Touch as the Ur-Sense: From Presence to Poesy

“Now the touch only is common to all animals.”  Agrippa

The very notion of sentience, with its root in feeling, cannot be understood without some reference to sensation. And sensation itself has at its bare core a “something” we feel. The response to that feeling is the mark of life: “quickening” upon touch is how we distinguish the animate from the inanimate. 

Touch demands physical contact. That breeze is the invisible dance of molecules on your face. Warmth is the agitation of your own particulate self, while coolness is the dissipation of that same agitation into the surround. While the scientific term mechanical refers to a physical force that contacts and thereby moves things, in the case of organisms, mechanical force incites a sensation on contact with that boundary, the skin. And whereas otherwise we say every action has an equal and opposite reaction, at that interface with the living some neuro-electrochemical reaction occurs. We understand that this new electrochemical medium somehow accounts for our inner feeling and that outer feeling of presence. 

The movement from sensation to perception is where talk of consciousness begins: where sensations “touch” our inner selves and form an experience we can engage and report on. This is our qualia.

Citing Duchamp’s concept of the infra-thin, Marjorie Perloff depicts that interface where sensation arises. The infra-thin partakes both sides of that interface and the interface along with it: this is the space toward which poetry directs us.