I’ve been talking around this for years, wanting to make a place where I could share some thoughts or observations – as though these fleetings would hold any value to a secondary eye. There is a kind of delicate arrogance required; an arrogance I’ve struggled to develop and enact. While even now, ironically, I grin when returning to that preceding sentence, adding the qualifier “delicate,” needing to forestall anyone from assuming this is mere solipsism. These posts are my practice of Goethe’s (1988) “zarte empirie,” (p. 307) his “delicate empiricism;” a methodology of which I am greatly fond, being akin as it is to Hillman’s (1992) oft-invoked concept of notitia: “that capacity to form true notions of things from attentive noticing…. A resurrection of soul to world means knowing things in that further sense… [an] intimate intercourse, carnal knowledge.” (pp. 115-116) In this way I hope my blog will be delicate, attempting to be not a bombardment of gaze, stare, or visual penetration. Simply, I offer reflections on personal and/or collective images and chiasms.
Henry David Thoreau (1910) suggested, “Begin where you are and such as you are, without aiming mainly to become of more worth, and with kindness aforethought, go about doing good.” (p. 62) Following that wisdom, ignoring the fear of lacking “enoughness” in favor of “muchness,” I begin where I am. This is that place, materially, on Earth (image at right). A place where the sun bleaches all, creeps into the crevasses of cracks and vessels, forcing out the contradiction of light and shadow, ecologically speaking, of course. And, not to invoke an over-used trope, the place is also an alchemical vessel, an alembic of that very contradiction of what is visible and what is translucent, invisible, without material weight and effect. Where airy thoughts seem to hang about, but in actuality, work tirelessly to carve, transform, erode unnecessary layers of history and idle musing. I, for one, find it physically impossible to linger too long in the brilliance of saturated sunlight. I am for the movement in and out of light and shadow.
More, this is a place who sees, figuratively, literally, and materially. I feel, therefore, an inspiration by this place; this place who sees, from whom I cannot seem to hide. For the time being, a kind of suspension of disbelief in itself, I seem to have been offered space in which to breathe outwards this invisible airiness I’ve been holding within myself, to further an initiation into visibility, to return to the community the gifts received from a very, very long pilgrimage road. I’m reminded thus of an observation made by Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1993), who said:
“We speak of ‘inspiration’ and the word should be taken literally. There really is inspiration and expiration of Being, respiration in Being, action and passion so slightly discernible that it becomes impossible to distinguish between who sees and who is seen [emphasis added]…. We say that a human being is born the moment when something that was only virtually visible within the mother’s body becomes at once visible for us and for itself.” (p. 129)
And so in welcome and thanksgiving, I set off on this red-green path of dust and air and slowly growing things, where heat lingers, forcing itself outwards from within weathered stone, into the dusk of the daylight, to be tasted by the skins of moving and unmoving creatures…
Sources:
Goethe, J. W. von (1988). Selections from maxims and reflections. In D. Miller (Ed. & Trans.), Scientific studies (pp. 303-312). New York, NY: Suhrkamp.
Hillman, J. (1992). Anima mundi: The return of the soul to the world. In J. Hillman, The thought of the heart and the soul of the world (pp. 89-130). Putnam, CT: Spring.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1993). Eye and Mind. In G. A. Johnson (Ed.), The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting (pp. 121-149). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Thoreau, H. D. (1910) Walden. New York, NY: Longman, Green, and Co.