Sink, Swim, Sense

Northrop Frye in By Liberal Things [his address upon his installation as Principal of Victoria College, 1959] invites us to contemplate the ingrainedness of practice. It rehearses for me the triple notions of immersion, acculturation and perception.

The kind of memory the university is interested in and tries to develop is practice memory, the skill and knowledge developed by constant application, the steady repetition that goes on in the unconscious, teaching us, as the proverb says, to skate in summer and swim in winter.

The seasonal antithesis calls to mind another.

Prior to a performance of Porch View Dances, following an acknowledgement of traditional territories and ancestral lands by Jim Adams, I witnessed [t]his invitation to the dérèglement des sens [I paraphrase from memory ommiting the pronominal references to "you" (implied as they are in the imperative mood of the verbs) and not wanting to trip up the euphony of the medial anaphora of the repeated preposition "with" so important to a world view where "all my relations" count].

hear with eyes
see with ears
feel with head
think with heart

Perfect advice for entering an aesthetic time and space. Practice.

And so for day 2184
05.12.2012

Setting Up the Punchline

"Playing against Type" by Doug Gibson - review of Gutenberg's Fingerprint: Paper, Pixels and the Lasting Impression of Books by Merilyn Simonds

The final section of the book allows Merilyn Simonds, the early adopter, to predict where books are going. She notes that readers are now "encouraged to explore and engage with the text. The reader's role is no longer passive, it is active, even though he or she can't actually affect the outcome."

The latest catchphrase-which may well be obsolete before this book is printed-is "augmented reality," or AR: virtual images laid over real ones to create an "augmented" display. AR integrates graphics, sounds, touch (haptics), and smell into a real-world environment, blurring the line between the actual and the computer-generated.

"Smell." Really? Hold that unlikely thought.

The key phrase here, I think, is "which may well be obsolete before this book is printed." Certainly, anyone reading this book to learn about the future of reading will find that while Merilyn Simonds's book raises many questions, it is too sensible to produce many confident predictions. Although it is notable that she has put a lot of time and effort in turning her out-of-print paper books into digital e-books.

A final detail, one that Bob Gottlieb [American editor and publisher] would like: the endpapers for the precious little book are specially created, with the help of the artist Emily Cook, from paper whose fibre comes from daylilies picked from Merilyn Simonds's garden. In discussing this process, Merilyn the Essayist tells us that way back, about 1780, Matthias Koops in London decided that for printing books, paper made from straw would be ideal. Nicholas Basbanes, in his 2013 book, On Paper: The Everything of Its Two-Thousand-Year History (published by Gottlieb's old company, Knopf) writes about handling a book based on straw. After more than 200 years, the paper still held "the agreeable aroma-of fresh-cut grass."

Worth holding the thought to catch that whiff.

And so for day 1961
26.04.2012

Veering on the Verge

The analogy of the blind person orienting herself in space can have a bearing on the many ways our cognitive mapping works: by bumps and starts. I invite readers to make the leap to via this excerpt from Alexandra Horowitz On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes.

So here I committed a cardinal walking-with-the-blind sin: I tried to guide her. I reached out, about to grab Gordon's arm to prevent this inevitable progress into the wall. Barely restraining myself, I managed to plainly offer, "Um, you're swerving to your left quite a bit. You've about a quarter of the sidewalk left before..."

Gordon was unfazed. "If I go too far, I'll hit the building. But I know where I am."

I couldn't be convinced. "... And now you're pretty close to hitting the side of the building..."

She stopped and seemed to look at me steadily, then resumed walking. True to her word, she went ahead and banged right into the building with her cane. Gordon's cane tapped a quick pattern on the wall and sidewalk, a perfunctory petting of an unbeloved animal. Then she smoothly righted herself, turning just enough to take a path parallel to the building's line.

Gordon had deliberately veered, I realized, in order to get a reference point. Out of the sea of the middle of the sidewalk, she headed for something tangible that could give her her bearings.

I was at least in good company in my overweening desire to help her avoid bodily injury. People grab her all the time as she approaches buildings, Gordon said. But they, and I, were simply not seeing how she was seeing the space. She was aiming to run into the building, not trying to avoid it.

"It's not an obstacle at all, is it?" I asked. "It's something you're using to navigate the space."

"Exactly." Gordon smiled, continuing on a perefectly parallel course.

I am careful not to suggest that each and every member of a group or collective adopt the blind pose. I want to point here that Horowitz's recounting has two people which serves as a reminder that as a collective enterprise research needs its blind (expert) and its naive guides: it's how the group can orient and reorient itself — different ways of embracing obstacles.

And so for day 1169
24.02.2010

Last of the Lost

Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin quotes extensively from Doctor Richerand's New Elements of Physiology on the order in which the senses shut down upon the approach of death.

Memory is extinguished next. The dying man, who in his delirium could still recognize those who approached his bedside, now fails to recognize his closest friends and members of his own family. Finally he ceases to feel; but his senses fail in a definite order: taste and smell give no further sign of their existence; a mist veils his eyes, which assume a sinister expression; but his ear remains sensitive to sound. This is doubtless why the ancients, to make sure that life was extinct, used to shout into the ear of the deceased. When the dying man can no longer smell, taste, see, or hear, there remains the sensation of touch, and he stirs restlessly in his bed, stretching out his arms, and constantly changing his position; he makes movements, as we have already remarked, analogous to those of the foetus in its mother's womb. Death is about to strike, but it cannot frighten him, for he has no more ideas; and he finishes life as he began it, unconsciously.

Trans. Anne Drayton The Philosopher in the Kitchen.

Makes one believe that the fulness of eros resides in triggering all one's senses together much like eating with one's fingers.

And so for day 925
25.06.2009

A Winter Letter

Out of the rebounding border of an ecstatic flight came/comes a letter.

There is this gorgeous beginning about snow:

The snow continues to fall, muffling the tones of shoveling and of cars struggling. Despite the overcast sky, the whiteness blanketing roofs, alleys, walks, lawns and gardens, pitches against the eye, a tingling glare. Muted with sharpness.

which then leads to some brief remarks on minimalism ("Minimalism is not simply for healing: minimalism can anneal"); some sentences about a mutual friend in ICU who is a scholar of Heidegger; and then a reading of a passage from What is called thinking? Then! There is an odd ejaculation in the midst of explicating a quotation from Heidegger: "Hands off my orgasm!" which begins to make sense if the reader carries over the previous statement about perception and sensation "where it becomes possible to admit I cannot see and there is no shame in not seeing, hearing, sensing". Our writer has imitated well the ecstatic moment and wishes to preserve it.

http://homes.chass.utoronto.ca/~lachance/letters/fadi_heidegger.htm

It, the letter, is in essence an extended objection to the contention promoted by Heidegger "You cannot talk of colors to the blind." And in a way too dares the reader to think about nothing but.

Years after the 2003 letter, I am prompted to reread it by what I read in an article by Cynthia Macdonald "A Shift in Perception" that

neuroscientists have discovered that there is much more crosstalk among the senses than we ever imagined before

Some of us have been imagining for a long time. Researchers at UC Berkeley are in the process of investigating synesthesia and mania.

And so for day 845
06.04.2009