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PATRICK COLM HOGAN, Affective Space and Emotional Time

so to speak absolute “up” (both egocentric and allocentric), is emo-
tional as well. The lines may be taken to hint that the tiāndào or norm
of life is contrary to the spatial isolation of the lovers—thus contrary
to the husband’s departure. The suggestion would seem to be that,
if he had followed the dào, he would have stayed with his mate, like
the paired butterflies in the west garden, or like the legendary youth
who prized waiting for his beloved even more than his own life. This
usage is in part enabled by the fact that the dào itself is a spatial
metaphor organizing one’s proper relation to society in terms of one’s
relation to a trajectory of movement in space.
A key feature of the neuroscience of space is the division
among “bodily space, peripersonal space, and extrapersonal space,”
which is to say, quoting De Vignemont and Iannetti, the space of
“sensory stimuli happening on the body, […] the space immediately
surrounding the body” and “the space beyond reach” (327; the au-
thors are drawing on seminal research by Rizzolatti et al.). Cléry and
colleagues explain that, “While space is perceived as unitary, exper-
imental evidence indicates that the brain actually contains a modular
representation of space, specific cortical regions being involved in
the processing of extra-personal space, that is the space that is far
away from the subject and that cannot be directly acted upon by the
body, while other cortical regions process peripersonal space, that is
the space that directly surrounds us and which we can act upon”
(313, also drawing on the work of Rizzolatti et al.). To a certain extent,
writers have recognized the relation between this spatial division and
emotion. Thus, Ferri and colleagues, referring to peripersonal space,
note that “We live in a dynamic environment, constantly confronted
with approaching objects that we may either avoid or be forced to
address” (16328). More explicitly, Cléry and colleagues, stress the im-
portance of “defense and obstacle avoidance behavior” and “protec-
tion of near peripersonal space or safety margin around the body”
(319, drawing on work by Graziano and colleagues along with other
research). But the treatment of the relation between emotion and
forms of spatial experience has been quite limited, at least in much
of the research.
Before we consider these forms of spatiality further, it is valu-
able to broach one further topic in the neuroscience of space, bound-
aries. Grieves and Jeffery point out that a “widely researched, but
often overlooked cell type responds purely to environmental bound-
aries” (120; see also Groh 84 on “border ownership”). Lǐ Bái’s poem

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