From: "Blank" <gulio-AT-sympatico.ca>
Subject: Re: Mnemosyne: thinking poetization
Date: Fri, 27 Jul 2001 10:56:22 -0400


Dear List,

It is a fact that no one any longer knows how very common words of our
language operate because we lost touch with the ways of life in our past
that made sense of such words as "tranquility" or we just don't read
Schelling or the other 5 or 6 writers who still keep in touch. But an image
does that, it is more or less touching, but in subtle literary writting they
have the effect of putting our deliberative consciousness to sleep, our
"adult self" as it is often said because when we are children we are still
not so deliberate and unfree. Simplicity of language is what I'm trying to
recover. I have this reticence with regard to making references, partly
because I want to think more simply, with less personality in a way when
personality means mostly an appeal to the symbolic fund or ordinary memory
of a particulat audience or group. Even the art of conversation is lost. On
this list I see little evidence of it. I think there is something to be said
for the monologue but even this is a dialogue between oneself and an other.
Of course we try to hear the other by not thinking too much, suspending our
own deliberation but in a dialogical monologue the other takes on different
shapes, if it is appropriate to use such a formal way of expression. It
depends on the background, on the prejudices that we have which today one
just can't assume are the same. I mean the imagistic fund or reserve comes
from our background which can be either driven by ordinary memory and so is
a fund that is used to flatter the sensibility of our own tribe or maybe it
is more primordial or immemorial and speaks to essence of our humanity no
matter where we come from. The problem with counting on our own ordinary
memory is really obvious in online discussion that brings people together
from various parts of the world. Often when it is used there is no real
contact, in one ear out the other. This is why serene contemplation which
appeals to moments of silence seems to me essential because it makes room
for whatever difference or distance there might be do to our variety of
backgrounds. It lets that variety or fecundity be. It preserves richness in
all conversations just because it stays in touch with the simple and unique.
So the felicity or success of an image depends not so much on flattering our
own memory but on bringing out and letting be the obscure clarity of all
things, the unconcealment of a self-sheltering withdrawal. Everything in a
way is not common but singular. We can only hold on to the truth of the pure
isolation and fluidity of things but momentarily; yet this is the most
singularly common thing there is which ultimately is not possible to
describe with the infinite poverty of words facing  this truth. The most
anyone can hope for, through language, is for the lustre and felicity of an
oxymoron or two. Anything else misses the mark, everything is else is an
empty aim that doesn't keep in touch with the rhythmic undulation of the
golden measure. Tranquility is a frugality of intentional thoughts aiming at
this or that. It indicates the withdrawal of intentions into a diamond whose
lustre is the mark of our firmness, our closed and private faith in all
things.


Gulio



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