Date: Fri, 20 Feb 1998 17:04:14 -0800
Subject: MB: Re:  The Running Mouth of Silence


Edward Moore,

  Can we deliniate *The* running mouth of silence?  You say:

> discourse... is alway already a sort of posthumous improvement upon a > previous discourse.

  For which I wonder, *improvement* how?  What's to 'improve'?  How does
'meta' mean more than self-referral or reflection?  While to re-feral
might improve or otherwise supplement a discourse, and while discourse
must stand opposite (if not opposed exactly) thought, as E.M. Forster
once asked:  "How can I know what I think until I see what I say?" And
isn't saying:

> ...thinking... is an idle, SILENT pursuit,

as you do, the same as claiming that the creation of difference is
idle?  If you'd said 'idylic' I might have grinned more greatly, or
nodded even.  And come to think of it, how META was Theocritus!  And his
goatheards!  Seemingly so idle, but we know better hmm?  What is there
to do at the height of highest culture after all but contest!  Such is
thought, a 'reverberation' of lute notes, if you will, but only in
opposition to your buddy's cacophony.  I saw it once, gleaming in the
sun reflected off a truckload of honey as we made our slow and ambling
way out of the pastures!

  Pure thought is a lintel; janus-faced, and so dispossessed, ironic. 
But how can thought be idle!  Idleness is an entirely puritan
projection!  A product of paternalistic paranoia!  Use your discourse to
improve upon that poisonous cachexia!  You wanna know what idleness is? 
Idleness is SLEEP, that's what it is, and it ain't silent either, it's
bloody unconscious!  Where's the thought in that!  Music, by the way,
appeals to the emotions not the mind.  There's more music being produced
today than at any time in history, and it ain't proof somebody's
creating change!  To think, Edward, as I think Nietzsche put it, to
think is to think differently.  Music doesn't allow for that, it only
confirms the phoney discourse everybody wants to believe.  Duchamp's
project was against what you call 'non-discursive art'.  He saw it for
the threat it was!

More later,

In the aforementioned nod,
where chaos only speaks, tellingly,
of 'art' in the absence of writing...