Tuesday, July 26, 2011
Ballaké Sissoko & Vincent Segal: Oscarine
Timber Timbre: Trouble Comes Knocking
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
And so, held accountable for nothing, life fades into nothingness. Automatization eats away at things, at clothes, a furniture, at our wives, and at our fear of war.
If the complex life of many people takes place entirely on the level of the unconscious, then it's as if this life had never been.
And so, in order to return sensation to our limbs, in order to make us feel objects, to make a stone feel stony, man has been given the tool of art. The purpose of art, then, is to lead us to a knowledge of a thing through the organ of sight instead of recognition.
- Viktor Shklovsky, from "Art as Device" in Theory of Prose.
Monday, July 25, 2011
Sunday, July 24, 2011
L89:
Loss is perhaps the ultimate philosophical problem --- and death, only incidentally and to the extent it is experienced as loss by those who remain alive. The great absolute architectonics of systematic thought are intended to secure the world against loss. Maturity is achieved when things are let go, left to be on their own, allowed their specificity; for although they become then most fully themselves, they become then most fully losable. To abandon classical system is to accept, in the sense of comprehend, the ontological necessity of loss. The more precious a thing is, the greater becomes its power to hurt us by simply being absent. We end up 'leaving each thing as it is' in two senses of the word 'leave'.
- from Jan Zwicky's Lyric Philosophy.
Loss is perhaps the ultimate philosophical problem --- and death, only incidentally and to the extent it is experienced as loss by those who remain alive. The great absolute architectonics of systematic thought are intended to secure the world against loss. Maturity is achieved when things are let go, left to be on their own, allowed their specificity; for although they become then most fully themselves, they become then most fully losable. To abandon classical system is to accept, in the sense of comprehend, the ontological necessity of loss. The more precious a thing is, the greater becomes its power to hurt us by simply being absent. We end up 'leaving each thing as it is' in two senses of the word 'leave'.
- from Jan Zwicky's Lyric Philosophy.
Saturday, July 23, 2011
Friday, July 22, 2011
Deer come out of the poplars just as day becomes night; they move in the blue air. Dropped grain near the house glistens in the hollow they've licked and stamped over the weeks into snow. Their bodies are dense with strangeness and are weightless, brief electric arcs on the eye, eloquent, two does faring well this winter, bow-sided, v-faced, coming down the slope through low willow and wild rose that holds the last of light. They stop repeatedly, their coloratura caution; their bodies seem the constant, quavering afterglow of this strained attention. Yet the gold of the grain pulls the goldenness of them. They come the last steps quickly along a path notched with their prints from nights before and bend to eat. Shadow soaks into them. One of them jerks up a look, then the other. They see me standing by the woodpile. They stare. I stare.
Consciousness walks across the land bridge of the deer's stare into the world of things. This is knowing. It tastes of sorrow and towering appetite. Their look seems a bestowal; I feel more substantial, less apologetic as a physical thing from having been seen. The traded look goes on in the building dark. There is no intention here, nothing of fairy tale of hagiography, animals lying down with the solitary, animals bearing messages, scrolls caught in the clefts of their hoofs. There is only wild seeing, the feel of it unimaginable: I am seen straight through (of that, no doubt) but cannot say how I am seen. Travelling back through the conductor of this gaze, something of me, a slant I'd never guess, enters them. Their look has a particularity, an inexpressibility, so highpitched it attracts myths. No wonder some say the darkness of the forest is a god.
When consciousness crosses the divide into the wilderness of what is there, it expects to find a point of noetic privilege: at last a clear view into the heart of things. But what it does find on the other side is further peculiarity, a new version of distance. The deer bend again to eat, then again nod up a stare. The world is a collection of oddnesses, things so gathered into themselves, so ruthlessly at home and separate, they seem to shine with difference --- poplar, these does, wild roses. The weirdness, unreachability of things, is not abolished by any sudden aberration of intimacy, fluked into being by a deer's look, but is intensified by it. The desire to feel otherness as selfhood, to be the deer seeing yourself, remains; for me it never leaves, the old residue of Paradise, that amicable common life desire seems to remember, the old bone it never quits gnawing. Nor does language's impulse to shrug off their distance vanish. Yet both are qualified by the unyielding unlikeness of specific things.
Looked at by the does in the falling light, I am "seen home", attended closer to the centre of what is, deked from a stance of noetic propriety, an heirloom of spirit soberly passed on to me, the mind's fine aloofness from bodies. The long stare is the occasion of a loss of cognitive rectitude, a debauch in the low life of objects. But at home through the other's look, the things of home seem even more deeply themselves, "known" are further enclaustered in idiosyncracy. The opposite of objective removal from the world is not subjective union but an intensely felt differentiation. The deer show out from around the word "deer" and they have no name.
The world is its names plus their cancellations, what we call it and the undermining of our identifications by an ungraspable residue in objects. To see it otherwise, to imagine it caught in our phrases, is to know it without courtesy, and this perhaps is not to know it at all. To see with presumption is only to note the effects of one's bright looks, the glimmering classifications, the metaphors, is merely to watch oneself confidently gazing. The Franciscan John Duns Scotus said individuality was intrinsically intelligible, though perhaps not to us in our present state --- in the body, after the Fall. Perhaps never, perhaps to no one. Perhaps individuality is not to be known, only lived with, each haecceitas helping to shape the other by its proximity. The desire to belong to what the deer belongs to, the wildness, the thereness, is mortified but remains true. You crane forward into the world in appetite and enter it in sorrow knowing that this good desire that casts you out of yourself is right and must not be lost but is necessarily and sharply frustrated.
- Tim Lilburn, from "How To Be Here?", in Living In The World As If It Were Home.
Consciousness walks across the land bridge of the deer's stare into the world of things. This is knowing. It tastes of sorrow and towering appetite. Their look seems a bestowal; I feel more substantial, less apologetic as a physical thing from having been seen. The traded look goes on in the building dark. There is no intention here, nothing of fairy tale of hagiography, animals lying down with the solitary, animals bearing messages, scrolls caught in the clefts of their hoofs. There is only wild seeing, the feel of it unimaginable: I am seen straight through (of that, no doubt) but cannot say how I am seen. Travelling back through the conductor of this gaze, something of me, a slant I'd never guess, enters them. Their look has a particularity, an inexpressibility, so highpitched it attracts myths. No wonder some say the darkness of the forest is a god.
When consciousness crosses the divide into the wilderness of what is there, it expects to find a point of noetic privilege: at last a clear view into the heart of things. But what it does find on the other side is further peculiarity, a new version of distance. The deer bend again to eat, then again nod up a stare. The world is a collection of oddnesses, things so gathered into themselves, so ruthlessly at home and separate, they seem to shine with difference --- poplar, these does, wild roses. The weirdness, unreachability of things, is not abolished by any sudden aberration of intimacy, fluked into being by a deer's look, but is intensified by it. The desire to feel otherness as selfhood, to be the deer seeing yourself, remains; for me it never leaves, the old residue of Paradise, that amicable common life desire seems to remember, the old bone it never quits gnawing. Nor does language's impulse to shrug off their distance vanish. Yet both are qualified by the unyielding unlikeness of specific things.
Looked at by the does in the falling light, I am "seen home", attended closer to the centre of what is, deked from a stance of noetic propriety, an heirloom of spirit soberly passed on to me, the mind's fine aloofness from bodies. The long stare is the occasion of a loss of cognitive rectitude, a debauch in the low life of objects. But at home through the other's look, the things of home seem even more deeply themselves, "known" are further enclaustered in idiosyncracy. The opposite of objective removal from the world is not subjective union but an intensely felt differentiation. The deer show out from around the word "deer" and they have no name.
The world is its names plus their cancellations, what we call it and the undermining of our identifications by an ungraspable residue in objects. To see it otherwise, to imagine it caught in our phrases, is to know it without courtesy, and this perhaps is not to know it at all. To see with presumption is only to note the effects of one's bright looks, the glimmering classifications, the metaphors, is merely to watch oneself confidently gazing. The Franciscan John Duns Scotus said individuality was intrinsically intelligible, though perhaps not to us in our present state --- in the body, after the Fall. Perhaps never, perhaps to no one. Perhaps individuality is not to be known, only lived with, each haecceitas helping to shape the other by its proximity. The desire to belong to what the deer belongs to, the wildness, the thereness, is mortified but remains true. You crane forward into the world in appetite and enter it in sorrow knowing that this good desire that casts you out of yourself is right and must not be lost but is necessarily and sharply frustrated.
- Tim Lilburn, from "How To Be Here?", in Living In The World As If It Were Home.
Thursday, July 21, 2011
L75:
In a metaphor, a gesture that takes its life from one context is suddenly manifest as a gesture in a context in which we had not noticed its possibility before.
That is: there is what Wittgenstein would have called an internal relation between the two contexts.
L76:
The metaphor does not establish new internal relations; it shows us ones that were already there.
"The eyes are windows." What is created here is not a resemblance; rather, noticing the resemblance creates (among other things) a deeper appreciation of the peculiar relation of certain types of beings to their bodies. In understanding the metaphor, we see the body (mammalian, only?---avian, too, certainly; amphibian? reptilian?---icthyic? insectival?) as both transparent, and as an enclosure (a prison; a house). To say "window" invokes simultaneously intimacy and separation; to see, but not to touch. To say the eyes are windows explains the peculiar kind of emotional shock we can get when we meet another being's eyes. (This shock is perhaps less shocking if we are thoroughgoing dualists but, of course, such experiences may be among the reasons we incline to such an odd and notoriously problematic view.) The metaphor explains the shock, in part, because it leaves its mystery intact. For, clearly, the eyes aren't windows, they're eyes; the body isn't a house or a prison---there's no real estate market in incarnations, no wardens with offices and keys. The metaphor thus echoes the experience of struggling with illness: we are, and are not, our bodies. It moves us to the extent that in it we confront and allow ourselves to be puzzled by the shape of our mortality.
L77:
"The eyes are windows." This changes, among other things, the way we understand houses.
- from Jan Zwicky's Wisdom & Metaphor.
In a metaphor, a gesture that takes its life from one context is suddenly manifest as a gesture in a context in which we had not noticed its possibility before.
That is: there is what Wittgenstein would have called an internal relation between the two contexts.
L76:
The metaphor does not establish new internal relations; it shows us ones that were already there.
"The eyes are windows." What is created here is not a resemblance; rather, noticing the resemblance creates (among other things) a deeper appreciation of the peculiar relation of certain types of beings to their bodies. In understanding the metaphor, we see the body (mammalian, only?---avian, too, certainly; amphibian? reptilian?---icthyic? insectival?) as both transparent, and as an enclosure (a prison; a house). To say "window" invokes simultaneously intimacy and separation; to see, but not to touch. To say the eyes are windows explains the peculiar kind of emotional shock we can get when we meet another being's eyes. (This shock is perhaps less shocking if we are thoroughgoing dualists but, of course, such experiences may be among the reasons we incline to such an odd and notoriously problematic view.) The metaphor explains the shock, in part, because it leaves its mystery intact. For, clearly, the eyes aren't windows, they're eyes; the body isn't a house or a prison---there's no real estate market in incarnations, no wardens with offices and keys. The metaphor thus echoes the experience of struggling with illness: we are, and are not, our bodies. It moves us to the extent that in it we confront and allow ourselves to be puzzled by the shape of our mortality.
L77:
"The eyes are windows." This changes, among other things, the way we understand houses.
- from Jan Zwicky's Wisdom & Metaphor.
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
Sunday, July 17, 2011
On Parables:
Many complain that the words of the wise are always merely parables and of no use in daily life, which is the only life we have. When the sage says: "Go over," he does not mean that we should cross to some actual place, which we could do anyhow if the labor were worth it; he means some fabulous yonder, something unknown to us, something that he cannot designate more precisely either, and therefore cannot help us here in the very least. All these parables really set out to say merely that the incomprehensible is incomprehensible, and we know that already. But the cares we have to struggle with every day: that is a different matter.
Concerning this a man once said: Why such reluctance? If you only followed the parables you yourselves would become parables and with that rid of all your daily cares.
Another said: I bet that is also a parable.
The first said: You have won.
The second said: But unfortunately only in parable.
The first said: No, in reality: in parable you have lost.
By Franz Kafka.
Many complain that the words of the wise are always merely parables and of no use in daily life, which is the only life we have. When the sage says: "Go over," he does not mean that we should cross to some actual place, which we could do anyhow if the labor were worth it; he means some fabulous yonder, something unknown to us, something that he cannot designate more precisely either, and therefore cannot help us here in the very least. All these parables really set out to say merely that the incomprehensible is incomprehensible, and we know that already. But the cares we have to struggle with every day: that is a different matter.
Concerning this a man once said: Why such reluctance? If you only followed the parables you yourselves would become parables and with that rid of all your daily cares.
Another said: I bet that is also a parable.
The first said: You have won.
The second said: But unfortunately only in parable.
The first said: No, in reality: in parable you have lost.
By Franz Kafka.
Saturday, July 16, 2011
From "Notes on Poetry and Philosophy"
in Wonderful Words, Silent Truth, by Charles Simic,
quoted in Wisdom & Metaphor, by Jan Zwicky:
My poems (in the beginning) are like a table on which one places interesting things one has found on one's walks: a pebble, a rusty nail, a strangely shaped root, the corner of a torn photograph, etc.... where after months of looking at them and thinking about them daily, certain surprising relationships, which hint at meanings, begin to appear....
in Wonderful Words, Silent Truth, by Charles Simic,
quoted in Wisdom & Metaphor, by Jan Zwicky:
My poems (in the beginning) are like a table on which one places interesting things one has found on one's walks: a pebble, a rusty nail, a strangely shaped root, the corner of a torn photograph, etc.... where after months of looking at them and thinking about them daily, certain surprising relationships, which hint at meanings, begin to appear....
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