“Our view of man will remain superficial so long as we fail to go back to the origin of silence, so long as we fail to find, beneath the chatter of words, the primordial silence, and as long as we do not describe the action which breaks this silence. The spoken word is a gesture, and its meaning, a world.” Maurice Merleau-Ponty
I loved your name before I loved your thought,
the pronouncing of it:
Mooreeece Merlow Pontee.
My mouth/tongue/lips enjoyed the luscious vowels ~
melodious – almost a song.
I spotted your name printed on the spine
of a book in a bookstore
and discovered your patient book
lingering where philosophers failed to wait:
The Primacy of Perception
I read pages I could and couldn’t understand,
your words as a solvent in my idea spotted brain,
words that gave my body back to thought.
You, Maurice,
were putting first things first,
experience first before thought,
leaping beyond definitions to descriptions,
correcting the distortions made by the cloud
of knowing created by the middling mind.
Pushing us to the very point where things
apprehend us before we comprehend them,
in the split second before the consequences
of sequential of language kicks in.
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Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) was a French phenomenologist philosopher working on understanding how the body receives and organizes into experience the sensations of the perceived world. His most important book was The Primacy of Perception.