, or what I feel we have lost in the pandemic.
Proprioception: the consciousness of your body within space; "awareness of the position and movement of the body" (OED); "also referred to as kinaesthesia . . . the sense of self-movement and body position . . . sometimes described as the 'sixth sense'" (wikipedia).
I became captivated by this idea in Ben Lerner's 10:04. He begins the book by analogizing a scene of him eating restaurant octopus to an awareness of the collective movement of bodies. The tentacles of the octopus seem to reach through the vast spheres of active life to become perceived through the narrator's body.
"I am kidding and I am not kidding when I say that I intuited an alien intelligence, felt subject to a succession of images, sensations, memories, and affects that did not, properly speaking, belong to me: the ability to perceive polarized light; a conflation of taste and touch as salt was rubbed into the suction cups . . . ."
The octopus returns with the next scene, an ambiguously-morphed description of the narrator at the doctor's office.
"It [the octopus. but tangentially the narrator?] can taste what it touches, but it has poor proprioception, the brain unable to determine the position of its body in the current, particularly my arms, and the privileging of flexibility over proprioceptive inputs means it lacks stereognosis, the capacity to form a mental image of the over-all shape of what I can touch: it can detects local texture variations, but cannot integrate that information into a larger picture, cannot read the realistic fiction the world appears to be."
As Lerner posits these localized sensory experiences into an entire field of sensory inputs, I could feel how the magnanimous orchestration of collective everyday life can apply to our individual placements. In other words, I sensed a proprioceptive energy through Lerner's guidance. This was not a new feeling. Rather, one which I was newly identifying.
It's the sensation of deliberateness picked up when observing how others thoughtfully select their market purchases for Saturday stew. Or the tender yet still competitive spirit of a park chess player in a match against a child, taking care to instruct the child but not going easy. It's the jerky sways of rush hour crowds moving into and away from each other as the 2 train makes its Times Square stop and the brush of wind on the Fulton stop platforms as the Q train rushes past, crowds mobilized out of the 6 train at Union Square; passengers reaching their desired end points for the evening, or morning, or next hour; attending meetings, picking up kids; new patterns forming and dissolving. The collective pause before roaring applause during the 11 o'clock number of Jagged Little Pill. The mismatched psychologies of every passerby on the street, differently processing the world as they walk, but nonetheless moving according with preprocessed scripts of physical life.
In a pandemic, we lose our proprioception. Separated by masks and distance and walls, there is constant, overwhelming detachment. Collapsing sensoriums. Dislodged from our communal experiences, and further, barred from the cues of facial expressions, our sense of a collective affect weakens. Or, we lose the connection between how we feel and what we sense—it is more fracturing, I think, than we realize.
"We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more….The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means," Susan Sontag wrote in "Against Interpretation." But it is nearly impossible to feel more without being in proximity to other bodies; all we are left with is the scrawny affective outline of an intellectualized spirit.
References:
Ben Lerner, 10:04, Farrar, Straus, & Giroux (2014).
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