Subject: MB: Online Carnivals
Date: Wed, 25 Feb 1998 15:35:09 -0500 (EST)


	In leaving the stability of a grounding principle, a harmonious
home and the historical circle of speculation one risks being exposed to
the elements and the aleatory instability of the weather now melting a
language rough-end by snow and the play of northern lights. In my humble
little plot where I curl up sometimes burrowing holes in the underground,
I planted last spring herbs, tomatoes, and for the first time an eggplant
which made a delicious curry which I could eat two three times a week.
Sometimes I add spinach which I know from watching cartoons makes me
strong enough to "cut off" the additives of a shaping form so that I can
remain in the potency of being on the verge... of writing something that
would satisfy yet another mike who longs to talk with others with regards
to the "importance" of Blanchot while remaining all shut up like a cold
clam whose _impotence_ while fascinated by Blanchot's "significance" can
only express a very empty and hollow longing for an infinite conversation.
Burrowing worms hidden underneath leave castings behind themselves which
enrich the soil on which this year thinking with more extra-vagance I want
to plant flowers and cover my furrows with a view without end. Take a long
breath here and think it over. In a festival of flowers like in any
carnival the natural order of things is turned upside down, everything is
topsy turvy and game for monkey business. I am absorbed in a savage,
bacchic rhythm in spite of the fact that I am cultivating my twisted plot
based on given techniques where in a cut-and-paste mode I put together a
mixed-up texture, a catastrophic event constituting a Harlequin's mantle,
a beautiful hybrid at once wild and cultivated -- a monster of the natural
order patched-up with the baroque, elliptical law of Kepler (see Serres,
_Le Tiers-Instruit_, pg 69-73). But does Serres have that all important
distance that comes with satire? As Severo Sarduy points out satire is
always around the elliptical curve in Lezama Lima whose writings he has
described as on the verge of exploding into a "parade of sarcastic
dwarves, dancing, jingling their little coin covered jackets". Yes, Jose
Lezama Lima has been read in the tradition of carnivalization (Petronius,
Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne, Swift, Kundera). This is why Lezama Lima can
write, "the survival of the baroque in Spanish poetry resides in the
possibility always contemporary of seeing the metaphorical ray of Gongora
enveloped by the obscure night of St. John" (quoted in Benito Pelegrin
_Ethique Et Esthetique Du Baroque_ pg 58) which surely is little funny, a
_bifrontes_. 

A travesti,
 Ariosto Raggo



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