From: "Aristotelos" <Gulio-AT-sympatico.ca>
Subject: Re: America, America
Date: Mon, 14 Jan 2002 17:41:19 -0800



> Plato, of course.  But the Aristotle I was thinking of is in the
> Posterior Analytics:
>
> "From experience--the whole universal that has come to rest in the
> [particular]soul, the one beside the many which is a single identity
> within them all--originates the skill of the craftsman and the
> knowledge of the man of science, skill in the sphere of coming to be
> and science in the sphere of being."
>
> Though Aristotle sees the critical link in the chain to be  sense
> perception,   the rattling ( or prattling) which sets it all in
> motion is the rhetorical impulse, the putting to words of
> possibilities so strongly felt as to be satisfied only by words which
> bring us closer and closer to the things themselves. . .so that there
> is nowhere else to go, but straight ahead to those words, those
> things.
>
> Like the "jazz idiom"?  You take a tune that rings true of something
> and roll it into a riff that means to be sort of funny, or at least
> ironic, if it means anything.  So an idea migrates from the world of
> Cole Porter to the world of Thelonius Monk.  Some of Plato's tunes
> migrate to Alexandria and are "thrown off" in a most peculiar way.
> Perhaps not thrown off at all, but thrown back and caught by a
> descendant of the Tristamigistus from whom they came.  Neoplatonism
> as Plato in a jazz riff.  I like that!
>
>
>

Just taking these two snips at random language migrates, moves in a
particular way that can be put into words and is its style that in so far as
one makes it one's own becomes an idiom but how do you play well? I can
improvise something that becomes something like a rhythm or a refrain in
Deleuze's sense and already I catch a turbine flow. On a swirl I see the
weather, really ride a storm. A piece of expression as patchwork is always
open ended, full of threads that roll out like swirling flames that have no
connection to just passing lines or just arriving lines. No, they tie
anywhere, to another piece from way back or to some yet to be thought
fragment. That's the non-linear versatility of an improvisation full of
loose threads. It can be taught to some extent if some readings are kept in
mind or worked through. In this case I am tying in the loose thread that I
left dangling to Deleuze that also ties to Serres whose Lucreatian atom,
according to D&G, goes from Mars to Venus and more threads split open. To
some extent there is also the ability to take what seems to you the good
kernel in what you hear in another and make that migrate elsewhere leaving
what is hard to chew behind. So as I go I define a fragment in making  it do
what it does when it no longer worries about preserving itself for a long
time but allows for the momentary hearing of a horn that fades away leaving
by virtue of a short-term memory a kind of sticky edge from which something
else can emerge. A period seems now to be a long ways away and each letter
so damm close, don't you think? So words for sure are bringing me closer to
what Emerson calls a fact, or the things themselves; but I also create the
value and measure for them. In this instance by giving a firmer sense of
what could be a piece as a patchwork in a quilt or any texture (the product
of a conversation with myself or others) I have made more of everything I
write. More...in the sense of freeing up more action, more spontaneous
action, more ties carrying an abstract war machine from Mars to Venus,
always more...
Gulio



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