Lines of Direction · 24 July 2009
The Empirical Self of each of us is all that he is tempted to call by the name of me. But it is clear that between what a man calls me and what he simply calls mine the line is difficult to draw. We feel and act about certain things that are ours very much as we feel and act about ourselves. Our fame, our children, the work of our hands, may be as dear to us as our bodies are, and arouse the same feelings and the same acts of reprisal if attacked. And our bodies themselves, are they simply ours, or are they us?
…We see then that we are dealing with a fluctuating material. The same object being sometimes treated as a part of me, at other times as simply mine, and then again as if I had nothing to do with it at all….
Now can we tell more precisely in what the feeling of this central active self consists, - not necessarily as yet what the active self is, as a being or principle, but what we feel when we become aware of its existence?
First of all, I am aware of a constant play of furtherances and hindrances in my thinking, of checks and releases, tendencies which run with desire, and tendencies which run the other way. Among the matters I think of, some range themselves on the side of the thought's interests, whilst others play an unfriendly part thereto. The mutual inconsistencies and agreements, reinforcements and obstructions, which obtain amongst these objective matters reverberate backwards and produce what seem to be incessant reactions of my spontaneity upon them, welcoming or opposing, appropriating or disowning, striving with or against, saying yes or no. This palpitating inward life is, in me, that central nucleus which I just tried to describe in terms that all men [sic] might use. But when I forsake such general descriptions and grapple with particulars, coming to the closest possible quarters with the facts, it is difficult for me to detect in the activity any purely spiritual element at all. Whenever my introspective glance succeeds in turning round quickly enough to catch one of these manifestations of spontaneity in the act, all it can ever feel distinctly is some bodily process, for the most part taking place within the head. Omitting for a moment what is obscure in these introspective results, let me try to state those particulars which to my own consciousness seem indubitable and distinct.
In the first place, the acts of attending, assenting, negating, making an effort, are felt as movements of something in the head. In many cases it is possible to describe these movements quite exactly. In attending to either an idea or a sensation belonging to a particular sense-sphere, the movement is the adjustment of the sense-organ, felt as it occurs. I cannot think in visual terms, for example, without feeling a fluctuating play of pressures, convergences, divergences, and accommodations in my eyeballs. The direction in which the object is conceived to lie determines the character of these movements, the feeling of which becomes, for my consciousness, identified with the manner in which I make myself ready to receive the visible thing. My brain appears to me as if all shot across with lines of direction, of which I have become conscious as my attention has shifted from one sense-organ to another, in passing to successive outer things, or in following trains of varying sense-ideas….
In a sense, then, it may be truly said that, in one person at least, the 'Self of selves,' when carefully examined, is found to consist mainly of the collection of these peculiar motions in the head or between the head and throat.
--William James, Principles of Psychology (1890)
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Context.
Posted by: (0v0) · Jul 24, 10:48 AM · #
Poor William. No holographic universe for him!
Posted by: karen · Jul 24, 11:39 AM · #
Tell me about it! I bet he was lonely.
He did have keen eye on an empirical basis of fragmentary “self” happening, unlike most everyone around him at the time. That’s pretty amazing. Though if I remember right, he found a ton of inspiration in David Hume’s philosophy.
I have been reflecting on where some kind of notion of self as a bundle of sensations comes up in western scholarship. Was going to post the last lines of The Wasteland , because of the line:
these fragments have I shored up against my ruins
What a devastating depiction of the self. But then I remembered Eliot concludes the whole poem with two quotations from the Upanishads. Crazy. So much for tracing a distinctly western strand of this kind of thinking….
Posted by: (0v0) · Jul 24, 11:54 AM · #
I love “The Waste Land”! It’d be the poem I’d choose for a desert island. But I hadn’t read it for years. Reading here, I suddenly felt frightened and thought, “Jesus, am I so old that I’m gonna prefer ‘Four Quartets’ now?” Went and had a read, and no, thank goodness, I haven’t gone the way of the constricted later work…
Here’s a version of the poem with notes (http://eliotswasteland.tripod.com/). The note for line 401 addresses “Datta, dayadhvam, damyata” (“give, be compassionate, be self-controlled”) and it’s fun to read the poem from there, seeing the Upanishad filtered through the heart of a banker in 1922.
Posted by: karen · Jul 25, 06:29 AM · #
let me resign my life for this life, my speech for that unspoken,
The awakened, lips parted, the hope, the new ships.
from Marina (the one poem that I can recite by heart)
from there off on a tangent to ‘distants ships sailing into the mist you were born with a snake in both of your fists while the hurricane was blowing ‘ (B.Dylan, Jokerman)
don’t think this relates to your OP, but as a good girl I am citing the sources of my stream of thoughts, and then asking them to sit down quitely in the corner, while I try to meditate
Posted by: Fatou · Jul 25, 06:53 AM · #
“So much for tracing a distinctly western strand of this kind of thinking….” I see the inclusion of the excerpts from the Upanishad as a young Eliot looking for a “solution” in Eastern philosophy. Casting his net wide in true High Modernist (and common American youthful) style. It’s worth noting that the older Eliot converted to Anglicanism and grew progressively more conservative. I guess my point is that I don’t know that Eliot included this because it arose out of his Western mind — I think it’s here as a “found object” that had intellectual appeal (and, possibly, a nice shiny exoticism).
Okay, I have to stop now. Eliot always gets me going…
Posted by: karen · Jul 25, 08:14 AM · #
I love all these stream of consciousness/ passing thought comments that are starting to happen. Fatou, those are both really good.
Karen, this online commentary of The Wasteland is amazing. Before, one would have to take a grad course to appreciate all his references… now they’re on the internet. I wonder if he’d be pissed.
I only first read the Four Quartets recently. I did find them all dark, disturbed and even terrorized, but then… he wrote them in the middle of WWII. What a horrible time in England.
Still, it also resonates as a description of the present day. Isn’t this amazing?
Here is a place of disaffection…
Turning shadow into transient beauty
Wtih slow rotation suggesting permanence…
Nor darkness to purify the soul
Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing affection from the temporal….
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after…. Not here
Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.
Posted by: (0v0) · Jul 25, 06:03 PM · #
Ok, I also can’t stop. Here are the last lines of the Four Quartets.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
Read against the conclusion of The Wasteland, which feels to me like a peace-making, a deep and capitulating acceptance of life and death, isn’t this ending much, much more mystical? A westerner’s attempt to put words to changes rendered by classical enlightenment, maybe even?
Posted by: (0v0) · Jul 25, 06:23 PM · #
in this twittering world?
Posted by: Fatou · Jul 25, 10:34 PM · #
Yes, more mystical. I always wonder: was it something that happened as a result of getting embroiled in language, or was it (as he would have wished, I believe) an intellectual journey? Both, likely.
Anyhow, have a listen:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tqK5zQlCDQ
Posted by: karen · Jul 26, 06:54 AM · #
Oh God, I found a fetish object:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ktb8EiLc2WI
Posted by: karen · Jul 26, 06:59 AM · #
I really like that. As both music and a mnemonic.
Posted by: (0v0) · Jul 26, 02:35 PM · #
Articles I didn’t get to this weekend:
Titmuss, C. Is the Now a lot of hype?
Trungpa, C. The Fourth Moment
von Glasenapp, H. Vedanta and Buddhism
Iyer, P. The Doctor is Within
Posted by: (0v0) · Jul 26, 05:37 PM · #
But it’s that act of attending that is perhaps so distorting. Most of the time we just act, interact with the world around us. We use the tools, stroke our childs hair, take a lovers hand and just be. As we know as meditators ramdom thoughts float back and forth through our heads often unrelated to anything. Most of what we do is unreflected. But your talking about turning attention towards, taking a standpoint, attuning into, and that act is always going to be artificial, because just what is this construct that we’ve tacked together and now propose to turn on itself in the hope that it will tell us some thing other than the construct. It’s fun and interesting to do but does it really get us anywhere. The tao that can told is not the tao because to talk about Tao we have to use language and then apply it to something non linguistic. Use non-tao to approach tao. Same here we’re trying to use the construct mind or self (both as bad as each other to describe and/or investigate non mind/non self.
Great post by the way, a keeper.
....think Elliot would have hated the online notes. faber and faber still don’t put a single note in their Wasteland. Do any of those notes really make the poem any clearer (more interesting perhaps, but clearer?), it’s a poem, a step into the abyss and should be read as a poem and not a thesis. Heard from a schoolteacher friend of mine last week, who says that her 15 year olds are loving The wasteland more than Great Expectations, and this without any keynotes.
Posted by: Grimmly · Jul 29, 12:05 AM · #
Absolutely agree: Eliot would have been scandalized by the footnotes. And perhaps particularly hypertext footnotes.
And no, the footnotes do not do anything FOR the poem. They are separate and not equal — purely for entertainment ASIDE from the work itself.
There’s a terrific book that is an illustrated set of footnotes to “Ulysses,” which is just terrific. All the places Leopold Bloom and Stephen Daedalus went in Dublin on June 16. It has nothing to do with the book, really — but it’s a joy to look at.
Posted by: karen · Jul 29, 11:57 AM · #
I don’t know Grim, I kind of find William James’s pompously mangled sentence construction to be increasingly infuriating.
To me, the act of attending is the least of my troubles. It does faaaaar more to relieve stress and complication than to create it. And it doesn’t compromise my ability to act on tacit knowledge at all. If it did, I couldn’t drive a car while also attending to the constantly changing sight scape as a study in vanishing. But: it works.
To just be also entails to be aware. One can be more or less conscious and intentional about what that awareness is of. Subjects, objects, boundaries, no boundaries, whatever. Awareness has content. Until maybe it doesn’t. (I suspect that’s Buddhism’s one real point.)
Choosing your own awareness doesn’t mean that whatever you don’t choose to put in the foreground has to stop working.
I agree there’s the whole potential thing of getting all identified with the observer and locked in the dualism of that, but I have a feeling this is a little conundrum that undoes itself in time. Shinzen’s take on it: when the witness consciousness gets in the way, just deconstruct it. No big thing.
Posted by: (0v0) · Jul 29, 02:18 PM · #
“A human being is a part of a whole, called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest… a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
Albert Einstein
Posted by: (0v0) · Aug 1, 04:25 AM · #