There is no way of living with others which takes away the burden of being myself, which allows me to not have an opinion; there is no ‘inner’ life that is not a first attempt to relate to another person. In this ambiguous position, which has been forced on us because we have a body and a history (both personally and collectively), we can never know complete rest. We are continually obliged to work on our differences, to explain things we have said that have not been properly understood, to reveal what is hidden within us and to perceive other people.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception (trans. Oliver Davis)

 Hilma Af Klint, 1907

Blechnum Spicant. The British fern gazette. December 1912.

Frederick Hammersley (American, 1919-2009), Up with in, 1957-58. Oil on linen, 47 7/8 x 36 in.

What Derrida writes about the poem as the epitome of creative language could also be said of a life-form: It is never fully revealed, there is always a piece that is largely inaccessible because the bond to a living being, to a creative piece of reality, is always at the same time a separation. "No poem without accident," writes Derrida, "no poem that does not open itself like a wound, but no poem that is not also just as wounding. You will call poem a silent incantation, the aphonic wound that, of you, from you, I want to learn by heart. . . . The poem falls to me, benediction, coming of (or from) the other.

Andreas Weber, Matter & Desire: An Erotic Ecology, trans. Rory Bradley

György Kepes, The New Landscape in Art and Science, 1956