SubscribeNovember 13th, 2010
nothing coheres
Living is normally like a narrative. Moments of time cohere, seem as if they are antecedent and subsequent to this one moment now. But for the last two days things refuse to join up.
Today at Trout Lake the ducks – preening that soft spot under wing. Yesterday at civil twilight, no ducks to be seen, but their quiet croaks drift past the frenzied joy of playing dogs.
There is a change in park personnel at twilight. The dog owners give way to after-work runners and those coming to find a place to drink then sleep. Dogs and day-chittering sparrows give way to skunks, raccoons and coyotes. At the same time flights of crows float forward below low hanging clouds, homeward to roost, nestled together.
It’s really hard to write poetry when the mind skitters. Even to read more than a paragraph or two seems impossible.
I slept on and off until 3 this afternoon, and still I’m tired.
The neighbour cat comes running when I come home. He stops at the door and peers in at my three female cats and then asks for kibble. My cats just ignore him now. At first they hissed and made a terrible fuss. I’ve carried him in a few times and he seems interested and not at all afraid, but then asks for his kibble on the stone outside the door.
It’s not unpleasant this mindlessness, except, perhaps, for a modicum of fear. Am I losing my mind? Absurd of course.
What does it mean that nothing is inherently meaningful?
November 9th, 2010
sound and calm
I’ve been thinking about what constitutes “quiet” for me. It’s not the absence of sound certainly. For example, yesterday I was anxious, out of sorts, almost panicky in my need for this elusive “silence.” I thought at first just to stay home where it is, in fact, pretty quiet but the thought of that drove the panic into a little flurry. So I got dressed, grabbed my stuff and got in the car.
Driving out on the highway has a calming effect on me most of the time. City traffic cuts down on the sensation but once there is some speed, some space and an open window spilling life smells into my personal space, I almost always feel tension lifting. And of course, driving with one’s window open is not quiet at all.
It’s not even the absence of human sounds because I often come to this cafe where there are always people talking, music playing, the sounds of cars moving on the road: the chitter of civilization. But the sounds make sense. They have a kind of harmony once one is accustomed.
But yesterday even that seemed impossible so I found myself heading along the highway to a small marine park I know just over the U.S. border. I got there, through a patch of hail, to find a blue sky, sun filled afternoon with just a touch of cold breeze. I travel with blankets and a pillow at all times so I just set up a temporary camp in this driftwood enclosure. I took my shoes and socks off, curled up under the sleeping bag and turned my face to the sun.
As I breathed I could feel the calm spreading. Where the tension had left on the drive here, instead there was a spreading warmth, a kind of resilient looseness that I haven’t felt much of in these last years. That calm has something to do with the sound world. The waves were a small shush, the bird calls and pronouncements were pointed, like arpeggios in an otherwise stately piece. The wind had the quiet power of a viola, and the dogs and their people were like well placed percussion. I didn’t hear anything with specific meaning, that is, nothing was intelligible but somehow everything had meaning. I’m sure you know what I mean.
Periodically I would sit up, read a bit, write when phrases would pass through my head on their way from and to where ever. Then I would lay down again. Sometimes I turned so the sun warmed the back of my head, sometimes I would keep my eyes open so that I could watch the bald eagle sit at the end of the pier watching the ocean. Most of the time I had my eyes closed and just drifted on the harmony that I was perceiving as sound.
I spent several hours that way.
I think, just based on my own experience, that there are certain sound ‘scapes that are conducive to promoting this “calm.” Certain kinds of nature work best for me, although the coffee house works to release tension most days. I suspect that these ‘scapes are somehow simlilar to the pattern of organization that is present in me when that calm is working. Like a kind of mimesis, the pattern of the calm is an echo of the pattern of sound of that day at the marine park and so one can foster the other.
That make sense? I’m talking out of my hat here.
November 3rd, 2010
At the limits of intelligibility, part 2
I’ve had a bit of a minor quake in my thinking about representation in the last two days. I’ve been reading the essays in Picture Theory by WJT Mitchell and then my son sent me a link to a podcast about the power and beauty of words. The two came together and smashed.
1st piece:
On November 1 I started talking about meaning, intelligibility and representation essentially saying that meaning was a process that occurs as beings experience their world given that all beings have motive. That is, they have limits which conscribe their perceptual world that have to do with biological survival. For example, we have taste buds that recognize “bitter” as well as “sweet” because we need to stay away from some foods and gravitate toward others.
Intelligibility is that aspect of meaning that is aware and is linked with language in humans. I concluded with my current understanding that the limits of intelligibility is where meaning and intelligibility diverge.
2nd piece:
In Mitchell’s book there is an essay on narrative and description as processes related to the technology of memory and our control of time and space. It’s in a section on the pictorial nature of text. One of the things that section does is examine how narrative controls our sense of time and how description works to establish our sense of place. One of the interesting things that came out of my first reading of the section are the differences between how these two processes work in Wordsworth’s The Prelude, Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Morrison’s Beloved. Through his examination of the three texts, Mitchell shows how the judicious use of description and narrative, through the construction of memory, controls our sense of self, and therefore our representations.
3rd piece:
Then I listened to the podcast. In it there is a piece about a deaf man who grew up without language. The idea that there is a time prior to memory, that and the way in which the group of deaf men used description, repeated, repeated and accessorized with additional descriptors, caused a re-ordering of my thinking, or perhaps, a coalescence of my thinking about sign, representation and intelligibility.
The process is far from over but certain things have started to emerge. For example, the control of time seems to be definitively related to language. This might go some way to explain why slave narratives, and other populations restrained from full access to human power tend to focus on description and the control of space. Virginia’s room, for example. Small safe places where some autonomy can be maintained.
Not that these places exist outside of time exactly, but time is minimized; a slow-ticking backwater is created where time’s inexorability can be forestalled, and the safe present, the now, can be emphasized. It’s as if, lacking full power over one’s own identity, the instinct is to push away the narrative because it is controlled by someone else. The retreat to space seems to suggest that we understand narrative as related to time in some fundamental way. So the emphasis of those dis-empowered populations is on something they can control – space. The thing is, that based on what little I know about A Man Without Words (one of the books suggested about the deaf men’s communication without language), and what I know about being deaf without sign, is that this control of space is a common thread.
Even with ASL, space is a deeply important communicative agent to the deaf. So much meaning is contained within the sign space. Meaning is created by how one uses, divides and transgresses that space. Even time is represented through spatial relations (e.g. the position of the “sun” along the “horizon” of the arm).
I find that deeply, deeply interesting.
There is a link here to the functioning of memory, but more on that later.
November 1st, 2010
At the limits of intelligibility, part 1
I feel like I’m ready to start writing out what I mean by “at the limits of intelligibility.” Please understand this is an ever adaptive phrase that has quite a lot to do with how I think poetry functions and, I suppose, art in general.
I am led to this obsession because of my odd perceptual capacity—that is, that sometimes I have these little “seizures” that have me experience the world in unusual ways: yellow as a “ting” sound; the light on the horizon as a blue “hiss” and the like. All I claim for this oddity is that has clarified for me the ineluctable relationship between the constitution of our bodies/cultures and our representations of experience.
I should also say that the phrase itself comes from my reading of Gadamer but that I have been tracing the idea through others, including Wittgenstein, Hegel and Heidegger. I have also be talking to friends (Thanks PL!) about these ideas, and while I make no claims of support from either these discussions or texts, I can say that ideas are always a shared phenomenon but that responsibility is personal.
Why do I say this? Because there are two idealets that have rooted themselves strongly in the humus that is my mind. The first is the importance of the verb and the second is the intrinsicality of time to the nature of representation.
The verb is just my short-form for the process-like aspects of meaning construction. Not that nouns are secondary. They are not. Rather nouns and verbs (or determinacy and indeterminacy, if you like) are co-dependent. For us, one cannot exist without the other; one inhabits the other so to speak.
There are nouns, as there are determinate things because we make it so by being limited ourselves and by grabbing hold of the world and eating it whole. We digest some bits and defecate or ignore other bits. By this very process we begin the process of determination, and therefore, of meaning.
Meaning at its broadest is the sum of a being’s relationship with something particular. So meaning is both limited in that there are things not included and limitless in that it is always adapting to the ever changing relationship of being and its environment, since both are in time and mutable. So for a starfish a bivalve has the meaning “food” regardless of the fact that it has not the brain to form the concept. It’s body has the concept and enacts it through its chemical and electrical biology.
Intelligibility is when this broad sense of meaning is willfully perceived. To say something is intelligible and unconscious is meaningless, like saying an orange has desires. An orange needs things for sustained life but this is not the same thing as desire. Or like saying 2+2=sea. So for something to be intelligible requires self awareness but not necessarily language, unless language and self awareness are necessarily linked, which I don’t know.
(Maybe. I’m not so sure about my examples here. More on that later.)
There can be meaningfulness without intelligibility but not intelligibility without meaningfulness. (Pretty sure about this.)
So the edge of intelligibility is where intelligibility and meaning diverge.
More on this and its relationship to the nature of representation later.
October 2nd, 2010
The eye or the ear?
There is a fascinating paragraph in Picture Theory that occurs near the opening of the chapter on visible language and William Blake.
What is it that writing and grammatology exclude or displace? Nothing more or less than the image—the picture, likeness, or simulacrum— and the iconology that aspires to be its science. If “différance” is the key term of grammatolgy, “similitude” is the central notion of iconology. If writing is the medium of absence and artifice, the image is the medium of presence and nature, sometimes cozening us with illusion, sometimes with powerful recollection and sensory immediacy. Writing is caught between two othernesses, voice and vision, the speaking and the seeing subject. Derrida mainly speaks of the struggle of writing with voice, but the addition of vision and image reveals the writer’s dilemma on another flank. How do we say who we see, and how can we make the reader see?
The paragraph went bong-bong-bong in my head and throughout this day I have returned to it repeatedly trying to let surface the chord it struck. No go so far.
To track this elusive illumination/understanding I had to open out some of the terms. Différance, for example. As I understand it différance refers to the relationship between event (the singular, non-repeatable experience of life in this moment) and machine (machine-like repeatability; the chemical and physical nature of the inorganic). Both event and machine express themselves in human beings as kinds of thinking that appear to be incommensurate yet, according to Derrida, each is internal to the other and yet remain independent.
This analysis has implications for the production of meaning in text. Words get their meaning by how they differ from other words. The example in the Wikipedia article linked above used the word “house.” “House” gets its meaning by “how it differs from “shed”, “mansion”, “hotel”, “building”, etc.” Since other words impact the meaning of “house,” no final meaning is ever achieved—there is always going to be a gap—or a circle / meaning travels around it, a semantic ouroboros and words link, ultimately, only to each other.
So that’s différance. What then is similitude and iconology? Where grammatology is the study of writing, iconology is the study of imagery; and where difference is the leavening agent with respect to meaning production in text, similarity/ resemblance is the yeast which enables visual communication. Similitude is also the source of Mitchell’s insistence that text and image are both forms of representation and not merely in opposition to each other. He says, in a footnote:
I will employ the typographic convention of the slash to designate “image/text” as a problematic gap, cleavage, or rupture in representation. The term “imagetext” designates composite, synthetic works (or concepts) that combine image and text. “Image-text,” with a hyphen, designates relations of the visual and verbal.
What it seems to me is that différance is an aspect of image/text and what Mitchell is trying to do is move to a place more inclusive of the work done by representation. Hence the focus on similitude. But what of the passage that starts, “if writing is the medium of absence and artifice…”?
To address this is as simple as reflecting on the choice of conceptual mirror in the chapter. William Blake and his text+images and typography are both the conceptual bearers and the narrators of meaning. It is perhaps easiest seen in the last section that is devoted to Blake’s type. It is, first of all, a hand-produced, repeated pattern (hand drawn on copper plate for reproduction). That is, by being both event and machine, Blake’s type straddles the différance gap. One example Mitchell uses is the script that creates the word “marriage.” It was
inscribed in flowing engraver’s calligraphy, and the tails of the letters merge with the vegetative forms in the pictured scene, Blake literally embodies in the calligraphic form of “marriage the symbolic marriage that his “types” prefigure in the text of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
By doing this Blake draws in our other senses, declares text as integral to the world and reaches a place where senses create an experience rather than a loosely jumbled set of different sensations. In Mitchell’s words, “Blake wants a writing that will make us see with our ears and hear with our eyes because he wants to transform us into revolutionary readers, to deliver us from the notion that history is a closed book to be taken in one sense.” That is, meaning is not either of the eye nor of the ear. Meaning is of the senses wound together into that of which the hand is capable.
As for that last sentence—How do we say who we see, and how can we make the reader see? That’s the question, yes? My specific iteration of it is how to make the reader see sound. Don’t know yet, may never know, but nevertheless, I will keep struggling to find a form that allows for it. Rock on Blake!
July 30th, 2010
Jung’s Red Book and the instinct for the sacred
I recently purchased The Red Book. As you probably know it is the reproduction of Carl Jung’s most personal work on what he calls the collective unconscious. The book is astoundingly beautiful. It is full of illuminations and calligraphic text. I know this despite the fact that I have yet to open the cover.
I may have reservations about Jung’s theories and the concept of humanity that results but I nevertheless feel a sense of reverence for The Red Book. Partly it is the sheer beauty of the drawings. When its publication was announced and I went surfing looking for material on it, deciding whether I would buy a copy, I stumbled across a few example illustrations. From the first I knew I was going to drop the (then) $200.
So I did. The day it came I was home ill. During one of my breaks between waves of pain, I went up to the front yard with the dog and found that UPS had been. I found the package (huge) propped up in the open laundry room. When the dog was done we all went inside.
I sat down with the box and just held it for a while. I knew what it was and I was kind of awed at its heft. Bodes well for the interior heft I am currently seeking, I thought.
I got the scissors and opened the outer box only to find a slightly smaller inner box that was free of markings. An indiscript brown package.
Jung’s work, as is true of many of today’s magicians and alchemists, roots in and through the mythic imagination. There’s usually no question when you’ve found yourself connected to the master narratives: hackles, goosebumps, shivers and other bodily signposts shudder into awareness.
What I felt holding the blank brown box were the trembling fingers of the great silence, the inhuman void that I have always known as the wyrd. When I feel that prickle, I take it as bodily recognition of something potentially and powerfully connective. I got a quick sense of a new aspen sucker wiggling above ground and beginning the transformation of what had been fundamentally barren ground.
Anyway after a while I opened the inner box and lifted out The Red Book. I just sat and paid attention to what I was feeling. It was immediately clear that I was not going to open the cover. I just stroked it. Reminded myself of Hagrid and his book of monsters, but that is what it felt like. I had just met a new friend, one that I knew I would be able to communicate with and that would, in its turn, communicate with me. I knew that I had met something fundamentally non-human and I was glad to get the chance to share space.
The power to be momentarily deeply, viscerally aware of sharing space, that’s the sacred thing, the magic that powers transformation. Even though this is a book of a man’s exploration of his inner narratives, symbols, and images, there is a network of dense mythic and narrative root-stuff under what shows and, like the aspen root network, it is longer lasting than the things that grow up into the air from its earthly source. How this works seems of some import, yet the question has not been answered in any satisfactory way. I don’t think archetypes float in some plane any more than I can get behind Potinus’ emanations — but the evolutionary biomechanics of it? Waaaaay to soon to say. Still, mythic magic works on us and if we create a bunch of new narratives to explain it, what of it? Isn’t the creative process what makes being human so much fun?
All these days later I have yet to open the book. I am waiting for my hands to feel like meeting the first page. But despite the physical stillness of the material book, it is already moving around in my cavernous interior. I have, for example, been thinking about what makes this reverence of mine for Jung’s book any different from my recent JW visitor’s reverence for the Bible.
I don’t think there is any real difference, except that I know the red book is a mythic representation of self and she, I’m afraid, thinks the black book is representative of something other than human reality. But all the bodily awareness, the perceptual reactions, the consequent sense of connection, all this is identical.
But wait a minute! I just said that I felt that what lies underneath the red book and provides it’s power to provoke sensory reaction is fundamentally inhuman and yet I am aware that what Jung represents is the human universe (not the larger material one out of which we sprout). The only way I can reconcile the two things (both of which I feel as fundamentally true), is to understand that there are parts of what shape human existence that are essentially non-human.
At the biological level this is easy to see. There are, for example, these fascinating little buggers called mitochondria. They are part of us, we cannot exist without them and neither can much of the rest of life (human or otherwise) on the planet. Yet they are not human. I mean even my finger nail isn’t really human despite the fact that it is part of me, but mitochondria are really not human. (Go read about how they work and their history if you don’t believe me.) So imagine getting a quick peak at the world from the point of view of the mitochondria. What it means to be human doesn’t have any meaning at that level. What it means to be human can only exist at a state of complexity far distinct from that of the lovely mitochondria. The two realms are invisible to each other with respect to meaning. Not that we can’t understand how they work but that is not the same thing at all as describing what it means to be mitochondria. In fact, that last bit is really a nonsensical phrase.
There are these limits beyond which what it means to be human just has no purchase. Meaning itself begins to dissolve at these margins. Sacred objects, poems, mythic narratives are those that allow us to approach the limits of intelligibility and experience for ourselves where in us the wyrd pushes. That’s what The Red Book is to me, a pathway to the thin outer reaches of the wyrd. It is a bridge to that realm where I experience the fundamental meaningless of the world that supports me and paradoxically, it is by that very experience, that the potency of my power to generate meaning for myself is made evident. At the edge of death, life is the most precious.
So both human and inhuman — when, through the gifts of the evolved brain and body we reach into that dynamo that Jung called the collective unconscious we get zapped by the inhumanity of our origins. Whether through Jung’s “active imagination” or any of the other myriad perceptual techniques, we seem to connect to aspects of ourselves that have a longer evolutionary history than has this current set of properties and skills that we define as “what it means to be human.” The contact of realms is always electric and if one is the studious type, sometimes transformative.
Contemporary alchemy. The transformation of awareness. That’s what Jung offers and make no mistake, this capacity humans have to make meaning out of drawings and words is our most sacred magic. The bodily shiver that comes with the contact with the other, even if the other is actually as aspect of self, that’s the instinct for the sacred. And one day, soon probably, I’ll get to open the cover and step across the threshold to the meeting ground.
Cool.
July 15th, 2010
Balm
This video is called Small Pleasures. It’s lovely. The narrator’s voice alone is like a warm bath.
via Wimp
July 2nd, 2010
Phenomenology, poetry and sense – part 2
If you remember, the idea is that phenomenology is using the language in ways that confuse some (most?) readers and, hence, contribute to the accusations of meaninglessness. I want to see if, by approaching words individually, I can come to understand what Gadamer and his compatriots experience when reading poetry.
Here again is the sentence from part 1 of this post:
Imagine things freeing themselves from the meaningful, becoming, not meaningless, but anarchic and non-identical.
(Gadamer on Celan Introduction by Gerald L. Bruns)
One important word in the sentence is “thing.”
Dictionary.com defines “thing.”
thing
–noun
1.a material object without life or consciousness; an inanimateobject.2.some entity, object, or creature that is not or cannot bespecifically designated or precisely described: The stick had abrass thing on it.3.anything that is or may become an object of thought: thingsof the spirit.4.things, matters; affairs: Things are going well now.5.a fact, circumstance, or state of affairs: It is a curious thing.6.an action, deed, event, or performance: to do great things;His death was a horrible thing.7.a particular, respect, or detail: perfect in all things.8.aim; objective: The thing is to reach this line with the ball.10.things,a.implements, utensils, or other articles for service: I’llwash the breakfast things.b.personal possessions or belongings: Pack your things andgo!12.a living being or creature: His baby’s a cute little thing.
I’ve cut some aspects of the definition out but this is enough to see two basic attributes of the word “thing.” The first is that it is a complicated word with many shades of meaning. The second is that even when “thing” refers to a life-form (item 12), it nevertheless refers to an object, in this case the baby. “Thing” in English refers very much to the objective world. Definitions 1 through 3 are the most common ways in which we understand something referred to as a “thing.”
The intensity of “thing”‘s meaning baggage is evident when we discuss animals we love. Technically a beloved pet is a thing. To be correct in English I would say “It ate its dinner already.” I don’t of course. I say “She already ate.” Calling someone an “it” is dehumanizing and quite insulting. That’s one reason I usually refer to the divine mythological “father” as “it” and not as “he.” “Are you telling me it killed all life on earth ’cause it was upset at the morals it gave us? Radical, dude.” Insulting, even without the obvious sarcasm. Using “it” for a life form impels disdain into the sentence. It implies an existence as an object as opposed to an existence as a subject.
Yet when Bruns speaks about “thing” in his introduction to Gadamer on Celan this isn’t what he means at all.
The following are from pages 20, 23 and 24 of Gadamer on Celan.
Something is thing-like if it is outside the alternatives of subject and object.
A thing is “set apart, elsewhere, outside not what we have made our own but that which is self-standing and alone…”
Things are strange when they are no longer “subject to our concepts and categories, when they escape us.”
The conceptual device that is subject/object gives meaning to “thing” in its normal use, and it is what Bruns and other phenomenologists are trying to get out from behind. “Things” are radically not-human in the sense that they are outside the limits our language/concepts place on the world. That is, there is an apple that is the concept of “apple” pointing to the world object that tastes lovely with a bit of cheese and then there is the world thing which fundamentally is not captured by the word “apple.” This world-thing is what is outside the world as seen through the lens of the subject/object conceptual framework. Ceci n’est pas une pipe.
So what is outside the concept of subject/object and can we understand it?
The best I can do at the moment is provide what I think is an example of such “outsideness” in action. Most people have had the experience of staring at a word they have used for most of their lives and then suddenly the word is alien, strange. Watermelon, for example. Normally it is only a signifier of that heavy, sweet, green skinned fruit synonymous with summer. The word is transparent or instrumental to what it signifies. The word in itself disappears into the world of what it points to. But sometimes there is that odd thing that happens and suddenly, the word fractures. W A T E R M – E L O Π bursts apart and the letters, the shapes, the history if its existence comes to the forefront and what it signifies has to share the stage with its carrier. Odd feelings are triggered when this happens. Meaning surfaces, but not linguistic meaning. That is, older, pre-linguistic sources of meaning close in on awareness. This kind of “meaning” moves in us like whales just below the surface of the ocean’s skin.
Poetry makes a habit of trying to make this feeling happen. It tries to make language visible again, tries to trigger these bodily, non-conceptual sources of meaning. So one of the things I am being asked to do when reading Gadamer, Celan or Bruns is to feel for the world-object, but further, I am being asked to see words as “things” themselves. Personally I find the first request much simpler than the second. The implication of the words as “things” in Bruns’ sense is that they have an existence in the world apart from humanity. Perhaps as memes exist? Not sure yet.
July 1st, 2010
Phenomenology, poetry and sense – part 1
Here is a sentence:
Imagine things freeing themselves from the meaningful, becoming, not meaningless, but anarchic and non-identical.
This is from a book called Gadamer and Celan “Who Am I and Who Are You?” and Other Essays. Page 20 if you want to look it up.
Does it make sense?
It’s no good that howl of incomprehension. It bears little weight especially if the ‘plaint is something that comes from the singular,”it means nothing to me therefore it has no meaning.”
More sturdy is the hundred-voice howl. L’élégance du hérisson: what? The mulitudes complaining about the incomprehensibility of this sequence of letters bears some scrutiny. But if the examination shows that the complainers are all non French speakers then a different kind of examination is required. It’s not that “l’élégance du hérisson” is meaningless, it’s that it is meaningless in this situation. What needs to be studied is not the letter combination and its claim to meaning but, amongst other things, the limitations of the assessors’ assumptions about the nature of meaning.
Still, the fact that most howlers against phenomenology appear to be kin to our non-French judges does not mean phenomenology is in fact sensible in any way other than the one in which Rorschach blots are sensible.
So does the sentence I started with mean anything? Of course it must since the author who wrote it is no dummy, and if nothing else, it means something to M. Bruns. Yet, so what. If it doesn’t mean anything to you (and it didn’t to me either) then what to do about it? Here’s the thing: it might be more profitable to assume that Bruns is speaking a language you only think you recognize. The only other option is to close the book, but then communication cannot occur and I prefer understanding, even if it comes at the cost of learning a new “language” – something at which I do not excel.
I think the key to understanding Phenomenology in some way that goes beyond the individual psychology and cultural orientation of its practitioners is learning to re-encode the words we think we understand. For example, what does “thing” actually mean to Brun? That sort of re-engagement is what I propose to attempt on my own behalf.
The question about whether Phenomenology has a “language” of its own is something I want to answer because the poet in me is attracted to sentences like “Imagine things freeing themselves.” Yet I am sceptical. I mean, really, things “freeing” themselves? How can one understand that in a way that doesn’t provide “mind” to “things” and thereby cast the universe in the image-shadow of all that is human?
So, more on this in these pages as time goes by. I am on a quest.
June 26th, 2010
Dreams and bodily prophecy
A short while ago I had a dream that prophesied some potential problems to come. And what’s true is that one of those “whales” from the dream smacked me nearly senseless as it went by only a few days after I had the dream. I won’t bore you with the details, but what may be of interest is how I cope with such things as “prophecy” given my atheism.
I know enough to realize that while dream images may be random firings of the brain, so, essentially is much else we experience. The point is what the brain does with those electrical and chemical impulses not just how they originate. There are many theories about how we achieve meaning and while many are interesting, I lean toward embodied cognition. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines embodied cognition this way:
The general theory contends that cognitive processes develop when a tightly coupled system emerges from real-time, goal-directed interactions between organisms and their environment; the nature of these interactions influences the formation and further specifies the nature of the developing cognitive capacities.
In other words, as Wittgenstein said, “The human body is the best picture of the human soul.”
(I would add another phrase to make it: “The human body (as it comes to be through trying to accomplish things in the world) is the best picture of the human soul. Not as catchy of course, but more accurate.)
This idea is where I begin thinking about how dreams accomplish meaning. Because language and concepts are so blazingly important in our recent development, they drown out much of our older forms of communication. Things like “my skin is crawling” or “my gut tells me no” are messages now largely consigned to the realm of spirit and intuition. They have become all but inaudible in the time it has taken to move from Erectus to Sapiens. We have developed technologies to listen for those “messages” – meditation and the like – and now, given our conceptual dependence, we create stories to explain their origins. Since those zaps of insight often feel as if they are not like us (i.e. rational and conceptual), those “communications” are often thought to originate in the outside-us — in the spiritual world. I understand the impulse to consign the conceptually unknown to outside-us but I think it unnecessary to posit another world when our own will do as an explanation.
Our bodies, living and developing in the world provides enough of an explanatory net. Where do dreams come from? The bodily (non-conceptual) systems as they co-develop with the larger set of (non-conceptual) environmental systems.
The body is the model (think of it as a biological non-conceptual framework) which guides the activity of organizing those random impulses into meaningful episodes. Impulses fired because of events in the body in interaction with its environment, are organized into packets based on past experiences. Like rain flowing down a dry stream bed, where a particular rain drop falls may be random, but the pattern the water creates as it moves across the earth is not. Because those body/brain firings originate and are released into a fairly tightly organized set of pathways, many of which result in (and have been caused by) meaning construction of the waking mind, it seems silly to assume that dreams would not have just as much meaning potential as other waking mental events.