Page 105 - Contribution To Phenomenology

98 MAXINE SHEETS-JOHNSTONE

that are my eyes widen in curiosity, grow vacant in boredom, flit in
discomfort, constrict in fright, glisten in rapture, harden in anger, I know
the feel of all of these mystic circles. I know their dynamics. I have a felt
bodily sense of their meaning. Thus, when I see the mystic circles which
are the eyes of another, I intuitively recognize their expressive character.
When I go beyond the intuited qualitative meaning of the mystic
circles—their curiosity, apprehension, or boredom, for example—toward
the density which is the full bodily presence of the other, I allow my own
seeing eyes a greater space of vision beyond me. To the degree that I
begin to fathom the mysterious interior of the other, I let go of my own
inwardness. I cannot, after all, be in two places at once: either I stay
centered inside the circles of my own being or I expand the boundaries
of those circles toward the other. To the degree I enter into the mystic
circle of the other, there is an ebbing of my own felt bodily sense and
a growing sense of the mystic inwardness of the other, an inwardness
that remains dark, that is not illuminated by momentary flashes of light
or by images, but that is pregnant with the rich, interminable, awesome
density of another being.

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Eyes are organs of sight; but they are also organs of social relation-
ship. They are the privileged site of our contact with others. Fundamental
aspects of our intercorporeal semantics are rooted in just such aspects of
ourselves, in our being the bodies we are. Because we tend to forget that
an intersubjectivity is first and foremost an intercorporeality, we tend to
forget that meanings are articulated by living bodies. Common linguistic
and conceptual focus is in fact wrongly placed: an intersubjectivity is
more properly conceived and labelled an intercorporeality. We are there
for each other first of all in the flesh. An understanding of intercorporeal
archetypal meanings demands that we recognize this fact It demands
secondly that we recognize the seenness of each other and the communal
somatic verities that go with that seenness. Third, it demands that we
recognize not merely what we do as forms of life, but recognize ourselves
as a form of life.
With further respect to an intercorporeal semantics, we tend to forget
that the perceived world is akeady alive with significations, that it is not
dead and inert until we christen things with names, or indeed, as if we
christen things into being by giving them a name. As the previous