“Brise Marine” in Stéphane Mallarmé: Selected Poetry and Prose is beautifully translated by Peter and Mary Ann Caws.
Croit encore à l’adieu suprême des mouchoirs!
is rendered most delicately as
Has faith still in great fluttering farewells!
So very felicitous.
And so for day 650
23.09.2008
Some notes triggered by Geoffrey Rockwell’s A Unity of Voices: A Definition of Philosophical Dialogue
The successful dialogue, the one that teaches, is judged to be the one that brings the reader close to identifying with the humiliated (the respondent) or the humiliating (the interrogator) and allows the reader to break the identification and in so doing also leave opinions and faulty reasoning behind. In this sense, the dialogue works along catalytic principles. This reminds me of Ricoeur’s notion of appropriation. Of course, the catalytic model of dialogue relies on solitary reading. And certainly does not account for rereading. [The “of course” is not so self-evident. What is aimed at is a reader able to occupy multiple subject positions hence to interrogate.]
But there is something to be found in an hermeneutic of suspension of suspicion — where the readers know about the rhetorical mechanism & choose to feign (or not) seduction. This is a highly complicated response but one I believe that is near the dialogue with the ineffable that Rockwell hinted at in his opening chapter on Heidegger.
And I wonder how much Rockwell’s remark about a dialogue by Heidegger (“Dialogue is recursive.” p. 33 “Chapter 2: The Danger of Dialogue”) can be generalized to all dialogue. At least the turn upon itself can be activated in the reading.
And so for day 649
22.09.2008
A passage from Rousseau about the innate human ability to feel pity found in Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes
Il y a d’ailleurs un autre principe que Hobbes n’a point aperçu, et qui, ayant été donné à l’homme pour adoucir, en certaines circonstances la férocité de son amour-propre, ou le désir de se conserver avant la naissance de cet amour, tempère l’ardeur qu’il a pour son bien-être par une répugnance innée à voir souffrir son semblable.
Bring this in conjunction with Octavia Butler’s “sharers” or “hyperempaths” in Parable of the Talents.
And so for day 648
21.09.2008
For a co-worker moving on to other work… if I were to laud her, I would point to her integrity and her love of poetry and I would quote from Robin Blaser’s essay “Particles” collected in The Fire: Collected Essays of Robin Blaser
And it is in the specific and the particular that integrity resides. What happens to emotion when it is not tied to the particular is that it becomes as large as Society and as dangerous as “the will of the people,” which according to modern history is not recognizable except by one man at the top. And it is in this realm of integrity that poetry has its political base. It is in the concrete nature of poetic speech that integrity remains and endures as a permanence in human affairs.
And then I would quote a few lines from one of her favourite poets.
a good memory cures
the scar a loss leaves
from Zbigniew Herbert “Chord” as translated by Alissa Valles and found in The Collected Poems 1956-1998.
And so for day 647
20.09.2008
Barbara Johnson in the interview published with her Bucknell Lectures in Literary Theory as The Wake of Deconstruction says
Analysis and action are not necessarily separable, but they may obey different temporalities.
Thinking and doing carve out the possibilities of our being. The trick is to be aware that sometimes one is faster than the other. There is no knowing in advance which is the laggard.
And so for day 646
19.09.2008
from sometime in the mid 90s
A gay man asking “why make babies” risks being unheard. Gay people pretend he is addressing straights. His question is aimed at closet cases so claim straight folk. The sophisticated lesbians have him talking to himself. So do the unsophisticated.
A gay man is always overheard. His questions sound like baby talk. His gestures resemble so many abstractions swirling round the asking, how he has been made, how he made it, so narcissistic. Knowing he is overheard he turns the made into a making like turning a trick, forever a boy.
None can ever quite reproduce his productions, unless they listen for the unhurriedness of the unheard at play and then they know the risking at work.
I was thinking a lot about reproduction in its social and biological aspects at the time. I like the lapidary sassiness of this prose.
And so for day 645
18.09.2008
bp Nichol, “Y for Victor” collected in As Elected: Selected Writing.
The form is of an ABC acrostic. Note the initial words to each line:
alphabet […]
beginning […]
creates […]
dreams […]
escape […]
These form the first line group. They also form interesting strings if one reworks the machinery of the text from the vertical to the horizontal. “alphabet beginning creates” and “dreams escape”. Now one wonders if the newly read lines along this vertical axis are two sentences separated by a virtual period or whether one reads an apostrophe into the continuous sentence formed by these initial words. That is does one read “alphabet beginning creates. dreams escape.” (two activities on the go simultaneously) or does one read “alphabet beginning creates dream’s escape”?
And so for day 644
17.09.2008
Patti Smith about the recording of Horses at Electric Lady. From her memoir, Just Kids.
Jimi Hendrix never came back to create his new musical language, but he left behind a studio that resonated all his hopes for the future of our cultural voice. These things were in my mind from the first moment I entered the vocal booth. The gratitude I had for rock and roll as it pulled me through a difficult adolescence. The joy I experienced when I danced. The moral power I gleaned in taking responsibility for one’s actions.
I admire the tricolon: gratitude, joy and moral power.
I also like it that she won a National Book Award for the memoir. The New York Times reported, she urged the audience at the awards ceremony, “Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please don’t abandon the book — there is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book.”
Now a beautiful book could be an electronic product, heir to the beautiful books on paper.
And so for day 643
16.09.2008
Rilke in the sixth letter in the collection Letters to a Young Poet writes about the importance of solitude and the normal state of the child to be in touch with necessary solitude.
The necessary thing is after all but this: solitude, great inner solitude. Going-into-oneself and for hours meeting no one — this one must be able to attain. To be solitary, the way one was solitary as a child, when the grown ups went around involved with things that seemed important and big because they themselves looked so busy and because one comprehended nothing of their doings. […] why not then continue to look like a child upon it all as upon something unfamiliar, from out of the depth of one’s own world, out of the expanse of one’s own solitude, which is itself work and status and vocation?
Rilke calls the child’s state one of “wise incomprehension”. Could this be analogous to “beginner’s mind”?
And so for day 642
15.09.2008
[Anthony?] Storr drawing on Winnicott writes:
Transitional objects gradually loose their emotional charge as the child grows older. Often such objects become linked with a variety of other objects and are used in play. Children easily transmute a broomstick into a horse, an armchair into a house. At a later stage overt play is replaced by phantasy, in which no external objects are needed to speed the flow of imagination.
This reminds me of Octavia Butler’s telepaths who are able to pick up readings from objects and later embed memories into objects for learning.
Q. How is the charge lost?
Possible hypothesis: as a child grows its storytelling time shrinks (in certain cultures); the object falls out of the play of narrativization.
Q. How does the object become linked with a variety of other objects?
Possible hypothesis: through story. Which leads to an other question — how description becomes an emplotment of perception.
Q. Is the act of transmutation connected to the act of linking objects?
Possible hypothesis: narrative plays with sets — their creation and rearrangements.
Q. Does practised displacement of objects abet the imagination?
And so for day 641
14.09.2008
