Slowly Waking

May 16th, 2006 Fred McVittie

The passage from the unconsciousness of sleep to the consciousness of wakefullness is usually characterised as a singular, smooth, largely unstructured or indivisible event. The metaphors we use to describe this passage reflect this general impression, usually drawing upon an image of a single entity (the self) rising from a dark deep place to a higher, more brightly lit place. Typically this transition from dark to light is seen as relatively abrupt, as if one is breaking through a layer of some kind, or rising above a surface (of an ocean perhaps), or emerging from a closed container. This collection of metaphors presumably refers to the physical circumstances of sleep and waking, and is therefore embodied, like all abstract concepts.

Posted in Darkness, Light, Metaphor, Sleep | No Comments »

We are the Dead

October 31st, 2007 Fred McVittie

The dead things of the world, the inert and inanimate things that lie all around us, are our sisters and brothers. We are part of an extended family of corpses, all engaged in the processes of the dead which are also the processes of matter. Here is grass and a rock, here is water and the wind through the trees. These are the dead things that are so far from where we appear to ourselves to be. But we also are the dead, and the living of our bodies does not exclude its simultaneous death. Death is not held at bay by life but lies alongside it, like a lover, or the shale under the snow. We are in its midst and it is in ours, and when life has gone we will still have that death. Hello darkness my old friend. Here is grass, the wind through the trees.

Posted in Darkness, Death, Matter | No Comments »

Darkness at Noon - Objectivity and Undeniability

November 23rd, 2007 Fred McVittie

A common metaphor for the acquisition of knowledge is that of ’seeing’. When we want to refer to such gaining of knowledge we might explicitly say ‘I see’, meaning that we have such an understanding. As noted elsewhere, this visual metaphor for knowing also confers object-like status on the knowledge itself and we intuitively begin to treat it as if it were some kind of object that can be ‘grasped’, ‘acquired’, and ‘transferred’, or might be ‘hard’, ‘robust’, or less positively ’slippery’.

The visual metaphor for knowing also has a number of significant entailments which figure within the structure of the metaphor but which may be less obvious. Firstly there is the requirement that these ‘objects’ of knowledge exist in some kind of conceptual ’space’, usually external to the body (obviously, or we would not be able to ’see’ them), and secondly that this space be illuminated. This latter point is evidenced in our references to being ‘in the dark’; we use this and similar phrases when we want to indicate that we know that certain facts (knowledge objects) are ‘out there’ but we cannot see them.

Some types of knowing are conceptualised without the use of the visual metaphor, and in these cases some other sensory mode is usually referred to. So for example, when we want to indicate that we understand what a person is saying but do not want to simply agree with their viewpoint (sic) we might say ‘I hear what you’re saying’. By using an auditory rather than a visual metaphor we have acknowledged the existence of the facts the other person is claiming sight of but have not awarded those facts the full objective status that would be implied by saying that we also ’saw’ what they meant. We are acknowledging the existence of their words, but holding back on accepting the truth claims that those words make. To this extent we might say that (metaphorical) seeing is believing, whilst (metaphorical) hearing has something of the status of rumour; a good indication of what the other person thinks they know, but no guarantee of authority.

Other metaphorical senses used as labels for knowing have similar partial status; ‘felt’ knowledge is usual personal and tacit, and the defining feature of that form of knowing we call ‘taste’ is that it is not ‘out there’ in interpersonal space at all but is inside the body, inside the mouth. Strangely, these up close and personal (or even internal, interoceptive) forms of knowing, whilst they may not have the interpersonal and social authority of ’seen’ facts often have a feeling of personal authority which exceeds the objective. Whilst we may rationally understand that ‘feelings aren’t facts’ as the AA mantra goes, at the same time there is an undeniability of this type of felt knowledge which is often lacking in the objective. Many of us will have had the sense that, whilst all the (objective) facts about a certain phenomenon say one thing, our guts say something else, and that ‘gut feeling’ has a authoritative quality which is hard to overcome.

Obviously these acts of knowing that draw on non-visual metaphors have different, and usually lower social status than the objective knowledge of the seen. In any official context, or in any claim for the authority mentioned above, it is visual, ‘objective’ knowledge which holds sway. For this reason it is not surprising that when we wish to imply that our ideas should be treated as authoritative we tend to use visual metaphors to frame those ideas. Any politician who argued that his opponents ideas were invalid because they were ‘not to his taste’ would get short shrift from those who argued that the truth of such ideas ‘could easily be seen’.

Occasionally the visual metaphor is used to articulate a belief about the status of knowledge which is not easily shared, or which has ambiguous status, and this is most clearly revealed in the language around enlightenment and spiritual experiences. Typically, a person experiencing some kind of epiphany or divine revelation would claim that this experience constitutes the gaining of knowledge or insight, usually a particularly significant or transformative insight which seems to have something to say about the external world. To this extent it requires an objective explanation. Also, such experiences tend to have a quality of undeniability about them; it is rare for a person having such an experience to doubt the reality of it, in the way one might doubt the reality of a contestable fact. To this extent such experiences also demand an explanatory form which indicates the felt certainty of that knowledge. For these reasons, any desire to communicate this experience and share the knowledge thus gained would require that this communication use sensory metaphors which convey the most authority, which as already noted tend to be visual metaphors with all the entailments of space and light that go along with them. (This paragraph has already mobilised some of these metaphors as exemplified in words like ‘enlightenment’ and ‘insight’). They would also require the use of metaphors which convey the ‘felt’ sense of the experience, with all of the self-evident undeniability of the closely-held belief, (again the idea of a belief being ‘closely held’ indicates the mobilisation of an appropriate metaphor, and the unavoidability of using such metaphors in writing and thinking about these concepts). The requirements of a form of expression and conceptualisation appropriate to these experiences inevitably lead to paradox; one must find a way of thinking and speaking which simultaneously evokes the metaphorically exterior space in which objects of knowledge gain their interpersonal authority, a space which is illuminated and translucent, but one must also suggest the darkness and contact of the internal space which give an undeniably sense of phenomenological truth. This necessary paradox may help to explain why some authors, when trying to articulate the enlightenment state (or cognate conditions) use apparently oxymoronic terms such as ‘the dazzling dark’, or possibly in the case of alien abduction, a strange set of (probably confabulated) experiences in which similar symptoms to enlightenment are featured, the light emitted by the aliens or the ships has been described as ‘white, but dark white’.

Posted in Belief, Darkness, Feeling, Grasp, Hearing, Knowledge, Light, Metaphor, Objectivity, Seeing, Sense, Space, Taste | No Comments »

Exploding Mirror

November 26th, 2007 Fred McVittie

Before the beginning was no thing and no thing was before the beginning, and in the beginning was no darkness and no light, and no space for the light to illuminate and for the darkness to consume. There was no time before the beginning and no time for time to be absent from. No skin marked the separation of nothing for there was no separation and nothing to be separated from. There was no zero before the beginning as there was no number to be subtracted from itself to generate such a zero, no one any where, no where, no how, and no asking of any question whatsoever. Nor was there a vacuum, or absence, or silence, or the absence of silence, or the absence of the sound of silence. There was no Simon and Garfunkel before the beginning, no old friends and new friends, no best friends and worst enemies, and the qualities and values of friends and enemies alike were not present. No face moved upon the surface of any water, and there were no dried-up riverbeds to mark the water’s departure, and no departure for the water and the river and the face. No thing, no at, no all. No holes punched in the fabric and no damaged goods requiring the attention of an expert. No thing provided a destination from which something might originate and nothing had the powers of containment from which something might emerge. In the beginning was no ‘in’, and at the beginning was no ‘at’.

The beginning was the beginning of the beginning and the beginning was the beginning of the bang, and the beginning was cracked in the shock of the bang.

The broken beginning was without form but the form that was the break, and nothing was each part of the break other than its similarity to the other part of the break. The two parts of the break were as the parts of a broken mirror in which each reflects the contents only of the other because there can be no other thing to reflect. And there was no difference between the parts of the break save that they were not the other part of the break, and the only contents of each part was the part that was the other.

Posted in Beginning, Darkness, Mirror, Universe | No Comments »

The Dying of the Light: Hello Darkness

December 11th, 2007 Fred McVittie

Development in human medicine may one day delay the onset of senile dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, and the routine deterioration of memory and reasoning that accompanies old age. (Recent studies have linked these effects with loss of integrity in the white matter of the brain (1).) We may eventually see a time in which aging of the brain is halted and as one gets older there is no loss of mental function, one stays as sharp and alert as a 20 year old, right up to the point when one dies from some somatic breakdown or other. Is this really a good thing? I am not at all sure I want to go out like that, at the absolute height of my cognitive powers, fully wide-awake and fully aware that, if only my body would keep going, then my brain would continue to carry me forward. I suspect that such ‘improvement’ would only add to the fear of death and the impossibility of imagining it. There would be no gradual decline, no fading away, no seeping of consciousness into the fabric of the world, no emptying of the self until the body is a hollow shell. Instead the ghost would be perfectly trapped within the machine, watching the decay of its vessel with increasing frustration and anxiety. There would be no ‘dying of the light’ to rage against, only the solid black wall of terminal embodiment to which we would hurtle, wide-eyed and with our path toward it brightly lit with anachronistic mind.

Let me dissolve into the gathering dusk piece by piece. Take this part of mind, then this, then this. Let me gently forget my friends and family, my home, the books I’ve read and the television I’ve watched, my wife, my past, my name. Return these things from wherever they came, out there beyond the extent of skin and bone. Take my freedom, my independence, my dignity, my continence, my responsiveness, my mobility, my rights as a human being, my sense of self, and stick them where the light of my sun no longer shines. Here is the dark, and here is the whisperer in darkness.

Andrews-Hanna J.R., Snyder A.Z, Vincent J.L., Lustig C, Head D, Fox M.D., Raichle M.E., and R.L. Buckner. “Evidence for large-scale network disruption in advanced aging.” In Preparation. Reported in Scientific American, December 5th, 2007.

Posted in Brain, Cognition, Consciousness, Darkness, Death, Embodiment, Life, Light | No Comments »

The Dark and Light of Dying

December 16th, 2007 Fred McVittie

Two images dominate our understanding of the death experience. In the first of these we imagine death as an embrace of the darkness. We find this in poetic metaphors of ‘the dying of the light’ against which we should rage, in visual representations of death as associated with blackness, impenetrability, and night, and in images of ‘fading’ consciousness, squeezing out of sparks, and the dimming of brilliance in senility. Conversely, there is the apparently paradoxical metaphor which associates death with entering illumination, a moving toward the light and a merging with the glory of that light.

Posted in Darkness, Death, Enlightenment, Illumination, Life, Light, Metaphor | No Comments »

Light and Space

January 17th, 2008 Fred McVittie

The key role that light plays in our metaphorical conceptualisation of knowing is linked to other elements or entailments of the overall schema KNOWING IS SEEING. Seeing is dependent upon the medium of light for its functioning, and closely related to this is the space which the light occupies and which allows for both the separation and the containment of the object of vision. In order to see something that thing must exist in a brightly lit shared space with ourselves, it must be separated from us within a prescribed distance, and it must not be obscured or occluded by other things. Only when all these conditions are met can the act of seeing take place. The relationship between the components of this schema, light and space, is such that they are inextricably linked; we cannot divorce the space from its illumination. A space which is totally dark, in visual terms ends at the surface of our eyeballs. A visually extended space, on the other hand, is defined by the extent to which it is flooded with light. The conscionable space ends at the limits of the light, and while we might suspect the space continuing into the shadows there is a distinctly different ontology to such a space; it is ambiguous, impenetrable, filled with the absence of lightness.

The conceptual metaphor KNOWING IS SEEING which derives from the phenomenology of sight similarly echoes this tangled relation between light and space. To know something is to recognise its existence out there in the illuminated space beyond our eyes, and we invoke the metaphor whenever we say ‘I see’ when we really mean ‘I know’. Also, the limits and entailments of the metaphor transfer to our conceptualisation of what knowing is. If the object of our knowing is too close to our self the elision of the spatial separation also banishes the light and we can no longer claim to have this kind of visual knowledge. An object held against the heart ceases to be visible, and similarly with objects of knowing, when we are too personally involved the object ceases to have the objectivity which light and distance conferred upon it. It is barely an object at all and seems to be part of our selves, part of our subjectivity.

Alternatively, if the object is too metaphorically distant from us we may have great difficulty seeing it at all. We may sense that it is partly hidden in shadow and it may even inherit an eldritch strangeness from the darkness toward which it leans. At such a remove the object of knowing becomes part of occult knowledge, secretive, hidden and the property of the gnostic.

Posted in Darkness, Knowledge, Light, Metaphor, Proximity, Space | No Comments »