A BLUE ORANGE IN THE OCEAN

Kahlil Gibran Then Almitra spoke again and said, And what of Marriage, master?       And he answered saying:       You were born together, and together you shall be forevermore.       You shall be together when the white wings of death scatter your days.       Ay, you shall be together even in the silent memory of God.       But let there be spaces in your togetherness,       And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.

     Love one another, but make not a bond of love:       Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.       Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup.       Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf.       Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of your be alone,       Even as the strings of the lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.

Se a cólera que espuma, a dor que mora N'alma, e destrói cada ilusão que nasce Tudo o que punge, tudo o que devora O coração, no rosto se estampasse;

Se se pudesse, o espírito que chora, Ver através da máscara da face, Quanta gente, talvez, que inveja agora Nos causa, então piedade nos causasse!

Quanta gente que ri, talvez, consigo Guarda um atroz, recôndito inimigo Como invisível chaga cancerosa!

Quanta gente que ri, talvez existe, Cuja ventura única consiste Em parecer aos outros venturosa!

"so I came round in my thinking to the tick that was kept alive in a laboratory for 18 years without nourishment by a zoologist named Jakob von Uexküll. For 18 years the tick hesitated between life and death. Jakob von Uexküll was an Estonian zoologist and philosopher (1864-1944) who invented biosemiotics, suggesting that every animal, human or nonhuman, has a distinct perceptual universe (an Umwelt or "world-surround") in which it exists and acts and makes meaning. The animal's Umwelt encloses it completely and does not refer to anything beyond itself. The human Umwelt, on the other hand, is open toward the future and toward transcendence (Jakob von Uexküll , Foray p. 219). Jakob von Uexküll's work influenced other philosophers, notably Heidegger, who distinguished animals from humans on the grounds that the animal does not perceive the elements of its Umwelt as things-in-themselves. "The behaviour of the animal is not an apprehending of something as something," Heidegger says. The tick does not apprehend waiting as waiting. It simply has no aim in life except to wait for a smell of warm blood to pass nearby, then drop down and drink blood. A tick has no sense of world or self or anything except the smell of warm blood: for Heidegger this is an instance of "the poverty of animals."

I love in-seeing. Can you imagine with me how glorious it is to in-see a dog, for example, as you pass…to let yourself precisely into the dog’s center, the point from which it begins to be a dog, the place where God, as it were, would have sat down for a moment when the dog was finished, in order to watch it during its first embarrassments and inspirations and to nod that it was good, that nothing was lacking, that it couldn’t have been better made….Though you may laugh, if I tell you where my very greatest feeling, my world-feeling, my earthly bliss was, I must confess to you: it was, again and again, here and there, in such in-seeing — in the indescribably swift, deep, timeless moments of this godlike in-seeing.