03 Jun Embodiment

Embodiment is described by Csordas (1994, p.12) as the ”perceptual experience and mode of presence and engagement in the world” and by Ingold as “being-in-the-world” within an experience. Merleau-Ponty writes of our existence as intrinsically embodied, our senses not showing us the world but constructing the only world for us (2012).

Within my project embodiment is defined as the experience of the world as visceral, personal and felt from within my own mind and body. This particular embodiment describes a dissolving of boundaries between myself and my experience of the tree – the landscape I am entrapped with. The shadow of the tree looms over my loungeroom, the looming feels oppressive, it reflects my own unease.  

When discussing and reflecting upon this project, I bring my hands together, barely touching, attempting to approximate something of the feeling of sensation between two objects, the trace or impression that the body and a landscape leave on each other. When writing of embodiment, Husserl (1999), articulates this feeling of doubling, of the hand being simultaneously, both the subject and the object. The boundaries between the subject and the object can shift, can reflect, can dissolve. Is there always a space between the two hands – the hand feeling, and the hand being felt – do they meet at certain and tenuous points or do they dissolve?

The boundaries between myself and the tree as separate entities shift and dissolve as memories and half-remembered stories connect us. As I watch the tree, at times it is not external to me; it becomes part of me, and I can feel myself reflected from within it. On occasion it is forgotten, until I smell the resinous ink that is sitting in the kitchen and I am reminded of stories, perhaps fairy tales or of the need to take the dog outside under its branches. An embodied experience is temporal, built by returning to the branches of the tree to visit the memories that hang there (oddly shifted since I left them[1]). The fabric of the experience is literally woven[2] by working with materials from the tree (inks, brushes and frottage), observing the needles, the bark, the scuffed roots, seeing and hearing and touching and feeling and remembering…

[1] Surprised by the memory not being as left. As I will be surprised that my current perception changes over time. “We will forget our present perception of the house: each time that we can compare our memories with the objects to which they refer, allowing for other reasons for error, we are surprised by the changes the objects owe to their own duration.” (Merleau-Ponty, M., 2012, p. 71) 

[2] “The real is a tightly woven fabric” (ibid, p. lxxiv) 

References

Csordas, T., ed. (1994) Introduction: the body as representation and being-in-the-world. In Embodiment and experience: the existential ground of culture and self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Retrieved from: https://books.google.com.au/books?id=24TAxcRJESQC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

Husserl, E. (1999) The Essential Husserl: Basic Writings in Transcendental Phenomenology. Edited by Donn Welton. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press

Merleau-Ponty, M. (2012) Trans Landes, D.A., Phenomenology of Perception. Taylor & Francis Group. Retrieved from: http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/csuau/detail.action?docID=1433878.