| Chapter 3: | A Kind of Response |
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ways of knowing or to disdain tradition. I wish to bring theory into a relational and reciprocal state.
Gasp.
Wonder at uncertainty.
dark of the closemouthed théoros,
Inhale the vespers from my closed mouth.
I'm tripping down the road, late for coffee with a friend. The word epistemaisthesis appears on my tongue. As I run to find paper, my feet lose the ground. I fall and bloody my hands with the guts of the sidewalk, and the page where I write is stained.
Episteme. Knowledge. What are the foundations of knowledge? The knowledge of words running, staining pages with bloody grit, episteme.
Aisthesis. The recovery of an active, interpretive, relational, and embodied aesthetic finds support in the work of Fisher (1997), who suggested a consideration of “the corporeality of the aesthetic processes…[which] have for the most part been left to the side of contemporary art criticism” will function to support the potential of an embodied aesthetic experience, co-extensively excluded, to produce and carry meaning (p. 6).17 This turn toward the inclusion of embodied aesthetic experience propels the recovery of an interpretation of aesthetic which “means at root ‘taking in’ and ‘breathing in’—a ‘gasp,’ that primary aesthetic response” (Hillman, 1992, p. 47).
My method of knowing is a wondrous “breathing in the world”. As an “experiencing body [I am] not a self-enclosed object, but an open, incomplete entity” (Abram, 1997, p. 125). Being open and incomplete could potentially produce a sense of estrangement. But I am excited by the prospect of being open to the world within which we rest.