In Love’s Body, Norman O. Brown places the origins and evolution of thought in and from the body. Everything outside the body, in the social world created by humans, is metaphor, the secondary term an externalization of the body. Brown resurrects the dead metaphors to illustrate his thesis, “The fall is into language” (p. 257). Brown worked on Love’s Body from 1958 to 1965, so there is no discussion of how the Internet might be changing our thinking.
Gaston Bachelard, in his The Poetics of Space (1958), did for the house what Brown did for the body: “…the house is one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories and dreams of mankind” (p. 6). “A house constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability” (p. 17).
Bachelard, writing in the late 1950’s, does not discuss the Internet, yet says, “In this activity of poetic spatiality that goes from deep intimacy to infinite extent, united in an identical expansion, one feels grandeur welling up. As Rilke said: ‘Through every human being, unique space, intimate space, opens up to the world…’” (p. 202).
On the Internet streets, one is essentially homeless, houseless, curiously wired yet wireless, and every day is moving day.
Bachelard, G. (1969). The poetics of space. (Maria Jolas, Trans.). Boston: Beacon Press. Foreword by Etienne Gilson. First published in French under the title La poetiquie de l’espace, Presses Universitaires de France, 1958.
The Coming of the Toads 