The Phenomenal Textual Encounter, or, The Body Dramatically Contorts the Curvature Of SpaceTime

In my authorship I am neither creator nor authority but merely an agent—of what then? Two things: language (as a human construction) and construction (as natural [original], nonlinguisitic phenomenon); (between them lies a gulf of meaning, strung over by a rickety bridge, but we cannot dwell here). The latter precedes the former in form and being but may not be conveyed without it; the former results from the need to convey the latter but in its own form reformulates the implications of the original phenomenon. The text which lies here, resulting from my formation of its form borne uniquely from my interior into our exterior, possesses an “authoredness” unique to my body and mind. Why? Is it merely, as Derick Attridge calls it, “the product of a mental event … whereby the processes of linguistic meaning are conveyed”? If the constructions are not original (their referents are preexisting, natural), then how did they get into me originally, only to be borne out as descendant, and to what extent is my reformulation of the ideas belonging to my body or of the world? Attridge would conceit that it is on the part of my “invention” that the original constructions have been borne through me into their new literary manifestation. What have I done to be called an “inventor” of text? The answer, Attridge concedes, has more to do on the part of the reader than myself, the “authoring” persona: “The experience of the literary text … arises not from the content of the invention, the series of arguments or proposed concepts it puts forward, but from the reader’s performance of it.” And so I have begotten a reconstruction of original otherness (phenomenality) which is then rendered somewhat benign inside me and leaves my body in a body of its own and enters my potential readers’ (your) body as other, and what do you do then? You are just an earlier me, experiencing these original phenomena anew, renewed, although set apart—singular—in their new inventive forms. My invention, my creativity, is now a part of the original. I am “a writing” and I am always “a writing” in my text to the reader since the encounter of my insides and your outsides in the text-space continues to be experienced as a singular event by every eventual reader. Yet wherefrom do I, the writing, encounter the phenomena and the language I have fit to it? The answer is that I have read them, that is to say, experienced them. In writing, an authoring merely siphons from the internal understanding of worldly referentiality back into the exterior; yet, from that new emergence, a text now born with a body of its own to meet (possibly) with my body’s mind (as many have done), how is that exterior phenomenon encountered and experienced in my own body. How is phenomena in general passed from external body to internal body—and if it means something, tickles a fancy, whose fault is it? We may do well to assume the autonomy of the literary event, that a text with no agency perchance encounters our body as a conductor which catalyzes it into reacting in a way that dissolves the text from a solid external to a permeable substance which may then be allowed to pass across the divide of our interior consciousness. The order of the words on the page is the event in which we are participating, the substance we are bringing into our bodies. So a statement like “the otherness and singularity [of literature] arises from the encounter with the words themselves, their sequence, their suggestiveness, their interrelations, their sounds and rhythms,” may be said to bestow upon the literary object unique in its originality and invention the quality (form) of any natural phenomenon we may encounter.

We cannot be sure of most things. How have the elements been brought out their dark origin to mingle in the ways they do now? Some of the disciplined nature would assume that some agent to be worshiped had their hand in the composition of our world. Empirically, we cannot account for this, and so like the New Critics, indignant of the conceit of intention, we turn to the “real stuff” of our world—our word. Literature, in lieu of the intentions of an Author to produce such a product, and not ultimately reliant on the fact of its existence to be experienced and thus propagated in the mind of humanity to reach the esteems implied by the term, must be the result of happenstance encounter between outside and inside, text and mind, as like fire and water so met will simmer, and only incidentally intentional, whoever responsible having set the quarks in motion some indefinite and therefore irrelevant years back; and it is clear that the majority of intentional attempts to create literature have begotten forgotten works of which, should they constitute a loss, the world remains ambivalent.

Two bodies, remote from one another, may be composed over time and set in motion, regardless whodunit, and with Time and his concubine, Inevitability, they collide in “a temporal event,” to again quote Attridge. In the meeting of these phenomena, the reader and the text, both inert, the reaction of literature sparks a heat and light and an alteration of elements and states of matter; the agency of the human conductor felicitates the transfer of energy from the text to the interior consciousness via the same paths taken by sensory experience and knowledge. The reader acts as catalyst in a reaction whose end result will be the transfer of non-material information from one spatial and temporal region (the writing of the text) to another. These regions, while too complex to thoroughly evaluate here, represent relationships between infinitely expanding space and infinitely condensing space—that is—space that goes on around and beyond us and space that contracts and gets denser within us. It is my theory that while the area of the universe continues to expand into the unknown border-regions of space, one may always define a boundary within which space acts equal to the rate and opposite the direction of change occurring outside the boundary, which we may call the event horizon—to say that there is as much linear movement occurring within the body contained by this event horizon as there is occurring outside of it in the exterior expansion of space; while space contains infinite such bodies, these bodies also contain the inverted yet equally vast frontier of interior space. Like outer space, this inner space contains matter and energy. Of matter, the bodies break down into smaller units which, spatially, become denser and more uniform, from liver to tissue to protein to cell to nucleus to atom to neutron to quark to … Of energies, the bodies condense and become pure aesthetic designation, from gas to nebula to star to sky-light to the star-gazer to astronomy to sublime … and the ultimate uncommunicable sensation which absorbs the sensory information and releases it anew from the depths of the body’s interiority (soul?) is the mirror of the deep expanse of space which troubles and awes us with equal power.

When the event horizon of a particular body is conscious of its boundary due to capabilities of memory and self-awareness, then such a body may actively (as opposed to simply passively, as the leaf passively experiences the ozone) transmit sensory information across the divide. This type of encounter may be called learning, or scholarship, the endeavor to apprehend sensory information. Bodies receive information in passing all the time, but the phenomena of the Outer World are just as ready to be taken in with intent. The Outer World is infinite in its phenomanifestation, or the complete probability set of combinations of elements which beget the whole of the world’s experiences. But the whole of this set is unlikely to be encountered by another body; much phenomena remains inert in the vacuum of space and thus fails to be channeled into the interiority of other compartmentalized bodies. In this way, they remain unread, and largely inaccessible. The phenomena of the Outer World exist insofar as and up until the point that in order to persist beyond the reaches of their form, or body (i.e., in order to maintain causal kinetic motion), they must be channeled across a divide implied in the event horizon of another body, after which their journey from Outer Space unto the local singularity of their experiential trajectory may continue inwardly and in a contained manner with equal rate and longevity into the “center” of the body (“center,” in that the phenomena become abstracted, decompressed, and congealed at a dense center of unique informational gravity); phenomena are born out of the Body of Space and Time and into one of the many bodies of perceivers, each of which processes the information differently and depending on the contents of their interiorities. The active or passive transmission of sensory information across the event horizon may, for our purposes, be called “reading.”

The event horizon of a human being is technically uncertain. We know the limit at which the Outer World begins to affect our physical sensory experience of it, but the limits of Outer effects upon Internal emotional sensory experiences cannot be determined. The network of sensory nerves extends unto the layer of human skin, and so we will define that area as the body of any given human. This may also constitute the event horizon of physical phenomena, but for psychological, emotional, and spiritual phenomena we can either confine the horizon to the brain itself or to all that is directly in contact with the brain, what the eyes perceive at any given time, what the ears hear, etc.; in this way the event horizon of a human being may in actuality be a certain circumference of Outer Space surrounding the physical body. It may also be the collective Interiorities of Humanity, or at least the surrounding population of sentient beings, if we are to consider empathy as a sense. In any case, for our purposes here, the event horizon of human being is the Outer Space matter and energy being directly experienced by the body of the human at any time. What one experiences informs ones context in the world and in the relationship between phenomenations of sensory information.

Sensory information may be conveyed through methods other than experience, such as representations of sensory experience. When a representation of a sensory experience is accurate or particularly poignant, then it will incite a unique feeling as it passes the event horizon of a human being; we may call this event a recognition: the body recognizes the representation as referential of some “true” experience or “true” phenomenon or that such a phenomenon could likely occur or be true. Herein the event of literature becomes apparent: when the Inner Space of the body receives from the Outer Space a sensory experience which incites in the body a unique feeling of “understanding,” i.e., the apprehension of some truth as a performance of truthfulness, a recognition of reference, or the potential thereof. When one apprehends sensory information in the form of text then one may be said to be “reading,” but when the information causes a reaction in the body whereby pleasure or the uncanny or the sublime or any other designation of aesthetic, abstracted sensation is experienced because of a “truthful” or “significant” encounter, then one may be said to be “reading literature.”

Texts, when they come into contact with a reader, become a plane surrounding the event horizon of the body; the text, in reading, becomes experience, the Immediate Outer World. Of course, the content and form of the Immediate Outer World is informed by the Far Outer World of Time and Space, whereby time past spawned the events which were to be recorded and the persons who would record and distribute them and the context for the encounter with the particular reader (because every reader and every reading is different) as well as near-infinite other significant details predicating the encounter. Yet when that fortuitous meeting occurs, the entirety of the world bears down upon the body through the dense symbolic medium of the text; then, the medium of the body conducts the Outer World of the text into the Inner World of the Body and unifies the duality of experience for a moment, until the encounter is passed into the networks and physics of Inner World Reality and processed in one of many psychological ways. The Immediate Outer World meets the event horizon flush and via a particular Intermediary System (which is known to the writer but cannot be described within the limits of this paper) is absorbed into the Inner World and proceeds deeper and deeper within the body.

We may picture this event geometrically. Consider a diamond; between two vertically-aligned points, a center expands outward at equal length in both directions. Now invert the image; replace the line with a point and the points with lines; a rectangle appears to be pinched in the center; two triangles meet at their apex in the center; a base narrows to become a point which begins the cascading expansion of another base. At the top base we find the expanse of Outer World Phenomena. As the base contracts the scope of phenomena shrinks into a smaller area, until just before the center point the phenomena is fully compressed into the text which then encounters the point—the singularity—of the reading of the text. This singularity is the reader encountering the text. After the singularity the Outer World text is transmitted into inner world sensory information which expands and diffuses to make up the Inner World psychological landscape. At the base of Inner World sensory information, the text has become so diffused as to be unrecognizable by the reader at the singularity. Yet there remains in the Inner World of the reader an understanding of the sensory information experienced. When encountered again, the sensory information will incite a recognition in the reader that the event is familiar, uncanny, or “true.” The reader will then designate the new encounter with the sensory information “literature,” retroactively label the first sensory experience “literature,” and seek out similar representations of sensory information to be designated “literature,” and taught and disseminated as such to others to share the experience for the value of the recognition it incites. Literature, thus, represents the rewarding movement of Outer World Phenomena via its condensed manifestation as text through the singularity of the reading body, thereby altering its elemental composition and state of matter in a way specific to that particular reaction, and its processing through that body’s Inner World store of Sensory Information.