Embodied Mind and Time

We have had some substantial decades of cultural concern with the body. We’ve turned to the body as a source of wisdom (listen to your body), for instance, or as a previously neglected object of history (material history), or as a site of political agency (the personal is the political), to name but a few strands. The idea of “embodied mind” (to my mind), however, signals a juncture, a rising awareness that for all that we have tried so hard to give the body its due against the mind, we have still not overcome the Cartesian dualism between the two. Perhaps we need to try another path. Poets can guide our way here (I will get to why at the end), so I’ll start from A. R. Ammons’s 1974 long poem, Sphere.

135

... time enough to think

of death when there’s no time left to think: big ditties:
the poem is love: love is fictional only where it can’t
grow, but always supreme: making the poem makes the body

that makes love: the abstract poem reaches too far
for the body, love bodiless there, better, if scarier, burns nearby:
or having loved nearby, the abstract poem turns to the spirit,

bodiless and frightless: or the abstract poem, searching
breadths and heights of fiery ease, trains its way down to
settle in the woman’s eye: we have so many ways to go wrong

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and so often go wrong, we must read rightness written in the
face of wrong: if the abstract poem goes out and never
comes back, weaves the highest plume of mind beyond us, it

tells by its dry distraction, distraction: love is better
awry than any other quantity true: the abstract poem, yearning
into the lean-away, acquires a skeleton to keep it here, and

its jangling dance shocks us to attend the mood of lips,
the liquid changes of the spiritual eye: the abstract poem
cleaves through the glassy heights like the hump of a great

beast, the rising reification, integration’s grandest, most
roving whale...

In the broadest sense, Sphere (subtitled The Form of a Motion) seeks to rethink and reintegrate in its motion the myriad forms dualism can take: body and mind, concrete and abstract, temporal and intemporal, science and art, sex and philosophy, sacred and profane, many and one. Ammons’s use of the colon is unusual, and unusually abundant, and allows him to say, among many other things, that his poem addresses the “one: many” problem. Why put it this way, what does the colon mean here? Colons normally signal things that follow upon each other, either logically, temporally, or even physically (as, arguably, when colons introduce speech). Colons connect, relate, emit, yet they also separate. In Ammons’s use especially, they become dynamic markers within a sea of constant movement, drumbeats. His poem enacts the becoming of one into many and many into one, and indeed draws on cellular life to describe how one organism can also be more than one:

... the
haploid hungering after the diploid condition: the reconciler
of opposites, commencement, proliferation, ontogeny:

2

often those who are not good for much else turn to thought
and it’s just great, part of the grand possibility, that
thought is there to turn to: camouflagy thought flushed

out of the bush, seen vaguely as potential form, and
pursued, pursued and perceived, declared: the savored
form, the known possession, knowledge carnal knowledge:

the seizure, the satiation...

Like cells, and of course constituted of cells, we are, each of us and all of us, one: many. And the poem likewise “makes the body,” as we saw, and at the same time “reaches too far / for the body,” “weaving the highest plume of mind beyond us” precisely to “shock” us again with “the rising reification, integration’s grandest, most / roving whale.” Thus the poem unfolds as “the reconciler / of opposites,” enacting the “ontogeny” of “thought” into “carnal knowledge.” As the stanzas turn, and turn again(and enjambments rule), we experience something like a vibration, or a wave, in which embodiment and mind alternate, fall into each other, separate again exposing the dynamism of life, its inescapable and ecstatic aliveness (and the exposure, crucially, is erotic —about “love” and “love” gone “awry”).

The medium, the ocean in which all of this swims, manifested and woven into form by the abstract poem, is time (as I take it, the very dance with time that makes it an abstract poem). Lest we solve this paradox too quickly, let me say that I decidedly do not mean time as moments, twomoments in time, when we might have now one cell, and then two, or move in succession from thought to carnal knowledge. I mean time asthe mysterious extension that shapes the passage, makes room for themove, and also time as emergent from the passage, generated by the wave as it falls from “bodiless and frightless” “breadths of fiery ease” to “potential form”’s “jangling dance” and “the mood of lips.” Ammons is showing us that we must inhabit time differently to move from dualism to something like embodied: mind. Or perhaps better, to ride the wave of embodied mind we must generate time, we must become conscious of how that wave and time are co-emergent.

Let me take a step back, and try to say a few concrete things about time. We tend to think of time spatially, as the ubiquitous image of the river suggests. Ammons’s poem does not go against that entirely, but it does remove our usual cardinal points: if the general motion of time is a sphere, that sphere moves in every direction at once, nullifying the rigidity that space normally allows us to impose on our temporal experience. Time is no longer an object for us to visualize here, but more like the air we breathe, breathing in chunks of time and letting them out. Concretely, Ammons’s text works, among other things, to nudge us into places where we think of space temporally, rather than vice versa as we usually do. Space becomes a moving sphere when we allow time to infuse it, and “psychic tides” become the visible gravity we must contend with as we ride a bike (“it is a matter of learning how to move with / balance among forces greater than your own, gravity, water’s /// buoyance, psychic tides,” Sphere st. 125-26). In the background of such reversals lie quantum physics (Schroedinger’s cat, for instance), modern neuroscience (brain tissue instantiates time via memory), even Bergsonian mysticism (with its injunction to “create creators”). More overt in Ammons’s poem is a political and ecological agenda in which thinking of space temporally makes apparently distant locations, bodies, and forms merge into a flow whereby “the earthworm is” “my radical cousin” (st. 10) just as “we try to put the nations and / communities of nations together and there, too, only by // joining tenuous extremes, asserting the dignity of the single / person above the united nations” (st. 152). One way to parse this would be to say that our embodiment contains, at the cellular level, a solidarity with distant pasts and futures, a solidarity we can think of as ecological in that it is both constantly enacted dynamically and, yet, also susceptible of abstract form, of pattern, of what can become information. Rather than consider the myriad ways Ammons’s poem invites us to think space temporally, I would like to bring this invitation into our present by drawing on recent proposals that we now live in a different “chronotope” that is no longer historicist, and is consolidated by modernity’s passage from technology to media (understood as a shift in which mediatization has become so pervasive that the different technologies involved in it are but a secondary concern). In this shift, Timon Beyes and Claus Pias write, “modernity has transferred the unbetrayable secret of sovereignty onto time itself. The future has become the secret that cannot be betrayed” (“The Media Arcane,” 91). Agency and power are concentrated no longer in a political entity, they argue, but in media’s predictive capacities, whose opaqueness works like Agamben’s state of exception: by excluding something like “bare life” in order to appropriate it, to wrest from it its aliveness, that is, the power of dynamism, generation, and “carnal knowledge.” In Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s striking image, we are forced to inhabit a “broad present” in which an unimaginable future hurtles towards us ever faster, while remaining entirely foreclosed and opaque Beyes and Pias suggest that we see this future within the dynamic of the premodern concepts of “mysterium” (an inherently un-revealable secret) and secrecy (that which is hidden and can be unveiled), clearly with an eye towards giving us tools to grasp the hidden passages from present to future (what is being hidden from us, under the guise of appearing inherently incomprehensible to the human intellect?). But to the degree that Gumbrecht is right, we have already been forced out of that dynamic, at least as agents. It is not that we have little agency over our uncertain future, but rather that we have no capacity to envision any future at all.

In this context, Ammons’s call for us to think space temporally might be a way to reawaken such capacity, or to approach the “mysterium” without unveiling it. This is not about taking the body as an object, or even as a priority, that needs to be “given a voice,” according to an image that, Gumbrecht would point out, marks a major crisis in our sense of our own presence to the world. It’s about potentiating, enlivening, walking towards rather than away from the engagement of embodiment with time. It’s about exploring how our bodies are embedded in time and how our perceptions generate time, and how the ecosystem of the body, like any ecosystem, is malleable, and can thrive or fail.

There is, in Ammons’s poem, a “raggedness,” an “incompleteness” to the flesh that we must not seek to counter, to make up for, frame, separating it from abstraction, allowing the mind to disengage from time. Or, to turn this insight back into present vocabulary: we must not be blandished by the delusion of a future mysterious and mystical in its completeness, like Kubrick’s black monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey. We cannot revert to the dynamic of veiling and unveiling, between transparency and opaqueness, because this dynamic also ultimately leaves us to our future as before an impenetrable object. Whereas no one —not even AIs —is ever holding the future hostage. The future, Ammons says, is all around us, and within us, in the very dynamism of our embodied mind —in the aliveness of the world —and, as such, it is constitutively improvisational:

... sketchiness and incompleteness, broken gestures, stuttering
intentions, fact blanching and breaking fiction, seizures

of cold and pied heat, these are prayerful realizations of
disorientation, holy efforts to accept change: nothing,
not even the least (the half-step or stalled intention) is

without the rigor of knowing: how to be saved: what is
saving: come to know the motions with what rightness, accuracy,
economy, precision they move and identify the motions of the

soul with them so as to find the self responsive to and in
harmony with the body of motions: morality is not a judgment
on action but acting rightly, truly — total, open

54

functioning...

In some ways, this may seem tremendously obvious. If we can feel more alive, we can reclaim agency. But Ammons has two important things to add here. First, he focuses on aliveness rather than mortality. They are obviously part of the same sphere, the same movement, and the temporal wave is and instantiates both. But mortality has fallen into disrepair, it is like Schroedinger’s black box that we cannot open: as we ‘think’ ‘about’ mortality, we engage with dying less and less. But if we risk feeling our aliveness, as Ammons demands that we do, we will certainly also suffer, and be “humble[d]” with “horrible splendor” (st. 94) yet also “[break] / into incredible ramification” (st. 108). Aliveness enacted is “total, open /// functioning” (st. 53-54) containing “intention” and “effort” without teleology (not even that of death, really, insofar as teleology implies a plan, a visible end point). We don’t ‘know’ where we are going so much as feel our way, learning to dwell in time and with time in the same way that you hope gravity will hold you while you ride your bike. Concretely this likely means that we, the risk-averse moderns, should lead riskier lives. Stop trying to minimize what appears to be coming our way in order to engage with it fully, and creatively, instead.

Ammons claims for art, then, and for poetry specifically the magic of invoking the mysterious without reducing it to a black box. With poetry the “mysterium,” or the future, is not revealed: but we are allowed to touch its bottomlessness, to enjoy its scintillation, we can almost hear it speak to us from somewhere where we are not. Concretely we should read more poetry, no doubt. But more to the point, we should allow the temporality of art —intention without telos —to be our own.

... if
nothing shaped stays and shapelessness is dwellingness, where

can we dwell: as shapes (bodies) we dwell only in the flow
of shapes, turning the arcs of mortality: but the imagination
though bodiless, is shaped (being the memory or imagined

memory of shapes) and so can dwell in nothingness: the human
being is as inscrutable and unformulable as a poem, or, if
possible, more so: the gas station attendant has a bottomless

well in him, too — shoots from his brain down his spine, breaks
into incredible ramification, the same as bottomless: we
have our definitions, imperfect, but we all have: around them,

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though, and running through, and immensely more vast, the
indefinable, the source of possibility...