OUR SENSES BELONG TO THE WORLD AND NOT TO US #1: Introduction

Imagine the perplexity of a man outside time and space, who has lost his watch, and his measuring rod, and his tuning fork. I believe, Sir, that it is indeed this state which constitutes death.
(Alfred Jarry - Exploits and Opinions of Dr Faustroll, 'Pataphysician)

We have the misfortune to be born aliens in a world we cannot see, hear, taste, smell, or touch. We come sliding and greasy from one world to the next, naked and useless in our dirty little envelopes of skin. How we got ourselves trapped in these sausages is anybody’s guess, but if we ever knew the reason you may be sure we have forgotten it by the time we get here.
What are we like, we who slip from the mother ship as if sucked out by the space that surrounds us? We do not know. Or rather, we are not really like anything. That comes later. We are born but partly formed (or, if complete, we are very imperfect): blind, deaf, dumb; without nose, hands, feet or tongue; senseless, voiceless, utterly lost and alone. If it were not for the Wonders of Science we would be forever unaware of the world which surrounds us and presses its stimuli upon us. Soon after birth we are whisked away to the hospital basements where green- and white-clad doctors covertly attach a set of prosthetic devices to our rudimental selves, connect the wires, test the circuits, and then return us to our plastic tanks before our absence has been noticed.
How different we are now! No-one comments on our strangeness, but for us the world is sudden and strong. Our senses are how the world chooses to present itself to us. We are awash in stimuli mediated for us by our artificial sensors. We flex our prostheses and wonder for what uses they have been designed. Why these auxiliary components and not others? Why this small bundle of awareness and not all the rest that we are unequipped to reach? We do not pause to consider these stupid questions but bend our efforts towards learning to make use of what we have.

WILHELMINA MILK

(21.1.05)

FUTURE POSTINGS UNDER THIS TITLE WILL ATTEMPT TO ISOLATE AND CONSIDER FIVE MAIN PROSTHETIC SENSES

(POSTINGS MAY BE UPDATED OCCASIONALLY AS A CONSEQUENCE OF FURTHER RESEARCH)

WHAT I THINK ABOUT WHEN I'M JUMPING

Once I was an archaeologist. I learned that the deeper in the ground something is, the older it is (generally speaking). The past is downwards, down towards the centre of the earth, the unreachable core, the beginning of time. Our earthly moments are temporally concentric spheres laid down each over the last. The present lies on the surface of the globe, and the future out into the atmosphere.
Perhaps we want to escape time. Perhaps we are anxious of our mortality. We want to fly above the surface/present and assert our existence in the future/heights. But the inevitable return to earth is the future’s inescapable nostalgia for the present, a force indistinguishable from gravity. The past is always pulling at us, but we can experience what it is like to exist in the future by flying, or, to a lesser extent, by jumping.

HELMINA MILK

MOUSE, DEAR MOUSE

I know you are shy, so I do not look at you. I just rest my hand on you and look at something else. My hand rests softly on you, so that I may guide your little dance with the minimum of force, my hand on your small back. Who would have thought that one so small and shy as you would know my wishes so completely, would be sensitive to every tremble of my finger, would command for me the world I cannot reach? I shield you, but from what? From my glance, from the glance of others? Between my fingers I glance at you, at your colourless colour, at the lines that define your buttocks upon which my fingers rest, at your tail – so long a tail that I cannot see its end though I look in its direction. If I remove my hand will you run away? No: you need me. I know you need me to guide you, to give you life, to make the ball in your belly roll. And I need you. I need you to know my thoughts, to exert my will, to join me to the world beyond. You are shy. I do not look at you, but before my eye I see your little hand, your little arrow, your little I, moving as my hand moves you.

HELMINA MILK