Throughout this blog, our references to the existence of other-beings are made exclusively about beings from the Ravel. This naming convention is purposefully general. We want to give campers a maximum amount of license to create and encounter these beings.
It is also purposefully essential. All of us are other-beings. When we ask campers to lucidly imagine – in order to encounter – other beings (from the Ravel) through drawing ravel cards and fabricating masks, we hope that in so doing we are also giving them tools that they can employ when encountering/imagining one another.
Camper’s access to other-beings is partial, but our access to one another is always partial. And though their empathy towards other-beings is primarily an act of lucid imagining, so too is our empathy for one another.
We are telling a story about the numinous: an uncanny sense of presence and otherness. The numinous is often felt when no one else is around. It is a type of fear, but it is not a sense of danger. Rather, it is a sense of vulnerability to otherness.
Levinas:
Before this obscure invasion it is impossible to take shelter in oneself, to withdraw into one’s shell. One is exposed. The whole is open upon us. (There is: existence without existents, The Levinas Reader, p. 31)
This feeling is related to the kind of vulnerability kids feel when they come to camp. Coming to camp can mean leaving comfort zones behind. Campers are asked to participate in a collective much bigger and with different rules than the family they know at home. This can make campers feel alone and sensitive to the presence of otherness – other minds, other bodies, other rules, other schedules. Time, space and relationships are experienced in a new way. This is also true for the darkness campers experience at night. It’s scary. And yet, the desire to make contact is what compels kids to come to camp.
The Ravel provides a quasi-fictional performance mode for campers to play with the production of boundaries, to renegotiate comfort zones, and to take responsibility for the way they contribute to the comfort and discomfort of others. By encountering other-beings through creative visualization, playful ritual and by building boundaries and gateways to the Ravel, campers will learn to encounter otherness with confidence and care.
