SubscribeJune 18th, 2011
melancholy
What is it about melancholy that, even a small thin wedge of darkness, can overwhelm the huge blue of a day?
The last couple of days have been slow and rather painful, in a dull niggling way. I’m tired of being ill, I suppose; tired of carrying myself instead of just walking around carrying nothing but my skin. It’s the price one pays for age and its attendant memory, I suppose.
That disconnect: the massive red of azalea occupying the whole horizon, that sea of rose swamping the nose, sometimes none of this is big enough to stomp down that small sequestered memory. And when that it true, when the hands of that memory reach out past its bars, the whole world folds up under the tiny thumb of its dark past.
It’s not regret, nor even a refusal of pain, its just a wiring problem. When that circuit locks, everything runs through the darkness and no joy, no awe can take first chair. But then, one day, it just lifts and the huge blue, is again the whole sky.
O the life we lead, we of chemical nature.
February 14th, 2011
roses and pale faces
The day started well enough. A lovely walk in the early morning, mild rain and the sweet smells that it brings; a strong but sweet latte and a snippy breeze in the last 10 minutes sitting outside before going in to work.
Even work was a bit like that—a morning task that was simple, but pleasurable, it allowed all my organizer-muscles a little swim in easy waters. And that finished, I went out for a bit of a walk at lunch.
The wind had picked up and spat rain around in a fitful manner, so it was a bit colder. Standing three blocks away from the office, looking across at the shops, I could feel the first stirrings of nausea which are often a clue that things may go badly very quickly. I walked back, went to my desk and took a dose of anti-nauseant and wished for a hidden place where I could curl up in the soft dark until this died down.
But it’s a new office, and quite beautiful as offices go, so there is no such place. The best one can do is the bathroom.
I tried a number of techniques I have, slow breathing, imagination exercises and the like, but the nausea just sat there and glowered at me. The relationship between conscious mind and the sensory homunculi that make up the ground of consciousness is difficult at times. We can only read the desires of the body through the body itself and there is always room for error when reading the state of a pale face, or the sensitivity to the smells of the world. I kept working in a quiet, clearing up kind of way, then at four, I could go. I had to fight myself all the way home. Don’t panic. Don’t throw up. Don’t start moaning, because by now the nausea, the pain’s forerunner, had taken over and all I could think about was controlling myself until I got home.
Then the first pains came, a rolling boulder grinding against my innards.
I think it’s a bit like a panic attack in the way it takes over. My brain is swamped and all that is left is the battle for self-control until a safe place is reached. I am of that age and ethnicity that the idea of losing control at work or in public is just so offensive that it never even occurred to me to call for an ambulance or even a cab.
I made it to the train station and luckily there was a seat free while I waited the few minutes for the train. A woman came by and handed me a rose, quickly followed by another. Her face. She spoke, and later I realized she had said Happy Valentine’s Day, but it was her face. It’s amazing what we can know when the mind is shut down. Her pale skin and the rapidly widening eyes when she caught a look at me. The tension on her lips, and the involuntary retreat of her head from my proximity.
There are random people here that go about on Valentine’s Day handing roses to men and women. It’s a nice practice I think, but it sets their minds on the idea of love, of companionship and the desire of people to connect that causes them to read other people from that point of view. And my misery showed I suppose. What she took it for cannot be certain, but since she left me two roses instead of the normal one, and took off, I suppose she thought my pale face and the sheen of sweat that comes from trying to hold on was the misery of someone unloved.
I smelled the orange and pink blossoms and they were very faintly of rose, and underneath a pale echo of the soil that once clung, but I could not carry them. I could not spare the attention or energy to transport them with me so I left them on the seat next to me, behind a young, very pretty, Asian woman and got on the train to go home.
I made it back, but by the time the door opened to my apartment, my restraints had broken and I went blubbering, puke bucket in hand, to bed.
It’s now some 12 hours later and you know what’s the worst? Not the pain, or even the nausea, but that I have no idea what specifically sets these attacks off. And since I have no control over when they occur, I am forced to live my life planning for their possibility. Oh the dark caverns of the mind! What, oh what, you homunculi, did I do to offend?
February 21st, 2010
On the black wing of the Raven and aging
I am not normally an emotional person.
This is both a true and a nonsensical statement.
It is true in that over the course of my life I am habitually a non-reactive type of person, not prone to either touchy-feely displays or to bouts of self-pity, that curse that accrues with a feeling of entitlement. Having said that, I must admit to anger. It is my most accessible feeling, and what eruptions I do have have tend to be related to rage, yet normally those only surface in moments when I am threatened, either physically or emotionally.
This is one sense of the statement “I am not normally an emotional person.” In this sense it is a true statement. Yet, as Damasio (and others) have shown, emotions are something deep and pervasive; not the simplest rational decisions can be made without reference to this, our first, discriminatory tool.
So whether the statement that started this is true or nonsensical is not really a valid question. It is both.
What all this tells me is that normally, my emotional reactions are there but that they are invisible to me. Having said this, it is not as simple as saying that I am unaware of my emotions and therefore I have a problem, but rather, when the background discriminatory tool that are feelings is functioning well, when the blare of anger is not needed to drive a self-protective response to some asshole who thinks he can play chicken with me because I am a middle-aged woman in a nice car and he is a 19 year old with his same-aged friend in his mother’s car (and with her insurance), feelings are supposed to be unobtrusive. They are like a gentle ocean with a minor tidal pull. Feelings guide the boat of our reasoned decisions to make sure we take into account things that reason, for all its brilliance, is simply not complex enough to accommodate.
And so of late, when I go out into a sunny, brilliant day, with cherry blossoms rising in the updraft, pink flutters in the blue air, and still I feel as if I am riding under the black wing of Raven, I cannot help but wonder to what extent reason is in fact just another face, and extension of, the thing called feeling. Which, of course, makes nonsense out of a phrase like “unemotional person” or for that matter “emotional person.” It’s like saying a four-legged biped or a two-legged biped.
My capacity to understand the day, to experience it, to think about it, and ultimately write about it, cannot occur today without the raven-wing any more than it could occur without the background swell of contentment that would more fittingly be there as a response to such a beautiful day. Normally I take my response to a day like this, to sun and fragrant air, and simply accept it as part of “how it is.” I don’t question whether it is reasonable to be happy on a fine day. This is, I think, right. I do question the sense of vulnerability that comes with the raven’s wing.
To question one and not the other is just a matter of habit I suppose and not really a matter of correctness in any moral sense. People function well together when, as a group, they respond happily to a fine day and probably wouldn’t if we all were acting like depressed over-thinkers instead. So it might just be that having feelings normally occur as a quiet (but powerful) guidance system is just what we evolved because this is what functions well for us as a group as well as for us as individuals.
To my credit, I do realize that this intimacy with Raven will go away. Since this haphazard emotional state seems to have to do with the endocrinal shudders associated with menopause, I suspect that when my body is finished turning down the tap on oxytocin and other please-let-me-take-care-of-you chemicals, things will return to the formally smooth state, although I suspect the colour of my sea will be substantially different.
I just hope the rage stays. I rather like my “I will kill you if you threaten me” response to idiots and other undesirables. In this, the evidence seems to suggest I may in fact have greater access to my willingness to bash the rude and dumb. I understand that once menopause has settled my body into a steady state, I will feel even less inclined to avoid conflict and even less likely to do the work necessary to keep unproductive relationships afloat. For this, I am glad. Roll on senescence, to thou I will offer tribute. And to you, Quiet Feeling, the ram’s blood.
September 30th, 2009
Philosophers and bubbles
Philosophy class earlier…still having a great time but it bugs me that so many philosophers treat the mind as if it were something that could be considered apart from the body, as if mind were cool little bubbles of thought and word, connecting, separating and reconnecting in some immaterial linguistic hyperspace.
Not me I ‘m afraid.
Imagine a vast machine, one that takes up building after building, all connected by some enormous network of pipe, cable and wire. Imagine that each of these buildings is connected to the world by its own sensors; these sensors are set at various heights, with different directional orientations, collecting different information about the world by different methods. Imagine that the vast majority of the machine’s work is done in-house in the different various buildings, its products made, decisions about future manufacturing, about the activity of the sensors, about work pace, etc. are all made in-building before a summary of activity is sent along the network to proximate buildings and (recently) to the assessment team. Now imagine the assessment team has been assembled to help the buildings coordinate their efforts. The idea is that the team will help the overall functioning in the few cases where some modulation of productivity might help the vast machine adjust to its changing market place. The team has a place for itself at the edge of some of the buildings – this place added on after the rest of the buildings were already in place and fully functioning. The team is wired in to the system so it can receive summary reports from the buildings, but the team doesn’t know about the vast majority of the day-to-day activity, processes or decisions of the various buildings in the vast machine. The team doesn’t need to know about the day-to-day because that’s not why the team was assembled. In fact knowing the day-to-day would interfere with the team’s job. The team was assembled to be able to assess things like ‘building T is making stuff that is going to undermine the ability of building E to function at all, so despite the fact that T really likes what it is doing, it needs to pull back because without E, T can’t keep going.’ Now imagine that in order for the team to come to that conclusion and send its message/suggestion back to building T, the message tube produces blue and pink iridescent bubbles that float out the window and up into the sky above the vast machine. Aware reason: those bubbles, that’s what most philosophers think make us human.
Not a bubble person, me.
September 11th, 2009
Bachelard, souls, metaphor, dolls and experience
Bachelard is a dualist. No doubt about that. And of course I am not. For me there is no “soul” as distinct from the corpus. There is no “mind” as distinct from the body. Yet I find Bachelard’s book useful, insightful, a mine of things to think with.
Just because Bachelard thought his experiences meant there must be a soul doing the experiencing, doesn’t mean that what he experienced was itself useless for an old atheist like me. For me the question is, can what Bachelard experienced be lifted off its old foundations and re-sited on something less dualistic? Since things that emerge as a response to the world must also be of the world, I think that must be possible. Mind is of the world, so is the soul, so is creativity and love and belonging. Bachelard did experience the relationship between self and space that provided the starting place for that wonderful little book; and since there is no “soul” (as distinct from the corpus), nor “mind” (as distinct from body), it must be so that Bachelard’s body moving through the world was the source of these experiences. That’s my starting place with a text like this.
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September 9th, 2009
Bachelard, Venus figurines, the senses and conceiving space
In Gaston Bachelard’s book The Poetics of Space, he says, in describing the phenomenology of the home, that “space is everything.” Time, he says, “ceases to quicken memory.” I don’t know if you’ve read Bachelard, so I don’t know if you have the context of his project to flesh out what he does with this during the course of his book, but in part at least, he describes a topography of human solitude by reference to the spaces we create.
Thinking of the implications: reading Bachelard reminds me of a paper I read some years ago called “Self-Representation in Upper Paleolithic Female Figurines” by LeRoy McDermott. In it he argues that the “Venus” figurines of the time represent women’s views of their own bodies. That is, these figurines were accurate, direct self-portrayals of pregnant women. What this means to me is that these “self portraits” were done without the intervening step of imagining oneself from a distance.
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August 19th, 2009
Not really synaesthesia
So I have always described the oddities of my perceptual system as synaesthesia. But really, based on what I have read, it’s not really synaesthesia. Normally I have seen such symptoms as coloured sounds described as “hard wired” allbeit mis-wired, but mine seems to come and go. Since I was diagnosed as a petite-mal epileptic as a teen, I have to assume that the times when my brain veers of course is somehow related to episodic misfirings which trip the synaesthetic circuits.
Now I know that’s not how it actually works but it is the closest narrative I have been able to come up with without submitting myself to scrutiny – which, based on my experiences of other forms of “scrutiny,” I won’t do.
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July 26th, 2009
The rule of the moving body
The world created by the moving body is one that marks distinctions through interrelating the basic building blocks of simultaneous and consecutive movement, duration and direction of that movement, by referencing all movement to the sense of uprightness of the body’s vertical axis and by reference to a non-visual spatial sense that locates objects by their proximity and reachability. Just like all the other sensory worlds it is a complete world in that the categories will make sense of the world on their own. If a person could not see or hear or utilize any of the other sense, the world would still be perceived as a whole world, one that was translatable—livable—by someone with only this set of categories and the rules they develop.
The world of the moving body, like that of the skin is continuous and immediate, but unlike the skin this is a world of spatial extension. It is a world of here and far. It is a world that has a primitive sense of past and future—cause and effect—since many of the possible movements of the body occur consecutively and need recourse to concepts like “before” and “after” or “this-then.” Like the skin though, this world is complete in itself. It organizes reality as if there were no other. It is this capacity that makes the various selves (both dominate and non-) so fundamentally independent of each other, yet makes the aware-self (which is completely reliant on the non-dominant selves (in-part the senses) for information about the world) such a dependent entity.
With reference to memory and the pattern of neurons which store memory, according to Rita Carter, concepts can be thought of in a similar way. That is, the physical linkages between cells in a neuronal pattern (what Carter calls “unconscious concepts”), which get stronger and stronger with each use or reactivation, when activated to a certain level of energy and “integrated with the general ‘chorus’ of activity in the brain” causes us to become aware of the stored concept—as a concept. In this way the body, which moving through the world, repeats and repeats and repeats general “knowledge” about sequencing, pattern, movement, cause and effect, etc. creates and stores concepts that our aware selves take to be the product of itself thinking and reflecting. But, in fact, they are the body thinking.
July 25th, 2009
By the nose
The world of smell seems to me to be organized in much the same way as taste. Some of its basic categories include sweetness, bitterness or acridity and spiciness. There is also a kind of instinctual sense of what is fetid and so I think it must be a category of its own. Nothing is so hard to learn to bear than the smell of something animal rotting. When I first learned to tan a hide, I got one that somebody had put in water to make taking the deer hair from it easier, but he or she walked away from it leaving it to rot and for someone else to take care of.
How it came to me is simple. I had been at Beryl’s traditional arts camp in Montana for some weeks. We were sitting in a circle under some ponderosas. Most of the women were beading but I was not. I don’t remember why but my idle hands were noticed. Beryl, not looking up from her own work, said something like There’s a hide there going stink. That’s all. She didn’t look up. No one looked up. Everyone kept beading. In my head I went Oh and then got up and went to get the hide.
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July 23rd, 2009
Touch
Touch is an interesting sense partly because of its constancy. Unlike the eye, it cannot be closed, so we learn to stop paying attention to it unless it crosses some threshold of type or duration. We notice touch, for example, when it begins to be uncomfortable whether from pain or pleasure. There are both internal and external sensors, although there are far more external sensors (e.g. the skin) than there are internal ones. We tend to feel internal space only when there are immediate bodily needs to be attended—hunger, thirst, a full bladder, a sore stomach. The skin seems to register nearly everything else. We feel small temperature and pressure changes: the tiny hairs on our limbs quiver. We can feel very soft touches on certain parts of our bodies and only fairly hard pressure on other areas. Arousal states—whether anger or lust—alter what we can feel. We feel a host of different textures and interpret the time and place sequence of contact as movement along the skin.
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