A Kind of Credo : Intertextuality : “Art is Difficult” : Manifesto?

“perhaps our arrival at interpretive conclusions participates in that process and affirms the inescapability of attempting to read the world in an empowered way, even if we are always missing the point”

-Anne McConnell, Approaching Disappearance

But then there is a reality to writing – the unexpected, the making-up, emergence and invention.  I believe in it, in spite of my theories, in spite of acquired knowledge.  Something like the terms of paradox.  Little matter, much substance (not really).

For fun, let’s say (in the manner of a credo):

  •  “I believe…

that language is a socially constructed resource recursively constituting and innovating meaning potential

  • “I believe…

‘the notion of meaning potential can be characterized as a heterogeneous totality of knowledge of conventionalized patterns of normatively correct situated verbal behavior which manifests itself and emerges from social practices of a given social community’ (-Mika Lahteenmaki)

  • “We believe…

that actual meanings are emergent from meaning potentials – are jointly created – recursively and interactively dependent – in their situatedness and perspectivity, unique and irreducible

  • “We believe…

‘reality works in overt mystery’ (-Macedonio Fernandez, via JL Borges)

  • “We believe…

that to live ‘is to make all these repetitions coexist in a space in which difference is distributed’ (-Gilles Deleuze)

  • “We believe…

that living occurs via the ‘conservation of autopoiesis and the conservation of adaptation – a constant and mutual structural coupling of continuous transformations betwixt organisms and environments (envorganisms)’ (-Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela, Paul Kockelman)

  • “We believe…

in complexity and meaning, difference and repetition, redundancy and novelty, structures and contingencies, openness and change

Measures of reality (situated and perspectival…partial and relative to) – our As-if-oscope and Toxic spoon-deep.  A hurly-burly and chaotic entanglementintertwingled – adjoined in movements (writing of writing) to use an outdated metaphor:  textuality and trace.

  • “We could believe…

that ‘texts record the meanings we make: in words, pictures and deeds…shaping and shaped by our social relationships, politically, as individuals as members of social groups’ (-Jay Lemke)

That no effect is not mutual, recursive, intermingled and intertwined.  Life is ambient, writing of writing.

In other words.

  • “We believe…

that ‘Art is difficult’ (-Viktor Shklovsky) and meanings dialogic/multilogic / multimodal/multivalent (-Mikhail Bakhtin, Gunther Kress, Bruno Latour, semiosis)

Empiricism regarding ourselves is impossible (the situation and perspective necessary are not available) so we rely.  i.e. we need one another and beyond.  Envorganisms, we.  We believe (we could say.  I might).

“When we leave each other, we leave.”

Henrik Nordbrandt

A text composed is intertexuality – an Irish monk illuminating a copy; a modern blogger mashing-up – bricolage, meaning – I write, WITH.

To say I instantiate a social practice.  It becomes.

Thank you.  And welcome.

-a glyph is a hunt for optimism-

Slideshow of works cited:

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Troubling Identities, cont’d: Franz Kafka’s “The Burrow”

Kafka - Drawing

-please click image for textual content-

Troubling Identity in Writing – What Scribbling Does

As an addendum and prequel to writing anything/everything I wanted to share a couple of terrific essays on the strange elimination (or difficulty of perceiving) a “self” or “personality” or “identity” or any of those socially constructed concepts relating to human individuals.  Prompted by the scribbling exercise of last week (see previous post) – the conundrum has long fascinated me and seems to be so well presented in texts like Jorge Luis Borges‘ The Nothingness of Personality (also perhaps available here) and this tremendous first essay – relating to Maurice Blanchot‘s writings – in Anne McConnell’s Approaching Disappearance – (click image to read)

McConnell - Approaching Disappearance

all help me to understand better why it often seems hard for writerlies to formulate or maintain “strong senses of self” – as the practice of entering language in such a way seems to dissolve the separations that might preserve that artificial construction.

Related…

“Yet if language gives no words for what happens…it nevertheless gives itself”

-Christopher Fynsk-

“Not to discover – not to be able to discover – the solution, is the general tragedy of all writing”

“To try to express oneself and to want to express the whole of life are one and the same thing”

-Jorge Luis Borges-

“Reality works in overt mystery”

-Macedonio Fernandez-

The Myth of the Universal Library

Universal Library

Myths of the Universal Library by John Thiem

I found this text captivating

A Real-ization?

A Real-ization(?)

“…And here begins my despair as a writer”

Jorge Luis Borges, “The Aleph

 

I should say, “began.”  And not “as a writer,” per se, or even primarily, no, I should more accurately portray the experience “…and so began, and ever continues to begin, my despair as a human.”

For experiences, no matter where or when, in full matter of where and when, are multitude that begin such despair.  They are occurrences of a process we call variously “knowing,” “comprehending,” “understanding” – encounters with unlimited and unnecessary contents we might describe as “revelatory,” “visionary,” or “true.”  We describe their feeling and fumble with content.

For they seem to circumscribe an everything – as contained and opening out – well-metaphored by the scientifically religious Big Bang, an un-caused cause or some like.  Experiences we couch in the babbles of mystery: synchronicity, omniscience, omnivorous, omnipotent and omnipresent.  We feel them like an orb or spiral, a series of looping waves without succession.

A.k.a “convergence,” simultaneity and emergence coming together at now and here.

I write “as a human” because I cannot be anything else.  And a human, as a living being, is characterized by limitations and potentials.  Although kinds of things never exhaust their potentials (as far as we know) – thereby always altering what might constitute affordances and constraints lists – nevertheless, in order to be unique (or anything at all – “what –so-ever”) humans must be limited, those limitations providing the very contexts for exploring potentials and potency.

One such environment or niche is the operation of our living processes in space and through time.  I.e. a simultaneous occurrence of everything cannot be processed, cannot be shared, as such.  It must needs be dissected and dismembered via many spaces and over time in order to be perceived by such an animal as we – re-membered and imaged-in (imagined) according to our nature (our processes and practices in our environments).

This is why moments we might re(in)fer to as “transcendent” or “wholistic” perhaps “encapsulating” or “converging” – compressing and expanding (synonymously) some happening that seems “total” generate despair for our kind or species.

I am unable to deny what comes to experience, but with labels and descriptions (interpretation) must take care.  One often turns to symbols or metaphors: icons that serve to absorb a variegated but comprehensible share of human experiences.  Accrued via descriptions and depictions over time, these symbols resonate and traverse times and boundaries in order to gather experiences of a kind.  Take for example the term “hunger,” or a drawing of an eye.  Mirrors, or a resolving I-IV-V progression.  These activities of reference and participation, renewal and recognition, present and re-present for us experiences that seem to extend or equal (again, synonymously) us.

Despair comes in the desired specificity each individual of the species wishes to convey (form of convergence – communicate meaning for our kind can be spotted by our use of the prefix co-).  That experience (in itself necessarily co-), in order to have meaning(humanly speaking) must be shared – we find that telling/singing/dancing/painting/acting/writing/ filming/making/working/sculpting/creating/crafting or any combination of them all and the human-specific processes this entails are unable to re-present such “totalizing” experiences, except at certain angles, perspectives, fragments, over time.

Yet, were it otherwise, we would have no need of any of our abilities – for we would know.  The relations, practices, potentials and processes depend on this inability (limitation) to be.  For us to be, as humans, what and whom, where and when, we are.

Unity would undo this.  In fact, we have no evidence that ANY living entity “shares alike” – reciprocates perfect understanding or replication (or reproduction, ex-ist-ing) exactly…down beyond our cells…there is difference, mis-matching, variation.  In fact, all the co-operations that provide con-vergence and co-mmunity, me-and-ing (meaning) depend on the disjunctions we strive to come over or through in order to express, be understood, known, “as one.”

So, though never “of the same mind,” perspective, or feeling, even when we experience me-and-ing together (gathered) – – this is also how we are.

Perhaps then, less despair than real-ization?

 

An Example of Structuring – Priorities

1.  Family

Nuclear Families

 

2.  School

Scholarly Pursuits

3.  Prioritization of Personal Pursuits

Structural Prioritization of Readings: Fall 2013

(please click on image for display)

Readings

Today is different – Selections

inspiration from Lynda Barry

Arriving today + Reflections

Jakobson - On Language

…and wonderings about language as a tool and an abstract medium.  Wondering if in the endless bewilderment of experience – of living – rife with woundings and joys – we move to shared media, providing communally devised realms in which to re-vision, simultaneously creating new life, wherewith and wherein to investigate and inquire, to dig and dig and…

Language as constructed or agreed-upon and functional (tool) medium.

Then there’s this full of resonances and also contributing to the reflections – required text of a current course:

Library: An Unquiet History by Matthew Battles
Library: An Unquiet History by Matthew Battles

…and I quote:

“As the reader gropes the stacks – lifting books and testing their heft, appraising the fall of letterforms on the title page, scrutinizing marks left by other readers – the more elusive knowledge itself becomes.  All that remains unknown seems to beckon from among the covers, between the lines.  In the library, the reader is wakened from the dream of communion with a single book, startled into a recognition of the word’s materiality by the sheer number of bound volumes; by the sound of pages turning, covers rubbing; by the rank smell of books gathered together in vast numbers…the physicality of the book is strongest in libraries, where the accumulated weight of written words seems to exert a gravity all its own.”

“So the library is a body, too, the pages of books pressed together like organs in the darkness…[in libraries] I can fool myself that the universe is composed of infinite variations of a single element – the book – that I, too, am made of books, like the person in Giuseppe Arcimboldo‘s painting The Librarian

Archimboldo - the Librarian

“…a person made of books; his is not a single book but a whole library”

“I have the distinct impression that the millions of volumes may indeed contain the entirety of human experience: that they make not a model for but a model of the universe.”

“…texts, fabrics to be shredded and woven together in new combinations and patterns…”

“everything in the world exists to end up in a book” (Stephane Mallarme)

“With their leaves of fiber, their inks of copperas and soot, and their words – books are an amalgam of [Roger Bacon‘s] three classes of substance capable of magic: the herbal, the mineral, and the verbal”

“For any question, the library offers no hope of a definitive answer…unlimited and cyclical”

“Together they tell us stories that they could not tell alone”

library pic

“In many places, the volumes are thick with dust, pocked with the holes left by insects,

which are almost as hungry for books as I

-all quotes except where noted – Matthew Battles Library: An Unquiet History

And somehow I can’t help but think the interface and interstice of languaging matter in this way – a way that provides comfort and the slightest skin of distance from the raw inside of skin – inseparable recursions – but mediated immediately – kind of like magic; a LOT like alchemy; always experience – but less abrasive or intrusive than “direct.”  Perhaps paint, light, cameras and brushes, clay, etc – any art that borrows matter outside the body – similarly provides a soluble, gentled, media through which to live forward…

…in other words…are our preferences for embodiment a part of what define us as artists in the societal mesh?  The media through which we most naturally express or experience or embody indicative?  Textuality as embodiment for the writer; clay, stone, marble, etc. for the sculptor; movement for the dancer; oil, pigment, brush, etc. for the painter; lines for the draughtsman and so on…

 

Sunday: 3 new things (to me) as gift recommendations (to you)

I have never engaged “graphic novels” much in a kind of snobbery for text and misunderstanding of modes of expression.  This weekend, visiting the library with my children, I snatched out titles that looked interesting and have truly been gifted by them.  I have needed a weekend for rest and refreshment, I am thankful it has come.  Here are my recommendations:

Trouble Will Find Me by The National
Trouble Will Find Me by The National

Trouble Will Find Me by The National

Harvey - Bouchard
Harvey by Herve Bouchard / Janice Nadeau

De-Presses

“What a joke it is to read or hear—as I have read or heard more times than I can count—that writers ‘see more clearly’ or ‘feel more deeply’ than non-writers. The truth of the matter is that writers hardly ‘see’ or ‘feel’ at all. The disparity between a writer’s works and the world per se is so great as to beggar comment. Writers who arrange their lives so as to ‘have experiences’ in order to reduce them to contemptible linguistic recordings of these experiences are beneath contempt.”

—Something Said, by Gilbert Sorrentino

Dalkey Archive

Via strange twists of events, connections that could only be re-constructed through fantastic imagination, I have been moved back into perusing publishers for work that inspires, raises and extends one’s ideas of what “art,” “literature,” “human” are.

While most publishers must infuse their catalogs with books that will sell, there are still a few presses that are simply committed to grandeur – to works that express and challenge what humans are capable of making, thinking, expressing, creating – works that assess and challenge our condition of being.

Two presses I’d like to promote – that continually provide works that surprise and engage (fully) and elastically foment my boundaries of concept and possibilities – with bewildering form and content – in other words, publishers from whom you might randomly purchase titles and ALWAYS be made richer, better, exponentially more humane – (THIS IS A REMARKABLE THING):

 

please visit them and order…ANYTHING…

your life will be BETTER.