October 22nd, 2016

                                                            Impressions of Gulfport


I've begun reading Jean-Luc Marion's Being Given.  That lead me to look at my Ph. D. dissertation (written over 40 years ago, can you believe it?!).  Rereading it again, I realized that even then I was becoming drawn more and more toward contemplation--especially as Zen practices it.
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I also was reminded of what I wrote in one of my earliest posts on this blog about impatience with philosophical discourse.  Here is Marion:

"To see a painting it is not enough to see it--to gather with the sense of sight the information found on a colored being. To this view must be added . . .  the event of its apparition in person . . . To the ontic visibility of the painting must be added a super-visibility . . .its upsurge.  This exceptional visibility . . . imposes . . . (itself on) me, in the flesh, in person, without screen."

Marion's convoluted prose weaving through his convoluted arguments somehow make me think of Wittgenstein's simpler:  "Don't think, just look."  Or maybe even more simply, what Basho wrote:

                              A crow
                     has settled on a bare branch--
                             autumn evening.