TurtlePissMountain: April 2011

Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Hostile Combatant Anyone?

How should we live? Answers on a postcard to anyone anywhere.

If you have ever watched ants move for any length of time you will regard the following points with some interest. If you have not, well then you should do so the first chance you get, for they have much to tell us about the conditions of the world in which we live in and share with others. And anyway it is a nice thing to do with some time if you have some at your disposal… This essay is a short meditation on the relationship of spatiality to experience informed by watching ants move on the ground and the thoughts that occurred to me whilst spending time in this way.

Dripping wet and seated comfortably after a swim one morning I was idly watching ants move on the ground around my feet, working, collecting things and going about their business. A number of thoughts came quite absently to mind revolving around the subject of spatiality*. The first obvious realization I encountered was that I myself am not an ant. This came as a shock to me at first (one is always shocked when one encounters ones consciousness perceiving itself). It threatened to destroy my ability to differentiate between the concepts of ‘ant’ and ‘me’ as separate entities. ‘I am me, I am not you. You are an ant’, I said to myself. Prior to this I simply perceived one fluid condition of man, ground and ant in perceptual unison. I observed through this united front that although there only appeared to be one perceivable condition (my own) – both parties were experiencing that single condition in multiple ways. We are correlatives of a single dimension, but we are isolated from each other by (or through) our experience of each other and the space we inhabit mediates these separate experiences. _/ _ I began to watch with fervor as I realized that although we shared the same space – we were experiencing it in radically different ways.

It is probably more prescient to describe the ant’s kingdom above our own, which is uniformly familiar to most of us anyway and has been described in great depth by many other texts and narratives**. The ant’s kingdom seems to be a planar world, or more precisely a world of infinite surface. It is one without volume or dimension in the conventional human sense and reflects the modes of perception specific to the ant in negotiating his (sadly I have elected to use the male conjugate as the English language has not yet developed a sexless or universal declension) terrain...

* Spatiality is defined here simply as a signifier of space in general as it is perceived by the individual. A phenomena of experience and a substance that is inhabited, physically and mentally.

** For a highly comprehensive description of space see Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception or work by Jean-Paul Sartre.