The Watchful Mind

[A museum's 3D representation of Wilder Penfield's so-called "cortical homunculus" depicting the relative importance of various senses, as measured by the percentage of our brains devoted to them. Photo by Robep on Flickr; click for original.]

From whiskey river:

Burning the Old Year

Letters swallow themselves in seconds.
Notes friends tied to the doorknob,
transparent scarlet paper,
sizzle like moth wings,
marry the air.

So much of any year is flammable,
lists of vegetables, partial poems.
Orange swirling flame of days,
so little is a stone.

Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,
an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.
I begin again with the smallest numbers.

Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,
only the things I didn’t do
crackle after the blazing dies.

(Naomi Shihab Nye [source])

…and:

Looking Around, Believing

How strange that we can begin at any time.
With two feet we get down the street.
With a hand we undo the rose.
With an eye we lift up the peach tree
And hold it up to the wind — white blossoms
At our feet. Like today. I started
In the yard with my daughter,
With my wife poking at a potted geranium,
And now I am walking down the street,
Amazed that the sun is only so high,
Just over the roof, and a child
Is singing through a rolled newspaper
And a terrier is leaping like a flea
And at the bakery I pass, a palm,
Like a suctioning starfish, is pressed
To the window. We’re keeping busy –
This way, that way, we’re making shadows
Where sunlight was, making words
Where there was only noise in the trees.

(Gary Soto [source])

…and (what the heck, the river was on a roll this week):

Do you have doubts about life? Are you unsure if it is really worth the trouble? Look at the sky: that is for you. Look at each person’s face as you pass them on the street: those faces are for you. And the street itself, and the ground under the street, and the ball of fire underneath the ground: all these things are for you. They are as much for you as they are for other people. Remember this when you wake up in the morning and think you have nothing. Stand up and face the east. Now praise the sky and praise the light within each person under the sky. It’s okay to be unsure. But praise, praise, praise.

(Miranda July, from “The Shared Patio” [source])

Not from whiskey river:

A person who is too nice an observer of the business of the crowd, like one who is too curious in observing the labour of the bees, will often be stung for his curiosity.

(Alexander Pope, Thoughts on Various Subjects)

…and:

Any first-time touch, or change in touch (from gentle to stinging, say), sends the brain into a flurry of activity. Any continuous low-level touch becomes background…

Touch receptors can be blanked out simply by tedium. When we put on a heavy sweater, we’re acutely aware of its texture, weight, and feel against our skin, but after a while we completely ignore it. A constant pressure registers at first, activating the touch receptors; then the receptors stop working. So wearing wool or a wristwatch or a necklace doesn’t bother us much, unless the day heats up or the necklace breaks. When any change occurs, the receptors fire and we become suddenly aware… Consider all the varieties of pain, irritation ,abrasion; all the textures of lick, pat, wipe, fondle, knead; all the prickling, bruising, tingling, brushing, scratching, banging, fumbling, kissing, nudging. Chalking your hands before you climb onto uneven parallel bars. A plunge into an icy farm pond on a summer day when the air temperature and body temperature are the same. The feel of a sweat bee licking moist beads from your ankle. Reaching blindfolded into a bowl of Jell-O as part of a club initiation. Pulling a foot out of the mud. The squish of wet sand between the toes. Pressing on an angel food cake. The near-orgasmic caravan of pleasure, shiver, pain, and relief that we call a back scratch…

After a while, as suggested, a touch receptor “adapts” to the stimuli and stops responding, which is just as well or we would be driven crazy by the feel of a light sweater against the skin on a cool summer’s evening, or go berserk if a breeze didn’t quit. This fatigue doesn’t happen among the deep Pacinian corpuscles and Ruffini’s organs (joints) or the Golgi’s organs (tendons), which give us information about our internal climate, because if they nodded we would fall down midstride. But the other receptors, so alert at first, so hungry for novelty, after a while say the electrical equivalent of “Oh, that again,” and begin to doze, so we can get on with life. We may feel self-conscious much of the time, but we’re not often conscious of our physical selves, or we’d be exhausted in a typhoon of sensation.

(Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses)

Finally, the full trailer for an independently produced science-fiction action feature called Eyeborgs (2009), starring Adrian Paul (“Duncan MacLeod” from TV’s Highlander series):

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P.S. Unrelated to the Eyeborgs film is the so-call Eyeborg Project. This is an effort to develop a “bionic eye”: a tiny camera and a prosthetic device which can be used to house the camera in someone’s eye socket. The “someone” in this case is filmmaker Rob Spence, who lost his right eye in an accident some time ago. The “bionic eye” will not function as an eye; it will not, for example, restore to Spence the binocular vision he no longer has. No, it will just be used as a camera — for a documentary about surveillance. For more about this so-called Eyeborg Project, see its site.

Here’s a very interesting video about the project which is, in spots, possibly not for the squeamish.