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Tuesday 10 February 2015

Proof we're alive
and (mainly) happy

I thought I’d invented the word tactility but it already exists. Merriam-Webster gives two meanings: (1) capable of being touched/felt, (2) responsiveness to stimulation via the sense of touch. It's the latter I'm interested in.

VR recently asked me to taste a beef skirt casserole. It not only tasted fine but it met another of my criteria: it had that gluey consistency (often more apparent from a re-heat) that gains my final approval.

Grapes have tactility potential. Bite them slowly; dwell on the moment your teeth pop through the outer skin - the essence of a tactile experience.

Bread's freshness is identified by its smell and its unique resistance (or lack of it) to your incisors. But a slice of tomato turns the bread soggy ruining its initial appeal; for me salad must be confined to a sideplate.

Expanding my thesis: tactility is also sensed with the ears as well as the finger-tips. Edna, my mother-in-law, loved one-arm bandits. But she admitted that if the machine's crunching sensation - a sound and a vibration - were removed, she would give up the vice.

When wood-sawing is going well there's confirmation in the rasping sound and the consistent mini-shudder communicated from blade to handle.

Tactility can be proof of unpleasantness - eg, efficient tooth-drilling vs. the actions of a butcher dentist.

Then there is the ultimate tactile sensation which nature has embedded in us to ensure we keep on breeding. Stopping short of that consider the kiss: the feel of the lips, of course, combined with tiny movements of the jaw, the sounds and zephyrs of someone else breathing, and that (frequently divine) smell.

PS: Yes, I know, sound is a vibration. But the above is physiology not physics.

5 comments:

  1. Small granules of salt in mature Cheddar cheese.

    Soundwise - the breaking of a Leki walking pole when I fell on it - a disastrous occurrence, but a pure, satisfying hollow snap almost compensated.

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  2. You are so right......and we don't pay attention. I immediately think of creme brulee and the insanely delicious crack of the back of the spoon. Does the sand shifting beneath my feet count? I am glad that Edna has been spared the indignity and disappointment of the push-button slot machines.....no-arm bandits. Slimy gym clothes!

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  3. Sir Hugh: Glad you got my drift. I take it the salt granules are a good thing not a bad. As to the snapping walking pole, you show true authorial detachment in being able to separate the unexpected good from the overall bad. I wonder if you might have been capable of the ultimate detachment, had it not been a pole but your femur.

    Stella: Again I'm pleased we're in synch since, as you can see, I widened the original field to include other senses. What I failed to include - as VR later pointed out - was the fifth sense: sight. Definitely the creme brulée and definitely the sand; the latter in particular since that also takes in sight; the lazy movement of that type of sand is, I think, unique.

    Glad too you picked up on Edna. Frequently she and I failed to communicate but on this occasion I was very careful, taking things step by step, and in the end she gladly confirmed my belief. Are slimy gym clothes good, bad or just memorable?

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  4. After an hour (walking) the treadmill in a humid gym, everything I'm wearing feels like glue.

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  5. Regarding Sir Hugh's walking pole. I have never broken mine. However, the ankle has been broken and to this day I can't decide whether or not my fertile imagination invented the sound of my it snapping.

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