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PATRICK COLM HOGAN, Affective Space and Emotional Time

made salient by the allusion to the story of the young man drowned
while waiting for his beloved. Moreover, the butterflies may suggest
the legendary Liáng Shānbó and Zhù Yīngtái, two lovers who were
separated, leading to the man’s death, followed by the woman’s
11
death, and their transformation into butterflies. All this links the
husband’s journey away from home, thus his location in space, with
both loss of attachment and danger. The wife’s emotional response
is characterized as “chóu” (愁), both sad or grief-stricken and worried
or fearful.
Of course, spatial experience may be delimited not only in
terms of access and attachment. Indeed, the neuroscience of space is
much more finely differentiated. Perhaps most importantly, neuro-
scientific research on space stresses several cell types. These include
“place cells, head direction cells and grid cells” (the last defining
one’s trajectory of movement). As Grieves and Jeffery explain, “these
cells collectively form the neural basis of a cognitive map” (113).
Specifically, “place fields represent higher order constructs assem-
bled from more primitive spatial ones such as direction, boundaries,
and self-motion information” (116). We may consider a few of these
elements.
Place orientation is often associated with landmarks; these are
salient features of the environment relative to which one may get
one’s bearings. We commonly think of salience here as a matter of
perceptual prominence, due to size, figure/ground contrast, or the
like. But the poem suggests that our orientation in space is not solely
physical, and the salience of landmarks may be emotional rather
than perceptual. A lovely example is the boy on his bamboo horse,
following through a trajectory around the speaker as she plucks
flowers. This arcing proximity to the speaker suggests that she is a
landmark for the boy, not merely one object among others, but a tar-
get that appears to orient and guide his path. Moreover, this con-
trasts his spatial orientation at that earlier time with his current lo-
cation, rendered implicitly disoriented by the unfamiliarity of the
alien places.

11 On the other hand, it is not clear whether or not the legend was current in
Lǐ’s time (see Idema 503 on a estations of the Liang-Zhu story).

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