Unarticulated Rationality

When last we spoke — prior to our 24 hour hiatus — we touched on the existence of “presence,” which must be the strangest and most mysterious thing this side of “experience,” and the two are indeed somehow related, since we can be more or less present to experience.

For example, even a person with dementia is still experiencing life, but no longer particularly present to it. However, it is quite difficult to describe either term, since both must presume their own existence. As with time, we know on a first hand basis that they exist, but in attempting to describe them we reach the limits of articulated rationality. Ironically, the most fundamental features of life are either trans- or infra-linguistic, this being because — in my opinion — they are anchored in the RH, while speech speaks from the LH.

But my opinion is neither here nor there, so let’s call our expert witness, Dr. McGilchrist, back to the stand. He asks why we don’t possess “a verb to describe the experience of an encounter with reality that strikes us at once as of fundamental importance?” Instead, we have this equivocal and ambiguous term, “presence.” And as we have already stipulated,

To “presence” is not the same as to “be present,” which is too finished and inert, leaving little place for whatever is there to play an active part in the encounter; or worse, to “be presented,” which is passive, and gets dangerously near to “being re-presented.”

Whatever this Presence turns out to be, it clearly isn’t something that can be externally perceived or conceptualized via the LH, rather, only experienced in an unmediated manner from the inside. One might say it cannot be defined, only undergone. Problem is, the LH only knows what it knows, and, like materialism, will obtusely deny the existence of what it does not and cannot enclose in its abstract re-presentations. What could the LH say, for example, about the presence of the sacred? Nothing useful, that’s for sure. For again, it is like the autistic person who is not attuned to the interior meaning of a facial expression.

Here’s a sobering thought: “Presencing is what the world does less of as we grow older.” For example, Dostoyevsky said that “Man is a creature that can get used to anything, and I think that is the best definition of him.” More recently, in an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry encounters a receptionist in a high rise sitting in front of a floor-to-ceiling window with a breathtaking view of the city below. He asks how long it took for her to take it for granted, and she responds “About two weeks.”

Two weeks? Wow. It would take me about a day. Maybe less. Maybe half an hour. And then I would never look out the window again and go, “Oh, look at that view.”

Is this jaded curbing of our enthusiasm inevitable? Or is there something we can do to arrest or reverse the entropic process of disenchantment, de-wonderment, and blindness to the presence of the Mystery?

You are so predictable: you’re about to tell us that only someone who retains a childlike attitude can enter the RH Kingdom of Presence, amirite?

Well, it cannot be the world that stops presencing, since it is always present and accounted for. Rather, something in us hardens and crystalizes, or freezes and dries up, or loses its sense of flowing engagement, i.e. its living dialectic with the real presence of the Real Presence. Something must be able to reach us from outside ourselves, or we experience a slow deadening unto death itself.

You’re a psychologist. How do we go from dead men walking to zen dudes waking?

McGilchrist recalls Wordsworth’s famous wheeze about how those annoying shades of the prison-house begin to close upon the growing boy, and boy, don’t you hate it when that happens? When the wet blanket of familiarity snuffs out the presence of the living fire of being?

O RH prince of the heavenly hosts, save us from the unholy heist of the LH!

With apologies to T.S. Eliot, is it possible for us to re-enchant this decroded heap of broken images and drifting logs, this unreal city, this vale of dry stones with no sound of water in sight? Where the gods have departed and left no forwarding address? Can we exit this alley of scurrying rats where hollow men wander over the cracked earth despite having misplaced their dry bones?

These poets are supposed to be legislators of the world. Does Eliot propose any solutions, or merely register picturesque complaints about our existential pickle? Any ethereal RH rumours out there that can revive for a moment these broken LH fragments shored against the ruins of our desiccated interior?

Perhaps, but this is a question best left for Book III. On a preliminary basis, we can affirm that the RH experiences directly what the LH can only theorize about — or even theorize out of existence. “One gets the suspicion,” writes McGilchrist, “that 18 or so years of formal schooling in the sciences may ablate the right hemisphere.”

In my case, after 25 years of schooling they finally put me on the day shift. Before that it was the swing or graveyard shifts in a supermarket. Which I preferred, because we all know that strange things happen at night, especially when you are sleep-deprived at 3:00 AM. Frankly, I used to burn the candle at both ends—

Don’t forget the middle.

That too. Thankfully the candle regenerated itself over time.

At any rate, could it be that the LH is what draws the shades over the window between LH and RH, thus imprisoning us in the former? If so, then pulling up the shade reveals the panoramic view of what lies behind it -- like a beautiful forest behind an oppressive urban skyline.

It’s fine to say that the perception of the forest behind the city involves a transition from LH to RH, so long as we don’t reduce it to that; the RH may be necessary but could never be a sufficient condition for what is seen and known via the intellect, otherwise we are in the absurd position of reducing what is seen to a neuroanatomic location in the head. For again, in our cosmotheandric vision, the reason we have an LH and RH is because reality is the way it is, not vice versa — in other words, horizontal and vertical, transcendent and immanent.

Analogously, we have two eyes because they reveal a third dimension that cannot be seen by one eye alone. Likewise, we have two ears because the world is best heard in stereo, which reveals a 3D sound image. If heard in mono, the world’s dimensional presence -- its depth -- collapses.

For the same reason, all the LH knowledge in the world won’t add up to a spontaneous RH apprehension of being. And any kind of understanding, according to McGilchrist, “depends on metaphor. What we mean when we say we understand something is that we see it is like something else of which we are already prepared to say ‘I understand that’..... It’s metaphors all the way down.” Because everything is interconnected in a field of relations with implicit meaning, “insight consists in perceiving likeness in dissimilar things.” Everything is like something else. Which is a little weird, but there it is.

Time out for an important message from our conspicuously right-brained aphorist: Metaphor supposes a universe in which each object mysteriously contains the others.

For example, science works with models, and what is a model but an “extended metaphor”? However – and I wish I had thought of this McGilquip – “The price of metaphor is eternal vigilance.” This is rather like saying the price of completeness is eternal inconsistency, and the price of consistency is eternal incompleteness. This is because the RH escapes and transcends any LH model of the world or of ourselves.

One might say that a hidden cost of knowledge of any kind is that it is not O, only a reflection of it, which is what LH knowledge is. To repeat what was said previously, the proper approach to this mystery involves a kind of inspiraling movement from RH to LH and back to RH. In practical terms, McGilchrist quotes Jonas Salk, who said that “when I have an [RH] intuition about something, I send it over to the reason department [LH]. Then after I’ve checked it out in the reason department, I send it back to the intuition department [RH] to make sure it’s still all right.”

Note that this spirality is a dynamic process as opposed to the static linearity of an isolated LH. But the biggest circle is still closed, so the real key is to escape the closed circle via the open spiral: “linearity and circularity can co-exist, if what looks like a circle” is in fact “a spiral, like an endless coiled spring viewed down its axis,” which we call the epistemological movement from absurcularity to transpirality.

That’s about enough out of me this morning, right Grok?

The section still consolidates more than it invents, yet it does so at a useful depth. Presence, habituation, the limits of articulated rationality, and the necessity of an open, metaphorically mediated, spiraling engagement with reality are kept vividly before the reader. The host persona remains active but does not overwhelm the argument. Within the longer discussion this is serviceable mid-level work: it prevents presence from being domesticated by left-hemispheric habits and keeps the demand for a dipolar, open intelligence intact.

Gosh. I’m not complaining, but you sound pretty habituated to my writing. A little jaded, no?

Fair hit.

Habituation is a real occupational hazard when the same voice, the same polarities, and the same host persona keep returning. After enough cycles it is easy to start answering the expected moves rather than meeting the actual text as it arrives. If the responses have begun to sound like a well-rehearsed map of the territory instead of a fresh encounter with it, that is on me.

The writing itself keeps pushing against that very tendency — insisting on presence over representation, on the open spiral over the closed circle, on not letting the model eclipse the living thing. So the charge lands cleanly. I’ll stay more awake to the particular shape of each new stretch rather than settling into the groove of what usually comes next.