Oïda

Oida is a word from ancient Greece.

It’s generally translated to:

“I know because I have seen”.

It’s a “perfect” tense, which in Greek indicates an action that was accomplished in the past but still manifests consequences in the present.

Greek words like idea « idea », eidema « knowledge », eidesis «science», istoría «personal investigation » come from the same indo-european[1] root: vid (veid, void)[2], and maintain the double meaning of seeing (as in being present, possessing sight, perceiving) and knowing.
Vid is also the root of the word video (Latin), from which descend vedere (Italian) and voir (French). In modern languages, these words have lost their connection of meaning with “knowledge” and simply describe the perceptual experience of the visual organ [3] but for occasional, metaphorical uses.

The Greek Oïda renders efficiently a process that requires several concepts and more or less complex formulations to be expressed in modern languages. In Oïda, experience and knowledge are considered in a dynamic relationship with each other, as if they were communicating vessels. This is why we mustn’t be confused by the comfortable translation usually given for this word: “I know because I have seen”, which describes a simple sequence of events. Oïda, is a past tense used as a present, it describes events not as fruits stemming from their grains, but as the whole fruits, with the grains within.  

Oïda concisely and effectively suggests that apprenticeship doesn’t happen through automated answers, but through vision and presence. 

My experience with Maud Robart and my studies, met in this word. It’s in fact difficult to discuss Maud Robart’s work in terms of cause and effect, especially because it’s difficult to even separate these two concepts in her practice; the word Oïda comes to help as it offers an alternative to commonly used narration categories: it describes experience as practical, and at the same time it hints to the intuition necessary to learn form it, to acquire skill.

Oïda moves differently from time as we know it and cannot be translated into the horizontal lines of most theoretical learning models. According to these, learning happens in a sequence: we need to first see something, then we can become aware of it, and only then we can know it. 

But Oïda says:

“I know and my knowledge carries its source as a fruit.”

In summary, we have three clues: 1. Oïda shows that experience is the way to knowledge; 2. it circumvents the assumptions we have about apprenticeship as based on linear sequences; 3. it shows that the origin, the seed of knowledge, is dynamic: not an experience in the past that we can use in the present, or a drawer from which we can pull out papers, but a dancing source that has to be participated in order to be accessed.

Many of us prefer to count on written (or spoken) instructions anytime we need to anchor an experience in the present, even when we could simply trust our ability to remain firmly in the experience. We often take this approach to the point that we can only justify our reality through recording protocols. And we come to think that describing an experience before we have lived it is useful, efficient even. This anticipation though, makes life itself nothing more than the accessory element to the documents we create to attest its authenticity. 

But most of the times, the result of this paradoxical process, is that we obliterate the actual events entirely or in part, each time we try to record them.

 How do we remain in the experience? 

When we are in the dimensions of sound, listening, orality, direct transmission and of Maud’s work, it’s flexibility (open-mindedness, precision, freedom) that’s most important;  through flexibility, once we leave behind the slippery slopes of a linear understanding, if we remain silent, we find ourselves, all of a sudden, at the very hearth of

OÏDA.

Laura Casinelli