> In a post from Tony Baker the other day I have the
> record of how one more
> open poet responds to a text, and I reproduce it
> with his permission:
> 
> On Tue, 7 Mar 2000, Tony Baker wrote:               
you know that        
> > whatever integrity a thing has goes through an
> utterly sensual world. I    
> > don't honestly think we can ever know much that
> doesn't pass through the   
> > physiology - we see what a thing means, or we miss
> it.                     
>                                                     
Or we _feel_ what a things means (which this
experience suggests more than _see_).

This prompts me to something I've been privately
worrying at - a different kind of "knowing" which
became very clear while I was in labour with my first
child.  Very rough, I'm afraid, but I'm sure you're
used to that... One thing is, this particular
experience was a radical one in my life: I came out of
the experience of labour changed, changed utterly.  

When I was in labour with my first child, I was in
total panic.  It hurt more than I expected and was
also an experience over which I had no control.  But
underneath, or behind, this panic was an
overwhelmingly clear experience of another kind of
knowing, and this knowing was not panicked at all. 
This Voice - it reached consciousness through language
- was very still and calm inside my head.  It "knew"
what was happening to my body.  It knew exactly when
the baby was coming, causing a flurry among the
midwives, who were totally unprepared, and it "knew"
that nothing was wrong.  It even "knew" how I should
breathe in order to minimise pain, although this
didn't get applied until the birth of my daughter,
when the hospital midwife asked me if I had been
"taking classes" (I hadn't) to the fury of my own
midwife.  But the politics of _that_ birth are an
entirely different story.

Now, this "instinct" was perhaps a rare upwelling of
anterior consciousness into conscious thought,
prompted by the physical extremity of childbirth.  One
of the things about my experience of it - and I make
no apologies for the subjectivity of the experience,
since there is no other way to talk about it - was
that it was not a raw, undifferentiated,
pre-linguistic knowing.  It couldn't be said, for
example, to be infantile, apart from the fact that
infants don't have babies...   It was quite specific
and clear, and revealed itself as knowledge -
knowledge, moreover, which it was impossible for me to
have by experience, since I had never undergone
childbirth before.  

It was physical knowledge about my own body, the same
kind of knowledge of cats who have their first litter,
when they clean and care for their young: what is
usually called "instinct" or "intuition", which is
placed in a heirachy of thought way below the complex
of intellection.  This kind of knowledge has had very
bad press from theorisers of knowledge.  It is
considered brutish, blind, undifferentiated,
primitive, and placed in opposition to, or beneath,
"thought": perhaps "primitive" thought, past which
human beings have supposedly evolved.

My experience of this knowledge made me think that it
is very closely linked to what we think of as
intelligence.  It was precise, differentiated and
sure. My experience is inflected through the fact that
I am a languaged being, and I think in language, in
words.  And this knowledge presented itself to me in
words, quite literally as a "voice".  And believe me,
there was nothing mystic about it: or it was as
mystical as childbirth itself.  But I was very aware
of a split between my ordinarily conscious mind (the
panicking bit) and something other.

Now, if "instinct" is expressed in language, how can
it simply be pre-linguistic and therefore a function
of the primitive animal?  If I had not experienced
childbirth before, how could I "know" what was
happening to my body (I was of course very well
informed theoretically, in that I knew precisely the
descriptions of physiological processes, but they bore
no resemblance at all to what was actually happening
to me and were no help when it actually came to it). 
There is of course the possibility that the only way
that this instinct could present itself to my
panicking conscious mind was through language and so
my languaged mind "translated" it.  But that doesn't
feel right.  More a feeling that this knowledge might
be a dimension of language itself, a dimension that is
tacitly accepted every time we speak?  And especially
so in poems?

I need to work out a vocabulary...

Whenever I read philosophers, who almost to a man talk
about Man (meaning, of course, either man or woman, as
is often footnoted, but the context often begs the
question) the wicked thought occurs to me that most
women really wouldn't bother with all that, because
it's all the wrong questions.  My problem with a lot
of philosophy is that it bullies this kind of knowing
out of existence, with its language and vocabularies
and categorisations, and its heirachies of knowing. 
All those dizzying, useless structures designed to
prove the Authority of Thought.  Aah, but I was always
impatient.

Best

Alison
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