My Year with Bluestone: High St Bridge, Clifton Hill

One of my walks/runs along the Merri Creek I call the "nine bridge walk": I usually only think of this number when I am running home and counting my way back. Some of the bridges are low crossings made of wood, where I sometimes pause and on either side and watch the waters meander — or rush, if it has been raining — towards me; and then away from me on the other side as they head down to join the Yarra river at Dights Falls; other bridges are bricked and embanked railway crossings I pass beneath. Two are magnificent bluestone bridges. This one carries High St from Clifton Hill up into Northcote: it was build of bluestone and local brick in 1875.




And here is a photograph from 1892.

And here is a close up of where bluestone and brick meet.

Underneath the bridge, along the creek path, the bluestone is covered in graffiti and tags.

There's a wide ledge that sometimes shelters the homeless: I've sometimes walked by and seen a swag on the ledge.


As a sign of the times, though, I did one day walk past here without the camera and saw a middle-aged man practising his climbing techniques, clinging on for dear life, all of half a metre above the ledge, to the uneven protusions of bluestone.

My Year with Bluestone: returning to the labyrinth

I went back to the labyrinth this morning to take some of my own photos. It had rained overnight after two very hot days and the creek smelled of fragrant eucalyptus. The labyrinth sits between the path and a cliff.


Close to the entrance is a sign, surrounded by bluestones. It respects Wurundjeri custodianship and invokes ancient, Biblical and new age discourse, concluding with a slightly strained inverted subjunctive. 

Here is the pock-marked bubbled basalt block that marks your first turn in the labyrinth.

And here is the rough, very irregularly shaped rock that is the first one you pass on your right as you enter.

And here, as if in answer to my desire to trace our affective relationship with bluestone, is the smooth square rock I talked about two days ago, on the left as you enter, but on your right as you emerge, having walked the labyrinth, on which someone has carefully scattered birdseed.

 
A form of homage? Just this stone and no others. At the very least, a sign that someone else has come to walk this labyrinth and make connections with the creek and its inhabitants.

Daily pleasures

I see and touch bluestone everyday, and clearly I am not the only one!  Alison posted on my facebook page today: 

Lovely book project! And bluestone - such a huge part of the daily pleasures, for me, of living in Fitzroy: sometimes I pat it as i walk past, sometimes I just like to rest my hand on it... I vividly remember the keynote given at your Hearts of Stone event a few years ago (Jeffrey Cohen?), which was so brilliant on affect and matter and stone....

A few people -- well, Melbournians -- have responded in this way when I mention this project. It truly does feel like the local stone (as sandstone is to Sydney, I think). And indeed, the project takes much inspiration from Jeffrey Cohen's work on stone. My project will be much more local, and even incidental than his, but I cannot wait to read his new book, out in a few months: https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/stone

We have written together on fire, and will be sharing a panel on the elements at the London Chaucer conference in July with Sophia Wilson and Hetta Howes. We have not worked on stone together, but I'm sure his book will be a guiding spirit to this project. 

Merri Creek Labyrinth

It's the second day of the New Year. High temperatures are predicted, so I decided to go for my walk early in the day. But I don't leave the house until after 11. I'm recovering from a broken arm and my shoulder and neck are hurting. Nevertheless, I manage to run about 2 km and then walk as far as the Bluestone labyrinth along the Merri Creek, constructed by a community group around 2001, according to a Cretan design.  It's not a puzzle, but you are invited to walk around its winding track. Perhaps there will be healing benefits, according to one of the notices. I head off, trying to focus on my breathing, counting 10 breaths then starting again,  and  feeling the rhythm of my footsteps,  and observing the bluestone cobs that have been used to indicate the paths.  There are all kinds of  plants and weeds growing up between the bluestones,  and tan bark  has been laid along the path.  the sun beats down and  I try to  feel the heat come through into my aching bones and muscles. After a while I get a bit dizzy, in the confusing counterpoint of breathing, counting, walking, turning, and trying to observe the stones. I reach the centre,  face the sun, and take a deep breath before turning out again. On the way out it is easier to observe the difference between the stones. Some are almost perfectly square, and I realise they will have been taken from laneways and kerbstones around the city.  Others  are more chunky and irregular in shape. Then I notice a rectangular stone that is  marked all over  with little holes where the  boiling, bubbling rock has been cooled suddenly in water.  One more turn  and I am out.  I turn and stand at the entrance again. On my right, where you turn to enter the labyrinth, is one of the most irregular shaped rocks, jagged and pointy, and covered with the white traces of lichen. On my left is one of the smoothest square blocks. The symbolism is obvious: you enter feeling ragged and jagged and uneven and you emerge smooth, even and serene. As you enter, the bubbled rock is your first obstacle: turn right here...

I start my walk home, feeling overheated and as if I have walked too far. Then I have an idea. My plan this year is to write a book on the affective history of bluestone in Melbourne and Victoria. I had always planned to blog my progress on the book as I go, so this is the first installment for 2015. But then I recalled the brilliant work of Philip Thiel, who for several years kept a series of wonderful blogs: mini entries each year: "A Year with Lemons", "A Year of Kissing People", "A Year of Stopping." What if I could do the same thing with bluestone, charting my encounters with this very characteristic Melbourne stone I walk on and past and through every day?

Well, let's not promise to do it every day. But let's see what happens. So set up your feeds, kids, and we'll see how we go.

Talismanic rock: next year's writing project

Every project on stone needs a talismanic rock object. This is a piece of volcanic bluestone I picked up yesterday from the path along the Merri Creek that runs past my house. It's going to sit on my desk to remind me to finish my two other essays before I can get started on my new project, my affective cultural history of Victorian bluestone. Most of the bluestone we use for building is smooth, and has presumably cooled down slowly. The bubbles here were presumably formed when this clump of lava fell into water. I have a lot to learn about geology. But I do like this little lump. My first impulse was to wash it, but I'm going to keep it as it is, with the detritus of suburban/urban passing.

The reef tank: building a world

Because we have too much to do, and because Paul is now commuting between Sydney and Melbourne, we have a new hobby. Yes it takes a lot of time and money. It is both a present to me and a desire fulfilled for both of us.

After several months (ordering, waiting, then installing the saltwater tank, and some live rock and letting that settle) we started observing several little creatures who'd stowed away on the rock (a sea cucumber, a sluggy trilobite-looking thing we saw once and never again), and a few little centipedy/wormy things. Then we moved in the clean-up crew (snails, hermit crabs, shrimp, trochus shells), whose job it is to keep the glass and sand clean.

By sheer chance, I was videoing one of the snails when it decided to procreate on its second day in the tank (0.18, 0.26, 0.37)

More on this later.

Finally, a few weeks ago, we put in our first two corals and an anemone.

The anemone is my favourite. It has a pink/red base and a crown of wavy "bubble tip" tentacles. Sometimes you cannot see the red base; other times this pink fleshy stem creeps up and encloses nearly all the tentacles.  This creature also moves around the tank, though it seems settled for now. There is now another pinkish one, though it sometimes appears green at night. Also, our first two clownfish went in. Little black and white ones, with orange chins.

We have been doing elaborate water testing to make sure everything is ok. Paul set up a small generator so water filtering could still go on when we had a 6 hour power blackout a few weeks ago. Various folk have come and given advice and fitted up more filters and processes, and yesterday Paul also bought a machine that will convert ordinary tap water to RO (reverse osmosis) water for top-ups, and thence to sea water with the addition of (sorry!) salt. So not so many trips to buy water from the aquarium. But yesterday he also came home with another pale pink anemone, a donut coral (glows slightly green in the dark and also pulsates), and this fabulous little red coral tree, which is surrounded by sunburst coral.


During the day these are just little pink tubes: at night they blossom into miniature sunflowers.

Most of these creatures and plants are softly, fleshily seductive as they wave their tentacles back and forward, or pulsate in and out around little slits for the movement of air and water, or as they sheath and unsheath themselves. It is all incredibly sexual. No one really knows whether the corals are plants or animals.

The whole world here is utterly absorbing. We pull up chairs and watch as the snails and shells move around cleaning up the sand. I sit on the little step down from the kitchen and peer in. I wheel my bike down the side of the house and see the green anemone draped beguilingly down the side of a rock, waving and glistening in the dark. The back of the tank is developing a lovely mossy patina that traps silver bright bubbles. Things move and float around in the currents. The two little clownfish (French and Saunders) hover around each other and flirt with settling in the anemones, but not yet.

And today, la pièce de résistance: a tiny white snail, stuck to the front of the tank, a thousandth the size of its huffing parent, starting to make its way across the reef. We have a made a world where snails are happy to breed!

On stuff, infrastructure, and beauty

I’m just back from a whirlwind trip to Sydney. We hired a van and drove up on Tuesday, taking up some furniture from the house, as well as a pile of stuff Paul had bought to set up the flat he is renting until the flat we are buying is finished. He is planning to be in Sydney only every second week, but there is still a lot of stuff you need to start out a residence from scratch. And because he will not have a car in Sydney and is also travelling a lot overseas at the moment, he had chairs and bed delivered here, while he also stocked up on kitchen stuff, an ironing board, and a pantry full of food to get him started. He also packed up about 24 boxes of books. Some of the kitchen things he bought are really beautiful, and it was a bit seductive to be unpacking them all and seeing his new crisp bedsheets, and shiny kitchen saucepans and the sharp knives and the green enamel bakeware and the green toaster and the pretty blue cups and teapot.

And also to sleep in a brand new bed when ours at home is so old it … well, you don’t want to know. The temptation of new stuff. But of course all the glasses and plastic boxes had sticky labels and paper wrapping and other boxes, and all the kitchen utensils were wired into cardboard, and had stupid little silver chains that attached their instructions.

I’ve been thinking about the big piles of rubbish in the oceans, lately; and we certainly made our sad contribution this week.

We shared the Hume with big trucks, all hauling stuff up and down between the cities, too. We arrived about 8 and went out for pizza, but then had to unload the truck so we could carry the bed and all the bedding upstairs, propping open the security door and waiting for the single, slow lift. And even with the lift, there was still a lot of lifting and carrying. The building’s a bit run down, but the bathroom in the flat has been recently renovated and the whole place is quite big and light.

On Wednesday we hauled boxes of books to Paul’s office on the UWS campus. By the end of the day my arms were a bit trembly with the weight of carrying big boxes of books upstairs. But we changed and headed off to our luxurious night out. We will have to pull in our horns financially to pay for this Sydney accommodation, but we treated ourselves anyway to the outdoor performance of Madam Butterfly. Should be easy, we thought. A pleasant ferry ride to Circular Quay, and there you are.

But.  The ferries don’t go all the way to Parramatta past about 5. So we ended up sharing a taxi with a woman we met at the dock. We drove ten minutes to Rydalmere dock, trying to persuade the taxi driver we didn’t want to go all the way in by taxi. So we paid $20 for a ten minute ride, but then only $6 each for a 55 minute ride on the Supercat. It was just beautiful.  

It went slowly at first, steering between the mangroves, I guess, but gradually speeding up past blocks and blocks of houses and apartments: so many people in Sydney must have a water view. It was dusk, and the sun was glinting off the water and the city as we approached.
 

As the harbour bridge came into view, the catamaran sped up, like a horse heading for its home, and docked at Circular Quay on perfect time. We then had to walk across to Mrs Macquarie’s point, through the Botanical Gardens. But the gardens were closed, and we found ourselves wandering around in the dark, wondering if we should get another cab. Surely there’d be signs pointing the way, we thought. But there was nothing. Maybe Sydney folk just drive everywhere or go by taxis. Maybe Sydney institutions don’t care about visitors. We were not the only ones getting lost and anxious. We ended up walking down a tunnel towards Woolloomoolloo (I’d learn to spell it if I lived there, I promise), where the narrow footpath actually gave out at one point. Honestly, Sydney: just a few signs for visitors would help. It can’t be that hard. Afterwards, we were directed to a water taxi, and did a quick trip around the point and back to Circular Quay for $10 in 5 minutes. We'll know next time. 

However, once we got there, we had time enough to buy edamame beans, almonds in soy, gyoza, and champagne to see us through the first act, which was astonishing. We were five rows from the front in the middle section. The seats looked west across to the opera house and the bridge, so the performance took place with the water and the sunset behind it, and then on the left, the tower blocks of the city, but with the darkness of the gardens intervening. There were a few flying foxes still in flight; and the crescent moon turned more and more orange as it sank into the water. You can just see it, pale and white, between the trees here:

The set is an exercise in engineering excellence. The first act is lit for dappled sunlight through the trees on a steep green hill. We were exhausted and so stayed in our seats at interval and watched as two cranes built Butterfly’s house and the unfinished block of units behind her (Pinkerton’s abandoned strata title), not a little like our own not yet finished Sydney apartment. The stage hands were more like builders, and indeed throughout the second act, these other folk (builders? Stage hands? Chorus?) hovered around and lit their little fires and walked on and off: the chaotic everyday world sitting behind this intense drama. As Pinkerton says, the Japanese house design is very simple, and you can change it as you go – like Japanese marriage.  The opera set was not simple, but its mutability was powerfully underlined through this “performance” of house-building at interval.

Hiromi Omura was simply extraordinary as Cio Cio San. A strong and lyrical voice, and a commanding actorly presence. I’d seen this opera before and the singer seemed abject and desperate all the way through. But this woman was playful, and defiant. The chronology of the opera’s setting was a bit confusing, but the symbolic force of this young Japanese woman loving her little rhinestone encrusted denim shorts and her American flag singlet, and draping them in her diaphanous white wedding gown in the final scene was heartbreaking.

It really was a highlight of my opera-watching career, on a par with Parsifal at the Met in March. It was both emotional and beautiful, and also intellectually smart, somehow. The simple beauty of two lovers against a bit white artificial moon? But it had also been a day crowded with stuff. Moving things here and there; setting up our own real house; seeing a fictional "marriage"disintegrate. Such beauty and stillness, but made out of such an expense of energy. Can it really be sustainable, what we do? What we give ourselves?

In Which I Begin a Long-Distance Relationship

Amidst all the trials and tribulations of a university in change, one of the most stable features of my life for the last twenty-one years has been having a partner with a good job in the same city. When I met Paul he was driving from Fitzroy to Monash most days, not enjoying the commute, but loving the job with great colleagues. He then moved to RMIT university in the city, and so for the last twelve years, or thereabouts, we have relished both being able to ride our bikes to work. It's true we hardly ever meet for lunch, as we often talk about, but we do sometimes set out on the bike path together of a morning.

But while I soldier on at Melbourne (I'm not complaining about my job; it's just that I have been here such a long time), he has just accepted a new job in Sydney, and will start tomorrow. It's another research-only position, but with minimal administration, unlike his job at RMIT, and once his routine settles down he'll be up there probably for four days at a time, twice a month. It's just that the first few months will be busy with international trips already planned and booked, so UWS won't see much of him, and there are some pretty nasty turn arounds on the calendar, when he flies home to Melbourne and then a day later flies up to Sydney.

It feels very odd at our advanced ages to be taking on a long-distance relationship. I know lots of people who do it, or have done it, usually at a younger age, and usually in hopes of eventually getting to the point that we have just abandoned. Paul's reasons for moving are complex - it's his story to tell, not mine - but I think we are going to be ok.

His first move has been to get an old bike reconditioned and shipped to Sydney to help with the flat-hunting, while his new bike is being built. If you are flying to work, it's important not to be driving another car.

Discussions about all this took place mostly over the month I was undergoing all my tests and probes and surgery for the possible recurrence of breast cancer (all good now). So we had lots of opportunity to talk about the life-work and the life-death balance. Financially it'll be tough for us in the short term, but probably ok in the long term. If I had been starting chemotherapy now, it would be feeling very different, I'm sure. Of course, the success of this venture depends on neither of us getting really ill. We are collecting stories from people who've done this kind of commute, and illness is one of the things that makes it much harder. It's also true that the Sydney-Melbourne air route is the most travelled in the country: planes fly every 30 minutes, so the logistics are relatively straightforward.

We're planning to build a different kind of routine. I'm going to try to work less at weekends and make a greater differential between work time and non-work time. I'll have a place to stay in Sydney, but how often will I really go up there? Isn't it more likely that my home-loving man will want to come here to be with his cats and fish and chickens and garden and son? How much easier it is to contemplate this with an almost-adult son, too.

The main theme in our discussions has really been about the quality of life. How to balance the wonders of a cycling commute and the beauty of quotidian, local, and domestic rhythms against the pleasures of a working and research community that gives you intellectual stimulation and fabulous professional support? In an era when a university career is such a complex, overladen and demanding business, it still seems crucial to have that research community around you. Mind you, we medievalists in Australia and in most other contexts are accustomed to making communities of scholars in adjacent and sympathetic fields. It's all relative, I know.

The expectation that you can have intellectual and communal and social satisfaction in a university career will be knocked down as unrealistic by the cynics, I'm sure, and of course I acknowledge I'm speaking from the privileged position of two tenured professorial incomes, etc. etc. I know the situation is completely different for the untenured, the sessional, the adjunct, and those who cannot easily move, or commute.

However, I want to own and celebrate this change as a mutual household decision because it's a sign that we are not giving up: that we can make the argument that our work is meaningful; and that we can still insist that our academic and intellectual work matters enough to organise our lives around it, instead of subordinating everything to financial expediency, for example.

Would love to hear stories from folks who've managed long-distance relationships and commutes, though. What works? What are the pitfalls? What's it going to be like?

My work, my breast, my life

So, just over seven years ago, I rather mordantly announced my breast cancer diagnosis under the title "How to put bad grant news into perspective." Our research team had just missed out on a large ARC grant, but the news was overtaken in my life, at least, by the diagnosis and then the surgery, radiotherapy and five years hormone therapy that followed. In the meantime, we got the four-year grant the next year, and produced buckets of events and publications. I was pleasantly surprised when I finalised the final report, earlier this year, at how much we had achieved.

This time, everything seems different, but weirdly similar. I'm posting to say that I am *not* going ahead with my vast fellowship grant this round, and that I do *not* have breast cancer.

I put in a rough draft of an outline of my application to the faculty committee that mentors applications and the general feedback was that the project was not really ready yet, and that it might also not be the best strategic time to apply. That's really fine: I still really like my idea and am going to explore other ways of working through the material, though the prospect of building another research team was certainly intriguing. However, it's not as if I don't have enough to do.

(I did get a little frozen up about blogging and facebooking all the application as I had planned to, as a colleague advised me against being quite so public about my progress with the grant, in the manner and the tone I had assumed would be ok... but I'm over that now, and in any case it's a non-issue, since I'm not going ahead with it.)

Anyway, over the last month, I've also been contemplating the return of breast cancer. At every stage (several repeats of both mammograms and ultrasounds on the 24th after the detection of a slight change since last year, the MRI on the 30th, the ultrasound and fine needle biopsy on the 4th, the suspenseful week's holiday and return to the news of an abnormal finding, another core needle biopsy on the 14th, with its inconclusive results and spectacular bruising, right up to the surgical biopsy and removal of the lump under general anaesthetic yesterday, I've been trying to stay calm and focussed. But questions keep bounding in. What does it mean? For this year, for the next five or ten years? Will that be all I have? Did I do enough over the last seven years to prevent its return? Did I work too hard? In the wrong way? What did I learn?  I sometimes think I learned nothing at all from the whole stupid breast cancer "journey." Perhaps I'm not so frightened of death as I might otherwise have been. Seeing my child growing up and starting to make his way in the world has made it easier this time, too.

Surgery yesterday involved in the insertion (under local anaesthetic, with ultrasound), of the hookwire that guides the surgeon's hand to the exact spot. Suzanne came in, still dressed in her elegant consulting clothes, while Monica inserted the wire, and Annette watched the screen. Suzanne checked, and asked for clarification and checked again, and then drew a purple line where the incision would be. Was I ok? Yes, I said, looking down at the array of patches and the long silver wire trailing out of the needle before they cut it off. It's hard not to look, I said. Yes, said Suzanne, but it's a day to set academic curiosity aside. After that, it was mercifully quick. Back upstairs in the wheelchair, and time to read a page of Questions of Travel, before the orderly wheeled me off into surgery. A quick chat with the anaesthetist about her cat and I was away. It takes me ages and ages to come out of a general anaesthetic (lowish blood pressure; slowish heart rate), and then finally to wake up properly to have a cup of tea. Paul drove me home and I slept and slept, and this morning just watched Game of Thrones on the laptop in bed. ("What do we say to Death? Not today.")

I was steeling myself to see Suzanne tomorrow for the review and to plan the next stages of treatment, but she phoned a few hours ago to say the results were very good. There *was* a small abnormality, but so tiny and underdeveloped it might not even ever have become the pre-cancerous lesion that might have warranted prophylactic mastectomy. It certainly won't now, because it has been utterly removed and I will have another surgical scar to prove it. So, yes, I am currently feeling rather imaged and prodded and injected and cut, but have taken the sum total of one panadol, so am not complaining about pain. In fact I'm not complaining about anything. I'm fine writing, but if a friend or a sister speaks to me on the phone, or when Paul came home, it's hard not to start sobbing a bit with relief.

It has been a very long month to live in this shadow, under the threat of entering the rounds of treatment again, while also fearing the stains and imperfections of disease, to say nothing of mortality or even more, the idea that illness makes you re-assess your life all over again, which is so exhausting.

It's not just the timing of the grant cycle and the mammogram cycle that brings research and health together, of course. That's one thing I *have* learned, I suppose, that I'm not really able to make clean breaks between work and recreation. It's the nature of the work itself, of course, that it is never finished. And it's the way I work, too, which often seems to me sloppy, messy, undisciplined, always interrupting myself. But that's what it is. I'm too old to change that now. I go on.

First official step

I've just taken the first official step on this grant application, lodging an "Expression of Interest" with the research office here. The title (reassuringly provisional) is "The Textual Face: Word, Image, Emotion, and Representation."

The next step will be a rough outline of the project (maybe 6 pages?) for a Faculty workshop. This will be brutal (I've sat on these committees in the past), because there is plenty of time for folk in fields well outside my own to tell me about the huge gaping holes in the way I've conceptualised it; or to say they don't think it's the kind of project that will have any kind of chance.

In spite of my being sick with the virus-that-never-ends, and still teaching, and doing some nitty-gritty archival and textual work for another project, I've been thinking some more about the parameters of the project.  And today I gave a paper for a CHE study day on methodologies for Literary Studies and the emotions that took me another step further.
http://www.historyofemotions.org.au/events/literary-emotion-methodologies-study-day.aspx

I was talking about William Reddy's concept of the "emotive". For him, it's a first-person present tense expression of feeling: e.g. "I feel angry", "I'm happy." It's neither constative nor performative, in Austin's sense. I'm interested in this form as it relates to the work that literary studies does. Literary texts are similarly explorative, about improvising expressions for feeling. They're only rarely taxonomic; they rehearse expressions about feelings. Reddy writes:

 Emotives are themselves instruments for directly changing, building, hiding, intensifying emotions, instruments that may be more or less successful.

This seems to me analogous, at least, to the way that literary texts often proceed.

My starting point for The Textual Face is the face that seems to speak. In many examples, that face "speaks" in the first-person present tense. This trope seems to gloss the (imagined) visual appearance of the face, by putting it into words. Here's my favourite working example again, which we discussed today:

Captain Wentworth looked round at her instantly in a way which shewed his noticing of it. He gave her a momentary glance, -- a glance of brightness, which seemed to say, “That man is struck with you, -- and even I, at this moment, see something like Anne Elliot again.”
  Jane Austen, Persuasion, 1816.

So I began my paper today by wondering about the analogies between this trope and Reddy's "emotives". First-person, present-tense, yes. Sort of about the emotions, though not directly, because as we agreed today, literary texts rarely are...

But the more I thought about it, the more I realised I was using Reddy really just as some scaffolding. There is so much more going on in this passage!  The radiance around the speaking face — "a glance of brightness" is itself quite nuanced and layered. The face is lit up for us as the readers; the glance is also a gift to Anne; it's the glance itself that seems to speak; the gloss on the glance takes longer than the glance itself (that's the mixed, layered temporality of the relationship between word and image; or word and wordy representation of image). Other questions arise, especially questions about focalisation. Who is observing and interpreting the speaking face here. To whom does the glance seem to say this? Does the glance "really" say this? Given there is no definitive answer to these questions, what is the status of this gloss? or rather, this self-glossing face, or glance? Claire remarked that Austen's texts are quite often unemotional: they push emotion away.

One of the things I'll need to articulate in my application is the relation between this project and my work for the Centre for the History of Emotions. So far, so good. I can see how I will be able to argue that it arises from the Centre, but moves more broadly to consider questions of interpretation, representation and expression. It will be in large part about the textual representation of visual expression, but there will also be room for studies of the visual representation of text. The fellowship allows up to four other positions in the research team. My next job is to think about what kind of team to put together.

And I expect I will also make mention of the findings of Emanuele Castano and David Corner Kidd of the New School, published in the journal Science, that reading literary fiction helps you develop skills of empathy, social perception and emotional intelligence: http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/03/i-know-how-youre-feeling-i-read-chekhov/?_r=0. If that's so, I bet the trope of the speaking face, that glosses visual expressions and translates them into first-person, present-tense expressions of feeling, play a big part.