essay by Brian Charles Clark
My interest in permeability formed a clot in my imagination the day I first flew solo. I was thirteen, and I was alone. I was sitting on top of the Knoll, for the first time surveying what would be my stomping grounds for the next fifteen years. My fear of moving away from Chula Vista, tucked away in the southwestern-most corner of California, fear of leaving friends behind, all sour was distilled by the calm sage and stoic Joshua trees. The dark chemistry of depression sank deep away into the vats of boulders beneath my feet.
I was leg dangling on an outcropping of rock about nine feet wide. The rock face dropped some ten feet beneath my seat, and then buried itself in the reddish desert dirt. The realtor who sold my parents the acreage, on which they had a house built, had dragged a magnet through the soil and pulled it up coated with iron filings. The eastern face of the Knoll sloped steeply away beneath me for several hundred feet. A cool breeze pushed with mild insistence at my back, and the future was luring me into the arms of the air. In a moment that is indelibly tattooed on my physiological memory—this is a moment that I can ever re-member—I lurched and then I flew. Out, over, in–now I can offer an explanation, but what was really happening, what did flying really feel like?
It felt like soaring. I kept trying to visualize wings, but failing. I was too inebriated with awe to care that I wasn’t allowed to fly. Not without my body going along. I could see my mother below me, walking the property line, straggling behind Dad, and Chris and Kay, my younger siblings. I wanted to yell, Hey! down at them, but found I had no voice. I let go to the pleasure of soaring, the exquisite vertigo of moving above the wide and rumpled landscape peripherating beneath me, hanging in the middle of the air, not face in the breeze, but part of the faceless breeze that rustles the world as she spins.
What the hell was that? asked a reverie-busting voice, and smack, I’m back, butt to rock. What did I think I had been doing? Having an out-of-body experience? Doing a neurochemical brain-glitch dance? Or maybe the flying was a budding-pubescent hormone rocket? It occurred to me that as soon as I started thinking, I started to confuse what I had experienced with wondering about a way to explain what I had experienced–just minutes ago–for those few moments. I was startled by the idea that thought–words, with which I was already infatuated–might be completely silenced in the completeness of an experience.
What remains of the flying is an image engrained in the muscles of my being, an inarticulable spot on my psyche, a node of congealed betweenness that I can feel–like a bee or a butterfly–in the pit of my stomach. The flying–the “no accounting” elsewhereness of it—made my adolescent self sit up and smell the difference, the intense particularity that queers all dismissive and blind generalizations of what it is “possible” (by which word we usually mean permissible) to experience. As the song says, “They can’t take that away from me.” For the longest time I kept the flying to myself, out of fear of ridicule, or worse. Hidden away inside, the engraved memory-image did some sort of alchemical work that didn’t so much change me, but that changes me, since and still.
The transformative quality of experience led me to the idea of interpenetration. For as much as I had leapt out and flown, something other had soaked into me: not as a simple mixing, but in an air-borne exchange of information. This is an image with a life and a perception of its own. At least, that’s how I think of the experience now. It took me a long time to grant the experience–and its “alien implant,” this cyst of memory–the validation of objective reality.
We speak of letting ideas “soak in,” as if knowledge or wisdom were a lotion one spreads over the skin, or salts for a long, hot bath. As if the idea will come to dwell within us, if only we might open our pores. I think I possessed the word osmosis when the flying occurred, but certainly within a few years I had the idea that “I”–body, mind, spirit, soul, all those parts–am porous. And that things–events, images, the very air itself–made an exchanging chain of molecules connecting me and everybody else, from lovers to grains of sand to spiral arms. To car exhaust, drifting clouds of radiation, and ultraviolet-rich sunlight raying down through an ozone hole, we are ever pervious. There is no “impermeable,” as the Brits call a raincoat; there is no prophylactic against the action of the world. Just ask the boy in the bubble: the co-mingling never stops, is unstoppable.
The interpenetration of the world, with the sometimes painful punctuation of individual borders, has given me an image of the world—the universe, really, but just speaking of the Earth will do for now–as a body. This is, of course, the Gaia or biophilia hypothesis: the planet is a syndectical system of processes. That is to say, the world is nothing but a bunch of connections. Like an arch or a row of dominoes, everything leans on something else, and is itself the support for some other. But this is the naïve or popular science version of the biophilia hypothesis. The complex version eschews the notion of one thing (creature, rock, what have you) being dependent on another, in favor of the idea that the things of this world (and, as I mentioned above, this universe) are forever partaking of each other. This, at least, is how I read James Lovelock’s 1988 book, The Ages of Gaia
“The Gaia hypothesis,” Lovelock writes, “supposed that the atmosphere the atmosphere, the oceans, the climate, and the crust of the Earth are regulated at a state comfortable for life because of the behavior of living organisms. Specifically, the Gaia hypothesis said that the temperature, oxidation state, acidity, and certain aspects of the rocks and waters are at any time kept constant, and that this homeostasis is maintained by active feedback processes operated automatically and unconsciously by the biota. Solar energy sustains comfortable conditions for life. The conditions are only constant in the short term and evolve in synchrony with the changing needs of the biota as it evolves. Life and its environment are so closely coupled that evolution concerns Gaia, not the organisms or the environment taken separately.”
Lovelock here is extending the idea of homeostasis–as seen in mammals that “keep a constant temperature whatever the temperature of our surroundings,” Lovelock writes–to the entire planetary body. Lovelock even renders the word homeostasis, which literally means “same state,” as “the wisdom of the body.” The wisdom here is in the word’s sense of “skill” or “know how,” of “kenning”: the wisdom to maintain a livable environment. In other words, with Lovelock and others, we’ve gone from a metaphor of the clockwork universe to one of a physiological universe. Evolution is not a top-down design, but a synergistic interpenetration. X never “equals” Y; X becomes Y.
With this idea, and a helping of your favorite mind-alerting substance, it becomes possible to take the poetic “arms of the air” literally, to find the “noble brow” of a cliff attractive or awesome, to enter a cave phallicly. As it turns out, though, for most of our Homo sapient existence, most of us haven’t needed a drop to act in the world just this way: the world is alive, and it’s breathing. We awkward moderns call this “a reverence for the Earth,” but I think it’s no such thing. To have the concept of reverence one must divorce oneself from that that is revered. The interpenetrative view wouldn’t consider this an issue, because that which is sacred is experienced directly, as being and living. More precisely, the world is all connections, and we are merely nodal points. That is a dialogue of life, of planetary being, a swapping of information between and betwixt air and water and earth and, yes, fire, that I can only describe as a conversation.
The metaphor of dialogue works at multiple scales, from micro to macro. The swapping of information is the simplest form of interaction. To paraphrase the song: Rocks do it, fleas do it, stars do it, let’s do it, too. Talk, that is. In human societies, speech is far more interpenetrative than sex, at least by sheer volume of number of acts. Until quite recently, the act of conversation, of any speech act, was called intercourse. We become soaked with ideas in the act of intercourse, we might say, but how, and through what medium, do we arrive at ideas and orgasms? Indeed, how does anything get done at all? These are the kinds of questions my nut-gathering mind has squirreled at incessantly for a number of years.
Some years ago a biological term, a name really, became lodged in my consciousness, where it has stuck ever since, right next to the flying. The name is permeable membrane, and I became especially enchanted with permeable. The word implies a porous body, and the diffusion of some other into the body. This was no simple penetration, but a dialogue, for in living bodies permeable membranes are information collection and dropping off surfaces–surfaces of texture and attraction that pick and guide just the right molecule from the shelf of materials that go coursing by. The permeable membrane is the living body’s primal site of instruction. Nothing is reproduced: the body just tells itself what to do. But to say “the body” is of course too simple, for it is the intercommunicativeness, the permeability, of the parts that makes possible the singing of the whole choir.
Everything started foaming. I was infected with permeability. I saw things talking everywhere. Still do, only more so. I started a publishing company where I could publish people who were writing, whether they knew it or not, about permeability. I called it Permeable Press. The first book was Shaman
This sort of publishing behavior went on for many years, until I started writing a novel. The novel was about an alien infection of human consciousness, about a young man I knew in my late teens who had just that problem. In writing Splitting I began to realize that being infected by language was no joke. I had become so porous that I was a danger to myself and others. I withdrew onto a plateau distant from my native Pacific coast, and briefly enslaved an editrix to guide me to the end of the novel. And the way synchrony permeates life, it’s no surprise the woman’s name was Dawn. No salve, Dawn quit this quiet burgh and my rupturous psychology, and headed back to the Coast.
Dawn’s leaving made me quake with solitude. I was left, fair and square, to deal with my heedless permeability. Heedless anything is probably too much, I finally admitted to myself. Hello, my name is Brian, and I’m a permeaholic. I finished the novel, and was soon able to dedicate myself to the investigation of the nature and history of porousness. I went to look and see if anybody else had had these ideas, because if so, I wanted permeate myself in them. There’s nothing like absence of emotional permeability to make known the “jones” of communication. Babies die from, or are badly damaged by, the lack of communication. For humans, to be communicable is a necessary condition.
As I’ve hinted, the communicative imperative is more than just an emotional need. And to call the human being a permeable membrane is more than just a metaphor. Biologists use many of the same terms in describing the physiology of permeability that a communication theorist would employ in describing dialogical intercommunicability. The pores in skin and membranes are, of course, porous, and the flow of water and other substances through these holes in our bodies is subject to “osmotic pressure” which can change the “state” of a pore from open to closed (Alan Finkelstien, Water Movement through Lipid Bilayers, Pores, and Plasma Membranes: Theory and Reality, p. 25.). And just as an individual consciousness is selective–whether overtly or unconsciously doesn’t matter here–in terms of what it accepts and rejects, “the membrane is remarkably selective with respect to those molecules it allows to penetrate and those it does not” (Peter J. Quinn, The Molecular Biology of Cell Membranes, p. 1.). This selectivity is not merely a matter of the size of a molecule, that is, whether the molecule can pass through the pore of the skin or membrane, but is “markedly dependent on the chemical structure of the permeant molecule…” (ibid.).
Membranes also have a homeostatic function, just as human communication does. The idea of homeostasis, “the wisdom of the body,” as Lovelock calls it, is not to insulate the being from all change, but to protect the being from a too rapid change. We communicate mostly to create consensus. A says to B, “Is this what’s going on here?” and B says, “Yes,” or B says, “No, you’ve misconstrued the context, here’s what’s really happening.” We also communicate to effectuate change, but the homeostatic function of language usually keeps change from happening in a “revolutionary” or extremely rapid fashion. Ditto the membrane in cells. “The fundamental function of the plasma membrane is the of protection. Thus the cell can maintain a constant internal environment, irrespective of changes that may occur outside” (Roger Harrison and George C. Lunt, Biological Membranes: Their Structure and Function, p. 9). Of course, the authors are wrong in claiming that membrane homeostasis is maintained “irrespective of outside changes,” as the consistency within the cell, or within a culture through communication, is kept precisely in respect to outside changes. If divorce, war or a virus threatens, it is only through the permeability of cultural and cell walls that these threats can be recognized and responded to. Thus it is the dialogue between and through the members of a community—of cells, rocks, or people—that keep things the same the more they change.
It is this conservatism of the dialogical model which I believe makes it applicable to multiple scales of being. Although I’ve only been able to give a sketch of the analogy between biological cells and human communication, I think what we can begin to see is that it is talk, and not sex, as so commonly thought, which gives us an image of the fundamental movement of life on this planet. But what about on other planets, that is, does the dialogical model of permeable communication work on a stellar or galactic level? Indeed, recent observations by physicists and astronomers would seem to indicate that that is precisely the way we should view stellar and galactic events.
As we know from Einstein’s theory of relativity, and the work done by others to follow up on some of the details of Einstein’s theory, light can travel no faster than approximately 186,000 miles per second. But light seems to have a property, which some physicists call “telegraphing,” that belies this limit. What seems to happen is that certain subatomic particles will react to other particles before the action of the other particles can be transmitted. This borders on the telepathic (in fact a word used by some scientists to describe, if nothing else, their own incredulity at such phenomena), as if you knew what I was going to say before I opened my mouth. In an article in the August, 2000 issue of Scientific American called “The Universe’s Unseen Dimensions”, the authors describe a possible scenario to explain such events as telegraphic particles. The scenario runs like this: our known universe, the one we wield our swords and ploughshares in, seems to be porous. The “unseen dimensions” of the article’s title refers to as many as ten dimensions which are permeating—invisibly, but nonetheless in subtly accountable ways—our four-dimensional (counting time) universe. The authors refer to our universe as a permeable membrane “that lies within a higher-dimensional realm” (Nima Arkani-Hamed, Savas Dimopoulos and Georgi Dvali, “The Universe’s Unseen Dimension”, p. 62).
The image of our universe as a membrane “that lies within” is analogous to both the eukaryotic cell, where the membrane lies within and, for example, surrounds the nucleus while itself is surrounded by the rest of the cell, and to language, which is always surrounded by some context, and itself, as utterance, surrounding some “idea”–information, in other words. To speak is to issue a membrane, permeable to both the speaker’s intention and the context of the hearer’s understanding. But what does this have to do with the flying?
The pervasiveness of permeability suggests to me a new definition of “self.” Finally, it is the psychological implications of ways of conceptualizing the world and ourselves that interest me most. For I am far from alone in having what the scientists I have been discussing (with the possible exception of Lovelock) might dismiss as “paranormal.” Indeed, as I became permeated in computer knowledge in my struggle to typeset a book, I ended up working as a graphic designer. This brought me into contact with a wide range of people—women, blacks, gays, the disabled, corporate marketing types—and gave me glimpses of individual perceptions of the way the world works, and of the way people perceive. The creative context of design work forces designers and clients into situations of philosophizing about the fate of the message that the client wants conveyed. What I learned from this years-long ad hoc study in communication is that complexity never quits. Effective communication is always contingent on some other. Or, better, the message is as permeable as the medium.
As permeable as the medium? McLuhan may roll in the grave, but then again, no, because he was a master of manipulating the context, the pores, the holes, that make an utterance mean first one, and then another, thing. I think we tend to view our everyday language as a watertight skin, which cannot leak or absorb “misinformation.” Communication is a skin, but it is full of holes. Our ongoing dialogue with the world insures that osmotic pressure is ever at work on everything we say, think, or do. I suggest that what we need is a biophysics of communication, and I am not to the first to do so. As Warren McCulloch pointed out in a lecture in 1948, the complexity of the task is so enormous that it has daunted the greatest of minds. “Perhaps the most notable attempt of this sort was by Sir Charles Sherrington, entitled Man on His Nature, for, near the end of a life spent on studying the ways of the brain, he forced to the conclusion that ‘in this world, Mind goes more ghostly than a ghost.’ The reason for his failure was simply that his physics was not adequate to the problem that he had undertaken. That has so regularly been the shortcoming of scientists who would have approached this problem, that even Clerk Maxwell, who wanted nothing more than to know the relation between thought and the molecular motions of the brain, cut short his query with the memorable phrase, ‘but does not the way to it lie through the very den of the metaphysician, strewn with the bones of former explorers and abhorred by every man of science?’” (Warren McCulloch
Not much has been said on the subject since. It may be possible, however, to at least get a glimpse of what such a science might be like. Take, for example, the peculiar case of what I’ve been calling “the flying.” If we allow ourselves to concede that I am a qualified witness to my own experience, then we can at least accept the experience as one that lacks a consensual explanation. “He flew without his body,” is, at best, currently a ludicrous idea. But there is something suspiciously permeable about “leaving” one’s body, and it suggests to nothing “paranormal,” but rather a banal exchange of information.
Why is the flying an exchange of information? That question requires us to examine the parts, as it were, of the communicative body. What part of me, I want to know, is it that flew? Not my body; I’ve ruled that out categorically from the beginning. So what else is there? The mind? Yes, I suspect most people would say. We live in an ago of a “mind-body problem,” and that is the very problem that calls for a biophysics of communication. How do these two parts get along? A fine enough question, as far as it goes.
The origins of the mind-body problem, which can be shown to be historical, required a cutting away of a third part of us. This invasive surgery was performed, I suspect, for a vast number of reasons, largely preventative, and largely having to do with the harsh economics of agricultural society. The American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce’s work suggests an aphorism to live by: between any two things there always lies a third. The third part of us that was lost in the past 2,000 years of “progress” is the soul. It is the soul that flies. And not only flies, but communicates in ways we simply haven’t the physics yet to describe.
But described and experienced and sought after the soul has been. Chaos, as Hakim Bey points out, never died. The soul hasn’t been lost, it has just gone underground. The purpose of this collection of essays is to weave my own experiences with soul—the drunken run-ins, the denials, the dénouements—into the fabric of soulful conversation that has gone on for thousands of years. For without this great conversation, without the dialogical universe, I am hermetically sealed, impervious and ignorant. On my own, I know nothing; but wherever two or more gather, anything is possible. And we humans are nothing, if not gatherers.
