Life of the Mind & Magic Paint
What’s magic paint? There is no easy answer that can fit into a small, shallow puddle of internet blogging. It’s complicated, nuanced, broad, vague, mysterious and nefarious. Why? Because it escapes the capacity of the English language. Give me a raft of symbols and I can do better. Give me an imagination where I can view in an embodied state a sense of knowing and there will be symbols so deeply entangled that any earth-based language doesn’t even work. It’s literally, a knowing and entirely non-verbal. It defies language. In fact, it flips it off entirely. Thus, it’s hard to explain because it’s an embodied experience that perpetuates more embodied experiences that then perpetuates a bond - a literal space in-between me and another being - that appears entirely empty while it’s completely full. Let’s just say, it moves around like the slish slosh of someone quickly pouring water between two cups. Even that doesn't do it justice because it’s just there - living - driving everything toward life.
Magic paint is an earth bound way to describe this embodied knowing and communal recognition. It runs really deep like a whale in parts of the ocean that are not suitable for humans. The songs of the whales rumble through my mid-drift and vibrate every cell with a melody of the bond - that space in-between that’s exhaling and inhaling. It’s vibrational - all harmony can move water. It moves mine anyway.
At the shallow surface level magic paint is how we describe the world around us. It involves not only our inherited understandings, assumptions, facts, and collective musings, it also engages our own experiences which are shaped by all the former. It’s a common thought we don’t really touch reality. We touch a constructed one instead that is often deeply shaped by both our own expectations and our cultural realities. Language helps us construct that reality. The only trouble is, at times I find English is more often a language of disembodiment or separation that doesn’t really lend itself to re-membering. I mean that as a pun really - remembering and re-membering [as in dealing with dismemberment]. There is a susceptibility to subterfuge wherever dismemberment is cycled and reinforced. Disembodiment is found in the dislocating power of language. In the presence of disembodiment, it’s really easy to believe anything about another living being. Let me give an example of what I mean.
Men like Jean Piaget and Daniel Siegal talk about something called schemas or mental representations [respectively]. The bag here, and I’m being fully lollypopped here because these are terms that exist in the academic world, is we form mental representations or schemas of the world around us as we go along experiencing it. Language though, helps us experience the world by giving us words that then shape those experiences in perceptible ways. If I have never met a being called a cat before, I will experience that being without the categorical label. The label is like a category or definition of a bunch of characteristics of what may make up a cat via collective understanding [e.g. shared knowledge]. Cats have fur, they purr, have sharp claws, mysterious eyes, long tails and they make a sound that transliterates into something like meow. Well, they make a number of sounds really but meow and purring are probably the most popular.[1] Other memories get stored in those mental representations so the next time we find our way around said being called “cat” we will be able to extrapolate some behavior responses.
When I was small and I saw a cat - I was told that is a “cat.” I was given the language to IDENTIFY the being I was seeing. Seeing is a form of experience, but it can be a removed experience in a sense. I know for me, when someone says “cat” there is no - literally NO - embodied sensation of “cat.” I do not, without fhinking about it, remember soft fur, claws, meows, and other embodied memories - I see a picture of a cat - but there is very little in the way of experiential pieces associated with cat. I would need to meditate on it. As my mind melts into memory, I start to feel sensations in my body of those memories. I can remember fur, funny stories, and the weight of my most beloved feline companion as I held him in a box that concealed his dead body from my broken heart. I have tears right here even though he’s been gone from my life for almost twenty years. It feels like less than two when I listen to my body speak. But if I’m honest, I have a hard time remembering more tactile spaces. When I talk about cats, I’m rarely talking about them from an embodied sense of each being that has been in my life. It’s basically, the life of my mind.[2]
It isn’t flinking, that’s for sure.
In a disembodied space, it’s really easy to magically paint. Psychology comes close to calling it “projecting,” but I tend to take a more expansive view of magic paint. It’s a creative process whereby we shape reality, often as we please, and too often without thinking that much about it. All magic paint is rooted in assumptions/facts/experiences about the way the world works and often these simply go unexamined. In that abstract detached mental representation, I’ve found that I am actually vulnerable to teaching that could say, make some aspect of a cat’s behavior, demonic. I don’t have to have a lot of experience with cats or demons to uptake the belief and apply it to myself to identify with a community reality or language. It’s just an abstract mental representation in the life of my mind - well - their mind really. I’ve agreed to it in a common literary and thus worldview sense. I am not real sure at what point it becomes an assumed belief but I think enough repeated exposure can make that a reality in a mere few years.
My point here is that my first experiences are defined by the language given to me to create understanding of what is happening. I meet a cat and my human handler hands me a mental file labeled cat. Is there some other way?
If I was little and were creating language and I saw what would be called a crow in English, I may mimic the crow and come to understand the crow from its behavior. I would watch it, hear it, maybe interact with it more directly as a being. My concepts form another mental construction that has no label - it’s just embodied. No crow label for you. I might label it caw-caw based on the sound it makes - language is - after all - sound. Or perhaps, I would not. I would notice, however, a group of crows which would further expand my understanding and framework and I might even be able to learn some of their language which would shape some of my brain and relational understanding. It would also shape my behavior….but I might never, literally, name them. But I would have an embodied imprint. In a weird sense, I would “embody” them.
Of course, humans are social creatures with a shared experience, so inevitably I would imagine some kind of descriptor would show up. For me, I prefer a picture for mutual understanding. Or maybe just making the proper sounds to mimic a crow…and maybe that’s where the descriptor would come from. The “language” forms through all the interactions, observations, and such that are embodied and have connected me to these beings. I have none of this in my life. I am given a crow picture and told that is a crow. I “experience” a picture or maybe a story or video. The animal itself isn’t present with me. It’s this disembodied reality in language. When I meet a crow though, I will hopefully be able to identify it before I ever actually had a being-to-being experience with any crows. In the gap are the elders and communal knowledge. Thus, if crows are scary, I am more likely to be scared even if there is no reason to be denying me the opportunity to formulate a different communal experience. I inherited my spider phobia from my mother by watching her behavior with spiders and mimicking and embodying it.
To provide another example how deeply embedded some of this can be in language, there is this basic article on Linguistic Theory i found. The author writes:
“There was a study done that looked at how German and Spanish speakers view different things based on their given gender association in each respective language. The results demonstrated that in describing things that are referred to as masculine in Spanish, speakers of the language marked them as having more male characteristics like ‘strong’ and ‘long.’ Similarly, these same items, which use feminine phrasings in German, were noted by German speakers as effeminate, like ‘beautiful’ and ‘elegant.’ The findings imply that speakers of each language have developed preconceived notions of something being feminine or masculine, not due to the objects” [sic] characteristics or appearances but because of how they are categorized in their native language” [Frothingham, Simply Psychology].
Language reinforces our perceptions in deep, often unseen ways, that appear to temporarily expand our world but also permanently stunt it if we’re not aware. There are people out there who insist the average US-ian[3] has an exceptional nature deficit [Narvaez Kindred Media]. Building on that conclusion for my own life, I would say that’s fairly true. That deficit is present for a number of equally complicated and nuanced reasons involving language, culture, and lifestyle. Because I LACK experience with a wide variety of animals, I become susceptible to the whimsy of authors who they themselves, may also have very little experience. It’s a detached experience. If I live a generally disembodied life, I may be more likely to simply take a symbols word for it - or someone else’s word - for meaning.
Symbols are a language. This stuff is the world of magic paint. And it’s to this disembodied, cat loving, life of mind dreaming magical painting I now turn.
Notations
[1] Research on cats shows that their communications with their people friends is actually quite unique. Additionally, some of the communication styles of cats toward humans is not done intra-cat species with the lone exception of a mother cat to her babies. In a nutshell, it appears we’re getting a lot of mommy/baby gurgling from the feline world.
[2] At present, for me, life of the mind is literally an disembodied intellectual experience where I do not feel any sense of connection to the topic. It’s like the topic is simply an idea, and not bound up in a living bond with experiential form. For some people, they call it “living in your head” although I see it as more complicated than the expression describes.
[3] A citizen of the United States of America
[4] Matthew Miller has a real interesting take on Arrival that uses some of the concepts I’m talking about but much more professionally.
Bibliography
Frothingham, Mia Belle. “Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis (Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis).” Simply Psychology, 1 Sept. 2023, www.simplypsychology.org/sapir-whorf-hypothesis.html.
Miller, Matthew Scott. “Arrival Explained.” YouTube, Logos Made Flesh, 27 Apr. 2020, youtu.be/yCpUl7pFOBE?si=z1B3MorpjzfE9dXL. [4]
Narvaez Darcia, PhD. “Overcoming Nature Deficit Disorder.” Kindred Media, 23 July 2020, kindredmedia.org/2020/07/overcoming-nature-deficit-disorder/.