From: Ariosto Raggo <df803-AT-freenet.carleton.ca>
Subject: Re: 6 Months and 14 days
Date: Sun, 10 Oct 1999 00:28:54 -0400 (EDT)


I have been reading  Ricouer too  again on  metaphor.  I  am trying to 
defend  metaphor  these days going gainst  the grain of my own
propensity and prohibitions and learning that imagery can unwork,
dissolved its own representability such that metaphor as a vehicle is 
an erring voyage towards intensifying unknowability, invisibility--and
really  what remains  hidden in clouds of thinking affected by a sixth
sense or meditation.

Meditation is 'speech' on the verge... almost speaking and because of
this practice, grows big, incubating and becomning fecund for a future
flowering. An event of writing that touches up this empty spacing with
an abstract blue hue then is an incubation by silence. Suspended potent
verses then are a roaming "not-yet conscious" twilight , an incipient
birthing whose clairvoyance is augury, a premonition of things to come.
A constitutional power, a virtous potency almost constitutes the fabric
of an ornate upward flow--Incipit vita nova. 

I'm wildy paraphrasing Ernest Bloch (The Principle of Hope) who says that
there is this compulsion to speak, a spur to productivity which "really
takes hold when the vision hovering ahead, that would have to be
formed, conceals itself, when it even seems  to  be flirting  with the
idea of  retreat." If you 'imitate'  this spur there seems to be  at
once a contraction and expansion, a returning  procession, an
impressionist expression. The Castilian spring  of muses rises up on
Parnassus, a mountain,  but one can also imagine a brooding volcano when
a spark  kindles inwarding seeing, an insight of a moment of  vision
flares up into a conflagration, a monstrous fortune that one wastes
without  reserve and without compensation just in case luck runs out.
Caillois in _Man  and the Sacred_ often refers to  Polycrate who
throws out a precious ring into the sea in order to protect himself 
from the turning of  fortune whose excessive bounty that he received
made him  doubt its continuation. This voyage is Romance too  and
ascetism is  the very path  of _puissance_ (virtous potency).

She comes to us,
A stranger, awakening,
The voice that shapes humanity.
--Holderlin--

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