Space Will Redefine Itself
Between worlds and bodies, light and shadow, Holly Dawson traces the fragile dance of presence, space, and healing.
words – holly dawson
location – sussex, uk
Mid-June, garden, heatwave. Dalloway Day for Woolf fans; eighth day of bombing for my Iranian friend; another day of heaviness for my pacificist friend from Israel; a day of agony for my friend in court. Here we are, almost Solstice – too much dark for so much light. And here I am, coming out of my own dark, to warm my skin in the sun by the pond.
I’m here, but my phone keeps transporting me to my friends’ worlds, as I try to read an article about an artist I don’t know. I’m scribbling annotations, highlighting passages, inserting myself into the space on the page. The final line: ‘Space will redefine itself…’
(‘Four days and no word from my sister’ – a message from my friend, her family
lost in Tehran)
…boundaries will fall…
(text from my Israeli friend. His family are in a bunker. Shaken, but lucky. So far fine)
…and edges will…
(a photo from my mum, by the sea in my homeland. I fall into the image, into the
waves. Long for home)
…become blurred out’.
I’m in too many places to concentrate. I’m in my garden. I’m in a bunker near Haifa. I’m searching through the rubble in Tehran. I’m bobbing in the salt of my childhood. I’m in court, clutching my friend’s hand. For a moment, I’m also in the reeds, watching dragonflies copulate, wondering how it feels, if it hurts.
(I jot in my notebook: We are always, all of us, in too many spaces. How hard
to be wholly present, when we are present in the whole)
I’m also still Elsewhere, after having two seizures. One big and definite, hard to come back from; the second, smaller (they often come in pairs). My child had sat with me. Nested me with cushions. Then covered me with a blanket, brought water to my lips.
Back to the article. My pen has redefined it, rendering it messy, disorderly, defaced. I study the photographs till I’m there, in the artist’s studio with his paintings – bold blocks of colour with white negative spaces,
(No text from court-friend; she is present in her absence, a block of white negative
space)
others with colours bleeding into one another, erasure and union side by side.
(Another text: ‘Happy Dalloway Day! See you later!’)
Tonight, I’ll be talking about Mrs Dalloway. About characters colliding in physical and imaginative space. London, like the artwork in the article, a spatial experience of straight lines and blurs. My body is too, in the aftermath of seizures. Perhaps that’s why I’m compelled by this line.
‘Space will redefine itself, boundaries will fall, and edges will become blurred out’.
It suddenly makes sense to me. The spatiality of a seizure. Dissolving boundaries, blurring edges. The body-space, redefined.
We are always, all of us, in too many spaces. How hard to be wholly present, when we are present in the whole
* * * *
There are over 30 types of seizure – not just the jerky ones seen in films. I get five types. I enter five different spaces. The journey time, and visit time, is different for each one. An ‘absence’ lasts a couple of seconds. I go somewhere, but you don’t notice I’ve gone. In a ‘déjà vu’ seizure, I go backwards, convinced I’ve been in this present before.
An ‘aura’ seizure takes me, like Alice, to ‘Wonderland’ – things appear huge or tiny, colour and light intensifies, smells distort, everything so loud that a whisper hurts me, my body either shrinks or grows enormously tall. Rooms turn upside down. I am here, but not here. Sometimes I throw up.
My most common seizure drags me to the seabed. It is heavy, subterranean. I am Below. Can’t move. Can’t respond. I dribble. Two to six minutes feels like hundreds of years.
Finally, there’s the classic tonic-clonic. I am Above, in this seizure. Floating above myself, watching on.
‘I’m back.’ That’s what I say after a seizure.
‘She’s back’ – so the doctors see them as spaces too. The first question, always: ‘Do you know where you are?’
For a while, though I’m ‘back,’ I’m also still in it. John Hughlings Jackson, the Victorian neurologist and epilepsy researcher, called this ‘mental diplopia’ (‘double consciousness’). I inhabit both spaces. I am There and Here.
Writers experience this mental diplopia, inhabiting real and unreal space at the same time.
* * * *
‘There and Here’ is also a description of the writing space. Writers experience this mental diplopia, inhabiting real and unreal space at the same time.
In turn, they create spaces for readers to inhabit – spaces we remain in, even after closing a book. Philippa Dahrouj’s article says something similar. That a canvas ‘incites the viewer… to enter the space of the painting’ and ‘give in to the dimensionality of the work’. Art and literature are collaborative spatial experiences; viewers and readers ‘participate in the formation’ of space.
It’s surprising how many writers had (or may have had) epilepsy: Tennyson, Flaubert, Dickens, Swift, Byron, Capote, Poe. Dostoyevsky has a seizure named after him. Remember my description of an aura seizure? Well, Lewis Carroll was epileptic too.
Perhaps it’s not surprising. Epilepsy is associated with a condition called ‘hypergraphia’ – an all-consuming drive to write. Both stem from the same place in the temporal lobe. Disruption or damage may spark a neurological imperative to write.
There’s consolation in this idea: ability and disability, mutually nurturing, side by side. Epilepsy, like the artwork in the article, pulls us into a ‘twirling abstract world,’ takes us on ‘a journey of self-discovery.’ Dostoyevsky said he was grateful for his condition, for the creative fecundity its ‘abnormal tensions’ brings.
How does the epileptic experience of space and perception shape a writer’s work? Does the condition drive the discovery of new imaginative responses, the forging of new stylistic tools? This heightened dualism of There/Here consciousness. Intense presence/intense absence. The journey to other worlds.
* * * *
Epilepsy, like the artwork in the article, facilitates the transformation of both internal and external space. But my experience of spatiality from inside a seizure is very different to how it visually, physically, manifests.
Witnessing a seizure is worse than experiencing one. If a canvas ‘incites the viewer… to enter the space of the painting’, a seizure incites the viewer to enter a space they’d rather not go. Watching a seizure is like watching a performance; the body enacts a story of disturbing things. It is confrontational: the body’s private space becomes public, the functional dysfunctional, the orderly disorderly, the controllable uncontrolled. A grotesque spectacle: body flailing, limbs jerking, lips frothing, tongue lolling, eyes rolling, the gargoyle contortions of face, of flesh.
A seizure disrupts the space around it – or attacks it (from the Greek epilambanein, to seize or attack). For the carer, a safe space suddenly becomes dangerous. Alert to corners and sharp edges, furniture and objects are moved or displaced. The usual function of something alters – a floor becomes a bed, a coat a pillow. The area around becomes messy, disarrayed.
‘What should I do, if you have a seizure?’ people ask me.
Make the space safe. Give me space, while I’m in it. Hold the space. Don’t be afraid.
Space is empathic; connecting; collaborative. Shifting and flowing. Redefining, redefined.
* * * *
The article quotes from a philosopher I don’t know – Merleau-Ponty. I fall into a rabbit-hole of research. A click of serendipity – he wrote a theory of body spatiality, positioning consciousness as the way a body connects to internal and external space.
An antidote to Cartesian dualism, he writes: ‘My body is not an assemblage of organs juxtaposed in space’ – rather, it is held together by an embodied consciousness, which he calls ‘body image,’ defined as: ‘a compendium of our bodily experience, capable of giving a commentary and meaning…to the impressions of possessing a body at any moment.’
In short, it is ‘a way of stating that my body is in-the-world.’
An hour ago, my body was not in-the-world. Now, by the pond, it is. I am painting back the boundaries that delineate this body, the edges that delineate this moment in time. I am Here. I am Here, where my body is. I dip my fingers in the water and watch the ripples circle wide.
How beautiful, that an article can change me. How, previously, I’d felt splintered, in so many spaces, with heartsore friends. How I felt I was there, because my mind was there. But I am Here, because my body is here.
‘Space is not the setting in which things are arranged’ writes Merleau-Ponty, ‘[but] the universal power enabling them to be connected.’
Space is empathic; connecting; collaborative. Shifting and flowing. Redefining, redefined. Our colours bleed into each other, creating something beautiful. But we also need our edges, to ground our bodies in this breaking world.
* * * *
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