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Tales from the Other Side of Language 87 My brain is changing, becoming a different brain. Art is not only resting and balancing the left, verbal part of my brain; it is promoting and enlarging the right, creative, gestalt side. I live more in the right brain now, finding huge, unexpected, undreamed pleasures. I’m experimenting, creating variety, playing with all manner of art. I didn’t grow up artistic, rather reluctant, even fearful. The sensory world is my playground now. Still, with so much effort finding and expressing with words, pushing at higher and more intense levels of functioning, my mind and brain are also expanding boldly into the sensations of observation and vision. I have always been a phenomenologist, looking and wondering. My brain began recovering in New York with making art, visiting galleries and museums, looking as an artist at the cityscape, at people, at the wild variety of shapes and colors. Here in quieter surrounds, luxurious for a badgered brain, I sense more into the details of felt space, relationship, motion, and presence. My body is less under siege from fatigue and healthier away from commotion and the riot of stimulation. The physical exercise practices—flexibility, strength, and aerobics—I started in the Brooklyn club in the basement of the old St. George Hotel were first to de-stress the enormous buildup of fatigue from pushing the verbal so hard. Gradually, they began to create variety, strength, and pleasure in my body. A happy body better supports and partners a beleaguered brain. Here in the West, my body is more rested and open. It becomes more responsive to kinesthetic perception: sensations of movement in muscle, tendon and joints, muscle sense, and sense of body moving in larger space. Yoga is a practice for me to become more aware of all that array of body sensation. In the soft, ancient environment of the Pacific Northwest and in my home, I rest into receiving the array of sensory sensation. Phenomenalism, without a clutter of verbal theory, observing for the sake of observation, finding what theory that evolves. Crow, Sahaya, my house, the firs, and landscapes have become intimates. My mind finds a kind of sentience in
88 Ruth Codier Resch Without Utterance: the sensory details of these relationships. My body, brain, and mind reach out to them, and surprisingly, they reach back. Sensory communication is evolving: between me and crow and the crow families that sing/caw my morning awake, between me and the spaces in my home, between me and silence. I’m experiencing new languages not given by words or sometimes even by communicative sounds. These non-verbal languages are sensory syntax, sensory language, felt though my body. Babies do this naturally; they have a capacity to extend their abundant interest to almost anything novel, to expand their sensory experience. I’m standing in a hospital cafeteria at lunchtime. The five-month-old baby, arms waving, nearly leaps out of his mother’s hold of him with a joyful expression on his face looking at a service dog. Babies also love looking at another baby, happy recognition, the beginnings of friendship. Crow, dog, and house are doorways into companionship, into reciprocal awareness, a kind of sensory empathy, less cognitive. I’m seeing more of what my brain can do, what it is willing to do. I’m willing to dissolve conceptual boundaries of mind to see what can happen. Without much engaging words or the left, damaged, limited side of my brain, my world is expanding. With these new encounters, my visual kinesthetic sensory systems and my right brain are moving into non-ordinary relationships and non-ordinary places. A brain has the capacity to move to other places, not just in imagination, rather to connect and move energetically into the surrounding world. Mystics do it, and spiritual adepts too. I’m not particularly aware of these processes now, more quiet enjoyment, pleasure in detail, and connection with the world around me. These expansions become a platform for much larger non-ordinary experiences to come.
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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Weeds, ink dr
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PART ONE: THE PRECIPITOUS ABYSS
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Tales from the Other Side of Langua
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lives around him in deep and import
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