"I wish I knew who, if anyone, there is to work with that knows, if anyone knows, who I am or what I am." Allen Ginsberg, from The Yagé Letters.
Here is where I can write in the first person. So this discursive space, at least, can be thought of as personal, as a place of private definition, grudgingly aware as I may be that my private sphere is socially formed.
Although Phenomenology holds little intellectual appeal these days (its point of view seems naive, its universalizing subjectivity too suspect) I still feel that there should be a place for reporting and sifting through one's own experience. (getting their feel?)
Do I experience space primarily in terms of my own body? (see proprioceptive.) Should we be exploring Raumgefuhl ? or the space of Selbstgefuhl ?
For Henri Bergson, the surface of the body, the common limit between the internal and the external, is the only portion of space which is both perceived and felt.
Erving Goffman has studied personal space as "the territory of the self."
(see also body image.)
Persons trained in the martial arts, such as karate, learn to feel the vectors and trajectories of the opponent's moves within the space of the combat. The near space around one's material body is charged.