[Whit Blauvelt]

Hi Shannon, Apologies for late reply. I’m not an art historian, but for some years lived with one, who gave me a copy of Svetlana Alpers’ The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century. Alpers presents a fascinating thesis which holds up well, that most European art follows the Italian model, where the art illustrates the narratives, and is secondary to the language of those stories. Golden Age Dutch art, by contrast, regards language as secondary to the visual. In our context here, we might ask whether Dutch culture (at least in the 17th century) had a different hemispheric balance than the Italian.

Of course, the Dutch of that time, as the premier navigators of the oceans, also had an intense spatial awareness. Witness the maps on the walls in Vermeer’s paintings — windows with light streaming in from the spaces outside — and the production of globes of both the Earth and the heavens.

Your account of spatial understanding of grocery needs is fascinating. Teasing out just what spatial intelligence is, especially in light of the recent realization from neuroscience that it’s not identical to visual … well it’s an active puzzle for me, especially as my own conceptions are more spatial than visual, or at least more abstractions than photo-like imagery.

Jackendoff places the spatial closer to the lived body than the verbal-conceptual, helping guide our actions in this spatial world. I’m currently working through an unfortunately poorly-written book by a trio of undistinguished professors, Spatial Intelligence: Why it Matters from Birth through the Lifespan, which despite the poor writing (and being printed in an impossibly tiny font by Routledge) has the virtue of exploring how spatial intelligence is generally neglected in both theory and education. Jackendoff suggests we’re generally less conscious of the spatial than the conceptual, yet it’s of equivalent importance in our mental architecture.

I’m currently trying to tease out the different affordances of spatial self-understanding as compared to verbal-conceptual self-understanding. I’m suspecting that what’s variously known as “the ego problem,” as well as McGilchrist’s “hemispheric problem,” stem from failure to bring the verbo-conceptual into full spatial contextualization, in a culture which follows Descartes’ faulty intuition that res cogitans is best conceptualized as without (spatial) extension.