QUOTATION MARKS - Seeing What Is by Iain McGilchrist

'Water is distinct from ice,
but in the ice cube it is present:
not as a fly might be trapped there,
but in the very ice. It is the ice.

And yet when the ice cube is gone,
the water remains.
Although we see water in the ice,
we do so not because it is there separately,
to be seen behind or apart from the cube.

Body and soul, metaphor and sense,
myth and reality, the work of art and its meaning,
in fact the whole phenomenological world,
is just what it is and no more,
not one thing hiding another;
and yet the hard thing 
is the seemingly easy business,
just 'seeing what is'.

The reality is not behind the work of art:
to believe so would be. as Goethe put it,
like children going round the back of a mirror.
We see it in- through - the mirror.
Similarly, he says, we experience the universal
in or through, the particular,
the timeless in, or through,the temporal.'

Iain McGilchrist
taken from The Master & His Emissary
published by Yale University Press 2020