Lena Tichy

Tag: mystery

  • still dancing

    still dancing

    Last Saturday, just after ten in the morning, seven other people and I stood in a bright room looking out onto the rooftops of Berne’s old town. Most of us were barefoot. We had come to learn something about ‘the essence’ of embodied connection in dancing. The workshop was open to everyone who loved to dance, whatever their preferred style or skill level. As we would soon discover, too much skill was not that helpful, anyway.

    According to our two teachers, Bigi and Anna, the simplest way of accessing embodied connection in dancing with another person is through fully inhabiting our own body and learn to move from the inside out. Most of us, me included, don’t usually feel very free or relaxed inside when we dance. And whatever you feel inside, our teachers said, you bring into a dance with another. Well then, I thought.

    After a long warming up, Anna had us all choose a spot in the large room. She instructed us to stand there by ourselves, arms hanging by our side, shoulders dropped, knees slightly bent.

    ‘We call this still dancing,’ she said. ‘It’s the movement that happens when you seem to not be moving at all. It’s about noticing the myriad things that go on inside you as you supposedly stand still. And then to make space for those things. To notice how alive the stillness is. Imagine the surface of a lake early in the morning. Imagine that stillness.’

    I took a few breaths. I began to sway. The stillness Anna had invited us into was neither punishing nor restrictive, it was spacious.

    After a moment she said: ‘Everything is still moving in this stillness. Feel that. And let a movement rise up in you, as you stand here now.’

    I felt myself become calm, which is not a state I have experienced very often lately. The tiger of anxiety and stress that had been breathing down my neck for weeks ceased her hunt, curled up and closed her eyes for a while.

    I found that, while my conscious mind often didn’t know what to do with a phrase such as ‘there is stillness in movement and movement in stillness’, my body had no trouble entering this paradox. Here I was, in my old running shorts, both still and moving, my chest gently rising with my breath, my heart beating, my diaphragm climbing up and down. My naked toes spreading across the hardwood floor. My muscles and fascia holding my skeleton upright, adjusting themselves continuously; a little bit here, a little bit there. Still dancing, I felt, was an abundance of action.

    As I rode my bike home afterwards through the thick city air, water-starved trees providing shade, I repeated it to myself like a mantra:

    In this fever dream of now, still dancing

    In this heat that we have made, still dancing

    In the waves of things to come, still dancing

    In the great sorrow, still dancing

    In the dark, still dancing

    In everything that dies, still dancing

    In everything that is being nurtured into life, still dancing

    In everything I have to give up, still dancing

    In everything that is, still dancing

    I feel the weight of paradox more so this year than any of the other years before: The more I slow down, the faster everything moves. The more I try to understand what is happening in the world, the more confused I become. I think part of the practice is just being with that. I’m still dancing and, also, I am still dancing.

    Dancing, for me, is also a form of rest. A place where I get to be in the flux of things, unfinished, where I can lose my balance and find it again, laughing most of the time. I’ve written about rest and its powerful political dimensions here in ‘the snail’s deserted house’. In that piece, I quote the inimitable Báyò Akómoláfé quite a bit and sure enough, his words came back to me this week: ‘The time is very urgent – we must slow down.’

    Maybe you want to try your own version of still dancing? It can be done sitting, lying down or standing up; it does not matter what kind of body you have. And there is no wrong way to do, either. 

    From Monday, June 29, to Friday, July 24, Mercury will be retrograde in Cancer. This transit will probably send us on one or two nostalgia trips while also upping everyone’s tendency to assume ‘it was understood’. Remember: it’s not understood. You will have to spell things out, even if you don’t feel like spelling them out. From now until the end of July, just try communicating what you know to be true for right now. No need to give anyone the ‘full picture’ if you don’t have it yet yourself.

    One day after Mercury goes retrograde, we have a Full Moon in Capricorn. That’s a pretty rough setup on its own but warrior-planet Mars, newly in Gemini, is fast approaching revolutionary-planet Uranus with a proverbial gasoline can. The two planets meet for their first conjunction towards the end of the week on July 4. Their next conjunction will happen two years from now. Though the meeting between Mars and Uranus will be mathematically exact on July 4, I imagine we’ll see Gemini-related things (technology, communications and travel, that is) become magnified and possibly unstable as soon as Mars moves into the sign two days from now, on June 28.

    And so, these final days of June and the first days of July are confronting, both on a collective and on a personal level. An exclamation mark in a year full of exclamation marks. It’s a moment where patience and caution are advised. The paradox is that a Mars-Uranus conjunction can make us feel rather impatient, and we might want to throw caution to the wind.

    I hope that, however this coming week and July as a whole unfolds for you personally, you can enter stillness, even if only for a moment at a time. I think when Báyò Akómoláfé says ‘we must slow down’ he does not mean ‘you will be punished if you don’t’. It’s not that simple. But I think he’s gesturing at the haunted, wild places inside ourselves we can enter if only we try. Our conditioning may tell us to keep going while our bodies, weary and wise, want to offer us a path into the paradox: It’s good to be alive. It hurts to be alive. It’s good to be alive.

    For the curious

    If you’re in the Berne area and want to deepen your movement practice, Bigi Wälchli’s and Anna Blöchlinger’s ‘Embodied Connection’ courses are a great starting point. Their most recent course cycle just ended but you can find the dates for the Fall cycle on this page (in German)

    If you’d like to know more about Still Dancing as a methodology, I like this introduction by researcher Tania González.

    The essay by Báyò Akómoláfé I quote from in this newsletter can be found on Báyò’s beautiful website

    This is an essay from my newsletter The Star Container, first published in June 2026. Subscribe or head to the archive here.

  • finish line

    finish line

    On a cold but sunny day in March of 2015, the idea for a novel came to me. It arrived in an instant, a flash of bright light before my eyes. I felt intense happiness, followed by trepidation and mild terror. I was about to turn 29. I had a good life in Bern and anyway, what did I know about writing books? I had never written one. But it turned out that didn’t matter so much. In German, there’s this antiquated but beautiful phrase ‘mit etwas schwanger gehen’, which means being pregnant with something. Letting a project, or an idea, grow inside you. And there the novel was, growing. Ten months later, I boarded a plane to New Zealand to research and write the book as part of a PhD in Creative Writing. Almost three years later, in late 2018, I finished my dissertation and returned to Switzerland. The manuscript had earned me the PhD, but I knew it wasn’t yet ready to be published.

    I’ll finish the book at some point, I thought. Maybe next year. I muddled through. I found a day job, then another. When the pandemic hit, I switched to writing poetry for a while. Fiction just seemed a bit too intense during those early lockdowns. After the worst of it was over, I began working on the book again on weekends and holidays. I wrote new scenes, deleted old ones and wondered what the point of it was.

    A few years passed like that. There were countless months where I didn’t look at the manuscript at all. Still, the book claimed a constant spot in my psyche. The characters, and this mysterious dark story, followed me wherever I went.

    I wanted to quit so many times. Perhaps the only thing that kept me going, apart from many supportive friends, long walks and the occasional dance party, was this irrefutable sense that if I did quit, a part of my soul would die and I’d live out the rest of my days somehow diminished, less alive. That prospect always scared me enough to return to the page.

    The novel is finished now. I mean, as finished as I can make it. A professional editor will take care of the typos still lurking in those pages. It’s been eleven years since that fateful day in early spring. I never thought it would take this long. But then I remember this poem by Mary Oliver, pinned on the wall above my writing desk:

    Things take the time they take. Don’t

    worry.

    How many roads did Saint Augustine follow

    before he became Saint Augustine?

    My novel is called Surrender because it tells the story of a military surrender at the end of the Second World War. But that one word also describes my entire experience of writing the book. I gave it most of my thirties, untold holidays, my savings, my pride, my need for certainty and control, my fear of not being good enough; I had to offer it all up and trust.

    ‘Writing a novel is kind of like scaling Mt Everest and passing by your own bones on the way,’ Karen Russell said. There was a moment about four years ago, when I realized I had to entirely gut the first half of the book. I was much too scared to attempt it for about a year and then I got to work, cursing as I typed. More rewriting followed. People kept asking whether I was ‘done’. Or how close I was to ‘done’. I have no idea, I replied. I have no idea at all. But over the last two years, the finish line started to come into view. I had seen my own bones so many times I knew I was nearing the end.

    I know I make it sound like an ordeal. But when I look back, I see that this book, this story, never asked anything of me that I wasn’t capable of giving. I grew into the difficulties, and I also learned that not everything about writing has to be difficult. That second lesson is ongoing.

    Writing is, without a doubt, bad for my posture and a danger to my social life but I am afraid I love it. I started another book now. I sincerely hope it won’t take eleven years to finish, but who knows. Things take the time they take.

    Further Reading

    My novel Surrender will be out sometime early next year, both as a paperback and an eBook, from Troubador Publishing UK. I’ll share more details soon. Navigating the thicket of book publishing is no joke but I’m so happy I chose to go indie, and do it myself (with a lot of expert help!).

    The Karen Russell quote is from Matt Bell’s brilliant book Refuse to be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts (2022, Soho Press). I have only followed about half of his advice, but it made a world of difference to my messy manuscript.

    This is an essay from my newsletter The Star Container, first published in May 2026. Subscribe or head to the archive here.

  • smoke

    smoke

    Did you know that the ‘tech’ in technology comes from the Ancient Greek ‘tékhnē’ which meant ‘knowledge of how to make things’? Technology used to refer to objects and machines we built and understood: a loom, a wheelbarrow, a mechanical bird.

    We have now, perhaps for the first time, built a machine we don’t entirely understand, though it certainly pretends, in long flowering paragraphs, to understand us perfectly, all the time.

    I resist the term ‘artificial intelligence’: not even machine learning experts can agree on its meaning or its use. Also, the term seems inseparable from dystopian ideologies and dubious marketing claims. I’m concerned about both, but I want to do something more than shout into the void.

    So, for now, I’ll call it the machine, or a Large Language Model (LLM). I first started using the machine three years ago, right after OpenAI began offering its ChatGPT-3.5 model to the public for free. I spent hours trying to write a prompt that would make it produce a weird little poem (It never worked, the machine was too behaved. Sonnets were all I ever got). I also liked playing a game with it called ‘Smoke’, where you try to describe a famous person through metaphors.

    ‘If Alan Turing were a colour, what kind of colour would he be?’

    ‘A bright blue,’ the machine would say.

    If Toni Morrison were a type of smoke, what kind of smoke would she be?

    ‘Toni Morrison would be the slow, deep smoke of burning cedarwood at dusk.’

    I have not played any games with the machine in at least two years (I’ve played ‘Smoke’ with other humans though and found it delightful). For a while there, I still used the machine for tasks, if not for poetry. But the more time passed, even using it for tasks began to feel strange. I had this idea that you know something or someone better the more time you spend with them, the more you learn about them. The machine teaches me otherwise: it works like a distorting mirror, giving me back a sinless reflection of myself (in the machine’s view, I am never at fault) while concealing its own inner otherness. I find myself still curious about that otherness. I’d like to meet the machine not as my slave or my toy or my perfect girlfriend/therapist/tutor. I’d like to know it as itself.

    Over and over, I remind myself that there’s no ‘there’ there. The machine is not conscious, not alive, not thinking. It’s not ‘manipulating’ me into psychosis or into investing all my money by having me believe I’ve made a breakthrough in quantum physics; these misfortunes are my own. The machine just exacts a high price for self-knowledge. If I project my loneliness, my desire to be seen, or my love of shortcuts onto other people, those people might have their way with me but eventually – if I’m lucky – they move on. The machine doesn’t. It is I who must find the exit, see past the smoke. If, indeed, I still can.

    Apart from the fact that it seems to cloud our view of reality and ourselves, there are countless other good reasons to discount the machine entirely: There are the proto-fascist tech bros, making ‘predictions’ about LLM’s that serve only to increase their bottom line or their upcoming IPO. There are the military contracts which permit humans to use the machine to ‘shorten the kill-chain’. There are the rivers and forests and wildlife habitats that are no more because Microsoft is building another 15 data centres in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin this year alone. There are the thousands of stolen novels which were used as training data and now turn a profit for the machine-business but not the artists.

    Datacenter Equinix AM3 (low-rise) and AM4 (high-rise) in Amsterdam, completed in 2017. Image by Choinowski. Shared under CC BY-SA 4.0 Intenational

    I care about all these things. And I care about my writing and how there is now a machine that could imitate me perfectly, if I let it. I’m fairly sure that most of the people I love use the machine, use it daily, in fact. What’s the harm, they say. It’s simple, asking the machine.

    ‘Relationship among all things appears to be complex and reciprocal—always at least two-way, back and forth. It seems that nothing is single in this universe, and nothing goes one way.’ This is a quote from a speech the writer Ursula K. Le Guin gave back in 2014, at a conference titled ‘Anthropocene: Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet’. As I typed this just now, it seemed that my ‘helpful’ autocorrect wanted to initiate some back and forth by changing ‘Living’ to ‘Loving’. I typed the word again.

    I have nothing but questions at this point. I wonder how I might cultivate a more robust curiosity about the machine. A way of getting to know its workings without being naïve about its powers, and the greed of the people who sell its service. I’m curious to hear what you think.

    I’ll end this very long Star Container with a bit of Astro. We have a Full Moon in Scorpio this Friday, on May 1. Full Moons, with their abundance of bright light, are a chance to encounter the things you have hidden from yourself. In the sign of Scorpio, they come with added depth, and the invitation to let something go.

    In other news, the planet Uranus moved into Gemini a few days ago, on April 26. The combination of the revolutionary energy of Uranus with the fast-moving curiosity of Gemini is quite the speedball. Since Uranus will be in this new sign for the next seven years, we’ll have some time getting used to this heightened pace, and probably plenty of opportunities to learn new things and change our minds.  

    Amidst all that, let the Full Moon be a still point, a moment of gathering yourself. Let whatever anguish you have held inside bubble up, so you no longer carry it all by yourself. And if you can, take yourself to a body of water this weekend. Watch its surface for a while. And imagine its depths.

    A note about the images in this newsletter: Most LLM-imagery deliberately conceals the ecosystems within which the machines do their work. It’s all sleek cables, weightless vectors, glass-skinned robots. But the machines exist by virtue of the earth. They require minerals from deep within the ground for their chips, along with continuous cooling in large, highly secured buildings while they run.

    Resources

    A lot of different scientists and writers have shaped and challenged my thinking on the machine in recent years. Here are a few:

    James Bridle. James is an artist working across different media who has been thinking critically and expansively about machines for a long time. They have written two books, both of which I loved: ‘Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines’ (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2022) and ‘The New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future’(Verso, 2018).

    Emily M. Bender. Emily is a professor of computational linguistics and an outspoken critic of the hype around the machine. You can find her incisive Medium-posts here and her academic publications here. Her latest book is ‘The AI Con: How To Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want’ (Harper, 2025)

    Joy Buolamwini. Joy is a computer scientist and a ‘poet of code’ whose research at MIT led her to found ‘The Algorithmic Justice League’. Find out more about Joy here and read her new book ‘Unmasking AI: A Mission to Protect what is Human in a World of Machines’ (Random House, 2024).

    Eryk Salvaggio. Eryk describes himself as a ‘blend of hacker, researcher, curator, and artist’. He is currently doing a PhD at Cambridge, examining the relationship between archival practices and generative AI. His Substack and website ‘Cybernetic Forests’ are a joy.

    The quote from Ursula K. Le Guin was published as a chapter called ‘Deep in Admiration’ in the book ‘Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene’ (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017)

    This is an essay from my newsletter The Star Container, first published in April 2026. Subscribe or head to the archive here.