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I would like to begin my post by writing that this reading had a big impact on me. In many ways, it presented ideas that I had already understood on some level, ideas that I had experienced but had not yet articulated for myself in any coherent way. And I’m sure I’m not alone in saying that. Felt sense, it seems, is above all a human experience, something inherently “inside us, if we know how to turn our attention to it and listen to what it is suggesting” (Perl 1). It is probably what my mom would refer to as the “sighing of the soul”, ineffable but real.
Which is to say, that so much of this reading took on theological dimensions for me. In her book “Gravity and Grace,” Simone Weil tells us that “prayer consists of attention” (105); and so our lives our constituted by a kind of prayer, because we are always paying attention to something—money, art, text, love, beauty? And in this reading, we are instructed to give our attention to felt sense, a “bodily experience—endlessly describable” (1). It is the “physical place where we locate what the body knows” (4). By paying attention to felt sense, we pay attention to what our physical capacities hold, store, and process.
However, felt sense is not something always residing within us. Professor Perl describes it as a visitation: “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). In light of these ideas, I can’t help but think of St. Paul on the road to Damascus: the visitation, the piercing light. The blind prophet suddenly has something to say. Or St. John the Beloved, on the island of Patmos: “a loud voice like a trumpet saying, ‘Write what you see in a book and send it to the seven churches’” (Revelation 1:10-11, RSV). And I wonder if felt sense could be considered a kind of prophecy: a mechanism for not only connecting with our own embodied knowledge, but also for connecting to a higher power located within us, a visitation of the spirit: the prophet channeling a vision?
I recently listened to a podcast with Eve Ensler in which she stated, “We are nothing but body” (“On Being”, March 5, 2015). And it’s true; our material flesh defines our existence. Why do we create this dichotomy between the mind and the body, when the mind (brain) is simply an organ, a part of the body? Moreover, language is constructed by the body: the larynx, the tongue, the hand, the fingers pinching the pen. And as we engage in creative acts, we use the body to enact our vision (prophecy?). As Professor Perl explains, the “process of creating new sense, of saying something fresh from all that came before, and from all that lives within us, is a bodily one” (52).
Like Bob Lazaroff, I too experience writing in a physical way. When I lived in Houston, I often turned to walking as a means of fighting off writers block. I lived near Herman Park, and so I took long walks through the park, listening to the rhythm of my breath, my feet, my heart. And it was there that I found a direct connection between poetry and the body, the poetic foot of meter rising from the rhythm of walking, the music of pilgrimage—the sole (soul) makes contact with the ground, and respiration becomes inspiration. The breath, a great wind, rushing in and out.
And ultimately, this connection between the body and writing is a democratizing one, because each living person has a body. As Professor Perl points out, her “theory has far-reaching implications. It suggests that creativity is inherently human and is, therefore, a human right” (60). At the risk of being redundant, I cannot help but think again of the theological dimensions of such a statement. As the writer of Genesis states, human beings are made in the “image” (Genesis 1:26) of a creator god. If, theologically, we are to take this idea seriously, then we must contend with the fact that the desire to create (to write) is inherent to being human, germane to those created by God; and as such, it is, at the very least, a reflection of the divine capacities of all humans.
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