Subject: Easing in slow
Date: Thu, 12 Mar 1998 14:04:03 -0500 (EST)


Meditative withdrawal, although bringing ease, is not the search for a
comfortable, secure, and therefore familiar space. Each time rather, its
'purpose' without begining or end is the overcoming and being in higher
and more disturbing levels of tension. To look for relaxation is already
to turn away from the movement out of one's familiar, enrooted
surroundings. Such closing off, as i read it, is the desire for a
universal ground and a refusal of a singular adventure in the topsy turvy
world of sailors at sea. Think about all the times you ask a new girl out
or a guy for that matter. Now, there is an adventure out to sea. Remember
that movie with Robin Williams who plays this private boy's school english
teacher where at the end the boys in saying goodbye to him jump on their
desks and exclaim, "O captain, my captain" which I think is from walt
whitman? Well, at the begining he asked the boys, "what good is poetry
for?" Some of the boys try out fancy, smart answers but at the end of it
all Robin Williams tells them that poetry is good for getting girls. After
this, he
proceeds to get them all to join him in riping out all the bullshit that
specialist and critics put at the begining of anthologies and so does he
start teaching. This reminds me of a note, a lesson on foreplay by Kenneth
Burke in _Language As Symbolic Action_. He is discussing Goethe's Faust
where we find a little whilrligig called Walpurgis Night but also we find
the interruption of the hide-and-seek game of Gretchen and Faust by
Mephistopheles which gives pleasure to the audience. Burke remarks, " He
[mephistopheles] had previously pronounced the formula, observing that
pleasure is increased by delay and slow preparation; there he had stated
as a matter of psychology what the dramatist in this interruption embodies
as a principle of form" (p 146). None of this is possible without a
perverse digression of normalizing language (which tends to ground and
enroot play above all). Such deviancy that can give readers some measure
of pleasure, represents the corporal position of a body that is moved and
separated (digresses) from its posture of repose and relaxation. In other
words, this is the difference in Quintillian between grammatica (ars recte
dicendi) and rhetorica (ars ben dicendi) (_Institutions_ I,9,19;
II,17,37). Poetic rhetoric always has to do with adapting itself to the
singularity (haeccitas) of a situation. The place of love or
grotto/clearing of a situation that one can come across in a black forest
midway through life is less a place than a taking-place of whatever
singularity or impression, a letting beings be (Gelassenheit in Eckhart).
Ease is the name of this emptied out space as an event-propriation
(Ereignis) which scatters the tranquilizing normativity of the they-self
(Das mann - the nobody who has been levelled into a common type). The word
ease (aizi, aizimen, meaning space on the side as in ad-jacent) was first
used, accroding to Giorgi Agamben, by the troubadors and was a technical
end of their poetry which takes-place in the heart or in the bedroom and
sometimes even in both. So, when you have a situation on your hands, and
things are getting a little hot and tense, what destroys taking it to the
(im)possible limit? Well, Blanchot in chapter ix of _IC_ 'A rose is a rose
...' (-AT--->-->------) suggests that it is developed thought (ars recte
dicendi?): "A developed thought is a reasonable thought; it is also, I
would add, a political thought, for the generality it strives for is that
of the universal State when there will be no more private truth and when
everything that exists will submit to a common denominator." (p339)

so, who wants to be player?


Ariosto



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