"Paperthin, the page weighs nothing.
The words slowly weigh it down, and page by page the heaviness transfers and shifts yet I don’t become lighter: there is more. More to breathe, more to feel, more to birth, more to penetrate. The words reinvent themselves after the coitus of momentary truth, pass further into more. And I am inside and outside this language, I merge with it, merge with the world. Writing is the moisture I excrete, the air I breathe. …" (p. 547)
"Writing from the body, I wait at the edge of absence. Writing, I attempt to salvage the temporality, living from moment to moment, between breaths, between lines. I am no poet in any language I know, but in this landscape of ink sky, words keep rushing in. I am the longest sentence, a question unanswered. My skin is just paperthin.
In writing I don’t mean to fill your absence. I mean to provoke it. Into more.
Your skin is just paper thin." (p. 552)
Milloy is inspired by Merleau-Ponty’s (1968) later sensuous writings of the body as a membrane in chiasmic ecstasy which couples one’s flesh and the flesh-of-the-world . For me, this is the real power of phenomenology. As van Manen (1984) notes, phenomenology is a “poetizing project”:
"Poetizing is a thinking on original experience and is thus speaking in a more pri mal sense. Language that authentically speaks the world rather than abstractly speaking of it is a language that reverberates the world, as Merleau-Ponty says, a language that sings the world. We must engage language in a primal incantation or poetizing which hearkens back to the silence from which the words emanate" .
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968). The visible and the invisible. (A. Lingis, Trans.). Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Milloy, J. (2005) Gesture of Absence - Eros of writing. Janus Head, 8(2), pp. 543-552. http://janushead.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Milloy.pdf
Van Manen, M. (1984). Practicing phenomenological writing. Phenomenology + Pedagogy, University of Alberta, 2(1), 36– 72. https://doi.org/10.29173/pandp14931
