Life lives on sensation; the elements are a nourishing medium…The light is not just transparency which the gaze slips through on its way to distant surfaces; our gaze delights in the vivacity of the light itself. It assimilates in its languor the soft depths of the dark. The sonority is not just a succession of sense data which the hearing identifies as signals and information-bits; the ears are contented with the resonance of realm beyond realm as with a content. The touch lets go of things to relish the terrestrial and solar warmth. The earth extends its indefinite expanses before the steps of the nomad who is not scouting for any retreat, moved by his appetite for open roads and uncharted deserts. Erotic sensuality is not a hunger…It surges in a vitality that lacks nothing, is fed and sheltered and contended, a vitality that greets the earth, the skies, the day and the night with the ardor of kisses and caresses.
- Alphonso Lingis
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even in his most one-sided gone native Romantic waxing I always appreciate that Lingis, as a phenomenologist extraordinaire, reminds us that what we often wrongly describe as Lack is really better understood as excess. Life, without why, exceeds our grasp even as it drives it.
The Eighth of September
This day, Today, was a brimming glass.
This day, Today, was an immense wave.
This day was all the Earth.
This day, the storm-driven ocean
lifted us up in a kiss
so exalted we trembled
at the lightning flash
and bound as one, fell,
and drowned, without being unbound.
This day our bodies grew
stretched out to Earth’s limits,
orbited there, melded there
to one globe of wax, or a meteor’s flame.
A strange door opened, between us,
and someone, with no face as yet,
waited for us there.
Pablo Neruda
I’m just now reading Lingis for the first time, so far so good.
I’m a long time fan and can’t wait to see what tMorton and others come up with for Sparrow’s new journal.
http://www.focusing.org/apm_papers/lingis.html
http://www.janushead.org/8-2/lingis.pdf