itself, that something happens. That something comes into being. For inside what is happening, there is at once something that evades, which gives way, which opens up. Noticeable transformations. A Chinese view of life, perhaps. That things change every moment. What is so hard for us in the West to understand. A lot is at stake, in the game. In fact, life itself, that we become together with what happens to us. This listening to the world of the game is also the subject of Jørgen Leth's film about Ulrich Motion Pictures (1969). When the world here gets bigger, it's because, not I think, but the world thinks in me. We are aware of our entire body. Pay attention because we step back from what we know, our empowerment, possession ... and listen again. We come to what Ulrich calls "body attention ... which is helpful, gentle, peaceful, playful". We discover that we share something the world wants with us.
To arrive at life
Life is an endless stream, but the creative transformation is not just about seizing the many opportunities (the great fad today), but the most difficult thing, to arrive at the game, to the event, to be receptive to what is happening to us. Therefore, this reluctant, discreet, eternal circle around an abyss, about darkness, in life, in the event, what we do not understand. Therefore, a book about the game and the transformation must also deal with the difficulty of precisely communicating this, therefore the repetition, therefore a book about the relationship between language and life. Because what's happening is also disappearing ...
A cosmopolitanism
Ulrich belongs to a generation with Asger Jorn and others who after World War II turned their lives into an experiment where you explore without knowing what to look for. French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (one of Ulrich's great inspirations in the book) said that it is difficult for man to confirm life. It requires courage, curiosity and receptive attention. It is far easier to regard life as something dangerous, fearful, which one must protect oneself from, as the competitive and control character and therefore something to be mastered.
Ulrich has gone the other way away from this winner-loser mentality that destroys life on earth, instead giving us a language for the living and the wonderful. A new thinking across all directions. A cosmopolitanism. He grabs us without grabbing the ball!
