Traces

I used to love blogging because I loved leaving traces of my life. I said it below: I throw documents over my shoulder and I continue down my path.

I got my first tattoo yesterday. That is not a document that I can throw over my shoulder. It is a document that is literally on my right thigh.

I had an image in mind for several years. It spoke to my thinking, spoke to many of my concerns. Now it is on my body. Last night, as I fell asleep with my leg wrapped in saran wrap, I thought to myself: "I no longer understand what this image means."

Perhaps someday I'll understand again.

Listening to Kacey Musgraves after Reading Merleau-Ponty and Gadamer

I'm fond of pop music. Recently, I have been taken with Kacey Musgraves' new record 'Golden Hour'. One reviewer said that she 'sings simply about the world as if she's the first person to notice, and you're the first one she's telling.' This is an apt statement. One of my favorite songs on the record, 'Oh, What a World', strikes that difficult balance between wonder and naivete. 

As I listened to the record today I was struck by a connection between her singing and some of my recent reading. In the last six months I have had the fortune of being exposed to the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Hans-Georg Gadamer. I read a portion of Merleau-Ponty's The Visible and the Invisible, a chapter called 'The Chiasm / The Intertwining', and large portions of Gadamer's Truth and Method. I continue to have misgivings about both the phenomenological and hermeneutic traditions, but now isn't the time for me to explore my inadequately grasped apprehensions. There is, however, something profound in both of those books. I want to write on them briefly, in the context of Musgraves' singing. I include the entirety of the lyrics to her song 'Love is a Wild Thing':

'You can't find it sitting on a shelf in a store
If you try to hide it, it's gonna shine even more

Even if you lose it, it will find you
There's no way to stop it, but they'll try to

Running like a river trying to find the ocean
Flowers in the concrete
Climbing over fences, blooming in the shadows
Places that you can't see
Coming through the melody when the night bird sings
Love is a wild thing, yeah

Oh, I can feel it, magic in your fingertips
And I can hear it in the words coming off your lips

Even if you lose me, I will find you
There's no way to stop it, so don't try to

Running like a river trying to find the ocean
Flowers in the concrete
Climbing over fences, blooming in the shadows
Places that you can't see
Coming through…'

How ordinary these words sound. So much of her music reeks of these potential platitudes. But somehow she manages to infuse them with life, with a genuine seeing of the normally-too-familiar-to-be-seen.

The crucial word for my reflections here is 'wild'. When she says 'love is wild thing' it would be possible to interpret 'wild' in the sense of 'crazy', 'unpredictable', or 'uncontrolled'. I think her real meaning, however, is closer to the sense of 'wild' as 'of the natural world', 'growing in a natural or uncultivated way'. Her lyrics make this clear enough. 'Running like a river trying to find the ocean...', 'Flowers in the concrete'... I am left with the sense of love as something that inexplicably pervades the natural world in the same way that life constantly appears in the most unexpected places. Life and love find their ways. 

It is clear that while her imagery begins with the natural world (flowers, rivers, birds, so on) these insights similarly apply to the experience of human love. 'I can feel it, magic in your fingertips/And I can hear it in the words coming off your lips.' The experience of human love is an experience of discovery, the experience of a force outside of us that demands it be reckoned with. Love is wild in that it grows around us. We are reapers, not sowers. 

Merleau-Ponty and Gadamer provide insights into this sort of experience that I think worth exploring. I will not cite them, I do not have that kind of time these days.

The major thrust of MP's essay 'The Chiasm/The Intertwining' is to work out something like a phenomenology of nature. This phenomenology of nature, in turn, is based on the experience of vision. The visual field, according to MP, implies the existence of the tactile field. Vision palpates, he says. To be able to see is to imply the capacity to touch. Our bodies appear in the visual field along with the rest of reality. From the experience of seeing our own body in the visual field we can infer that we belong to the fundamental natural order. It is impossible to look at our bodies without knowing that our bodies are seamlessly intertwined with our minds, or with thinking that is, in principle, hidden from the view of others. The visibility of our bodies implies the invisibility of our thoughts. The human experience is unintelligible unless we accept that the visible necessarily implies the invisible, or that bodily comportion necessarily implies thoughts that 'give rise' to those actions. This intertwining is too intimate in our lives to be cleanly separated. But our thinking demands that we make this statement about the necessary dependence of the visible and the invisible in human experience.

This idea that the visible field necessarily implies the existence of the invisible, in the sense of 'thought' or 'meaning' that governs visible movement, applies to the entirety of nature. It is obvious that animals, like humans, are unintelligible except from their assumed inner lives. The visible action of a squirrel implies their invisibile inner life. This is true also of a rock falling down a hill, or a tree rustling in the wind. All that is visible necessarily implies the existence of something invisible. The experience of intelligibility implies this relationship between the visible and the invisible. 

Intelligibility itself, I am tempted to say, is this relationship between the visible and the invisible.

The translator, Alphonso Lingis, claims that MP was working towards a conception of what he called 'wild logos', or meaning that pervades the natural world. I lied when I said I wouldn't cite. This long quotation captures what I have been attempting to say here: 

"Already our existence as seers... and especially our existence as sonorous beings for others and for ourselves contain everything required for others and for ourselves contain everything required for there to be speech from the one to the other, speech about the world. And, in a sense, to understand a phrase is nothing else than to fully welcome it in its sonorous being, or, as we put it so well, to hear what it says.... The meaning is not on the phrase like the butter on the bread, like a second layer of 'psychic reality' spread over the sound: it is the totality of what is said, the integral of all the differentiations of the verbal chain; it is given with the words for those who have ears to hear. And conversely the whole landscape is overrun with words as with an invasion, it is henceforth but a variant of speech before our eyes, and to speak of its 'style' is in our view to form a metaphor. In a sense the whole of philosophy, as Husserl says, consists in restoring a power to signify, a birth of meaning, or a wild meaning, an expression of experience by experience, which in particular clarifies the special domain of language. And in a sense, as Valery said, language is everything, since it is the voice of no one, since it is the very voice of the things, the waves, and the forests. And what we have to understand is that there is no dialectical reversal from one of these views to the other; we do not have to reassemble them into a synthesis: they are two aspects of the reversibility which is the ultimate truth" (155, my emphasis). 

If we are serious about taking human experience as a guide to the nature of reality, then something like this account seems necessary to me. Just as bodily comportion is unintelligible without reference to the 'invisible' domain of thought, so the world's activity, its movement, is not intelligible without reference to its invisibility. We live in the midst of wild logos, or natural meaning.

If we live in the midst of wild logos, nay, are wild logos, then it follows that all activity is a form of speech or writing. If we are political creatures, which we are, it follows that all action is not only speech or writing, but dialog. If all speech or activity is dialog, then it is not up to us what we are or what we say. This is one of the lessons that I initially learned from my friend Collingwood, but that I have recently reapproached through Gadamer. I won't say much about Gadamer except that he is a strong voice for the language as an ontological condition. Where he falls short, I fear, is that his is an exclusively human account. With MP, I see the possibility of expanding Gadamer's account to include the whole of the natural world, a conception of all being as dialogical.

What does this have to do with Kacey Musgraves? 

Love is indeed a wild thing. It is part of the wild logos. It is, at that, a particularly dialogal form of the wild logos in that it is the ultimate relational experience. Or, at the very least, the most unequivocally good form of the wild logos. When asked: What is good in itself? I am tempted to answer: Love.

I am in a position that I have been in before: there is so much stuff between me and another person. It isn't my choice that it is there. The space between us is full of it whether I like it or not. But somehow it is still a choice how we relate to what is there. I am unable, at this time, to act on what is there, because the other person is not able or willing to do so. They have other dialogues that they find more pressing or worthy than fully dialogging with me. I find this at odds with my current life task.

My current life task, I will dramatically and flippantly declare for the purpose of this writing, is to explore the notion of listening as a way of being. If the world speaks, then it is up to me to listen. If even my own existence is a kind of speech, it is up to me to listen to myself. If my relationships with other people speak in their own way, it is up to me to listen to what those relationships say. To do otherwise feels like an experience of dishonesty. This is what pains me. I cannot dialog partially with them. They cannot dialog fully with me. They have other wild logos to listen to.

Perhaps this notion of listening as a way of being is best described in the language of situation. I will be reading some more Gendlin this summer and so will have some opportunity to reflect on his notion of situatedness and focusing and all that good stuff. 

It occurs to me that I'm really just trying, again, still, to grapple with something that Collingwood described as deference to the situation at hand. I conclude with a long quote from him:

"The rational activity which historians have to study is never free from compulsion: the compulsion to face the facts of its own situation. The more rational it is, the more completely it undergoes this compulsion. To be rational is to think; and for a man who proposes to act, the thing that it is important to think about is the situation in which he stands. With regard to this situation, he is not free at all. It is what it is, and neither he nor anyone else can ever change that. For though the situation consists altogether of thoughts, his own and other people's, it cannot be changed by a change of mind on the part of himself or anyone else. If minds change, as they do, this merely means that with the lapse of time a new situation has arisen. For a man about to act, the situation is his master, his oracle, his god. Whether his action is to prove successful or not depends on whether he grasps the situation rightly or not. If he is a wise man, it is not until he has consulted his oracle, done everything in his power to find out what the situation is, that he will make even the most trivial plan. And if he neglects the situation, the situation will not neglect him. It is not one of those gods that leave an insult unpunished."

I don't know what to do about my situation. Waiting is always an option.