Photo: Dennis Friedler
Dedicated to the memory of Bob Raymond
Many thanks to Sarah Bliss for her contribution of my transcription text by Michel Serres, which passed through the mail slot at 55 Norfolk Street via postal delivery.
I transcribed the remaining portion of Serres' text and used large, heavy scissors to cut the paper. The work was slow, methodical. I was curious to see how it would feel taking a spot closer to the interior of the space, set back a couple of feet from the front door. I thought a lot about the doorway as an enduring symbol of passage, marked as it is in many cultures as such. A young couple sat for a while on the wooden bench I put out by the curb, conversing socially, enjoying their evening out - enshrined by the door. Before leaving, each responded to my invitation to write about passage.
Photo: Dennis Friedler
Continued from Sixth Week, the remaining transcription of THE FIVE SENSES, a Philosophy of Mingled Bodies by Michel Serres
Translated by Margaret Sankey & Peter Cowley
Chapter 1-Veils
(BIRTH)
…Then a big wave, coming suddenly from the side, violently jolts the neckpiece towards my suspended ribs. God be praised, I am out. I breathe the cold air and almost faint. To my horror, the sea, still more relentless, hammers randomly at the bottom of the boat which tilts over on to the other side and I am inside again, rammed again into the iron circle under my chest. It felt as though the hull were passing over piles of stones. A shock on the one side freed me; a shock from the other side imprisoned me again.
I was inside, I was outside.
Who was this “I”?
Photo: Dennis Friedler
It is something everyone knows, unemotionally and as a matter of fact. You only have to pass through a small opening, a blocked corridor, swing over a handrail or on a balcony high enough to provoke vertigo for the body to become alert. The body knows by itself how to say I. It knows to what extent I am on this side of the bar, and when I am outside. It judges deviations from normal balance, immediately regulates them and knows just how far to go, or not go. Coenesthesia says I by itself. It knows that I am inside, it knows when I am freeing myself. This internal self proclaims, calls, announces, sometimes howls the I like a wounded animal. This common sense apportions the body better than anything else in the whole world.
If I slide a leg through, I am still inside, while my leg, thigh and knee are outside. They become almost black. My pelvis goes through, my genitals, buttocks and navel are most certainly outside but I remain inside. I know what it is like to be a man without legs; I know for a moment what phantom limbs feel like. At a precise moment, the very moment when the totality of the divided body shouts ego in a general toppling movement, I slide out and can drag through the remainder of my body, pull through the pieces that have remained inside, yes, the scattered pieces that have suddenly been blackened in the violent overturning of the iceberg.
Photo: Dennis FriedlerThe random jolting of the vessel as it heaves to throw the I to the left and right of the window of hope. I dwell inside, I dwell outside; the I inside the boat finds itself outside, in the icy gusts of wind. The movement of the waves pushes or pulls the thorax a few millimetres in either direction, a tiny distance. My body is aware of this deviation; it is able to appreciate the movements around it. I am delivered or debarred, breathing or asphyxiated, burning from the fire inside or stripped bare by the biting wind, dead or alive. I go under or I exist. There is an almost identifiable point which, in the spatial experience of passing from inside to out, is proclaimed by the whole body. The I as a whole leaps towards this localized point and moves decisively from on half of the body to the other when the point slides, in contact with the separating wall, from its internal to its external surface.
Since my near shipwreck I have become accustomed to calling this point the soul. The soul resides at the point where the I is decided.
We are all endowed with a soul, from that first moment of passage when we risked and saved our existence.
Photo: Dennis FriedlerI understood that evening the meaning of the cry: save our souls. Saving this point is enough. I found myself outside, in the horrifying cold, when the point passed the threshold of the restraining collar. I was still inside until that moment. Descartes is right to say that the soul touches the body at a particular point, but he was wrong to locate it in the pineal gland. It hovers around the region of the solar plexus. From there it illuminates or obscures the body, in bursts of light or dark, making it translucid or epiphanic, transmuting it into a black body. It is somewhere in that area for everyone, according to the dictates of each individual’s body. We all retain it, marked and definitive, where it was fixed on the day we were born. More often than not, it is forgotten and left in the shadows of internal meaning, until the day when the sudden fury of nature causes us to be born a second time, through chance, pain, anguish or luck. It is not such a bad thing, pace Descartes, that on that youthful day, piloting a ship, we were to discover that a pilot says I for his whole vessel, from the depths of the keel to the tip of the mast, and from the quarter to the boom, and that the soul of his body descends into the soul of the boat, towards the central turbines, to the heart of the quickworks. To free yourself from that vessel, you have to search for your soul in the hold, where the fire is at its most dangerous – one perilous day.
Photo: Dennis Friedler
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