embodied experience

Nov 22 2021

Stone memories

A boy at Stonehenge (photo: David Craig)

A childhood memory revolves around a deeply overcast sky, unhemmed by hills or rooftops, a wind against face and ears, hands resting on a rough, cool stone, the stone gritty under fingers and palm, solid and unyielding, the stone a presence, huge, weighty, lying on its side and long grass growing up around it, the wind setting the grass swaying, the stone unmoved, its surface resting against the small hand resting against it, experiencing its existence. And shortly afterwards, sitting on another fallen stone, under grey clouds, stone hard — the impression of it against thighs, calves, still here, still summonable after so many years. Those physical sensations more vivid than the balance of this memory, facing towards the camera, the man behind the camera, the standing stones behind us, the resulting Polaroid skewing perspective, objectifying stone ring, boy sitting, the fallen rock: at odds with the matrix of remembered sensations, the obvious fact the boy looked into the camera as the father looked out. And pressed the shutter.

In the early 1970s, visitors could freely move around Stonehenge. No fences, no visitor centre, no interpretation boards. Simply the stones, the plain, the weather. And one’s senses and the physical interaction with the stones, the half-dome sky.

A much more recent memory: visiting Wayland’s Smithy. A still September morning. Overcast also but raining, a steady drizzle, neither winter-chilled nor late-summer warm. We get lost searching for the site. Joke we’re being led astray by the faery. The rain patters on a pulled-up hood. It drips from hedgerow and runs between clasped hands. Walking hand-in-hand until, through the trees, the old stones appear. Set within a ring of trees, the rain slackening and fading into silence. Stones arranged into an entrance portal, the mound long gone. Crawling into the tiny burial chamber behind the portal stones. Stone walls brushing against arms, head ducked. Smell of damp earth, rich and cool; smell of stones, enclosed space. Semidarkness, body blocking dim light. Crouched, turning little by little to face out, between the portal stones. Stillness. Drip of water. Stones hard against shoulder, close to crown of head. Hand reaching to rest against speckled rock, aware of hardness, cool, uneven. All these sensations more vivid, more evocative than the photographs taken

from this vantage, looking out of the chamber, as are the physical impressions of walking around the monument, seeing it from each angle, pausing between photographs, slowly returning to niche and portal stones.

Not that it has to be ancient monuments—a house in early evening, summer sun casting this side into shade, uneven paving stones underfoot, a voice, a face seen for the first time, air still and scented by the sea only a short walk away. A meeting that led to walking hand-in-hand in search of Wayland’s Smithy.

Hannah Arendt once said story reveals the meaning inside sensory impressions. Story comes in retrospect, drawn from memories that are themselves drawn from the interactions between the incarnate, feeling-experiencing body-mind and the world in which it finds itself.

The American poet, Jake Skeets, calls this the ‘memory field’, a matrix of place, sensory experience and memory, in which the elements making up the field interact in ways that make it hard to be certain exactly who is acting on whom. From Skeet’s perspective, time is fluid within the memory field. He speaks of that too-easy-to-ignore fact that the light we see from stars is old light, radiated years or millennia ago. Our present is the star’s past, our observation set some time in the star’s future. Place, time and memory interact with a similar disregard for the notions of linear time represented by calendars, timetables and smart technology’s pestering reminders it’s time to go to sleep.

As we’ve considered before: memory is a present thing, not the past tense of literary convention. Just as sensory experience is encountered in the moment, a continuous unfolding now, so our memories return to us in the same way: a small hand resting against a fallen stone at Stonehenge; the same hand, decades older, pressing against the stones of Wayland Smithy. These are together, in the same moment of recall and, in that recall, they are now.

Time becomes layered in memory. Skeets has spoken of visiting the Grand Canyon, of seeing the valley, aware of the place in the moment of sensory experience and, in that same moment, aware of the age of the site, of the millennia needed to carve the gorge out of the sandstone, the passage of weather patterns and days leading up to this now. Likewise, in remembering Stonehenge and Wayland Smithy, not only are decades conjoined into a moment of recall, so the awareness of how long that fallen sarsen must have lain there impresses itself as much as the awareness that once the chamber at Wayland Smithy was enclosed, buried.

Much as the star we see this evening is a star from the past experienced in this present.

Memory is not anchored by time but by place. The writer BS Johnson once stepped into the main hall at Nottingham railway station and was struck by a welter of memories about a very close friend who had lived in Nottingham. The station was a part of those memories (he had come to the city by train to visit his friend) as much as it was the trigger for the memories to return.

The landscapes we inhabit inhabits us, in memory, in story, in the very physical sensation of our experience of them. Landscape in this sense is far from passive — the field that Skeets refers to is both the zone of interaction and the physical field of the landscape itself. There’s no duality in this. Memory and experience don’t divide past from present, external landscape from internal sensation. The notional duality of person and/or place grows less clear the deeper we delve, as does the strict line between past and present: a child who visits Stonehenge always remains linked to that place, carries the sensation of the visit in an ever-afterwards… now.

Nov 06 2021

Stories of experience

A night of broken sleep gives way to sleeplessness. Awake. No going back. Mind on the move, in turmoil. Uncertainty, emotion. Rest-less. Before dawn: twilight heavy grey, still. Alone with anxiety, unfixed. Alone although someone nearby breathes, sleeps: distant, unknowable. Conflicts and circlings, supposings and worries. Thoughts restless, tormenting.

Too much to lie still. Must move.

It is a morning on the cusp of June, sunrise still an hour or more away, hidden beyond grey cloud. All is grey. Shadows limiting vision, unpicking road, trees, footpath, even feet and hands. In daytime: all familiar, all taken for granted, all solid and reliable. In daylight the path is unseen: its existence is assumed from memory, from the way the daytime world works. At this time, liminal, neither of night or of day, the path hardly appears to exist. To walk is to move with caution, requires more than usual trust in the world being consistent and concrete. A trust tested at each step.

The footpath runs through an avenue of trees, tree limbs unpiecing the sky. Emotions cluster, mob: doubts, self-justifications, recriminations, memories retold and recast, futures unwritten and rewritten. Semidarkness. Shadows. Vision limited, unreliable. Sounds: rustlings, scrape of footfall, a branch snapping, trees restive, a faint breeze. Air cool, darkness rendering it grainy. A medium to travel through, the accepted made conscious: another thought in the welter of thought, in the careful placing of each step, balance equivocal because it comes as much from familiarity as from the inner ear. The opportunity to move freely, take for granted and assume, filter out: the reflexive, daily ignoring of all but a very little of immediate environment.

Immediate environment is monochrome: areas of shadow, near black, impenetrable and featureless, largely formless; mid-greys emerging, forms guessed, constructed from hint, memory, a few pale grey highlights. From pausing to squint, peer.

Restlessness gives way to concentration. One step. The next. Air, against forehead, ears, lips, tongue, throat. Exhale. Listening to branch, breeze, the stillness between each footfall. Silence: standing still, breath quiet, not the puff of emotion, body under tension, muscles made to relax, self made to listen. This silence is formed of the sounds of the river, nearby, beyond the trees; of the sounds of the trees, moving; no birds, although something moves, beyond the path, in the undergrowth part-glimpsed, part-assumed. Moves. Makes no further sound.

Trees overhang the path. Path curves. Patch of sky (mid-grey, featureless, no texture, only sky, only grey… gone in a few steps). Embankment to the right (trees, tall). Slope to the left, dropping away (trees, tall on the vergeside), river only a sound. Rising of hills from the opposite bank a memory, an inference (greys, near-blacks, densities, a darkness of its own). Yet: less dark, path wider, clearer to the senses. Going on, steps less cautious. Mind freer to wander. Turmoil distant. Not forgotten but less. No longer acute. Not… present.

Present is: cool air scent and touch, first bird waking, river’s purl and lap, muscles, breath, step, stride, feet against path, path against feet, weight of boots, rustle of clothing, gradual change in light, greys paler, shape and form becoming apparent. The path gains solidity, is no longer an assumption.

Later, sitting on a bench beside the path. Less night than day but not yet day. Grey-on-grey forms; a sense of depth and differentiation. A bat circles unseen: sound of wings, the impression of movement. A bird calls into the silence, to fall silent in turn. Silence: of the body, of the path, trees, long grass hissing, the bench answering to small and unconscious movements, river ceaseless. The almost day. Sitting.

Sitting.

Months later. This event comes to mind and with it the urge to make a story of it. A homily, maybe, about how emotions pass and are not concrete, not like the present, physical moment. A good life lesson. But what is here when the storytelling reflex is resisted? What can be gleaned from the impressions and memories of a small-hours walk?

Narrative realism — the default mode for writing in the Anglosphere — is based on a given: no psychological change, no story. Actually, ‘plot’ is a better term. ‘Plot’ is the direction of the flow of events propelling the reader from the start of a narrative piece (novel, article, documentary programme, feature film…) to its culmination. Plot implies resolution; maybe epiphany, maybe a happy ending, maybe an ending that leaves threads unresolved but nevertheless coincides with a change in the energy and flux of the narrative. Archetypally, a realist narrative will have characters who change during its course. They learn things about themselves, grow, overcome, become fuller. Implicit, even when the narrative remains open, is that life makes sense, or that sense can be made of it.

By our natures, we make stories. We live by stories. It’s how we are.

The beginning-middle-end cycle of narrative realism is ingrained in our culture but the materials such stories are cut from — the stuff of direct, bodily experience — rarely, maybe never, conform to such expectations. The circumstances that spurred this early morning walk weren’t resolved by the walk; no epiphany, only experience. The walk, from a narrative point of view, led nowhere. It simply was. Much of life simply is. Its sensations, like those of the walk, might be used a dozen different ways but they also remain: thus, just so, not the elements of a story at all. Without story, we find instead a sequence of impressions, a series of encounters with the environment in which the walk took place. And without story, the whole thing appears meaningless, an incident unworthy of being written down.

But at the time, even once emotions grew muted, the experience appeared anything other than unworthy. Is this apparent in the writing? Very probably not. Try not to narrativise, try to keep out character in the conventional (realist) sense, and what sediments out is a series of impressions, words and phrases that can only approximate the simultaneity of the lived, sensory body-mind experience. A closer approximation might come from taking a step away from the linguistic into the visual arts. Yet the experience of any moment is a confluence of body and environment, an interactive whole, complex, sometimes subtly so. Not matter the medium, to describe is to unpick and to unpick takes away the very ‘thusness’ of the experience.

What we write, what we read, the paintings we study, the movies we consume: none of them are better than approximations. The stories we base on such experiences, or the description of such experiences, are fabrications in the sense that they are neither recreations for the qualia of the moment-by-moment, nor are they any sort of direct substitute.

Our bodies experience in concert with environment and our body-minds (or, rather, body-mind-environments) can create stories to give direct, carnal experience meaning — to make a verity. We bring meaning to experience — this is who we are as incarnate beings, as beings not observing but intimately participating in our surroundings. In the world.

Narrative realism, with its ambition of ‘illuminating the human condition’, ultimately fails in its task because it confuses approximation with real experience. Realism comforts us: there are explanations, there is sense in things and events, there is a direction to life. In this way, realism is the most unrealistic literary genre, as JG Ballard once said.

That we search for meaning is not a flaw in us. The great 20th Century composer, Elisabeth Lutyens, was fond of saying that the truth should never get in the way of a good story. Lutyens, as raconteur, drew from her direct experience and her anecdotes and tales often conformed to some verity that spoke of a ‘truth’ beyond the mere facts of a day-to-day encounter. Stories can ‘lie’ and tell us verities in the same breath.

Stories drawn from other stories become a cerebral activity that’s attenuated from the world of experience. The novelist who draws most from the descriptions and events found in other novels; the poet who describes a painting only in terms of what’s visible on the canvas: neither is even approximating actual experience. To create stories in this way is to step away from the actual, moment-by-moment ‘thusness’ of being incarnate within an environment. It is to step back from the world and into fantasy. Should writers only write ‘what they know’? Hardly — that would be a different kind of handicap. The imagination feeds on the thusness of being a body-mind in the world. It’s not either-or, always both-and: a relationship and an interchange. As we need experience so we need story; as we understand the world through story, so we understand the story through experience. Verities come in many guises. As many as experience itself.

Oct 26 2021

Wanting only to see and to touch

In his poem ‘Lock-step’, John Barnie wryly observes ‘the disciples of iPhones’ taking endless selfies, lost in the images crowding those tiny screens. As the majority walk to the lock-step of technology and the virtual worlds it conjures, John feels he’s walking in the wrong direction, ‘wanting only to see and to touch’.

There’s a resonance here with John Irving’s The World According to Garp. Garp writes a short story about a man who owns a pair of magic gloves. Wearing them, death cannot touch him and he can do anything he desires. But life lacks meaning as a result — the gloves make it always slightly distant, always out of touch. The man throws away the gloves and death finds him. But in that moment he is truly in contact with life — he sees and touches for the first time and, in the last, his life gains texture and meaning.

From certain gnostic sects to René Descartes’ famous declaration that proof of his existence rested solely upon his mind and his thoughts, there’s a history of turning away from the body and favouring the cerebral. As the exercise craze of CrossFit weirdly echoes the extremities of a Medieval flagellant’s mortification of the flesh so that the spirt might be set free, so our culture’s increasing interaction with the physical world through apps and mobile computing devices mirrors those approaches to mysticism that turn away from the body to search for experience that are pure, immaterial… virtual.

The guitarist, Robert Fripp, has spoken of the difference between an LP or CD recording and a live gig as being like the difference between a love letter and a hot date. The letter brings back memories, even memories of having had strong emotions, but it doesn’t create emotion with the intensity of present, physical, carnal experience. It’s a difference in qualia, the textures and properties of experience that vary in the moment — or the ‘pressant’ as James Joyce calls it in Finnegan’s Wake. As Fripp has also pointed out, no drum roll experienced in the moment has ever swirled mightily around from left ear to right as they so often do in a stereo mix. That’s a conceit, an artificial experience that substitutes for being in the same room as the drummer, sharing the same ‘pressant’. It’s drumming while wearing magic gloves.

Fripp is touching on a theme drawn out further in Zoltán Huszárik’s dazzlingly sensual 1971 film, Szindbád, that it’s in the sensory, in the incarnate and bodily, that we truly anchor ourselves not in the shifting and untrustworthy landscapes of rolling news and social media. Descarte’s philosophical position is undermined by the advance of technology — in a virtual world, in which fantasy vies with direct experience and wins out more often than not, our minds become the worst foundation on which to build anything solid.

In contrast, for the eco-philosopher, David Abram, it’s only when we see and touch the world directly that we’re fully alive, fully human. To live as we are being encouraged to do, through the medium of human-made technology, Abram says, is to forget our past and our origins. If the ingrained notion that humans stand at the apex of creation and evolution would set us apart from the natural world, the truth is our bodies, our senses, our very being has been shaped by and has developed in intimate relation to the same planetary environments and forces as every other creature, plant and landscape feature we see framed in a smartphone’s screen.

Descartes argues that mind is the bedrock of reality, the only certain point in the otherwise uncertain welter of stimuli that constitute the ‘pressant’. There’s a separation here as misleading as the notion that humanity is a species different from all others. What happens when the ‘pressant’ of messages, notifications, news headlines, adverts, phone calls, images, zip-panned videos, clickbait, deadlines, popup events, flash sales, and all the rest reaches overwhelm? We feel anxiety not as an abstract but as a bodily reaction. Muscles tense, breath comes shallow, blood pumps faster, pupils narrow, adrenaline and other chemicals are released. Mind and body respond together. Culture might encourage us in the belief that technology’s mediation keeps the world manageably ‘out there’ but visceral experience argues otherwise.

Likewise, the imagination itself seems protean, boundless and, most importantly, separate from the brain that it haunts, ghost-like and untouchable except through the artefacts it brings into being. But, as David Abram has argued, our imaginations also spring from the body — from our senses, in fact. The taste of a madeline dipped in tea, the smell of a bonfire on an autumn afternoon, the caress of a lover, a child’s laugh: all are as intimately linked to the senses as they are evocative to the imagination. To see and to touch is to imagine.

Cover of a book — John Barnie’s latest collection, A Report to Alpha Centauri

Sometimes, there’s no choice but to listen to a record of a concert, read through old love letters, or wander the streets of a faraway town through the medium of digital images. But to only experience the world in this way — through magic gloves — is to loose a little of ourselves, to forego something vital, visceral, integral to who we are as incarnate beings. The word ‘human’ itself comes from a Latin word meaning ‘earthborn’, a word rooted in older words relating to the ground and to the earth. To want to see and to touch is part of who we are.

embodied experience

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