2.1
The Primacy of Bodily Experience
As Alva Noë has amusingly observed, science-fiction accounts about brains in jars soon have to start replacing parts of the lost body, for the brain must be given eyes, ears, a voice, just in order to play its fictional role.1 This would, in reality, not be easy, no one-way cable connection, for the eyes would need muscles to direct the gaze, the voice a larynx, mouth and passage of breath. Not only is the nervous system an extension of the brain, but it deals in two-way traffic, gaining constant feedback from its actions. Normally, too, in these stories, the brain has lived a life, and so it has already accumulated a personality and some memories, but a baby’s brain would require a set of senses and an ability to flex muscles and act upon the world just in order to develop.2 A mind without a body, therefore, makes no sense, even if our ability to think, dream and remember makes us aware of goings on that seem independent of the physical world.
René Descartes is usually blamed for the mind–body dichotomy, but, long before him, there existed beliefs in body and soul, well founded in phenomenal experience, that perhaps provided a foundation for this division. Witnessing the death of a close relative, for example, combines mute presence of a lifeless body with feelings of grief and memories of that person, and their aura seems still strongly present. However, the spirit, the personality, all possibility of real interaction, have gone, and so the soul must have fled. Among some African and East Asian peoples, the soul is even thought to leave the body during sleep, which explains for them both the experience of dreams and the absence of consciousness that is witnessed by others. Illnesses too, particularly mental disorders, are attributed to loss of the soul, ritual processes being enacted to encourage its return, such as a mother on the threshold of the house making an offering addressed to the errant soul and urging it to come back.3
Such beliefs are supported by an underlying logic, for they register a world of mental events that seems obviously separated from the physical. Yet much of it is due to our taken-for-granted mastery of time. We possess only the present moment, but we are convinced of continuity with a past that no longer exists.4 Our confidence is not misplaced, for the causal chains we read in the world must have some basis,5 and, if we failed to trust our memories and our ability to locate ourselves in time and space, we could no longer live and act.6 However, we remember only such things as our minds are able to sustain and recall, by transforming them into schemata, and memory is far from permanent, complete or accurate.7 We can check it against the memories of others, but, as the years go by, comparison reveals that we have retained increasingly diverse accounts, for we re-edit our memories as we recall them.8 We can also check our memories against persisting material records, such as writings, buildings and photographs, which are important precisely because they provide the most seemingly objective evidence, but they too are subject to loss and damage, as well as requiring interpretation.
We are embodied, and our lives unfold in sequences of time, consciousness being perhaps the means of linking space with time. Walking involves both: the physical activity requires muscles, balance and rhythms of movement that are largely automatic, but we must know, too, where we are going and manage to find our way, in which all our senses are engaged, not only sight, hearing and smell, but the haptic sense of how we are moving, how our muscles respond to our commands. Our experiences have a necessary but varied duration, for not only must we make full strides just to complete rhythmic movements and retain balance, we also register obstacles ahead – a stile, a tree across the path – and mend our pace accordingly.9 The necessity of retaining short-term duration is starkly exemplified by music: a single note means little, although it is all that we hear in an instant, and so a sequence of notes must be remembered before the pattern of sound can be registered, tested for familiarity and compared with the already known.10 Such durations can be a matter of seconds, as with a single birdcall, but human songs and dances usually have durations of several minutes. They tend to consist of repetitive phrases, and we quickly register structure and variation. Written concert pieces are more extended and complex, but even they are normally broken into movements of 20 minutes or less.11 The Ring Cycle lasts days, but it is driven by the narrative of an over -arching story that can be broken down into episodes. Wagner enthusiasts can both summarise the whole thing and recognise which part of the unfolding spectacle is taking place. Memory seems, therefore, to be involved in different ways throughout our thinking, from the few seconds taken to recognise a musical phrase to the days or even weeks over which a long event unfolds. Long measures of time are anchored to the rotation of the Earth. A long walk, taking days or weeks, may be structured by changing terrain and stopping places for food or rest, but normally it is broken into days, because of daylight and the need for sleep, the brain’s period for transmuting short-term memories into longer-term ones.12 It can also be divided into weeks, but the week is an artificial creation, perhaps the reason it needs so much backup in Genesis: some societies have a 5-day week, some no week at all. The month, by contrast, is called after, and supposed to follow, the moon.13
The child’s acquisition of space and direction
Our understanding of the world starts with the interaction of body and space. As infants, we build a relationship with the world by making bridges between our senses, so that we see things that we feel, starting with the breast and sucking, exploring with the fingers, and then attempting to crawl about.14 Present from the beginning, even within the womb, is gravity, which causes things to fall, holds us to the surface of the planet, makes it necessary to balance when standing and gives us the vertical axis proved by the primary right angle: that between the plumb line and the spirit level.15 There are also potential axes within the horizontal plane, and, as our eyes develop and vision begins, we differentiate between what is before us and our unseen behind, at first appreciating what it means to be face-to-face with mother and other human beings. As soon as we can stand and move around, we have a front and a back, and we move towards or away from things. It is difficult to propel ourselves other than forward, and our eyes are directed to what is ahead: we use them, not for full peripheral vision, as with herbivores on watch for danger, but for binocular vision, to predict depth and distance. We can move our heads to look up, down or sideways, even back over the shoulder, but the normal gaze is straight on, and we are blind to the rear. The approximate symmetry of the body and apparently identical limbs and eyes allow identification of the centre-line as axis of symmetry. Not only we, but also most other animals, insects and birds, are symmetrical in full face, asymmetrical in profile and move forwards on their centre-line. This makes the primary axis, front to back, essentially different from the secondary one, side to side, for there is an expectation that the primary axis must be the axis of symmetry. With animals whose body runs horizontally, such as cats, it is also the spine, linking head and tail to distribute commands.
However, the mirror image of the body is only approximate: left is not equal to right. Not only are the internal organs irregularly disposed, but the left side of the face does not exactly match the right, so that a photo of each side added to its reversed double gives us two slightly different faces. More crucially, the limbs of the right side dominate those of the left, the right hand being predominantly stronger and more skilful, the right foot ready to lead off. The limbs are cross-wired to opposite brain hemispheres, which, though inter -connected, have become specialised in different kinds of task, the left to do with language and logic, the right more spatial. Many people are left-handed, and in rare cases the bodily organs can even be disposed to opposite sides, heart on the right, but the majority are right handed, and most, if not all, societies give priority to the right as the side of honour, dexter in Latin producing dextrous. The left hand is sinister, borrowed by English for its negative and uncanny connotations.16 The anthropologist Rodney Needham edited a book on left and right that included an early and fascinating essay by Robert Hertz, who tried to show that right-handedness was culturally constructed, and there is indeed much cultural construction, but based, it now seems, on an underlying biological preference for the right.17 Iain McGilchrist has seen the dominance of right-hand–left-brain as productive of an excessively rational society, which he considers is to blame for many of our cultural ills.18 He shows, at least, what a rich and suggestive edifice of theory can be constructed around this topic.
When we stretch out our arms sideways and look forward, our bodily axes are set at right angles, echoing the 90º between horizontal and vertical, and so generating a three-dimensional world. Readers will by now have noticed that, in putting together top–bottom, front–back and left–right, I have extracted the three dimensions of space from the body, following Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of ‘the body as geometer’.19 According to him, the understanding of spatial transitions and inversions also starts with movements of the body, rather than with the abstract Cartesian coordinates that were added later as a cultural superstructure. In addition to the three bodily directions, there is also a fundamental experience of inside and outside. The body develops in relation to an outer world, which is at first that of the womb, which it must leave, the primal experience of moving from inside to outside. The sense of inside and outside gives rise to recognition of the contrast between centre and periphery, and to the familiar notion of things being ‘inside-out’, as a direct parallel to the notion of them being ‘upside-down’ or ‘back-to-front’.