  The wrestling with form and its overcoming and its reanimation with living energy in Buber’s early work was rooted in a concern with the embodiment of perception and imagination. Whether writing about Hasidic masters, Nijinsky, religiosity, Judaism, mysticism, myth, “the Orient,” or the Isenheim Altar, Buber always returned to the same fundamental dynamics. Everything starts from the most basic facts of human existence: the body and motion. As understood by the early Buber (following a Kantian intuition), the world is one in which the objective spatial order was dissolved, where up and down, left and right, bear no intrinsic meaning. More fundamentally, orientation is always related to the body, which is, however, an objective datum. Ethical life remains inextricably linked, within the world of space, to the human body and to physical sensation as they reach across the divide toward an unmitigated Erlebnis. The “unity,” so important to Buber’s early conception of the self, was not an original one. It was instead the effect of those gestural acts that “dance it out” (Pointing the Way, 1957).