Sunday, April 29, 2012

The Image (3)

The image is the secret that Lorca says St. Teresa stole from her duende. It is "the subtle link that joins the five senses to what is core to the living flesh, the living cloud, the living ocean of love liberated from time."

What, then, is "core to the living flesh"? What does the image join the five senses to? The image inhabits the fleshy region between our senses and our motives. I suppose there may be exactly five motives (just as there are exactly five senses) but we have not, I think, enumerated them yet. Lorca speaks simply of a "core", and it is possible that some unity of motive is implied. Kant also supposed that the five senses are brought together in a "manifold" of experience, saving experience from becoming a rhapsody of mere impressions.

There is the "living ocean of love liberated from time" and there is a living ocean of wisdom restricted by space.

2 comments:

Presskorn said...

As I understand Kant, the manifold of sensibility is quite the rhasody. While what saves experience from being a mere rhasody of impressions is the act of synthesis. (See CPR A77/B102)

Thomas said...

In imagination, I thought.