Exhibit A
From Leslie Scalapino The Public World / Syntactically Impermanence
‘Not perceiving impermanence’ itself becomes an action, an intention.
Exhibit B
From “See also” listing from Wikipedia entry “mono no aware”
- Lacrimae rerum
- Memento mori
- Mottainai
- Nine Changes
- Wabi-sabi
- Ubi sunt
- Weltschmerz
- Sehnsucht
- Saudade
Exhibit C
The conjunction of Exhibit A with Exhibit B.
And so for day 1882
07.02.2012
“Dear Living Person” John Russell in Blast Counterblast edited by Anthony Elms and Steve Reinke. (First appeared in Mute Feb 16, 2011)
It has a put down that functions by way of repetition.
In this context the curator is the key performer — as organiser, collector, cataloguer, archaeologist, manger and guardian. And for instance, Rancière is the philosopher par-excellence, as the philosopher of aesthetics-in-general and the generalised interdisciplinary. In a world where there are no categories, we are left to experiment with the senses. A meta-politics and framing of a common sensorium, rearticulating freedom and equality in relation to new relationships between thought and the sensory world, between bodies and the social distribution of bodies. Rancière is the writer of this position, an extra-institutional relational aesthetics. He’s not very good, but then this is not a very good position. With the dissolution of genre he offers us a generalised reorganisation of senses in general in general in general in general.
In general, it works as polemic. Less so as persuasion.
And so for day 1881
06.02.2012
Recalling the toughness of the body by invoking its frailties.
the incessant waves seize me, my hands
on my head in my hair, I don’t forget how
fragile the brain is under the bone of the
cranium, how friable the bones beneath the
skin, tender the flesh, thin the nerves, the
veins.
Chantal Neveu A Spectacular Influence translated by Nathanaël.
I don’t forget that every step is a falling.
And so for day 1880
05.02.2012
Waters Remembered begins with a catalogue of streams Taddle Creek, Garrison Creek, Burke Brook, Castle Frank Brook, etc. All buried watercourses in Toronto.
It is not quite an epic catalogue. Their mention is a lyric impulse to anchor the poem in place.
This beginning tying name to place suffers a displacement when it comes to portraits. The subject is not named by a kind of divergent ekphrasis. “Royal Street Diamond” begins as a description of a bronze bull created by Joe Fafard and poised outside the Mira Godard Gallery in Yorkville and then the poem turns to the speaker’s companion, a friend “who is losing memory and language”. The poem is full of details and apt anecdote that allow me to identify its subject. And I ponder why his name isn’t invoked.
He points to the anatomically correct
scrotum dangling between the bull’s sturdy
back legs, giggles, waves his hands and saysneeds something … at his neck … He reaches
for words and finds them: a sign … waiting
for the girls! We laugh and walk on pasthigh-end clothing shops. His words flow now
remembering his cousin’s dairy barn smelling
of straw and shit, its din of bawling calves.
He was a professor of English and an admirer of pretty boys from way back. The creator of Stonyground, a very special farm garden on the Bruce.
But I understand the poet’s reticence. This is not a poem for. It is a poem about.
But naming is important for the the full presence of the genius of the place to carry on. Our friend’s name is Douglas (never Doug) Chambers. He has since that walk with Maureen Scott Harris lost more of his memories and has less of his exquisite mastery of language to work with. He still giggles on occasion.
Maureen Scott Harris Waters Remembered
And so for day 1879
04.02.2012
Simon Hopkinson. Introduction to Roast Chicken and Other Stories
Good cooking, in the final analysis, depends on two things: common sense and good taste. It is also something that you naturally have to want to do well in the first place, as with any craft. It is a craft, after all, like anything that is produced with the hands and senses to put together an attractive and complete picture. By “picture,” I do not mean “picturesque”: good food is to be eaten because it tastes good and smells enticing.
Look at how the adjective circulates in the paragraph — like a fine soupçon of garlic — echoing like a chiasmus: good taste tastes good.
And so for day 1878
03.02.2012
Leslie Scalapino “Footnoting” in The Public World / Syntactically Impermanence in her own abstract way supplies me with an epigraph to my indulging in
To produce this impermanence by iterating dissimilarities until they become something else—is the opposite movement of (converse of) obsession or imitation.
serves nicely as an epigraph to this selection of quotations from the catalogue for works by Kai Chan Rainbow Lakes with essays by Stuart Reid and Robin Metcalfe.
Robin Metcalfe “Synaesthesia” leads us on an etymological run
The word ‘node’ derives from an Indo-European root, gen-, which means ‘to compress into a ball.’ It gives us the words, ‘knit,’ ‘connect’ and ‘nettle,’ and once named several plants of closely related genera, such as the ever-useful hemp, that were anciently employed as sources of fibre. The same root provides sailors with the words ‘net’ and ‘lanyard,’ the name of that peculiarly nautical accessory, the knotted cord sailors wear around their necks.
Stuart Reid has constructed his essay around the theme of lists. Down the side of Metcalfe’s and Reid’s essays are a set of lists of which this is the first:
1. Synonyms for pants
Drawers
Underwear
Trousers
Dungarees
Pedal Pushers
Capri Pants
Bell Bottoms
Knickers
Cords
Bloomers
Pantaloons
Slacks
Flares
I first encountered his work at a 2011 show at the Textile Museum of Canada. I like that now I can think of “node” and “list” as elements of the work and know that what is at work here is neither obsession nor imitation.
And so for day 1877
02.02.2012
From the lyrics to Annie Lennox ‘Primitive’ (on the album Diva)
[…]
For time will catch us in both hands
To blow away like grains of sand
Ashes to ashes rust to dust
This is what becomes of us[…]
One distinctly hears on the audio the “rust to dust” — a line providing a variation of “earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust” phrase from the funeral service in the Book of Common Prayer — which variation leads me to propose another: “ashes to ashes rush to dust”.
And so for day 1876
01.02.2012
Anne Carson in Eros, the bittersweet draws on the work of Eric Havelock postulating a shift in the Greek mind with the coming of literacy. She evokes this line of thought in the following terms:
At the same time, a more private revolution is set in process by the phenomenon of alphabetization. As the audio-tactile world of the oral culture is transformed into a world of words on paper where vision is the principal conveyor of information, a reorientation of perceptual abilities begins to take place within the individual.
An individual who lives in an oral culture uses his senses differently than one who lives in a literate culture, and with that different sensual deployment comes a different way of conceiving his own relations with his environment, a different conception of his body and a different conception of his self. The difference revolves around the physiological and psychological phenomenon of individual self-control. Self-control is minimally stressed in an oral milieu where most of the data important for survival and understanding are channelled into the individual through the open conduits of his senses, particularly his sense of sound, in a continuous interaction linking him with the world outside him. Complete openness to the environment is a condition of optimum awareness and alertness for such a person, and a continual fluent interchange of sensual impressions and responses between the environment and himself is the proper condition of his physical and mental life. To close his sense off from the outside world would be counter-productive to life and to thought.
I quote at length to make a few points: self-control is not alien to an oral culture, indeed regulation of information received is important for sorting out life and thought. Carson’s individual could be a tool maker or a creator of artefacts — and would there not be need for periods of introspection to build and create?
Substitute tool-making for reading and writing in the continuation of her account to see that all that is ascribed to the power of reading and writing can and does exist in prior oral cultures.
When people begin to learn reading and writing, a different scenario develops. Reading and writing require focusing the mental attention upon a text by means of the visual sense. As an individual reads and writes he gradually learns to close or inhibit the input of his senses, to inhibit or control the responses of his body, so as to train energy and thought upon the written words. He resists the environment outside him by distinguishing and controlling the one inside him. This constitutes at first a laborious and painful effort for the individual, psychologists and sociologists tell us. In making the effort he becomes aware of the interior self as a entity separable from the environment and its input, controllable by his own mental action. The recognition that such controlling action is possible, and perhaps necessary, marks an important stage in ontogenic as in phylogenetic development, a stage at which the individual personality gathers itself to resist disintegration.
What I do grant is that reading and writing permit affordances that enhance recursivity. It is easier in writing to inscribe the writing moment into itself. And easier for the reader to be aware of his or her own reading. But self-relexivity is not alien to an oral culture.
Instead of a historiography of rupture between literate and oral eras, one can following Carson’s own triangulation of beloved, lover and the distance between the two, propose a schema between environment, interior self and the distance between them. The structure may vary from historical instance to historical instance but it is not totally absent from any given formation. I still maintain that storytelling in an oral culture demands self-control and writing as a practice can lead the self to disintegrate along lines of flight. In either situation, one can take on or resist voices. Voice-distance-self.
And so for day 1875
31.01.2012
It is no wonder that in a book of poems entitled Light-crossing Michael Redhill makes us attentive to starlight.
starblown night, scattered salt thrown for good luck over a shoulder
That was from “Night Driving”
This is from “Mahoney Point”
But the Milky Way is a chalk mark
erased against blackness
And the title to this blog entry is derived from the final words of “Allen’s Hill”: wild starlight.
What is remarkable for me in these examples is the pairing of a celestial figure with a human gesture. In some ways, one would expect such treatment to result in a domestication of the phenomenon. However, the impulsiveness of the gesture releases a sort of sublimity.
And so for day 1874
30.01.2012
Ted Chiang “Story of Your Life” — the linguist Louise explaining her acquisition of the writing system of the Heptapods …
As I grew more fluent, semagraphic designs would appear fully formed, articulating even complex ideas all at once. My thought processes weren’t moving any faster as a result, though. Instead of racing forward, my mind hung balanced on the symmetry underlying the semagrams. The semagrams seemed to be something more than language; they were almost like mandalas. I found myself in a meditative state, contemplating the way in which premises and conclusions were interchangeable. There was no direction inherent in the way propositions were connected, no “train of thought” moving along a particular route; all the components in an act of reasoning were equally powerful, all having identical precedence.
once. though. semagrams. mandalas. interchangeable. precedence.
These are the terminal words of the sentences in the paragraph. They enact the very thing/event that is described. They work as a syntagm either forwards or backwards. All-at-once time is given.
And so for day 1873
29.01.2012
