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PATRICK COLM HOGAN, Affective Space and Emotional Time

is relevant for our purposes is that such a shift is not simply a matter
of inferring or simulating a distinct information processing perspec-
tive. Understanding another person’s relation to space does of course
involve information and lack of information. But it is crucially a mat-
ter of empathy or emotion-laden response as well; it is crucially a
matter of integrating the other person’s knowledge or expectation
with his or her care and hope. In other words, it is important to rec-
ognize the affective quality of spatiality not only in cognitive science
and neuroscience, but in our daily interactions with or simulations
of other people.

Lǐ Qīngzhào’s “Sound after Sound, Lingering”

In discussing Lǐ Bái’s poem, I have focused on space and spatiality.
Time and temporality clearly enter into the poem as well. Time is un-
even in precisely the way space is uneven. The moment of the hus-
band’s parting is an emotionally salient landmark in time; it links
past and future, or rather memory and anticipation, through the feel-
ing of chóu, grief and fear. Another landmark is the memory of a day
when the speaker was plucking flowers and looked up to see the
young boy on his toy horse. That implicit looking up perhaps links
the memory with the later temporal landmark of her finally showing
her eyebrows and embracing her husband. In Lǐ Bái’s poem, time is
a series of forceful memories intruding into consciousness with mes-
sages of joy or grief, jostling against hopes for and fears about the fu-
ture, all animated through current, continually changing experience.
Like space, it is not continuous or uniform. It unites or fragments,
grows and comes close or diminishes and recedes, with its emotional
force and valence. To develop our understanding of time, I will con-
clude with another poem, also one of the most famous in Chinese lit-
erature, a poem by Lǐ Qīngzhào, often considered China’s greatest
woman poet.

To the tune of “Sound after Sound, Lingering”
Lǐ Qīngzhào

Scan. Search. Seek. Strain.
Cold. Remote. Clear. Alone.

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