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PATRICK COLM HOGAN, Affective Space and Emotional Time

ical separation, but their mental inaccessibility. That is the reason she
suffers chóu, both grief and worry. The utter difference of her hus-
band’s self—both body and experience, bodily space and periperson-
al space—leaves her unable to know his condition when she remem-
bers the threatening flood waters. Moreover, when she was first mar-
ried to him, at the age of fourteen she actively engaged in boundary
marking (in the macro-spatial sense), which stressed the importance
of maintaining the bodily boundaries. Again, her facing the wall and
refusing to turn is implicitly a refusal of sexual intimacy. In being un-
cooperative, she enhances the boundaries, makes them more salient,
almost (metaphorically) in the way that lateral inhibition enhances
edges in perception. This shy behavior could be understood as that
of a good (modest) Confucian wife. But there is something quietly
subversive about it as well; her “lowness” is also a way of defying
authority and asserting her autonomy. Both interweave spatial rela-
tions and emotion.
By the time she is fifteen, however, the speaker’s feelings have
changed. The husband at last sees her eyebrows as she lifts her head
ever so slightly, glancing perhaps coque ishly from the corner of her
eye. That is when the intimacy comes, and their sexual union is ex-
pressed in an extreme form of the merging of space. Not only are the
boundaries of peripersonal space dissolved, even the very feeling of
body ownership and distinct body image are gone. Now, both she and
he are intermingled dust and ashes. Cooper claims that the image
refers to the impossibility of extracting dust from ashes, rather than
cremation (128). Either way, the distinction between bodies dissolves.
But the suggestion of death seems pertinent, enhancing that sense of
union. Cremation became a significant funerary practice during the
Tang dynasty (see Han). Moreover, the immediately following line
makes reference to the story of the faithful lover’s death. It seems that
this integration, this unity in personal space, is both the living union
of the lovers in sexual embrace and the eternal union of their remains,
perhaps suggesting a spiritual identity that is not spatially bound at
all. The idea is in keeping with Semir Zeki’s observations on the cross-
culturally recurring motif of “unity in love,” as well as the research
on peripersonal space just cited. The key point here is that such a feel-
ing of unity is in part a ma er of one’s sense of space, and once again
shows the integration of spatial processing with emotion.
In all these cases, it is important to recall that the poem is in the
voice of Lǐ Bái’s wife. Thus, it represents a shift in point of view. What

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