The Visionary Space of Story

Abstract

> Friendship, magnanimity, wit in conversation shared in laughter and tears, and truthfulness exist in the contact with the you that you affirm yourself to be, with your visions, respecting you, listening to your story.1 In The First Person Singular , Alphonso Lingis writes the subject—an I—as an embodied encounter with others. The I–and–you encounter happens in the sharing and receiving of stories—though not stories composed in a rationalist or logical sense of this happened, that happened; who and what and why and how. No. Lingis says our stories are not tales of “plans, initiatives, achievements that would be the diagram of [our lives].”2 Nor are our stories “inner representation[s], which [we] contemplate and figure out, find the meaning of, understand.”3 Instead, our stories are formed through and out of the vast open space of “an outside where unintelligible, visibly random forces hold sway.”4 This “visionary space” is not one in which we make ourselves intelligible and worthy to a scrutinizing other—reader and/or listener—but rather, an offering of the “halos, mirages of the world” in which we lead lives that makes us laugh and weep, that make us “cry out blessings or curses.”5 In Lingis's estimation, readers and/or listeners must not …