From How Like a Leaf |
My deep formation in Catholic symbolism and sacramentalism—doctrines
of incarnation and transubstantiation—were all intensely physical.
The relentless symbolization of Catholic life is not just attached to the
physical world, it is the physical world. (86)
My insticts are always . . . to insist on the join between materiality and semiosis. Flesh is no more a thing than a gene is. But the materialized semiosis of flesh always includes the tones of intimacy, of body, of bleeding, of suffering, of juiciness. (86) My inability to separate the figural and the literal comes straight out of a Catholic relationship to the Eucharist . . . The fundamental sensibility about the literal nature of metaphor and the physical quality of symbolization—all this comes from Catholicism . . . this sensibility—the meaning of this menagerie I live with and in—gives me a menagerie where the literal and the figurative, the factual and the narrative, the scientific and the religious and the literary, are always imploded. (141) |