intent
Prior to all our verbal reflections, at the level of our spontaneous, sensorial engagement with the world around us, we are all animists. (57)
imagination is from the first an attribute of the senses themselves. (58)
Like suburbanites after a hurricane, we find ourselves alive in a living field of powers far more expressive and diverse than the strictly human sphere to which we are accustomed. (65)
…the gestural genesis of language, the way that communicative meaning is first incarnate in the gestures by which the body spontaneously expresses feelings and responds to changes in its affective environment. (74)
Merleau-Ponty suggests that such a view of language [as a formal system readily detachable from the act of speaking] could arise only at a time when the fresh creation of meaning has become a rare occurrence, a time when people commonly speak in conventional, ready-made ways “which demand from us no real effort of expression and … demand from our listeners no real effort of comprehension”–at a time, in short, when meaning has become impoverished. (77)
at the most primordial level of sensuous, bodily experience, we find ourselves in an expressive, gesturing landscape, in a world that speaks. (81)
Ultimately, it is not human language that is primary, but rather the sensuous, perceptual life-world, whose wild, participatory logic ramifies and elaborates itself in language.
That it is being that speaks within us and not we who speak of being. (86)
–From The Spell of the Sensuous, David Abram