Sensory Experience of Perception
Introduction
Ideas Sensations 2
Introduction
'I remember only ideas and sensations.' (Ulysses, the Corrected Text, page 7.)
I’m sure I read this passage the two or three times I set out to read Ulysses. I didn't notice it until I heard it read aloud recently. I was struck by how it situates ideas and sensations as aspects of knowing, and how knowing is entangled with and informed by the sensory experience of perception.
Ideas are the products of cognition, and perceptions are the results of sensation.
Experiencing place is a complex multilayered experience. My earliest memories of place are sensory – images, that help me recall what I was feeling at the time, sounds --what people were saying, music, birds, traffic, animals -- also smells, taste, weather.
Visual memories are, however, my primary source of access to experiences of place. These are overlain by, and interwoven with knowledge acquired through study and travel.
Aix en Province
The Mountains of California -- My First Summer in the Sierra, John Muir; Up and Down California The Journal of William H. Brewer.
Coastal California -- Belmont Shore in 1946 and 1947, .
New Mexico -- Toddler on the ranch, summers in Santa Fe, Uncle Howell's dude ranch, 'The Lazy Ray', near Jemez Springs, The Daybooks of Edward Weston, Taos Moderns, memories of what I have seen, read, and experienced.
