Gut feeling

Queasy: From a series of images searching for how a gut feeling could be visualised

We know the term 'gut feeling' so well that perhaps we ignore it. Our feelings lie inside us and often lodge themselves into or emanate from our stomach. A stomach that is filled with bacteria, another life form that has evolved in conjunction with ourselves and that is so entwined with our bodily processes that it could be thought of as both another brain and another body, our ghost or double, that is thinking for us or alongside us, as we predict what to do next in the world.

Writers are very aware of this and we often find passages in novels that suggest that our bodies contain the source of our intuitive feelings. For instance this from Vajra Chandrasekera's myth creating novel, 'The Saint of Bright Doors':

'He feels that familiar sensation in his gut: the sickening, queasy tugging that he has always thought of as his luck, his instinct, some deep sensitivity to the world that senses where he needs to go, what he needs to do, long before he can even articulate it. When it bubbles up in him, there is always something he needs to do, even if he doesn't know it yet.' (2023, p. 26)

In an earlier post, when writing about Turner and his relationship to weather I wrote, "I believe that at the core of art's image making process is the idea that the universe is made of physical stuff and that as Seth (2021, p.20) states, 'conscious states are either identical to or somehow emerge from, particular arrangements of this physical stuff'. Artists can therefore work with material processes to create metaphors by making their own arrangements of physical stuff (paint, drawing materials, clay, stone, found objects etc.). These arrangements or physical conglomerations are like in someway, those other particular arrangements of physical stuff that are not art, those organisations of materials that we call life experience. By making these arrangements, (art) we help ourselves come to terms with the chaos of the arrangements of materials we experience as 'life'.

So yes physical stuff moved around in similar ways to other physical stuff. Echoes of larger forces perhaps? Our microbiome is spread throughout our body, and concentrated differently in the various areas that bacteria and other organisms, such as fungi, collect. It is also important to remember that microorganisms form the bedrock on which every ecosystem on Earth is founded. Without them we would have no air to breath or food to eat; without them we would not even be able to digest food, even if it became available. At a basic level, they are linked to the atoms and molecules that make up the non-animate physical world, sitting between them and 'life', holding myriads of conversations between animate and non-animate worlds through chemical and electrical exchanges. Everything is connected and the trillions of entities that live within us, connect us together, and link us to the rest of the world, just as surely as gravity holds together the mass of substances that we call the Earth, and in its own small way, how the various blobs and marks that make up or compose a drawing, come together.

So can I fuse these various bits of awareness with the visual metaphors I use in the images I make? Towards what purpose? If we can begin to see our bodies as feeling tones, as thinking entities that operate as material texts, then perhaps we can begin to see how inextricably linked we are into the Earth's bio-systems and as one steps back and looks at the situation from a cosmic distance, how we are linked in to the universe itself. Portraits of humans could be more like star systems or molecular level clusters seen via electron microscopes, all linked by interwoven energies be they electromagnetic, nuclear or gravitational.  

Stomach ache linked to constipation

The Milky Way

Granite seen under a microscope

Self portrait as a material text

References:

Chandrasekera, V. (2023) The Saint of Bright Doors Oxford: Solaris

Gershon, M. D., & Margolis, K. G. (2021). The gut, its microbiome, and the brain: connections and communications. The Journal of clinical investigation, 131(18), e143768. https://doi.org/10.1172/JCI143768

Seth, A., (2021) Being you: A new science of consciousness. London: Penguin.

See also:

Up close and far away: The macro and the micro
Drawing texture
Drawing and quantum theory
Powers of 10
Macro and micro: Embodied networks