How perfect is that?
Month: February 2012
Good ol’ Franz
“The variety of views that one may have, say, of an apple: the view of the small boy who has to crane his neck for a glimpse of the apple on the table, and the view of the master of the house who picks up the apple and hands it to a guest.”
-Kafka, Zurau Aphorisms
Taking the word(s) further…
Part the Ninth: At the Thresholds: Afraid
“the torture of meaning is the vain and interminable agreement between what there is, on the one hand,
and ordinary language, on the other”
-Alain Badiou-
“Fear is the original and basic feeling of man; from fear everything is explicable”
-Friedrich Nietzsche-
“Fear is the basic condition, and there are all kinds of reasons why we’re so afraid.
But the fact of the matter is, is that, is that the job we’re here to do is to learn how to live in a way that we’re not terrified all the time”
-David Foster Wallace-
“Only reality has frightening us as its goal”
-Helene Cixous-
“We produce imaginary causes because an explanation of a thing helps to alleviate the fear of it”
-H.L. Hix-
“Our culture likes to think of everything as true or false – this is a way it has of fending off enormous realms of experience that make us feel uneasy, and rightly so.
The unknown must be explained and explained until it is explained away and we don’t have to be afraid anymore.
We want to ‘understand’ everything…such is the hysterical strength of our commitment to statistics…
the unknown being the fertile medium in which we live…”
-Ronald Sukenick-
“Writing is an assault on the frontiers…”
-Franz Kafka-
“to be wrenched from anonymity…”
-J.R. Firth-
Of course it is entirely possible that it is not long-reflected and pondered hopelessness that halts us, not our sense of finitude nor our ennui in the face of things impossible. It is possible that it is not, after all, our angst and frustration at being unable to adequately match our experiences to our languaging, or to cover our borders and fill our betweens with equally accessible, mutually comprehensible signs and gestures, so to share,
but rather a deep and enormous fear of what/who/when/how might emerge there – in that nowhere-that-exists interstice between ourselves and ourselves, ourselves and our world, ourselves and the others that we line with signs and symbols.
That, of one thing, if one thing only (if) we are certain without a doubt…that is: that we are absolutely uncertain…that “within” and with-out we are totally, utterly immersed in unknowns.
Fear of prodding, at guessing, at moving, at assaying our limits (where we expand) – our embodiment, our entity, of realizing that all living is engagement fundamentally, with mystery, with uncertainty, with chaos, that hesitates us, that confines.
To sign these deepest limbic passions is to open them up to all that threatens and grows/strengthens us. To gesture, to sound, to question or proclaim, to posit – these each call the piranhas of difference, expose the inadequacies of our surmisings, offer matter to be broken, perceptions contradicted and undone.
Acting, as a human, is the risk of being. The medium our lives are fueled by and exist in is unknown to us. Those among us who risk, who in courage or desperation try the world and its objects, others and the self, immediately and fragile-ly expose themselves, in “weakness” to being wrong. And it is just so that any advance in our feeling of comfort or safety, predictability or workable hypotheses or theories of reality in living have come about: “every advance in science, such as quantum theory, involves a crisis of communication” (Stuart Chase).
Somewhere reality (a workable correlation between experience and theories about it) doesn’t jibe, and those willing to risk try something else, something new, something different.
For an individual human entity – the entirety of perceptual capacities is FRONTIER. Every moment tests something learned or thought, overheard or felt, everything is every instant in question, except for that very circumstance: limitation/ uncertainty.
“the operation of imagination in life is more significant than its operation in or in relation to works of art…the chief problems of any artist, as of anyone, are the problems of the normal and that he needs, in order to solve them, everything that the imagination has to give” (Ronald Sukenick).
So we sign, sign, gesture, move. Listen, speak, touch, look, taste and feel in order to find out…to be wrenched from the chaotic void and our anonymity…to learn our bodies and the world around us…and out pathways and passagings of the thresholds are (indeed can only and must needs be) “languagings” –
From breathing to behaviors, conceptual frameworks to cognizing feelings of hunger, we are porously engaged with everything within and surrounding us. “To learn how to live in a way that we’re not terrified all the time” by the reality of uncertainty, is to recognize the essential relatedness that is a fact (as far as we can surmise) of our existing and to break out and welcome in the “fertile medium” everything is.
Imagining causes, attempting descriptions, ill-seeing and ill-saying all help to “alleviate the fear of it” and are all of them miscommunications, opportunities, that is, to engage reality more fully. Explanation, it appears, will always be unprovable theory, but it is an assault on the frontiers and somehow it helps and can help us.
To experiment experiences of our medium(s) moves us, and moves us along, as a species, a personality, a participant, amidst grave setbacks (certainly),
yet…
Additional Addenda…approaching an end…
Addenda…Creative Languaging
Here I would like to insert some thoughts and observations regarding the import and opportunities of artistic or literary, making-up, collaging, discombobulating, rearranging “ordinary” languaging. If “words are congenitally conceptual,” and I believe they are – that fact alone being one of the fiercest tractions to work through and past in utilizing language as a medium for art – as objects in the world, rather than symbols standing in for (or between or over) objects in the world – then to arrange them or copulate them between languages or existent terms in a language, etc…is a way to bring the word and the activity of languaging toward experience in itself. Being creative with existent languaging systems means often turning accepted uses or meanings back on themselves, undoing “ordinary” uses and definitions in order that the words might be substances of a medium (like paint or clay for plastic arts, the body for dance, shapes and frames and objects for photography, and so on) that then can be its own artifact – its own place of meeting for a community of persons – a field for creating “meaning” in the world.
Ronald Sukenick and kin repeatedly direct us to view novels and poems not as “problems to figure out” but as “experiences to respond to.” Kafka suggested that “language must not be used as a means but must be experienced, suffered.” Given the flexibility and inaccuracies, polysystemic and multivalent capacities and references of existing language systems, to craft new paths of language, tweak or invite new usages provides us with new ranges of possibilities for direct relations. In a way, using language “novelistically” (ever-new) intends and evinces the making of new “speech fellowships” – occasions for overlapping our experiences – in each new reality of speaking, saying, inscribing.
To draw attention to letters and words as things-in-themselves rather than simply signs-referring-to-things-in-themselves, opens up vast territories of potentiality for the meetings and relations of human beings across languaging-systems, cultural contexts, professional or social standings, psychophysiological realities and so on…meeting in the words, the new words, the repurposed words, revised and invented as new objects in the world – artifacts – for us to engage and encounter together.
I would argue that this is precisely what great literature does (and a principal criteria for “greatness” in literature) – serves as a meeting point for the widest range of humans to deepen and expand their engagement with themselves and the world. The “speech fellowship” aspect might help to explain why some persons respond more strongly to particular authors or styles of languaging, but those works which are great, which renew, humans will recognize (given time) from any point of view.
This, I believe, is a challenge to all humans to attend to their languaging – viewing it as an activity much like sex or eating, work or play, that we do, indeed must do, in order to survive, but may also take pleasure and care in – that it might enrich and increase our moments of being alive – and create opportunities for more and more meaning – which occurs when we actualize and accentuate our interrelatedness – the fact of our being.
Well, there’s that…
On another timbre
OUR BECOMING, pt. 1
Presence Sounds Like Love
It would begin with a sound.
If it is to be, it would begin in sound. For sound is the nearest relative of presence, presence to that which exists, and all of it full and invisible.
She spoke.
She mouthed, and her voice made no sound.
But he heard. And he helped, only from much too far away. So far removed it couldn’t register. As empty as can be, sound still requires space, think “silence.”
They were silent and distant, but echoes arrived in his ears on the winds and through wires, his sister, his landscape, his past and the rains.
Might he hear who he’d seen long before, across so many miles? The machines, said his sibling, those designs against timing and space, they can do it, can take sound beyond its own body, beyond its own place, they unravel and ravel again, their logic like that of play, she said.
He tried. He failed. He pressed stop.
She replied.
Her lips moved but produced not a sound. Just an echo, he heard and translated, attached to the waves flowing back to her, so familiar, familiar enough to engage, engaging in her recognition, what seemed a reflection of her.
He flowed in and she spoke and they swam through the wires in their sleep.
And he wrote. In cursive, presenting the shape of the waves while charting their flow, susurration, their absence, the words were transported as whispers.
And she sensed, as did he, empty sounds full of each, making music. Larynxing tones of the sea.
Reflecto Numero Ocho
Pt. 8: Mean What You Say What You Mean
“Meaning, the torture of meaning, is the vain and interminable agreement between what there is,
on the one hand, and ordinary language, on the other – between ‘well-seeing’ and ‘well-saying.’
The agreement is such that it is not even possible to decide if it is commanded by language
or prescribed by being”
-Alain Badiou-
“What makes a word is its meaning”
-V. N. Volosinov-
“As a general rule – each word when used in a new context is a new word”
-J. R. Firth-
“A new meaning is the equivalent of a new word
The real is only the base. But it is the base.”
-Wallace Stevens-
I am supposing that it could be inferred from the previous section that since we are implicitly unable to adequate our total experience in language, and that a direct transference of our experience in and through language is not possible; in other words, that our presentations of our experience in language are inherently ill-seen and ill-said efforts; that dipping into the language palette as a member of the human community equals an action or activity of relating rather than an accurate substantive transaction…
that it might not, in fact, matter what signs or gestures are utilized, but merely participating in the activity itself.
A skeptical view, perhaps, that, if all signs are multiplicitous (like all perceptions) – both overly general and inanely individualized – simply using language accomplishes its meaning, not what language(s) is/are used?
Another way of saying – is it possible to effectively mean something, or to translate substantively, matter, in language…communicating content instead of relations?
Common-sensically writing, we are, when speaking, utilizing billions of units of accrued and generally agreed-upon ranges of “meaning” or indications, directions, references and significations attached to these kernels of sound and expression…”words are congenitally conceptual” (Jerome Klinkowitz).
de Saussure might have signed these palettes as langue – the fund of sign-systems in parlay at any given time among certain social systems of persons – the cultural clime, professional environments, demographical contexts of semiotic webs. But accounting for the psychophysiological uniqueness of individual entities in these systems results in a furthering texture of usages, an explosive ganglia of intentions and purposes and desires for each occasion of a gestural item or practice of signs.
Which leaves all manner of matter of languaging approximate. Every time.
If involvement in languaging at its essence is relational, the primary or ontological “meaning” of the fact of languaging is given: languaging is a human system of engagement and encounter. That means a lot already, as a purposive human activity. Beyond that, we demonstrate a need that that fundamental exhibition of relatedness have experiential-personal-specific trans-actional effect.
This is where each palate or hand operating with the ocean of signs always affects and, at its fullest, effects the language(s) utilized…
I’m tempted to say that the languaging experience, whether that experience is of language itself, or is using language to stand in or refer for some other content (feelings, ideas, messages, objects, etc) is an activity of what we “mean” by “meaning” at its core. If by “meaning” we sign something like an experience or sensation plus the rationality of awareness added to agreement, that is, gesturing some aspect of reality in to a field shared in common, therefore a capacity of understanding, a co-relation of questioning or co-mprehension of experiences, then to constantly increase our apprehension of available sign systems and continually developing our facility of utilizing (organizing, selecting and incorporating) this universe of signs seems critical and imperative.
For the function of languaging in humanity it seems crucial, given its relational reality, that although perhaps “any old sign” will arbitrarily “do,” in the fullness of possibles our closeness to well-seen/well-said satisfaction will be in proportion to each entity’s concern and acquisition of the greatest possible breadth and depth of shared sign-systems, and locating or languaging into what J.R. Firth has called “speech fellowships” – something referring to collections of humans sharing the greatest overlappings of sign-systems and contexts they generate/are generated by.
“within speech fellowships a speaker is phonetically and verbally content because when he speaks to one of his fellows he is also speaking to himself. That can be the most deeply satisfying form of self-expression” (J. R. Firth)
“And to meet: in my sense, exceeds the power of feeling, however tender, and of bodily motions, however expert” (Samuel Beckett). This harmony that may occur between happenings and their languagings into a shared system, wrenches each inhabitant of the “speech activity” away from anonymity…provokes “meaning” I believe. As does shared feeling (or an overlap of sensory/sensational happenings among persons) or shared movements and embodiments.
This drives the urge of ill-seeing ill-saying toward better-seeing better-saying, the compulsion to recommence and recommence the attempts…extending/expanding utilization and aptitude of sounds and gestures available and seeking “fellows” with similar or overlapping apprehension of languaging-systems…to co-rrelate and co-rrespond, ask and answer toward…to relate…to “mean…”
Up with the Word(s)…continued (Pt. 7)
Part Seven:
Do we “know” what we’re talking about?
What can we (are we) know(ing) in words?
“that we cannot know the essence of language (that we cannot escape language in order to view it cognitively) – know it according to the traditional concept of knowledge defined in terms of
cognition as representation – is not a defect, however, but rather an advantage through which
we are drawn forth in a distinctive realm, that realm where we, who are needed and used
to speak language, dwell as mortals.”
-Martin Heidegger-
“the human engagement with language in usage engages us in our mortality; second, our relation
to language, our dwelling as mortals with(in) language, can only be thought from our
‘linguistic’ usage, that is, from the way we are used and engaged in usage for the speaking
of language…in other words, we must speak the relation in order to begin to think it.”
-Christopher Fynsk-
“the ‘relation of relations’ (is now the relation in which language itself unfolds)
thereby our saying remains, as an answering, always relational”
-Martin Heidegger-
So what happens in our palatizing of the palette of language, our utilizing and being-used-by the fund of signs and gestures we appropriate toward communication? Do we “know” what we’re talking (writing, translating) with, through and about? If we can never quite adequate our signs to individual or universal experience, if we line and limn the threshold of entity/not-entity with this matter of language(s), ever seeking to approximate the “all” of our experience into available sounds and gestures that might be sensed and understood, but incompletely, what do we actually result with(in)?
Samuel Beckett has written that the conditions of our experiencing are the “ill-seen, ill-said,” ever striving for the “well-seen, well-said” that would stop it all, silence us, allow us to rest…completely…comprehensibly.
We are limited, finite. Our eyes perceiving always from their particular point of view, their stance in relation to the world, turning, deleting, comparing, choosing, focusing, blurring out, etc…millions of things in order to see anything at all – “ill-seen.” Our languages and vocabularies, grammars and knowledge and palates are also distinct and finite, our experience (no matter how broad or deep) an excruciatingly microscopic fraction of the happenings of the world – “ill-said.”
In seeking to express the happenings specific to us into a world specifically various and multiplicitous incalculably, we encounter an inconceivable expanse, breach, rift between our microcosm and the macrocosms of microcosms that might possibly acknowledge us, share or join with our experiences.
Given all that…for what might we hope? What content, substance, matters might be communicable? Might we “know” anything together? What is the nature of the signs?
Here, Heidegger, Fynsk, Bakhtin, Wittgenstein, Jakobsen, Halliday and their likes redirect us…joyously. They point out that what is being known in languaging are systems of relations – our very connectedness – interconnectedness – in fact, utter mutual dependence, absolute co-dependence with our world and others. In examining HOW language is used, what occurs in the actions of signing and saying, they help us see perhaps further than the apparently impossible struggle or lost battle of adequate communication.
Our own using of language(s) already immerses us in relatedness, whether it is “incommunicable,” “private” (questionable possibilities) systems of marks, movements or sounds, or efforts at comprehensive lucidity to the widest possible audience. To “make language” means as much to be “made by languages,” as an abstract painter whom we find it difficult to “understand” is still using materials and movements theoretically available to all.
In other words, in languaging, we are always already communicating –with even as we strive to communicate. There is always a prior relatedness before we seek to relate. Therefore, every ill-seen, ill-said attempt functions as both a pointing out of the enormous rift between each and all, and as the suturing that cleaves the gap.
Signs are relation, whether “successful” “comprehensible” or not. This is where, again, Derridean deconstructionist mythologizings of differance comes handily into play.
Along the vast scale of gradations of comprehensibility – each understanding, correlation, comprehension, or connection is only possible because it can be apprehended, shared, insofar as it is different, that is knowable, identifiable, recognizable, perceptible.
So whether speaking to ourselves (teasing out our worries, fears, feelings, hopes and so on) or shouting for someone to get out of the way – the miscommunications, disjunctions, incompletions, multipossibles of languaging forge us together via incomprehension.
“Ill seen, ill said” means necessary relatedness…that knowing, communicating, saying, thinking, feeling, doing at all, requires a world and others, a world of others, even to be conceivable, perceptible, possible.
Singing (even signing “poorly”) might be said to be the “relation of relations,” relations exemplar in the very rudimentary awareness that a sign does not exist except as a human utilizes it, nor a human identifiable apart from signs and gestures (even isolated, or “to-oneself”). No self occurs until we make a rift, invent a sign that might refer, imaginatively separate it enough to treat as something capable of being investigated or related to…like all things for the human.
What we “know” languaging…what is experienced languaging, then, is RELATION – an ill-seen ill-said asking and answering toward….
A center, aside
For those of you seeking inspiration, rest, delight…my wife Holly Suzanne has a beautiful show of art work going up this evening at Oeno Wine Bar in Wichita, KS…we will be hanging about there 6-9 PM. Would love to see some of you!
To read…to save your lives…
nuggets…
if you squirrel them away and chitter at the meat…
your life can/will be different….
Eugenio Montale, The Poet in Our Time
Aleksandr Hemon ed., Best European Fiction 2012 (the preface by Nicole Krauss & intro by Hemon remind)
H.L. Hix, Spirits Hovering Over the Ashes
I urge…encourage…envision…plead…hope…wonder…
more (irrational?) fears…no fear
Why I Fear Secret Agents
More examples of my so-called “irrational” fears which motivate me in daily life to semi-debilitating anxiety, overall grumpiness and cynicism, and intermittent irritable melancholia:
– that humans will address me at places like the grocery store or post office
– that strangers will wave, gesture or ask something of me
– that conversation will consist of small talk or reportage, weather or politics, movies or television or the like
– that people will form lines
– that people will speak to my wife, not to discuss important subjects, but to be near her
– that I will be subjected to dismal vocabularies and poor grammar in checkout lanes
– that wealthy people exude entitlement
– that people are attracted to my wife and see fit to feed their attraction on her
– that drivers, pedestrians, etc., are not paying sufficient attention to their surround to avoid inconveniencing one another
– that I will be forced to wait on people rather than things
– that strangers will feign friendliness or personability
– that people are lonely
– that people will talk even when they don’t know what they’re talking about
– facile, banal, pretentious, crass, or just-to-fill-silence sounds or speech
– poor music at public places
– strangers that look at other people
– that people will look lustfully at my wife
– that mean, arrogant or afraid people will hurt my children
etc… etc…
These things come up because my wife’s line of work involves events and occasions that thrust us into the company of unknown persons. Also there are children’s school events, and the family’s penchants for going to public places – restaurants, stores, parks, etc. And then the unavoidable (in our situation) necessities of garner food, gas, books, medicines, etc.
Each go-round, dinner out, art opening, bowling adventure, doctor’s visit and the like spawn this grimaced panic and negativity/cynicism/paranoiac expecting-the-worst in me which truly annoys and bothers my wife, interfering with her own process of attempting to enjoy or at least “make the best of” apparently unavoidable situations that arise – in her opinion they offer possibilities as positive as they might be negative – and rely on, at least to some extent, our own outlook and will, agency and action, for resultant experience.
It is this “some extent” I would like to address.
But firstly – expecting the worst allows for a sense of relief and even gratitude when the occasions are not so grueling, involve no meddlesome characters or inane chatterboxes, process people smoothly and peaceably and so on. Given what I have observed, endured in life (including my own self), public appearance without some impingement of others is quite rare, so bracing oneself offers an opportunity to be surprised.
At first I thought perhaps I was neurotic, paranoid of the outside world to an abnormal degree, frightened unnecessarily by elements seemingly beyond my control (knowing that even my heartbeat and breathing feels only nominally up to me) – that I had an overdeveloped or trauma-induced phobia of the unknown, of change and such things implicit in our world.
But this is not the case. I love extremes and discoveries – fantastics in geography, weather, even cultures and climates. I delight in new music, literature, arts and aspects of the natural world. Even exotic or unexpected animals don’t frighten me too much. No, it is only ever circumstances in which there is the possibility of encountering humans (unknown, or sometimes even positively known) at a personal level that wig the bejeezus out of me and deliver me psychophysiologically to panics, dis-ease and serious discomfort.
The only natural element I fear similarly is the prospect of my own death or suffering and cessation of my loved ones.
So what I fear, really, is the company or vicinity of unknown beings with agency. The “some extent” my own strength, choice and abilities amount to in a room- or theater- or store- or park-ful of human persons feels/seems/appears tremendously miniscule to me: if we all count as ONE entity of volition and instinct in any given setting – my personal power of self-protection always amounts to an extremely small fraction (1/200 – grocery store?, 1/400 – zoo?, 1/300 – library?, 1/infinity on a walk or bicycle ride?, 1/100 at an art opening or museum, 1/20th at a café and so on)
Bad odds for safekeeping.
Any one of those “others” speaking, looking, acting offensively, invasively, accostingly, uncouthly, disrespectfully, outgoingly, personably and so forth (according to my own standards which I have no right to project onto another, but which are similar to the “Golden Rule” – mine being “I’ll pretend you do not exist if you’ll pretend I do not exist” or “I’ll stay out of your space/sound/business – you stay out of mine”, tending to necessary transactions only – which rarely require speech or contact in these days of automation – thank you technology!) levels the limits of my “personal agency” by half. Add another person and I’m at 33% power and so on, incrementally I am laid into the arbitrary hands, minds, eyes, mouths and minds of insurmountable odds the moment I step out of my door.
Hence I have affinity for places like caves and Montana, Wyoming, Kansas’ Great Plains, my house – any places population statistics give 1:25 miles or more. And travel is usually okay – tend to be moving too quickly to be personally accosted, possibly imposed, or at least there is the available motion – to move away.
I don’t trust humans. Judging from myself and those closest to me – we are veritable paradoxes of mixed wants, feelings, perspectives and desires, concatenations of all manner of possibilities with very little apparent say in the matter or manner of our instincts and cross-purposing wills.
I.e. my fears seem reasonable enough. And have gotten me halfway through my life relatively healthy and calm. I’ll stay on guard, avoid what I can, and try to survive another forty years of relative disquiet.
N Filbert 2012
All my Words are Silent 