Space, as you can perhaps gather by certain references in this blog, is of a particular fascination to me. I have always been aware of its various properties wherever I have been and have always tried to maintain an openness towards it. Indeed, just yesterday, atop the Kilpatrick Braes, I, alongside the cows, ruminated upon its very existence, and the difference in depth of feeling one can have from being in two different spaces.
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Almost Mediterranean (and it's not even April).... Must be the Corsican pine, and that late March lull. [Looking west-ish from the Kilpatrick Braes over the Clyde Estuary towards Langbank on the opposite shore].
For the second time this week, the Czech phenomenologist Jan Potocka accompanied me into the braes (if only in spirit and book). His wonderful set of lectures (translated by Erazim Kohak and edited by James Dodd) which comprise Body, Community, Language, World, had a profound effect on my thinking five years ago when I first came across it. This germ has directed my thinking ever since on ideas and practices of the body, and one's own locomotive force. So, I thought I would browse through it again, and what better place to do it than sitting up here on the braes sheltered by the great gnarledness of pine trees and serenaded by the mellifluous songs of robins, chiff-chaffs, and yellowhammers.
'There is a fundamental difference', proclaims Potocka, 'between being in space as a part of it, alongside other things, and living spatially, being aware of being in space, of relating to space... Our body is a life which is spatial in itself and of itself, producing its location in space, and making itself spatial'.
This 'location', and the 'locating' force behind it, is all important. As the American farmer and poet Wendell Berry once wrote (in Life is a Miracle), we don't know where we are anymore. Children are growing up with no sense of the local. And as the word local suggests, they are also growing up without a vital sense of place. 'Kowing where we are,' writes Potocka, 'is a necessary foundation and starting point of life.'
Part of the problem of course is the outsourcing of locomotion and the practice of living spatially. People are sealed off from space, and thus from their own 'lived corporeity'. The body and its vital energies, in the modern technologized and obesogenic environment have been sold off. This effective privatization of the body has devastating effects on the world as a whole, brought to light in the mental health issues of the day, the various economic/ecologic crises, the primitive conflicts that arise over sheer greed and debasedness, and the general inability of people en masse to think critically or independently of media or political garbage.
Living spatially is not just a matter of body then, but of bodymind. It is remarkable in this day and age how tightly packed people's minds are, almost as obese as their bodies, filled with second-hand thoughts, super-imposed templates, and spurious subroutines. Most people are locked in to this unoriginal thinking and being from a very early age and rarely break free from it convinced as they are that it's not so bad. And yet, now more than ever, what we need is spaciousness of mind, the ability to 'space out' and contemplate, to re-ignite that part of the mind that can see systemically, that can see poetically, that can see unhindered by prejudice and politics.
'Aisthesis and kinesis are inseparable.' announces Potocka. 'Our seeing is always linked to movement'. Without this crucial movement, atrophy occurs: degeneration of brain, degeneration of body, in short, the complete collapse of bodymind. The inability to think critically and systemically, as well as perhaps the inability to move critically and systemically, is one of the most pressing concerns of a modern age which has lost sight of its self, or, which, in its betrothal to science and solipsism, simply does not care.
It follows then that if we do not move, on our own, of our own accord (whether mentally or physically), sua sponte, then we are, to put it mildly, in trouble. And it is the consequence of this 'trouble' - conflicts and crises, outsourcing and over-technologizing,. aggressive and primitive capitalism - that we can see all over the globalized world. Removed from the fundamental fabrics that enable the human, and trapped within a state of existential paralysis, man emerges as an invasive species, and the human submerged as an endangered one. Locomotion, bodying forth (as Buber would have it), and living spatially (which ineluctably leads to living poetically), are the keys to reignite our seeing, and understanding. Without this, we are as good as pallid acquiescent zombies unable to see beyond our own bloodstained hands.
'There is a fundamental difference', proclaims Potocka, 'between being in space as a part of it, alongside other things, and living spatially, being aware of being in space, of relating to space... Our body is a life which is spatial in itself and of itself, producing its location in space, and making itself spatial'.
This 'location', and the 'locating' force behind it, is all important. As the American farmer and poet Wendell Berry once wrote (in Life is a Miracle), we don't know where we are anymore. Children are growing up with no sense of the local. And as the word local suggests, they are also growing up without a vital sense of place. 'Kowing where we are,' writes Potocka, 'is a necessary foundation and starting point of life.'
Part of the problem of course is the outsourcing of locomotion and the practice of living spatially. People are sealed off from space, and thus from their own 'lived corporeity'. The body and its vital energies, in the modern technologized and obesogenic environment have been sold off. This effective privatization of the body has devastating effects on the world as a whole, brought to light in the mental health issues of the day, the various economic/ecologic crises, the primitive conflicts that arise over sheer greed and debasedness, and the general inability of people en masse to think critically or independently of media or political garbage.
Living spatially is not just a matter of body then, but of bodymind. It is remarkable in this day and age how tightly packed people's minds are, almost as obese as their bodies, filled with second-hand thoughts, super-imposed templates, and spurious subroutines. Most people are locked in to this unoriginal thinking and being from a very early age and rarely break free from it convinced as they are that it's not so bad. And yet, now more than ever, what we need is spaciousness of mind, the ability to 'space out' and contemplate, to re-ignite that part of the mind that can see systemically, that can see poetically, that can see unhindered by prejudice and politics.
'Aisthesis and kinesis are inseparable.' announces Potocka. 'Our seeing is always linked to movement'. Without this crucial movement, atrophy occurs: degeneration of brain, degeneration of body, in short, the complete collapse of bodymind. The inability to think critically and systemically, as well as perhaps the inability to move critically and systemically, is one of the most pressing concerns of a modern age which has lost sight of its self, or, which, in its betrothal to science and solipsism, simply does not care.
It follows then that if we do not move, on our own, of our own accord (whether mentally or physically), sua sponte, then we are, to put it mildly, in trouble. And it is the consequence of this 'trouble' - conflicts and crises, outsourcing and over-technologizing,. aggressive and primitive capitalism - that we can see all over the globalized world. Removed from the fundamental fabrics that enable the human, and trapped within a state of existential paralysis, man emerges as an invasive species, and the human submerged as an endangered one. Locomotion, bodying forth (as Buber would have it), and living spatially (which ineluctably leads to living poetically), are the keys to reignite our seeing, and understanding. Without this, we are as good as pallid acquiescent zombies unable to see beyond our own bloodstained hands.
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