Date: Wed, 3 Mar 1999 22:59:10 -0400 (AST)
From: Stacey Maxine Armstrong <armstrsm-AT-is2.dal.ca>
Subject: Re: rhizomes




On Wed, 3 Mar 1999, Ariosto Raggo wrote:

> > 
> > my dream of the sound of the letter A
> > i couldnt tell if you were teasing me with this particular
> > question/task...*but* the familiar you only reaches so far... 
> > to be played to Disintegration on randomn repeat.  Prayers for rain in
> > looping shudders and stutters...(you didnt tell me you had been reading
> > Deleuze...i need you to be more clear about where your vocabularly is
> > coming from...i spent most of today attempting to read to meet you
> > somewhere...after stumbling across a quote of his talking about bodies
> > without organs...a metaphor i find mildly disturbing...but enticing at the
> > same time...)  Is your sense that the phallocentricism implied within
> > verticality and hegemonic imagos neccessarily implies that the other side
> > is the feminine? (YIKES woman?) ...one of my continuing questions is the
> > binary movement of male/female which you so articulately described in your
> > wasp flower imago (OUCH) (my initial reaction was to not continue
> > conjugation on this particular topic but as you say no more pussy-footing
> > around....i seem to intuitively shut down when these sorts of systems
> > begin to appear..this is why i get off on spinoza so much....he attempts
> > to describe a system in which awareness and imagination are infused with
> > the body...human-doing rather than human-being...this is how i would move
> > through the world...without cartesian theatres and without in some senses
> > any kind of head...how does rilke put it ..."day struggle and night
> > struggle and day struggle and night struggle..." 


This will go very slowly.  You have read so much more than me with so much
more patience.  A professor of mine told me once that I have an "uncanny"
ability to intuitively feel my way into the deeper structures of a text
without actually following it *logically*.  In this way, I can often claim 
that I have not *read* anything at all. (Hence my desire
to read theory about reading so that I can become a more self-aware
logical reader.)  Is the attempt at the building of a metalanguage the
gift you (the sound of A) are offering me?  

I keep coming back to these lines...I have attempted to read
> Spinoza's ethics a couple of times but I find him so difficult. Sounds
> important if something as you write here is where your ambition and
> lust is. 

I just think that Spinoza is where I would begin/began my initial
re-thinking/re-doing of my body.

What you called a "binary movement" when read as text I would
> describe as coincidence of opposites and the writer would be a crossing
> of male/female. 
What do you mean by coincidence? (arbitrary?)  Does this make the writer
androgynous, hermaphroditic, asexual?

I know this makes me and my expression a narcissistic
> simulacra. Another name for simulacra is anamorfosis or trompe l'oeil.
> The appeal through the laterality of the turning phrases is to the
> observing reader who is included if not incoorporated in the imposture.

Yes, my complicity - and self-awareness of my complicity with a text often
leads to more pain.  My interpretive desire is used against me.

> This is the figure and position(a protean one, constantly changing
> depending on circumstances, situations, occasions, the moment) of the
> sophist. 

You are talking about entrapment theory right? And I think you are write,
this isnt me at all.  Not clever enough.

For me it leads clearly to metafiction. I am not sure if this is
> you, I mean stacey. You say you read me, and repeat that you do. Do you
> read this? 

I feel that I do.

I think this is my sense of direction through language that i
> am begining to express, or rather paint as mask and image, as ornament
> and display.

Will you tell me what it sensorily seems like?
 
> question: this is way of making something (but also a manner existence
> and being?) that elicits the readers response, his capture. I had this
> inhibition when to saying "her" rather "his." I am not sure that in the
> shape up I am in right now there could be women readers, only writers
> it seems.
So you are saying that only I could entrap you...that you could not entrap
me? (you are so wrong and amazing at the same time)  Or are you using
"woman" as a kind of rhetoric? (ie. I am not a woman figuratively
speaking)

*essentially*
stacey

 Break time.
> 
> Ariosto
> 
> 
> >(that isnt it...he says
> > it better...i am so close to just going home and looking it up...but i
> > have more to say...)  ambition and lust reside here for me...but they are
> > messy house guests and (and never seem to actually want to be my
> > roomates) sometimes i have asked them to leave...*Perhaps* this is why i
> > do not enjoy it when other people watch me engaged with the
> > world/myself...they are not really engaged with any kind of
> > complexity...(fuck is that bordering on vertical movement? i am trying
> > to avoid it) dont be an ant or a word... seriously have you read
> > Derrida's book on the postcard? i send postcards to my friends all
> > the time...and sometimes it isnt about what i say... but the expression 
> > of longing inscribed in POSTING at all
> > (doing)...transgressing...impossible...you continue
> > to surprise me...now i think i am comfortable...
> > 
> > a postcard
> > 
> > i dream of a dress made from a bivouac...a shift dress of living
> > ants...organic tapestry...seething chocolate brown speckled with
> > white...the heads of major worker ants...clustering responses and tarsal 
> > claws keening to clad me...my knees and elbows join me as surfacing
> > possibilities...i dance in a dress that moves and breathes with the
> > surface of me...opening the errogenous...erroneous from monolitihic teleos
> > to rain and wool on skin and liminality shuddering the folds of increasing
> > starriness...the pearls of gifts given with expectation reshaping into
> > animals and cannibals...there is no need for sharpness....scissors.
> > shears. swords or lasering beams....zones literally and laterally expanding
> > across the limits of the shift into senses...the eye/i's that do not
> > speculate but participate...
> > 
> > stacey
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > i just had to clear one other little (mis)interpretation up...pinking
> > shears does not refer to the colour pink...(not a big fan of pink...forced
> > to wear it way too often)  they are scissors which have a kind of serrated
> > edge which prevents fraying...sorry this sounds a little
> > patronising in my head...did you already know this?
> > 
> > 
> > 
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
>                                
>         
>