BERNEVAL

Julie Joosten
Nought

“Swoon Revolt” in its exploratory beneath-the-skin approach to organs this reminds of Monique Wittig Les guérillères. For example …

Have you ever wondered what it would be
to caress the liver, the spleen, a kidney
with the same sensitivity of your tongue
on my skin.

I unfurl your heart from its breastplate,
breathe its beating.

And this bit from “, touch”

I’m looking for hormones and the names
of my organs in other languages–

the album on repeat, warming in front
of the fire, I’m looking for all
the sentences that include bodies and
body parts and chemicals the body
makes and responds to

And there is this passage which reminds me of Lisa Robertson’s essay in Nilling that draws on Benveniste’s “The Notion of Rhythm in its Linguistic Expression” which Joosten seems to be channeling in “Dear Friend”

The mechanics of rhythm extend
to feeling (rhythmoi referred once
to the positions the body assumed
during a dance, not flow but pause), and I,
existing where feeling is, a line that
breathes–

These intertextual moments themselves form a pause. Did she? Is it just me?

And so for day 2911
01.12.2014

Encyclopédie entry on logic … from finding to transferring …

Comme pour penser juste il est nécessaire de bien appercevoir, de bien juger, de bien discourir, & de lier méthodiquement ses idées ; il suit de-là que l’appréhension ou perception, le jugement, le discours & la méthode deviennent les quatre articles fondamentaux de cet art. C’est de nos réflexions sur ces quatre opérations de l’esprit que se forme la logique.

Le lord Bacon tire la division de la logique en quatre parties, des quatre fins qu’on s’y propose ; car un homme raisonne, ou pour trouver ce qu’il cherche, ou pour raisonner de ce qu’il a trouvé, ou pour retenir ce qu’il a jugé, ou pour enseigner aux autres ce qu’il a retenu : de-là naissent autant de branches de l’art de raisonner, savoir l’art de la recherche ou de l’invention, l’art de l’examen ou du jugement, l’art de retenir ou de la mémoire, l’art de l’élocution ou de s’énoncer.

See Anonymous “Logique,” Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, etc., eds. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert (University of Chicago ARTFL, Encyclopédie Project (Autumn 2017 Edition). Robert Morrissey and Glenn Roe (eds),

https://artflsrv03.uchicago.edu/philologic4/encyclopedie1117/navigate/9/2969/

Notice that the Encyclopédie is not couched between the terms of tradition and labour as is Francis Bacon’s division in The Advancement of Learning Book II

XII (3) The arts intellectual are four in number, divided according to the ends whereunto they are referred — for man’s labour is to invent that which is sought or propounded; or to judge that which is invented; or to retain that which is judged; or to deliver over that which is retained. So as the arts must be four — art of inquiry or invention; art of examination or judgment; art of custody or memory; and art of elocution or tradition.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5500/5500-h/5500-h.htm

A subtle shift from describing the “labour” to describing aims. From Bacon’s parts comes Diderot and company’s ends.

And so for day 2909
29.11.2014

Lisa Robertson
Nilling

Worth quoting at length because it reminds us of that the private/public split is not impermeable, not universal, not unhistorical.

In Indo-European Language and Society, Benveniste analyzes the Latin worlds “Civis” and “Domus,” finding that the earliest written uses of these terms did not pertain to concepts of bordered and material spatial limitation, and that both civis and domus related to immaterial concepts of collective reciprocity. “The authentic sense of civis is not ‘citizen,’ as it is traditionally translated, but ‘fellow-citizen’,” he specifics: “A number of ancient uses show the sense of reciprocity which is inherent in civis, and which alone accounts for civitas as a collective notion.” In a similar dematerialization of meaning, Domus denotes the “house in its social and moral aspects, and not as a construction.” He aligns the Latin domus with the Greek oikos, which also indicated a community of companionship and quotidian participation: the sharing of food, worship, and the “works of peace” in Aristotle’s words, not a built architecture, defined the household. These everyday operations were at the centre of a scaled series of collective concepts, which progressed outwards from the household to the polis. The domus was that group — related perhaps but not necessarily by blood, but more specifically by shared everyday operations — that group which used the same door as a point of arrival and departure Both domus and civis correspond to the specific milieu of a social reciprocity. The difference between them is not qualitative or oppositional, but is one of scale. No sense of private or public, in the way we now understand these terms in relation to ownership or to interiority and exteriority, appends itself to either.

And so for day 2904
24.11.2014

From an interview in The Rusty Toque

Kathryn Mockler: What is the best piece of writing advice you’ve heard or been given that you actually use?

Lisa Robertson: Writing is the good use of boredom. I try to have a boring life. I don’t socialize, and I eat nine servings of vegetables a day.

Kathryn Mockler: Your funniest or favourite literary moment, if you have one.

Lisa Robertson: When Jam Isma[i]l read at KSW [Kootenay School of Writing] in 2002 she sat a tape recorder on a windowsill and played a cassette recording of New Delhi crows. Vancouver crows came to the open window to listen and respond. Every emotion cracked open at once.

http://www.therustytoque.com/rusty-talk/lisa-robertson-poet

That juxtaposition between nine servings a day and crowing. A comment? Irony of the juxtaposed.

And so for day 2903
23.11.2014

I remember reading as a young boy Hal Borland When the Legends Die (1963) and committing the epigraph to memory: “When legends die the dreams end. When the dreams end there is no more greatness.”

Recently all over the WWW, I’ve seen some forms of the quotation attributed to Tecumseh but I haven’t found a source that predates Borland. Wikiquote notes:

Quoted as a statement of Tecumseh in Inspire! : What Great Leaders Do (2004) by Lance H. K. Secretan, p. 67; but also often quoted as an anonymous Shawnee proverb, as in The Soul Would Have No Rainbow If The Eyes Had No Tears (1994) by Guy A. Zona, p. 45.

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Tecumseh

Secretan gives a clunkier version: “When the legends die, the dreams end; there is no more greatness.”

The series of competing attributions, reminds me of the Desiderata by Max Ehrman which on posters from the 1970s had the attribution “Found in Old St. Paul’s church” which is explained by

After Ehrmann died in 1945, his widow first published the work in 1948 in The Poems of Max Ehrmann. The Reverend Frederick Kates handed out about 200 unattributed copies to his congregation at Old Saint Paul’s Church, Baltimore, during 1959 or 1960.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desiderata

Why does attribution matter? Otherwise it is like labelling saffron as paprika. Time, person and place matter. And of course misattributions are a source of joy for the sleuth.

And so for day 2902
22.11.2014