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2. The World’s Skin Ever Expanding: Spatiality and the Structures of Child Consciousness
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T W O The World’s Skin Ever Expanding Spatiality and the Structures of Child Consciousness SUNLIGHT Spatiality is inscribed into our bodies and souls. The toddler, called by curiosity and desire, steps into the spatial web and moves along its threads. The sunlight falls onto the bare floorboards and beckons. It lights up the hand that moves into the sunbeam out of shadow. Small flecks dance in the light, which smells of warmth and dust and feels good on the skin. The child curls up on the floor to fit the toes into the patch of light. The world recedes. Hands hold still. Attention wanders. The body is enfolded by light. Time for a nap. IN THE BEGINNING: BEING SITUATED In Phenomenology of Perception (1962), Merleau-Ponty identifies space not as the quantitative, logical setting in which things are arranged and placed by their geometrical coordinates but as “the means whereby the positing of things becomes possible” and as “the universal power enabling them to be connected” (243). From the “spatialized” space of the logician, we move to the “spatializing space” (244) of human experience, which forms the matrix of placement and relationship for all beings in the world. Direction, depth, and movement, beyond their measurable quantities, are preobjective and prethematic qualities of a person’s hold on his or her world. Merleau-Ponty leads us back to this “pre-logical” 27 and “phenomenal layer” (274), where “being is synonymous with being situated” (252). Child experience, as Merleau-Ponty argued in his lectures at the Sorbonne (1964a, 1994), allows us to come closer to this prelogical and phenomenal layer of human experience. Following MerleauPonty , Benswanger (1979) defines the goal for phenomenological research on children’s experience of spatiality as the task “to rediscover the layer of living experience through which spaces and places are first given to us. Implicit in this endeavor is the conviction that an understanding of the phenomena as they emerge in childhood will lead to an enlightened understanding of the psychological implications of spatial experience at all stages of human life” (115). The experience of spatiality comes to us through the senses in various ways. Touch gives us the contours of things at arm’s reach, their texture , their coolness, their weight. The eye sees the sweep of space from the closeness of my hand to the expansion of the distant horizon and locates things within this extension: near and far, here and there. The ear pinpoints coming and going and, especially in the dark, is attuned to the particular sounds that announce a comforting or threatening presence in space. The nose provides us with the traces of things that have happened or will happen in this particular space, and the memories it leaves with us are the deepest and least reflected. Taste bridges the boundary of the body and creates the immediate link between the world at hand and body itself; together with the rise and fall of breathing, it opens up the possibility of an interior space in all its metaphorical ramifications. We can think of the eyes, ears, nose, and mouth as variations of the sense of touch: all the major sense organs are openings in the skin, are folds of vulnerability where the sense of touch intensifies because the boundary between the inside and outside of the body is breached. In the following pages we will examine the establishment and function of primary boundaries and their expanding horizons in the infant’s development. We will watch how spatial forms are inscribed into the structures of perception and consciousness by following the toddler into the world of the upright posture (Straus 1966/1980)—and feral children out of it. Continuing the developmental trajectory, we will trace the three-year-old child’s new sense of “lived distance” (Minkowski 1970) and the four-year-old’s terrifying experience of night space. The chapter ends with a topo-analysis (Bachelard 1994) of the older child’s secret spaces. 28 CHAPTER TWO [44.212.93.133] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 09:15 GMT) INSIDE AND OUTSIDE: OUR FIRST HOME Intrauterine space is marked by a caressing, liquid darkness, which over time touches the fetal body ever closer and tighter. In a powerful description of deep-sea diving, Lingis (1983) compares the experience of going into the deep with the desire to return to the womb. His description can give us an approximation of the experience of fetal spatiality: “Denuded...