The Sense of Space

CHAPTER 5 RESIDING UP AND DOWN ON EARTH

CHAPTER 5 RESIDING UP AND DOWN ON EARTH At my feet ticklish and hard like the sun, and open like flowers, and perpetual, magnificent soldiers in the gray war of space, everything ends, life definitively ends at my feet, what is foreign and hostile begins there: the names of the world, the frontier and the remote, the substantive and the adjectival too great for my heart originate there with dense and cold constancy. Always, manufactured products, socks, shoes, or simply infinite air, there will be between my feet and the earth stressing the isolated part of my being, something tenaciously involved between my life and the earth something openly unconquerable and unfriendly. —Pablo Neruda, from “Ritual of My Legs” in Residence on Earth WE ARE IN A CURIOUS CONFLICT with the earth upon which we reside. We are bound to it, yet are separate from it; there is “something tenaciously involved between my life and the earth,” yet this something is “openly unconquerable and unfriendly.” The conflict concentrates in the legs and feet, which are, as we might say in English, foot soldiers in the “gray war of space,” the zone where push comes to shove. A gray war, because unending and self-defeating, because we cannot conquer our residence on earth, 129 130 THE SENSE OF SPACE because we are rooted on earth. Yet we are not rooted in one spot, in the manner of a plant; we move about. Neruda’s “infinite air” is not simply a sign of unsurpassable distance, but of an unsurpassable rhythm of a life dragged out on earth, a pedal rhythm transformed but never undone by manufactured products, shoes and socks. Neruda turns us from world to earth. One’s body is not merely crossed with a world, but crosses the earth. Earth is thus not merely a planetary body suspended in astronomical space, it is a larger body crossed with one’s own. In this chapter I detect an integral relation between body and earth by studying the unearthed body, the body floating in weightlesness. The study reveals what I call a topology of residing, a topo-logical constraint in bodyworld movement. The topology involves posture and has an emotional sens concerned with being on earth. I show how our sense of up and down, of orientation, refers to movement constrained by this topology. RESIDENCE ON EARTH From the start, our topic has been a moving body crossed with the world. But even before we turn to the testimony of the poet, it is philosophically and empirically clear that the moving body moves not just in any sort of world, but in an earthly world, a world that is not devoid of place but laden with it. The claim that movement depends on earth is central to Aristotle’s philosophy, as is clear from On the Movement of Animals and the way that his philosophy of nature keeps coming back to earth as the central orienting place that makes movement intelligible.1 In book two of On the Soul Aristotle writes: Empedocles is mistaken in his account of [growth], when he adds that the growth in plants, when their roots spread downwards, is due to the fact that earth naturally tends in this direction, and that when they grow upwards, it is due to the natural movement of fire. His theory of “upwards” and “downwards” is wrong; for up and down are not the same for all individuals as for the universe, but the head in animals corresponds to the roots in plants, if we are to identify and distinguish organs by their functions. (II·4·415b29–416a6) Up and down and are rooted in a functional, topological relation between a living body and the larger body upon which it lives, and this topological relation correlatively invests zones of a living body with functional specificity. In book two of Parts of Animals Aristotle observes that: “plants get their food from the earth by means of their roots; and this food is already elaborated when taken in, which is the reason why plants produce no excrement, the earth and its heat serving them in the place of the stomach.”2 The sens of a living being’s body (what is stomach, what is head) crosses with its sens of place (what is up, what is down) in a complex topological relation. Body and place are implied in one another. [18.217.116.183] Project MUSE (2024-04...