ENITRAM

« Danny wondered where he was: where he was. Really – which was the place in the body where he felt himself to be.

It was something that you did know – you just never thought of it. Ask the question and the answer always came: « I’m up here, mainly up here, » with yourself inside this little kind of capsule, busy at the back of your eyes and aiming wherever they aimed: quieter with them shut, but definitely in there all the time, huddled in some indefinable space at the back of your sinuses and arched up, somehow, over the roof of your mouth, an invisible lodger.

You could feel through the whole of your body, you were aware it belonged to you and was personal, but you – where you were – that didn’t quite extend into your limbs, it faded. There was a sense of attention lying in your head, that was where you lived.

He knew the experiment, thought he remembered it from a lecture – where you’d ask someone to write their own name on their forehead and almost every time they wrote it backwards, for the benefit of this interior self they had, crouched behind their face, seeing out through their skull.

That proved it – everyone lived inside their heads. »

From Indelible Acts, by A.L. Kennedy. (You should really read her stuff.) I love the way she comments on the many reviews of her book here.

I remember a meditation teacher trying to get us to move our thoughts, our sense of self out of our heads and into our hands, feet, etc. Needless to say it didn’t work for me. I very much live in my head, to the point where I sometimes surprise myself: « Oh, look! My foot hurts! »