peter nesteruk (home page:
contents and index)
A Question of
Being Human (9)
Whole/hole:
(Room/Architecture)
A
hole punched into reality. Already imagining its wholeness; reality its lining;
the imagining of its wholeness. The otherness of everything but the self at its
centre. The welling up (from out) of the hole of the self; become the whole of
the self… Pictured, become an illusory whole (incorporating elements lining or
supporting the hole). A hole opening onto matter, onto what matters. And as
‘this’ is all we have, to call it ‘matter’ is immaterial, it is what (our)
space is paved with (certainly it is what matters). A whole opening as
ourselves, walls with cavity, with space within… our illusion, part visual,
requiring a space within the lining (for there to be a lining there must be a
space…). But also fundamental; constitutive beyond personification. The sense
of a room.
(The question, whose room, leading us to the
answer, ‘genius loci’, the spirit of the place, a personification, our
projection, so… our room, we haunt ourselves, in the space we occupy as much as
in the spaces we experience and project. …foremost amongst them, the sense of a
‘room’.)
.
So
of space in general, of our experience of space as such (and not only place) as
our room (perceived as such only by ourselves – often anthropomorphized,
personified as a, more or less pantheistic, deity).
Extensions
of the room (reaching across ‘the room’). In the case of a ‘feature’ such as a
mountain, it is the place that we revere, or, perhaps more precisely, the view
of such, that we revere (that we look up to…). The distance vision (or ‘the
vision’) traverses en route to the focal point, intuited as ourselves, so
offering beginning and end (of the journey of the image), self and object,
either pole, both ends of perception, both sides, all the walls of perception,
enclosing… the space between -the ‘empty distance’- as the room of this
experience of a feature… The
vastness of the room so constituting our experience of the sublime. Extended,
but recognisably the space of a room, the sense of a room… the ‘walls of
perception’. So be it sacred lake (sacred valley) or sacred mountain (or some
other feature), all increase in value with distance, with the space they
bridge, accrue meaning in order to be themselves, to provide the view: to make
of the feature, a feature, permit its being seen as such; the sense of bridge
as special because of this joining, because actualizing this distance… unifying
the sides, subject and object bridged… bridged by their gulf, the gulf between
them – bridged by space. Our intentionality (and our imagination) throws a line
to the other side. The other wall of the room. And so space becomes place. The
‘distance’ itself, finally is not quantitative, but qualitative; it fills,
resounds from the walls of our place. ‘Place’ writ large, is but the whole of
our world. As the whole of our experience may be invested in value – made
sacred.
Personification,
genius loci, is a fundamentally
second person experience, a projection, metaphoric, producing a sense of ‘you’?
Beyond it, or the he/she of third person… for our experience of a ‘place’, if
intense, is (like) that of being faced with, in the presence of (sensing) a
person, in a kind of communication with that person, as such… (an awareness of
the other as in some way the same; as described by Buber and Levinas). It is
the intense ‘You’ of ‘place’ which gives it the characteristics, and rights, of
another human being, of human beings as valuable, so as something worth saving
(it seems we must confer sacrality of some sort onto things in order to
motivate ourselves to protect them) or in the sublime sense, as terrifying.
(Imagining a place or rock as a deity is one thing, third person, but to
communicate with such … to enter into a second person relation… to commune with
such - that is unthinkable. We flee this impossible thought, it is the root of
the Sublime, of our blind terror at even the touch of this thought…).
Room.
Whence the favourite trope in imagining our spaces, our types of space… as we
project our basic experience of ‘this’ (there being no ‘that’ – unless ‘that’
of second order or indirect, reported, told, experience) onto parts of ‘this’
(our experience) finding in those parts a home from our home, a home for our
home, a room divided between the homely, of our desire to make our environment
homely, safe and secure, and our apperception of greater powers, inimical
forces, to pacify, accommodate, understand (via personification, reason,
science). Including perhaps those forces which appear as if, or as representing
(our fear of), us at our worst… so requiring cure, sacrifice, the making of our
‘better’ self. In architecture too… a home, an environment to be ‘at home in’. A
better world. ‘This’, our fundamental opening, from which all others gain their
allure and terror, threat and promise… an opening onto an opening, cut onto a
space - a ‘room’ we will carry around with us for the rest of our lives (and
which will cease to be only with our death).
Senses/orders
of experience. Showing/telling (mimesis/diegesis); narrative versions of direct
and indirect (speech, the experience of), of learnt or communicated experience
as transmitted by the word, oral, heard (overheard) or read (already vision,
prompting the voice within). Or as vision, mimetic always (when not ‘reduced’
to writing) whether direct or mediated by recording or other technology.
Hearing also may of course be direct or recorded, technologically transmitted (the
other senses, smell, balance or touch are either implied, or rarely and with
difficulty recorded and transmitted – usually found described indirectly
through the word, read or recounted, heard - often not only indirect but with
no origin except mimetic, as the imitation of experience which is fictive… so
already a translation).
Dominated
as we are by our sense of vision… How different to the other senses (when
imagined as the main form of organization of incoming information… into a
whole). Sound (intensity, repetitions and rhythms, proximity, toward/away and
including the Doppler Effect… re-vibration as indicating degree and kind of
enclosure). Smell (intensities, towards/away and fading (built in)). Touch
(zero/sum, pressure as intensity, mode of caress, repetition and rhythms, from
patterns to Braille, language in touch as we are used to it in sound and
sight). Balance (zero/sum; sense of uprightness, verticality, in part defined
by our (visual) experience of its opposite, horizontality, the horizon – if we
can see it: by the horizontals of the built environment if we can not…). All
organized by some sense of proximity, and by the (self-preservatory) perception
of a movement towards or away from the self. Even balance, the proximity to the
floor, implying an equidistance to the horizontal and a (largely pre-conscious)
alignment with gravity… our embedded verticality – life as a standing creature
(even when we sit, and by so doing reduce the giddying distance from the
ground). With the possible exception of touch (wind, pressure) all map a space,
better a surround… not with walls, but with movements, densities, around and
centering on ones self, again suggesting that self (its place, the centre of
perception). The centre of the world, in the middle of something again… a room
without walls; porous, fluid horizons, or limits… fading as (defining distance
from the) outer rim (where perception vanishes, its non-visual vanishing
point), so configuring intensity as proximity… extensions as movement away from
our self centre… like radar or sonar… (A sensitivity to gender issues generally
involves noting the gendering of the senses; masculinity often involves
metaphors originating in visuality and extension, femininity polemically draws
on metaphors of touch (Irigaray)).
Our
intentionality: amplifying portions of our experience, a ball bouncing of the
walls of the room of the self… and of the self; there and there and … here (or
whatever it is (whoever it is)) that covers the hole in the wall which permits
us to peer in (the whole of the self) looking in from … outside? And behind
us…? The ‘blind spot’ that prevents
us from being conscious of what it is that makes us conscious, the blind spot
in every theory (and artificial language, not least, logic) that covers the place
where it joins on to, is supported by, another realm, other levels, invisible,
or self-contradictory as ‘seen’, experienced, from within, imaginable only from
‘without’, a fictional position, but necessary, one of our very many necessary
fictions. ‘After all’…
s
(We
are like…) A pinhole camera where we are the place of the hole, the place of
the passage of light… (the hole of the self) a moment of passage… moment of the
eternal present, the whole of the self (together with our self-knowledge, our
self-recognition, so many rites of passage, so many positions taken up in the
nexus of forces that is the place of the pinhole, held up, held aloft, held
together, experiencing, as by a web of magnetic forces). If recognition is the
gift/curse, medicine/poison of the social in the self (of the self as self, as
self before others, including itself) then ritual is the shoring-up it so
painfully and persistently demands. Repetition as nurture; persistence as
identity. Identity as our room.
We are part of everything
whether we like it or not: everything (we experience) is a part of us, whether
we like it or not. We may devalue this experience; but the gift of identity it
offers us would imply a return of gift as its protection (a better definition
of the word ’care’). A debt that should appeal to our self-interest, it is a part
of our self that we succour when we pay this debt. And we must live with the
results. The makeover we offer our room is also constitutive of ourselves.
Copyright Peter Nesteruk,
2012