the walker + the maze

But this morning, a kind day has descended, from nowhere,

Is there a way of being intellectual that isn’t social? When I think about the way we use the term ‘study,’ I think we are committed to the idea that study is what you do with other people. It’s talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice. The notion of a rehearsal – being in a kind of workshop, playing in a band, in a jam session, or old men sitting on a porch, or people working together in a factory – there are these various modes of activity. The point of calling it ‘study’ is to mark that the incessant and irreversible intellectuality of these activities is already present.

By word is not meant a word that is audible only to the ears; by word is meant all that is conveyed to you, all that is expressed and comes to you as a revelation. It means that what you hear with the ears, what you smell with the nose, what you taste, what you touch, what you perceive through all the different senses and through all that becomes intelligible to you—that is a word. It is life's mission to convey something to you, and everything that it conveys to you is a word. Through whichever sense you experience it, through whichever sense it is conveyed to you, it is a word. It is not only upon the five senses—taste, hearing, seeing, smelling, and touching—that the word depends; we call them five senses because we experience them through five different organs. In reality there is only one sense, a sense that experiences life through the vehicle or the medium of the five external senses. As life is experienced through these five different directions, the experience of life becomes divided into five different experiences, for the word—or life—becomes visible to us, tangible, audible, it can be smelled and it can be tasted. But besides these five aspects in which we are accustomed to hear the word there is another aspect of hearing the word, independently of the five senses, and this way of hearing the word is called the intuitive way.