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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For about a year and a half, when I was fourteen to fifteen, I lived in Pittsburg. I didn’t like the school in which I was enrolled very much so when I left the house in the morning I usually just didn’t go. Instead, I went to the museum, the Carnegie Library, the zoo and the various parks within reach of my feet. It was in the library that I first recall seeing a picture of the Venus of Laussel. I don’t remember reading the text of the art book I held. I presume it was on Paleolithic, Mesolithic and/or Neolithic art. What I remember is the shape of the book in my hands, the press of the metal walkway under my bottom, the gloss of the page and the sense of space that opened up as I sat and stared at the picture. I knew nothing about the statue, nothing about art or the human history of the Paleolithic but in that space I felt a connection knitting between me, the statue, the sculptor and the crescent horn-moon in her hand.
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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.

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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