Lyrical Slippage, Meaning-Making, and Proximity in Song 2:10-13

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Abstract Where does lyric significance happen? With recent interdisciplinary studies from the fields of aesthetics and neuroscience offering support to Emmanuel Levinas’s idea of proximity, I propose that proximity is the maternal body of lyrical meaning. In this paper, I will illustrate the case by unpacking the mental processing of the lyrical imageries in Song 2:10–13, and highlight two aspects of proximity along the way. First, the perception of lyrical imagery is more complex than a representational correspondence between the word and the world. It covers the stages from the verbal cues to multisensory imageries, to evoked synaesthetic experiences, to accompanied feelings and provoked actions. Cognitively it is best described as one’s approximation toward the core semantic sense of the verbal cues, which is diversified by the reader’s embodied minds. Second, at the root of the aesthetic experience is one’s sense of self, which is susceptible to the intrigue of alterity. One’s reception of lyrical imageries in Song 2:10–13 can be characterized as an over-abundant synaesthetic experience. It directs one’s attention to an anterior receptivity embedded in subjectivity by way of the excess of the sensing over the semantic, and the sensed over the sensing. This reduction to the baseline level of function, or the sheer sensation of oneself, beckons the lyrical subject to become aware of one’s a prior proximity to alterity. In brief, while the readers’ individualized approximations preclude a verifiable universal reception, they do not warrant the kind of hermeneutic violence that overrides the text with the readers’ contexts. Rather, by being awakened to one’s susceptibility to the otherness of the poem, the lyrical subject realizes that proximity is the ethical precondition in making sense of the poem and oneself.

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