FOGGY SILK SENSES

Siguiendo con el ejercicio de asociaciacion e higroscopia, nos parece oportuno presentar un fragmento del texto escrito por Paula Caspao para el libro Bicho. El texto completo se titula Foggy Silk Senses.

"....While reading Steven Connor I was in deed reminded of “the highly sensory nature of […] language” – and this despite the fact that many philosophers (and even poets) claim that the “sharpness and subtlety of the senses” are “dimmed by the dominion of language”, and concentrate much of their efforts in a work of recovery of “the sensory body for philosophy”, as “a rescuing or redemption of the senses from language’s petrifying force” [1]. And although Connor is referring specifically to “spoken” language when he writes that the “highly sensory nature of spoken language has often compelled the suspicion that it might actually itself have a claim to be thought of as a sense”, I couldn’t avoid thinking that this might be the case not only of the act of speaking, but also of the movement of reading, not to speak of the movement of writing. To start with, I must say that I have always suspected the movement of reading, be it aloud or in silence – in which the implication of the mouth and tongue is undeniable, be they apparently motionless – to be one of the senses that are part of our sensorium; a sensorium whose list has remained stable, but very incomplete since as far back as Aristotle. I am, needless to say, also willing to advocate that thinking should be part of that list. Or, to be more accurate, if not reading, writing and thinking as such, at least the infinity of small movements, small perceptions and (sometimes silky) weavings, we have to be able to sense to make those activities happen. So that we could to some degree extend what Connor says about the nature of speaking to the activities of reading, writing and thinking:

Speaking is like having something in our mouth, something which you have actually made, from the confluence of the soft breath drawn in from outside and drawn up from within, and the interplay of the various hard and pliable participants in speech: the tongue, the palate, the teeth. In shaping my mouth to speak [and to read, and to write, and to think], I seem to shape the words themselves, conceived as objects. Speaking [and reading, and writing, and thinking] is tactile, a shaping of an imaginary, elemental substance, perhaps that primal phantasmal playdough which Gaston Bachelard suggests is at work in every encounter between man and matter, giving rise to the principle that he calls the ‘cogito pétrisseur’, the cogito of paste.

[1] A talk given at the conference on The Senses, Thames Valley University, 6 February 2004<http://www.bbk.ac.uk/english/skc/intersensoriality/>(28.11.2008)....."

Paula Caspao es dramaturga, investigadora y escritora residente en París.

Sentimos no conseguir colgar el texto completo en el blog. Es precioso.