Exploratory and manipulative touch

“Touch is a general term, including the study of passive and sometimes punctuate cutaneous sensitivities. But it may also include the active exploratory and manipulative use of the skin, and hence stimulation of receptor systems in the muscles, tendons, and joints – the kinaesthetic system. The term haptic is often used to indicate exploratory and manipulative touch, in contrast to the tactile “sensations” resulting from stimulation of passive skin receptors (Gibson, 1966; Kennedy, 1978). In this volume, the term tactile is used primarily in referring to passive touch (being touched); the terms tactual and haptic are used primarily in referring to active exploratory and manipulative touch.”

(page xi)

William Schiff, Editorial preface to Tactual Perception: A Sourcebook. Cambridge: CUP, 1982.

Found in the ECU library during research for a studio project in ceramics.

A sense of meaning like a sense of place

“It had come to me not in a sudden epiphany but with a gradual sureness, a sense of meaning like a sense of place. When you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back; the more one comes to know them, the more one seeds them with the invisible crop of memories and associations that will be waiting for you when you come back, while new places offer up new thoughts, new possibilities. Exploring the world is one of the best ways of exploring the mind, and walking travels both terrains.”

(page 13)

Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust.

Recommended to me by my sister; I finally bought a copy at St. George’s Bookstore in Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin. We wandered in, three Canadians on a Friday evening, and ended up entertaining the owner with our absurdities until closing.

No representation is complete

“Jorge Luis Borges wrote a parable about some cartographers who eventually created a map that was 1:1 scale and covered much of a nameless empire. Even at 1:1 scale, the two-dimensional map would be inadequate to depict the layers of being of a place, its many versions. Thus the map of languages spoken and the map of soil types canvas the same area differently, just as Freudianism and shamanism describe the same psyche differently. No representation is complete. Borges has a less-well-known story in which a poet so perfectly described the emperor’s vast and intricate palace that the emperor becomes enraged and regards him as a thief. In another version the palace disappears when the poem replaces it. The descriptive poem is a perfect map, the map that is the territory, and the story recalls another old one about a captive painter who at the Chinese emperor’s dictate paints so wonderful a landscape that he is able to escape into its depths. These parables say that representation is always partial, else it would not be representation, but some kind of haunting double. But the terra incognita spaces on maps say that knowledge also is an island surrounded by oceans of the unknown. They signify that the cartographers knew they did not know, and awareness of ignorance is not just ignorance; it’s awareness of knowledge’s limits.”

(pages 162-163)

Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost.

Recommended and lent to me by my sister; later I bought my own copy.

The unconscious of a city, its memory, unknown, darkness, lost lands

“A city is built to resemble a conscious mind, a network that can calculate, administrate, manufacture. Ruins become the unconscious of a city, its memory, unknown, darkness, lost lands, and in this truly bring it to life. With ruins a city springs free of its plans into something as intricate as life, something that can be explored but perhaps not mapped. This is the same transmutation spoken of in fairy tales when statues and toys and animals become human, though they come to life and with ruin a city comes to death, but a generative death like the corpse that feeds flowers. An urban ruin is a place that has fallen outside the economic life of the city, and it is in some way an ideal home for the art that also falls outside the ordinary production and consumption of the city.”

(pages 89-90)

Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost.

Recommended and lent to me by my sister; later I bought my own copy.