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PATRICK COLM HOGAN, Affective Space and Emotional Time

poem are selected and organized by reference to the emotional rela-
tions of the couple, in part as these are embedded in a social context,
which provides norms that structure the expression of those emo-
tional relations, and to some extent structure the relations them-
selves.
The most obvious aspect of spatiality in the poem is one famil-
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iar from Existential Phenomenology as well as Enactivism. As Noë
puts it, there are different “varieties of presence” or “availability”
and these define “varieties of access” (12). Someone may be present
to us in thought (when we remember him or her), in words (through
a letter), or in space and time. In this poem, the speaker’s world is
organized fundamentally by the modes of access she has to those
forms of presence; her spatial geography is most importantly a matter
of what she can do to reach her husband, literally and figuratively,
what she can do to achieve a variety of presence that allows for touch.
I suspect that this is the point of the final lines. She does not have a
cartographer’s sense of where Long Wind Sands is located. But she
has some understanding of how to travel there. It is the farthest point
that she can envision practically reaching. The rest of the spatial
world is, in both senses, beyond her grasp.
This is related to another basic division of space, into alien
places and places of attachment. As Jaak Panksepp notes, place pref-
erence appears to be often involved with person attachment systems
(or “Separation-Distress” systems, 265). This is in part a division be-
tween familiar, safe places and unfamiliar, unsafe places. In the tra-
ditional interpretation, “the poem is a love-poem to [Lǐ Bái’s] wife
but written as if from her to him” (Cooper 127). In part, the sense of
security and attachment in the home is Lǐ Bái’s own feeling as he re-
calls that inaccessible place. But the poet also imagines his wife’s
emotional sense of space. In particular, when the speaker imagines
her husband’s journey, she thinks of “Qú embankment” and “the rip-
pling Yù,” images of potentially threatening water. The threat is

10 In a more general form, it is familiar to readers of work in spatial studies,
as indicated by Katie Barclay’s comment that “emotion . . . determines, for
example, the meaning of distance, whether it is near or far, bearable or un-
bearable” (22). For further discussion of space and literature, bearing on the
present concerns, see Easterlin.

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