(no subject)
Feb. 28th, 2010 02:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoceptionOne of the best things in Proust
One of the best things in his book/as remembered by me/read so long ago is on the first page--his talking about a woman in his dream being created out of, what was it, pressure felt in his own leg. We're usually just cognizant of the world pressing in on us on one side at once. Stands to reason that when some part of our mind sets out to give a felt reality to some figment of its own it uses one of those bodily sensations that quiver like mercury--that are pressed on from, therefore press back towards, all directions, and therefore form not a solid but what a solid in itself, and not just as an imposition on our senses, might be like. Or even what a consciousness not our own would be like. In moments of great but slightly sleepy certainty or art-derived awe I get this with parts of my skull or head, probably most often with jaw tension (always about to both close and open, the mind's jaw has the same pushy claim as a real thing). With a way I hold my teeth, say, where they're both an outer part of me and a first grouping of the object world that goes out so far. It takes the limit away: the walls, trees, everything nearby seems made of tooth. Nothing is enameled or anything ridiculous like that, but what my teeth feel like to me, that real presence, is plausibly projected onto them--a similar feeling is imagined backing every surface, packing every ounce. I'm explaining this terribly enough that you're ready to swear you don't do this, but I think you must do something like it now and then. Our mind touches our foot touches the floor touches the ground touches everything on the planet, all the items on its table, all the out beyond. The recognition I give my foot just soaks out further, at these times.
It's an interesting contrast to certain ways the world can become terrible--like if you haven't slept and are down and out outside among dirty nasty iced surfaces in late February well, well below freezing and with skin exposed. The world's a lot of rusty, chalky scraping knives and the wall's down between you then too, but the wrong way. You're not sympathizing out to it, it's screaming into you, like you woke up and found out in your sleep your bones had been surgically replaced by a cinder block wall you're now part of. I wonder if that's through the teeth, largely, too--chattering, the dead parts crush at the live ones, the roots.
With the good way not just the world you see gets filled, fleshes out into live theater, no longer just holographic cartoons, in your head aquarium, but what you remember and posit and imagine. Ideas feel sure here, your sense of their reality interlaps with these realizings of your sensations, in a free interpenetration of unharmed, equal states. Only consciousness has that privilege, or the privilege of being able to earn that privilege: not peace, but bloodless conflict won by all. Not everything at once, but some things themselves and together at once, if things are still things when inside one another. Is it a lie? You continue into the world at those times--and don't you always, but only now feel it? Perhaps feel it wrong, but at least feel it. And perhaps there are ways to feel it right, to give this weight--or conference of dense inner lightness on weight--in the right proportions, infuse the right ideas in the right objects, fuse the palace universe...
Peace you can find in so many places.
One of the best things in his book/as remembered by me/read so long ago is on the first page--his talking about a woman in his dream being created out of, what was it, pressure felt in his own leg. We're usually just cognizant of the world pressing in on us on one side at once. Stands to reason that when some part of our mind sets out to give a felt reality to some figment of its own it uses one of those bodily sensations that quiver like mercury--that are pressed on from, therefore press back towards, all directions, and therefore form not a solid but what a solid in itself, and not just as an imposition on our senses, might be like. Or even what a consciousness not our own would be like. In moments of great but slightly sleepy certainty or art-derived awe I get this with parts of my skull or head, probably most often with jaw tension (always about to both close and open, the mind's jaw has the same pushy claim as a real thing). With a way I hold my teeth, say, where they're both an outer part of me and a first grouping of the object world that goes out so far. It takes the limit away: the walls, trees, everything nearby seems made of tooth. Nothing is enameled or anything ridiculous like that, but what my teeth feel like to me, that real presence, is plausibly projected onto them--a similar feeling is imagined backing every surface, packing every ounce. I'm explaining this terribly enough that you're ready to swear you don't do this, but I think you must do something like it now and then. Our mind touches our foot touches the floor touches the ground touches everything on the planet, all the items on its table, all the out beyond. The recognition I give my foot just soaks out further, at these times.
It's an interesting contrast to certain ways the world can become terrible--like if you haven't slept and are down and out outside among dirty nasty iced surfaces in late February well, well below freezing and with skin exposed. The world's a lot of rusty, chalky scraping knives and the wall's down between you then too, but the wrong way. You're not sympathizing out to it, it's screaming into you, like you woke up and found out in your sleep your bones had been surgically replaced by a cinder block wall you're now part of. I wonder if that's through the teeth, largely, too--chattering, the dead parts crush at the live ones, the roots.
With the good way not just the world you see gets filled, fleshes out into live theater, no longer just holographic cartoons, in your head aquarium, but what you remember and posit and imagine. Ideas feel sure here, your sense of their reality interlaps with these realizings of your sensations, in a free interpenetration of unharmed, equal states. Only consciousness has that privilege, or the privilege of being able to earn that privilege: not peace, but bloodless conflict won by all. Not everything at once, but some things themselves and together at once, if things are still things when inside one another. Is it a lie? You continue into the world at those times--and don't you always, but only now feel it? Perhaps feel it wrong, but at least feel it. And perhaps there are ways to feel it right, to give this weight--or conference of dense inner lightness on weight--in the right proportions, infuse the right ideas in the right objects, fuse the palace universe...
Peace you can find in so many places.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2010-02-28 04:35 pm (UTC)And I know what you mean, yes, about the way your teeth and the world feel. My experience of this has changed since I've been on medication. I used to have a lot of anxiety in my midsection and the world seemed to approach me from there, but now all of my anxiety seems localized in the hinges of my ankles so that when I see something in the world shaking with some deep energy or something shimmering in the distance I feel it the way I can feel my anxiety in the tapping of my foot.
no subject
Date: 2010-03-01 05:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-01 12:38 am (UTC)Talk about your proximoception.
William James is relevant here, on the experience of willing. And ROger Caillois's great essay, "Mimesis and legendary psychaesthenia." B/c legendary psychaesthenia is what you're talking about.
For me, a certain kind of caffeinated, despairing, focused anxiety tends to take the form of feeling that everything is brittle like frozen wood, the ground and my feet walking on the ground, and my body carried by my legs pounding my hard feet into the hard ground, as though everything were like the tooth-jarring tapping of a stick against the world.
no subject
Date: 2010-03-01 05:53 am (UTC)Frozen wood! I feel so benevolently toward frozen wood. The terrible thing the world becomes, for me, is a rusty icy knife--probably a composite of objects from my past:
1. A horribly rusty crescent remainder of a knife my parents kept around because it's very filed-away, nasty ghostliness was so fine it cut right through anything.
2. A monstrous bigger-than-a-horse-sized icicle that formed every year in the freeway underpass I had to drive under to get anywhere right over where I had to stop for the red light that always caught me, and that was absurdly sharp and twisted and evil and dirty and pointed straight at the middle of the top of my head and no car roof could stop it when it finally fell.