On Birth & Madness

Among the many ways of looking at experience two of them - the successive and the mutative - are unusually interesting when compared. I owe my description of the successive to Aristotle. From it we can infer an influential if misleading picture of early development.

Succession
I imagine myself as blind, alone in this room, running my fingers along the top of a chair, along a desk, to a bookshelf. One thing follows another. I experience a succession, and the idea of succession, once experienced, takes on an unwarranted authority: if it happens so to me, it must be so out there. But succession, or proximity, is a magical relationship: meaningful in mind in ways that otherwise cannot be endorsed. The true forms in nature and art, often unconscious and usually difficult to elicit, owe little to succession. One room follows another; the succession has authority in memory - it tells us nothing about the possible architectural relationship of the rooms.

The snail-like way in which the blind man glues sensations together through touch has its reflection in the infant, newly born, whose lips and tongue latch onto its mother’s nipple. The infant takes comfort from closeness. Physical and emotional intensity become inseparable. The successionist believes that the further away the infant feels its mother to be, the less warm are its feelings about her. Distance becomes a symbol for modifications in feeling. The feelings are then imposed on map places and map distances. The idea of space, suffused with feeling, remains undistinguished from the perception of actual places - nature as described by the Aristotelian physicist, undiscriminated from the emotional stagings of mind. The planets exhibit temperamental inclinations. Zones are warm or cold places where you want to go to or avoid. Geographers discover Sloughs of Despond. Locations come to allegorise feelings.

The infant acquires a certain knowledge. It registers differences between kinds of touch, taste, sights and smells, and arguably raises mythologies out of them. Reveries about the coherence of a mother, as a body and as a personality, may at some early stage in development find their outlet in cosmic mythologies, concerning contrasts in texture and temperature. ‘How is the world put together?’ asked the pre-Socratic philosophers. ‘How is my mother put together?’ asks the infant -and the infant who persists in the adult. How does the experience of the successive relate to the coming together of a maternal coherence?

The successive impels us. Misleading ourselves, we think to tap our way to conclusions. Resting flesh and bone against flesh and bone, the infant acknowledges hardness and softness. Proximities in sensation echo proximities in measure: the pulse of blood and the rhythm of breathing (both in ourselves in others), heart beats, tempos in sucking and digesting - one thing leads to another. With a slight leap in inference, the infant senses a life within the body as well as without. Familiar rustles and rumbles and odours from within add to feelings of security; much as we feel secure, at night and in bed, when we listen to the rattle of heating pipes in an old house.

Succession theories tend to be causal, in the sense of being sympathetically causal: they hint at the influence of some occult power, of some invisible binding energy, the unseen womb itself. Under the influence of the wandering unseen womb, a woman drifts away from male jurisdiction. She is no longer open to reason. Male doctors will summon up a concept of madness to ‘explain’ her behaviour.

Children at play in the sand pit invest the uses of sand with feeling. Hardness and softness, contrasts in touch, increase in meaning when connected with some source in emotionality. The infant has reveries about its mother. She is the moon that moves the tides, occult, exercising powers as invisible as the fragrance of her body.  Parts of her body are hard or soft to touch; sensations about her personality, also, can be hard and soft.

The infant thinks: my place is next to her. Relationships are proximities. Enquiring, the infant works through presences (or absences) of familiar surfaces. Changes - when acknowledged -are thought to take place within some continuous context; and continuity seems to require the need for fixed points. Aristotle, in his Physics, defines place as the innermost boundary of that which contains. Things fit together hand-in-glove. The sailor has his place within the boat. The boat has its place on the river; the river has its place on the earth; the earth has its place - where? -in the totality. Children write notable envelopes, on which they inscribe their addresses in ever-widening cosmic circles; starting from home, they soon reach the perimeter of the universe, and then boldly voyage on. At some point - or so the logic of continuity has it - the journey outward reaches nothingness (which we cannot imagine) or some immovable object, the primum mobile, the wall at the end of the universe, which spears cannot pierce.

At this point, the belief in the importance of proximity is checked. We think to make a leap. We find ourselves obliged to recognise the realm of mutative experience.

The universe moves, takes on patterns of change, like the patterns in the steps of a dance. Something - the First or Last Cause - exerts an attraction, and its power cannot be accounted for in terms of the successive. Music and love reflect the power of its attraction; the universe dances out of love for it. The movement of the planets celebrates a music so sublime that earthly music can only hope to echo it. Post-Pythagorean composers do not create music out of a void. They listen to the implicit music of the universe, whether in the sounds of nature or in silence.

The successionist conceives of the universe as a plenum. Nothing can be added to it, nothing can be subtracted. He seeks to deny the existence of gaps. Or, finding a gap, he sidesteps it by inventing a missing link. Gaps, like the idea of the vacuum, are profanities. Only witches and madwomen and mothers believe in them: gaps are the kind of place where someone new, unpredictable and horrible might emerge - such as a baby brother or sister. For the successionist, there is no void, no space unanimated by human qualities, no sheer nothingness. Gaps are places through which the enemy enters.  Continuities, great chains of being, are means to keep out the unwanted. Officially, continuities join things together; they are constructive and therefore worthy; unofficially, they are esteemed because they exclude. They are like a passion for smooth uninterrupted skin: warts, moles, pustules, blackheads, unholy bumps, are dreadful indications that a rival is on its way.

The successionist believes in knowing your place. He expects teachers to emphasise the importance of proximity in differentiation. One number usually follows another. One idea leads to another, in a shoulder-rubbing egregious way. By stages so gradual that no human eye can see them, the seed grows into a plant. Comfortably cradled in the finite world, the essences of movement and change sway into meaning.

The successive is a source for poetry. A blind man nourishes himself by running a palm across the rough surface of a pine table. Step by step, we come to conceptions of loss as well as of accretion, of distance as well as of closeness. An Aristotelian end has the power to generate its beginning. The successionist comes to believe in the idea of imaginative conjecture - and comes to -imagine the existence of that which is not. Accomplishments like this can begin in some awareness of proximity.

Mutation
But what of the mutative? I turn to Kafka’s story, ‘The Great Wall of China.’
A great wall has been built to protect our kingdom. It keeps out the enemy. On closer inspection we see that this is not exactly so. The wall has been built piecemeal, in sections. The sections are later to be joined. As we contemplate the wall, we notice that the gaps between the sections are greater than we had supposed. A weariness descends on us: and the gaps seem to increase. The built bits are less than we had thought.

Our security, ill-founded, had been gained from a belief that succession informs us about the structure of experience. One thing leads to another - deceptively, like the steps in an argument. Succession seems to guarantee the meaning of sensation. But the sole guarantor of succession turns out to be consciousness: and consciousness of itself cannot indicate truth.