IMAGE – SENSE

[Triton]

IMAGE – SENSE


Our usual language for perceiving dreams is curiously imprecise. We
listen to the dream to see what it is telling us, or we look at what
it says. We see through it in order to hear its message.


The quick movements back and forth between seeing and hearing seem
to prevent either from being the privileged sense for dream work. We
cannot assume that understanding dreams is simply a matter of seeing
by means of images or hearing by means of metaphors. It is as if the
psyche mixes these two modalities to remind us of its complexity: that
at least two senses are needed for grasping an image.


There is something more here: I think we are also being told that
we can’t get at an image at all by sense-perception taken in the usual
Aristotelian or empirical view of it. For images are not the same as
optical pictures, even if they are like pictures (Spring Journal
1978). Nor are they actual physical sounds. We do not literally see
images or hear metaphors; we perform an operation of insight which is
a seeing-through or a hearing-into. The sense-words see and hear
themselves become metaphors because, at one and the same time, we are
using our senses and also not using them as we may believe we are. By
appearing together in the single psychological act of studying an
image, seeing and hearing relativize each other. We see-through our
hearing and listen-into our seeing.


By confronting our usual sense language, images and dreams are also
retraining our senses themselves. They are being freed from the
conceptual constraints which decide how they must perform and what
their proper objects are. So, a dream is indeed a derangement of the
senses as was said so long ago by both rationalists and romantics.


Unfortunately, so long as we go about our training in terms of
knowing about images (symbolizing) rather than sensing images
(imagining- cf. Spring 1977, pp. 62-69), we may never let the dream
image derange us enough to retrain us. Much of what we learn to do
with images in training institutes defends against the derangement of
the senses.


I suppose that is why these places are called “training,” rather
than “retraining,” institutes. The senses and the mode of
consciousness based on them are taken for granted; they are given new
kinds of content to work with, but the mode of perceiving the content
is left unquestioned. It is as if one could read the dream of Blake
with the mind of Locke. Whereas lake’s intention is precisely to break
Locke’s notion of consciousness based upon sensation. So, it seems to
me, a primary purpose of the dream is not to redress the balance of
consciousness but to re-train the senses, our simplistic belief in
them, by means of the dream. Dreams, after all, are incursions of
imagination into the usual world of sense which we pretentiously call
“consciousness.” In this world, dreams don’t make sense because sense
doesn’t make dreams. Dreams are images, made of imagination.


There is probably something still more perplexing being said by
this mixture of sense. It suggests that imagination has no sense
language of its own. Maybe it has no language at all of its own. Even
those words which are most appropriate for discussing imaginative
products- tension, inhesion, vision, voice, expression, authenticity,
surface, spontaneity, fecundity, structure, maturity, unit, integrity,
creativity –are concepts that do not present themselves as images or
have images as their first reference. They are equally valid for other
sorts of events. The language of poetics (stylistics, rhetoric,
aesthetics) and the technical terms of each art are only tenuously
connected to the imagination as it presents itself in images. The
dream comes in its own terms, images- just like life.


Now you may see better why I have been trying to use the actual
words of the image for grasping its significances. I have been very
literal about “sticking to the image,” even sticking literally to its
language, so that the image can tell us about itself in its own words
(Spring 1977, 78-79, and Spring 1978, 153-57). I have been
experimenting –probably too literally, obsessively- in hopes of
showing that imagination can speak of itself without borrowed terms,
that concepts are neither sufficient nor necessary for making sense of
dreams.


It is not to be bemoaned that imagination has no conventional
language of its own (except the word-play of the image), for
imagination seems to turn this weakness into an amazing grace. Its
borrowings from the language of sense-perception are also
transformations of that language. When we speak of “hearing a
metaphor,” or “seeing an implication,” we have twisted hearing and
seeing from their common-sense meanings, for we do not hear a metaphor
as we hear a bumble-bee buzz by. Seeing and hearing are deliteralized,
having lost their sense sense. One of the major accomplishments of our
dreaming is precisely this re-sensing and re-visioning usual scenes
and events, forcing us not only to train our sense in a new way, but
also our language of sense words.


I believe Gaston Bachelard saw this deforming-transforming capacity
of imagination better than anyone. But then he came on the heels of
nineteenth-century French tradition that insisted upon shocking the
senses, deranging them thoroughly out of their accepted paths in order
to awaken the sensibility of images. We, however, come to our dreams
via Locke and Freud, the empirical tradition that starts with
sensation as the fundamental criterion of reality. Our public-and-
palpable ontology insists that what is ultimately real is what the
senses perceive. That is why the spontaneous confusion of the senses
when speaking of dreams is so very important: it shakes our
foundations.



Both aesthetics and psychology have tried to deal with the
confusion of the two senses in terms of “synesthesia” and the relation
between poetry and painting (ut pictura poesis). Synesthesia is not
only a puzzling quirk in certain sensitive persons for whom numbers
are colors, colors taste on the tongue, or musical tones present
sculptural forms. Synesthesia –confusion, interpretation of one sense
with another- goes on all the time in our common speech when we talk
imaginatively, or of imagining. Evidently, synesthesia is how
imagination imagines. What this does is transform the singleness of
any one sense out of its literalness. It brings us to a new sense of
the senses, making metaphor of sense perception itself.
Consequentially, synesthesia plays a special role in the arts because
it helps art’s own intention- metaphorical insight, awakening of
sensibility- freeing it from depiction and representation.


My point here is that when imagination does the usual language –and
that is about all it has to use- then it must twist this usual
language into a second sense. “Running” is merely abstract until we
can hear the word visually, as a faucet running or a convict running.
Or it is sheerly conceptual until it becomes particularized into
running toward, with, from, for, etc., or is adverbalized as
desperately running, flatfootedly running. A curb is but a curb until
we can hear other senses in that granite hard-edge, its further
potentials. And any word, every word in a dream can reveal a second
sense, especially when we play with it as we have shown in ‘Spring
1977 and 1978’.


PROTESTOR: “If imagination has no language of its own, then how can
we claim it as a faculty? Other faculties have their languages:
feeling, thinking, the moral faculty, and the will, each has a string
of terms describing its modes and concerns.”


Grand- imagination not a faculty! The claim that it is a faculty
has been precisely what has deceived us most about imagination. We
have considered it one function among others; whereas it may be
essentially different from thinking, willing, believing, etc. Rather
than an independent operation or place, it is more likely an operation
that works within the others and a piece which is found only through
the others- (is it their ground?). So, we never seem to catch
imagination operating on its own and we never can circumscribe its
place because it works through, behind, within, upon, below our
faculties. An overtone and undersense: is imagination prepositional?


We shall be looking more carefully into prepositions in another
section of this enquiry. Here, I want to show only what I mean by the
“preposition of images” as an essential factor in imagination. If, in
a dream, “I am walking with my wife,” this is an image not only of
walking and of wife. The image is pre-positioned by with, and the
components of the image, “wife” and “walking-I” are litigated by this
with, so that the persons and the actions are pre-positioned, governed
by, this “with-scene,” a “with-walking” of the I who is in a compound
or combine, or complex, with the wife. Does this further imply
compliance, even complicity?


I have said at the beginning of this enquiry (Spring 1977, 62) that
an image is a specific mood, scene, and context. The factors which
help determine the mood and scene and which definitively determine the
context (mode of weave) are the prepositions. They specify the mode of
relations, the structure of events. They are the subtle joints which
articulate the internal positioning of the image, how it knits
together. “Subtle,” by the way, probably derives from “sub-toile,”
underlying canvas, weave, texture, the invisible network.


Symbols are held in the subtle net of an image. They can be
discovered in substantial things (nouns like redbirds, hags, pearls)
or in actions (verbs like fly, grow, sleep). But it is the
prepositions which subtilize symbols by dissolving their substantial
universality into a specific pattern, an image. This shift of
noticing- from what is seen and heard to the way in which it inheres-
is sensing an image. Here, I am explicating Edward Casey’s useful
dictum: An image is not what you see but the way you see. Imagination
might here be defined more closely as the subtle sensing of the
prepositional relations among events. Of course, these prepositions
don’t have to be written out as words. They are also there in
melodies, in sculptures, in a walk down the street (“up” the street,
“through” the street…). So, we sense the subtlety of images by means
of prepositions: their overtones and undersense; looking into behind;
listening for and hearing through. The sense of images is a composite
of the gross sensations of nouns and verbs, adjectives and adverbs,
and the subtle sensations of their relations; the composition is
performed by the prepositions.


I am also trying to deliteralize the sensation function from its
narrow definition based upon physiological sensations. I want to give
sensation back its intuitive power, its second sensing. I am also
trying to return sensing to intuition, giving it back its precise
appreciation of significant detail. And my way of doing this is by
“sticking to the image” (a very sensation sort of idea). For any image
offers a way off the cross of typological oppositions.


It follows that our usual talk about certain images, that they
refer to the sensation function or that they are more concrete,
sensuous, and gutsy than others, is not to be taken literally. Van
Gogh’s shoes, Zola’s whores, and a dream of emptied bowels and
rockdrills do not show more sensation than images of wee elves in leas
forlorn or primary numbers and bare ideas, or images presenting highly
qualified feelings. To consider some images sensate and others not,
deprives some images of their sense and literalizes sense into the
narrowed meaning of grossly earthy. Bachelard would hold that each and
all these examples are images, but bespeaking different realms of
imagination, one group presenting the poetics of earth, the other the
poetics of air. It is all poetics. And all involves the senses –though
a sense beyond sense, a second sense, a sensibility of the sensuous,
not the sensuous as such.’