The First Person Singular

3. Where I Am

12 3 Where I Am Mapping the Environment In the boundless expanses of light, air, and warmth where luminous and resounding substances extend over the supporting ground, we establish a site from which we depart and to which we return. Our home base is not simply a shelter for a collection of implements; it is a zone of intimacy and tranquillity.1 It is closed off from the bustle of the workplaces and markets. Its furnishings—the armchair, the seats on the balcony—merge with the substance of our body to which they give support and rest. The hi-fi and the TV fill a space with entertainment separated from practical concerns; the plants, the fish tank, the back garden welcome sustaining nature. When we were just driving across the state, this town was a flux of visual patterns passing across the car window. Now, we have arrived to live here. We take a room in a hotel or rent a house. Then we lay out a Main Street that extends from our door to our place of work, and side streets leading to the grocery store, the laundry, the bank and post office, the cinema and the bars. We establish pathways, envision objectives, take hold of implements and encounter obstacles. Things that are used are first grasped and taken possession of: they are substances closed in themselves.2 Things are means, but they are also ends; they satisfy our hungers and respond to our needs, and they attract our sensibility and sensuality. They are annexed to the zone of tranquillity and intimacy, kept on hand for enjoyment. The area we map out with practical intentions and objectives is limited . The work spaces of the carpenter or of the nurse making rounds in the hospital by night do not extend instrumental relations unendingly across the world.3 The grocery, the laundry, and our workplace in the factory, office, or hospital are zones we stake out with practical initiatives, but they are also places of relaxation and shared pleasure. For us to live here is to have a home here, to enjoy this town, these forests at the edge of the ocean or these rice-terraced mountains, these northern or tropical skies. What lies beyond the paths and implements we use and the objectives we work toward is not only the background of what is just on hand, 13 B E I N G H E R E what has broken down, been used up, is in the way, or has been left aside:4 beyond lies the alien, the elemental. Beyond are earth, light, air, and skies, elements not enclosed within surfaces, extending indefinitely in the distances and in depth. Rhythmic and Melodic Space A living organism is a material composite in which blood, nutrients, and energies circulate according to multiple circadian periodicities. Its sensory organs pick up vibratory stimuli at their thresholds that vary with levels in the biochemical homeostasis of the body. Its sensitive surfaces record movement, rumble, pressure, texture, and substance with quiverings , tinglings, pacings, and strokings. We shift position, relax, tense up, assume one posture and then another , advance and retreat, avoid things, manipulate things. We shudder, rock, sway, swing, pump, prance, and gesticulate. Surges of superabundant energy become vibrant and intensify in exhilaration, then subside. We advance into the outside environment and act, then return to our home base. Particular initiatives are generalized and become habitual. The behaviors of our body cannot be explained as reactions to the impact of physical stimuli, but they also are not a succession of initiatives launched each time in view of objectives. There is a rhythmic and melodic structure to body movements. The rhythm of our breath is internally coded, but it takes on the pulse of the atmosphere weighted with humidity in tropical lowlands or of the jittery wind in the air thinned out at high altitudes. Our heartbeat synchronizes with the onrush of exciting or menacing events and, at night, with the ticktock of the clock. Our circadian rhythms pace our inner organs with the cycle of day and night and with the lunar month and the seasons. When we walk, we set up a certain gait according to the intensity of our energy or our languor, but our stride or amble takes up the rhythm of the rocky or sandy ground and that of the waves against the beach. It catches on to the pace of a companion. What the neuropsychologist Alexander Romanovich Luria...