Date: Tue, 26 Aug 1997 10:23:05 -0600 (CST)
Subject: Suppose its Poe..



To recall once more these lines by Poe, to lend them to their negligable
legibility, I proceed: in Al Aaraaf Poe writes a couplet whose enunciation
reveals a clue to understanding language, following in its path the
silence which surrounds and founds it:

    "Ours is a world of words: Quiet we call
    'Silence' -- which is the merest word of all."

   In a footnote Allen Tate reminds us of an archaic meaning of "merest" 
as absolute, bare, unqualified from a Latin term "merus" - unmixed, pure. 
This unqualified sense points in the direction of a difference more
radical than any possible comparison of qualities, than any determinable
sense which might refer us to the experience of an existent being. It is,
in fact, in the insistence of quotation marks that the unqualified comes
into language, in which the indeterminate appears in the place that it
does, as a dose of the power of negation to form language and the
conceptual "world of words." This "mere" word is the word itself suspended
by negation once its very sonification intrudes and disrupts the "silence" 
thereby signified. It is and isn't what it would hope to reveal or to have
made evident, known in itself, by itself, by silence which precedes and
exceeds. 
    A further indication to its decipherment is provided by the title of
the poem whose most direct translation (a word to be used under erasure
a la bifurs of Leiris: and this is the whole story) is, in reference to
Mohammedean cosmology, that of limbo, a place between heaven and hell,
between, as it were, the living and the dead, no longer alive, not yet
dead or drowned in silence. And this is the whole story.
    In these mere words, then, as they slide before my eyes, I hold to a
silence which slips between the clasp of signifying marks and present by
exposure and withdrawal the simultaneity of space whose quality of
"givenness" is both the promise and agony of being, an ambivalence which
comes and passes with the enunciation of the impossible. It precedes me
but eludes me. Only the montrous force of the negative makes it shine by
default, in a simulacra that must "be."
    I will owe you the truth in due time.

I will decide.. 

    Bataille: "The idea of silence (which is the inaccesible) is
disarming! I cannot speak of an absence of meaning, except by giving it a
meaning it does not have. Silence is broken because I have spoken. Some
lamma sabachtani always ends history, and cries out our total inability to
keep still: I must give a meaning to that which does not have one: in the
end, being is given to us as impossible."  (EI, p.215). 
     
Leonardo..