in the sea of sense...

...The hills are moving into their stillness. They mean something because they are being transformed into my brain, and my brain is an organ of meaning. The forests of redwood trees upon them

look like green fire, and the copper-gold of the sun-dried grass heaves immensely into the

sky. Time is so slow as to be a kind of eternity, and the flavor of eternity transfers itself to

the hills—burnished mountains which I seem to remember from an immeasurably distant

past, at once so unfamiliar as to be exotic and yet as familiar as my own hand. Thus

transformed into consciousness, into the electric, interior luminosity of the nerves, the world

seems vaguely insubstantial—developed upon a color film, resounding upon the skin of a

drum, pressing, not with weight, but with vibrations interpreted as weight. Solidity is a

neurological invention, and, I wonder, can the nerves be solid to themselves? Where do we

begin? Does the order of the brain create the order of the world, or the order of the world

the brain? The two seem like egg and hen, or like back and front.

The physical world is vibration, quanta, but vibrations of what? To the eye, form and color;

to the ear, sound; to the nose, scent; to the fingers, touch. But these are all different

languages for the same thing, different qualities of sensitivity, different dimensions of

consciousness. The question, "Of what are they differing forms?" seems to have no

meaning. What is light to the eye is sound to the ear. I have the image of the senses being

terms, forms, or dimensions not of one thing common to all, but of each other, locked in a

circle of mutuality. Closely examined, shape becomes color, which becomes vibration, which

becomes sound, which becomes smell, which becomes taste, and then touch, and then

again shape. (One can see, for example, that the shape of a leaf is its color. There is no

outline around the leaf; the outline is the limit where one colored surface becomes another.)

I see all these sensory dimensions as a round dance, gesticulations of one pattern being

transformed into gesticulations of another. And these gesticulations are flowing through a

space that has still other dimensions, which I want to describe as tones of emotional color,

of light or sound being joyous or fearful, gold elated or lead depressed. These, too, form a

circle of reciprocity, a round spectrum so polarized that we can only describe each in terms

of the others.

Sometimes the image of the physical world is not so much a dance of gestures as a woven

texture. Light, sound, touch, taste, and smell become a continuous warp, with the feeling

that the whole dimension of sensation is a single continuum or field. Crossing the warp is a

woof representing the dimension of meaning—moral and aesthetic values, personal or

individual uniqueness, logical significance, and expressive form—and the two dimensions

interpenetrate so as to make distinguishable shapes seem like ripples in the water of

sensation. The warp and the woof stream together, for the weaving is neither flat nor static

but a many-directioned cross-flow of impulses filling the whole volume of space. I feel that

the world is on something in somewhat the same way that a color photograph is on a film,

underlying and connecting the patches of color, though the film here is a dense rain of

energy. I see that what it is on is my brain—"that enchanted loom," as Sherrington called it.

Brain and world, warp of sense and woof of meaning, seem to interpenetrate inseparably.

They hold their boundaries or limits in common in such a way as to define one another and

to be impossible without each other.