I cannot understand the function of the living body except by enacting it myself, and except in so far as I am a body which rises toward the world.
— Merleau-Ponty (1945, 87)
If you haven’t engaged the whole bodymind in trying to answer it yourself, you don’t have ears to hear the answer to a living question.
The signs are there for you to read. The author is only here as a tour guide (or sometimes – as in this digression – a detour guide).
Even though it’s all about you, there’s a catch to reading these signs: to make sense of them, you have to believe that there are other subjects, and that i (the author) was one of them. It’s an odd sort of collaboration where i supplied the words and you provide the meaning. I’m in past tense because the script is mine, while the performance and the presence are yours. It’s a strange arrangment, but that’s how it goes for literate social animals like ourselves. As Laurie Anderson used to say,
This is the time, and this is the record of the time.