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PATRICK COLM HOGAN, Affective Space and Emotional Time

is clearly concerned with boundaries or borders in a very broad
sense, what we might call the ‘macro-spatial’ sense in which they
bear on large regions of space, whether those marked out by rivers
and embankments, or more locally those of walls. But the more cru-
cial concern here—both in the neuroscience and in the poem—is
‘micro-spatial’, the boundaries that bear on experiential aspects of
bodily and peripersonal space, particularly the boundaries or borders
that define self and other.
Grivaz, Blanke, and Serino explain that, “The sense that our
body belongs to us, body ownership (BO), is argued to be one of the
cardinal features of subjective experience” (602). Related to this, Ra-
machandran defines “body image” as “the vivid mental awareness
you have of your body’s configuration and movement in space.” He
goes on to stress that “even though it is called an ‘image,’ the body
image is not a purely visual construct; it is also partly touch and mus-
cle based.” Cléry and colleagues explain that “the parietal node of
the . . . parieto-premotor VIP-F4 network possibly contributes to the
construction of both a representation of one’s own body and of the
body of others” (320). Perhaps surprisingly, the division between self
and other, marked by bodily space, peripersonal space, body own-
ership, and body image, is not absolute. Cléry and colleagues explain
that, after we have engaged in cooperative interaction “peripersonal
space boundaries between our self and the other individual merge”
(322). Di Pellegrino and Làdavas discuss empirical work showing
that “When the other subject behaved cooperatively, results revealed
that there were no more detectable PPS [peripersonal space] bound-
aries between the self and other, thus suggesting that the partici-
pant’s PPS had extended as far as to include the space around the
other. By contrast, when the other subject failed to cooperate […] the
PPS boundaries between self and the other did not change. Thus, the
study showed that PPS representation not only responds to the pres-
ence of others, but is also shaped by interactions with others and,
more specifically, by valuation of other people’s behavior during so-
cial interaction” (131). In other words, research indicates that periper-
sonal space boundaries usually contract in the presence of other peo-
ple, but not following cooperative interaction with those people.
This research comes very close to asserting the crucial impor-
tance of emotion for spatiality. Lǐ Bái’s poem arguably takes us still
further. On the one hand, the speaker of the poem feels very deeply
the isolation between herself and her husband, not merely their phys-

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