Reflecting

There was a time I did it without thinking. Yet how can one reflect without thinking? A mirror can do it, a body of water, a window, the eyes of another. I guess what I was trying to say was that thinking was second nature to me and that reflecting on what I was doing presently was closely related to what I had done sometime before, and in a sense contemplating what I might do in the future if the same conditions prevailed. I had a brief love affair with Merleau-Ponty when I thought he was talking directly to me and then the moment passed. A friend's immersion in a warm mud bath got me to thinking again. And so I turned to Merleau-Ponty once again. In SIGNS he says "to think is not to possess the objects of thought;it is to use them to mark out a realm to think about which we therefore are not yet thinking about." These remarks are in an essay about the phenomenologist Husserl entitled "The Philosopher and his shadow".

I'm in a ruminating stage right now awaiting an outpouring. In a way I'm marking my territory like an animal perhaps to warn people off, but only in the sense that my thinking is emerging, not even comprehensible to me except for a feeling that I ill return again and again until I get it straight or until I leave it behind because the scent has dissipated.