How to feel things

How to feel things?

We feel through the senses. When we are sensing, we generate different types of information: tactile, visual, auditory, gustatory, olfactory. We feel the texture of an object, we perceive the qualities of its surface, an image of its contour, an idea of its material, an imagined colour. We compose these sources of information into experience.

One is waken up by the increasing sound of the bird song fading in into our sleeping unconscious. The texture of the sheets enters our awareness via our skin, we are reminded we are in bed. The smell of rain, its drizzle sound. The morning light filters into the eyes. One judges by its quality and intensity, if this is a cloudy morning. Proprioception or kinaesthesia is the sense of self-movement, force and body position. We know we are in bed, we feel our body is in an horizontal position. Our muscular system recalibrates while we feel the need of stretching. Our eyes gain sharper focus.

A sensing experience can transport us to the realm of memory: we feel the present, the past and the future too. Depending on our personal memory, the experience of a rainy morning may bring up hopeful feelings of a pulsing Spring, or the cold sadness of grey days. We feel with the gut and the heart too, we create visceral information. Our nervous system extends through the intricate territories of our biological suit and collects data, which is later translated into different languages and layers of experience.

We feel and sense at the same time. Sensing is organised into a complex experience which we call feeling. A "feeling" could be described as the intensified meta experience of juxtaposed sensing information. We learn and connect with the world through sense and feeling. If one ponders on the question on how to feel things, one may land at a subsequent question: How to know things? How is that we create knowledge about things at all? In much of the world influenced by the western gaze, there is an stablished hierarchy dictating which sensing information is privileged and which is discarded in the process of knowledge creation. We tend to privilege visual and auditory information over tactile and visceral sources. Reconsidering and dismantling these epistemological hierarchical structures demands from us to embody our full senses: to drive focused attention and open gates to the intricate details of the sensing information we are receiving in its fullness, before our judgement discards it.

How can we approach the textural without giving primacy to our Western knowledge-eye? How can we stop "seeing" as both a visual act and a way of knowing, an open ourselves to feeling as an act brimming with knowledge, affect, and social and individual memory?