Going bleary-eyed to the balloons, leaving a warm woman waiting, because…
Never once have i regretted going out early, when the blue half light of dawn seeps into your room under the door and drags out your soul. the thin air somehow full and distant. Something very old reaches into your love. Something simple. Something that isn't human yet underlies us. A few stars remain overhead. The world seems a simple thing. Looking up every now and then, the silence of the universe becomes sublime. How much do we really know? If we sit down with a quiet heart and open mind, we all know what to do really, how to live: Be kind to others, live more in the present moment, l practice simplicity at the same time as living each day like our last. Not always thinking about what we wan from life but what the world might require from us. The thing is doing it. Why not start NOW? 😊
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“Through me the way into the suffering city, / through me the way to the eternal pain, / through me the way that runs among the lost. / Justice urged on my high artificer; / my maker was divine authority, / the highest wisdom, and the primal love. / Before me nothing but eternal things / were made, and I endure eternally. / Abandon every hope, who enter here" (Dante, Inferno, 3.1-9). I have in my hand one of the most interesting books I’ve ever read, One River by Wade Davis. My plan was to spend a few hours quietly reading. But the mere tone of the girl’s voice opposite me seems infinitely more enticing, her thick unkempt hair apparently more enthralling, than the rich Amazon rainforest in which Davis makes some of the greatest botanical discoveries of the twentieth century. It is imposible to read because, owing to the fact we both happen to be alive, there is a chance, no matter how remote, that we might talk, discover we like each other and spend the night in the slow throes of ecstasy. It is a mechanism that has become as overpowering as it is inevitable: I find myself dissecting a room wherever I go with almost scientific scrutiny until I identify the most sensual women there. Not necessarily the most beautiful, but the most intriguing. I proceed to endow her with all sorts of perfections and possibilities that are not her own. Stendhal was right about the Crystalisation process of love, but underestimated the rapidity of its strange and frightful effects. I attach myself to her in 10 minutes in the same way only a few fortunate men feel about their wives after 10 years. The sound of her laughter becomes music. The possibility of her belonging to me takes on the same immeasurable proportions as the night itself. The soft light on the side of her face gives her the appearance of an angel-in-waiting. My tea has gone cold. My book is unopened. Time has ceased to exist and my peace of mind is shattered for the evening. That still moment after physical exertion is when true ecstasy finds you. When you move out of yourself, and the world is gone, suspended, suddenly empty and yet more present than ever before. Exhausted, breathless, your body is newly anonymous and suddenly your own. Consciousness itself is little more than a glazed light looking up at the sky as though looking into itself. Time and place slip away, and the trees overhead glow and sway and become truly sublime, as one feels as a funeral or on a quiet mountain or beside a woman you love deeply or leaving a place that made you feel at home or when you stop for no reason on quiet Sunday morning walk in the park or see two people walking along and you feel they in love or when you wake up in the middle of the night and realise you are lying beside someones absence and understand true longing. Something magical exists in that moment, after the game, when you have fully exerted yourself. Time does not exist, senses burning, a truly privileged moment… when, for just for a few seconds, you see it, you almost see it, a glimpse of that silent beyond… and it floods down into your body and comes to rest in you, so that the world becomes a light unto itself, and nothing reaches you for those few moments, only the cool breeze, and that is all you need and everything you believe everything in the world to be fine, because it will happen in It’s own time and, if it doesn’t, it doesn’t matter anyway, because that cool breeze, or woman, or place, or whatever detail it is that found you and shrank time into your absence, will always be there whenever you choose to return, or rather whenever you allow your body to take over and lay you down again, in that long sudden-ended always, making time stand still. And you know your good girl looks so good, tender voiced and her kind smiling shining eyes get bright just for you and she’s waiting over town for your call and you know she’ll take care of you and feed you and then, the greatest thing ever happened, while I was driving over to her place in the sun, with the windows down and the music loud, grinning to myself thinking how good life can sometimes be if you just let it - as easy as that! I noticed in the car to my left a cute little Filipina girl in the passengers seat looking over her shades at me… I laughed and smiled and stuck my tongue out and she waved and with half a second to spare I turned off the highway and we were right back on the same road to continue the dance… We took it in turns to overtake each other, smiling and laughing as we did and, when we came to a stop at the traffic light, she wound down the window and said hello and asked where I was going…. she gestured for my phone number and I tried to give her the business card I’d already taken out of my wallet, but the lights changed, so I overtook her on the right and drove up along beside her so close our cars were separated by mere centimeters and handed her my card laughing and smiling like a kid and waved as I sped off in the sun with the windows down and music blaring again and feeling just about as good as anyone ever felt in the world surely, going to my good girl’s house with an empty belly and a full heart and the sun shining oh so sweetly and we ordered a feast and got a little tipsy and she called her friend up to invite her over to join us in bed for the afternoon… There is no real success in life, but in the glimpses of immortality we are sometime afforded. How our understanding of death shapes and grounds our lives gives them purpose and significance. Understanding the thing that renders our life meaningless, ironically gives it meaning. What does this mean day-to-day? It means involving oneself in the wellbeing of the community and experiencing everything as acutely as possible, filling your days with sudden liberating thoughts, original moments of fleeting insight, that come in a formless flash and are gone in the same way…. Those privileged moments when there is no thought of time … momentary freedom from what Burroughs described as “the claims of the ageing, cautious, nagging, frightened flesh”. Then occasionally we can bypass the brain’s instinct to busy itself with analysis and tap into a deeper well of sensation and experience The other factor, that you doubters are free to blindly ignore, is that I have an awareness - in sports in general - that isn’t normal for most players. I’ve had it since I was young. I often take it for granted but remember it when, like now, I finish playing (basketball) and come back to reality and think how many plays I made that happened independently of thought and made people say “wow” and “how did he see that”. I’m inconsistent, even with basketball, but you won’t see many players making as many special plays as I do. That’s a fact you can accept or ignore. It doesn’t matter. But I am a force of nature. And, with football, that most rudimentary of games, I only needed to develop the basic skills (I still never practiced once, or need to) for the awareness and fluidity and voracity to be transferred from the court to the pitch. Who the opponent is makes not one bit of difference: the only factor is me and my capacity on a given day to disappear into myself and allow my body to take control of the game on my behalf. An obvious but overlooked idea: that ontological solipsism / the ingrained self-other dichotomy underpins social inequality. How (a change in) that theoretical stance could influence political action in any practical sense remains to be seen… Well, we should give up our salaries for one 😅 We always read about the importance of aiming to be happy, to ‘love myself’ and focus on personal goals. It might be prudent instead to live what Socrates called a life of Virtue, to Flourish, and not always ask what do I want from life, but what the world might require from me Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology – essentially a critique of Cartesian dualism – demonstrates that our perception of reality is primarily dependent upon bodily experience. Form itself, though ontologically fundamental, cannot be accounted for in the terms of traditional realism, in that it is fundamentally perceptual: there is an “immanent signification” underlying reality’s essential mutually-dependent relationship with consciousness. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology offers an interpretation of reality that realigns our understanding of the world with the natural flow of experience: presenting reality as neither as objective and complete in and of itself, or as a mere projection of experiential solipsism.
Sensing, in contrast with knowing, is a “living communication with the world that makes it present to us as the familiar place of our life.” The world as it appears directly to perception, then, should be our starting point for philosophical enquiry, argues Merleau-Ponty: “Perception orients itself toward the truth, placing its faith in the eventual convergence of perspectives and progressive determination of what was previously indeterminate. But it thereby naturally projects a completed and invariant “truth in itself” as its goal. Science extends and amplifies this natural tendency through increasingly precise measurements of the invariants in perception, leading eventually to the theoretical construction of an objective world of determinate things. Once this determinism of the “in itself” is extended universally and applied even to the body and the perceptual relation itself, then its ongoing dependence on the “originary faith” of perception is obscured; perception is reduced to “confused appearances” that require methodical reinterpretation, and the eventual result is dualism, solipsism, and skepticism. The “fundamental philosophical act” would therefore be to “return to the lived world beneath the objective world” (PP: 83/57)” (from the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy). In his seminal work “Phenomenology of Perception” Merleau-Ponty begins by asserting the primacy of the body-subject and its pre-objective orientation towards the world. Not only do our pre-cognitive experiences (in which experience is grounded) contain meaning, they underpin it. An extension of this, language should be seen as itself a physiological form of expression, that may appear limited or closed off from the world it seeks to interpret only on account of its having become habitual. At a fundamental level, language is comparable to music in the way that it remains tied to its material embodiment; each language is a distinct and ultimately untranslatable manner of “singing the world”, of extracting and expressing the “emotional essence” of our surroundings and relationships. Whilst a solipsistic incongruence prevents us from discovering the inner worlds of others in as complete a sense as we each experience the world ourselves; our common corporeality nevertheless opens us onto a shared social world. Similarly, while we never coincide with the world itself, or grasp it with absolute certainty, we are also never entirely cut off from it; perception essentially aims toward truth, but any truth that it reveals is contingent and revisable. So, somewhat paradoxically, phenomena both transcend us, and are dependent upon us. The tacit pre-reflective form of consciousness becomes explicit only when it finds expression through itself, but always already exists: “The phenomenological reduction, on his interpretation, is not an idealistic method but an existential one, namely, the reflective effort to disclose our pre-reflective engagement with the world.” (from the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy). If the nihilism of Samuel Beckett's work was replaced with Merleau-Ponty's flourishing.... "in the destitution of modern man, acquires its elevation.” His philosophy sought transcendence though the expression of the ordinary. In its richness, the very texture of consciousness is revealed; in its intellectual rigor, the true nature of experience is distilled down to its bare elements; in its simplicity enabled readers to "arrive where we started and know the place for the first time" (T.S. Eliot). Becket's secret defence of humanity is, for Merleau-Ponty, a very overt one. Both plumb the depths of the human condition, which is where thought and poetry can work their miracles. |
AuthorEnglish teacher from the UK. Living in Granada. Currently working in Doha. Archives
February 2022
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