Although I think Merleau-Ponty’s conception of “matter” in the passage below and elsewhere is somewhat archaic and anemic, I hold the truth of the world-flesh as self-evident. The tangibility and facticity of the world is the immanent location of action – the absolute ground of consequence, continuity, intimacy and causal precarity; and thus all meaning.

Prior to thought and “translation” there is the Real as potent possibility:

“The flesh is not matter, in the sense of corpuscles of being which would add up or continue on one another to form beings. Nor is the visible (the things as well as my own body) some "psychic" material that would be – God knows how - brought into being by the things factually existing and acting on my factual body. In general, it is not a fact or a sum of facts "material" or "spiritual." Nor is it a representation for a mind: a mind could not be captured by its own representations; it would rebel against this insertion into the visible which is essential to the seer. The flesh is not matter, is not mind, is not substance. To designate it, we should need the old term "element," in the sense it was used to speak of water, air, earth, and fire, that is, in the sense of a general thing, midway between the spatiotemporal individual and the idea, a sort of incarnate principle that brings a style of being wherever there is a fragment of being. The flesh is in this sense an "element" of Being. Not a fact or a sum of facts, and yet adherent to location and to the now. Much more: the inauguration of the where and the when, the possibility and exigency for the fact; in a word: facticity, what makes the fact be a fact.” – Merleau-Ponty [source] 

UPDATE:  Access, Ontological Intimacy and Thickness 

In The Visible and the Invisible Merleau-Ponty’s writes,

“[H]e who looks must not himself be foreign to the world that he looks at... It is that the thickness of flesh between the seer and the thing is constitutive for the thing of its visibility as for the seer of his corporeity; it is not an obstacle between them, it is their means of communication. It is for the same reason that I am at the heart of the visible and that I am far from it: because it has thickness and is thereby naturally destined to be seen by a body.” (p.134-135)