Mira Heikkilä: Knowing and Perceiving
“From a very early age, I have been highly annoyed by the manifestation of Freedom in our modern world. And as my questions about the Ideas of the human world intensified, I was often labelled a utopian: it was as though I absolutely had to choose to belong to a group. But by seeking experience, over the years, I have learned to resize my thinking by erasing the boundaries between different worlds. Freely, I left my Finnish nature behind, and travelled many lands on foot, by train, by car or by plane seeking the origins of the stories of civilisation. From the forest where there was nothing else but nature, I left to look for History.
My voyage lasted twenty years. I have travelled the continents, taking backroads more often than highways, never knowing how to settle down. At first I had an old film camera, but I eventually threw it away because my eyes captured a dualism that I was not yet able to express on film. I lived both in the modern world and in the traditional world, in science and in beliefs; in the houses with guards and in the streets. I have experienced all types of communities and immigration. I crocheted these dichotomies with longs threads. I crossed the invisible lines between utopia and reality. I read ancient poetry and philosophy, translating them into modern languages. And I never knew how to be satisfied with just one language.
"The pantopic vision of philosophy was a response to my colleagues who, in the postmodern era, were heralding the end of grand narratives.” — Michel Serres
Since the beginning of my university studies in the human sciences, I knew that my attention was focused not only on Knowledge, but also on Perception. The question I kept asking myself was how did we end up here, in today’s world? What are the historical strata that lead to the point where we see what we see: how did we come to take our immediate perception for granted and how does Knowledge participate in our perception? So, I went back to the earliest writings, the first poems ever written on Liberty. I followed the river, translations from Sanskrit to Hebrew, from Hebrew to French, and I was like an adventurer in an undiscovered ocean because my native language, Finnish, had never crossed these waters. Only after learning the French language, did I dive into the depths of Thought.
These questions required long-term experiments. I have been a cook in Thailand and Spain, a massage therapist in France, a tourist guide and martial arts practitioner in India. I took the Hippocratic oath on the Trans-Siberian train, I had a private conversation about the human mind with a Kung Fu master on the steps of the Shaolin Temple. I have been to caves in India where the study of the human mind has been going on since the beginning of time. I have travelled with the weapons of ancient warriors, fought with the masters on a battlefield in front of tens of thousands of spectators. I lived in the forest where the oldest trees still whisper in the ears of beings.
I have loved in English, Spanish, Indian and French. For a very long time, I have loved an old poet that no one can learn by heart, and I fall asleep with another, more popular one. I married a writer for life, asking him to never be faithful. I have embraced all languages innocently, but only French endured the incurable poison that is everyday life, and has stayed with me, even when the physical constraints on my time vanished. I gave up my Finnish to rediscover the origins of the sounds. And I hold on to Sanskrit to ensure that I can never say this is it, Knowledge acquired.
I have lost several times. I lost several homes, many friends. But more than that I lost direction, objectives, the good energies. I lost all ideas. I fell into the black holes of ignorance, into the womb of the Invisible, the birth place of oblivion. And there, in the midst of disaster, I realised that there is an independent perceiver who manages to observe all human experience while experiencing it.
This perceiver within me opened up a wider viewpoint, sublimated all the burned green grass, and I became a poet who too often forgot the reality of the physical world, a painter that sought more and more abstract expressions.
By crossing the roads, I learned the geometry. I learned that the modern mind is a triangle: a construction made by nature, tradition and science, and that the battle between these forces makes the mind spin, projecting an image outside, which is taken to be Real. I understood how the brain uses a metaphor, a representation, a symbolic projection - in which the emptiness of the modern narrative no longer has value. And that the Philosopher can become the translator of all these voices, of all expressions.
“The Thanatocrats are the masters of history. They reverse the real. Or, the sense, that is both signification and direction. To reverse the meaning, the direction, is to falsify reality.” — Michel Serres
But still, I didn’t settle down. As a woman, how could I express myself when I was born outside of all expressions of History? What is a stable situation for a woman, when the functioning and constructions of the common culture have been written from just one side? I left behind the Western philosophies that have for so long remained in the clouds of Ideas, where I have never been interested in living.
The vocabulary of philosophies is inherently based on the perspectives of a certain time and context. The “Virat”, the world of thinking that we are living in, is an accumulation of layers of value systems that we no longer acknowledge, nor remember. It’s like a wasteland where we see only the most recent layer. But this Historical “thinking” is still behind all the visible devices of our everyday life: in the necessity of having a name on the electricity bill, in the obligation to have an address to be a member of the community; behind the attributes and roles of men and women. To know this, doesn’t change a thing. To change, the only alternative for the human is Self-study.”
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“During the Pantopian residency I mean to develop a virtual place to study the Self. My working tool is a harmonising gesture. This study, which creates links between opposites, rereads history by joining the feminine and the masculine, animal instincts and aspirations. It relates to the lines of force of human thought, through the etymology of words; it goes to the roots of Sanskrit words, to the geometry of Platonic solids, to the structures of our mind. Our laboratory is silence, and with the tool of Asana, the Position, the mind comes back into the body and joins the experience. Self-study also means adopting a body practice: to free the perception we must first turn to the body and look at its habits; our fears and thoughts feed on misconceptions.
This study is mainly a virtual place. Prayssas could host all sorts of writing projects: philosophical, personal or artistic. The aim of Self-study would be to enlarge perception by knowing more about the Writings that captivate the Thinking.”
