The Flip Effect

            A hot day on Elliot Street, hot enough to send heat waves off the sidewalk and pedestrians scurrying for the shade under the awnings on the south side of the street. Would it be too hot for the noon yoga class? A newcomer to this studio found the teacher ready and smiling. Thin purple curtains kept out the sun and let in a steady southwest breeze. If the air was moving, so would we.

            By twelve o’clock the yoga studio was filled with students sitting on their mats, checking in with their intentions, and focusing on their breaths. As the purple curtains fluttered in and out, we prepared ourselves for the task at hand. Luckily, we knew there would be places to rest, asanas where we could hang for a moment and let pulse and breath make common cause. In this class, the resting place was downward dog, that posture midway through the sun salutation where the human body looks remarkably like a pup tent.

            Perhaps it was the heat, or the pace of the sequences, but at some point around twelve-forty the room flipped upside down. In the middle of what might have been the twelfth downward dog, gravity melted away. As the teacher encouraged us to reach the back of our heels and the webs of our hands towards the floor, my yoga mat curiously started to recede. My normally weak feet no longer felt unsteady, but like delicate tendrils in search of a friendly hold. My hips might as well be anchored to a curtain rod, so effortlessly did the rest of my body float towards the mat. “Ah,” I said to myself, “this is what it feels like to flip.”

            I had just been reading about the flip effect in a new book by philosopher Deborah Bird Rose entitled Wild Dog Dreaming. The flip effect is most commonly associated with Op Art. Remember that drawing that looks first like a vase and then like two faces staring at one another?  Those optical illusions reveal just how easily the mind can switch back and forth between foreground and background. But flipping is not just a visual phenomenon. Ethnomusicologist Cath Ellis discovered flipping in Aboriginal music, where background patterns suddenly flip into the foreground. Ellis calls that flipping “iridescent.” “For the dancer,” writes Rose “there is the flip between the feet on the ground and the ground on the feet: who is the dancer, and who is the danced?” For participants in the ceremony, “it is clear that both are dancer and danced.” Ground and feet are making each other.

             “Flips appear at first to be either/or: either this foreground or that foreground. But for participants, the patterns are experienced in the body and in time.” When one is in the flip, “one is experiencing both flow and simultaneity.” For the yogi in a state of sweet delirium, the hands and feet are on the mat and the mat is on the hands and feet.  The background becomes foreground, the foreground recedes to the rear and both experiences are held in place like a Tuvan producing overtones in his throat.

Rose, who is deeply concerned about the current rate of species extinctions, finds in “flip philosophy” a way out of the cold, cruel production of death, a way to navigate through a world where corpses are manufactured in factory farms and plants and animals die not singly but for eternity.

            But what does flipping have to do with the sixth great extinction event on Earth? How can shifting foregrounds and backgrounds turn around what conservation biologists call anthropogenic extinction, that wide-scale permanent death caused by human beings? The answer, to be consistent with the philosophy, is both “not much” and “everything.”

            When we don’t flip, we are the dancers and the earth is our stage. If the dance calls for a thruway, then by all means, put one in. If the dance needs a cast of thousands, then bring them on board. If the dancers need protein, then give them three meals a day. We dance and dance never noticing that the earth is drying up beneath our feet and the plants and animals somewhere out beyond the last parking lot are disappearing.

            But when we flip, suddenly the earth is dancing us. Pushed to the background, we see how much our movements are determined by where we are, by the land and the plants and animals that make up that energetic mix. Moving the background into the foreground can be terrifying: the thing we thought was a stage turns out to have the power of a director. But it can also be liberating.  As the ego recedes to the background, suddenly the next move becomes clear. With the earth as dancer, we get to just follow for a while.

            And so it was in that ceremony called yoga class, when the room flipped upside down and the downward dog became a spider walking across the ceiling. The background advanced, the foreground receded and the colors of the purple curtain pulsed sometimes black, sometimes violet with inextinguishable iridescence. A gravity bound body was swept up in an unbound pulse that flowed beyond Elliot Street and a hot summer day. Producer became product, mover became moved. For a brief spell, the exchange was effortless. Even in that heat, one couldn’t help but stretch both hands and feet towards an advancing world.

Meg Mott teaches political theory at Marlboro College. Comments welcome at: www.megmottshottopics.com