Hilarie\'s Response to "Three Assertions"

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#687

I went ahead and wrote a whole analysis of a couple of Gene’s points in this essay, channeling my undergraduate philosophy major experience, and then I remembered that I was supposed to pause.

When I pause to examine the edge of my thinking, I get the same combination of thrill and anxiety that I get when I sit down to meditate. I wait for something to happen while I acknowledge (or try to acknowledge) that nothing has to. Sometimes I get excited about something that feels like an insight, and then later I wonder if I’m only excited about it because I’m looking for an insight and I really want to accomplish something in my mediation time. (I’m a yoga teacher, but I’m also type A.)

I’m also writing these words at a time when my meditation practice has fallen off a bit. Even the potential ten minutes of sitting time disappears into my day on a pretty regular basis. Sometimes I don’t remember that I want to do it at all. In this kind of daily pattern, I find my meditative moments elsewhere: in a lull in a conversation with a friend, in the middle of an attack round in a kickboxing class, when I notice the daylight filtering through the shower stream, when the cat’s footfalls land on the comforter next to me, during a hug with someone I love.

The edges of my thinking where words can’t come is maybe a place for images. It’s a place where feelings can be felt more deeply, perhaps, because since we aren’t able to put them into words, we might free ourselves from the need to try that. Maybe there are ways on the edge of thought of wrapping our mind around something that doesn’t actually involve words, just attention and acceptance.

Here are the full-throttle thoughts. I wanted there to be parallels, but I don’t see many:

Gene’s situating of felt sense within and in relation to bodies is really instructive for me. He says, “A felt sense is distinctly something there, something with a life of its own, that we attend to directly. If we attend to our bodies, in the middle of the body it comes, and then it is in an odd sort of space of its own. It brings its own space. In that space the felt sense is a direct object, that, there” (21). The idea that it can be there without us knowing, while implicit (sorry) in the whole discussion, is weirdly encouraging for me – we all have this interesting power of connection, even if we don’t know it’s there. I’m having a harder time wrapping my head around felt sense both as its own space and as something existing in that space, but I was once a philosophy major, so it’s a fun puzzle. A bit below, his idea of putting different kinds of noticing on a continuum is really helpful – and I wonder why, as Gene points out, we haven’t come up with language for it yet.

Regarding hunches, I am less comfortable with his formulations, and I think there’s two other layers that he doesn’t account for here. He describes a hunch this way: “If it says “don’t,” just what is it that says “don’t”? It is not the words, but that uneasy, queasy, unaccountable discomfort, a bodily sense. Instead of feeling good about the good things that are visible, you feel physically uncomfortable about the situation” (22). I think there are also positive hunches – which can sometimes be confused with wishful thinking, just as the negative ones he describes can be confused with fear. More importantly, though, there are unrealized hunches. What about when the body thinks it knows but is wrong? What about when the body doesn’t have the danger feeling at all, and thus can’t protect itself? (The inability to feel pain seems like a strong example. What about when we just don’t have the feeling of foreboding even though we could?) finally would Gene give different names, other than hunch, to these scenarios I say he’s not discussing?

If I am right that Gene is in some way attributing a certain power of perception to all people when some people may not have that perception (or parts of it), I then wonder about how disability studies would engage with this essay. What would be a generative way of bringing the two together? Would a disability studies reading of Gene’s work be helpful?

In another way related to access, the thing that gets me about the symbol, while visually interesting, is that it can’t be represented in every technological medium. When I pasted it into my iPad word processor app, the little line disappeared:

“Silences make some people uncomfortable; they feel a need to keep talking so they find other things to say. But if they can stand the silence, they may keep their attention on the ….., on that edge where there is more, but no more can be said” (26).

How could we represent “the edge where there is more, but no more can be said” in a way that everyone no matter their writing platform could reproduce it? (The question after that, of course, is, is it even important to be able to do that, and I’m not sure of that answer.)

[Sondra Perl]

#702

Lovely and thoughtful responses, Hilarie. Much here to ponder. Gene would say, in response to your last question, that all people have access to this realm — some may need more practice than others — but it’s available to all. Perhaps it’s like meditation in that you can get on fine without practicing it, but when you do turn attention to other realms (of quiet, of non-languaging), other ways of knowing can come to you.

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