The reminder should be resurrected as often as needed.
After all, she's writing about you, isn't she?
I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!
How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one’s name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!
(—poem by Emily Dickinson 1830 – 1886)
Are we meant to be nameless?
Unsounding our presence?
Content to say what is near us without identifying our personal location?
Is there something sacramental about presence without nomenclature? While we're at it, just when did naming things begin? Was the creator in Genesis just joshing with Adam and Eve when he told them to name everything? Pulling their leg, so to speak. (Pulling their leg by suggesting they should speak?)
Presence without name.
An interesting thought.
Before moving on to a close reading of our novelists, however, I wish to mention one other contemporary philosopher–Julia Kristeva–who also has had much to say on the sacramental imagination, especially as it relates to what she explicitly calls an aesthetic of “transubstantiation” in Proust and Joyce. As a linguist and psychoanalyst by formation, Kristeva adds new perspectives to the phenomenological vision of Merleau-Ponty which she also espouses. In particular she ventures rich insights into the workings of unconscious tropes and associations in modernist writing about sense and sensibility. In Time and Sense, Kristeva offers this example, amongst many others:
A sensation from the past remains within us, and involuntary memory recaptures it when a related perception in the present is stimulated by the same desire as the prior sensation. A spatio-temporal association of sensations is thus established, relying on a link, a structure, and a reminiscence. Sensation takes refuge in this interwoven network and turns into an impression, which means that sensation loses its solitary specificity. A similarity emerges out of all these differences, eventually attaining the status of a general law in the manner of an idea or thought. The ‘general law,’ however, is no abstraction, for it is established because the sensation is immanent in it ... This process keeps the structure from losing its sensorial foundation. Music becomes word, and writing becomes a transubstantiation in those for whom it creates ‘new powers.’11
Kristeva links this aesthetic of transubstantiation, which she finds in Joyce and Proust, back to the writings of the later Merleau-Ponty, which she calls “mystically significant.”12 Indeed her notion of a “general law” of ideational sensation is surely not unrelated to Merleau-Ponty’s reference to a “momentary law” cited above. Most specifically, Kristeva relates the eucharistic aesthetic to the chiasmic relation between the visible and invisible, the inner feeling and outer expression that Merleau-Ponty describes as a reversible interpenetration of flesh. Refusing the dualistic division of spirit and body into two separate substances, both Kristeva and Merleau-Ponty counsel us to rethink flesh more phenomenologically as an “element, as the concrete emblem of a general manner of being.”13 And in this respect, Kristeva keenly endorses Merleau-Ponty’s claim that “no one has gone further than Proust in fixing the relations between the visible and the invisible,”14 though she (like us) would want to add Joyce to the list. Indeed identifying Merleau-Ponty’s model of reversibility with the notion of “transubstantiation” in Proust and Joyce, Kristeva sees this miracle of the flesh as a model both for therapeutic healing and for reading literary texts.
(--pp.246-7, from, Sacramental Imagination: Eucharists of the Ordinary Universe, by Richard Kearney, 2009, Analecta Hermeneutica)
The thought arises that terms like transubstantiation and sacramental imagination are not necessarily proprietary to what we might consider established churches or traditional religions. Even my Catholic background glances at a widening inclusion of concepts once thought to be exclusive to liturgical theological spirituality. Perhaps absent the reverential piety accustomed to such themes, now quite secular poets, writers, filmmakers, and scholars are foraging through hithertofore overgrown fields of transferable philosophy and spirituality.
Put differently, God isn’t owned by anyone.
-- transubstantiation, in Christianity, the change by which the substance (though not the appearance) of the bread and wine in the Eucharist becomes Christ’s real presence—that is, his body and blood. In Roman Catholicism and some other Christian churches, the doctrine, which was first called transubstantiation in the 12th century, aims at safeguarding the literal truth of Christ’s presence while emphasizing the fact that there is no change in the empirical appearances of the bread and wine. See also consubstantiation. (--Britannica)
Sacramental imagination refers to the ability to perceive and interpret the world as infused with divine significance, where everyday experiences and objects serve as visible signs of deeper spiritual realities. This perspective connects the material and spiritual realms, suggesting that through ordinary things, individuals can encounter and experience the presence of the sacred. The concept is crucial in understanding how literature can reflect and express theological ideas, especially in the context of devotional writings and novels that explore complex moral and philosophical questions. https://library.fiveable.me/key-terms/religion-literature/sacramental-imagination
Fact is I have heard during weekly conversations in two prisons over thirty five years enough spiritually sound and mystically concrete expressions of mind and heart — thoughts and words, telling interactions and experiences— coming from men charged and found guilty of any and all the crimes you could imagine — to convince me something is going on beyond the standard narrative usually associated with felons, inmates, prisoners, residents of maximum and minimum security prisons. As though monastery and university were masquerading as carceral confinement and committed conversation. Something's going on that is easily confused with something else.
They, along with the dozens and dozens of civilians in the larger community for whom conversation and meditation practice are respite sanctuaries over time, become representatives of a territory that might be called transubstantial and sacredly imaginative -- an inner and outer landscape -- dwellers in an evolving place where holiness is air breathed and awareness the very ground on which each stands.
It is the allowing of transformation and transcendence that whispers freedom through our soul.
Who are we, really, in one another’s presence?
What inner reality is being birthed in our midst?
What daily death and miraculous resurrection takes place in our everyday surround?
What unknowing faith and trust germinates our inner infinity and outer boundless creation?
