Writing is a
solitary act. The text, an audience of self, an endless bending, folding back
on itself, transfers experience between the writer and the written. I knead,
mold myself in the process, no catharsis, only now and then a collision…writing
has become a second nature, second only to the movement which comes first, that
which motivates. A momentum that wounds up the loosely unraveled threads of
time and space translates between the self and the text, from language to visceral
action, effortlessly, naturally. A dominant forging of what was there,
collecting, fermenting, breathing shapes, re-shaping, exhaling and taking in
again. Not predictable, but almost certain.
It begins as a kind of
swelling, slow, but urgent pulse of mounting energy. Somewhere at the core of
the body, the somatic energy traverses spherically throughout a torso, a steady
pulse that leads to a threshold where I surrender to the moment just ahead, the
moment of not yet. The duration itself is part of the body and its movement.
Both time and the body surrender the calculated intentionality to the impetus
in being-ness, this-ness itself. Time takes on another texture. It softens,
slows, gives up the linearity of measurable flow, carries, caresses the body,
swells into the fringes of the sensate.
The immediacy, lived
experience of narrative inquiry, the somatic imperative and what it brings to
philosophy, cannot be found in calculating, analytical academic expository
treatises, which pay more attention, the formulaic structure and particular
vocabulary that is established within the academic field of philosophy. To
recognize the transience of duration requires letting go of this apprehension
of consciously looking toward the next moment, pre-conceiving, infantilizing
the future before it has a chance to unfold in the time’s ravenous summoning.
The
fullness of the lived, vital moment of touch, of contact, coincides with
the
moment of surrender, the moment of release into the swelling of the
corporeal
sensibility, where, Alphonso Lingis agrees, “a sensuality of life exposes
itself to the elements, enjoying its exposure”.
This
surrender to the summoning, this moment of contact is multidirectional,
reciprocal, it is a simultaneous offering and craving, it gives and takes, it
combines, unites, the moment of approach and opening up to the other who, as
the self, both summons and surrenders. There are many sensibilities and
tangibles that motivate the poetics of the flesh. But amidst multilayered
affects, dispositions and durations, there is the possibility of that
synchronous moment when all the parts of the body, time and space, coalesce and
mingle in a temporal approach and flow for an instant, in pure duration. Silent
language, the tongue-less ventriloquist of senses that softly distort the
plotline of method.
Each moment, I am similar,
but never the same. Not layered,
but loosened, bits that move apart and join back together for a brief contact,
and then float asunder in a pulse of the movement that crosses the boundary of
skin. The time and the writer synchronize, articulate, couple, tangle in
tousled fragmentation, a fragrant, ebullient, tumid accord, a chord, an
arpeggio, made of pieces, being infinity. Each moment ornates in a delightful
confusion. Each moment a child of duration.
And my flesh, it is not a
surface, it is meat in a bowl, a moist summoning. My pencil becomes a supple
lance between my fingers and I hurl it into this moment. Something dislodges
and begins to travel. Small clusters stirring. These are my thoughts clasped
together by the fingerprints left in my hair.
