Merleau-Ponty: Where What Can Be Done

“Sound always direct us toward its content, its signification for us; in visual presentation, to the contrary, we can much more easily ‘abstract’ from the content and we are much more oriented toward the location in space where the object is situated.” Thus for visual people, where music must be words, melody leading to the next signification. The content of hearing determines the next sound, the next meaning. Abstraction emotional flight alone, steered by composer, composition, form. Thus trained she feared lifting her pen from the paper. She was taught to draw dreams in one continuous line. Melodic action predictive in a sense. The location information, informed, informative. Stuttering she lifted it, the noise it made halting. Morse. Perjorative but new | ly invigorating, while trapped. It allowed her to smell : dream.

The soul plays on the perceptual, untrap it. Ekstasis. She thought Dyonisian? More, and different. The perceptual impinging, and the body impinging, on the soul’s capabilities. But dream? Dream can extend : the soul. Religious dreams the most, the some. Or for some, constrain. It’s dream. It is dream that extends. Whether awake or otherwise, drawing in. Breathing, broken or line. The artist performs | embodies, plasticitly (whatever the time allows, requires, inspires or agency forms, on its own -if such avenue of will is allowed | described, describable, necessary : it’s not, not for this) the artist, in all senses | on all, senses, awakens and asleeps and adream or lifts the pen off the page. Words flowing where places all over.

CITATION
Kurt Goldstein 1931 as quoted in Merleau-Ponty, p.116.
EXCAVATION
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (1945), translated by Donald A. Landes (2012)