CHAPTER ONE

Part Three

Everyday unseens

My invisible bodymind is one of millions.

I centre the word... the term... the idea of invisible.

The word invisible for me is a very personal term.

I use the word invisible because it is the word put upon me.

Invisible illness.

Invisible symptoms.

Invisible disability.

But when I think about all of the bodyminds and all of the many kinds of cultural, social, racial, economic, physical, mental, cognitive, emotional, medical, gender, sexual, collective, individual, systemic invisibles that are experienced every second of the day... I expand my personal term, invisible bodymind, into a collective term... everyday unseens.

There are so many kinds of everyday unseens.

There is so many different ways the everyday unseen exists in our lives.

There is so much everyday unseen of us.

When I have said invisible, and when I now say everyday unseen, I am speaking to...

The everyday unseens that come from within the self...

Hidden.

Private.

Secret.

Silence.

Repressed.

Unspoken.

The everyday unseens that are socially or culturally imposed perceptions and positions...

Peripheral.

Undetected.

Unnoticed.

Subliminal.

Background.

Inbetween.

Underneath.

Absent.

Lost.

Scripts.

Waste.

The everyday unseens that are complex, spatio-temporal experiences...

Impermanence.

間 Ma.

Transitional.

Ephemeral.

Oblique.

Behind.

Befores and Afters.

Liminal.

Unperceivable.

Intangible.

Transitional.

Thin Places.

Atmosphere.

The everyday unseens that can be irreducible embodiminded experiences...

Vague.

Ambiguous.

Obscure.

Intangible.

Ineffable.

Ethereal.

Tacit.

Implicit.

Autonomic.

Slowly compiling these words brings me to such a different feeling than how the medical relegation through the term invisible have owned me.

Though spending time with the many words and ways we have come to define the experiences of our everyday unseens reinforces... for me... that there are so many parts of our everyday invisible bodymind that are still experiential outliers.

Our invisible bodymind experiences are often positioned on the outside of everyday bodymind understanding.

Codified as quiet, organic spectres of the physical experience.

Everyday unseens are often waiting in the data dark.

A concept and concern of overlooked everyday unseens that has stayed as a wrinkling piece of paper in my pocket of thinking is Michael Polanyi's, The Tacit Dimension (1966). For over twelve years, I always come back to it.

The Tacit Dimension explores embodied knowledges and information that are experienced and processed pre-verbally and or without material form such as tacit knowledges, embodied, implicit and habitous types of knowing and tacit information, abstract and conceptual ideas and modes of thinking.

Here, the everyday unseen is foundational, affective and complex. Here, the everyday unseen is curious, growing and changing.

In discussion of the everyday unseen and the world, Polanyi talks about the importance of challenging and disrupting implicit and tacit knowledge and the far reaching consequences, such as a continuation of unconscious and traditional value systems, if we don't.

If we... if I... continue to engage with the everyday unseen as only a natural phenomenon... then it exists without history, context or an exploration of impact and possibilities for use.

I take these thoughts to heart.

I take them to my unstable sick heart.

It has always been important for me to think with the idea that the heavy imposed, destructive, exclusionary, inaccessible systems and structures of societies and cultures have an overlooked backdoor for change.

A door that I can move through and into.

Here each everyday unseen can become a door.

A window.

An explosion.

I want to spend time here.

I don't want to move too automatically, quickly, "naturally" within the spaces of the invisible bodymind and the everyday unseen.

I don't want to overlook, take for granted, romanticise or miss.

So I stay here for a long time.

I feel it is meaningful for me to begin to explore my own experiences of how parts of me are unseen, everyday.

Where do they live inside me?

How can I find them?

How have they become this way?

How am I keeping them this way?

Can I create with them?

In the next couple of months I will stumble and fumble exploring my everyday unseens.

But I am careful... because I want to honour and celebrate these experiences.

And also not disturb the unseen qualities of them.

I want to move towards them... not bring them, and therefore possibly change them, into purely seen in order to be talked about, valued and focused on.

I want to bring my everyday unseens into the middle of my life.

I want to explore and work with the invisible at a foundational depth.

I want to put a microphone towards the everyday unseen and let them communicate... share their moment to moment experiences.

It is my first way of attuning to my complex invisible bodymind ecologies of our everyday unseens.