BERNEVAL

Martin Buber Tales of the Hasidim: The Early Masters translated by Olga Marx (New York: Schocken Books, 1947) pp. 216-217

When Rabbi Levi Yitsak came to Nikolsburg to visit Rabbi Shmelke who had taught him the way of fervor when he was young, and whom he had not seen in a long time, he went into the kitchen, covered with his prayer shawl and with double phylacteries on his forehead, and asked Rabbi Shmelke’s wife — on this very first morning — what dishes were being prepared for the noonday meal. His question, though rather surprising, was answered. Then he went on to ask whether the cooks had really mastered their art, and other things of the same sort. Rabi Shmelke’s disciples, who heard of this, took him for a veritable glutton. He, however, now entered the House of Prayer and — while the congregation prayed — began to talk to an utterly insignificant man, despised by all, on quite unimportant worldly subjects, as those standing near could determine. One of the disciples could not bear to observe such behavior any longer and said roughly to the stranger: “Silence! Idle chatter is forbidden here!” But the rabbi of Berditchev paid no attention to him and continued his conversation.

At the midday meal, Rabbi Shmelke greeted him joyfully, bade him sit at his side, and ate from the same bowl as he. His disciples, who had heard of the curious manners of the visitor, marked these signs of favor and friendship with sullen surprise. When the meal was over, one of them could no longer suppress his annoyance and asked his master why he showered honors on so empty-headed and impudent a man who had behaved in such and such a way. The zaddik replied: “In the Gemara we read: ‘Rab (Abba Areka), for all the days of his life never spoke of worldly matters.’ Is this praise not strange? Does it indicate that the other masters spent their time in wordly talk? Can nothing worthier be told of Rab? The meaning is this: Whatever worldly affairs he discussed with people in the course of the day, each of his words was, in reality, filled with secret significance and a secret purpose, and made itself felt in the higher world; and his spirit remained steadfast in such service all day long. That is why our sages have accorded him praise of which none other was found worthy. what others could do for only three hours, after which they sank from this level, he could do throughout the day. And the same is true of Rabbi Levi Yitzak. what I can do for only three hours, he can do the whole day through: concentrate his spirit, so that it makes itself felt in the world of Heaven, even with talk which men consider idle.”

Being neither devout nor agnostic, I still find this story enlightening. It shows a path of being present in the delivery of words and equally attentive in the hearing.

And so for day 1000
08.09.2009

I first came across his critical writing (a review of sorts of books by Steve McCaffery). And then I went cruising. And found this nugget.

Again. Writing is an aid to forgetting.

For those of us fastidious about words writing is
a way of getting some of them out of the head in
order to make way for new experiences.

Without writing we’d hold on to words at the
expense of those experiences which happily (at
times) give rise to them.

Writing is letting go.

To write is to let go.

Writing is a way of getting younger.

(It’s a way of getting younger so that we can
age.

Gracefully.

Gracelessly.

Or otherwise.)

from Alan Davies This Is Thinking
http://www.fauxpress.com/e/davies/p5.htm

I do like that elegant degradation at the end — it almost looks like repetition and then you see it is a way of making a plurality of possibilities emerge from a stark dichotomy. It’s a trick worth remembering even if it is in the service of forgetting.

And so for day 999
07.09.2009

from a while back, a letter full of speculations and musings…

Dear Friend,

Very last day of the month: time to sneak in under the wire a report some disjecta and let you know that I have continued to meditate on the theme of experience and expression.

First, the hyacinth is blooming and the smell of the six or so plants in the garden is heady. It is a temporary phenomenon all the richer because of its transiance.

Second, I found myself considering what I am inclined to call the forgetting of narration. I have observed in some examples of critical discourse that there is a tendency to speak in terms of many narrations and a single narrative. If a phenomenological perspective is introduced then narrative is not seen as a single and unique object of thought (or experience) but as the product of agreement between subjects. The diagram of a diegesis is no less a narration than the many words or images that also give access to similar constructions.

It is by agreement that we produce the same story, an agreement renegotiated at every telling.

The same story is always a new agreement. Recall children wanting to hear a favourite story with all the noises and gestures that produce the sense of the familiar. It is a language trap to insist that what returns is the same. It is familiar.

No two cups of tea taste the same yet they are recognized as cups of tea and even tea of the same flavour (but with a wee difference in the intensity due to slight shifts in steeping time).

I have been propelled to this nominalist realization of the instability of any given entity called a “narrative” by recalling a question that Professor Fitch asked at my defence so very many years ago. His question was about Ingarden’s notion of concretization. My answer then makes more sense now: a rereading produces a different concretization. Of course some readers would set concretization on the side of narration and a narrative on the side of some unchanging structure. But the structure itself is malleable. Its stability, a function of our agreements.

In Saussure’s Cours there is an illustration (referenced by Barthes in Elements of Semiology) where there are two flows and samplings from each. Below is a typographic transcription

===== < ====== > =====

………. < ……. > ……..

The famous aribitrariness of the sign is a relation between samplings. The signified is as much an incision into a flow of matter as is the signifier. All this seems rather obvious to anyone that understands the semantic field to be dynamic. If the pair narration/narrative is isomorphic with the pair signifier/signified, the slippage that is perceived in expression/experience is built in to how humans process the relations between language and reality.

And language is a part of reality.

Third of the disjecta, all these musings on the intersubjectivie nature of the stability of narrative as object of thought or experience came after a lecture by Martin Lefebvre to the Toronto Semiotic Circle where he quoted Peirce to the effect that “every fine argument is a poem or a symphony” and outlined a scheme where habit mediates between chance/origin and necessity/telos. This is getting long and convoluted. The following is very sketchy.

involution is not equivalent to self-reflexivity

involution produces a copy of the world in a given state which becomes the base state to compare subsequent states [This is similar to how a computer’s central processing unit keeps a copy in active memory to work upon — the model can be applied to the act of reading. In my thesis way back when I briefly touched upon the notion of involution in a quick look at the similarities between the semiotic square and the mathematical object called a Klein group. This in the context of positing the semiotic square as a machine…]

Someone somewhere may have already introduced the notion of states into possible world semantics. This might just give access to a poetics of impossible worlds. Impossible worlds are games (considered as moves between states). A focus that might interest those in searching to bridge the ludology versus narratology in gaming studies.

Of course I’m left with questions to ponder: How does, if it does, the pair world-state map onto the pair narrative-narration?

And so I take time to breathe and smell the fleeting hyacinth.

30.04.07

I am still intrigued as to how far one can push the world-state mapping.

And so for day 998
06.09.2009