Subject: Edward Moore: _Uniqueness_
Date: Wed, 06 Aug 1997 08:39:10 PDT


There is only one moment of uniqueness, this we know. The originary
moment when the individual body establishes a presence in history
that makes waves. This moment cannot be captured again, for then it
would no longer be unique.

I can speak of my unique experience of a Work, however. There is no
difficulty there, for each work exudes an infinite number of
different (unique) reactions in an equally infinite number of realms.

In this case, speech is no barrier. I know my moment.

BUT -- if I wish or aim for READING, then I can only proceed by
categorizing my experience as one of many individual or unique 
experiences, making it no longer unique... I DO open up a space,
however -- a space that is filled with an unexpressed or isolated
idea of ME, or of MINE, and this space is no space at all... it is
an un-uttered moment of history that is known but not preserved.

Can a reading be unique? Rather, I should ask: can a reading be 
written about uniquely? Expressed so? Certainly. But that written
reading, that perhaps critical text, will not be a critical text, 
or a description of a reading -- not if it is to be unique... then 
it will be a new moment unattached to, but not independent of, the
text from which it proceeded, the _read_ text....

Here we arrive at the border between the private language of gnosis
and the common language of the Everyday, of "Everyman."

MY READING OF _Sir Gawain and the Green Knight_:

...but it was not really a reading at all. The story, the tale of 
the knight and Gawain takes a back seat to my private aesthetic
theatrical "performance" of the poem.... The sunny afternoon in my
neighborhood, when I walked through the pine-shaded streets and the
park with the lake and the geese, I felt as if I were in the world
of the 13th century poet, looking out of a narrow window at an
exquisite countryside...
(subjectivity) --

Any writing I might undertake in the direction of that poem will
necessarily be a product inspired by and controlled by the
commonplaces of the university: the library with all its books about
the poem and the period.

When I am faced with the possibility of anything but a private 
language, I immediately sense a "theft," on my part and on the part
of the commonplace system -- the seemingly infinite garage of
signifying vehicles containing shadows of robbers who are no longer
active, but act like a stain on the "pure word" _in the air_, as
it were....



Edward Moore
monsieurtexteEM-AT-hotmail.com

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