distance

“As your perspective of the world increases not only is the pain it inflicts on you less but also its meaning. Understanding the world requires you to keep a certain distance from it. Things that are too small to see with the naked eye, such as molecules and atoms, we magnify. Things that are too large, such as cloud formations, river deltas, constellations, we reduce. At length we bring it within the scope of our senses and we stabilise it with fixer. When it has been fixed, we call it knowledge. Throughout our childhood and teenage years we strive to attain the correct distance from objects and phenomena. We read, we learn, we experience, we make adjustments. Then one day, we reach the point where all the necessary distances have been set, all the necessary systems have been put in place. That is when time begins to pick up speed. “

– Karl Ove Knausgård, “A death in the family”

 

Inside

Inside and outside are inseparable. The world is wholly inside and I am wholly outside of myself – Maurice Merleau Ponty –  Phenomenology of Perception p 407.  

Phenomenology?                                                                                                                                     A philosophy which strives, not to explain the world as if from outside, but to give voice to the world from our experienced situation within it, recalling us to our participation in the here-and-now, rejuvenating our sense of wonder at the fathomless things, events and powers that surround us on every hand.

cave 2

I am obsessed with Merleau Ponty’s writings!                                                                                           How he sees the body as the very subject of awareness (not only the rational mind) – The body as it actually experiences things. Bringing us back in touch with our body and the sensuous world around us.

Caving 1

Ultimately, to acknowledge the life of the body, and to affirm our solidarity with its physical form, is to acknowledge our existence as one of the earth’s animals, and so to remember the organic basis of our thoughts and our intelligence

passion

words, words, words

I wanted to feel the blood running back into my veins, even at the cost of annihilation. I wanted to shake the stone and light out of my system. I wanted the dark fecundity of nature, the deep well of the womb, silence, or else the lapping of the black waters of death. I wanted to be that night which the remorseless eye illuminated, a night diapered with stars and trailing comets. To be of night so frighteningly silent, so utterly incomprehensible and eloquent at the same time. Never more to speak or to listen or to think.

Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer