RUNOUDEN PUOLUSTUS

aja; se ei ole este
niiden välissä, vaan niiden yhteydenpidon
väline. Kirjoituksen paksuus – kaukana
siitä että kilpailisi maailman paksuuden kanssa –
on päinvastoin sen ainoa
tapa päästä asioiden ytimeen,
tekemällä itsestään osa
aineellista maailmaa – siihen
absorboituneena. 55
55 Säkeistön kaksi viimeistä lausetta perustuvat seuraavaan Merleau-Pontyn
katkelmaan: ”It is that the thickness of flesh between the seer and the thing is
constitutive for the thing of tis corporeity; it is not an obstacle between them, it is
their means of communication... The thickness of the body, far from rivalling
that of the world, is on the contrary the sole means I have to go into the heart of
things, by making myself a world and by making them flesh.” ”The Intertwining
– The Chiasm”, luku 4. teoksessa The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude
Lefort, tr. Anphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1986), s.
135. Kiasma on painauma tai x:n muotoinen risteys tai risteymä. Sen merkitys
anatomisessa nomenklaturassa on sama; esimerkiksi optinen kiasma on silmistä
tulevien kuitujen risteyspiste, jossa ne yhdistyvät aivoihin.
Merleau-Ponty luonnehtii lihaa seuraavin sanoin: ”it is that the look is itself
incorporation of the seer into the visible, quest for itself, which is of it, within the
visible – it is that the visible of the world is not an envelope of uqale [a pellicle
of being without thickness], but what is between the qualia, a connective tissue of
exterior and interior horizon – it is as flesh offered to flesh that the visible has its
aseity [self-origination] […] whence vision is question and response… The
openness through flesh: the two leaves of my body and the leaves of the visible
world… It is between these intercalated leaves that there is visibility… the world,
the flesh not as fact or sum of facts, but as the locus of an inscription of truth: the
false crossed out, not nullified” (s. 131).
Tähän on kiinnostavaa rinnastaa katkelma Jerome Rothenbergin käsitettä ”deep
image” koskevasta tarkastelusta esseessä ”From Deep Image & Mode: An
Exchange with Robert Creeley” (1960): ”So there really are two things here,
conceivable as two realities: 1) the empirical world of naïve realists, etc. (what
Buber and the Hasidim call ’shell’ or ’husk’), and 2) the hidden (floating) world,
yet to be discovered or brought into being: the ’kernal’ or ’sparks’. The first
world both hides and leads into the second, so as Buber says: ’one cannot reach
the kernal of the fruit except through the shell’; i.e. the phenomenal world is to
149