This essay argues that film historians can learn from historian J.H. Hexter's ideas about the rhetoric of history, particularly his concept of using language 'psychedelically'. The author distinguishes this approach from the history of 'head' films or writing film history under the influence of drugs. Instead, the essay explores how Hexter's writings offer a method for historians to employ vivid, imaginative language to convey historical understanding. The focus is on the rhetorical strategies historians use to make their accounts compelling and insightful, drawing a parallel between the mind-expanding connotations of the term 'psychedelic' and the creative use of language in historical writing.
The body's relationship to the world is not merely physical but perceptual and intentional: perception and motor action together constitute an integrated world. When perception presents a clear, articulated spectacle and motor intentions receive expected responses from the world, the body is geared onto that world. This maximum sharpness of perception and action reveals a perceptual ground—a general setting for coexistence between body and world. The passage articulates a phenomenological argument that the body's engagement with the world is foundational to lived experience.