Megan H response to "Felt Sense"

[Anonymous]

#703

I’m having a difficult time grasping the nature of “felt sense.” But I also feel I’m behind my own times a bit in terms of mind/body concepts. I instinctively relate to what Gendlin describes, that “[An] ancient error was to divide between body and feeling, then again between feeling and thinking. Conceptual forms were held to be the forms of reality, while feeling was merely an emotional reaction from the even lower body. In that way the body ended up at the bottom, as if it were the least human ‘part’ of us” (52). I’ve wondered at my own default belief in a Cartesian separation between mind and body before. This week I’m unsettled because it’s undermining my openness to “embodied knowing,” despite the neurological/epistemological/metaphysical theories I’ve read that disregard mind/body separation as outdated and uninformed – I’m still stuck in it.

Chapter 3’s discussion of how the body relates to meaning makes me consider what bit I have studied of Composition and Rhetoric. “It is not just with our minds or our eyes that we perceive phenomena, but with our living, sensate bodies,” and language is our main, intuitive tool to channel those perceptions into recreated accounts of experience (52). I can interpret felt sense in terms of those silent moments during the writing process, the instinctively “right” breath of air in the lungs when finding the perfect words, as I once heard playwright Will Eno describe it.

I’m still fighting a bit of doubt, though I hope to give the practice a chance. It does seem to require some practice and conscious effort: “Felt sense is not just sitting within us waiting for us to find it. Rather, felt sense comes to us as other bodily processes come—the way sleep comes, or emotions come, or tears come—as we make room for the body to express itself or by allowing the rhythm of bodily processes to take over, by making room for whatever is there to happen” (2).

I have questions about the mind-body-situation dynamics: What about the fact that sometimes senses lie or when our mind-brain connection short circuits and can’t comprehend a situation – something analogous to when our eyes view an optical illusion? What about when the environment/situation is crafted to lie to our senses, something similar to subliminal messages or marketing manipulations of colors to induce certain emotions? What about the states, however temporary, in which the mind cannot recognize feelings? Or are those questions answered by the sleep metaphor? That sometimes the body is in a condition that makes it impossible to fall asleep; so, too, sometimes the situation cannot stir the body’s feelings and sometimes it can?

[Anonymous]

#712

Megan,

I’m very interested with the difficulty you have with the nature of felt sense. While I was reading the piece I was actually thinking of one of our workshops in which I made a comment about the words in your paper facing some type of distance from you–that each word was so thought out, and that each draft was edited multiple times. The mind-body questions you raise are thought provoking, and I do wonder whether it is this urge to have the right word, to have the realization, and to have the concreteness, that may fight against felt sense? While felt sense may exist in all of us–since it is just a state of inner awareness, I believe–I wonder about those writers whose style fights against it. You’re right, our senses lie, and our innerness manipulates and deceives us. Is this why it’s hard to tap into felt sense? Because it makes us too vulnerable and it brought these feelings upon us without our permission?

[Sondra Perl]

#716

Megan (and Joanna),
The point that Joanna brings up about your multiple drafts, Megan, also makes me think of the point that Sondra brings up several times about feeling when something isn’t quite right yet. In our writing group, you seem to be the least willing of the three of us to compromise, to settle for almost good enough. I’m not sure which side of the Cartesian split it happens on, but you seem to have an incredibly strong sense of when you’ve done what you wanted and when you haven’t gotten there yet. In a way, it makes me think of that goofy old cliche about the people who protest the most against something being the people who are most deeply affected by it (and thank you, Shakespeare, for linking that idea irrevocably to incest and murder!).

[Author]

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