We are speaking of space, silence, the empty canvas upon which we play our lives. Structure is not something above and beyond emptiness, but rather its structuring and restructuring. The gaps in a chain link fence are what allow it to have form, the not-self allows us to make up a self. We play our lives like we play music, with emptiness giving and taking shape at hierarchical intervals. Between thoughts, while asleep, between lifetimes: there is.
Is there a phoenix? Where did this self-immolating bird come from other than the individual living outside of himself, entrenched in soul. Each night we offer ourselves to sleep and relax into the flames that torch our habitual tensities and denial. It is at this time that persona makes its final call before it is forgotten, the mask is removed and the forces I call myself and other are undeniably simultaneous. How does one bring about the living death of sleep every night? Klee's "Aged Phoenix" must be asking itself this same question, contorted, eyes half closed on the verge.
Do we say it is already dead in its one footed contrived regality? Has it died of its habits already, and is now awaiting its birth? It definitely does not seem excessively alive, but the phoenix never dies. It is perpetual by self-destruction, a turning wheel that merely must turn. Regardless of however this image might view itself it calls great attention to the moment. We are so accustomed to the image of the phoenix rising where motion is apparent as it flies upward covered in flame. Here, the upward motion is less apparent, or is another beat or two away. "The picture makes movement visible by its internal discordance." (145) And so we see the phoenix on the way down, decrepit with one eye looking up struggling to stay open.
We do not see the phoenix's great return, only its powerful internal discord. It begs to move on, and makes the viewer aware of its uncomfortability in this contorted state. The image is not trying to make a claim against paradox, but rather live within it, and show its "attitudes unstably suspended between a before and after..." (144) Merleau-Ponty likens this to life as it is lived; "The painting itself would then offer to my eyes the same thing offered them by real movement" i.e. "movement without displacement" (144). Making claims or generalizations often becomes a denial of counterfactuals, and this is often accepted as a method of proof. This is movement with displacement, whereas the phoenix is self-negating, contradictory, but still existent. We are deluded into thinking that this sort of thing cannot be, and in a way it cannot, it gathers up its being and non-being and exists within paradox. The artist is intentional in her or his being in paradox. "It is by lending his body to the world that the artist changes the world into paintings." (123)
~Quotes from Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception