Memory and the body

“One may dream, not in plots, but in sensations. The sensation of not being able to push or pull something heavy. The sensation of free fall, of inclination, of pressure. The sensation of being unable to take a deep breath. Many sensations of being inside of something, perhaps something moving out of control, like an elevator that does not stop at the basement but continues to descend. Psychological states are inextricably wound up with these physical sensations, and vice versa…

Then perhaps whole narratives swiftly assemble themselves in the waking.

We always talk about dream or memory as something located in the head. Why do we locate the mind in the head? Brain cells extend the length of the spine – sensory neurons and motor neurons – and from there send out their axons to all perimeters.

Remembering is something that goes on all over the body.”

Elizabeth King, Attention’s Loop (A Sculptor’s Reverie on the Coexistence of Substance and Spirit), 1999.

Elizabeth King, sculptures and bio at the Kent Gallery, New York.

Attention

“I am lost in thought, moving about in my mind in a familiar room. Suddenly, with shock, I realize I am in that exact room. A tiny shift of attention and one room explodes into another. In bursts all the light, air, and sound of the here and now. What is this shift, in and of itself? I’d like to be watching at the moment of this interruption in someone else’s reverie, to see what it looks like from the outside. Maybe the head makes an imperceptible jerk, the eyelids flicker. It could look like almost nothing! Or take the return trip: the precise instant when a child ceases paying attention and slips into daydream. All but invisible: the eyes stop seeing the world in front of them. But what is really changed on the face? Perhaps only that two pupils release their convergence on your own face a few feet away, a movement the width of a hair.”

Elizabeth King, Attention’s Loop (A Sculptor’s Reverie on the Coexistence of Substance and Spirit), 1999.