Waking up as A different person.
The night of bioluminescence. The hour of hang gliding. The visceral recoil to the streets of Philadelphia suburbs after returning from Maui. I have been granted three memories to share with you for this essay. I have other memories but they have now hidden themselves into longer term memory structures and the gate to those structures is now no longer permeable.
Most of my days are sterile by comparison. I sit at a steel and wood desk that barely retains the memory of the tree. I type into a white box that has no trace of nature. My desktop screen saver tries to save the day by providing me with a forest and sunlight in which dust sparkles like mist. The Roku screensaver is tiny circular spheres flying around in the pitch dark that are faint imitation of fireflies. Everywhere around me the lines are angular : superstraight and right angled. My intelligence is then abstracted into modernity and my animal intelligence fades into the nature that awaits at the koi pond.
As you can tell, I slept in the afternoon and woke up as a different person. All you have to do is read the prior essay to notice the difference.
THIS POST TO BE CONT’D.
SO THE RECUPERATION OF THE INCARNATE, SENSORIAL DIMENSION of experience brings with it a recuperation of the living landscape in which we are corporally embedded. As we return to our senses, we gradually discover our sensory perceptions to be simply our part of a vast, interpenetrating webwork of perceptions and sensations borne by countless other bodies—supported, that is, not just by our-selves, but by icy streams tumbling down granite slopes, by owl wings and lichens, and by the unseen, imperturbable wind.
This intertwined web of experience is, of course, the “life-world” to which Husserl alluded to in his final writings, yet now the life-world has been disclosed as a profoundly carnal field, as this very dimension of smells and tastes and chirping rhythms warmed by the sun and shivering with the seeds. It is, indeed, nothing other than the bio-sphere—the matrix of earthly life in which we ourselves are embedded. Yet… this is not the biosphere as it is conceived by an abstract and objectifying science, not that complex assemblage of planetary mechanisms presumably being mapped and measured by our remote-sensing satellites; it is, rather, the biosphere as it is experienced and lived from within by the intelligent body—by the attentive human animal who is entirely a part of the world that he, or she, experiences.
Chapter end of Philosophy on the Way to Ecology, in THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS.
