The Los Angeles teacher Ida brought into her own classroom
Ethel Longstreet was not a Structural Integration practitioner. She was a teacher of general semantics — the discipline Alfred Korzybski founded in the 1930s to examine how language structures perception — and she had spent decades quietly building a community of students in Los Angeles. Her presence in the Open Universe class series of 1974 came at Ida's specific invitation. The introduction Longstreet received that evening was given by a colleague who had watched her work for years, and it places her in the lineage that mattered most: not Korzybski himself, who by 1974 had been dead for a quarter century, but the thinkers who had carried his ideas forward — Samuel Bois above all, the French-Canadian Jesuit-turned-semanticist whose epistemology Ida would name as a direct source of her own approach to teaching the body.
"hundreds and hundreds of people in Los Angeles in a very quiet way with this discipline. The most interesting thing about her to me is that she didn't stop with the movement. That is, as Korzybski began to recede after his death as a force and a continuing innovator, she followed then the people who took his notions further than he did. And all the thinkers that moved in where he was and made their contribution around the edge, she was aware of she was pushing out all the time the edges of what general semantics meant and what it could mean. I'm not even sure you use the term general semantics anymore, do you Ethel? What are you talking about now? Epistemics, epistemology. Epistemics, which has become a kind of marvelous word showing them the most fulfilled notion in our time of where this original thing that Corsuch began with has gone. And so, you have here, I think, a woman who has demonstrated a multi level life in this community. She's a researcher. She's a person who helps others. She's a lecturer. She deals with groups in very direct and interactive ways. She's a political person. She's involved in family and music and everything. And, to me, there are just a very few people like this Ethel. And, I can only tell you that the only tribute I can offer you personally is, you're one of the two or three women left in the world who can say to me, stand up, and I stand up, or sit down, and I sit down."
The colleague introducing Longstreet describes the arc of her work after Korzybski's death:
Longstreet's response to the introduction is unguarded — she admits she had come with a smart-aleck answer prepared and was disarmed by what was said about her. What follows is not a lecture in the formal sense. She tells the audience she is going to throw paint on a large canvas, to offer a feel for the subject rather than a system. The subject she names is language itself, and the framing question — which she borrows from the physicist Arthur Eddington — is the question that hangs over her entire evening: what do we mean when we try to describe something unknown doing what we don't know what? It is an unusual opening for a Structural Integration class, but it is precisely the territory Ida wanted her students to enter.
"And, I can only tell you that the only tribute I can offer you personally is, you're one of the two or three women left in the world who can say to me, stand up, and I stand up, or sit down, and I sit down. No matter what you say to me, I just do it. I thought I was gonna be a smart ass about that, but I'm deeply touched, I tell you. It's a real nice kind of thing you said there. Now I know why I came tonight and why I brought my brains with me. I'm not nonplussed, but I'm wondering how many people here know anything about semantics or general semantics. Thank you. I'm not going to give a lecture in the sense of a lecture, but I'm going to sort of approach an enormous canvas and throw some paint around in a way that I feel may offer you something to make some sense out of. And then we see how it goes. I hope that after an hour or so, you will have something to talk about that may make us feel together, that we're into the particular subject of language. And I notice here that there are 10 subjects. I see these 10 subjects as sort of an enormous musical score, each one of these a particular instrument, together forming some kind of musical project, which is attempting to make some kind of sense of what Eddington called something unknown is doing what we don't know what. I haven't changed that to make it more grammatical, because I like very much what he said. He's no fellow to sneeze at. And he put it in those terms, something unknown is doing what we don't know what. It was his way of expressing his feeling about process, ongoing, eventing, or what eventually some people call universe and becoming."
Longstreet describes how she intends to approach the evening:
Korzybski's three notions, named directly
The center of Longstreet's evening is the recitation of Alfred Korzybski's three foundational notions — the map is not the territory, the word is not the thing, and the map is itself a map of the mapper. Before she gets there she walks the audience through a parade of twentieth-century quotations: Einstein on language as a hat-check for the hat, Fuller declaring himself a verb, Bohr insisting that physics concerns what we say about nature rather than what nature is. The cumulative weight of the quotations is meant to land the reader at Korzybski not as a curiosity but as one voice in a chorus of physicists, philosophers, and poets who all came to the same conclusion in the first half of the twentieth century: that our descriptions are not the things they describe. It is in this passage that Longstreet also names Ida's debt to Samuel Bois, the man who carried Korzybski's work forward and whom Ida had studied with personally.
"He said, the maps we make, the map is not the territory, or the word is not the thing. The map does not represent all the territory. And three, the map is not a map of a territory, but a map of the mapper himself, an interaction with the territory. The word is not the thing. The map does not represent all the territory."
Longstreet recites Korzybski's three foundational notions:
Longstreet immediately returns to the third notion and unfolds it. The map is not a map of the territory but a map of the mapper interacting with the territory — meaning that whatever we describe is always inflected by who is doing the describing, where they stand, what their nervous system is doing in the moment of description. She acknowledges the difficulty of the doctrine openly — it took her eight years, she says, to understand what it was about. And then she returns to the linguistic trap that follows from these notions: the verb to be. When we say something is a certain way, we have already made an error. The grammar of English forces us to claim identity between our descriptions and the world, when in fact no such identity exists.
"so The map is not the territory. Whatever I say it is, it is not. The word is not the thing. And again, I'm using the verb to be, is, and that in itself becomes a trap. A trap in the grammar or the geography of language. The map does not represent all the territory. And the third notion, the map is not a map of the territory, but a map of the mapper himself in interaction with the territory."
Longstreet circles back to the doctrine and names the trap inside English grammar itself:
The point of naming the trap is not to abolish the verb to be. English-speakers cannot stop using it. The point is to know that one is using it, to hold the description loosely, to remember that one is describing rather than reporting. This is the discipline Korzybski tried to install through his exercises and his somewhat baroque notational systems, and it is the discipline Longstreet had spent her professional life teaching to her Los Angeles students. The connection to Ida's work in the body should be felt rather than argued: Ida's lifelong objection to the language of cause-and-effect medicine — her insistence that you cannot say what one technique did because the body is a relational whole — is a translation of Korzybski's doctrine into the territory of fascia and bone.
A chorus of physicists and poets
Longstreet's method that evening was to embed Korzybski in a larger conversation. Before naming the three notions she had already quoted Einstein, Buckminster Fuller, Niels Bohr, Wittgenstein, Plutarch's Bion, and Korzybski himself. After the three notions she continues — Bois, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Suzanne Langer, and finally Benjamin Lee Whorf. The list is not a name-drop; it is the entire point. Korzybski's doctrine is not eccentric or marginal. It is a recognition that emerged across early twentieth-century physics, philosophy, linguistics, and aesthetics at roughly the same time, because all those fields had run into the same wall. The wall is the realization that the observer is part of the observed.
"to read you a few quotations from some men and a woman of the last seventy five years. I'll go to Albert Einstein first. And I'm going to read these are all very good names, and I'm hoping that their prestige and status will impress you so that you'll pay attention to what I say. I read a quotation tonight. I don't know whether it has any relevance at all, but I like it, so I'm gonna read it to you. It was the saying of Bion, B I O N, that though the boys throw stones at frogs in sport, yet the frog do not die in sport, but in earnest. Plutarch said that. It's a long time ago. It offers itself for consideration. Now language. Albert Einstein had this to say, we can talk about language as we might talk about a hat check for the hat. But Mr. Fuller had this to say, I seem to be a verb. Niels Bohr said this, there is no quantum world, only an abstract physical description. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out what nature is. Physics concerns what we say about nature. Wittgenstein says, what can be shown cannot be said. And Khrzyszewski, Alfred Khrzyszewski, whatever you say it is, it is not. He also said this. These are the three main notions of his work of general semantics. An introduction to non Aristotelian systems. After a while, this will become clearer. I know that Doctor. Rolfe, in her study with Doctor. Sam Bois, who has developed the work Epistemics following Alfred Korczewski, became a friend of Ida Rolfs. And she attributes a good deal of her approaches to the work of Rolfing to this work. Anyway, back to Krzybski."
Longstreet walks the audience through the twentieth-century chorus that converged on the same insight:
Of the figures Longstreet quotes, two have a direct biographical connection to Ida. Erwin Schrödinger — whom Longstreet cites for the line that science is a fashion of the time — was the physicist whose Zurich lectures Ida sat in on during her 1920s research trips to Europe. That encounter is one of the foundational moments in Ida's own account of how Structural Integration began. She had gone to Europe as a Rockefeller Institute chemist and came back having begun to suspect that human behavior was tied to body physics and body chemistry in ways the chemistry of the time could not describe. Longstreet's choice to quote Schrödinger in front of Ida's students cannot have been accidental.
"the third notion, the map is not a map of the territory, but a map of the mapper himself in interaction with the territory. Vois says this, the prism, P R I S M, for self analysis is our language and the logic we derive from it. We are immersed in a world of energy manifestations, out of which we abstract only a very small proportion. Werner Heisenberg these are all men of the last thirty, forty, fifty years, sixty years. We have to remember that what we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our methods of questioning. Well, we see human nature, in quotes, as seen through the lens of our common sense language. Schrodinger. Science is a fashion of the time, or as some have said, the errors of our time. And Suzanne Langer, got a woman in here. Artistic expression is an expression of ideas, constructs. The artist's ideas of what feelings are like, how they rise and take shape, grow, culminate like breaking waves, and spend themselves. Alfred Krzybski. Whatever happens, happens at the silent level. Whatever happens is different in existential quality and richer in complexity than whatever we can say about it. And the last I'm going to quote from is Benjamin Lee Wharf, Languages and Thinking, from his book Science and Linguistics."
Longstreet continues through Bois, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, and Langer before arriving at Whorf:
Then Longstreet turns to Benjamin Lee Whorf, the linguist whose work on the Hopi language had pushed the argument in a specific direction: that different languages do not merely describe the same world differently but actually carve up the world into different shapes. The phenomena we name are not waiting in the world to be discovered. They are imposed on a flux of impressions by our linguistic categories — and the imposition is socially enforced. We agree, implicitly, to organize experience this way, and we cannot speak at all except by subscribing to that agreement.
"We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages, the categories and types we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face. On the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscope flux of impressions, which has to be organized by our minds. And this means largely by the linguistic system in our minds."
Longstreet quotes the closing passage of Whorf's Science and Linguistics:
After the Whorf quotation Longstreet completes the sequence — the agreement is implicit, the agreement is obligatory, the agreement is what we mean when we say we speak English at all. The point is not that we should somehow speak outside our language, which is impossible. The point is that the cuts we make in nature are choices, even when they feel like discoveries. This is the deepest level at which general semantics challenges its students. And it is, Longstreet implies but does not quite say, the level at which Ida's work asks the same question of the body. The categories of conventional anatomy — discrete muscles, discrete bones, discrete systems — are also cuts that the anatomist has made, and the body itself is more nearly continuous than those cuts suggest.
Early man, technology, and the worlds we live in
After completing the parade of quotations Longstreet turns to a long developmental sketch. She asks the audience to imagine early man — forty thousand years ago, at the emergence of Homo sapiens — without language, without science, without any of the accumulated information we now take for granted. He had his senses, and he found himself somewhere he did not know. Then came the extensions of the senses: microscopes, hammers, bicycles, stethoscopes — what we call technology. Then came another dimension altogether, the dimension of thinking and feeling, of mathematics and logic and language. Then came a third dimension, of theories and doctrines and philosophies. The sketch is borrowed from Korzybski and Bois, and Longstreet uses it to introduce a distinction that matters to her teaching: semantics and general semantics are not the same thing.
"Because as we are right now time binders of forty thousand years, we have with the special unique quality of being human, develop the kind of being in the world, we cannot forget what we know, how we learned it, and our humanness. We have been able to time bind all knowings of the past into what Doctor. Keppe presented last week, to the noosphere of Chardin, Thayarte Chardin. That particular thin envelope enveloping the earth, which is made up of all human knowings, all human enterprise, all human projects. It is as material as the lithosphere, the hydrosphere, the biosphere, which envelops the earth. It reminds me of what Alan Watts said, not we come into the world, but we come out of the world. We come out of this world. We are the emergence from this world, as much a part of what is going on as any animal, plant, or whatever, even plastic. To that early man, all he had were his senses. Eye, ear, muscles, joints, tendons, etcetera. And he found himself someplace he didn't know what. And as time went on, he had experiences. I can't assume they were anything like ours. Our experience had already been fed by all the information we have. We have to look. We have to. We still do have to learn to see. We have to learn to hear. We are born with the various organs. But seeing is a learned activity, as is hearing, as is speaking, as is living, as is living. If we have learned one way, we are likely to learn another. Into this enormous unknown, and we call it unknown, the next step in man's development or transformation was the extension of his senses or his tools, his technology, microscopes, stethoscopes, hearing aids, radios, tools, hammers, whatever it is, bicycles, automobiles, whatever we use as an extension of our senses, our muscles, our joints, all these were man's constructs for finding himself in the unknown. As he developed, he went into a world or a dimension of his methods of thinking feeling. The world of mathematics, logics, personal world. The the world that general semantics is interested interested in. I'll tell you about general semantics in a little while. General semantics and semantics are different. General semantics incorporates the work of semantics and linguistics."
Longstreet describes the layered worlds humans have built — sensory, technological, conceptual:
Longstreet's distinction between semantics and general semantics is worth pausing on. Ordinary semantics, the academic discipline, studies how words mean. General semantics, as Korzybski conceived it, is a general system of evaluation, of which language is only one part. The discipline asks not just how this word means that thing, but how the whole nervous system of the human evaluating organism processes incoming information — sensory, linguistic, theoretical, emotional — and arrives at the action or judgment it arrives at. It is, in this sense, much closer to what we would now call cognitive science than to what we would call linguistics. And it is this broader project that drew Ida in, because Structural Integration is also a general system of evaluation — one that begins from the body's relationship to gravity rather than from words.
"to use operational language and describe something. I don't want to define it. To define it means to put it up. Here is a two dimensional flat drawing to describe a multidimensional semantic transaction. Let me tell you what these various figures mean. With the first stirrings of life of the fetus, we have the forming of the nervous system. X indicating electrochemical activities. Now with biofeedback, this is becoming extremely important. At one time we felt that we had no awareness of what was going on in our nervous system except as the machines were able to detect them. Now we're beginning to know a great deal more. This was done many, many years ago. One dimension of the model of a semantic transactor are our X activities, our electrochemical activities, our glandular activities, activities, our our hormonal hormonal activities, activities. All having to do with what is going on in our nervous system. The second dimension of this particular model are A activities, which the work of Adelaide are self moving, motoric, muscular, heart beating, circulation, tendons, all these having to do with this dimension, A activities. Then our B activities, our feelings, our purposes, our motivations, our drives, our ethics. Lastly, our C activities. Thinking, talking, writing, concerning language. In our Western culture, we have mostly paid attention to are C activities. Language, talking, the left side of our brain according to Onsi. These four dimensions are always in some environment, a physical environment and a cultural environment. Always with a past. This past, to make more sense, should be seen as going back years and years and years. We could name this past 1970, 'sixty, 'fifty, 'forty. This again, gross diagram to point towards something. And an anticipated future. These, at least seven dimensions, are described this way."
Longstreet describes the four dimensions of a human being as Bois mapped them:
The four-dimension model is meant to be held loosely. Longstreet is careful, every time she introduces it, to remind the audience that the diagram is itself a map — flat, two-dimensional, dead — while the human it describes is alive and multidimensional and in continuous transaction with everything around it. She uses the diagram to point toward something that the diagram cannot capture. This is the discipline of general semantics in practice: name your map, hold it loosely, never confuse it with the territory it represents. It is also the discipline Ida tried to install in her students when she insisted, repeatedly, that the body talks and the practitioner's job is to listen rather than to apply a recipe by rote.
The semantic transactor and the three readers of a single report
Longstreet's central pedagogical example for the four-dimension model is a story about three people reading the same medical report. The report contains a single word: malignancy. To the technician who carries the slip from the lab to the doctor's office, it is just a day's work — he hands over the paper and moves on. To the doctor it is a problem with many alternatives — empathy for the patient, treatments to consider, consultations to arrange. To the patient it is a panic event — temperature rises, blood pressure spikes, the anticipated future suddenly seems not to be there. Same word, three radically different semantic transactions. The example is meant to deflate any naïve view that meaning lives in words rather than in the nervous system reading them.
"tell myself over and over again, don't be silly. Don't be silly. Don't be so superstitious. But I'm gonna change it. I'm gonna put Harry as a technician. I'll make Harry the doctor. Harry is going to be the doctor, and Dick is going to be the technician to make oh, I'll give him a name that no one hear about. Any Ronalds here? We'll make Ronald the patient. The technician, Donald, comes in with a report. He hardly reads it. The report says malignancy. He gives it to the doctor and out he goes. This is just a day's work for him. The doctor Harry, my son the doctor, he looks at it. He has choices to make. He knows the patient. He feels empathy. He understands what's going on. He's thinking of various alternatives, kinds of treatments, consultation. His see activities, his thinking activities are very active because in that diagram, those dimensions don't stand still. This is a dead diagram. This is a cut under a microscope. In the living human, those dimensions are in constant movement. If I'm at ease, there's a certain balance. If I am frightened, likely my A, my moving activities, maybe under tension, my feelings, And this is what happens here to the patient. We come to the patient, or wherever he is, and he gets this message. So these three words do not mean the same to these three people. These are semantic transactors, and their transaction in relation to those squiggles is different, extraordinarily different. You couldn't measure the difference if you had instruments there to measure them. In one, the temperature, the blood pressure, the heart beating, the sweating, the anticipated future which suddenly seems not to be there. The past, the responsibilities, the values, all these come to the fore. Perhaps thinking is not going on at all, there's a panic. To the doctor, the C activities are going on. There is a good deal of feeling, but there's a greater balance. Why not? To the technician, it's a matter of walking out of the room. He's just busy getting out of there fast so he can get to the next room. So semantics is concerned with the relation of words to one another. General semantics has to do with happenings, meanings, and the way of systematizing this so we can live as best we can. I don't know what a human should be like. There have been many people who have theorized about what a human should be like, but we can all dream."
Longstreet works through the malignancy example to show that meaning lives in the reader, not the word:
The example does more than illustrate. It makes the doctrine usable. A practitioner of any kind — whether of medicine, of language, of Structural Integration — has to know that the same intervention lands differently in different nervous systems, because the dimensions Longstreet has mapped are not equally active in everyone. Some people are dominated by their C activities, the linguistic and conceptual layer; some by their B activities, feelings; some by their A activities, motor patterns. The skilled practitioner reads which dimension is in play and meets the person there. It is not a coincidence that Ida's late teaching repeatedly stressed the same thing — that what comes out of the practitioner's mouth has to be adapted to who is on the table, even when the technique stays the same.
Bachelard's epistemological profile and how knowledge gets organized
Ida herself returned to general semantics in her own lectures, usually by way of the figure she credited most directly: Samuel Bois. In the RolfA5 public tape — a class lecture given to her advanced students — she devotes substantial time to explaining a model she had learned from Bois called the epistemological profile, originally developed by the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard. The profile is a way of mapping the levels at which a person organizes their knowledge of the world. The simplest level is direct sensory assertion — the child sticks her toe in the water and says it's cold. The next level is measurement — the brother gets a thermometer. Above measurement come further levels of abstraction, and Ida's interest is in moving her students up and down the profile depending on the situation.
"between us and Esselin. We don't leave the barriers. There's also another item which I would like to talk about. I don't know. I don't think it's being dragged drug in by the hair of the head. It has to do with this. It has to do with semantics, as a matter of fact. General semantics. There once was a I don't know whether or not. There once was a trustee in the general semantics group. He was very much devoted to Kozipski. His name was Bachelard, b a p c h e l a r b. And this man was a professor in one of the French universities, not at Paris. I think it's Leo or somewhere in there. At any rate, this guy went over the corner, and he looked at things. And he looked at what he knew from general of general semantics and flu general semantics. And he began coming up with a certain amount of insight concerning the way we organize knowledge, the way we look at things to get knowledge. And he came out with what he called an epistemological profile. I haven't even heard of this except you people who have been in my class who may have heard me talk about it. I mean, you ever heard of this? Yeah. That sounds very familiar, but I couldn't put it somewhere. Yeah. Yeah. Well, this is where it came from. This man Bachelard. And he published his work in French. And there was a little French Canadian whose name was Sam Bois, who was now down in Los Angeles, that time in Canada, in Montreal, who was very much interested in this and took and translated the material and put it into a general framework of general semantics understanding. And it was from Sam Bois that I got. Now what Bachelard saw was this, that primitively, and in a pattern which is still around us on all sides, people look at the world, at their incoming sensations, and try to organize them into knowledge and say in the language of the Western European, this is so. This is something that you hear in every direction. This is partly a problem of European grammar. It dates back to Aristotle, in front of me before. All these European languages say, this is so. The little girl goes down to the pond, to the river in the morning, and she sticks her toe in the water, and she says, it's cold. And brother, who's had some science in the eighth grade, said, who says it's cold? I'm going to get a thermometer. I'm going to measure it. Now this is the second compartmentalization. So he measures it. And now this is now science compared to the first area. Now the stuff which comes over the television as science is practically all in this area. 80% of doctors recommend that you smoke such and such a cigarette or that you don't smoke at all or that you"
Ida explains how Bachelard's epistemological profile came to her through Bois:
The detail of the lineage matters. Bachelard wrote in French; Bois, working in Montreal, translated and re-systematized the work; Ida picked it up from Bois and brought it into her teaching of Structural Integration. The continuity Longstreet had described in the Open Universe class — Korzybski to his successors to the next generation of thinkers extending the work — is not abstract. It is a chain of named individuals, and Ida is one link in that chain. When she tells her students about the epistemological profile, she is passing along something she received from Bois, who received it from Bachelard, who received it from the broader Korzybski circle.
"Another place where you control a system which amazes you at times is through the soles of the feet. When you get reflexes to points that are significant. As for example, when you get reflexes to the pituitary gland or the fourth ventricle or something of this sort that has gone askew whose job it is to control our whole system. When you get reflexes which allow you to reach in to get better adrenal Now I'm sorry that most of you get out from under my guiding hand, and I can't give you merry help when I hear you during the rest of the day saying, what is the cause of this? There's no answer to that question. Some of you may have known, I doubt it though, of a very delightful little Frenchman who lived and worked in Montreal, at any rate, French Canada, who was very much interested in general semantics. His name was Bois. He had started in life as a Jesuit priest and he had gotten involved in some of the labor disputes, political labor disputes, where he had been something of a radical. And he had been called on the carpet by Rome, thus himself he had resigned from the Jesuit priests. Being still basically and essentially a teacher of humans, became interested in general semantics. He's a great friend of Placzynski. He has written some of the best of the books journals of all, the most readable books on journals. And finally, he was a man who in his youth had had tuberculosis. And finally, as he got on up into the sixties, he decided he was going to California. He, quote, resigned and went to California."
Ida returns to Bois in the 1976 advanced class and tells the story of his life:
The warning Ida embeds the Bois story in is the operational point. She is telling her students not to ask what caused a given symptom, because that question imposes a linear cause-and-effect frame on a body that is in fact a web of relationships. The frame is Korzybskian, by way of Bois, by way of Bachelard. To ask what caused the headache is to mistake the map for the territory. The territory is a body in continuous transaction with itself and its environment. The practitioner's job is to read the relationships, not to chase a single cause. This is general semantics translated into clinical doctrine — and it is precisely the translation Longstreet had set up for the audience two years earlier in the Open Universe class.
The two languages of teaching
One of Ida's persistent themes in her late teaching is the distinction between two levels at which a practitioner of Structural Integration works — what she calls the silent level and the verbal level. The silent level is the level of the hands, the level at which structural change actually occurs. The verbal level is what comes out of the practitioner's mouth, the explanation the student or client receives. The distinction is general-semantic to the core: it is Korzybski's map-and-territory translated into the working day of a practitioner. The hands work in the territory; the words are the map. And Ida is at pains to remind her students that the map is not the territory, that what they tell a client is not what they have done.
"you people were the first time that this idea came to you, and all these people are just as confused. They may know that rolfing is a good thing, but they don't know why rolfing is a good thing. And they can't go home and spread the gospel when they haven't got any words that constitutes the gospel because people communicate with each other only through symbols, through words, through drawings, through symbols. So you've gotta dish out on two levels. Your significant work on that silent level is very important. But in terms of a gospel, you have to get off that silent level and into a level of abstraction, into a level of symbols. And then after you've gotten their legs and their feet their feet and their legs up to their knees, and I didn't say their hips. Who was I complaining about? You? How was it? It's time to get into their hips yesterday. Okay. You hear me? When you've got that done, you begin to be aware of the fact that with that entire new balance that they're getting below the knees, that their back is really holding them up, holding them down, holding them, period, holding. And you better get in there and do some changing. You better get that back lengthened. Because as we said yesterday, the thing that you are doing in every hour of brothing that you do is lengthening that body, thinning it for the most part and lengthening it."
Ida insists her students learn to operate on both the silent level and the level of words:
Longstreet's evening with the Open Universe class is, in this light, a master class in operating at the symbolic level — at the level of words — with full awareness of how words deceive. Her chosen tools are paradox and quotation. She does not try to define language; she shows it failing, repeatedly, in the hands of the most rigorous thinkers of the century. The strategy is itself general-semantic: rather than offering a definition that would inevitably mislead, she layers attempts at description until the cumulative effect lands the audience somewhere a single definition could not reach. It is, on a scaled-down scale, what Ida tries to do with the body — bring it into a state through many small adjustments that no single adjustment could produce.
"And we run our civilization on words. We forget all about what Mr. Kozipsky said. What Mr. Kozipsky said is that the map is not the territory. And the map is not the territory. And you people have to learn what is a map and what is a territory. And you have to learn what they learned thousands of years ago, that somebody goes out and makes a map and it isn't always right. And it often has no relation whatsoever to the territory. And it often has a very misleading relation to the territory. And it is these words that human beings insist on having. It makes them feel good, they feel they know a lot, and feel if they can put some words on top of the other guy and he hasn't heard them yet, that makes them much bigger. This is an ego trip, nothing else. But it is the ego trip that is characteristic of being given out of nowhere. Now this, by golly, is the trip I'm going to get you out of or know the reason why. I am going to try to get you. No, I'm not. I'm going to get you to look at the territory not at the map. To look at the map only secondarily and say, Well, by golly, that's a map all right, but this isn't what I saw when I looked at the territory. Now realize, I don't think any of you here in this room do, but God knows I do. Realize that what has to be done by Ralfus, for Ralfus, for the information of all human beings, is to take a brand new look at all of this territory and create new maps, because our maps do not fit our territories. Now don't just sit back and say yes, but sit back in awe and wonder and be amazed at the job that some of these enthusiastic inspired rolfer's like Schultz, Ronnie like Thompson. A lot of our senior officers have had the guts to say, I'll do it. And don't let those anatomy books bulldoze you because they were all wrong. Do you believe me? Remember what you saw on the screen yesterday? Remember what you see in the anatomy book, also neatly labeled this is muscle x y z, this is muscle a b c, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. There ain't no such animal. There is only a field of energy with the energy somewhat differently distributed."
Ida tells her students they have to look at the territory, not at the map:
This is the moment where Longstreet's lecture and Ida's classroom converge most cleanly. Longstreet had given Ida's students the philosophical tools to doubt the maps they had inherited. Ida, two years later, applies those tools to the specific maps her students need to doubt — the anatomy textbooks. The continuity is not stylistic but operational. Korzybski's doctrine, transmitted through Bois, arrives in Ida's voice as a directive to look at the bodies on the table rather than at the diagrams in the books.
Languages we do not yet speak
In the closing portion of her Open Universe lecture, Longstreet receives a question from the audience that pushes the doctrine further. Could she suggest a language that might be more useful than English — one whose state of consciousness was not in one-to-one relationship with its grammar, one that might be more open? The question is exactly the question Whorf had left hanging. If English forces us into identity claims through its grammar, are there languages that do not? Could one construct such a language? Longstreet does not give a clean answer, but the question itself opens the door to the broader project of which general semantics is a part — the project of building practices that loosen the grip of inherited categories on perception.
"unimportant. Where categories and the cliches of our Western culture and of my own personal culture become secondary to the feeling that we can have together. For our fields at this particular stage five, we can come to through functioning at stage four. At stage four, I no longer see the world as going on out there. I don't see myself as an observer. I see myself in transaction with something, and that whatever it is I see is a transaction between the mapper and what is observed. And now I if you have anything you want to say, a statement, or anything else, please do. I think I've said all I want to say. One of our necessities is to have a brief stand up, and then we'll do these questions that you're suggesting. Can you just stretch, and then we'll go right back to Ethel with the questions that you may wish to pose. He bases this particular construct on Gaston Bachelard's epistemological profile. Bachelard, a Frenchman, was a friend of Korzybski's. And this work is only an original systematizing of what is already known. It offers a valuable way of evaluating people, writings, our behaviors in light of this particular evolutionary plan. Are both these gentlemen written books or are they simply Yes, they have many books. Doctor. Ball has five books: The Art of Communication as Creative Experience. His last book, The Science Art of Innovating. Fine. Other questions, please. I realize the answer to this question will depend on the evolutionary intent and the role of the individual. But could you suggest a language that may be more useful than English? And what I mean by that is suggest a path in which the state of consciousness will not be determined by or be a one to one relationship with language. Or that may create a language that is a more open language. Or create the ability to use language."
Longstreet describes the higher stages of awareness and receives a question about language itself:
Ida's own answer to the question Longstreet was asked — is there a language more useful than English? — was the silent level. Not a verbal language at all but a tactile one. The hands of a practitioner reading the fascia of a body under them are doing something the verb to be cannot do. They are not making identity claims. They are participating in the relationship Longstreet had described at stage four: a transaction between the mapper and what is observed, in which what is observed is altered by the mapping. This is part of why Ida placed Longstreet in her classroom in the first place. The general-semantic critique of language clears the ground for a non-verbal practice to claim its own legitimacy.
Coda: the friend Ida kept naming
Longstreet does not appear in the public histories of Structural Integration the way Schultz, Aston, or Schutz do. She was not a practitioner; she did not develop a technique; she did not run a center. What she did was teach Ida — and through Ida, Ida's students — to hold their own work loosely, to remember that the descriptions they gave of what they did were not what they did. The friendship, by the accounts that survive in the transcripts, was warm enough that Longstreet was one of the very few people who could tell Ida to stand up or sit down and have Ida do it. That detail, dropped almost as an aside in the introduction to her Open Universe lecture, says more about the relationship than any formal description could.
What endures, in the archive, is the doctrine — the three notions of Korzybski, recited in Longstreet's voice in front of Ida's students, with the explicit acknowledgement that Ida herself had studied with Bois and attributed much of her approach to that line of thought. The map is not the territory. The word is not the thing. The map is a map of the mapper interacting with the territory. These propositions are the philosophical bones underneath Ida's recurrent refusals — her refusal to describe the work in simple cause-and-effect terms, her refusal to let her students settle for the anatomy textbook, her insistence that the body speaks at a level the language has not yet caught up with. Longstreet's evening in the Open Universe class is one of the clearest places in the archive where the underlying doctrine is named, by name, in front of the people who would carry it forward.
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, RolfA5 public tape — an extended discussion of Bachelard's epistemological profile and how Ida received it from Samuel Bois. RolfA5Side2 ▸
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, 1976 advanced class — a return to the Bois biography and the warning against asking 'what is the cause of this?' as a violation of general-semantic discipline. 76ADV111 ▸76ADV31 ▸
See also: See also: Ethel Longstreet's continued discussion of the semantic transactor model and the four-dimension diagram in the Open Universe class series. UNI_062 ▸UNI_063 ▸
See also: See also: the 1976 teachers' class discussion of Korzybski's silent level and the relationship between abstraction and perception. T2SA ▸
See also: See also: Ida's reflections on language, fascia, and the difficulty of teaching the silent level in the 1975 Boulder advanced class. B3T12SA ▸