Our lives form around the structures and landscapes we grow up and live in, no matter wether we spend our lives complying to or rejecting them. Our expressions, in whatever format or language, forms around its structures and landscapes in just the same way. And what we make out of that is what makes us us, or our voice our voice. With no obstacles, at all, we could consider ourselves completely free. Or lost.

What if we could express exactly what we thought and felt. I dont mean that we ever could, but what if? Wouldn’t it just be… a roar? A shockwave of sound, so complex that it fills every wavelength. And it just keeps coming, doesn’t it? But if we succeed in distinguishing and channelling some part of it onto a page, or a canvas or a scene or into a little gesture, it may, it has a chance to sing in tune with someone-else’s roar, and we can truly, though not ever fully, understand.

He has now taken the step of announcing a picture for sale on Etsy.com. It is a picture of the abandoned Paris Metro station Croix Rouge.

Croix Rouge Metro Station by Bradley L. Garrett

This is how he writes: “For me, it embodies Baudelaire’s poem The Swan, where he laments the Paris that is being cut through by regeneration, never to return to what it once was.”

That made me think:  Can an image actually embody something? I know that is a common thing to express, but think about it. A picture is a two-dimensional, non-flesh, fairly stable over time representation of something. A moment frozen in time. I guess another, much flatter, and more boring way of expressing it would be blah blah the picture blah, blah is a visual expression of the blah blah. Flatter indeed, but then a picture is flat. Or is it? I guess it depends on our idea of the image as medium. What do you think?

Doing a research project on health care access for undocumented migrants, such things as broken bones, aching teeth, heightened blood pressure, tumours, repetitive strains, psychosomatic pain, and other health related body issues are inescapable parts of my material, my daily discussions and thoughts. I have been accused by fellow geographers for having a medicalized idea of what the body is, and these themes however fit badly into any of the discussions of bodies, embodiment or other bodyisms in the social sciences of our era.

But let me take an example:

Henry Ascher at Rosengrenska stiftelsen tells me that many undocumented migrants that he meets in his volunteer work have bad teeth. The Rosengrenska clinic for undocumented migrants have volunteering dentists come screen the undocumented patients, and offer free dental care to those that are in need of it. These dentists claim that, apart from helping persons with no access to dental care, these screenings are important learning experiences for dentists. Within the undocumented group, they find cavities and deteriorated teeth in a state very seldom seen in the Swedish population. So, what does this mean?

In terms of inscription on the body, we can surely talk about “bad teeth” as having no access to dental care (due to certain political/legal/social/economic or other discriminatory features of society) inscribed on the body. This inscription can then be read by others:  ”bad teeth” as a mark of “no access to dental care” or “poor” or “undocumented”. Bad teeth is not only the result of discrimination, but may also lead to discrimination, on the labour market or in society in general.

These two strands of research paying attention to the body are much preoccupied with text and discourse, and I can’t but think that there is more to it worth discussing. What about the pain of having bad teeth? What about other health risks related to bad teeth?

Phenomenology comes some distance with this, by situating the body in the centre of our lives, the lived body as a veichle for emotion, empathy and intersubjectivity. There is also some stuff on phenomenology of pain that i haven had time to look closer at yet. Here then, I should be able to think about pain and suffering (due to bad teeth) as experiences individuals endure as products of discrimination (political/social/economic or what have you). Taking a phenomenological point of view will permit me to talk of the experience of bad teeth as something important.

Fine, but still, there is more to it. How about high blood pressure? Is that stress inscribed in the body? Is that something that can be read on the body? No I’m not sure I’m posing this question right. Lets rephrase: The high prevalence of heightened blood pressure among, often very young undoumented migrants, and the threat that that poses to these persons very lives, how do I discuss that in a way that the important elements in this come to the fore? It seems all to often forgotten or obscured by theoretizations of inscription and body as text, that what that text consists of may snuff the life out of these persons. This can be contrasted with the bluntness of the medical professions.

With all this said, I am absolutely able and willing to see these health issues risks as a legal or political situation manifest and/or inscribed in undocumented bodies, and include other issues otherwise discussed under the headline of embodiment such as viscerality and other stuff i also, to be honest havent read much about.

I’ll end here, because I have to go move my car to avoid getting more parking tickets.

After a couple of disease- and death- infested years in my family, I sort of shut down for a while. Not as in “I’m sorry, I haven’t been blogging for a while”, but as in, “I haven’t written a word nor read a book in months”. It was as if my whole system’s hung itself, as if my OS suddenly was running to many emotionally laden programs at once, and that innocent-looking, colourful wait-a-moment-wheel started spinning, and just wouldn’t stop.

But I have such a privileged situation at the moment! How is it even possible to throw that away? Why haven’t I tried harder to take advantage of living on a new exciting continent, with grant money, with super interesting people, options and projects all around me? Why? Well, the disturbingly simple answer is that I didn’t care much. I could sort of think that I should care, but then that thought fell out of my mind too, as everything else. From being quite wound up and stressed about my parents health, about not working enough, about not getting out enough or getting enough sleep, I fell into a languid apathetic attitude where I couldn’t care less about anything. I got five (five!) parking tickets in a month; I missed or was late to basically every appointment – those I didn’t cancel that is. I even became a sloppy driver, ending up in two potentially quite bad situations. Not that I wanted anything to happen, I just wasn’t paying attention. That felt kind of bad though, and my uncle had me promise to wake up and slow down. And to pay attention! Time flew by without me noticing, and I bought a wristwatch that would beep every hour, to remind me of the flow of time. It was quite a smart thing actually, but then I lost it, as I wasn’t paying much attention to my things either.

In hindsight it is difficult to say how or when it started – I don’t remember much of it to be honest- or how come I succeed in breaking my silence today. But I’ll be sure to find out. And when I do, that knowledge, in combination with some sharp deadlines, some rewards for success and dreadful punishment for fails, I’ll be on the right track. 2011 is supposed to be the year of initiative (or the Nike year – just do it!) and here and now, I promise to do it; to pay attention, reboot – several times a day if necessary, to pay attention, and start writing. I’ll get back to you as soon as I have anything more to contribute with, even if only a knitting pattern.

Wikimedia Commons provides the world map of time zones that we often see, but have a look at this great flash map at radical cartography!

A few days ago, Boelhouwers invited me to discuss these things again, taking a starting point in our earlier email exchange and a recent focusing experience of his. This is the text (slightly revised by both me and Boelhouwers) I sat down to write right after that discussion.

Shortly, focusing means making use of the body in knowledge production. The body may guide us in learning, in research, in learning about ourselves or other things; listening to the “pure experience” of the body gives us a new dimension of a situation. It is a matter of inviting the sensations and knowledge stored in the body and break the hegemony of the mind in the learning process. However, our thinking mind should not be understood as the enemy; but our brain, the organ producing thoughts, should not be the only body part we attend to.

Head is body too

This sort of reasoning seems to imply that body and mind are two separate poles where we can move from “living in the head” and produce intellectual knowledge, or “live in the body” and produce pure experience and concept- and theory-free knowledge. This is however not how it should be understood. My biggest issue with the body-mind dichotomy is that we tend to rank them and say that mind is better, more important and more abstract than the body (Sayer, 1991), but, in our discussion we found a way of reasoning to get around this.

The body and mind may be two elements in us, but not necessarily separate. In one sense, we are all body. The prerequisite for our very existence is our living body; our brain is a physical organ where doctors can monitor our brain activity and thoughts as impulses in nerve-threads and synapses. But, we are also all mind. Our self-conception has very little to do with flesh and blood, it is our idea of what that flesh and blood likes, dislikes, enjoys or does. My body is the extent of my existence, but what I am, for myself as well as for others is just as much a mental construct as is our image of Narnia. Body and mind are simultaneously everything and nothing, both needed for a full understanding of something. Possible at all?

Let us for a while exchange the words body and mind for experience, or even empirics, and theory. Kenny Jansson recently defended his very interesting and inspiring thesis (Jansson, 2009) at Uppsala University and framed it as a radical empiricist geophilosophy. He argued that everything he had done, seen, read, experienced, during his PhD constituted the empirical basis on which he pushed his, quite theoretical arguments. Everything, including theory, is experienced, and should thus be labeled empirics. Thanks Kenny for blowing up that brick wall between experience and concept, now I just have to come up with what to do with all that gravel!

My reasoning goes, shortly, like this: My language with its vocabulary, grammar and discourses and my experiences (including reading of theory) this far in life is my theoretical framework for understanding the world. If I encounter something that I don’t have any, what so ever, words or concepts for, it is impossible for me to grasp. If I came across an alien from outer space, it would most probably be so, well, alien, to me that I wouldn’t understand that it was an alien. As soon as we have something to say and say it, that is, conceptualize what is going on, what we think, feel or see, it is theorized.

Connecting back to body and mind then: If they are both all of us, what is the connection between them then? I don’t know, and to be honest, I’m not really sure that that is the important question here. If both body and mind are, they are both needed in our learning process, and how that is done is something Boelhouwers has been preoccupied with. Coming from different traditions of learning, we have had different experiences of how to merge them; He “living in his head” and finally learning to listen to what his body tells him; I previously living in an unconceptualized chaos, finding relief in putting it in the hands of the mind, analyzing the shit out of it. Meeting halfway, we agreed on sentences like “both are needed” and “balance is key”.

balance

We may intellectualize and analyze our world, but if we don’t ground that in ourselves, sit back, feel what the words stand for; ask “is this what I mean?” “is this right?”, then our learning will be too rational to understand life. Likewise, if we listen to our “gut feeling” without analyzing what that pleasure or fear driven voice has to say, we might be swimming dangerous, prejudiced waters without even knowing it. The gut feeling contains all those unformulated feelings of fear, anger, and joy. While it can teach us many things, we must be just as critical as usual. Shutting the mind out is to not dare or want to investigate what those feelings symbolize and are based in.

In our discussion, there were three words that emerged as very important, perhaps more important than the rest of it’s content. The three words are integrity, courage and responsibility, and are the answer to the question “what are the most important things in the learning process?”

I want to end this text before loosing either my own or your attention, so I’ll finish up now by trying to explain what we meant by these words. They are very intermingled and interconnected. Here they come in order of appearance in our discussion, and I believe also in order of importance.

Integrity is for me the capacity I need to be true to what I believe, to my experiences. Integrity is a willingness to take an argument to its endpoint and to take all the steps necessary for being able to say “this is how I understand this”, “this is my truth” and to be inquisitive about our own feelings, prejudice and thoughts. As researchers, we need integrity to not make sloppy claims, taking things for granted or taking those extra measures to understand things, with body and mind. The main elements in my term courage are curiosity, honesty, and courage. It takes courageous integrity to start digging in ones own world view and fix ideas.

Although partly being included in integrity, courage needs to be uttered in this context. Knowledge can be scary, it takes courage to be inquisitive.

And finally, when we have reached that knowledge, what do we do. We supposed responsibility would fit here.

References

Gendlin, E. T. (1993). Three assertions about the body. The Folio 12(1). http://www.focusing.org/gendlin/gol_intro.asp

Gendlin, E. T. (1995). Crossing and dipping: Some terms for approaching the interface between natural understanding and logical formulation. Minds and Machines 5(4), 547-560.

Jansson, K. (2009). Tillsammans : bidrag till den etniska boendesegregationens geofilosofi. Uppsala: Uppsala universitet.

Sayer, A. (1991). Behind the locality debate: deconstructing geography’s dualisms. Environment and Planning A 23(2), 283-308.

Other sources of inspiration to this text:

Alla lika alla olika

Vård för papperslösa i Sverige – Sammanfattning av landstingsriktlinjer

Uppsala riktlinjer
Gävleborg riktlinjer
Halland riktlinjer
Jönköping riktlinjer
Örebro Vård till personer från andra länder
Protokollutdrag Norrbotten
Sahlgrenska riktlinjer
Skåne policy
Skåne Tillämpningsanvisningar
Sörmland riktlinjer
Stockholm riktlinjer
Västerbotten tillämpningsanvisningar
Västernorrland protokollutdrag
Västragötalandsregionen riktlinjer