I slept in my car last night, the first few hours not far from the Columbia River, the next an hour or so west of Spokane. The air moving down from the Cascades brought some low clouds but far above them were the stretched gossamer of high plateau moisture. Jupiter hung sparkling below the barely waning moon, the sky was so bright it glowed a shadowed blue, and I missed being homeless.

I saw this film yesterday. Oh my. It was so glorious, so deeply moving, that I am still in the stage where I am checking to see if I can get tickets to McMurdo Station. Not that I would actually want to live there, but 6 months or so, yes I would want to do that. I can count penguins.

It’s the same thing as the cicada video I just posted. It’s so non-human that I feel as if I am just a part of things – a small, non-important part – and not the center of the universe. I find the switch from center to periphery deeply reassuring, a stunning pleasure.

This center of the universe thing: that’s the problem with cities, they lead you more deeply into the delusion that the universe is about being human, that our measure is also the measure of the rest of eternity, and of course it isn’t. The most horrible thing is that while the feeling of centrality persists, not only is it simply wrong, it is also deeply disruptive. I mean how can one actually attend to what is in fact the case when blinded by one’s own reflection? I mean it would be like assessing the possibilities of the world outside the home if all one’s widows were mirrors.

This film is a visual reminder of both our belonging and of the non-human nature of reality. I am deeply glad that Herzog was granted a pass to the base because, I suspect, this film is the closest that I will ever get to that booming silence.

I find things like this stunning. It is both beautiful and so completely non-human that entering into the edges of their world dislodges, temporarily I admit, my reality from its human-centered tendency. I deeply appreciate that when it happens. That ability to include the reality of another completely non-human being makes me feel like we might have some redeeming value as a species.

via Wimp

The moon is dark today, as is the sky. It has been raining all day, so much so that even while it was light, going down the narrow walk between houses to get my laundry, I could have used a flashlight to avoid tripping over that *!*&#$ lip of concrete.

I’ve been in my head all day, writing a little essay on Frank Jackson’s knowledge argument and why it isn’t really a problem for physicalism. This may make absolutely no sense to you, but it is what I’ve been doing all day. Next it’s an edit on an essay on Greek god origin myths and their reference to specific body parts and what said references say about the polis-mind of the people. After that, if there is time before I need to sleep, a novel by Louis Owens called Nightland.

I went in to my office to get the first draft of the Jackson essay down. I’ve been struggling with it all week and found that all the home distractions (dishes to do, laundry, cats to pet, dogs to walk, plants to water and kitchen-floor-ground-in-dirt to eradicate by toothpick) irresistible in the face of Mary the supreme colour scientist. So I gathered my materials, drove downtown and sat in my empty office. It helped, because five hours later I had a draft.

It was really dark there. My office is high in a tower and we have acres of window glass but the world just didn’t light up today.

Part of my reaction to the day is because I know it is dark moon. There is something about that, especially now we are past Halloween, that makes me think of dark dreams I have had in the past, and once that happens the dreams are back, slipping under me like a sheet tumbled in a dryer with mugwort. There’s a sense of the dream as ever-there, even though you know it isn’t, or that’s is so long gone that it no longer signifies; nevertheless, it does linger, like it’s a vague smell, or an occasional prickle, like a tiny dried stem that pokes you in the waist when you turn to move your nose out of odor’s reach.

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In the last few weeks I have been rather ill and as a consequence I have been inside for much of that time. This morning, when I went outside just for the sake of being outside, I realized how much of a toll living in has on me.

You should understand that at various points in my life, starting when I was a teen, I have lived out.  I spent a couple of years on the road as a kid, just wandering around the country. Technically, I suppose I was homeless, although I could have gone to my mother’s house had she not been such a madwoman.  I have to tell you that it was not terrible. I was not suffering, in fact they were wondrous years full of discovery and learning.  As an adult I have lived in cars and vans (with children and pets) for long stretches of time. These were not terrible years either and both my children are better people for it too (even according to them). This is what I call living out.
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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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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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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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As a person who has never believed in the soul or mind as entities apart from the world, I approach books whose authors’ depend upon such a demarcation (and the vast majority do) with my “translator” on automatic: since the soul and mind do not exist, it must be the body working itself out in space and time. This is how I approach Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space.

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 that he wanted to communicate and this experience is something in which I can participate.
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