Abstract
This paper focuses specifically on three poems: ‘The Driver’, ‘The Slope’ and ‘Incident at Galore Hill’ and the relationship between poetry and place. In trying to prepare the ground for a philosophy which can deal with what he terms the ‘phenomenal field’, Merleau- Ponty spends a number of pages early in The Phenomenology of Perception clarifying what he sees as the limits and traps of several narrowly psychological approaches to perception. Such psychologies set up the observed world as a transcendent domain which maps consciousness as if it were somehow separated out from the world, as if, to employ his phrase, there are two different ‘modes’ of being. In this paper I explore the relations between inside and outside and the perceiver and the perceived as well sensory experience in relation to poetry, in conjuction with discussions of Merleau-Ponty's philosophies.
Highlights
For the spoken version of this paper I read a number of poems, interspersing them with some of the comments made in the prose part of the paper
We have the peculiarly modern experience of walking from an illuminated interior to the dark outside. Whether this inside–outside relationship is marked by a feature as distinctive as light thrown from the open back door into the darkness or whether it is marked by a series of inconspicuous glances through windows, half-noticed exits and entrances as we carry the rubbish out to the carport, or sit out in one of the chairs along the veranda, the place we live in comes to terms with, arrives at its own limits in relation to the environment, the surrounds, the location
It sets up its own field of terms—words, thoughts, markers, journeys—for where it is
Summary
A psychology is always brought face to face with the problem of the constitution of the world. We have the peculiarly modern experience of walking from an illuminated interior to the dark outside Whether this inside–outside relationship is marked by a feature as distinctive as light thrown from the open back door into the darkness or whether it is marked by a series of inconspicuous glances through windows, half-noticed exits and entrances as we carry the rubbish out to the carport, or sit out in one of the chairs along the veranda, the place we live in comes to terms with, arrives at its own limits in relation to the environment, the surrounds, the location. VOLUME12 NUMBER1 MAR2006 someone’, says Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘anyone at all, each and everyone, and this one and none other’.5
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