Category: Giveness

L’Écho de la Harpe

Featured Monica Carroll4 Comments

Who do you summon when the words won’t play?

Amable Tatsu (1795-1885) wrote to the lyre, silent and dusty, hooked above the wainscoting.

On silent days listen for the echo. That will be enough.

What is your harp, Writer?

L’Écho de la Harpe

D’un souffle vagabond la brise de la nuit
Sur ta corde muette éveille un léger brait:
Telle dort en mon sein cette harpe cachée,
Et que seule la Muse a quelquefois touchée.
Alors qu’un mot puissant, un songe, un souvenir,
Une pensée errante et douce à retenir,
L’effleurent en passant d’une aile fugitive,
Elle vibre soudain ; et mon âme attentive,
Émue à cet accord qui se perd dans les cieux,
Garde du son divin l’écho mélodieux.

Tastu, Amable 1827. Poésies. Paris: J. Tastu

Familiar with ostranenie

Featured Monica Carroll3 Comments

How do you revive your writing eyes, Writer?

Seeing the world, rather than merely recognising it, is an offer of complicating perception. Agents of estrangement can bring about ostranenie (after Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky). Children and the child-like, animals wild and free, the stranger, the alien, the visitor, the guest; all can move us into seeing.

What can a phenomenologist see when they look at the world?

Monica Carroll5 Comments

Husserl talks about gegebenheit when describing the process of perceiving something in the world. In translation to English we usually use the word ‘givenness’. Givenness illustrates two aspects of the world. It is a quality of that which is given, or perceived, as well as the act of it being giving.

Givenness has a generous, immediate and egalitarian quality. It is a process of offering rather than exchange or ‘having’. The world perceived ‘displays’ and ‘contains’ givenness. It is a condition. It is not ‘displayed’ for us to have, nor are we asked a price for it.

Givenness is a quality of the process of being. The givenness of a tree is not hidden nor delayed from our perception, it is immediately present. The givenness is neither reserved for certain types of creatures or those with endorsed qualifications. It is there for all and every and always.

If you look you will see that the world gives itself to you. You don’t need any documented credentials, or socially endorsed status, or sanctioned knowledge. You don’t have to be a celebrity, or a person with a title, or CEO of McMeaters.

The whole world is given to you; how will you describe what you perceive?

 

Image: Delegation admiring Tom Bass sculpture ‘Ethos’

 

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