The voyage begins with a meditation on the self-portrait of a mirror image, followed by a consideration of the head’s various secretions. Tallis contemplates the air we exhale; the subtle meanings of nods, winks, and smiles; the mysteries of hearing, taste, and smell. He discusses the metaphysics of the gaze, the meaning of kissing, and the processes by which the head comes to understand the world. Along the way he offers intriguing digressions on such notions as “having” and “using” one’s head, and enjoying and suffering it. Tallis concludes with his thoughts on the very thing the reader’s head has been doing throughout the book: thinking.
The voyage begins with a meditation on the self-portrait of a mirror image, followed by a consideration of the head’s various secretions. Tallis contemplates the air we exhale; the subtle meanings of nods, winks, and smiles; the mysteries of hearing, taste, and smell. He discusses the metaphysics of the gaze, the meaning of kissing, and the processes by which the head comes to understand the world. Along the way he offers intriguing digressions on such notions as “having” and “using” one’s head, and enjoying and suffering it. Tallis concludes with his thoughts on the very thing the reader’s head has been doing throughout the book: thinking.
The Kingdom of Infinite Space: A Portrait of Your Head
The Kingdom of Infinite Space: A Portrait of Your Head
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Overview
The voyage begins with a meditation on the self-portrait of a mirror image, followed by a consideration of the head’s various secretions. Tallis contemplates the air we exhale; the subtle meanings of nods, winks, and smiles; the mysteries of hearing, taste, and smell. He discusses the metaphysics of the gaze, the meaning of kissing, and the processes by which the head comes to understand the world. Along the way he offers intriguing digressions on such notions as “having” and “using” one’s head, and enjoying and suffering it. Tallis concludes with his thoughts on the very thing the reader’s head has been doing throughout the book: thinking.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780300151824 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Yale University Press |
| Publication date: | 02/29/2000 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 343 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Kingdom of Infinite Space
A Portrait of Your HeadBy Raymond Tallis
Yale University Press
Copyright © 2008 Raymond TallisAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-14222-8
Chapter One
Facing Up to the Head
Could any man bear to look at himself at every moment of his life, and rethink, as a witness, all he has thought, all that has come into his head, into his whole being? Who would not hate himself, not wish to blot out what he was, not so much from want of success, or the effect of certain acts he has committed, but simply because of the particular person whom these have little by little defined, and who shocks his full sense of possibility. Our history makes of us Mr So-and-So - and this is an offence. Paul Valéry, Monsieur Teste
Portrait in an Ordinary Mirror
Look into a mirror. Nothing could be more routine. It is something we do without thinking, every morning, when we prepare our faces for the judgement of the great world. And yet it is an extraordinary thing to do. Nothing could be less straightforward than the relation between our head and its mirror image.
You are not René Magritte, so it will be the front of your head, your face, that you will see mainly. You may note that your head - Everyhead - is of modest size,neither egghead nor kingly nor microcephalic, justifying neither a second thought nor a further adjective. You may be generally pleased with it, displeased, or indifferent. Most likely, it will be one of those middle-of-the-road heads, with a face that will neither make your fortune nor count as a great misfortune. One of those faces which strangers neither look at in longing or in horror, or in fear. In short, for philosophical purposes, an ideal face: the face of Everyman or Everywoman.
Perhaps you might try to describe yourself, penning a verbal portrait of the portrait in the mirror. This is what I see, looking out at me. The longish, sunken-eyed face is that of a man in his late fifties. And, frankly, it looks it. The time-weeded cranial dome is encircled by a low hedge of grey hair, echoed in the grey Van Dyke beard. Above the eyes are those frontal corrugations some of which, echoing the curves of the eyebrows, mock both the brows and half a lifetime of surprises that, by dint of repetition, have been translated into fixed structures. The eyes have mud-yellow sclera and irises of an indeterminate greenish bluish brown (I have had to check in a better lit mirror). There is a slight drooping of the eyelids, as if the effort of keeping my eyes open for so many years is starting to tell.
The sitter for this instantaneous self-portrait has a straight nose, from the side a perfect half isosceles, marred only by a slight asymmetry of the cartilaginous tip. The large ears look as if clamped on as an afterthought. The mouth is not generous and the less these lips say of themselves the better. Through them, he pokes a pink tongue - his palate's closest pal - in order to remind himself of his existence, and then retracts it in order to expose his teeth (his own and in reasonable condition), all encircled by a fullset beard.
You try it now, putting your own face in a hole cut in the page. You will at once realize, as I have, that we are facing defeat. The defeat to which I refer does not lie in the face itself (though there is a little of that as well) but in the sure-fire failure of any attempt to transfer the face from the mirror to the page. The face that looks back at the gazing face - with that very gaze, into that very face (an easy but misleading model of self-consciousness) - lies beyond any descriptive powers. Your face is a singular entity and your words are general. Any verbal portrait you might construct will be little better than those Identikit pictures that the police issue when they are looking for someone with whom they would like to have a conversation. The transformation of a visible surface into an intelligible description is no easier even where the surface in question is your own face. The more it makes general sense, the less faithful it will be to its individual appearance.
Writers often give us the impression that they have described the faces of their characters, when in fact they have simply given you an outline to fill in. Of Esch, the most important character in Hermann Broch's masterpiece The Sleepwalkers, we learn only that he has big teeth. Even so, we don't feel as if his face is a dentate blankness. Most often, we mistake being told what effect someone's appearance has for an account of that appearance. The poet Mallarmé's advice - Peindre non la chose, mais l'effet qu'elle produit ('Paint not the thing itself but the effect it produces') sounds like a self-denying ordinance. Actually it is a rather cunning way out of an intractable problem. When, in one of his novels, Evelyn Waugh says of a new character, that 'he had just the kind of appearance one would expect a young man of his type to have' and nothing else, you still feel as if you have been told exactly what he looks like.
If you have stared at your face long enough to feel that it eludes all the words that would locate it snugly in the world, you may start feeling odd. The fact that this face is my face, this head is my head, will dawn on you. Fancy, you think, of all the faces I know, being this face. Fancy, come to that, being this thing, living this life. The feeling passes: after all this head is your head; the thing in the world that is nearest to being what you are. Nothing could be more familiar or an object of more anxious concern. And yet you know so little of it.
Look at your head and remind yourself of its multiplicity: its many components and the multiple uses to which some of them are put. The head is a site of endless trafficking. It takes in and it gives out 24/7. There are inputs of sense experience, of air, and of food: it harvests sights and sounds and smells and tastes; sequesters indoor and outdoor, private and public, urban and rural air; and ingests food and drink and medicines and worse. And its outputs are as impressively varied. The number and variety of secretions should compel admiration, though our attitude to them is somewhat ambivalent. They range from fluent ones such as saliva and tears, to more measured examples such as ear wax, to the glacier-slow growth of hair and of teeth. There are other outputs which leap straight out of the head - vomiting, for example. More importantly, the head emits an endless variety of signals, voluntary and involuntary, linguistic, paralinguistic (such as affirmative nodding) and non-linguistic (like smiling). All of these will detain us in due course. However, before we set out on our journey around the head, let us think what purpose such a journey might serve.
Dwelling on our relationships with our heads is a way of getting hold of our relationships with ourselves: what it is to be this self. This relationship is highlighted when we look in the mirror. The first, and most obvious, thing to be said is that the gaze that is looking out at your head is also the gaze that is looking in at your reflection. It is your gaze and it is intersleeved with itself, in a chaste, ocular auto-copulation. This seems promising, a perfect philosophical thought, though difficult to maintain. The mental gaze - unable to stand still, unlike the long-legged fly on a stream or a kestrel at stoop - wanders. Other things, however, may strike you.
For example, the head you are looking at when you gaze in the mirror is silent and yet you can hear your thoughts articulating themselves and you are inclined to locate them 'in my head'. (Big trouble for you if you don't: mislocating or misallocating your thoughts brings the gentlemen in white coats, armed with syringes.) You could not, however, tell from looking at your head that it is thinking, never mind what it is thinking.
The stared-at head is as opaque to its owner as it is to other people or others' heads are to it. In fact, as we look at that opaque object elevated by the neck above the shoulders, it suddenly becomes difficult to tell that it is looking, even less what it is looking at, less still what it succeeds in seeing. (As philosophers remind us, with their charming pedantry, 'seeing' is not a state but 'an achievement'.) It is only because it is your head that you have no difficulty seeing that it is seeing, or being confident of your thought that it is thinking. Indeed, you cannot doubt this, as Descartes argued, since to doubt that you are thinking is to think. Actually, Descartes' 'I think therefore I am' does not take us very far. The logical certainty you have that you are thinking does not guarantee that the head that is thinking is the one that is looking out at you from the mirror and which smiles when you feel yourself to be smiling.
This prompts a question. How can Everyhead staring in the mirror tell that this head in the mirror is its own head, in the way that it feels it to be its own? No answer is forthcoming. Nevertheless, the owner feels entirely easy and at home with identifying his head in this fashion and calling it 'my head'. Heads may shock, disappoint, please, and worry their owners, but they never ambush them with the fundamental question: Whose head? This ownership goes very deep indeed - to the very bottom of what we are.
OK. But what does it mean to say that this head staring out of the mirror belongs to the person staring back at it? Or, to vary the question, what does it mean to say that you are this head? At the very least it means that you suffer, or experience, this head without mediation. It is the site of the sensations you have now: the down of dry warmth on your cheeks; the weight of the upper teeth on the lower, falling just short of a clench; the seeping of saliva behind the teeth and under the tongue; the verge-of-headache dazzledness around the eyes; the looking through the nose-supported spectacles and the pressure of said spectacles on said nose; and so on. This is how you experience the very special relationship between that object with the visual appearance you see in the mirror and the experiences just listed: they refer to - they are of - the same thing.
We could frame the question differently, perhaps at a more superficial level. How do you know that the visual impression of the face that you see in the mirror is of the same thing as certain sensations you may be feeling - for example the diffuse headache that seems to have developed in response to your attempts to take up my invitation to concentrate on what it is to be or to have this head as your head? This is something that has preoccupied philosophers. The great German philosopher Immanuel Kant was especially puzzled. How is it, he asked, that different sensations, arising from the different senses and seemingly originating from different parts of the body, and occurring over time, are felt to belong to the same moment of consciousness of the same person? What holds them together? What makes them all belong to the same moment of the same person? And what makes successive time-slices of persons belong to the same person, so that there is a smooth transition between our moments? How is it that at any given time, 'I' am enjoying a tune, feeling the weight of my bottom on a chair and seeing the blackbird flying past the window? And how is each moment of the tune impregnated with other moments, so that I can enjoy the successive notes as parts of a melody? Kant called the necessary binding 'the unity of apperception'. Being somewhat cerebral, he spoke of the '"I think" that accompanies all my perceptions'. Vision, touch, smell, all the buzzing confusion of the moment of consciousness, were referred to the same me, he said, because each of them was accompanied by a reference to an 'I' that thinks it is the same 'I'. I am not totally convinced that that is quite right: the tactile down on the cheek does not seem like an endlessly repeated 'I think'. Consciousness is not so donnish. Nor does 'I think' capture what it is that binds that faint sensation on the cheeks to the gaze of our head at itself in the mirror, or to awareness of the thoughts we are having.
As I gaze into the head that is gazing at me, into the thoughtful face of the man who is thinking these thoughts, which include the thought that the face is thoughtful and that it is the face of the man who is thinking the thoughts, vertigo beckons. And while philosophy is, quite properly, a dance around the edges of a whirlpool, it is probably a good idea, once you feel the current taking hold, to take precautions against drowning.
Avoiding Anatomy
Let us cover up the mirror and return to the physical reality of the head, unhollowed by introspection. There is a massive body of knowledge about the head, spread over thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of textbooks, websites and databases - and heads. Most of it will apply to all the 6,000 million heads on the planet, the 6,000 million objects from whose open mouths pops out the first-person pronoun. But we mustn't be over-impressed by facts, for several reasons.
First, very little of our experience of our heads is fact-shaped. The myriad of fugitive sensations by which my head declares its presence elude being skewered by sentences. Secondly, there are many facts about my head that are not experienced by me. I defy anyone to feel the measurable difference in manganese levels between tears prompted by a poke in the eyes and tears provoked by grief. Thirdly, there are even more facts that are neither experienced by nor known to me.
It is astonishing to think how little of our head is available to us other than by third-person report. This is true not only of recherché matters, such as the microscopic structure of the vasculature in the skull vault or the way the bones in the middle ear are connected up. It is also generally true of pretty easily available stuff. Most of my skull vault is at best faintly present. Facial and cranial skin glows only intermittently and on a rather low flame of awareness. Ears tend to come out largely in winter, when the rim of the pinna is nibbled by the piranha fish of cold air. My brain, the biggest thing in the head, is silent for most of the time. When it does speak, its locutions tend to be referred elsewhere: activity in the brain is 'about' the non-cerebral body or the world. In short, the presence of the head to its owner is an intermittent, spatially discontinuous blossoming out of absence.
This usually suits us just fine. We can manage nicely with a head that has disappeared largely down a hole in consciousness. The head seems to work best as a justified assumption, which is cashed only intermittently, rather than an asserted presence. The general silence of the skull vault, for example, does not undermine our confidence that, when we attempt to head a football, it will bounce towards the goalmouth rather than fall straight through the brain, into the mouth or whichever part of the head is currently on parade. And when we open our mouths to eat, we can assume without checking that the palate of which we are currently unaware will be there to guide the food to the right place.
If all the places in the head that might be called upon to do their duty were required to be constantly iterating their presence, there would be such a cacophony of cephalic sensation that it would be difficult to see how the necessary attention could be paid to the parts that mattered or any attention could be paid to anything that was not a part of the head. If the tongue was constantly aware of itself, language would be drowned in the auto-Babel or babble of this busy piece of meat endlessly discoursing of itself. The background silence of the skull vault is necessary to ensure that the contact with, or the failure to contact, the football would be registered.
Of course, there are times when places that should be quiet are noisy. The accidentally bitten tongue shouts out horrible anti-meaning. When the playground bully tugs at the earlobe, he gatecrashes our sense of what we are - that is why it is such a potent means of humiliation. The throbbing vertex makes the scalp present when it has no job to do. The aching tooth develops an agenda at right angles to the purposes, the tasks, the hours of its owner. Tinnitus, courtesy of which the head is a source of noise rather than a device for detecting it, curdles the heard world. These are potent reminders of the importance of the silence of the head.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Kingdom of Infinite Space by Raymond Tallis Copyright © 2008 by Raymond Tallis . Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements xi
Foreword xiii
Facing Up to the Head 1
The Secreting Head 16
First Explicitly Philosophical Digression: Being My Head 45
The Head Comes To 51
Airhead: Breathing and Its Variations 65
Communicating With Air 90
Second Explicitly Philosophical Digression: Enjoying and Suffering My Head 99
Communicating Without Air 102
Notes on the Red-Cheeked Animal: The Geology of a Blush 116
The Watchtower 129
The Sensory Room 156
Third Explicitly Philosophical Digression: Having and Using My Head 180
Head Traffic: Eating, Vomiting and Smoking 186
Head on Head: Notes on Kissing 202
Headgear 211
Fourth Explicitly Philosophical Digression: Caretaking My Head 222
In the Wars 226
The Dwindles 236
Final Explicitly Philosophical Digression: Knowing (and Not Knowing) My Head 257
Head and World 260
The Thinking Head 274
Epilogue: Heading Off 288
Notes 293
Index 313