in it and of it

Had a conversation with a good friend about consciousness. I said something that, after I wrote it, I had to back and read several times. I don't know if I've thought it before, but it feels very right. Consciousness is how we feel time. You run your finger across your hair and you know how your hair feels. You hear the train rush by and you know how that sound feels. You walk out of a building into summer air in the city and you know how the street feels. I think that we feel time passing as what we call consciousness. The difference, I feel, is that the feeling we call consciousness is as if we were running our hand through hair that goes on for all our waking hours. That sort of extended feeling is usually ignored. Are you aware of the clothing touching your shoulder? Likely not (maybe now that I've made you focus there). But that feeling is there the whole time the clothing is there. Our brain ignores it for us. Consciousness is the draping of time over our being like cloth, but we do not ignore it. We feel it.

We are in the world and of the world. The fact is that we often talk about how things "feel right" and I think there is a lot to that. I do think we can feel the world. We feel it and we lose grasp of that feeling not because we fall short of it in our experience but rather because the words fail us. The definitions are never nimble or supple enough. We can never make a word bend as a reed does in the wind. And I don't mean that is some abstract poetic way at all. I'm being as literal as I possibly can be. The wind blows, the reed bends and the two play with each other to form the actual reality of the world, the actuality of the world. Our words can't bend in the wind our mind blows. Our words are stiff, or, if not, ineffectual. What is a word if it doesn't mean the same thing said twice? As always, the exception proves the rule. Look at the way a poet must break words to make them be art.

It's no coincidence that the more complex society becomes the more rich our languages become. It's not just that you need new words to label new things, though of course that has a role. But there are also new modifiers, new tenses, new abstractions, new phrases and more. The words can not change. But the way we combine them, the new ones we make and the ways we find to contrast them gives huge leaps for the mind to take. And the space to jump from where we are to where we will be is why we need language to grow. We have learned to encounter and experience so much more. We have shifted and broken time, space, context and our bodies. Of course the old language would fail to meet the needs of the new reality. We feel new things and we need new words. We feel old things in the light of new things and we need new ways to use old words. How plastic is this lump of flesh in our skull? How much further can it leap and stretch? Will we know when we reach the precipice? Or will we think we're leaping long after we're left to stare over the edge wide eyed and dreaming of jumps we never really take?

This post was inspired by hearing Neruda's "Enigmas" quoted in the movie Mindwalk. Maybe I watch too many movies?