Listening to Max Richter – “Sarah’s Key” soundtrack and “Die Fremde”
My wife is home.
Ideal-ish sorts of things.
Planning to start a new longer project.
Thinking these things:
“Language arises in the life of the individual through an ongoing exchange of meanings with significant others…language is a shared meaning potential…the context plays a part in determining what we say; and what we say plays a part in determining the context”
-M.A.K. Halliday-
“Only in the stream of thought and life do words have meaning”
-Ludwig Wittgenstein-
“…in writing, one cannot say anything extraneous to writing”
-Italo Calvino-
“..we would have very little if we only had words. What we need are the presences that words leave in dotted lines in their mysterious intervals, and that words in themselves cannot restore to life”
-Yves Bonnefoy-
“Zeno, pressed as to whether anything is at rest, replied: ‘Yes, the flying arrow rests'”
“It can be safe to say that when we learned to speak to, and listen to, rather than strike or be struck by, our fellow human beings, we found something worth keeping alive, worth the possessing, for the rest of time. Might it possibly have been the other way around – that the promptings of friendship guided us into learning to express ourselves, teaching ourselves, between us, a language to keep it by?” – Eudora Welty –
The ripping sound, then gathering the pieces, hoping to see something in the jumbled pile. Of sorts.
tearing and gathering of sorts
Wife calls this “attachment theory” by which I assume she means something along the lines of conflict and loss=feeling or that consequence, because
What making is
or seems to be
dealing with all that
There are four rocks on my desk, well really one is a petrified bone from the penis of a whale and then the rest seem partially fabricated, only insofar as some human’s hand has touched them, obviously, thereby construing them an “object” (too smooth, too bastardized to be native, believable) [“object” for attachment or detachment I presume]
talismans after a fashion
See, they’re kind of “favorite things,” talismans after a fashion, that’s why they occur more than once. They make up my surround, thereby influencing my thought and otherwise.
like wife, Buddha, quote-mouse & mystical hands
like wife, reclining Buddha, a mouse holding sheaths of quotations up for my view and mystical hands (an encaustic painting/collage by said wife) among other things (or everything else in my surround). I’d share more pictures but why should you care, and I’m not interested in that kind of common knowledge.
Suffice it to say loads of books shape my nest. Maybe I can’t bear being alone or something. Noisy conversations –
– imagine that!? – a cacophony of chattering, ceaseless, every voice saying something earth shatteringly important (leastwise how they say it). That’s the chaos I exist in.
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for examples.
Perhaps the “madness” referred to above comes blitzing out of the concatenation of conversing brilliant voices from remarkable minds, a kind of primordial dust for my own flint-ticking brain to spark fires.
(Be that as it may)
I have children too, seven to be exact, all offering a raw freshness of human expression and avarice at all times, a kind of explosive vitality of persons-in-the-making for good or for ill (for themselves). A mighty influx and demand for my own crusty mechanisms to mulch and digest
tearing gathering stepping back to observe
if any forms…
“Explosive” on purpose because so agile and all-over at once (waking-through-sleeping), those children: angry, eager, generous and quick-witted; intelligent, selfish, selfless; hard, tender, but all of it, more total-like, not sundered quite the same as middle age.
Creates shards, fragments, flames and flights; more noise; more wonder and awe and helplessness. More hope. Some despair.
I’d call it “love,” not certain what attachment theory would say (I probably appear shell-shocked or “detached” much of the time in my overwhelm).
This is how I row the boat.
Wrap scraps and strings around a heap
(it doesn’t hold much, but some things stay intact, at least temporarily, in this way)
I call it “writing”
I feel a little less like I lose it if I make a note of it. Or even list it…a touch more manageable, as if one element at a time – even though that’s farcically fictitious.
The part that’s “real” or “true” being that my hands are only capable one word at a time, one mark really, even if contiguous; that is, at best, letter-by-letter…
Tearing Gluing
stringing lines
Attempting to bundle a cloud of dust, as it were
(it doesn’t have to be children – alive and loud silent genius-voices buzz about the ether as well)
(it could be anything – smells (or stench) of a passenger next to you, the size of the landscape, wind, employment, hardship, illness, memory, emotions)
you name it (which can help)
it’s too big or way outsizes you
To be alive is to exist in maximum-capacity space every moment
(i think)
(writing is one way to pretend it’s not quite, like snagging only one butterfly in the net when there are thousands, or at least saying so, which does something, the admission of helplessness, an individual’s version of a “demand letter”)
Now I’m thinking attachment theory might resemble a semiotician’s “systems theory,”
i.e. whoever says ‘system’ says arrangement or conformity of parts in a structure which transcends and explains its elements…everything is so necessary in it that modifications of the whole and of details reciprocally condition one another, Emile Benveniste shouts out above the crowd from the shelf over yonder
Makes a kind of common sense
Like signifier and signified aren’t terrifically helpful concepts examined separately, since neither one exists without the other, really one concept catching light as it flutters…anyhow, language (perception-interpretation) does that
stairs going up and down
both sides of the paper
chickens and eggs
ad nauseum
ripping apart (abstraction)
melding together (composition)
as it were.
Perhaps its a process, if you stretch it out a little, set it in motion (notice it always already is)
and so on…
embedded on my body
Ouroborous tattoo
“i am here, more than that i do not know, further than that i cannot go”
This post does not occur formatted as I have written it, but near enough. The inserted quotations are actually sidebars in the original text, not inserted, but I couldn’t find a way to do that here. Let me know what you think!
“Fear – No Fear” by Robert Frank
“Experience teaches not to trust experience”after Robert Frank
-Lynne Tillman-
“It may be that to understand ourselves as fictions,
is to understand ourselves as fully as we can”
-Jeanette Winterson-
The “Talking Cure” they called it.
Fear
It occurred to me to talk to myself again.
“Finally, after five months of my life during which I could write nothing that would have satisfied me and for which no power will compensate me, though all were under obligation to do so, it occurs to me to talk to myself again”
-Franz Kafka,
Diaries 1910-
I’d gotten lost. In images. In grey.
Fear
Pictures of dolls mangled by storms. Pictures of 19th century Parisian street scenes. Pictures of the American South in the 1940s. Pictures of hands, the sea, of flowers. Fragments. Instants. Without contexts.
Transposing my values to ambiguous greyscale. They called it “Black & White.” Albumen. Platinum. Ambrotype, Calotype, Collotype. Half-tones. Silent.
I had walked away at “unable.”
Fear
“My condition is not unhappiness, but it is also not happiness, not indifference, not weakness, not fatigue, not another interest – so what is it then? That I do not know is probably connected with my inability to write. And without knowing the reason for it, I believe I under-stand the latter”
-Franz Kafka,
Diaries 1910 –
I wasn’t unhappy, exactly. Not happy either. Not indifferent nor ill nor unusually fatigued. No crisis attended my aporia absorption…I simply hesitated…still.
There sat my typewriter, as every day, on top my large wooden desk, flush to the window, bright sheet of paper curled clean round the platen.
Loose pages scattered around, unmarked but willing, blank notecards and various writing implements all there, at which I sat and stared, unable…
Fear
(“the expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with an obligation to express”…Samuel Beckett)
…not knowing why.
Someone suggested the talking cure.
“Why don’t I stay within myself?”
-Franz Kafka,
Diaries
What would that mean? I thought. To whom would I speak, about what, with what and for what I could not imagine.
It occurs to me to talk to myself again.
me: might it be fear?
me: but fear of what?
me: fear of the unknown perhaps? the blank page, some swallowing void? distance?
me: I wouldn’t know what to be afraid of in that scenario
me: how could I fear?
“the blank page, the void where everything is called into question”
Ronald Sukenick
me: all these questions!
me: fear of having nothing to fear, yet feeling anxious or afraid
me: the obligation to express
me: from where or whom? and with nothing to express
me: nor apparently the wherewithal to express it
me: perhaps to express that fear, unknown, having nothing to fear?
me: make up a fear
Fear
I find myself afraid of losing things. Things changing. In other words, not being unhappy, I imagine alterations that might requisite unhappiness, might disturb a pleasant, if anxious, calm.
Someone with whom I have to relate, or find myself relating, might become dissatisfied or discontent. Travel, clothing, socializing, any number of disruptions are apt to dismember the present.
How fragile is the now!
me: afraid of change then?
me: the losses that change brings
me: and what of the gains?
me: what gains?
me: knowledge, experience, emotions, sensations
me: do you – do I – really go in for all that?
me: that change is advance? evolution, adaptation?
me: quite right – outside of a controlled environment – there are plenty, countless in fact, chaotic elements in this little room, our little house by the sea
me: I suppose
me: all we need for knowledge we can gather here, I’ve no doubt we’re not experiencing one another fully as it is – not ourselves, nor one another
me: susceptible to disease, age, time, accident, weather, supply or lack thereof, erosion, pests, mechanical failures
me: moods, thoughts, states, dreams, sounds
“words…are the source of mis-understandings”
The Little Prince
Saint-Exupery
me: one another and ourselves
me: words and expressions
me: point taken
Fear
me: not of unknown but unknowable?
me: fragility, insecurity, contingency, frailty of finitude
me: mercy!
me: seems at the mercy of everything within / without
me: reason to fear then, logical rational evidential reason
me: but I wasn’t afraid!
me: we invented that in order to try the “talking cure”
me: it had occurred to me
No Fear
Not fear, finally, but dislike, distaste. Can a reasonable person fear what is inevitable? Mustn’t he or she come to terms with it? Lack of control, utter insecurity, constancy of change, approach of unknowable end? A trembling truce, an honesty.
It is conceivable to me that some humans might be such as inviting, engaging these things – find them exciting, compelling – to pass their time in action, adventure, experiment. Seems possible.
Various interpretations, fabrications, means for developing – in unaccountable degrees (albumen, Collotype, platinum, half-tones), hundreds, billions of shades.
me: if I were such a person
me: an explorer, a sailor, a hunter…Gracchus
me: yes Dante, Babbage, Rimbaud
me: inventive, welcoming, brave, per chance
me: bon chance!
me: nothing would be done
me: too much living and then dead
me: the noise, over-exposure, chaos
me: blown circuits
me: let’s stick with the metaphors
me: no limits
me: nothing contained
I walked away at “unable,” desk just so, the papers, the pens, the typewriter, the window.
Not knowing what to do. The waves kept doing. Grasses and winds. Even the page danced from time to time (in light, in draft).
Fear – no fear
The talking cure, they’ve called it.
It occurs to me to talk to myself, again.
I’ve nothing to say.
No way of expressing it.
“
“When people look at my photographs I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice”
-Robert Frank-
the genuine writer has nothing to say. Only a way of speaking. Must create a world,
Today’s blog is the above photo by a photographer who’s work continually leaves me speechless. Robert Frank’s films and especially late photographic work are for me quintessential photograph/graphoto reciprocators. I still have not uncovered languaging for the above picture which I have spent many an hour gazing at/into/through. I encourage you to do the same…and please please please add languaging to it as you find some – I’d love to read any and all verbal responses! Thank you!
A little something extra – a photo of Frank’s I believe must resonate with all writers…
Hundreds of thousands of bloggers just today. More hundreds of thousands of words. If internet and web cloud technocommunication virtuality haze space signifies anything to me it’s an enormous, incalculable black hole. Like numbers of the dead in war-torn countries, the mind numbs, is unable to actually perceive, barely conceive the truly vast amounts of language traversing the aether even as my fidgety cursor leads me on.
Greyscale. Fog. If we could layer the sentences uploading and downloading each nanosecond we would create a gigantic palimpsest of shadows and abstraction. With all of these voices, all these digits and copies and pastes and links and quotations and -ipedias of information flooding, flooding, pouring forth…who might hear? How will your line or my line, each individual’s arrangement, profession, offering into the dialogue/multilogue languaging necessarily is – find a hint of an echo, a reverberation, let alone a true response?
“There are many more languages than one imagines. And humans reveal themselves much more often than they wish. So many things that speak! But there are always so few listeners, so that humans, so to speak, only chatter in a void when they engage in confessions. They waste their truths just as the sun wastes its light. Isn’t it too bad that the void has no ears?” -Friedrich Nietzsche-
Void: deaf and hungry, is that what I’m understanding? Like black-hole-vacuumings…taking everything in without distinction, churning it up like a sink-e-rator, farting it further through the absence of space?
And what of Jabes…a seer…some hopeful pseudo-Biblical desert screamer…personalizing the void? Trying to soothe or encourage us in our madness to express, uncover, discover, be acknowledged, be heard – urging us to seed the void with our words? A void without ears waits for language – what does this mean?
“the whole struggle of literature is in fact an effort to escape from the confines of language”
-Italo Calvino-
“Any page of writing is a knot of silence unravelled”
“Letters give form to absence”
-Jabes-
Closer…at least to some thinking…that this reaching, this stretching, this hope beyond hope and irrational exigency to language language language this world…is also to get further, farther out, farther in to our world in its muteness. Void might be empty, deaf, dumb, blind…and our language, our images and movements and sounds might cohere once in awhile…if only…this cosmosphere of chatter (i think i’ve even read “blogosphere” somewhere) might possibly torque us forward, pulling from our mouths languagings that belong…”to make writing appear, is not to dispose of privileged knowledge: it is to discover what everyone knows but no one can say. It is to try, just once, to raise the veil which maintains us in an obscurity we have not chosen” (Philippe Sollers)
So everyone, keep feeding the sphere, fertilizing clouds, singing into the canyon…the void waits and waits and will always be waiting (else it could not be void)…there seems to be something Promethean, mythic, human about the effort to fill it, one word at a time
“the blank page, the void where everything is called into question”
-Ronald Sukenick-
“and you’d know. You would know goddamn it. And never be able to say”
-Denis Johnson-
“mysteries are problems that encroach on their own data” (George Santayana)…
Words are dropping like heavy Autumn rain off of leaves. I walk over them like lily pads, every step a stride over something not said, that liquidy deep.
They lie here tendentially. Bobbing so lightly against the surface of things, skin on a bubble, what can they hold?
They feel heavy, made of water and air, a breath. I test them with “heaviness,” with “weight.” They hold. I try “mountain,” I try “sea.” I heave “sorrow” and “darkness” and “death” into the words. They continue to stick to the surface, though I could not see them underneath.
I step again. Around me the pluck and leave marks, then vanish away.
I step. I have landed on “brick” held fast by the world. It wobbles a bit as if in a thick fluid, but I’ve balanced and am able to stand. I use “house” to shelter and observe. I choose “window” and “bay” and “uncovered” to watch them fall, to try and count them.
How they plop and then slide on each object in my surround. For moments they adhere, just long enough for me to piece them out – “branch” “wagon” “tarp” “barn” “flower” and then they have wriggled on and away, objects identified by attention and sense. Yet the rain of words is steady and all-over-at-once so I cannot take them off-guard, or catch something before its language is there. This is true as well for all of my perceptions.
I smell “must” and “dust” and baking “bread.” Wet “smoke,” “plants,” and “heater fumes,” some I am unable to see,
the sounds of “piano” and “strings” traveling toward me from great distances, invisible, and yet filled up with words.
I step again, into this grey rain.
I am wanting more language to catch on more surfaces, especially the unseeable ones. These “feelings,” “melancholy” and “nostalgia” with “sentiment” and “ennui.” More words please, more details in this downpour: identify “griefs” and these “loves.” I open my arms out wide, hunch over, lean back – where must they fall in order to land on these things I uncover no words for?
“Silvery” “mercurial” and “faint.” “Ominous,” “wistful” and an “obtuse pain.”
Not only. So much more without name in them!
“Molly.” “Wendy.” “Theodore.” “Distance,” “remorseful,” “unrequited” and “maimed.” “Misbegotten,” “disabled,” “mourn of the manufacturer’s defect.” “Insoluble.” “Ineffable.” “Now.”
I lay down. Afloat on the words as the stream together, overlap and cohere. Wide open now, mouth, legs, eyes and arms, rain runneling ears and nostrils, fingers and clothes – saturate me with words, let me hear of it all, all that there is, inward and out –
I am ready to drown – if all might be covered in words.
This very morning, in the midst of a heated discussion with my beloved spouse, my eyes (seeking some rest-place) perused the nearest bookshelf to the table. Top shelf Proust and Beckett’s complete works. Next shelf down the Kafka shelf. Beneath that the Dostoevsky shelf. Finally, bottom floor a shelf of Henry Miller.
I felt a familiar tugging, this things that happens as I walk through my house and am ever stopped long enough to actually look. My stomach, my limbs, my fingers, my nose need or desire some particular bound and beautiful carrier of words. Today – the resonation settled on Dostoevsky’s “Writers Diary” and Gustav Janouch’s “Conversations with Kafka” and a single-volume work of Kafka’s “Diaries.” I never know why, but after two decades of magnetism and result, I just go with it.
These become the first things I peruse when I reach my desk, get busyness out of the way and household necessities, have cleared air and desk to get down to it, this labor of languaging. I met an interesting energetic man earlier in the week who goes by “Sam the Writer,” another local word-lover (who also led me to WordPress and the idea of blogging) and apparently he had planted the idea of all this nonsense in my head – of rattling off my head more spontaneously that “blogging” involves. I’d always viewed it all as a part of America’s “everyone’s a star” mentality – millions of human critters out there letting their brain brittle bubble and boil out over the planisphere of shared space. Who needs another?
Probably no one.
But my wife had pointed out that sometimes she listens to me when she doesn’t really feel she has the strength, because she wants to and cares…and knows by the way I am talking that I need to. Maybe blogging will help her poor soul. So here goes the splattered, I hope dialogue, but feels an awful lot like monologue thusfar.
From Dostoevsky I stumbled right into as good a tagline as any for “blogging:”
“My situation is as uncertain as it can be. But I shall talk to myself and for my own amusement, in the form of this diary, whatever may come of it. What shall I talk about? About everything that strikes me and sets me to thinking.”
“What truly shapes life, what makes it meaningful, is always taking place unnoticed before us.”
“We all know that entire trains of thought can sometimes pass through our heads in an instant, like sensations of some sort, without being translated into human language, never mind into literary language. Your idea, even though it may be a bad one, is always more profound when it is within you, but when you put it into words it is more ridiculous and less honest.”
“constantly concerned with moments of transition, uncertain boundaries in life and between life and art.”
All my Words are Silent 