From: Ariosto Raggo <df803-AT-freenet.carleton.ca>
Subject: contemplative humanism and savagery
Date: Thu, 8 Apr 1999 18:46:09 -0400 (EDT)



"...travel seems to me a profitable exercise. The mind is continually
exercised in observing new and unknown things; and I know no better
school, as I have often said, for forming one's life, than to set
before it constantly the diversity of so many other lives, ideas, and
customs, and to make it taste such a perpetual variety of forms of our
nature. In it the body is neither idle nor overworked...

To be methodical means to go on, to get on with it, a departure
"...from...to...". It always implies a deterritorialization and in
Montaigne's essay "on Vanity" which is a monstrosity of conceit; it is
a way of travelling in spite of this rootedness in a particular
situation whose mood today is polycultural which according to Mafessoli
distinguishes a sensible postmodernity, often recycling past archetypes
of which the "monster" is the most fecund; from the generalization of
modern statements. Monsters express the striking taste for variety in
nature that when it acts freely, it doesn't fail to diversify, pluralize.

There are a variety of references that could be made. For instance to
_Natural History_ by Pliny where book VII has drawn interest for its
discussion of the race of monsters and the singularities of human
generation. In Pliny nature sometimes expresses the provenance of the
mother but also the caprice of a cruel tyrant. He observes nature
through a mixed sentiment of fear and admiration.

Monstrosity is, in so far as it blurs contours, an impressionist,
fecund play of colors. Nature in this lateral regard is out of focus.

Monster/monstrous: [<L. monere, to warn; mostrare, to show]

In Isadore de Seville _Etymologies_ it is the study of the monstrous
form that is significant for the divination of future events.

The methodological style of mystic writing is always a search for lines
of flight, it induces a departure in the reader.

The monster is an index of the sacred since it is outside of
hierarchies and ordinary categories. As symbol of the bounty of nature
monsters express its excessive energy, that there is always something
other. As a name, "nature" never corresponds to the thing. It induces
and exodus of a hand across virgin, untamed territory. In becoming
adjectival writing is a constant going out of place, an ecstasy of the
simple manner, the illiterate savage "I". The authority of this writing
does not derive from propositional statements following a linear order of
cause and effect with a well governed origin and end; but emerges from
going over the same place from which it speaks which is constantly
withdrawn from the meaning words which obscures seeing the support of
this floating side-glance writing its aimless digressions not sure if
it is progressing or regressing but knowing it moves on, who knows where.
This movement over 'nothing' describes the nomadic savage who is
foreign to every place and homeland which is why there is no question
here of a figure of speech that has its proper place. The primitive
style as boundary, limit, fault line, blurs the topographical order of
language to show the empty memory, ancestral forgotten ruins, on which
it depends to record its travel.

Ariosto and others


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