Those who say that one never looks upon one’s fellow as an interruption are wrong. I always do. Do you not see I am at play, I was rather enjoying myself! But he insists. One would like to turn away and sigh. There is always the possibility of a humorous response, but only on the condition that no one speak. He insists. During the dance, he comes speaking without thinking, un-one’d, to the point, bumping in he says ‘I was listening to the rain; I was hearing something else,’ and then it is quiet. Your missus gives a hiccup.
This is the act for which one does not account. The approach on which one imposes no law. It is enough, you say, to follow rules on the road and have taxes on my enjoyment. I will not have this last portion of my existence parliament’d upon. But it is all a matter of re-convention. Move the laws from one territory to the other. Rotate the communal crops. But this fellow comes up in a bump, gives a jolt, and takes what’s his. Sets himself a stallion among mares and sheepdogs. It’s goddam insensitivity.
Have it refracted upon. When the approach and your missus. But it is not just my affair. It sets in, the voice of this and now that device, it reaches into small parts of the day and then swells in a deliberate gust, brings all the sedentary sands into spell and upholds them, binds the desires into one, the sense of responsibility, the pharaoh that builds a pyramid between your ears. This is what it feels like when you are a child: ginger-ale can. But then everyone has one, it’s the whole goddam soda machine, adulterated, tranquil. You either put your coins in or go thirsty.
Ah, but I am too tired for this right now. Too tired of such speaking. The ale is glistening to-night, is it not; one would be far gone to denounce it. It is enough that the gulls cry outside. I met a man once who said I would write about these things. The wind, and the air, the birds – not he and his kind, he said. He had come from the side of the river, where he sat with the other saps. We smolder there, he said, drinking orchards. Write of our plight. Ah, but it is not me, I said. And he nodded. I supposed he understood. But he, spitting like cursing as he said it, You will write of Ireland, you will write of the wind, the birds, like all the rest. Then he stumbled back along the path towards the bridge, and I returned to my book.
All right man you should read Beckett if you haven’t. As a reader I need to read it again–if you’re more about eliciting emotion than conveying something, I think parts could be really useful as a monologue, part of a discussion. As a reader I also want to hear more from the orchard-drinkers, but if that’s not you I respect that.
One line didn’t leave me:
“This is what it feels like when you are a child: ginger-ale can. But then everyone has one, it’s the whole goddam soda machine, adulterated, tranquil. You either put your coins in or go thirsty.”
But I need to read this again, I think. Give me a couple days.
August 26th, 2008 | #
I should just mention that these would be paragraphs in the middle of a chapter, hopefully with some better frame of reference.
Eliciting emotion is probably more the idea, though did this elicit much emotion? I’m still not sure what emotion it would be anyway. I guess I’m trying to elicit a sense of the subject. I’m writing my dissertation on all this crap right now so let me just put these three quotes in, since I have them at hand.
Foucault, in ‘The Subject and Power’: “There are two meanings to the word “subject”: subject to someone else by control and dependence, and tied to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge. Both meanings suggest a form of power that subjugates and makes subject to.”
Deleuze and Guattari, in Anti-Oedipus: “Desire does not lack anything; it does not lack its object. It is, rather, the subject that is missing in desire, or desire that lacks a fixed subject; there is no fixed subject unless there is repression.” (A-O 26)
Alain Badiou, in Being and Event: “A subject is not a result- any more than it is an origin. It is the local status of a procedure, a configuration in excess of the situation.”
And a fourth, Deleuze and Guattari in ‘Kafka’: “There isn’t a subject; there are only collective assemblages of enunciation.”
Not sure if this helps.
August 27th, 2008 | #
yayayayah and this you take and put back on Bocanegra, who is a subject maybe only as in reaction to the revolution he is caught up in. As in reaction to the repression which he must fear as reaction to the police looking for the mayor’s killer. Or that he is an expression of the revolution which is a collective assemblage of enuciation.
August 27th, 2008 | #
Hey JP, did you ever give it a second read? I’d be interested to hear what you think I’m getting at? And how’d it go with the Supremes, Jez and Daphne?
August 31st, 2008 | #
A tile is lost
awaiting
from a fresco
:time
education,
forgiveness, lacking
A stagger of landscape underneath
Where is the oceanic
in enmity, staggered
as jest
A beggard, you shall squander the gifts of all Rome
With a file you cut a sculpture down
Whence comes beauty
from a smattering
A legality of paint folding
upon the floor, of a feeling
unto itself and a master
a friend a
laughter, last, A library of cadences
and people, and chess
and lies. Move under, baring, frowning frowning frowning dirt
bake it in the vapors, sunset.
a question
of tolerance, transmission
quietude you would not know it is gone
expecting to find anything, got home okay.
Besides flying fish and fisherboys
We are soaring, buzz, speaking
to a rosehip we plaster along the citywall,
summertime
habits, yes, it’s ignorance and
we argue to the crash of seasons.
squawk bird
for you’re a nest of salience,
Give me what you will
thank you
September 1st, 2008 | #
I absolutely love this poem. Such a wonderful stretch of metonymy. “habits, yes, it’s ignorance and” — a line I could not tire of reading over and over and over. ‘With a file you cut a sculpture down’ — if this is someone’s poem, maybe move ‘down’ to just after ‘cut’? I see all of Italy fading, but only because the sun is going down. And because one knows it rises, and that birds will cry when it does, there is only to become animal and let it be. And letting-be, giving permission to beings to be, is that of which we’re at once most unused and beautifully capable.
Giorgio Agamben, in “Man and Animal: The Open”
In our culture man has always been the result of a simultaneous division and articulation of the animal and the human, in which one of the two terms of the operation was also what was at stake in it. To render inoperative the machine that governs our conception of man will therefore mean no longer to seek new– more effective or more authentic– articulations, but rather to show the central emptiness, the hiatus that– within man– separates man and animal, and to risk ourselves in this emptiness: the suspension of the suspension, Shabbat of both animal and man.
But don’t respond to this. Respond to the poem.
Agamben also draws attention to how man, defined as Homo Sapiens, is defined in terms of his ‘knowing’ (sapiens). We might ponder the possibilities of a new ignorance..
“Etymologists have always been left perplexed when faced with the Latin verb ignoscere, which seems explicable as in-gnosco, yet which does not mean “not to know” [ignorare], but rather “to forgive.” To articulate a zone of nonknowledge– or better, of a-knowledge [ignoscenza]– means in this sense not simply to let something be, but to leave something outside of being, to render it unsavable. Just as Titian’s lovers forgive each other for their own lack of mystery, so in the saved night, life– neither open nor undisconcealable– stands serenely in relation with its own concealedness; it lets it be outside of being.
September 2nd, 2008 | #