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CHAPTER Two: WHAT Is A DRAMA EVENT
They are the protoself foundation for more complex levels of self”.*°° Damasio
argues that the primordial feelings “provide a direct experience of one’s
own living body, wordless, unadorned, and connected to nothing but sheer
existence”.%% He claims that images of “body events” Like pleasure and pain are
created in the brain which is “at no instant is separated from its body”? and
defines the location of these images in the brain stem rather than the cerebral
cortex where other images and maps related to the self are located. Damasio
states that this connectedness changes as the next level, the core self develops,
but this step in development needs the brain “to introduce into the mind
something that was not present before, namely, a protagonist”.?°® Subjectivity
is produced by the existence of this protagonist that structures mind content
in specific manners says Damasio. According to his theory the third stage of
self-development is the autobiographical self, where narrative structures are
also used by the mind to organise images and maps stored in the brain.*””
The protoself, as defined by Damasio, seems very similar to what Bond
describes as the basis of his term radical innocence. The appearance of
subjectivity only at the core self stage suggests that there is no distinction
between experiencing the internal and the external forces affecting
the body in the protoself stage. Damasio links the formation of a ‘material
me’, the awareness of oneself as an independent material entity in the world
with the formation of the core self as well, this also suggests that there
is some sense of connectedness with the surroundings of the baby in
the protoself phase.
Bond connects what he calls the monad state, not being separated from the
outside world, with the concept of responsibility. He argues that the baby acts
upon its condition, for example she cries bitterly when hunger storms her,
she takes action to solve her problem. Bond’s statement that “nothing else has
the dignity of a crying child”,*° can be understood as the appreciation of the
new-born taking responsibility for its problem and taking action to solve it.
Clearly, a new-born does not conceptualise or intellectualise its
sensations, it lives them and being is its main imperative. Damasio writes
about the “elementary feelings of existence that spring spontaneously from
the protoself”.?!! Bond describes this as the right to be at home in itself and
the world, that is axiomatic for the monad. This need for the self to be at
home in the world remains the starting point ofthe individual’s relation to its
surrounding after the monad becomes aware of itself as a part ofthe material
305 Tbid., 27.
306 Ibid., 26.
307 Tbid., 27.
308 Tbid., 155.
309 Tbid., 134.
310 Edward Bond: Notes on Imagination, in Plays: 7, London, Methuen, 2003, 121.
311 Damasio: Self comes to mind, 27.
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