Image description: Rows and rows of small succulent plants on a table, from a plant stand in Parque México, Mexico City. Purples, yellows, greens, reds, and many things in between.
This week I finished reading an interview with philosopher Brian Massumi and Arno Böhler called “Do we know what a body can do? #2” I loved how Massumi talked about mentality as a bodily thing. “A mode of activity” that functions with and through the material.
I’m interested in this because I am someone who self-identifies as cerebral. And because I am someone who often struggles with obsessive and intrusive thoughts for whom recourse to the body is one of very few medicines that works. And because I am someone with an air moon.
I’m interested, as someone who has a felt sense of why when Psyche went to the underworld she stayed low to the ground. And I’m interested as someone who spent the majority of a fifty-minute somatic therapy session last week visiting quietly with my kidneys.
Massumi cites a definition of mentality from philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead who’s been a big force in my world lately. Whitehead defines mentality as “the capacity to exceed what is given and to bring forth a novelty.” It’s about making.
Like many people, I tend to think of the physical and mental as being to do with the body and mind, respectively. It is not so for Whitehead or Massumi. For them, physicality has to do with conformity with the past, while mentality is about becoming.
Physicality involves an instinct toward stability and equilibrium, while mentality lurches toward experimentation and deformation. Massumi uses the word supernormal to describe the way mentality exceeds what is given. Mentality is about going beyond the blueprint and the plan. It makes me think of the progression from The Tower to The Star.
I was also very interested in Massumi’s understanding of care, as I’ve spent much time considering care this summer. Not only thinking about but practicing it. In ways that go beyond what I’m used to. Massumi drew on his partner Erin Manning’s work to describe a way of prioritizing “care for the event,” rather than focus solely on care for our selves, or other individuals.
Care for events—as I understand it—has to do with considering what might bloom out of a particular event or situation toward flourishing for all involved. It doesn’t mean we have to give up self-care, just “self-centeredness.” Which is exactly what turns me on about it. Because I know—an you may know, too—that big pain brings a tendency toward self-absorption. And that sort of fixed, inward gaze can yield the opposite of what a hurt person needs.
It feels spacious to imagine that the extension of care in painful times could include the whole of an event and all those involved. In that space made are potentials. Openings toward supernormal tendencies, becoming other than what we have been, and taking rare chances offered up by the gods.