Some months ago, I realised that I didn't really know much of Alexander as a person, apart from the "actor-who-lost-his-voice" story, so I purchased F.M. - the life of Frederick Matthias Alexander, a biography put together by a student of Walter Carrington. What an extraordinary story.

And what an extraordinary, puzzling and contradictory man. I think that, as with all great teachings, it is hard not to let some of the teaching rub off on the teacher. It's very tempting to assume that a teacher will be the ultimate example of his own teachings. Alexander wasn't. Or was he? Apparently, people who met him were struck with his lightness in movement, his clearness of mind and his overall presence, even when he grew older. So, in that way, AT worked for him. But how come that I'm left with the impression of Alexander as someone who's so afraid? Afraid of attachment, afraid of people stealing his ideas (because without them, what would he be?), afraid of being wrong, afraid of people who had more status or more education than he did, afraid of being caught, afraid that people might find out who he really was andnot love him for it? It strikes me as sad that someone who has taught others how to make most out of life seems to have been in survival mode most of his own time. I hope that others can contradict me, but he doesn't seem to have had many moments of relative hapiness or peace. Losing his voice almost seems like the smallest of his problems.

Also, I hadn't realised the era in which Alexander lived. Of course, I already knew that Alexander lived quite a long time ago. But it really hit me when I read that he left from Australia for London on 19 April 1904 on the Afric of the White Star Line. That's the same company that eight years later launched Titanic. It's only ten years after the Lumiere brothers scared the hell out of an audience by showing a short film of a train arriving at a station. Film was still such a novelty that people's mental schema's did not yet cater for the notion that something on screen is not real, and they thought they were going to be run over. Against this background, Alexander's discoveries stand out even more. But it also makes me wonder how much validity one should contribute to his quotes about yoga being bad for you etc. I've never put too much importance on those sayings to begin with (it's the process that matters, as always), but I think that yoga now, compared to yoga 100 years ago, is quite different both in concept and content, so taking his words literally doesn't make much sense to me.



The state library of Tasmania offers online access to historical archives; I found some pictures of Wynyard, Alexander's birthplace. There's more where that came from, although I found very little on Tasmania in relation to the Alexanders.

Fascinating stuff indeed. It's interesting to see how Alexander was a man of his time; if you look at how he writes, the words he uses, the concepts and the ideas, he's very much an industrial revolutionist, raised in an age of large technological inventions which, even more than today I think, changed men's perception of life. This must have caused such a sense of confusion and exhilaration at the same time; on the one hand everything was possible. But on the other, everything was possible. Oh dear. And to discover that it's really not about that, that what other people see as advancement is actually deterioration, as one of the few people of your time. That's impressive.