Care of Self Meets Care of Other 

(and How they broke free from the frozen binary and played freely together the game of reciprocating well-being)

 

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What is the body schema?

 

Is it a thing, like a body is a thing?

Is the body actually a thing?

Are you a thing? Am I a thing?

Not at all like a rock is a thing,

Or a chair, a hammer, a book.

Are there degrees of thingness?

A rock is a rock, but a book? Now

That’s something else.

Is a hammer even fully a thing until

it has something to hammer at?

Even the nail isn’t fully what it is

Until it’s driven into wood

Maybe to help make the chair

that is not the thing it is until

it’s sat upon.

 

And do you not sit upon every chair you see?

You as body schema if not quite yet flesh.

 

The body schema is how you move without moving.

Your body schema.

Possessive pronoun? Is it “yours” or is it just you?

Move in any way you choose to move and

It’s there before you get there.

 

Unless you are flung somewhere

—like over a rainbow—

That’s another way to move,

A different flavor of movement.

We are laid down in a matrix of

background cosmic movement.

Heraclitus, Greek God of Movement.

 

It’s not something one is generally aware of.

Being aware would only get in the way,

Slow things down.

Might go so far as to say it’s a phase of the body.

Going grammatical

(we will be going grammatical

From time to time)

I posit that this BS is the body in a subjunctive mood.

Body schema=body subjunctive,

I.e., the body what-if, the body as-if, the iffing body.

 

Might say body schema is a concept

(WTF is a concept? That’s a story to hard to tell here, try Fodor)

Devised by neurologists in the nineteen teen years.

How the body keeps track of itself,

Knows the space and the stuff of the phantom called self.

 

Before I wander on too far, first some basics.

What is an organism? For that matter what is life?

What are the actions of any organism?

What do inner and outer mean?

 

First though a warning.

The word  quantum is a thorn-word.

I coin the term thorn-word.

Words to be very cautious and intentional about using.

(“But” was my first thorn-word to master; I no longer blurt my buts.)

Many years ago  in Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage I was warned about “popularized technicalities.” The word quantum falls into this category. Unless you are reading serious physicists or certain philosophers (physics needs more of theses) it is likely someone is trying to hoodwink and bamboozle you.

 

All that Quantum Healing claptrap.

 

I have done my best to avoid using the word but after reading a few books by quantum physicists and know at least a little about what is meant by the “Copenhagen interpretation” I will cautiously use the word. I would humbly request that certain neurologists and cognitive scientists get together with a select team of quantum physicists and ask some seriously playful questions. How does the body schema weave it all together? What is value and how does valuation move stuff around, change the shape of the world? Somehow, when I read about things like quantum entanglement I see the world. I’m hoping someone will set me right.

 

Let’s get going.

In the beginning…,

In the time before the invention of beginnings and endings

Who says there has to be a beginning?

Maybe the big bang is just a big burp

Cosmic flatulence.

 

Once upon a time, in the time before the invention of time, there was a universe with no life, the universe before the invention of life.

Like a child taking a toy apart to see how it works

I ask you to imagine this universe without life.

Just be aware that the very act of imagining such a universe automatically obliterates it.

But set that aside.

 

Stuff is roiling about.

A higgledy-piggledy hodge-podge of multiverse.

Confront now the great mystery of the origin

(And the extent of)

Life.

 

What does Life need?

Life organizes stuff (this pun is highly intentional).

To organize it needs

Compartments.

Life first needs an inside

for itself to be in and

it needs an outside or it is nothing

but the sound of one hand clapping

It must define against all the rest of the stuff that it is not.

It is only in relation* that it gains existence.

*This word relation has made its first appearance here and I promise is to have a starring rôle in this story.

 

Life knows that in order to be it must have boundary.

There must be a barrier that maintains a milieu intérieur holding the within within certain parameters while just on the other side—the out— there is wilder variation.

 

The cell membrane (many organisms—e.g.,plants, bacteria, fungi—have an added outer cell wall) is a leaky barrier. To be alive means it needs a constant flow trough of specific kinds of stuff.

 

Now we see we Las have value entering the picture.

Life sorts stuff. Some stuff it recognizes as different to other stuff. It needs this stuff

(but only just so much) and none (well, maybe just a smidgen if it will be fun and different oh wow I know I shouldn’t be ingesting this but give me more of that Lots More…. I’ve slipped beyond the cellular and jetted to the supratentorial).

 

All this activity comprises a system. An open system, as opposed to a closed system. All closed systems are imaginary; open systems rise to the level of true fiction.

 

Any organism is located as a system of systems. 

A fractalized system, level upon each level and each level mixed in in every other level. Some only in potential.

 

We now have bubbles. Sloterdijk would maybe have it as a foam. A whipped cream world, a meringue.

 

Trying to pick up now from a two-day spell away and distraction in the background. And I am thinking I want to lay down here a list of properties of the BS as presented in Wikipedia.

 

Neuroscientists Patrick Haggard and Daniel Wolpert have identified seven fundamental properties of the body schema. It is

• spatially coded
• modular
• adaptable
• supramodal
• coherent
• interpersonal
• updated with movement

 

 

 

 

These will be expanded upon as needed. In the meantime, the reader may prepare by reading the Wikipedia entry.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[I am finding myself distracted by the idea of transition zones. I had written a bunch of stuff here that did not save and when I returned it was gone. This is not the place for it but this is where it continues to want to be.

 

How is it that the BS makes matter move? If I had the power I would organize a team of neurologists, cognitive scitnetists, and quantum physicists to figure this one out. A blob of ofganized matter makes in itself a model of itself then the model moves the matter. It thinks itself into a different shape, a different place then finds itself there.

 

It is well worth the time to hang in this transition zone, Hit the next key but don't hit the next key, hover between moving and not moving. Feel the apophatic of movement.

 

One of my favorite words is cleave. It is a kind of word called a contronym; it is one thing and its opposite. These kinds of words are also called Janus words. Hold on to and let go, separate. That is how mucus is (think snail slime), sticky and slippy. Body Schema is psychic mucus.I am not even close to being a quantum physicist (physics was my weakest college course, barely passed) but something like entanglement must be involved here.

 

[I Paused to listen to a John Updike story.]