ok, i promise I won't post anything else after this (i've posted a lot tonight, though mostly in the form of comments on other peoples' posts).

Since I've been trying to catch up by reading the merleau-ponty, a number of things have come to mind. I'm only a few pages in, but I can't help being incredibly excited because of what strikes me as a kind of wondrous optimism. At the same time, I'm skeptical because I've had a number of experiences in my life that, upon reflection, seemed to fall apart. A particular poem by Robert Hass comes to mind:

All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

Perhaps it partially comes to mind because of the posting of Lacan further down, but for some reason I feel that somewhere in the Merlau-Ponty essay, or in some corner of this neat thing called phenomenology, there might be something redemptive toward experience, something that was lost with analysis.