start with any kind of pause
July 14, 2011jack layton, the giving body, the anatomy of empathy, the fire, the light
August 27, 2011Dreaming of an origin to existence: rising to wakefulness from sleep. A fetus to the new day invites a parade of revelations: a point, a moving point, a length, laterality, longitude. A muscle opens as its antagonist contracts, the seam of the eyelids flutters, forms glint, warmth down here, cold air on the upper shoulder.
The first thought, a tiny wind, is mental vocalese, a series of long vowels opened into through mm or nn, to mimic the breath and the chiff of sensory doors opening. What is the sound of the eyes recognizing form? What is the colour of an ambient breeze?
After several moments thought focuses in concert with groundless identifications: window, floor, temperature, quality of light, a spiral of coalescences into here I am. The focus of consciousness into the personal follows the sensory groundwork. The world is here before I am. Self-awareness and its considerations follow the quiet torrent of sensation.
But I have been schooled both externally and internally to believe that I preceded the sensations of being in this world, that I, pre-existent to the sensations over which I then claim ownership, came from somewhere else to discover what this world is, and, in my discovery of the world, gave it its real value. Self-awareness arrives on the scene as the last player, and then stakes a claim to what preceded it. Things become owned: my environment, my senses, my relationship. And so, subtly, I steal the world from you. The highest work is to give it back.
Self-awareness colonizes the senses, others, the world. It usurps the nervous system, which arises from milk and broth, berries and kale, and pine nuts. It reflexively says I am made from other stuff, something permanent, inorganic. I have no process, I am larger than all processes. Self-awareness invents the soul.
Sensory life plays host to the parasite of self-awareness. Self-awareness plays host to the parasite of a larger self: an abstract god.
But the bread rose overnight. I smelled it. My nose now, to the dirt.