The landscape thinks itself in me

Consider “our” nonlinear universe as Ilya Prigogine does, far from equilibrium and full of irreversible processes. In such a universe we experience emergent causality, or the precarious process by which new entities and processes sometimes surge into being. What is suggested here is the oscillation between periods of arrest, heightened imbalance and change, and new and imperfect stabilizations. Can we then consider imbalance as a means for disrupting what is stationary, such as the integrated power structures that govern being?

Swimming in a philosophy of immanence, this essay celebrates corporeality, heightened sensation and sensitivity, rather than searching for an abstract experience, that seemingly relieves us of the matter (but does not in fact). While there is more to reality than actuality, the universe is not dependent on a higher power. Rather, consider it like this, all matter is folded and invaginates you.

FOLDING

Imagine that your flesh is but matter folded into the rest of it all. Perhaps simply consider your sensations in relation. Folds as a curvature of matter: ripples, hidden recesses, shadows, secrets. In the continuum of folding, hollows are made and unmade. To consider the folds of flesh is to reflect on a body enveloped in its own environment, the body itself a field, an “emergent, future-oriented but open organization that is immanent to the organism.” (103)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes the folded flesh as a wild being, a “sensuous, visual/tactile, pluri-dimensional flesh, where matter is a fabric coiled over and over in its more material or ethereal layerings and gatherings.” (111) Matter without voids but labyrinths and hallows, “an infinitely porous spongy, or cavernous texture without emptiness” in which each body is “pierced with irregular passages and dependent for its cohesion on the pressure of external forces.” Moving matter replete with an interiority constituted by its folding.

If meaning and matter are irreducibly interwoven in endless folds, how then does sensation and affect emerge from, yet remain enmeshed in, the material world. Let us plunge into the world instead of observing it through a window.

DISGUST

I have a pathological relationship to spit. According to my memory, it began with brushing teeth parties. A nightly routine that involved sharing the single bathroom in my childhood home with my mom. As I brushed my teeth I watched her cavernous mouth, foamy spit dripping down her chin, I became acutely aware of the spit in my mouth and rejected it. Our personal distinctions disintegrated, undoing our borders, disturbing my subjecthood. Fixated on abject spit, my perception developed as intersensory memory folds, suffused with anticipation and anxiety. But perception can change, and does when new, intense encounters overpower old memories and associations.

When you spit in my mouth, slimy, frothy mucous entering through my lips, an alien substance conjoining with my own spit in my porous mouth, I feel sick. Even now as I consider the merging of surfaces, of our slimes, I recoil. But there is also desire, as your spit is a part of you– you which are the totality of all your spit, shit, hair in hair brushes, nail clippings–and I want you in my mouth. In her book, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Sara Ahmed talks about how disgust involves distantiation (recoiling) as well as the possibility of desire as the intensification of bodily contact “disturbs” the skin.

SPACE SEX

And then I had that moment, you know? Or perhaps you don’t, but I described it to you and it was landscapes of real. A “wild-flowering world and mind; a jointing and framing of being’ wherein there is a ‘genesis of sense.” (100) In it, I experience you as you. Fully you. But in a flash, that expands and dissolves. It is a moment of recognition without allusion. And it is you and it is discrete. It is not mine, but between us somewhere. “The depth and perspective that permit visual clarity belong to neither seer nor seen [alone] but unfold where they meet.” (185) All my skin longs for you, hair standing on end, like children waving their arms. Excitement, nervousness. Nerves and only you can satisfy those screaming baby follicles that cover my surface. Impress on me and leave more behind. I ask it of you but not as a question. It’s you and you are real with all of the years that I have not known you. Now, a part of you now, and all of a sudden I can witness it too. Separate from me. Perception at rest.

PAIN

When we lie in bed together, I fall into you. I think we fall into each other and sometimes I am not aware of my body as separate from yours.

One time you made a passing comment about how I don’t ever touch you.

It was hurtful, a moment that was “marked by differences in the very experience of intensities.” (27) I withdrew and became aware of the surface of my own skin, our bodies as separate. Through this intensification of feeling, my surface is impressed upon and it is through the encounter that the “surfaces are felt as being there in the first place.” (24) It is hard to say which happens first: the pain or the withdrawal. I move away from you as if it is your body that is inflicting pain on me, which reconstitutes our bodily space, as the “reorientation of the bodily relation to that which gets attributed as the cause of pain.” I fear that it is your body that has caused me pain.

Pain is lonely. We will never know each other’s pain and furthermore, I will never know my own. However impossible it is to feel the other’s pain, this does not mean that the pain is simply theirs, or that their pain does not concern me. Ahmed introduces “an ethics of responding to pain [that] involves being open to being affected by that which one cannot know or feel.” (30). A moment of understanding: that I cannot know the pain of the other brings with it self-awareness. I realize that my own is ungraspable. If I can share this lack of self-knowledge then it is “in the face of the otherness of my own pain” (31) that I am undone before you, and for you.

Let us rethink the assumption that skin, as a delineation of internal and external, is already there and instead consider it as a surface that is established through impressions that are left in the encounters we have with others. In this sense, it is through experience, or more specifically, as Ahmed proposes, “the intensification of pain sensations, that bodies and worlds materialize and take shape.” (25) If we consider Judith Butler’s concept of materialization as the “effect of boundary, fixity and surface”, it is pain itself that materializes. As pain materializes, a kind of contingent attachment is established that makes an ethics of being with pain very important. An ethics that demands that we act with this obscured knowledge as our reference so as to not appropriate the pain of another as one’s own. Instead, I am moved by what does not belong to me.

The pain that you share with me is an offering. I can experience you with a clarity that comes only from seeing you undone before me, and for me.

IMPRESSIONS

Sometimes, to ease my mind, I inflict pain upon myself so as to comprehend it as my own, as if I can bring the pain to my skin's surface. Consider that pain is not inside of me or you but rather establishes individuals as objects. For it is through pain that individuals are first delineated. The pain circulates, establishing a contingent attachment between objects. Ahmed refers to this as a sociality of pain.

There is left on my skin an impression, but it is not a substitute for the pain that I felt prior to cutting. It is, rather, another intensification of  the feeling.

SUFFERING

When we go many days without seeing each other there is an urgency in sex. I can forget about my body; although after, throbbing pain in my vulva will bring me back to myself. I love getting carried away but when I am  myself again, so to speak, the pain must be bearable. I do not want to abandon my body, for it is when one cannot digest one’s suffering that the body despairs of itself.

I used to be very scared of your suffering. Feeling as though I had to stay open, available, even as you turned away. I feared separation, detachment, as the result of not experiencing it with you. I realize now that suffering is lonely, that I will never know your suffering, and in not knowing I can be there with it. Delineation that does not result in distantiation. You are always in my heart.

LETTING GO

I have surfaces but my flesh is not sovereign. Although I was born into the folded matter, I am not its beginning, nor is it possessed or controlled by me, or anything else. Moving closer to that which we cannot know is a way of returning to our bodies and the matter that makes us.

We are not as one and yet I am moved by you. You are wild and we are “relational fields that emerge hazardously and ambiguously within a multitude of organic and social processes” (10) and furthermore, I love you.

CITED

The Cultural Politics of Emotion by Sara Ahmed
&
New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics edited by Diana Coole & Samantha Frost