From: Jacob Von Uexküll: 'A Stroll through the worlds of animals and men'
Jacob von Uexküll was fixated on the unwelten or phenomenal worlds of other creatures. He was particularly interested in how living beings perceive their worlds, arguing that organisms experience life in terms of species-specific, spatio-temporal, "self-in-world" subjective reference frames that he called 'umwelt'. He believed that every living creature inhabits a world of its own. The structure of this world being determined by the nature of each individual species; by its physiology, its behaviour, and its interactions with its environment. Von Uexküll firmly believed that these worlds disclosed themselves only through individual subjective experience, therefore these worlds were private and unique to each living creature. This of course fascinates me, because I have been worrying about how to move forward in my work on interoception and have at times begun to think about whether or not the internal lives of other creatures could be intuited or thought about in a way that could parallel what I have already been doing in relation to my fellow humans. If the hidden unseen world within us can be explored, as if travelling through some sort of sublime landscapes, then the interior worlds of other creatures can also be imagined as alternative universes, not unlike perhaps, those alternative worlds in Doctor Strange as imagined by Steve Ditko back in the 1960s. I used to love Doctor Strange comics. Waiting eagerly for them to turn up at my local newsagents in Dudley, they opened doors that still remain ajar in my mind even now, those comics showed me how the possibility of otherness could be depicted.
From Doctor Strange: Marvel Comics 1960s Steve Ditko
Ditko was able to blend organic forms with geometry, creating hybrid forms that were perfectly suited to the depiction of spaces and places between worlds. These were environments where the normal laws of physics no longer applied and where magic and other mystical forces held sway. These small printed paper panels were gobbled up by myself as a teenager, a spotty youth who was also looking at Surrealism, especially the other worldliness of Tanguy's paintings. Ditko in effect bought Tanguy into my world, via my local paper shop.
Tanguy
Many years later I'm still trying to make images and once more of invisible things, the signals sent to us from inside our bodies, signals that include our embodied minds; that are a product of the strange interface between outside and inside, all of which when I think about the possible worlds of other creatures, become image triggers, but images that can arrive blended with ghostly apparitions from the past.
But again I'm drifting off on another tangent, I only seem to be able to get an idea of what I'm doing after the event. Perhaps this is the right way round, because then you discover the image as if it is fresh minted, if you had worked it out beforehand, it would arrive stale and already used.
Jacob von Uexküll had this to say, 'We are easily deluded into assuming that the relationship between a foreign subject and the objects in his world exists on the same spatial and temporal plane as own relations with the objects in our human world. This fallacy is fed by a belief in the existence of a single world into which all living creatures are pigeonholed. This gives rise to the widespread conviction that there is only one space and one time for all living things.' (Von Uexküll, 1934 in Schiller, 1957, p.14)
The diagram below is from Von Uexküll's 'A Stroll through the worlds of animals and men'. I was interested in his way of relating our external spatial alignment with the world to our internal physiology. Our particular way of orientating ourselves has a lot to do with where our senses are clustered and by them being located around the axis of a bilaterally symmetrical organism and then being 'sided', i.e. eyes are only on one side of the head, and mainly located in the top or raised part of the organism. But hidden beneath all this external sensor location is the fact that inside the head, an extension of our ears has a semicircular canal form. This form is an ancient one and is designed to help an organic form orientate itself when moving.
The semicircular canal system first of all evolved in fish. Fish are jawed vertebrates like humans and like us have inner ears with three semicircular canals, which are what allow fish and humans to sense the position they are in space and stay balanced in the world. If you look at the three canals they are joined together, but orientated to follow the three axes that we associate with the coordinates of Cartesian geometry that are usually labeled x, y, and z.
The worlds of fish are unique to each species, just as the world of an animal is unique to each species. You would not expect a freshwater trout to inhabit the same world as a sea going manta ray, just as you would not expect the world of a human to be the same as a giraffe.
When I was a boy I used to go with some of my dad's friends fishing to a place near Upton upon Severn. I was not very good at it but I do remember catching a few Roach. We would cast a few balls of damp bread out onto the water first and I still remember the wriggling maggots that were then used as bait. As a boy I was mainly restricted to bread bait and was a bit squeamish as well, so was happy to miss out on the maggots. We used to camp over night which was the best thing and there was always a fire and an attempt to cook the fish caught over it. The world of the fish was totally invisible to the world of young boys, fish were simply other things, part of the strange natural world that was outside Dudley. It was only when I began drawing seriously that I also began to get a sense that things like fish might have worlds of their own. I would buy a fish from the market to draw, usually one I knew would be tasty, draw it and then eat it, but in drawing it I had to slow down and really look and as you did you began to slip, if only for a moment into the possibility of a fish's world.
The roach is a member of the carp family, therefore it, like other members of the family, lack teeth set into jaws, instead, they grind up their food with toothed bones set into their throats. It spends a lot of time rooting around in mud at the bottom of ponds and rivers and in order to identify what it is finding in these dark, murky waters it has a highly developed sense of smell. They usually feed by swallowing mud, which they then process in exceptionally long intestines, which can often be 15 times the length of the fish. Their specially adapted mouths can dig up to five centimeters into muddy sediments, their extended top lips, capable of working like shovels. Roach use special holes called “nares” to sniff out tiny bits of chemicals in the water, just as we sense tiny bits of chemicals suspended in air by using our nose. However a fish's nares are just used for smelling, unlike our noses that are also used for breathing. There nares are also far more sensitive than our noses, fish like dogs, relying far more on smell than humans. So what I wonder would be the inner feeling tone of such a creature? Where we look a roach may well smell, where we try not to get dirt mixed up with our food, the roach is designed to sift out its food from mud. Our sense of well being is intimately associated with breathing and as we breath in we also smell the world. However fish breathe in a slightly different way. They take water into their mouth, this then passes over the gills which are situated inside the mouth, just behind its head on each side. The gills' filaments and lamellae (folds) contain blood from which gases are exchanged through the thin walls, the oxygen rich blood then carries the oxygen to other parts of the body. Fish exchange gases by in effect opening their mouths as they swim forward, an action that pumps water over their gills, so that within the gill filaments, capillary blood, flowing in the opposite direction to the water, is subject to a counter-current exchange. As the exchange takes place, carbon dioxide passes from the blood through the thin gill tissue into the water. At the same time, the water's dissolved oxygen is absorbed into the blood. The gills then push the oxygen-poor water out through openings in the sides of the pharynx, or what we would call the throat. As a feeling this must be not too dissimilar to using lungs to breath, except for the fact that water is a much more viscous substance than the air we move through. It would be a similar feeling to running with your mouth open and thick air entering the mouth but then exiting via slits in the throat. This breathing must be central to the roach's inner feeling of 'rightness', watching them gasp as they were lifted out of the water, was always traumatic and my own chest still tightens as I cast my thoughts back to those days of fishing with the boys. Sound would just like ourselves, be very embodied for these fish. Roach have their ear's otoliths hard-wired into their swim bladders by a series of bones that extend from their spines. Otoliths are the inner ear bones located in a fish’s skull. Inside them are tiny hairs called cilia that are stimulated by vibrations in the water. These vibrations are interpreted as a sound by the fish’s brain. Roach have a heightened sense of hearing due to the close proximity of their swim bladder to the otolith and it is connected to the bladder by a system of bones called the Weberian Ossicles.This connection means that their hearing range is considerably different to humans; because sound is created by rapid changes in pressure and the swim bladder works as a sort of very sensitive pressure amplifier. This is why anglers are always quiet, they know that fish can hear them, especially as they walk along the river bank and in particular because water is an excellent conductor of sound vibrations. A human can generally hear between 20 and 20,000 Hertz, (Hertz is a measure of sound frequency, or pitch). The roach can hear between 5 and 2,000 Hertz, so it can tune into lower, deeper sounds than ourselves. Gradually the more information about this fish we have, the more our imaginations can begin to build a picture of what it must be like to be a roach. We now need to add the fact that along both sides roach also have lateral lines, which consist of sensory receptors called neuromasts used to “feel” sounds. A lateral line is made of a series of U-shaped tubes. Every time the water outside the U vibrates, a tiny hair is made to wiggle, which in turn sends a nerve signal to the brain that then translates information coming from the collective of wiggles into information about where the vibrations came from. Information coming from these lateral lines is used to find food, escape predators and to avoid obstacles. So the roach has two overlapping sound vibration sensors. This is probably an evolutionary adaption to the fact that there are about 800 times more particles in a metre cube of water than there are in the same cube filled with air. Sound waves therefore travel much faster in water than they do in air. In freshwater at room temperature, sound travels about 4.3 times faster than it does in air at the same temperature. Therefore fish are operating in a fast sound environment and they have the necessary sensors to cope with sound information travelling so much faster than the sound information we are experiencing. Their bodies are attuned to sound in such a way that it might feel as if their ears extended down the full length of their bodies and were also attached to their lungs. It seems as if they swim through sound as much as they swim through water, i.e. they can 'feel' sounds as if they can be touched.
Taste is another of the senses that fish like ourselves have, but they can taste with their snout, mouth, tongue, and throat. Again they are more fully immersed into the world because water has dissolved into it all the chemicals fish need to respond to. Our tongues need to be wetted by being inside our mouths and then taste can operate. The problems faced by fish as they emerged from the water were as you can imagine considerable. Dryness is in fact a much more sterile condition than wetness and we still carry within us enough wetness to soak our body's insides so that nutrients can be dissolved in our stomachs to enable them to be taken up by the body as food.
Some of the fish's organs are the same as our own, like us they have a stomach, heart, liver and kidneys, but gills are different to lungs and a lateral line operates very differently to ears, and pectoral and pelvic fins operate very differently to arms and legs. But perhaps we can think about movement through the air when flying, as being closer to what it feels like to be a fish? For a plane, like a bird, the air is thick enough to give it support. A bird's wings operating like a fish's fins to power the creature through a fluid environment. I remember taking a helicopter ride over New York before the attack on the Twin Towers and the thrill of being held stationary in the air so that we could look down at certain landmarks and then the feeling of my stomach turning over as we wheeled away to find another spot from which to view the city. Of course swimming itself is something that we also still do, some mammals such as whales and dolphins eventually returning to the sea and re-evolving in order to readapt their bodies to it. These types of experiences, information and thoughts all help to get a feeling for the roach's 'umwelt'. In our imaginations we can begin to sense what it might be like to be another creature, a process that is an important one if we are to develop both empathy and the possibility of using animism as a way of making sense of the world.
Roach: Sensations No. 2, 3 and 4
A bottom feeder
Reference:
Von Uexküll, J (1934) A Stroll through the worlds of animals and men in Schiller, C.H., (1957) Instinctive behaviour; the development of a modern concept. New York: International Univer. Press
Available at: https://monoskop.org/images/1/1d/Uexkuell_Jakob_von_A_Stroll_Through_the_Worlds_of_Animals_and_Men_A_Picture_Book_of_Invisible_Worlds.pdf
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