Category: Current Reading
What I’m buried in this week or this moment
Stammering Great Literature
“Great literature is written in a sort of foreign language. To each sentence we attach a meaning, or at any rate a mental image, which is often a mistranslation. But in great literature all our mistranslations result in beauty”
“Having a bag into which I put everything I encounter, provided that I am also put in a bag. Finding, encountering, stealing instead of regulating, recognizing and judging…It is an assemblage, an assemblage of enunciation. A style is managing to stammer in one’s own language. It is difficult, because there has to be a need for such stammering. Not being a stammerer in one’s speech, but being a stammerer of language itself…writing does not have its end in itself precisely because life is not something personal. The only aim of writing is life, through the combinations which it draws…and there is no method for finding other than a long preparation…”
-Gilles Deleuze-
Waiting for words to tell…
Immersed in summer and studies, I find myself struggling with capacities of some purer form of origin beyond connections. The creativity that satiates me in relationship and studies is one of associations, extensions, combinatory experiments of life-experiences and informations and knowledges. Fiction and poetry, in a unique manner, seem to process the connectivities and associations invented somehow more within myself. Not so much in activities of external bonds and ties that loop within/without between concepts and voices, persons and family, and my own; but what bonds those activities and informations spawn within me. I am finding that these recognitions and constructions take a different sort of time and attention than the frenetic and immediate processings of conceptual knowledges and intimate relations. Those, of necessity, must be continuous, on the fly, in situ. Creative writing, in distinction, requires for me the ability for bracketing a space and time in which I am able to attend (somehow) to the recursive loops and dangling ganglia of my own organism of thoughts and emotions. A sort of internal processing vaguely distinguishable from reciprocal or social processing. It may not even be real, but only a sensation of process, a variant attention, a sidelong perspective. In any case, it emits something unique in my writing and reflection, feelings and sensations, and something that I cannot simply produce; something that must be prepared and allowed for, visited, beckoned, welcomed.
I recognized this as I struggle to create for a project, and also possess a yearning to be creating new fictions. The process art both provides and requires is unique and intense, difficult and serious. It calls to mind the “effortless efforts” of things like meditation and awareness, mindfulness and tolerance. The writings of Laura (Riding) Jackson piqued this recognition for me and I will share a couple of early paragraphs from her book The Telling.
“[1] There is something to be told about us for the telling of which we all wait. In our unwilling ignorance we hurry to listen to stories of old human life, new human life, fancied human life, avid of something to while away the time of unanswered curiosity. We know we are explainable, and not explained. Many of the lesser things concerning us have been told, but the greater things have not been told; and nothing can fill their place. Whatever we learn of what is not ourselves, but ours to know, being of our universal world, will likewise leave the emptiness an emptiness. Until the missing story of ourselves is told, nothing besides told can suffice us: we shall go on quietly craving it.
[4] Everywhere can be seen a waiting for words that phrase the primary sense of human-being, and with a human finality, so that the words themselves are witness to what they tell. The waiting can be seen not only in the eager inclined posture of believers. It can be seen also on the faces of disbelievers, the idolizers of the evident: they are not happy in their impatient assurance of there being no cause but uncaused circumstance, they wear the pinched look of people whose convictions make them a meagre fare. In the eyes of all (in the opaque depths in them of unacknowledged presentness to one another) are mirrored (but scarcely discerned) concourses where our souls ever secretly assemble, in expectation of events of common understanding that continually fail to occur. We wait, all, for a story of us that shall reach to where we are. We listen for our own speaking; and we hear much that seems our speaking, yet makes us strange to ourselves.
[5] …A religion addresses the longing in us to have that said from which we can go on to speak of next and next things rightly, in their immediate time – the telling of what came first and before done forever…How our story has been divided up among the truth-telling professions! Religion, philosophy, history, poetry, compete with one another for our ears; and science competes with all together. And for each we have a different set of ears. But, though we hear much, what we are told is as nothing: none of it gives us ourselves, rather each story-kind steals us to make its reality of us.“
from The Telling by Laura (Riding) Jackson, 1967
Here. Now.
Reading Maturana & Varela’s accounts of how we ought to go about engaging scientific activity (and life)… with integrated mindfulness/awareness and sense of our embeddedness in whatever we are observing, inquiring…
coupled with required textbook for LIS – metacognition and reflection in learning contexts:
and then this comes on…..the sound of the meaning, I guess….
Infinite Medium / Unlimited Meaning
“And the fact is that ordinary words don’t have just two or three but an unlimited number of meanings, which is quite a scary thought; however, the more positive side of this thought is that each concept has a limitless potential for variety. This is a rather pleasing thought, at least for people who are curious and who are stimulated by novelty.”
– Douglas Hofstadter & Emmanuel Sander –
Henry Magazine
Greetings all – thanks to the continuous hard work of Lisa Thatcher et. al., the experimental literary-aesthetic new magazine Henry is live! I’m excited about this project, not only because Thatcher’s own work and interests are so astute and lively, but the principle of the thing and the open energy of the legacy of Henry Miller. I invite you all to check it out (helps if you are able to read French), and you will also find a piece of creative writing by myself within. Thanks Lisa & co., thanks Henry for verve and example, thanks writers and readers – it manifests!
The Return
Within the hallowed halls of Powell’s Books in Portland, OR with a next-to-nothing budget is not an easy thing to be for book-cravers. But it also picques the selectional impulse somewhere thrumming in our genetic bands. Survival of the “fittest” given current conditions and some self-observation through excruciating choice.
What came back with me:
what did not , purely due to economic constraints, and set aside at the last possible moment (at closing):
equivalency finds for my wife:
now to prepare pictures of those immaterial experiences – the fleeting profounds – that happen as we go
to be posted soon
Accompanying me home
“For my father, the road had to wind uphill both ways and be as difficult as possible. Sadly, this was the sensibility he instilled in me when I set myself to the task of writing fiction. It wasn’t until I brought him a story that was purposely confusing and obfuscating that he seemed at all impressed and pleased. He said, smiling, “You made me work, son.” He once said to me in a museum, when I complained about an illegible signature on a painting, “You don’t sign it because you want people to know you painted it, but because you love it.” He was all wrong of course, but the sentiment was so beautiful that I wish to believe it now. What he might have been trying to say, I suppose, thought he never would have even thought about it in these terms, was that art finds its form and that it is never a mere manifestation of life.”
-Percival Everett-
compliments of:
“Acquiring an open rationality”
The best that I can do on this trip is to share some of the inputs coming my way… aside from the gorgeous lush thick greens of Oregon and Washington, there are also these gorgeous, lush, thick growths…
Edgar Morin – Paradigm of Complexity
All my Words are Silent 