history

Some time ago, Mark Willis suggested I write a “history of the senses”. I’ve been thinking about this on and off over the last couple of days. And I had ample opportunity to consider an approach. The wonderful, new Comde cane arrived today, and I thought about the reason why I ordered it: because of its construction it is more flexible and so provides me with more information. It is a more perceptive finger, because that is what my cane has become: an extension of my hand, a means to touch the ground, bhumi sparsa. With Condillac, I’m wondering if there is replacement here. I remember how difficult it was to function while both sight and touch/sound fought for dominance in my perception. Condillac wonders if it is not true that all sensory perception is, in fact, a kind of touch. I translate this as “perceiving gesture”. To him, the sense of smell is a kind of touch, likewise, the newly born sense of sight “touches” the environment and by this gesture, space and distance are born.

L’oeil a donc besoin des secours du tact, pour se faire une habitude des mouvemens propres à la vision ; pour s’accoutumer à rapporter ses sensations à l’extrémité des rayons, ou à peu près ; et pour juger par-là des distances, des grandeurs, des situations et des figures. Il s’agit de découvrir ici quelles sont les expériences les plus propres à l’instruire. Elle [i.e. the experimental "statue"] sent les couleurs au bout de ses yeux. Soit hasard, soit douleur occasionnée par une lumiere trop vive, la statue porte la main sur ses yeux ; à l’instant les couleurs disparoissent. Elle retire la main, les couleurs se reproduisent. Dès-lors elle cesse de les prendre pour ses manieres d’être. Il lui semble que ce soit quelque chose d’impalpable, qu’elle sent au bout de ses yeux, comme elle sent au bout de ses doigts les objets qu’elle touche.

So, touch comes before seeing. Seeing is itself a form of touch. I started wondering how my work with the camera had changed. As I started to be enveloped by the modality of touch, I found I could only photograph what I had touched. I remember the sensation of photographing into touch-less space to be almost sickening, highly unpleasant.
Along with the cane, D. brought the pinhole body cap for the Leica M8. A few weeks ago, I boasted: the lens too must go. As I thought about cameras and pinholes, it occurred to me that I would be able to construct a huge camera obscura and photograph in that. That would introduce “space” to the confines of four walls, and so make it fit to be touched. An expanding camera obscura, much like how space has become universal: like we measure our distance to the sun in light years, which is a measure of time, so distance, to me, is time.