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the “there,” the “one same space,” (OE 85/147) the “one same being”; (OE 17/124) depthis the experience of the reversibility of dimensions, of a global “locality,” where all thedimensions are at once. (OE 65/140) Now, and perhaps this is not so well known,Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of depth (la profondeur) in “Eye and Mind,” refers us backto his early work in The Structure of Behavior on the Gestalt, to the relation of figure andground (le fond). Therefore, we can see how Merleau-Ponty is proceeding here (in PartIV). With the enigma of vision we have depth and therefore we have the background; nowwe need the figure.For Merleau-Ponty, the figure is generated by color and line. But, color and line, likeall the other dimensions, are not based in a “recipe,” as Merleau-Ponty says, for thevisible. It is not a question of adding other dimensions to the two of the canvas. The lackof a recipe means that painting, or more generally pictures, for Merleau-Ponty do notimitate nature. He is rejecting the traditional concept of imitation, which implies an externalrelation between the painter and something outside of him or herself. For Merleau-Ponty, the painter is not viewing something else from the outside. Instead, the painter isborn in the things by the concentration and coming to itself of the visible. This “beingborn in [dans] the things” is what Merleau-Ponty means when he speaks of the picturebeing “auto-figurative.” (OE 69/141) But, what is most important about this discussion inPart IV of “Eye and Mind” -- it seems to me that pages 69-72/141-42 are the heart of theessay; they overlap with the final pages of Chapter 4 of The Visible and the Invisible 26 -- is that, not only is the painter born in the things, but also the writer, or better, the poet.Here, through the idea of auto-figuration, Merleau-Ponty is trying to bring the languagearts back to painting, back to the visible. 27 First, Merleau-Ponty refers to Apollinaire,who said that there are phrases in a poem that do not appear to have been created but thatseem “to have formed themselves.” (OE 69/141) Then, second, Merleau-Ponty quotesMichaux as saying that Klee’s colors seem to have been born slowly upon the canvas, tohave emanated from “a primordial ground” (un fond primordial), “exhaled at the right spotlike a patina or mold.” Between these two comments we have an “et,” an “and,” whichimplies a comparison or better a compatibility between the colors forming themselves onthe canvas and the words forming themselves on the page, a compatibility between theeye that sees and the eye that reads. Here we must also refer to the intersection withFoucault. On the one hand, Apollinaire of course composed his poems as a calligram, thecalligram being what Magritte “unmakes,” according to Foucault, in This is not a Pipe.On the other, in Chapter Nine of Les mots et les choses, Foucault will say that an “et”connects the doubles that define man’s ambiguous existence. The “et” means thatMerleau-Ponty wants the painter and the poet -- in a word, man -- not on the inside ofGod (this would be large rationalism), but on the inside of the visible. Merleau-Ponty’sdefinition of art shows us that this “et” implies a mixture, an ambiguous relation of lightand feeling, of the visible and the invisible. Art, for Merleau-Ponty, is not a “skillfulrelation, from the outside, to a space and a world.” Instead, “art is the inarticulate cry, thevoice of light,” “la voix de la lumière.” (OE 70/142) In the course from 1961, “CartesianOntology and Contemporary Ontology,” Merleau-Ponty reproduces Valéry’s poem“Pythie,” which speaks of a voice of no one, the voice of the waves and the woods, which26Deleuze in his book on Foucault cites these final pages of The Visible and the Invisible. (VI 201-02/153-54 See Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (Paris: Minuit, 1986), 119 no. 39; English translation by SeánHand as Foucault (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 149 no. 38.27For more on Klee, Merleau-Ponty, and auto-figuration, see Stephen Watson, “On the Withdrawalof the Beautiful: Adorno and Merleau-Ponty’s Readings of Klee,” Chiasmi International 5 (2003): 201-21.See also Galen Johnson, “Thinking in Color: Merleau-Ponty and Klee,” in Veronique Fóti, ed., Merleau-Ponty: Difference, Materiality, Painting (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1996).134