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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Most authors have an experience that they want to communicate to others but given the private (or pre-linguistic) nature of most experience, it must first be clothed in a delivery system that allows it to be shared with others. This clothing process is (of course) narrative. Bachelard had a particular set of experiences which link home spaces, nests, boxes, drawers with reverie, poetry and a deep sense of pregnant solitude. This is something in which I can participate, which I recognize.  I have had similar experiences which his book brought to mind, to my attention. But to share these (laregely pre-verbal) experiences with us, he had to work from the non-linguistic to the linguistic, constructing the story. In the process, he used a conceptual foundation for his experiences with which he was comfortable and familiar. He built a verbal house for us so we could share his experiences, but because of who he was, his time, his place, this foundation had to do with souls and creativity and mind distinct from the forms (the things, the bodies) through which such experiences come to us. Because, for me, these notions are sterile, I ruck them up, and start again from the experience that, under it all, he still communicates. It is that experience, the one that sees a corollary between imaginative/cognitive space and the spaces of the world that we experience, which I find fertile ground for thought.

So I agree that his analysis of what his experiences mean, that images have no past, that “poetry is a soul inaugurating a form,” perhaps even that “the poetic image has an entity and a dynamism of its own,” that these are nigh-on useless. Or his disdain of metaphor due to the fact that it “gives a concrete substance to an impression that is difficult to express” or that metaphor

is related to a psychic being from which it differs. An image, on the contrary, product of absolute imagination, owes its entire being to the imagination…metaphor (can) not be studied phenomenologically,

these are things that, in my opinion, are logically weak (as over-cooked spaghetti is weak), but they are also unnecessary to the intrinsic value of the experience the text communicates.

I read about the house and the universe in Bachelard and concentrated on the feelings that he is communicating about how space effects him. It makes me think about the differences between living in a house with angles and a round house and how that affects the sense of self that develops there. I wonder about the propensity to gather belongings, and all the trunks and cabinets that this entails, or how being migratory reduces belongings to a cherished few, and how the oneiric self responds to these images and activities. Really what Bachelard does is interpret the world as if it were a dream and comes to the same conclusions Jung did about the need for Archetypes to explain how we humans seem to have such similar repertoires of communicable imagery. This is why, for him, time is not a constructive force in the emergence of the image (as he defines it), because the image emerges from the imagination in the same way as does an expression of an Archetype – in response to the world but not of the world. And of course, there are other ways to think about the relationship between our representations and the bodies that generate them; the Archetypal universe is not necessary even if it is easy.

Where to go from the experience itself? It’s is a bit like dressing up bits of tied wood to make them appear human. Dress them and redress them and see what happens: take them as children do and they become a projection, an extension of self, an homunculus that allows emotional and mental exploration and learning, with the added benefit of deniability. That’s not me! That’s the Other, the Shadow! Through this play we can come up with all kinds of neat ideas about how these things we can do — these experiences of self in space, of time and timelessness — all these creations of ours can help us think about who and what we are.  (This is what I do with Laussel. Those Venus figurines are a bit of an obsession with me, a “doll” of deep resource, of images and experience that bear nearly constant fruit.)

Our “dolls” can help us learn about where we are now, and how to live well with ourselves and others. These dolls of ours, these imaginings, these moments when we take our experiences, categorize them, and decide what they mean, they are as useful as they are fun. The key, I suspect, is not to mistake the doll for anything other than she is. She is not the meaning. She is not the category, nor the resultant universe. She is only herself: twigs that can be tied and retied.

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.

McDermott’s pictorial evidence is compelling: if not of the Paleolithic woman’s sense of self, at least of a possible reading of one’s sense of personal extension.

What links the two pieces of writing for me is what I sense about the reading of home-space in Bachelard. It seems to me that his phenomenological reading is made possible by orienting to space, not through the sense of distance (and time  linked to distance) that the eye prefers, but sensing space by reference to where one sits, how one negotiates the doorways, by  the sense of a hand reaching into a drawer. This seems to me the same kind of reading suggested by McDermott. My question is ‘what does the reading’ for those sculptors and for Bachelard? Of course the obvious answer is the hands or the body moving, and only latterly, the eye: the world read first by touch and by the kinaesthetic sense which privileges the rule of the moving body and how it senses the world.

I’ve talked about this in other posts (category, senses) so I won’t go into it here, but how I read Bachelard, and most Phenomenologists, is that they assess the world through the rules inherent in the non-visual senses. The feeling of being alive, of experiencing what it means to move through the day, is something deeply kinaesthetic and most often, non- or pre-linguisitc. When one assesses the world by these “other” rules, it suggests analytical categories very different from those of the eye, or of what we traditionally call analysis.

I think about the figurines and how what is represented of the self comes first from the spaces the hands can touch. The use of the eye in these cases is directed by what the hands conscribe and not the other way around. It seems important that these figurines are not descriptions of the localized self from a distance. It suggests that the eye has yet to take precedence in the description of space, or at least that precedence is not yet determined. With these women’s bodies as representations, what is described is immediacy, the relationships between the elements of the body as they are sensed from the point of origin of the body itself, of the hands.

This is, I think, at the core of Bachelard’s sense of the home as primarily spatial; why this intimacy is atemporal. What he says of his project: “for a knowledge of intimacy, localization in the spaces of our intimacy is more urgent than determination of dates.” What, I wonder, is the connection between our sense of time as distancing and our movement from the intimacy of the Venus figurines to the distance-based spatial awareness of the Lasceaux horses and the Tanumshede dancers?

Solitude, to return to Bachelard, is perhaps a return to primacy of this kind of intimacy – a sense of self localized in the body, immediate, atemporal, comforting and creative.

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.

Posting these poems together made me realize that what ever it is that happens – it happens whether I am awake, in pain or not, or asleep.  That seems to me to indicate a probable physical cause rather than a psychological one, although the lines between them is pretty thin I suspect. All this goes to say is that I have come to the conclusion that I am not crazy, despite occasional protestations to the contrary.

So, my question to myself is “what is it?” That is, I recognize that ting-yellow is an illusion, but…

Yellow doesn’t ting, nor does the sound “ting” have a yellow face. But it is also true that a purple hyacinth is not really purple – that is purple is a sensation most humans get in response to a specific wavelength. That’s what purple is, a response to an environmental set of circumstances. Yet we wouldn’t call seeing a purple hyacinth an illusion, because it is one we (for the most part) share. And, for what ever reason, at certain times, I respond to certain environmental stimuli by perceiving ting-yellow.  So really I’m not so different. It’s just that ting-yellow isn’t a “normal” response to that particular stimuli.

In my thinking about these kinds of experiences and the common human response of meaning-seeking, I have had to pretty rigorously remind myself that experience and meaning are separate realms.  In other words, Purple is not out there in the world as some sort of Platonic Ideal just because we respond to a specific set of wavelengths in a certain way. Experience occurs automatically as we live in the world. Meaning is something that has to be generated and is fundamentally a story humans make up in response to the living we do.

So my short form for this is: Experience is the response of a entity reacting to its environment;  meaning is the story we tell ourselves about that response. This way I avoid the problem of illusion altogether because the word illusion is one that assumes a conflated experience-meaning; it assumes that there is some meaning that is necessarily connected to some set of experiences. And that just doesn’t seem to be true.

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.

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.

I dumped over the large plastic garbage container that held the water and the hide and let the stink water wash out onto the grass. The smell was of rot not quite yet to the stage where the hide would be unworkable, but close. I was given a draw knife and as I knew where the scraping poles were, I just started working. Meat side first, was my only initial instruction. I dragged the wet deer hide over to the scraping poles, lifted it up on the alder pole and started peeling strips of meat and fat from the hide underneath. Within the first few minutes I smelt of slightly raunchy deer hide. It was a smell that I was to come to dream about.

After the first day—or many hours of scraping—the meat side was clean right down past that grey filmy, almost checkered, layer that is the last to be scraped from the meat side. I put my nose to the skin and could still smell the stink from the, as yet, unscraped hair side, but there was another smell now. Maybe it had been there before, and the incipient rot just hid it, I don’t know. Now though there was also this sense of spiciness, a kind of sweet intensity that could only be smelt if, holding the hide close to the face, breathing slow and even, the smell had a chance to gather. At the end of the day, I slid the hide into clean water and jumped into the cold creek, after stripping off most of my very dirty clothes.

The next day I started scraping the hair side. It was hard work. It took me two days (a good tanner would have finished considerably less time) and I got very dirty. The combination of the sweat from the physical labor, the remaining dirty water from the hair side and the deer hair sticking to my arms, legs and hands was enough to drive me the ten miles down to the closest public shower facility. I really valued hot water and the smell of soap that day.

Once the hair side was clean, the next stage—soaking the hide in gently cooked brains, stretching it, wringing it out and then scraping it dry—took two more days, and at the end of each day my hands were so sore from holding that scraper that I had to pry the fingers of my right hand open with the left and force them backward, stretching out the muscles. Once I got the hide dry on the second day, it was the softest thing I ever felt and all the smell of stink had gone, replaced by the spice of healthy animality. I didn’t smoke that hide. I kept it white so that I could keep that smell as it was.

Once done, I brought the hide to Beryl’s hands. She felt it, made a soft grunting sound and handed it back. Nothing else was said, but some time later, in that circle of women while I was somewhere else, she made me a pair of moccasins. I was called back into the group; she handed them to me smiling. Everyone else giggled. I wore them until I put out the bottoms from so much walking.

Blindfolding, to allow concentration on the sense of touch, will develop one’s awareness of the subtleties of this sensory system. Its building blocks—intensity, duration, texture etc—get built into a whole, an organized world that is quite distinct from the world-view of the eye. To the skin and the internal sensors the world is a place of immediacy with no real spatial extension. It is a place of no radical demarcation or edge. Reality is continuous, unfolding and pretty much commensurate with what the skin describes spatially, or at its greatest range, the limits of what changes the small hairs can feel. This reality is as important to the successful operation of a body as is any of the other senses but its “world” is, for whatever reason, seemingly one of the most difficult to keep in the aware mind.