Subject: Re: Mnemosyne: thinking poetization
Date: Fri, 3 Aug 2001 09:43:43 -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
>
>
>

Dear List,

Morning, just woke up, trace of dreams still lingering on the tip of fingers
shaking off sleep. I was dreaming that I was part of some sort of secret
underground resistance movement. I have no idea what we were resisting. It
was so vague but I remember distinctly that my name was "Enigma" and my
codename was "Farmer". It made sense to me as after I was ten my family
ended up in a small farming community where I learnt English watching sesame
street on TV while the rest of the kids were doing classwork. Even though I
was ten I have absolutely no memory of any effort of learning the language
like I do of learning French. Or almost no memory of anything before that,
of being settled anywhere I could call my first home. Mostly it was constant
motions of uprooting that did away with much of early memory which has
giving me my sense of just wandering through the places I happen to stop in,
passing without attachement and always feeling that I just don't quite fit
anywhere as if I were the spy with a vanishing double identity. Naturally I
have a predeliction for misfits everywhere and a keen ear for foreclosing
disavowal. Generally a tendency to be on the side of the defense, that of
the underdog which changes constantly. For instance I have come under the
heavy influence of Derrida like many intellectuals of my generation and I
picked up his sense of going "contretemps" as he says but shit I came too
late to consider Derrida "contretemps" so I latched onto his enfant terrible
the recollecting internalizing way of thinking and, well, there is nothing
here that seems like a narcissistic introjection of the other by the same.
But everything he is valuing like polysemia and differance which is a
capitulation and resistance at the same time 'representing', or better
putting into  play our doubled tendency where the impulse of a conflictual
contradiction opens up a space. This is what he means by writing which he
describes as an adventurous strategy. He says in his essay "Differance" that
by adventurous strategy he means that here it is not a case anything
governed by a thematic _telos_. Writing is an interminable strategy without
end, a "blind tactics" that goes on and on and on. Neither does it have a
beginning or arche and so is outside all teleology. Differance combines two
senses of the word differer. First it is a temporization which is a "detour
that suspends  the accomplishment  of "desire" and "will," and equally
effects this suspension in a mode that annuls or tempers its own effect".
Presumably we are being told that we ought to be reserved in how extreme we
take this aspect of differance. Secondly, differance is a spacing, in the
sense of working with an interval and a "certain perseverance in
repetition". Thus arche-writing is a temporizing spacing. Okay, it's getting
confusing and startting to look like a labarynthian web of non-sense. I mean
really, to understand the essay you have to have a lot of background in
Heidegger and psychoanalysis and I promised myself that I would be
recovering simplicity which is just that which a complicated man like
Derrida, even in this essay, is put off by, perhaps because it's not so
overwrought by a knotty sheaf that is impossible to read in a legible
manner. I know he would excuse me if I tried a repetition and another more
simple beginning starting from texts written long ago before the oppression
of signifiers were fullfilling themselves on illusory signifieds and weaving
a higly complex tapestry of consciousness and unconsciousness that goes on
and on and on working at the limits of mastery in itself undoing it's
foreclosing introjection to make room for the poverty or the margins of our
conversations, the forgotten soundlessness of graphic inscription wandering
aimlessly like orphans without origin near the intimate proximity of an
idleness without telos. I'm awake now and ready for a shower and some tea.

Gulio



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