Beyond the Double to Prismatic Perception

holding the paradox until it expands beyond the confines that created it

Calibration: In looking at the landscapes of our lives and noticing their navigabilities, we practice a doubling that unveils itself into a wider ecological process. This is a multi-scale dialectic, a ‘doubling on all sides’, a fractal experience that can open into further prismatics of perception and sensuality. At times, it may feel like walking the tip of a razor blade. I refer to it often as holding the paradox.

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A few days ago I opened In the Spirit of Crazy Horse and found a note there from Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin saying “welcome… eat the blueberries!”

This note, which I’d not seen in over a decade, was from a time he’d let me stay at his apartment in Winnipeg when I was meeting with members of the First Nations of Manitoba for a writing project.

Reminded of this, I immediately thought of the word twospirited (or two-spirit), a term I heard for the first time during that trip. The same day I rediscovered this note, I’d been thinking about ‘double consciousness’ and going back over this passage by W.E.B. Du Bois:

born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.

Perhaps only because encountering both again within the same hour, I felt a resonance between twospirited and the term double consciousness. I also felt resonance between these two and another term I’ve been reading about for years, that of double sensation.

Double sensation is a phenomenological term discussed in the work of philosophers Edmund Husserl, John Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and expressed in Simone de Beauvoir’s writings on conscious and Other.

This idea of double sensation is important for the framework of Way-making and its associated practice of Navigability because it holds the pattern of implication or enfoldment, the process by which we realise we are involved in a movement we had not considered part of us until then.

When we are dancing, for example, we are no longer separate from what we are dancing with (and to): As Rumi expresses it, we are like a ruby flooded with sunlight: “Is it still a stone, or a world made of redness?” This enfoldment of what seems to be two and yet dances as many is the pattern by which embodiment and intersubjectivity clarify, by which we come to understand ourselves as shared movement.

Merleau-Ponty writes of this doubleness of embodied experience by pointing out that we are simultaneously that which “sees and is seen,” that which touches and is touched—this doubleness is inherent in every seeing, every touching: “That which looks at all things can also look at itself and recognise, in what it sees, the ‘other side’ of its power of looking.”

We cannot notice the air without it having touched us; we cannot gaze upon the landscape without that landscape having already entered us. Our lives are, in part, stories of this pattern of realising our embodied implication and enfolding with all that we are encountering.

As children, we are given names and told we are separate. We enter a life of development, a long process through which, if we are lucky, we come to realise that we cannot be named and are not separate.

We sense ourselves as persons through the senses of others until we learn how to look through our own eyes at ourselves, doubling back and forth as we make our way. This doubling is only a pattern, not one and not two, through which we discover nested levels of experience and awareness. This is the multi-scale doubling of our development, happening in many fractal relations of self and encounter at once but too overwhelming most of the time to be understood as such.

My first experience of this sense of doubleness, at least as I remember it, came when my brother was born and brought home from the hospital. In sensing him, and in seeing my parents explain him to me, and later, to himself, I had my first understanding that I was also someone else.

Another early moment of doubleness came when I went into a forest I was not supposed to be in alone: The trees and animals were suddenly beyond the familiar definitions I’d been given of them, and so I was too.

Each in our own ways, we experience doublings with what moves us, moments where we push out of ourselves but are simultaneously fully present.

I’ve often come back to two quotations that express this well for me, the first by T.S. Eliot (Little Gidding, 1942):

We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring. Will be to arrive where we started. And know the place for the first time.

And the second by F. Scott Fitzgerald from an essay called The Crack-Up (Esquire Magazine, 1936):

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.

The way I’m writing this so far, it may sound as if this double sensing is an easy process, or as if it is the same process for all of us, but it is not.

Many of us, much of the time—and all of us at some time—struggle to complete this loop of doubling back to where we started and knowing it. Holding paradox without discounting its oppositions is challenging. We are not able to hold the opposing ideas life imposes upon us, or we impose them on one another, or we are seen as doubled, or othered, and we cannot reconcile the twist.

In this experience, we might believe in this doubling and think we must choose sides, as sometimes indeed we must. We might assume there are opposing choices of lived experience, or that everyone’s experience of the world is like ours. Still, even when we must fight for our side, and even when our side is falsely assumed to be another’s, there remains the paradox of being no winning side at all.

The experience of coming to know oneself can be forced upon us, or it can be given to us; it can come as an invitation, or it can be a means of survival. In some cases, it can be so strong that we cannot recover from its break; there is little fairness about who gets allotted these lived experiences.

For those who know W.E.B. Du Bois and the quote I mentioned above, you know I have not yet included the following line, perhaps the most important one:

One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body.

Likewise, twospirited can be a struggle, what filmmaker Noam Gonick described to me once as “being doubly blessed with twice the amount of spirit everyone else gets,” which sounds like a good thing, and often is, except that twice the amount of spirit can mean having to hold twice the amount of paradox, and often not your own.

Because doubling is a pattern, it cannot be resolved anymore than one can resolve a whirlpool. All we can do is work together as the shared space holding the pattern. When that space has been held by a different energy, the pattern has already changed.

If we can hold seemingly contradictory notions in mind at once, we can loop back to ourselves and sense ourselves anew, widening our sensuality into prismatic perception. This may bring us into a new notion of ecological, and of self: To hold the space for both is to perceive them as a kaleidoscope, beyond the doubling.

Here we can recognise our capacity to expand, to sense and to develop perceptions as shared space, to choose to explore the world while holding the paradox, until that paradox moves beyond its confines, and the pattern shifts beyond itself.

Texts:

The Souls of Black Folks by W.E.B. Du Bois

Little Gidding by T.S. Eliot

The Crack-Up by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Rumi Book of Love trans. by Coleman Barks

Sartre on Embodiment, Touch, and the "Double Sensation” by Dermot Moran

The Phenomenology of Perception by Merleau-Ponty

The Visible and the Invisible by Merleau-Ponty

Writer comments, thoughts, rumination here or to wayandlifeworld(at)gmail.com

In the next post, I will be discussing The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram.