BERNEVAL

There is a wonderful set of epithets that one encounters in reading an essay by John Koethe (poet and philosopher) found in the collection Poetry at One Remove. Here they are lifted out of context — with a slight misquotation:

islets of memory and estuaries of desire

These are placed in parallel to “thoughts” and “feelings”. And for you to judge how they sharpen the figure offered for the relation between subject and representation, here is the complete sentence:

The experience of the condition of extremity of the perspectival subject, then, is one of the dissipation of this sense of the private character of experience and of a correlative expansion of the sense of the possibility of a completely objective version of the world, which would locate “our” thoughts and feelings, inlets of memory, and estuaries of desire unproblematically on a map of the world and still leave no aspect uncharted.

I find the shift from “inlets” to “islets” telling as to how I regard the relation between thoughts and feelings. Koethe would use the water metaphor throughout and I long for a harbour.

One of us is more prepared to inhabit the sublime longer. Do see the collection for some further remarks about poetry, subjectivity and the sublime.

And so for day 828
20.03.2009

Brian Fawcett in an essay on Robin Blaser entitled “Robin and Me; The New American Poetry and Us” [Yes that is a semi-colon after “Me”] offers this as one of the things that he learnt

I learned that real thinking and writing is more about orchestration of materials than creativity. Your task, whether as a poet or novelist or scholar or union researcher or urban planner, is to integrate your own intelligence with the active intelligence around you to enhance articulation. You are not here to impose your signature on a set of materials, raw or cooked, human or inanimate. You are here to discover both their essential and detailed truth, and to then put both into action politically and personally.

As befits a good pattern maker, the theme is exemplified in the way the final anecdote is told:

I wasn’t present for his last hours, nor did I attend the funeral. I’d said my final goodbyes during that three hours I spent with him, knowing full well that he was going to forget what I said to him within minutes. I told him that I loved him, and that I was lucky to have been a part of his very large world. He accepted my expression of gratitude as I expected him to. He said, “It was nothing.”

Before I could protest — it had not been nothing; it had been the gift of a much larger world than I would have had without him — he looked into my eyes and added, “but you’re welcome.”

Note the appearance of the semi-colon. A mark of a linking hiatus.

And so for day 827
19.03.2009

Frye on Frazer. Frye situates art between magic (work) and religion (belief).

A ritual, in magic, is done for practical purposes, to make the crops grow, to baffle enemies, to bring rain or sunshine or children. In religion, a ritual expresses certain beliefs and hopes and theories about supernatural beings. The practical results of magic don’t work out; religious beliefs disappear or change in the twilight of the gods. But when deprived of both faith and works, the ritual becomes what it really is, something made by the imagination, and a potential work of art.

Reminds one of Vico. From Northrop Frye on Sir James Frazer (a CBC talk in the series Architects of Modern Thought). The situation of ritual “between” magic and religion is to be questioned. The between situation is suggested because magic and religion are figured to fall away from ritual (“when deprived of both”) by an act that is almost like the shedding of husks. And what is left is the seed, for the quotation continues: “As that, it can grow into drama or romance or fiction or symbolic poetry.” And of course against this invocation of the organic may be opposed the machinic and the assembled. Just as one may distinguish the ritual from the ceremony.

And so for day 826
18.03.2009

Bill T. Jones

While Amsterdam had shown me that I didn’t know very much about many things, it did teach me that freedom was worthless without the focus of some passion other than pleasure. I knew that I wanted to make something, something important. I chose dancing as way to make it.

It is the phrase “freedom without focus” (which is not exactly in the text) that caught my attention. And at the end of copying the passage I realize that there is a need for a period of aimless freedom before settling into passion-focused activity.

And so for day 821
13.03.2009