"YOU FEEL ME?"

Michael K. Williams as Omar Little

“YOU FEEL ME?” was the query by everyone’s favorite assassin on “The Wire,” Omar Little. (Michael K. Williams)  It’s a very apt phrase for those working out embodiment meaning in terms of the brain.  

When we say the word “grasp,” there is a faint sensory echo in the brain of actually grasping something.  That’s embodiment — that little ghost in there, in the body.  You FEEL grasping, actually and electrochemically.  This is NOT about the pre-frontal orbital abstracting abilities behind the forehead.  In fact, on brain monitors it might not even show up in one spot in the rest of the brain but be distributed around the connectome according to how the act of grasping was first recorded — maybe your baby bottle.

The first surface, the first muscle pattern, the first stress on the wrist bones, all processed into electrochemical traces in brain cells.  After that, the concept is there.  The word doesn’t come until much later.  Using it to denote an abstraction (grasping the truth) comes even later.

We’ve thought that words were the pinnacle and container of thoughts.  That was wrong.  The experience is recorded from the sensory qualities of the act, then it is somehow associated with others that are similar but indexed by the sensory qualities of each instance.  Finally a word might be assigned.  Then there is a cloud of associations around each word, where it was rhymed, when used in a poem, who often used the word, and so on.  None of this is in the famous pre-frontal cortex, but in an image of a page, an echo of a conversation, seen on some billboard passed during a long drive.

“Grasp” of vocabulary and abstract concepts depends on being exposed to them — words and categories — but more than that -- and earlier -- it depends on the original experience.  A person who has never grasped something (no hands?) will have to rely on watching and empathizing with the person who grasps, from his first crayon to the concept of “the end.”  It’s subconscious, not intentional, not a product of education — particularly the Germanic factory fodder kind of education many people get.

Or did you use fibertips to color?

Sometimes I talk to a Blackfeet kid who’s never left town and as I talk, I see his brain behind his eyes shutteringfluttering as he tries to “grasp” what I say about things he's never experienced.  Elevator?  Bookstore?  I said to a young woman in uniform back on her first leave, “But 9/11 was not planned by Iraq — most of the terrorists were Saudi.”  She was paralyzed for a moment while her brain went in and out of hearing what I said.  She couldn’t “feel” me.  She walked away.  

The same thing happened with the small town white kids.  Their life schema did not include what I said, it included only black and white and I was gray.  Their faces said, “Does not compute.”  They tried to feel as little as possible.  “Grasping” means your fingers get pinched and burned.  New ideas are dangerous.

Insisting that words are the same as “knowing” and that knowing lots of words means you are "smart" is a common delusion, esp in a 19th century rural culture that was largely immigrant and illiterate until world wars made reading important.  That was a short time ago.

The pre-existing culture where I am, the indigenous peoples, were an oral culture, who did everything face-to-face and — because of that — “felt” each other.  They had time, they grasped what they did even if it hurt, and when the Napi Yahki’s didn’t have time to listen to explanations, they just withdrew to wait it out.  There were lots of old tribal words and they were famously punished for using them, as though they were unpatriotic, the way the Euro-immigrants were punished for speaking Ukraine or Celtic or Spanish. It wasn't just the indigenous who were being pounded into a mold.

But the old feelings weren’t in the sounds — they were in the grasp of things, the tipi poles, the arrow shafts, the buffalo hide, the horse’s jaw, and the grasp of each other’s hands, “feeling” each other. Not just the things, but the motions of throwing or scraping or skinning.  There’s no use in learning words for things one has never experienced.  Unless it causes one to go looking for the experience, to recognize it when it appears.  The loss isn’t the words so much as the experiences, because those are contacts that access sensory memory.  To get back the vocabulary, one must live the lost life.  But it is gone.  Now we have new lives and words.  But it still feels the same to have a horse under you.

There’s a Blackfeet gesture meaning “everything you say, I take to my heart” which has come to be a sort of “amen” when attending an event with speaking.  The gesture is holding out one’s hands to the speaker, then pulling them back to one’s heart.  The neotraditionalists use it a lot.  So I taught it to UU congregations but then one day a man said, “I want to add to that.”  He gestured the opposite direction, from his hands on his heart to stretching them out.  “All that is in my heart I give back to you.”  We grasped it.  We always used both after that.  By now there need be no words so long as one can feel the message and respond to it.

Because I was curious about where “Saving Grace” came from, I googled the person, Nancy Miller, who was behind this series before Holly Hunter made it hers.  This is Nancy:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgumdWJmmNY  She’s talking about not just grasping something, but feeling that it is so important that it must be conveyed to others — so they can “feel” it.  Then arranging a forceful enough plot that the actors can form it into a kind of piston that pushes meaning into actions.  That’s what I mean by “designing ceremonies” — building that force into feeling that can be shared.  No noodling around in the soft familiar, no empty repetitions, no blurry dispersals of images. 

Nancy Miller

It’s a tall order and not something that be thrown together on a Saturday night, but it can be done by a group.  (Just don’t call them a committee, which is by now a crippling idea.)  Figuring out some exercises that will bond a small group together would be good.  Easy stuff like the trick of finding something in the environment, a rock or a flower or a scrap, studying it closely and then explaining it to someone.  More powerful for bonding than you might expect.  

Most of the theory of embodiment is still unfolding.  There are two kinds of structure involved: the brain cells and connections that come from sensory experience and the metaphorical abstract concepts that interact with each other.  Probably there are more confusions like those two.  Long ago when I said I was going to wait until computers were a little more easy to understand before I got into them, some wise person said,  “No, start now and grow with the computers.”  I didn’t do it quite soon enough.  But you've already got a headstart with feeling.  We all do.

PAPER AUTHOR VOOK

A book is not the same as an e-manuscript.  Right.  A book is a physical thing that requires supplies like paper, and manufacturing like a printing press -- therefore a book is a product of capital.  The skill set of the reader (both the recognition of letters and ability to see through the writing to the ideas) is more crucial than even an editor or type setter.  Print has no usefulness if no one can read it. Once it is made, it can be physically altered by marking or tearing out pages or burning, but it is as real as a chair or a bicycle.  No instrumentation is necessary.  Just a mind.  (You can read with your fingertips.)  Learning to read is a public good that justifies basic schools.

Translating to electronic media means one does not require learning language code, not even spoken.  It may be entirely in terms of images or sounds or graphic symbols.  It does not exist in reality, but only in the arrangement of cybercodes and its reception by a person with an ordinary set of senses.  And a mind.  It requires special machinery to detect: a hard-drive, a screen, maybe Internet.  The education has not been provided by schools.  Access may be handheld, but it will need electricity.

A barrier to either kind of communication (paper print or electronic media) is instrumentation, the same as radio, or at a very primitive level, a musical instrument, but a human body is the ultimate instrument of communication.  It can sing, dance, tell stories, give backrubs and have sex. It can sign-talk and code things like eye-blinks in order to convey information and meaning.

We are all struggling with the problem of how to create gradients of value for the purpose of creating profit from writing.  Not for paper and a press, but to keep the creator eating.  A book, like any physical object, can be physically seized, locked up, destroyed, in the most direct way.  It can be artistically bound or encrusted with jewels.  The creation of the actual choice of words is mysterious and mostly misunderstood or misrepresented as when something is print was supposedly dictated by a god or a spook.  It was once mysterious.  When print is changed for the purpose of making it worthy of sales, we call that editing.  Now that editing is controlled by profit, and distribution of books means physically storing and moving objects, it falls into the paradigms of widgets which have been heavily industrialized and pounded into advertising concepts: defining consumers, promoting directly to them, pandering, associating with celebrities.  Music is a little different.  As long as people can whistle, there will be no real copyright for a tune.

Swerve.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiDTK8uFy4o  This is a link to a trailer for a course that can be taken online from the U of Chicago.  I don’t know whether anyone else in my circle of readers has access to this course, but I’m going to try to take it.  It’s nerdy stuff and I may get lost, but I think I need to have the concepts.  I want to escape widget marketing.

So what are the prospects.   Once past the status and keeping up with the Joneses,  the great cry is always for “immersion,” an experience.  How does media become an “experience” instead of an object to leave on the coffee table?  (Or maybe hide somewhere private.)

“Shared experience” like a roller coast ride together or sitting on a bench together watching a sunset might be a good paradigm for non-print “vooks.”  Unique experience is probably the key to a lot of social goods, even more than money.  It’s the missing part to the HIV puzzle, the Ebola puzzle, the war puzzle, because empathy is a moral empowerment.  But it is not immersive to simply be in someone else’s head, esp. if they are rather different, unconventional, like a Somali or Tibetan child.  You can’t just empty their lives into someone else.  There needs to be artistic shaping to deliver the message.  The problem is how to do that without simply playing Procrustes and smashing them into the already established stigmatic patterns.  It cannot be one-size fits all, can it? 

Another problem is that not every person who has been stigmatized and abused will want to make their life available.  They will need disguise, interpretation, and protection.  And there are bound to be people who want to seem worse than they are.  If bad is going to get attention and money, some can be badder than anyone else.  No problem.  Happens all the time.  Deal with it.  That’s what fiction is about.  Learn from it.

I’m a person who wants to do the right thing, to see what’s happening with accuracy and sympathy, and then to do something that helps, if only providing insight.  It’s not enough.  The culture has to see with accuracy and sympathy and then act.  Even so enlightened and educated a group as a Unitarian Universalist congregation will have a pattern that they believe and it will be hard to get past.  They won’t attack or question, it will just be blank.  Worse, some may get off on the drama of it all.  But mostly they just won’t get it.  And they’ll go to widgets: banners and t-shirts.  Celebrity marketing.

It’s easy to see people one doesn’t know very well as just pegs with no intentions or preferences.  BIG mistake.  Don’t think they can’t shuck and hustle and blow smoke and even participate in what is best for themselves.  Or worse.  Out of desire.  They can be infuriating.  How do you make people want to immerse in THAT? School has taught too many the evil of fearing ambiguity, even more than the Other.

I’ve been thinking about two dimensions of doing the right thing that address content rather than style.  One is compassion, when one understands suffering and moves to oppose it.  (“Black Beauty,” “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” “Girl, Interrupted,”  "Dispatches")  Compassion towards oneself is included.  The other one is justice.  It’s on the logical/rational side of the room where Science lives.  Law comes to visit, but law is more about social accommodation on the group level, in print.  Skillful and inspired writing does come into it but how it works in a specific case will be different.

They say that a cardinal or maybe even the Pope once remarked that hearing the confessions of nuns was like being pelted with popcorn.  Maybe the equivalent (for similar reasons) among American aspiring female writers is something like being plunged -- not into a searing cauldron -- but into a jet-circulating hot tub with plenty of bubble bath.  It is class-written bliss dependent upon equipment.  Like “Shades of Gray.”  Watch the very popular film, “Half the Sky,” and note that it took movie stars to get the story told.  It is THEIR immersion that we are watching, not the Third World women and girls.   Are you realizing why I prefer CSI shows, even with the glamour (magic) of fantasized Miami?  The tragedy of it is how sexy and bizarre the violence has to be to pull people into the story.  BUT it is accessible to anyone watching, not just readers.

Reading is distancing for some people.  Writing is a little different.  Even writing logical clarity can put the writer into a state of “flow,” which is when you are working at the edge of your skill level, no matter whether it is beginner or master.  “Flow” is an active version of immersion.  Flow is more effective than opium, can get you higher than meth, can pull you into extraordinary emotion -- maybe healing and maybe not.  It can give you an orgasm.  In fact, orgasm and ejaculation IS your body coming to flow, the obliviating edge of experience.  To many of us, writing is making love.  It’s combat.  It’s parachuting out of an airplane in the dark without knowing whether it’s flying over land or water, much less where.  

And you don't know who packed the parachute.  Or when your next meal might be.  But that was the same with paper.

HOMELAND SECURITY MEETS THE METAPHOR

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/print/2011/05/why-are-spy-reseearchers-building-a-metaphor-program/239402/

This post will be a line of logic on the above article, which has kicked up dust in several different ways, mostly because people seem to feel it’s another homeland security scheme for scanning us naked.  Others think it’s a fool’s errand anyway.  I want to pick up the Lakoff angle (metaphors in thought and poetry -- I read Lakoff’s and Johnson’s “Metaphors We Live By” (1980) in seminary.) and use it to thicken (!) my unaccepted thesis on the poetics of liturgy (which I understand to be the expressive structuring of experience). 

First I need to establish the idea that a human being (or any “animal” -- animated, living)  is essentially a way of gathering sensory information and organizing it into an identity that can interface with the environment.  In the case of humans this enabled expressiveness we call art and can transmit to other humans. 

Back again to the level of “brain cell organizing,” which we can experimentally confirm is a physical structure of relationships among brain cells in order to store sensory information for retrieval and manipulation as “thought.”  The sensory information includes deeply internal phenomena like digestion or filtering by kidneys or orgasm.  It’s complex and not always conscious.  (Accounting for the difference between conscious and unconscious brain processing seems still undone.)

The original structure must be according to the experience of the infant before and just after birth when the final layer of brain is forming.  I originally found the categories formed then in the writing of mystics who had visions, which I understood as bringing to consciousness those primal structures.  They are dark/light, up/down, held/dropped, warm/cold, hungry/fed, and so on.  The mystics present them as paradoxical but intensely present at the same time.

The Atlantic article by Alexis Madrigal describes research by a semi-secret, highly-funded, quasi-governmental body called IARPA into metaphor systems embedded in the way we talk.  They want a computer to be able to scan language and pull out assumptions for the sake of their implications.  For instance, if you think “life is a journey,” then I would speak to you in terms of, maybe, “Pilgrim’s Progress,”  but if you think “life is a struggle”, then I might do better to talk about Jacob wrestling with the angel.  Part of this study is called “Incisive Analysis”!  The autopsy metaphor:  IARPA according to CSI.  Eeeks.

One little project asked people in one group to think about “crime-as-a-virus” which caused them to think about mitigation, meds, protection; and another to consider “crime-as-a-wild-beast” which caused people to want law enforcement, punishment, confinement.  The study claimed that the differences created by these two systems were LARGER than those between Democrats and Republicans or between men and women.

Other metaphors, often very simple, generate many a familiar phrase.  “Food is thought” triggers things like “what a nourishing idea” or “his ideas are half-baked” or "don't feed me that line."  The concept becomes a domain:  “thinking is preparing food and understanding is digestion and believing is swallowing and learning is eating and communicating is feeding.”

I love the lists of meta-concepts:
"Darkness is a Solid."
"Time is something moving toward you."
"Happiness is fluid in a container."
"Control is up."

Even the cartoons are exploring this stuff:  consider the “spin ninja” thread on “non sequitur” where assertions and assumptions are practically the spine of the strip.

We are told the idea that “happy is up” is nearly universal.


So, going back to my seminary liturgy project, I’ll make some generalizations that are not metaphorical themselves (maybe) but are useful in the choosing and organizing of metaphors in liturgy.  I will define liturgy as a performance/participation that uses sensory elements to express and reconfirm harmony with the universe -- sometimes marking a transition from one state to another and sometimes through a disruptive and disorienting change.  So sometimes it’s a rite of passage, sometimes a celebration of survival, sometimes an assertion of origins, sometimes the confirmation of the community.  I haven’t thought about using it in a negative way, but surely that’s possible.

I take the basic structure from von Gennep and Turner, which describe “liminality.”  This metaphor is about crossing the threshold (limen) between the sacred and the profane which are not entities or adjectives but different kinds of consciousness.  The brain must shift the way it is processing in order to “cross the threshold”.  I would argue that it is going to a deeper, more subconscious, more primal sort of thinking, maybe even using the mammal brain more than the human overlay on it.  But since mammals are deeply aware of “mapping” -- running the maze, searching for food, migrating through the territory -- this idea of a kind of different space is useful.  MUCH more useful than the dogmatic designation of what is sacred.  (See Eliade, “The Sacred and the Profane".)

The therapies of the Sixties and Seventies were sometimes effective and sometimes dangerous in using staged experience while in a liminal state, possibly induced by drugs.  Imitations of birth, experiences of being passed overhead or falling and being caught (mosh pits), blindfolds, sensory deprivation chambers -- a lot of experiment was going on.  The trouble was a lack of useful note-taking.  (I think of the Nazi experimenters who crucified people to see what actually happened, but for obvious reasons either kept no records or destroyed them.)  And sometimes the person’s interior organizing structure simply collapsed or went into a state of chaos that sometimes could be re-organized and sometimes not.  Physical malfunctioning of the body can do the same thing -- deep shocks, longtime stress, rogue molecules.  Now we talking about torture, a liturgy of destruction.

I take social rites of passage like weddings, graduations, birthday parties, debutante balls, memorials and funerals, to be liminal experiences at some level.  But regular intervals of worship -- coming together as a community, sharing in a liminal space, and then separating are important ways of keeping harmony.  There is another double-element that I express in terms of, well, “gravity.”  If it isn’t present and explicit, the experience will be more, um, “shallow” and less “immersive.”  The first is conscious awareness of threats, terrors, destruction, horror -- a “pressing down.”  The second is a conscious stating of what  saves, heals, strengthens, and forms identity -- a “lifting up.”  The two things need to be present together, in that order, and near the beginning of the communal experience.  In Christian terms they are called “the confession of sins” (our vulnerability and limitation as humans) and “the assurance of pardon”  (that we are loved and included).

I certainly welcome this particular use of Homeland Security funds to explore metaphor. Maybe the metaphors of “home” and “land” and “security” deserve welcoming reflection.  Do they “lift us up” enough to bear what “presses us down”?