Let's consider this

To see characters such as Anna Karenina or Captain Ahab as they are, or were, or the places described in books, we are seeing what we imagine, not precisely what the author saw or imagined. But we do see images from the words that the author has provided for us to use to imagine, which often is not so much physical as trait-based. Was Anna a raving dark-eyed beauty? Was Ahab's left or right leg pegged with whalebone? Got me, but these physical incidentals are not as evocative of a person as what they thought and said and did.

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Exercise one: The data do show

A. For each writing, what is the phenomenon described? Can it be rendered in a word or phrase? This is to say that each is about something--a noema, an X, an it . B. Is each writing "a direct description of our experience [of that something] as it is"? This is to say, or claim, that each is a phenomenological description comprised of both the it and how one experiences that it . C. Each writing as an it in itself is an object of intentional gaze, or could be; each is a phenomenon which can itself be described, both noema and noesis. Which, 1 or 2 below, is more clearly a writing/text/work as phenomenological description? . . . Just to get things started. SAMPLE #1 {BEGIN WRITING} The last poem Years and years and years past I would write a gift, and thought it shared the love at Christmas. Now and now and now at last through the years I sift, and think to share our love at Christ's mass. Then and then and then repast I would mine eyes uplif...

Aside

"Lauren Silbert uses brain scans to try to zero in on what happens when two people click." (http://www.radiolab.org/2011/apr/18/soul-mates-and-brain-doubles/) Ms. Silbert read a story and had her brain activity mapped (scanned). Then she told the story to others and their brain activities were mapped. One listener's brain activity matched that of the storyteller, exactly. Thesis? The matching points represent the same experiences of the words-images that comprise the story. And if they match entirely, both storyteller and listener have had the same experience that the words create (evoke?). Is this the fundamental phenomenology of writing--the intentionality--to create in your experience that which I intend and had when I wrote what I did?

All is interpretation

What appears to you is what is. There is nothing outside of you which tells you, or me, that IT, what ever "it" is, IS. The only way I can know is through me and my senses. My stream of experiences are mine, no one else's. These experiences do not prove the existence of the exterior world or anything in it. I construct that sense-world by attributing my sensations to an unknown universe. The world then is my projected picture of it, symbolic and approximate. We justify, on the whole, the external world by accepting our private evidence that something exists beyond ourselves. So, I contend, we go about our business thinking that I see, feel, hear--sense--what you think you see, etc., or can. Thus the bases for science and other things. I becomes w e. And we proceed beyond me and under the illusion that my concrete reality is the same as yours, a "consensual realty." We carry on our oh-so-practical lives on what are defenseless and uncertain foundations. Thus all...

Noematics 101, an inquiry into writing as phenomenology

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