2.7
In being pierced by a particular thing (§2.5), we see how it is and is not everything (§2.2). First, a particular thing can reveal to me how my care, love, or ability to attend to it is limitless because it means the world to me (it is everything), and yet it’s also clear that it is not everything: actually, its power comes from it precisely not being everything else: it stands out, unique.
Second, a thing is only the particularity it is thanks to the infinite context of relations around it: any given particular thing is what it is because it has been contextualized, shaped, placed by the things and relations around and transpiercing it (it is everything). In partaking of these relations of ‘is’ and ‘is not,’ we see that thisness has a metaphoric structure (§2.2).
Because the transformation is of the world, and the world is only through things (§2.5), the transformation involves a return to things themselves. When we return to things, we’re struck by their particularity, by their irreducible thisness (§2.5). But the experience of thisness cannot simply be willed: we cannot stare at a thing and expect to be pierced by its thisness. Only certain things pierce and draw us in.
To be struck by a thing’s thisness is to be struck by its losability,[1] which reverberates through our being and bones. We can feel it. To love something is already to have lost it, just as to lose something is already to have, if not loved it, found a place for it and been concerned with it. Transformation is constitutively bound up with loss (§2.6), and thisness shares this connection. Our openness to loss is to the vulnerability of the other and also to our own.
Openness to thisness is a mode of engagement typically occluded by everyday comportment.[2] Thisness has the power to change our world, for it pierces through everything with its metaphoric structure, vulnerability, and particularity. If we’re affected deeply, if the thisness shows us something of its way of being, we can experience a kind of transformation in and of the world.
Things call to us, draw us in, and pique our interest; and because each thing is placed within the context of the whole—is related in its way to every other thing—to be pierced by a particular thing is to feel the pressure of the whole expressed through it, to see the whole gathered in a particular way through the particularity — as though hearing sygyt funnelled through one mouth.
[1] Zwicky, Lyric Philosophy, LH70, LH89, LH147, LH243, LH302.
[2] Zwicky, W&M, LH53–5.