Perception as resurrection

Merleau-Ponty (1945, 95) writes of the

paradox … of all being in the world: when I move towards a world I bury my perceptual and practical intentions in objects which ultimately appear prior to and external to those intentions, and which nevertheless exist for me only in so far as they arouse in me thoughts and volitions.

This ongoing resurrection of buried intentions, their transformation into a world of objects, rolls up the meaning cycle, encapsulating the inside-outness of the world.

So Man looks out in tree & herb & fish & bird & beast
Collecting up the scatterd portions of his immortal body
Into the Elemental forms of every thing that grows

— Blake, Four Zoas, PPB 370

In Blake ‘what we see in nature is our own body turned inside out’ (Frye 1947, 349); ‘the fallen world is the eternal one turned inside out’ (291).

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