Talking bodies, senses, and imagination with one of my favourite people

A conversation with writer Joe Rizzo Naudi

Thank you to those of you who reached out after my post last week on the unfolding situation in Gaza. I am really grateful for the thoughtful conversations, both in my inbox and more broadly. This week, I’m returning to writing about the imaginal realm, because as I wrote last week, I believe that severance from the imaginal is at the root of humanity’s problems, and figuring out how to reestablish contact with the imaginal otherworld is a matter of life and death.

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Hello all,

Sorry about the skewed publishing schedule this week. Here’s what happened: I’m an idiot.

More precisely, I had a chat with my pal the writer Joe Rizzo Naudi, about senses and the imaginal. And wow, was it a chat. Joe is one of my favourite people to talk to, and I think you’ll see why. If I weren’t an idiot, I would have recorded it properly and then learned to edit out all the parts where I start eight sentences at once and finish none of them, so that I could share it as audio. But since I’m an idiot, I did not do those things, and you’re getting an edited transcript—late, because the chat was three times as long as this, and I didn’t really want to lose any of it. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed having this conversation.

One question: How many of you would be interested in audio conversations in future? I’m considering making that a regular offering … dare I say, something like a *whispers* … podcast … ? Would you be interested in that? Drop me a comment or an email and let me know.

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Meanwhile: Joe. Joe Rizzo Naudi is a writer who engages with themes of blindness and subjectivity, and you can check out his various projects here.

We chatted a couple of weeks ago, and touched on Shakespeare-induced involuntary haptic experiences, the fleshiness of the imaginal realm, the phenomenology of reading, and “blindness gain” and the generative uncertainty that can come with blindness and other non-normative sensory experiences.

We began by talking about what imagination is—how we each understand it, and how we access it.

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Joe: It's telling, isn't it, that we've got this word “image,” which is synonymous with “picture” in our culture, and all of these denote visual concepts. Even though “the image” and “the imagination” can actually be applied to all of the senses.

Ellie: Absolutely, and I think that that—this fixation on the visual—is one of the biggest hurdles to people stepping into their full imaginative capacities. A lot of people struggle to visualize something, and then they think that's the only way in.

The way I access imagination and the imaginal realm, and the way I understand it written about in other people's writing, is that it’s in all of your senses, and more than that, that there's this difference between your bodily senses, your physical senses, and your imaginal senses. That there's a kind of subtle body that feels and sees and hears and has its own independent senses, and the route to the imaginal is through those subtle senses.

What’s your experience of those subtle senses?

J: I think I have two quite concrete examples of what we're talking about. One is—there's something which lots of blind and visually impaired people will be aware of, and which lots of sighted people aren't aware ever happens, called a “touch tour” at theatres and sometimes at musical events and things like that. Have you come across that?

E: No!

J: It usually comes before an audio-described performance, and it's an opportunity for people to come and explore the stage and some of the props in person—so usually, that does mean haptically. They'll be able to use things like the table which is going to be used in the play, the chair which the actor sits in, the fork that one of the characters uses, which will be instrumental because, I don't know, the character is going to use it to play a harp later on in the piece, and you can feel the harp as well, and maybe hear the harp, and maybe play the strings of the harp as well if you want to. So it's this embodied experience of the play space, which is then going to be looked at and listened to by the audience during the performance. And often as well, you'll meet some of the actors, and they'll introduce their voices and the different characters that they play. There's sometimes an opportunity to feel the clothing as well, and have that described in more detail. So it is about touching, but it's also touching in a metaphorical sense, because it's about a slow introduction and proximity to the play, in all its senses, that's going to be experienced.

And it's beautiful, and very intimate and quiet usually, and funny and fun. And it's a real privilege to have that experience with the artists involved.

E: I didn't know that that existed, that's amazing. I'm fascinated to know how that might alter the experience of the play, whether that allows you to enter more deeply into it.

J: Yes, I have one very specific example. I went to a touch tour of Measure for Measure at the Globe Theatre. This was during the winter, so it was in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. And I’ve been reading your piece on caves and other things about caves, and I'm now struck by the cave qualities of so many constructed spaces and theatrical spaces. What is a church but a resonant space? What is the theatre but this dark, closed space where we enter the imaginal, perhaps?

The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse is unique—in London, anyway—in that it's completely candlelit. So it's incredibly dark and visually atmospheric, but also the candles employ the other senses in a more subtle way, perhaps. There's the smell of tallow, and the creak of chandeliers as they are raised and lowered by the stage managers to manage the light levels at different points of the play. It's an incredible experience, to be there.

I went on this touch tour before, and then sat down to watch. It was a modern—contemporary—imagining of Measure for Measure, and one of the main props was a Bakelite telephone. One of those ring-dial plastic telephones from the fifties, sixties, seventies, and we'd been given that to hold and to have a play with during the touch tour. And the first time this telephone came on stage, and one of the main characters grabbed the receiver, picked it up, and brought it to his ear, I had a completely involuntary haptic sense impression of that receiver in my hand. It's one of the only times I can remember—though it must happen more often, it's just not registering in my memory—of having an involuntary haptic image. They happen all the time for me in terms of visual images, these involuntary flashes which come into the mind—sometimes we call them intrusive images and things like that, if they're unpleasant. And it happens occasionally that I'll have that with auditory imaginings. But this is the only time I can remember that happening haptically, and it was so strong and precise and breathtaking, because I must have been so entirely engrossed that as I saw and heard this character pick up the telephone, I got the sense impression imprinted into my hand as well, which was in my lap, 15 metres away from where it was actually happening.

E: Wow. I love that, because my deepest held belief these days is that the imaginal is real, and in many ways more real than the material realm. What I love about what you just shared is that it wasn't an experience that your mind was generating in any kind of conscious or laborious way. It was something that you felt and that was real, in the moment, even though in the material sense, it wasn't real. And I think there's probably some boring neuroscientific explanation for that, but for me, the more expansive and interesting explanation lies somewhere in the fact that this is what humans were born to do—to be able to access worlds that aren't happening in the material realm, or haven't happened yet in the material realm. And for me, that can only happen when all of your senses, whether they're your imaginal senses or your physical senses, are activated.

J: I think that's true, yeah—that we need all our senses either to be properly engaged, properly in an appropriate sense, or—and I was thinking about this with reading—we need to enter into almost an asensory space, where the physical senses cease to matter, and we can fully engage with whichever imaginal senses, subtle senses, we choose, or which come to us. So I was thinking about the cave-like quality of reading a text, where you're—as much as possible—shutting your attention down to just the interpretation of signs. There's a really pure experience that you can get there, if you can maintain the concentration.

E: Yes, and this is only occurring to me right now, but I actually wonder if the imaginal place that you go to when you read and you go into that sort of trance state... I suspect it isn't the same place, or the same realm or order of existence, as the imaginal you access when, say, someone is telling you a story live and it's accompanied by drumming that is activating your senses. Or you're in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse and you're smelling the candles and feeling a Bakelite phone in your hand. I do think that the place you go to when you're reading a novel—and obviously I say this as someone who, the central activity of my life has been reading novels, and I love them—

J: —and writing them—

E: —and writing them. But I do think that there's something thinner or shallower about the version of the imaginal that you access that way, because it's not in your physical senses, you haven't accessed it through your whole bodily senses. I think I'm probably contradicting myself here.

J: I'm really interested in this, though. So, it's thinner because in a way you're only deploying half your arsenal?

E: I think thinner because it's solitary. My sense—and this will make me sound insane, and I don't have any return to that—my sense is that when you're listening to music or to a story or you're in a live theatrical experience, and you go to a place, I think that that is a collective place, and I think it is real, more real than this world. That is the imaginal. Whereas I think that often, the place that you go to when reading a novel is imagination and not the imaginal. Even though I think I often go to the imaginal when I'm writing fiction—in fact that's the only way I write fiction, to go to the imaginal and source what I'm going to tell from that place. Is this making any sense at all?

J: Yeah, and I think we have a dialectic emerging, where I impulsively disagree with you, I think in interesting ways. I'm really interested in why you think, why is it that there's something communal about the imaginal, and that this isn't something you get when you're reading? And maybe we should also talk about what we mean by reading, because I think there's interesting stuff to unpack there in terms of sensory engagement. Could you say a little more about the communality of the imaginal?

E: Probably not in a very coherent way. This is all completely instinctive, but my sense when I am transported there during a storytelling, for instance, is that it is a fleshy, robust place that, because it is real, even though it's not material, because it's very real, it must be visitable and accessible by anyone. Whereas—and I can only really describe all this elementally or in a tactile way—but the imaginal is sort of fleshy, whereas the imagination or the place that I go to in reading a novel on my own is airy.

J: Do you feel like you've never had a fleshy imaginal experience while reading a novel?

E: I have. I'm sure it's happened multiple times, but interestingly, the only time that's springing to mind now is when I was actually listening to an audiobook, and not reading on the page. It was an audiobook of Middlemarch, and it was a very fleshy experience.

J: Yeah, so when we talk about reading, I think probably both of us were imagining someone sitting with a book and using their eyes to interpret the signs printed on the page. And I guess also we can't—I don't know that much about it, but whenever I think of reading in this way, I'm also reminded of the philosophers and linguists who use the word "reading"—and I guess it's in the vernacular as well—as a kind of analysis, or an interpretation of something. "What's your read on this person?" So there is a sense in which there's an intellectual abstraction happening. But I do feel like I've had fleshy experiences in that cave of reading.

E: And is that regular for you?

J: I think when I'm doing it well, yes. And maybe this is a distinction here. With reading, it's autostimulation, isn't it? (Laughs) Because we have to interpret the signs. The text doesn't live on its own. In a quite beautiful way, we have to activate it. And you could say the same for listening to a story or watching Shakespeare. But I feel like something you were getting at with this communal angle is that there's an invitation that may be irresistible within the communal experience. I'm thinking of all the different examples we've had, of the drumming, or someone being onstage with a thousand people watching. You almost have no choice, as a social being, you almost have no choice but to participate and enter that space. Or at least, it's difficult to resist. Whereas it's so easy to resist the book.

E: Yes, it requires more active collusion.

J: And what I’m getting at is, perhaps when we are in a communal experience of art and that irresistible invitation is happening, we can give ourselves fully to the experience, like sleep or like trance or ecstasy or dancing. There's a falling into and a buoyancy to the experience. Whereas with reading, there's a way in which we can never fully lose control of ourselves, actually take our hand off the side of the pool and push out into the dark centre of it, because we have to keep reading. I experience it all the time when I'm falling asleep reading—I feel like, fuck, I really want to continue.

E: And your experience of reading is often different these days, right? It's often via audio. How does reading differently on a screen, even—does it affect your ability to go into that otherworld?

J: Yeah, it can do. And I was actually feeling sad about it a few nights ago. I was ill recently, just with a cold, but I was spending a lot of time in bed, and reading a lot. And I really noticed that my eyes were getting tired of screens. And I read—if I'm reading text on a screen, I'll read it as white text on a black background, relatively big. But what I'm trying to do with the way I set up the reading experience on the digital page is, I'm trying to get as many letters into my central field of vision as I can—so that would mean making them as small as possible, because I'm trying to cram as many as I can into the smallish circle of central vision that I have. But they can't be too small, otherwise I won't actually be able to see what those letters are. And I'm trying to do that so that I can move my eyes along the line in a way which is similar to the normative reading experience, where, if you have normative visual faculties then your peripheral vision, if we're reading English from left to right, then as you start on the left side of the page, the peripheral of your right eye will already be looking and in some ways beginning to interpret what is at, say, the middle or towards the end of that first line, as it moves across the page. You're getting a sense of how long the words are, whether the words continue all the way up to the margin, if there are spaces, this kind of thing. And as you move your eyes across, you get more and more information about what's there, until the word hits your fovea, that central part of it, and you interpret that combination of letters accurately. And then, as you move your eyes further along the line, your left eye's peripheral will be double-checking, just applying some failsafes, making sure that yeah, that word was "yesterday," it does say that, well done, mind, for that interpretation.

And I don't have that experience. All I have is the central part. So it's an intense experience of concentration, and I have very few ways of checking what it is that I’ve read unless I actively move my eyes back again. I'm very aware of the interpretive process—and we might get onto this, because I think it's very interesting. It's a theory I have, but I feel like if you have a sensory impairment, I think you are much more aware of the constructed, basically the fiction of your senses than you are if you have normative sensory experience.

E: That's fascinating, can you say more about that?

J: This is something which is based on ideas by Professor Hannah Thompson at Royal Holloway, who has this concept of "blindness gain." Which is what blindness brings to your life. What benefits does it bring? As a reaction against the normative idea of blindness as tragedy, as catastrophe, as curse. And one of the things that I think blindness has brought me at least is this pretty much constant awareness that what I see is not really what is there. And that's because what I see is clearly ... I'm searching for the right word. Words like "corrupted" have come into my mind, and I don't mean that. I mean, the signal I'm getting is noisy. I've become aware of the material I'm working with, in a way which I think normatively sighted people, and people with normative senses, are sort of lulled into a sense of "this is reality." That what I am seeing, and what I am hearing and feeling around me, is what is really there, and all that is there. And I think like you say, it doesn't take much, really, for us to be aware that that's a fallacy. We see it all the time with illusions. But I think the experience of impairment in a sense is incredibly valuable for centring the person in what I've been referring to recently as “generative uncertainty”, which I think is a very creative space, and a very exciting space where anything is possible. And that might also be quite a good definition of a kind of imaginal.