If Creations are not a Possession

26 Feb If Creations are not a Possession

February 25, 2013

Last month I wrote and turned in to the publisher the Introduction to the Classic Edition for  Lev Vygotsky: Revolutionary Scientist, which Fred Newman and I wrote twenty years ago. I’m happy that the book is in producction and will be released in the early fall of this year. There’s just little things remaining for me to do, like deciding whether to keep the original Epigraph or choose a new one.

The Ocean at Sunset, Montauk, 2/25/13

I spent today in Montauk, a village at the end of Long Island, 120 miles from New York City. It’s pretty much my favorite place, surrounded by ocean and bay, and filled with beaches, clifffs and woods to hike in. Before I left the house for an ocean walk with a friend and my dog Reggie, I looked at the Epigraph Newman and I had chosen. On the walk I fell in love with the quote again and decided it was definitely staying.

It’s a quote from Merleau-Ponty, the French phenomenological (and, according to some, existential) philosopher. (It might have come from his book, Sense and Non-Sense. I can’t remember the source, so if you know, please tell me.)   I’ve only read a little of his writing and it’s pretty fascinating and far reaching. I’d like to do a more serious study of him someday.

Here’s the quote:

If no painting comes to be the painting,

if no work is ever absolutely completed and done with,

still

each creation changes,

alters,

enlightens,

deepens,

confirms,

exalts,

recreates,

or creates in advance

all the others.

 

If creations are not a possession,

it is not only that,

like all things,

they pass away;

it is also that

they have almost their whole life before them.

Actually, that’s not the exact quote. Merleau-Ponty wrote it as prose, like so—

If no painting comes to be the painting, if no work is ever absolutely completed and done with, still each creation changes, alters, enlightens, deepens, confirms, exalts, recreates, or creates in advance all the others. If creations are not a possession, it is not only that, like all things, they pass away; it is also that they have almost their whole life before them.

I took the libery of setting it down poetically, to make visible how I hear his words.