File spoon-archives/bataille.archive/bataille_1999/bataille.9903, message 39


Date: Wed, 3 Mar 1999 08:23:53 -0400 (AST)
From: Stacey Maxine Armstrong <armstrsm-AT-is2.dal.ca>
Subject: Re: words


good morning to you Don Socha,
yes, i definitley watch what is happening in the skys at night; did your
moon seem bigger and more yellow than usual? that would be mine.
> 
> > i was having tea with a friend today and recalled a wish of yours to hear
> > moments in which someone was moved to action...
> 
> Yes, this is one of my basic excuses for taking up people's time.  I
> have deeper intentions though.  How is the self/social changed through
> such action?  Then again, change is a matter of perspective.  Nothing is
> non negotiable.  Still, I got this test tomorrow night; a three hour
> essay exam I can't possibly reread all the material for by then.  And I
> go to therapy.  Well, she's more of a witch actually.  She rents out
> this little shack on the edge of town.  Currently I visit Monday nights;
> hence the lunar siting.  Funny, I've been visiting her for over a year,
> thought I'd covered all the "relevant" territory, and last night new/old
> stuff comes up.  Of course, in answer to my queries and proddings I'm
> reminded I've been short in the resource department, but that I've done
> remarkably well in spite of all that, and none of that's new, but it is
> seen from a different angle, in a different light, which is cool;
> enervating, I enjoy thinking, in unforseen ways.  
> > i would have to say that
> > some texts have done this for me for quite some time and i think that
> > rhetoric (form) has alot to do with it...> 

> what do you mean by texts?  Whether it moves you to act or not, is this
> morning a text for you?  Soon as you relfect on it, it becomes
> rhetorical, no?  But rhetoric leads us to kairos: that moment we begin
> considering a departure from form.  It's that edge I urge others to
> elucidate for me: autoethnographically.  

I have been thinking about this. I am not sure honestly what i mean about
texts. Here where I am studying we use the word 'text' to describe the
work we use...and "text" is suppose to postmodernistly allow us to talk
about the work as if the author is dead.  I have been getting into a
little trouble lately in class by asserting that the author is not dead.
That words are chosen and certain words have more weight.  Whether or not
then we can get to the intentions of the author is debatable.(as i know we
are both all too aware)  this may be a little trite..i dont mean to be but
it seems like lately that people in my classes find "authenticity" in a
text they agree with.  I am working hard on this.  I am trying to
struggle against it.  I pay close attention to the places where
boredom for me occurs and then ask why.  I still do not understand
what Barthes means when he poses boredom as a form of bliss.  Could it 
be that there is some kind of jouissance that i am just not "open" to? 
Sorry I am blithering on.  This fits into some of the theory I have
been reading on reading.  Wolfgang Iser makes a less poetic attempts than
Barthes as talking about reading.  But he talks about the text (there i 
go again) as the "implied reader" an escalating exchange between the
reader and the words on the page which is continually remodifying itself. 
He says that works of literature
must have elements of both familiarity and the alien in order to truly
engage the reader.  His argument is a little problematic in that he
demands the reader have some kind of open-mind on first entering the
text...a trust in the text.  (it seems this is implanted at birth for
he cant seem to talk about how one might develop this state) One of my
friends has a thing for the romantic hero (abusive stalker types) such as
Rochester in Jane Eyre or Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights.  I find her
interesting.  We argue sometimes and she does not find texts that I like
all that interesting.  
Here is an omission for you.  I read Foucault's piece on commentary on the
weekend and the first four paragraphs made me cry (with a sad kind of
happiness).  I realise now that I havent even answered your question.  I
obviously need to think about some more. 
 > > > someone can say to me that
> > everything is subjective but then rilke will say that we can only be
> > intimate with each other if we recognise that we reside in neigboring
> > solitudes in which if we try we can view each other against a wide
> > sky...
> 
> Friend of mine just came out with a book on Rilke and his lover Paula
> Modersohn-Becker.  Please find the quote.  Such notions of 'proximity'
> interest me.  And Rilke always seems so self-absorbed, albeit remarkably
> so.  You like poetry?  Ever read Mary Oliver?  Clark Coolidge?  C.K.
> Williams?  Bernadette Mayer?  Just saw that Helen Vendler recently came
> out with a volume on Seamus Heaney.  
The book that this quote comes from is called Rilke on Love and other
Difficulties. translated and collected by j.l. mood. (norton book)  I
have three copies of this book so i can loan it out to people without
worrying too much about ever getting it back.  Our impressions about Rilke
are quite different.  But this is a book I re-read and still have painful
moments.  It has given me a lot of courage to be patient. I love it so
much I want to type the whole thing out.  Have you ever done this with a
book that you want to become cellular?  I wrote out Virginia Woolf's _the
waves_ when I was sixteen.  > > > 
"A togetherness between two people is an impossibility, and where it seems
nevertheless to exist, it is a narrowing, a reciprocal agreement which
robs either one party or both of his fullest freedom and development. But,
once the realisation is accepted that even between the closest human
beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by
side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them
which makes it possible for each to see the other whole and against a wide
sky!
Therefore this too must be the standard for rejection or choice: whether
one is willing to stand guard over the solitude of a person and whether
one is inclined to set this same person at the gate of one's own solitude,
of which (s)he learns only through that which steps, festively clothed,
out of the great darkness.
At bottom no one in life can help anyone else in life; this one
experiences over and over in every conflict and every perplexity: that one
is alone.
All companionship can consist only in the strengthening of two neighboring
solitudes, whereas everthing that one is wont to call giving oneself is by
nature harmful to companionship: for when one abandons himself, he is no
longer anything, and when two people both give themselves up in order to
come close to each other, there is no longer  any ground beneath them
and their being together is a continual falling.

That dip has just turned this into the best of days. Can I thank-you for
the opportunity of typing it?  


\> > have to say that rilke has more texture and makes me forget
objectivity
> > more readily.
> 
> What do you mean by that?  Find yourself at a loss for words?  In excess
> of recognizable form?  When exactly does he do this?  What is your
> response?  When/why do you write?

 Most difficult of questions. thinking thinking thinking.  Can I tell you
that it makes movement possible for me.  I dont mind (so much) the
inconsistencies in myself or those of others.  Does one need consistency
to have a recognizeable form?  Or can there be a consistancy of
movement/doing which eclipses calcification?  This morning I want to say
yes...but then I am a hopeful monster.  (without being teleological I
think) 

 > > i was thinking of surveillance and discipline in
terms of > > the kind of calcification that occurs when people go into a
> > coma...when they come out of it (if they do) movement becomes painful and
> > the kind of physio-therapy needed excrutiating...the kind of texts of
> > bliss needed to perform this physio-therapy sometimes hard to find...
> 
> Nice metaphor.  I want to remember/steal that for my interview with the
> ethnographer.  I flatter myself when I think this is something that has
> happened to me in deep meditation.  Fact is, I never got that deep. 
> Worked at sitting meditation for two days once.  It was winter.  I sat
> in a cabin high on a bluff above and icy river.  Would have sunk nicely
> had a cigar not intervened.
> 
> Blanchot's _Writing of the Disaster_ has done what you describe, for
> me.  Proust, Borges, and Sollers, among others as well, I think. 
> Interesting that you associate this state with "action."  You're just
> sitting there, reading in the most excruciatingly blissful way.  Again,
> I try to achieve this over tea. 
> 
> > (do
> > you know Roland Barthes distinction between texts of pleasure and texts of
> > bliss?) the winterson book of which you speak is called _the
> > passion_...i have read it outloud in neighboring solitudes...quite fine
> > results...
> 
> Yes!  I've enjoyed that, and _Art * Lies_, and her short book of essays:
> _Art Objects_, in which she promotes the perspective of Roger Fry of all
> people.  You remember the title of her latest novel?
> 
> Have a provocative day,
> 
> Socha
> 
Art [Objects] is one of my favourite books.  A very dear friend of mine
gave me a hardcover version of it that is so beautiful..it smells so good!
alright I have to get back to work. I will think more on that liminal
space you describe between thought and action. her new book is called _gut
symmetries_.
stacey


   

Driftline Main Page

 

Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005