"The Spell of the Sensuous" Two!

There was a lot of this chapter that jumped out to me, surprise, the chapter about science and experience jumps out to me. However, the one part in particular that just wouldn't leave my mind was the part about "life-world" The specific line that inspired me was:

"The life-world is the world that we count on without necessarily paying much attention, the world of the clouds overhead and the ground underfoot, of getting out of bed and preparing food and turning on the water for tap."

Immediately from this line a million ideas sparked, however, I decided to go with doodling. I thought doodling a reaction was appropriate because doodling is simple, it's not over thought, it's usually what comes before all of the thoughts and reflections and theories, much like the "life-world". I simply wrote out the quote and doodled without thinking.

"The life-world is thus peripherally present in any thought or activity we undertake. Yet whenever we attempt to explain this world conceptually, we seem to forget our active participation within it."

Therefore, I'll just let my active participation through the doodle do the "explaining".

"The Spell of the Sensuous" One!

Perhaps it's because of my recent dance with death that made this portion of chapter stand out so much, but whatever the reason, I chose to react to pages 15 and 16, more specifically where the Abram begins with:

"Each indigenous culture elaborates this recognition of metamorphosis in its own fashion..." (Referring to the change of living to dead.)
My piece originally sparked from the description from cremation: "Some cultures may burn, or "cremate," the body in order to more completely return the person, as smoke, to the swirling air, while that which departs as flame is offered to the sun and stars, and that which lingers as ash is fed to the dense earth."

(This was all done in a glass jar.) I wanted to represent that cremation, I wanted to have that physical smoke, so at first I burned some paper to create ashes. But I really wanted to add more to it, so I added pieces of the land around me to represent being reunited with the land (and the tradition being shaped by the terrain around us) and burned some of those as well. I was also thinking about other traditions of celebrating death or making that transition, such as dismembering body parts, so I left the matches in the jar to represent those parts. I added a flower on top as well to represent the common way that we in our culture put our dead in caskets and put flowers on top. (Although I realized when I was done, in a way the jar was like a casket, holding everything inside.) I also used tape on the lid to represent mummification. Basically the entire description just got me thinking of all of the ways that we try and celebrate death, or try and get out dead to "next place", and I represented a few of those ways. My favorite though, is that if you unscrew the lid right now, a little bit of smoke will still come swirling out, reminding me of the sentence that inspired this whole creation in the first place.