from a while ago, a question snuck in a declaration…
the will to write is in part a will to dialogue, is it a will to fracture the self into various listening and speaking positions
from sometime in 1997
And so for day 600
04.08.2008
In honour of Tara Collington, friend from graduate school days, and author of Lectures chronotopiques: Espace, temps et genres romanesques
There is an old riff I’ve always imagined to have been invented by some graduate student […] struggling through Kant’s abstruse account in his Critique of Pure Reason of the barely comprehensible categories of time and space, and decided that all this could be put much more simply […] “Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once… and space exits so that it doesn’t all happen to you.”
By this standard, the novel is an ideal vehicle both of space and time. The novel shows us time: that is, everything doesn’t happen at once. (It is a sequence, it is a line.) It shows us space: that is, what happens doesn’t happen to one person only.
from Susan Sontag “At the Same Time: The Novelist and Moral Reasoning”.
And so for day 599
03.08.2008
One of the most eloquent expressions of our existential condition is given to us by Aldous Huxley in The Doors of Perception
We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcedence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies — all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable.
And so for day 598
02.08.2008
From “Hyperboarding: From Aristotle to Brenda Laurel and on…” by Heikki Salo comes this lovely and telling typographical instance:
In real world we perseive [sic] and distinguish objects and their relations – this is also true of abstractions like thoughts and hypermedia.
http://www.kyperjokki.com/hexa/academic/AtoBL/AtoBL1.html#1.1
Which (selectively reading “ei” as “ie”) leads me to point to a picture of a sieve
Line drawing of a sieve
And so for day 597
01.08.2008
A fragment dated 31/08/03 – 21/10/03
He would wander the halls. Not sure if the humming he was producing was for himself or some audience he would find beyond the pair of doors that would swing outwards into the light of another hall running perpendicular to the one along which his feet now shuffled. He felt as if he would never come to the T. And yet the humming matched the white noise of the fluorescent and he knew he would bend the puppet.
He had shuffled the long hum of fluorescent hall to come upon that phrase. the wrist bends. Puppets bow. To bend the puppet: to fold the sock cloth, pocket it, and shuffle.
He wanted to have blue nails.
And so for day 596
31.07.2008
From How to Cook a Wolf by M.F.K. Fisher
Kneading bread means pressing it rhythmically with the heel and fingers of each hand, in a gentle rocking movement, turning the dough over on itself with each push, folding it lightly, pushing, pressing. It is a calming, musical rhythm. In eight or ten minutes, when the dough looks and feels as smooth as silk, you can stop.
And start again later.
And so for day 595
30.07.2008
Susan Sontag, “Unextinguished: The Case for Victor Serge” collected in At The Same Time
The truth of fiction depicts that for which one can never be consoled and displaces it with a healing openness to everything finite and cosmic.
This is not something easy to do but remarkably within reach. It requires a training of attention.
And so for day 594
29.07.2008
A quotation from a quotation. Vika Zafrin posting to Humanist and asking about references to “associative thinking”. She quotes from Vannevar Bush “As We May Think”
With one item in its grasp, [the mind] snaps instantly to the next that is
suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate
web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. It has other
characteristics, of course; trails that are not frequently followed are
prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is transitory. Yet the
speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental pictures, is
awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature.
Humanist 16.312 (November 2002)
And so for day 593
28.07.2008
Always ask “Cui bono?”
Style is mighty pleasant for those who benefit from it, but not always rewarding for those who make and live by its necessarily strict rules.
Lillian Hellman from Pentimento
And so for day 592
27.07.2008
Snatched in a moment of mania… still pondering its possibilities
Skill may be the capacity to manipulate perceptions of knowledge.
Magic is.
And so for day 591
26.07.2008
