Date: Tue, 24 Jun 1997 00:44:37 -0700
Subject: MB: Brouhaha!


Lucio Privitello wrote:



>  |...and what would it feel like to gain a passage within the gods?   |

>  |Like walking through a silhouette. 



Black outlines persuade the eye to remain in contact, to "adhere" with

that which fascinates and haunts the imagination and turns things into

images. In "La solitude essentielle" this operation draws our attention

to events of writing where the personal I becomes the impersonal It(Il)
and one allows to takes it's course. This is to dispose language under
fascination, an invention of spaces where dissimulation appears; where
that which withdraws from all mimetic activity appears as the speaking
of the absence of language(see note 1 in "La solitude essentielle"). 

 From the house next door, a call |
>  |is sent, about much and soft memory, from who awaits the fate of    |
>  |the dead, who have circles performed above them, of wings spread,   |
>  |and talons poised; there I return a welcome, and a turn st(y)le     |
>  |on memory - where destiny is the density of disasters dusty air, as |
>  |we are silouetted there as pure outline. "[S]ecret reign" enough?   |
>  |Almost feels like that of Danae.

provenance gathers together, makes dense a presence-absence and as such
constitutes a memory that... may not die alone but is kept by that which
survives disasters dusty air. A memory  no longer than that of
cobwebspining historicists but so much shorter like Bataille's instant,
and Heidegger's recollection(see Vattimo's _The Dialectic of
Difference_),- and how can we forget Emerson's sense of youth and his
ephebe's "active forgetting" ? Emerson who was so steeped in  nineteenth
century magical arts of "correspondences" with Baudelaire, Poe and
others. But tell me why does it feel like that of Danae ? Danae whose
son  by a grandfather fearfull of an oracle was placed in a casket and
sent adrift on a  river of forgetfullness like the son this time locked
in a tower spellbound and woken again to be fooled into believing he was
dreaming and now is a prince in "Life is a Dream"(I forget his name) ? 



> Yet, "Ne devient pas fou qui veut"(Not everyone has the good luck to go
> mad. Lacan). Without the mat, then maybe "mat"(Fr.), or the gold of those
> who "know", and noun analytically. (Fools gold!?!). Sufficies to read
> that I have mentioned _The Truth In Painting_, or was that 'in painting',
> which is practiced by departments of Conservation?

or restoration(small r :-). To digress somewhat I add to Barthes on
blurring and Twombly, Deleuze on Bacon's fourth phase of painting  where
we sense a full breakdown of representation: "the zone of blurring or
sweeping away, which makes the figure surge up, will now matter in and
of itself, independently of all defined form: It will appear as a pure
objectless Force... the figure is dissipated" (Deleuze quoted in Dona
Polan - "Francis Bacon: The logic of Sensation" in _Giles Deleuze and
the Theater of Philosophy_) One could go on with the I as secretary
about Merleau-Ponty's reading of Cezanne and Lyotard on impressionism or
Bataille on Manet(or is it Monet?) but I recall that Benjamin has writen
that the spontaneous aim of the surrealist movement was a constant
search for the force(s) that would  be the spark of revolutionary or to
use a current word transformative analysis and practice; what Bataille
would call a "feverish poetry" and Blanchot "fascination" and how can we
forget Emerson's "enchantment of Nature" or the love of beauty. It is
not ludicrous to allow things to slide towards the prophet of Concord
given the hold he had on Nietzsche and that surrealism is a sort of
condensation of romanticism. Think of Schopenhauer for instance whose
critique of the secondary reasonings of the understanding - is analogous
to Breton et al's critique of rationality which at times actually
deteriorates into irrationality and regresses to momma THETHE.(This
regression  is one of Bataille's points of contention with the
surrealists. Blanchot himself writes that Breton and his friends lacked
the seriousness to secure their methods more securely( see _The Work of
Fire_ pg87).)
	 This romantic drift in surrealism is most evident in Julien Gracq
whose assesement and strong misreading of the surrealist movement  is
shared to some extent by Bataille. In "Julien Gracq: Romancier
Surrealiste" Simone Grossman writes with regards to his novels "le heros
du recit evolue dans une sphere detachee du monde. L'instrument de ce
"depaysement"[In the preface _La Femme 100 tetes de de Max Ernst_ 1929 
Breton writes that surreality is the function of our will de depaysement
de tout. Bataille's word is "glissement". I picked up "drifting" from
Deleuze I think, eventhough his way over my head.] voulu est le
brouillage: une occultation des contours transformant les objets." From
Gracq's brouillage we return to Deleuze's Figure without form and drift
on the verge of begining towards the essence of solitude blurring our
tracks as twombly remarked while smudging the word in taking his cows
from Apollo. We erase our tracks in gathering by a secret memory which
does not hide anything but shows the memory of memory.     

One day I will remember to look for some drivers or something to add
some accents to my writing machine, a little color to a Gothic zone
tinged by digressing Baroque folds.


Fumario.