It's possible to look so hard that substance coalesces into pure being

I've slackened in my blog responses not so much because I have too little to say, as as I have too much to say: so many things are going through my mind - art shows, paintings, drawings, Merleau-Ponty, the lectionary texts for this Sunday and last Sunday, Eberhard Jungel on justification by faith, Barth talking about Christ the servant as lord, Keck's Roman's commentary, our cats health, house buying, being a good husband, being a good friend, and many more articles recondite and mundane: all these things run through my mind, inviting me to grasp hold of them, each in turn, only to elude my real grasp. As I said before, the past eludes us and the future has no shape in space, such that we only grasp the present.
Merleau Ponty says that we are so caught in time, embodying time, that we "secrete time" we "create time" and live in a present against a future, empty, hollow; our past, conditioned by interpretation and habits, never is a present. We ask, "what am I looking at" never fully in possession of ourselves - hence our existence is penultimate. We are embodied, though and our embodied existence is a "work of art." We are thrown into things between the horizons of our past and future limits.We live by looking, by focusing - not allowing our focus to slip off into unconsciousness- we must describe what we see. At least that's as far as I've read now, and I can't say that I've absorbed everything. But I continue in hope: I am immersed in Ponty's book. I find that I've been immersed like this in only a few books: the New Testament, Barth's Church dogmatics, Calvin's Institutes, Becker's Denial of Death, Bakhtin's Rabelais and his world, Whitman's Leaves of Grass. There are many similarities between Whitman and Ponty - this keen emphasis on observation and the sense of embodiment, open to multifarious points.