First time of writing, of posting, for a long while.
I had the thought of a laptop with just Ulysses on it. A place where I only came to write.
I thought also of the process of writing. How it is like the conscious recording of the journey of a boat setting out onto a lake. One push, two push and jump in. And the wind catches it and carries it. Then writing down the thoughts that rise up from the surface of the experience of the moment. A moment is the stretching out of the expanse that is the single field of my perception and the landscape of what is perceived.
I am conscious of the cherry blossom trees, several of them standing in the gardens marked by the old flint walls between me, my bedroom window and the Barbican. Every day this past week, even the end of the one before, I have been aware of them coming into bloom, but at different times. The one nearest is still in its winter darkness. The one just beyond is now becoming heavy in it’s whitey-pink. The one at the far end of the allotment, beyond my other garden, invisible to me now, is in my memory, somewhere between the other two, a dusting of whiteness, some distance off. It is the 25th of February. This is important. I have gone through my life consistently failing to record when things in nature happen. It doesn’t matter that much but I struggle to be involved in the conversations that go, “things are early this year”, or late, because I never marked what time things have happened in previous years. I have a casual envy for those who do!
Out on the lake, heading over there now, I track back to a thought of some minutes ago, before I started to write.
The trees sensing my house, my weaver’s window, me sitting in my bed. It is not sight, but some sort of knowing. The distant whitey-pink tree knows the dark terracotta tiled house just beyond it. Everything is presencing, one to another. And the presence and the presencing are in the spaces between, with a thick palpable viscosity of sense, not of matter.
What if we do that? If we wrap the field of sensation and perception in the vocabulary of physicality? What stands forth then? What becomes perceptible that is normally unconscious to us?
Let air be my tutor. My guide in learning an awareness, a sensibility, to what is not ordinarily present in my perception.
There is the see-er, and the seen. There is also the seeing. We normally privilege the see-er and the seen, what happens if we privilege the seeing. Firstly, the verb of it, the happening of it. And then the field of it, the dimension, the space, between the seer and the seen. And lastly, the felt sense of it, the palpable presence of the “physicality of seeing”.
And I went to write, “and with all the other senses too”. But I am not qualified to say that. I have not given enough attention to whether it is the same with hearing and touch. And do they actually shift my perception of sight? There is no “space between” with touch. Suddenly I wonder about sensing seeing in the same way as touch. Is there “space between” in the receptivity of soft eyes? What would it be to touch with our sight? And is hearing a specialised form of touch? The movement of the heard against the hearer, through the sway of air?
Photo by Patrick Shaun on Unsplash
