The Insomniac Walk

I

A sleepless night had left me irritable and irascible. Feeling co-opted by sleepless forces, my body was left to wander on an aimless and indeterminate excursion; an insomniac walk if you will. Finding myself on the mossy borders of the UEA Norfolk broad, acquiescence soon turned to contentment as the downpour and freshly concocted mud percolated through both my shoes and socks. I was lacking functionality and worldliness, yet I was forced to face the bare bruteness of the present, what the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas would call the ‘anonymous rustling of existence.’ There is no escape in this condition, no safe chamber of slumber to return to, no sojourn of sleep to find solace. It became impossible to withdraw into my shell. I was vulnerable. Naked and exposed to the elements.

Robbed of the comfort of the habitual, however, my peripherals were infused with a different kind of vibrancy. The fringes became less of a backdrop, facilitating my worldly projects, but engendered a striking attunement towards the minutiae that inhabited this now quite explicitly shared space. A robin rustling in a thicket was so close in proximity, I felt stunned by this species’ trust, as if I was the wild boar that would unearth the topsoil, aiding the robin’s hungry search for earthworms. Scarlet elf cups began to appear and disappear in their droves, as I found myself thinking like this red blooded mushroom, attaching myself willfully to the moss covered branches. A shared atmosphere of elemental hunger hung in the air between me and the robin as I began digging in the earth for these cups of dew intended for the thirsty elf. 

A timely encounter with ‘the man of stones’, a sculpture made from bronze stationed on a quasi promontory of land between the river and the broad, lugging the seemingly cumbersome weight of flint, led me to identify with what at first seemed like a solitary figure. Yet on closer inspection, this figure was quite intimately connected with the reed beds and undergrowth with which it stood, his feet too sunken into moisten earth. A homology was drawn between our state of exposure to the elements. Referring to the statues of Auguste Rodin, Levinas suggests that ‘reality is posited in them in its exotic nakedness as a worldless reality, arising from a shattered world’. It too appeared as if this geological creature was emerging from a shattered world, perhaps a world not too dissimilar from our own. 

While the man of stones was seemingly burdened by evanescence, sinking gradually into the reed beds, he also appeared to carry the weight of a geological past, laden with the quarried flint of the palaeolithic and composed of the alloyed tin and copper of the bronze age. Bearing the weight of the past on his shoulders, he also seemed, more strikingly so, to bear the weight of the present. I felt a contiguous bond with this geological creature in the very anonymous elementality of insomnia.

In this piece of art, just as in insomnia, sensation had returned to the impersonality of elements. This impersonality fostered by insomnia no longer felt like a disorder, but roused a sense of adhesive intimacy with the other-than-human, an ‘elementality’, if you like, a mentality suffused with elements. The sheer nudity of the elemental, engendered by sleep deprivation, may well have forsaken me from the enclosure of my shell, and yet the composite shell of calcium carbonate, constitutive of our elemental bond with the other-than-human, endured obstinately. 

Insomnia quite felicitously captures the stickiness of our ecological situation, a situation we cannot merely escape from or wake to find that it was all a dream. There are no dreams here, yet this is not synonymous with the absence of hope. As Levinas writes ‘Hope hopes for the present itself.’ This bruteness of mere presence constitutive of insomnia may well encumber the worldliness of the world from operating and yet the anonymous rustling of the robin in the thickets and the anonymous elementality of the man of stones awaken us to something still more primordial. Bearing a handful of scarlet cups, I am reminded of alternative presents, a present that needn’t be endlessly deferred, nor relegated to the past. 

II

Something is consolidated in the very sedimentation of flint, a stable and sturdy present and yet this present is always vulnerable, always subject to being shattered into the innumerable pieces of quartz that compose it. Underlying the anonymity of the present is a capacious space of difference, where robins and earthworms, scarlet cups and moss reside, where reed beds, flint and bronze are cohabitants. In spite of the sheer anonymity of the rustling, something unique still makes itself felt. Notwithstanding the anonymity of the elemental, this geological creature still bears the name ‘the man of stones.’ 

The ancestrality of such a creature is neither archaic nor anachronistic, nor is it a petrified relic of a putatively stable past. It is very much part of the present, a sign of how one can live resolutely like the element and yet vulnerable like the stone. Being exposed to the elements does not equate to being resigned. The river will flood the promontory, as the man of stones accretes more miscellaneous objects, whether ephemeral like an autumnal leaf or enduring as a plastic bottle cap. As we too accrete more deposits of sediment, weathered by the elements, we must learn to coexist, to be laden with the other-than-human with little resignation. 

The insomniac walk, a rhythm without rhyme or reason, yet syncopated and uncannily attuned. Here, accents fall on the places we don’t ordinarily expect them to. A shattered world might look like a frightening place, but in stepping out of the groove of familiar rhythms we find ourselves on the most intriguing paths. Emerging from the detritus and debris like the man of stones, we find ourselves face to face with a present that can no longer be ignored, as it glistens like the incandescent ember, we are drawn into its molten core.

References

 E. Levinas, Existence and Existents, Kluwer Academic Publishers, tr. A. Lingis, 1988

Merleau-Ponty’s slippery Flesh

What is the Flesh? For David Abram it is the tissue that binds us to the sentient earth; for Melissa Clark it pertains to the lives of sentient creatures and for Bryan Bannon it is all relations between singular bodies, living and nonliving. The problem with these approaches is that the Flesh either gets circumscribed to the point of seeming arbitrarily parochial or holistically stretched out to the point that it seems to accommodate absolutely anything at all. What I would like to suggest is that the Flesh of the world pertains to the conditions for life, while the style of the flesh pertains to styles of both living and dying. In lieu of invoking the ground as the grounds of this fleshy style, I would like to invoke the image of water, which pops up in several passages in The Visible and the Invisible. When describing the Flesh, Merleau-Ponty writes ‘To designate it, we should need the old term “element,” in the sense it was used to speak of water, air, earth, and fire, that is, in the sense of a general thing, midway between the spatio-temporal individual and the idea, a sort of incarnate principle that brings a style of being wherever there is a fragment of being.’ Whilst Merleau-Ponty is reluctant to identify Flesh as water as such, his invocation of elements pertains, as he outlines, to the ‘old’ sense of the term, as opposed to its scientific meaning, that is in terms of the chemical composition one would find in the periodic table. What this ‘old’ sense of the term might mean remains vague, but one could plausibly conjecture that Merleau-Ponty is referring to the Pre-Socratic sense of the term. Thales, as Aristotle recounted, was allegedly the first to posit water as the first material cause. But this was indeed a slippery slope, as attested by continual efforts to seek more foundational elements, such as fire and air respectively.  For Aristotle, there is a naivety to postulating one particular element as a grounding cause and this is because not all causes are strictly material. Yet, for Heidegger, the pre-Socratic interest in the elements wasn’t merely an investigation into material causes themselves, but was more importantly an investigation into what allowed meaning and the world to appear in the first place. If we are to consider the world as significance a la human significance then it becomes clear that the element in this sense might only relate to the human realm, and yet the necessary coalescence between the elements of the natural world in Pre-Socratic philosophy (water, air, fire, earth) and Heidegger’s fourfold (earth, sky, divinities, mortals) suggest that meaning and world are not all too human. Merleau-Ponty, however, arguably takes this further than Heidegger.

Taking seriously the work of Jakob Johann von Uexküll, who effectively initiated the field of biosemiotics with his conception of the Umwelt, Merleau-Ponty’s Fleshy notion of the elemental perhaps takes this to its extremes when he declares ‘language is everything, since it is the voice of no one, since it is the very voice of the things, the waves, and the forests.’ But is it everything in this sense? Merleau-Ponty appears to be referring to particular things to demonstrate the Flesh, e.g. waves and forests. Again, water features in the imagery of the waves and yet the waves are recalcitrant to reification. Rather than being the primordial layer, water acts as a significant condition for the emergence of fleshy styles (think of the first signs of life beginning in water). As Aristotle suggests, regarding the reasons for Thales’ attributing water with a foundational cause, he most likely saw ‘that the nutriment of all things is moist’. Instead of seeing water as the first principle, water can be recognised as essential to all living things. Notwithstanding this biological and ecological fact, there is something intuitive about the significance of water. Water as element or Flesh is something essential not only to life in the biological sense, but also in the phenomenological sense. As Merleau-Ponty writes

‘Perception is not first a perception of things, but a perception of elements (water, air . . .) of rays of the world, of things which are dimensions, which are worlds, I slip on these “elements”.

This element of water has a necessarily worldly dimension; it is essential to worldliness itself, but this worldliness is not confined to humans but disperses itself amongst living things, whose Fleshy relations are necessarily intimate and vulnerable. This is suggested when Merleau-Ponty asks ‘Why would not the synergy exist among different organisms, if it is possible within each?’. This Fleshy synergy is not only sentient, but symbiotic. Bonds are able to take place between nonliving entities and yet these bonds are not necessarily symbiotic nor Fleshy. The living and the dying, however, form an intimate chiasm in their capacity to be truly exposed to another, to respond to another through the medium of water. 

In an age of water insecurity, where waterways are threatened by continual pollution and commodification, an aquatic philosophy is perhaps needed now more than ever. What could this look like? Perhaps in Merleau-Pontian terms, this slippery and fleshy philosophy would be a philosophy of vulnerability, one that recognised our contiguous bond with the elemental. Water, like air in the Irigaryian sense, takes us beyond the ground and into something more fluid. This philosophy of the flesh, where the distinction between ourselves and the world is entirely blurred, as demonstrated famously by the two hands touching, is also strikingly encapsulated by one’s immersion in water. In a river, a lake or the ocean, one’s distinction between body and environs is entirely shaken. This needn’t be some humdrum piece of nature writing. Instead, this sentiment extends beyond humans and even animals and applies to all living beings who rely on this watery otherness to exist. Interestingly, water is not merely a source out there, but is always with us - think of the fact that the human body is made up of 55-60% water. Yet water too has a dark side. In aphotic zones, the bodies of refugees sink. Away from sight, water is forgotten, something to leave for human waste and remains. But this will catch up, as water levels rise and pollutants contaminate our sources of hydration. Water cannot be ignored, for it is what makes us vulnerable, vulnerable to slipping into death, but also to slipping into life.

References

D. Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, Vintage Books, 1997

Aristotle. Physics. Hackett Publishing Company. tr. C. D. C. Reeve. 2018

B. Bannon, Flesh and Nature: Understanding Merleau-Ponty's Relational Ontology, Research in Phenomenology 41(3):327-357, 2011

M. Clark, “Ontology, Ethics, and Sentir: Properly Situating Merleau-Ponty.” Environmen-tal Values 11 (2002): 211–25

Greaves, Tom. "Environmental Arts as First Philosophy: This too a NeoPresocratic Manifesto." Environmental Humanities 3, no. 1 (2013): 149-55

M. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, Northwestern University, tr. A. Lingis, 1968,